The EPA is still in the pocket of the chemical industry, and a new report says that the agency is filing a court order by letting Monsanto continue to sell toxic herbicides containing Dicamba – all the company had to do was change the label. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The EPA is still in the pocket of the chemical industry, and a new report says that the agency is filing a court order by letting Monsanto continue to sell toxic herbicides containing dicamba. All the company had to do was change the label. All the company had to do was use alternatives, and they had plenty. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. The EPA was told by a judge, you cannot approve these herbicides. These herbicides are devastating, not just to the neighboring farms where this stuff will drift up to a mile away and kill somebody else’s crops. But the effect this is having on the entire ecosystem, the entire food chain in certain areas where it’s being used, the judges said, you can’t do this. So the EPA says, okay, Monsanto, you’re not allowed to do this. But what if you just change a couple words on your label and then we’ll reapprove it?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Even though it’s gonna kill people. Even though it’s gonna destroy crops. I mean, what’s the number is startling. It’s, the projection was that after a $260 million hit, they were already hit for destroying farmland and the acreage that’s gonna be, I mean, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of acres that are gonna be destroyed by this dicamba. Here’s the ugly part of it. You know, again, Republicans, everybody thinks, oh, Republicans are so different than Democrats. They’re so great for the environment. The White House has done nothing. They can, the White House can do something about this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They can put, there’s things that they can do from a, just a pure police power to stop this kind of thing. They haven’t done a thing. This has all been happening since 2020, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. It has. Actually, it even goes back, you know, 2016 when dicamba was approved.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: And from the beginning, well, technically before the beginning, Monsanto’s own studies showed how dangerous this stuff was. BASF’s studies showed how bad it was, how it was drifting on there, how it was destroying the ecosystems, you know, killing the small animals. It was preventing flowers from being able to produce nectar.
Mike Papantonio: Right, right, right.
Farron Cousins: And that’s what basically disrupts the entire food chain leading to the death of even small mammals once you go far enough along.
Mike Papantonio: In this $260 million lawsuit that they got hit with, didn’t change anything about the way they do business, they found that these folks had falsified science. Falsified clinical data on science. They found collusion between government at all levels, all the way up to the White House. I mean, from bottom up. The collusion had to do with the fact that you had these companies putting millions of dollars into the coffer of both Democrats and Republicans. And Democrats had their handouts just like the Republicans. No difference. So don’t write Republican, Republican. No, Democrats were very much involved in this. If you go back on this case, follow it all the way back to, follow it back to Hillary Clinton. Look at where the money started flowing. It started Bill Clinton. This is major money behind Bill Clinton when he ran for president this company. And so nothing’s really changed. They’re part of that democratic machine and everybody seems willing to just look the other way. Just give us enough money for our election coffers. Yeah. You can destroy millions of acres that may never come back. May never come back because what they do is the White House actually signed off on the idea of crop dusting, air to ground crop dusting. What happens with drift when that happens?
Farron Cousins: Oh, the drift is phenomenal. It goes all over the place because it’s not necessarily, you know, just one guy out here spraying it with his hose. You put it in the air and what happens in the air? You got wind, you’ve got breeze. You’ve got all of these other things. You’ve got these tiny chemical particles that get carried for up to a mile, possibly even more around the spray site. So you’re talking about other people’s farms that aren’t using these dicamba ready crops. Those people get devastated. Local forests, wetlands get devastated because this.
Mike Papantonio: State national reserves.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Because this stuff is all over them.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, you’ve got city parks. This, the list, they give us a list of everything that’s affected.
Farron Cousins: Homes and neighborhoods.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, exactly. State and fish game properties, state natural reserves, city parks, state and natural wildlife refuges are all being affected by this. And Washington is just, look, it’s not this judge. You understand the White House could take action to stop this?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So it can’t be blamed on one judge. And even when the judge gave them an out and said, just change a couple of words. Just change a couple words, they still wouldn’t even do that. Because they know that if they did that, it would affect sales, not just in the United States, but globally. That’s how they look at everything nowadays. Globalization, that’s what it’s all about.
