tagged w/ corporate malfeasance
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-- As the trial begins in a major toxic pollution lawsuit against Monsanto Co., jurors won't be allowed to tackle a key issue: Should the company pay to clean up dioxin it allegedly spewed across the city of Nitro?
Experts won't testify about the need for property remediation. Lawyers won't argue about the issue. Jurors won't be asked to force Monsanto to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars such a project could cost.
Judges O.C. Spaulding and Derek Swope issued rulings in July and November that threw out that part of the case.
As a result, Putnam County jurors will decide only if current and former Nitro residents should receive medical monitoring to detect diseases potentially caused by exposure to Monsanto's dioxin. They won't be able to do anything to clean up homes and businesses, ending the toxic exposure.
Lawyers for thousands of residents and property owners in the class-action suit appealed the decisions by Spaulding and Swope. They say the rulings left a huge gap in their efforts to deal with the legacy of Monsanto's chemical-making operations.
"The current presence of dioxin contamination in the class area is a public-health hazard," the lawyers argued in court documents. "It makes little sense to initiate a medical monitoring program for a population without first eliminating that population's exposure to the toxin at issue."
The West Virginia Supreme Court isn't likely to even begin considering the appeal until April. By the time a decision is made, the trial on the medical monitoring question will probably be over.
The situation has left insiders and observers scratching their heads, as lawyers for Monsanto and Nitro residents prepare to head into one of the biggest civil trials in the Kanawha Valley in years.
"It doesn't make any sense from the standpoint of the impact on the community," said longtime Nitro lawyer Harvey Peyton.
Peyton is a former law partner of Charleston attorney Stuart Calwell, who is the lead lawyer for Nitro residents in the case.
Twenty-eight years ago, Calwell and Peyton were among the lawyers who lost in a landmark effort to get jurors to hold Monsanto responsible for dioxin-linked illnesses among Nitro plant workers.
Today, the science showing dioxin's dangers is much more advanced. The law has created some new ways -- such as medical monitoring cases -- to address these issues. Industry has also gotten much better at fighting citizen and worker lawsuits, and at the lobbying and public relations efforts that can block tougher regulations or expensive cleanups.
For decades, chemical plants like Monsanto's provided Kanawha Valley residents with thousands of good-paying jobs. The industry has been in a long decline, and the bulk of those jobs have disappeared. The Monsanto plant went through several ownership changes and then closed in 2004.
Generations of workers put food on their tables and sent kids to college with a chemical plant paycheck. But the industry's legacy also includes tough questions about long-term health effects on workers and plant neighbors.
More than 40 years after Monsanto stopped making 2,4,5-T, the Agent Orange ingredient blamed for much of the plant's dioxin pollution, it's not clear if Nitro residents are any closer to getting answers to such questions.
In the beginning
Nitro was born as a literal World War I boomtown, the location of one of the federal government's large gunpowder plants. The name "Nitro" came from the chemical term Nitro-Cellulose, which was the type of gunpowder to be produced.
When the war ended, private companies took over the government buildings and converted them into chemical plants. Among the companies was Monsanto, which began making rubber chemicals for the tire industry.
In about 1947, Monsanto's agricultural division designed a new molecule called 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacidic acid, or 2,4,5-T. This new substances killed plants by making their roots outgrow their leaves. Plants destroyed themselves through defoliation.
Monsanto began making this powerful herbicide ingredient in Nitro in 1949. Workers cooked batches of it in large pots, called autoclaves, rather than making it through a continuous production stream.
Monsanto made 2,4,5-T in Nitro for more than 30 years. In its best-known form, 2,4,5-T was used as an ingredient in Agent Orange, the defoliant deployed widely in the Vietnam War.
But 2,4-5-T was contaminated. Every batch of it contained 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin. This chemical is also known as 2,3,7,8-TCDD, or more commonly, simply as dioxin.
Dioxin has been linked to cancer, birth defects, learning disabilities, endometriosis, infertility, and suppressed immune functions. The chemical builds up in tissue over time, meaning that even small exposures can accumulate to dangerous levels.
An early sign of dioxin's effects came in March 1949. A massive explosion rocked the Nitro plant when a pressure valve blew on a 2,4,5-T cooking container. More than 220 workers got sick.
Years later, more than 170 workers sued Monsanto, alleging dioxin exposure at the plant had made them ill. Cases involving seven of the workers went to trial in federal court in 1984.
After an 11-month trial, a jury awarded one of the workers, John Hein, $200,000 for bladder cancer he contracted because of exposure at the plant to another chemical, para-aminobiphynol, or PAB.
Jurors found that dioxin had made the other workers sick and that Monsanto had not acted diligently in seeking to determine the possible impact of exposure on worker health.
More at the link-- As the trial begins in a major toxic pollution lawsuit against Monsanto Co., jurors... more
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Olympic organisers are under growing pressure to reconsider a lucrative sponsorship deal that was awarded to a controversial US chemicals firm which has "failed to address one of the worst corporate-related human rights disasters of the 20th century".
Amnesty International will today demand that Lord Coe publicly reveal how the deal with the Dow Chemical Company (Dow), which gives it "exclusive marketing rights" to the main stadium, complies with London 2012's ethical code.
Dow is the 100 per cent owner of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), the company responsible for the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal, India, which is thought to have killed 10,000 in its immediate aftermath and 15,000 since.
The company's name will be emblazoned on the £7m artwork "wrap" around the main stadium, guaranteeing months of exposure. Dow and UCC are defendants in a public-interest litigation case in an Indian state court for clean-up of the factory site. They have refused to comply with an application by an Indian Ministry request of 1bn rupees (£12.3m at today's exchange rate) as an advance for clean-up costs.
Health and human rights groups in Bhopal continue to report high rates of congenital deformities and cancers among families who are forced to use contaminated groundwater sources.
More than 10 independent scientific studies show dangerous levels of chemicals such as carbon tetrachloride in water supplies. Earlier this month, The Independent witnessed children as young as eight filling sacks with contaminated soil from the factory landfill to use for building material in their homes.
MPs want the Government to intervene in the controversial deal, which threatens to overshadow the image of the London Games. Critics say Lord Coe must explain Locog's admission that the deal was struck after Dow provided "a full briefing" about Bhopal. The Bhopal Medical Appeal accuses Olympics organisers of "playing dumb over universal legal principles".
Tessa Jowell, the shadow Olympics minister, said last night: "Given the allegations which have been made about Dow's responsibilities in Bhopal it is clear that there are further pressing questions that they must answer."
Home Affairs Select Committee chair Keith Vaz has tabled an Early Day Motion condemning the decision. "If sustainability is at the heart of Locog's decision making as they claim, they need to look long and hard at their decision to do business with Dow," he said.
More at the linkOlympic organisers are under growing pressure to reconsider a lucrative sponsorship... more
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Good old hydrofracking. You know about it right? It's the method to produce natural gas by fracturing rock formations with millions of gallons of water and toxic chemicals. It's been contaminating groundwater in the Western US for many years and now it is being pursued with a vengeance in the East, particularity with respect to the Marcellus Shale formation that extends across Pennsylvania and New York.
Everyone in the know has warned us for years that hydrofracking was highly dangerous to sources of groundwater used for human consumption. But only now are we being told how much worse is that contamination of our water supplies. So bad it will make you ill after you read this investigative report from the NY Times:
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
In short, if your source of drinking water is a water plant that receives treated waste water from hydrofracking operations, your health and the health of your children and your neighbors and everyone else you know is at serious risk, a risk far greater than previously acknowledged by the oil and gas industry and federal regulators.
The Industry has known of these problems for many years, as has the EPA, as the documents shown to the NY Times reporters demonstrate. Yet neither the Industry nor the EPA has acted on those reports. Instead, both have turned a blind eye to the fact that waste water from hydrofracking is hazardous to your health. Indeed, since 2006, beginning with the Bush administration, the EPA told hydrofracking operators in Pennsaylvania that they did not need to test the the waste water that was released for radioactivity.
Astonishing, but true. Your government, politicians and the Oil and Gas Industry collaborated in a conspiracy of silence regarding the safety of using hydrofracking techniques to produce natural gas. As one alarmed expert stated:
“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”
The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water.
cont.Good old hydrofracking. You know about it right? It's the method to produce... more
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HMM, if this was an accident, why the secrecy BP?
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Bayer CropScience has not properly maintained or tested the underground storage tank where it keeps roughly 200,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate, the deadly chemical that killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India, in 1984, state inspectors have alleged.
Department of Environmental Protection inspectors issued four citations to Bayer for alleged mismanagement of the MIC tank. Inspectors discovered the problem during a June 2009 inspection, and formal violation notices were issued in late September.
No fines have been issued, and DEP officials said last week they don't know if Bayer has fixed the problems.
Tom Dover, a Bayer spokesman, said in an e-mailed response that the company "is in discussions" with DEP and wanted to "emphasize that the integrity of the referenced tanks is not in question, nor is the safe storage of our materials."
But officials from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, who reviewed the DEP violation notices at the Sunday Gazette-Mail's request, said the allegations concerned them.
"It doesn't give us a warm and fuzzy feeling," board Chairman John Bresland said Friday. "I would have thought if you were dealing with a tank containing methyl isocyanate, you would always want to have the best practices in place."
CSB investigators have been examining the Institute plant's operations in the wake of the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two plant workers and forced thousands of Kanawha Valley residents to take shelter in their homes.
For years, the Institute facility has been the only one in the nation to store large quantities of MIC onsite.
Last April, congressional investigators concluded the explosion could have easily damaged a nearby MIC storage tank and triggered a disaster that would have been worse than Bhopal. CSB officials described the incident as "potentially a serious near miss, the results of which might have been catastrophic for workers, responders and the public."
In late August, as the one-year anniversary of the deadly explosion in Institute neared, Bayer announced it was cutting its MIC storage by about 80 percent. After the changes, Bayer hopes to keep its daily maximum MIC inventory below 50,000 pounds -- still far more than any other chemical plant in the nation.Bayer CropScience has not properly maintained or tested the underground storage tank... more
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The agricultural giant Monsanto may well still be the world's most hated company. The company that brought the world Agent Orange, the defoliant of choice in the Vietnam War, followed up a decade ago with a strident push to flood the world with genetically modified crops. It alienated millions – and even its friends and rivals among GM supporters blamed Monsanto's belligerence for putting back the cause by many years. But I'm going to ignore GMs and talk about water. And belligerence.
In part, no doubt, to help salvage its GM-tarnished reputation, Monsanto now makes great play of its efforts to help engineer a second green revolution built around "sustainability".
Sustainability is a much-abused term and it infiltrates almost every corner of the company's website. But to be fair they do try and define what the word means for its business. The company promises that its "sustainable yield initiative" will "reduce by one-third per unit produced the aggregate amount of key resources such as land, water and energy, required to grow crops by 2030."
Many analysts now see water, rather than land, as the key limitation on growing food to feed a future world population of nine billion in the coming decades. So a third more crop for the same amount of water is a valuable goal. The company trumpets especially its work to engineer more water-efficient maize.
Of course, despite the company's public pledge to "share knowledge and technology" the company's corporate aim is to make sure that farmers buy Monsanto-patented water-efficient seeds by the trillion.
But you would expect Monsanto to be especially sensitive about how it manages water in its own farming operations, and particularly to show concern for how neighbouring farmers are facing up to water shortages. Wouldn't you?
The scene shifts to the Hawaiian island of Molokai. This is an old stomping ground of Monsanto's. It is the largest employer and the island is sometimes known as "the birthplace of biotechnology" and "the Silicon valley of the seed corn industry".
This is where Monsanto does a lot of its research into GM crops such as maize, and where it grows many of the seeds it sells to farmers round the world.
Nature on Molokai has suffered badly from the invasion of Monsanto and other big-farm companies. In recompense, Monsanto puts money into a Nature Conservancy programme on the island to "preserve biodiversity and protect water sources".
The company has nonetheless gained a bad reputation there as a water bully. As a local journalist wrote there last year in the Molokai Dispatch, "Monsanto's thirst for more water" threatens its future on the island. "Like most large corporations, Monsanto's number one priority is to maximise profits. In this case it means planting as many acres as possible, and using a lot of water," wrote Todd Yamashita.
Recently, during a drought that emptied reservoirs and forced the local irrigation company to demand 20% water cutbacks from local farmers, Monsanto insisted on the right to take more water and lobbied for a new aquifer to be tapped.
In law, two-thirds of the water from the Molokai irrigation system should go to homestead farmers. In practice big landowners, especially Monsanto, take 84% of the irrigation system's water consumption. Monsanto alone, according to Yamashita, takes almost twice as much water as all 200 homesteaders.
So I think I have this right. In the cause of developing crops that will allow the world's farmers to use less water, Monsanto is so overusing the water in its own backyard that local farmers are have resorted to legal action to get their water back. As the Molokai Dispatch's headline has it: "Monsanto could be its own worst enemy."
end of excerptThe agricultural giant Monsanto may well still be the world's most hated company.... more
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Fifty recently filed lawsuits allege Monsanto and related companies are responsible for causing cancer.
Each of the complaints, filed Aug. 3 in Putnam Circuit Court, say Monsanto and its successor companies caused cancer by exposing the plaintiffs to dioxins/furans contamination of the air and property in and around Nitro. The cases mention the "negligent and otherwise unlawful release of dioxin from defendants' waste disposal practices on properties ∑ located in and about Nitro, West Virginia."
These individual cases, filed by Stuart Calwell and The Calwell Firm of Charleston, are not part of an ongoing class action involving thousands of current and former Nitro residents alleging Monsanto polluted the area with dioxin. The class action case specifies no specific damages, and the class-action plaintiffs seek medical monitoring.
The plaintiffs in the new cases, also represented by Calwell, are residents and former residents of Nitro or one or more of several surrounding communities of the now defunct chemical plant located near Nitro. They lived, worked or attended school in Nitro.
Monsanto owned and operated the plant from 1934 to 2000. From 1949 to 1970, the company produced an herbicide that was heavily contaminated with dibenzo dioxins and dibenzo furans. The complaints say the company disposed of the dioxin-contaminated waste in a way which caused dioxins to escape into the air.
The plaintiffs say their property and soil was contaminated.
"During the years that Old Monsanto was operating it's trichlorophenol plant, it adopted an unlawful practice of disposing of dioxin waste materials by a continuous process of open 'pit' burning," the complaints state. "This practice was largely denied by Old Monsanto whose representatives characterized the practice as an 'incineration process' when asked by regulatory authorities.
"Old Monsanto and its successors ∑ failed to adequately control the dioxin contaminated soils and other dioxin contaminated waste materials both on and off the plant site. Dioxins/furans continued to be re-deposited and re-distributed from the plant site and the off-site dumps so as to continue the process of air and property contamination."
The complaints say the defendants knew of the dangers.
The defendants "should have known of the highly toxic properties of dioxin and that dioxin was and is a known promoter of cancer and that dioxin was and is a known human carcinogen," the complaints state. The defendants "knew that the area around the Monsanto plant was populated with permanent residents who would likely live out their lives in the area contaminated."
The complaints also detail the history of Monsanto and the company's knowledge regarding dioxin. The Nitro plant produced herbicides, rubber products and other chemicals, including Agent Orange.
Dioxin has been linked to cancer, birth defects, learning disabilities, endometriosis, infertility and suppressed immune functions.
The plaintiffs seek compensatory damages for medical bills past and future, lost wages, pain and suffering, mental anguish and loss of enjoyment of life. They also seek punitive damages for the "willful, wanton and reckless" actions of the defendants "evidencing a callous disregard for the health and wellbeing of the residents of the Nitro area."
Putnam Circuit Court case numbers 09-C-243 through 09-C-282
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And they want to "feed the world." Be afraid, be very afraid.Fifty recently filed lawsuits allege Monsanto and related companies are responsible... more
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On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston,
the people ate dirt. They called it "Alabama clay" and cooked it for extra
flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back
yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and
played and were baptized. They didn't know their dirt and yards and bass
and kids -- along with the acrid air they breathed -- were all contaminated
with chemicals. They didn't know they lived in one of the most polluted patches
of America.
Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the
now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto
Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped
millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of
pages of Monsanto documents -- many emblazoned with warnings such as
"CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" -- show that for decades, the corporate
giant concealed what it did and what it knew.
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek
turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if
dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in
another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is
little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In
1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered
its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to
be carcinogenic."
Monsanto enjoyed a lucrative four-decade monopoly on PCB production in the
United States, and battled to protect that monopoly long after PCBs were
confirmed as a global pollutant. "We can't afford to lose one dollar of
business," one internal memo concluded.
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This story dated 2002 tells of something that happened decades ago that Monsanto knew and did nothing about. Will the same thing happen regarding GM foods? Will the effects of them on our health and on the sustainability of our planet start to show themselves in the next decade? Inadequate human testing of GM soy and corn has led to America being one of the only countries allowing it in food. As many of my entries and other entries on this have shown, Monsanto cannot be trusted with the health and safety of Americans. They thought nothing of dumping lethal compounds into the waterways and land of our country. I doubt they then care about the potential toxins they dump into our bodies by not allowing proper disclosure on food labels by using their political muscle to stifle Democracy.
BOYCOTT Monsanto until they do, and until the govt. agencies entrusted with the health and safety of the American people do their job.On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston,
the people ate dirt. They... more
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