Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
This week in “government by special interest,” flyover country is awash in agricultural chemicals — and it’s only going to get flooded harder in the near future if a raft of proposed legislation is any indication.
Related: Grocery Chains Ration Eggs After Mass Chicken Slaughter For Bird Flu
Glyphosate (aka Roundup), formerly sold by Monsanto and now owned by foreign multinational agrichemical company Bayer, is one of the easier problems to solve on the contamination front in that it mercifully only remains in plant tissues for a decade or more.
Via Forest Ecology and Management (emphasis added):
“We collected plant tissues from five forest understory perennial species growing in two distinct biogeoclimatic regions of northern BC to map out how glyphosate residue quantities change over time according to species, plant tissue type, and climate regime. We found that residues persisted for up to 12 years in some tissue types, and that root tissues generally retained glyphosate residues longer than shoot tissue types.”
What’s a dozen years of pesticide contamination here or there among friends?
Iowa Senate Study Bill 1051 — one example out of dozens currently proposed in various state legislatures — would make it just a little bit easier for these agri-chemical corporations to get away with, potentially, murder:
“[The bill] provides for a defense from civil liability associated with the use of pesticides that are registered with the United States environmental protection agency (EPA)… The label is sufficient to satisfy any requirements for a warning or label under Code Chapter 206… or any other common law duty to warn.”
How Democracy™ works:
Slap a tiny label no one is going to read on your techno-toxin, hide behind the veil of authority of the EPA, and you too can get off scot-free with slaughtering and maiming the peasants with the state seal of approval — provided, obviously, that you have enough cash on hand to divvy out to legislators.
Related: SHOCKER: Bill Gates Met With Trump, Pressured Him Not to Investigate Vaccine Safety
They don’t have licenses to kill out like candy.
Something, though, in the Iowa environment has been handing cancer out like candy.
Via The Gazette (Iowa) (emphasis added):
“Fifty years after Iowa began collecting and analyzing data on residents diagnosed with cancer through its Iowa Cancer Registry, statistics reveal Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence rate in the nation…
With cancer registries now in 50 states, Iowa tops most in incidence of at least eight types of cancer — ranking first nationally in oral pharynx cancer diagnoses; second in leukemia; fifth in melanoma; and sixth in Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
Via The Gazette (Iowa) (emphasis added):
“Iowa’s stubbornly-high cancer rate can’t be blamed on just one thing, but oncologists and public health researchers agree it’s time to look more closely at Iowa’s top industry to see how it might be contributing.
“If you did an aerial map of Iowa, we are — river to river and north to south — a bath of ag chemicals: herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, nitrates,” Dr. Richard Deming, a Des Moines oncologist, said at The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas conference last fall.
“We’re not yet at the point where we can say what every single chemical that ultimately gets into our water supply (or) onto our skin causes, but when you look at the amount of ag chemicals Iowans are exposed to compared to other states, I suspect that we’ll find that might also be one of the contributing factors.””
My best guess — and my hope — is that these corporations are threatened, for the first time perhaps ever, by an ascendent RFK Jr. MAHA regulatory machine that appears, at least in rhetoric, to be hostile to the forces that have sickened and killed Americans with impunity for decades.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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