Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter 3

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.

1. THE SURPRISINGLY HARD THING ABOUT NEWSLETTERING

...is to stop reading news stories and write the flippin’ summary already. I apologize. This is a short letter in any case, because it’s August...so...

2. THERE’S NOT A LOT OF ACTUAL NEWS

More people are joining the Glyphosate Awareness movement. More lawsuits are going to court. Bayer is blustering. Pesticide-addicted “farmers” are kicking and screaming as people increasingly demand that they stop poisoning the food supply. What else is new? It’s hard to be patient, to remember that many of these people don’t use the Internet and don’t have access to the facts we’ve been posting and sharing for more than a year.

We can fix that...and you don’t have to send me money to fix it, either. In fact I’d prefer that you not send me money. You know more people whom I don’t know. Your name has more credibility with people who know you than mine would have, since these people don’t know me. You’re encouraged to share this newsletter with your own neighbors at your own expense! Or, if you don’t want to take the time to copy, mail, e-mail, etc., you could just send money to Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter, c/o Boxholders, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. Whichever. Spreading Glyphosate Awareness is something you’re doing for your own benefit, not mine.

Anyway...

3. GLYPHOSATE (AND DICAMBA) BREED SUPER-GERMS...TUMMYBUGS!

We knew glyphosate is one of the antibiotics whose overuse has been breeding MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which has complicated the recovery of so many sick people in hospitals during the last ten years. But this New Zealand study confirms that both glyphosate and dicamba (Spectracide), separately or together, breed more virulent, harder-to-treat strains of salmonella and Escherichia coli. https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2018/new-study-links-common-herbicides-and-antibiotic-resistance.html .

4. HOW LONG DOES THE LOCAL DAMAGE LAST?

Alabamans debate the precise amount of ongoing damage Monsanto did to the town of Anniston: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/harrietwashington/monsanto-anniston-harriet-washington-environmental-racism .

5. GLYPHOSATE BECOMES A GYNECOLOGICAL ISSUE (THOUGH ALSO A UROLOGICAL ISSUE)

FIGO (Federation International of Gynecologists & Obstetricians, or equivalent spellings in several European languages) identifies glyphosate poisoning as a women’s/reproductive health issue. “Whether scientists are reviewing increased rates of cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders, pregnancy outcomes, or birth defects, there is evidence to support the effect of chemical exposures on health.” https://sustainablepulse.com/2019/07/31/global-womens-health-federation-figo-calls-for-phasing-out-of-glyphosate-herbicides/#.XUSCGdTyvs0

6. MORE ROOM FOR COMMENTS AT EPA WEB SITE

Here’s my comment: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-2392 . “Anonymous” evidently means from outside the EPA network. You’re welcome to share your “anonymous public comments”! To post your comment, go here: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-2340 .(You’ll note that “Comments must be received on or before July 5” has been extended to “Due Sep 3.”)

7. GLYPHOSATE/CANCER VICTIMS NOW INCLUDE PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE

Former Pittsburgh Steeler Merril Hoge discusses his lawsuit with People.com : https://people.com/health/former-steelers-player-merril-hoge-suing-maker-of-roundup/ .

8. BAYER RETREATS TO MONSANTO’S OLD HOME GROUND: CALL TO ACTION

This is not just “One more lawsuit, fourth verse same as the first...” Bayer wants to be prosecuted in St. Louis, rather than California, because St. Louis is the home of Monsanto. Lots of people’s reaction to the glyphosate lawsuits there, Bayer hopes, will be “My father worked for Monsanto...” or “My business needs those Bayer people...”In the next week or two you Gentle Readers need to strategize: https://twitter.com/careygillam/status/1156251856785551365

Admittedly a lot of people have hated both Monsanto and Bayer, for good and sufficient reasons, for a long time. For some people this has been part of a more general feeling about privately owned corporations, generally, and some people are thinking, “Yesss! Shut down the factories, put the office staff in jail, and nationalize those ratbags’ ill-gotten gains!”

Those are not the people we need to activate in St. Louis next week, Gentle Readers.

It might be a good thing for St. Louis (consider the undisputed details from Anniston, above) if Bayer were taken over by new stockholders with Glyphosate Awareness, who could order the company to move away from making poisons to making something relatively wholesome like weeder robots. It would not be a good thing if Bayer were simply shut down, leaving a lot of people in St. Louis unemployed and damaging their local economy.

It would also be better for a lot of us if Bayer were actually kept in business...as a corporation deeply in debt, indentured to pay a lot of people a lot of damages over many years.

Bayer will undoubtedly be telling folks in St. Louis that our goal is to wreck their local economy, probably to leave their hardworking fathers (who probably have grotesque chronic diseases they blame on their ages) homeless and their children dependent on welfare meals served in miserable public schools with smashed windows and blah blah blah on.

We need to get out the word to folks in St. Louis that our goal is to maintain their local economy by keeping people employed on more worthwhile projects than making poison. Bayer’s legal obligation is not primarily to keep human beings healthy but to make its stockholders wealthy. We need to explain to people that the goal of a glyphosate ban is to keep the Bayer Boycott from bankrupting the stockholders, to get Bayer turned around and on a track to some sort of ethically tolerable business that can keep the children of St. Louis in good schools. And able to benefit from those good schools because they’re not sick from glyphosate poisoning.

Those of you who know people in St. Louis need to reach out to them now and talk in detail about how, if they don’t impede the glyphosate ban the whole world needs, Bayer just might be pushed forward to the cutting edge of twenty-first century robotic technology, rather than stuck in an old technology that’s rapidly becoming useless to farmers at the same time it’s being shown to be harmful to every living creature that’s ever been studied.

Since I don’t know people in St. Louis I’m about to wrap up my work week. On Tuesday, when I come back on line, I look forward to seeing the hashtags “Glyphosate” and “StLouis” linked on Twitter and in e-mails, and reading about how youall have been activating your friends there.

We’re winning, Gentle Readers. Pass it forward!