Book Review: Merchants of Poison

Title: Merchants of Poison 

Author: Stacy Malkan

Publisher: U.S. Right to Know

Date: 2022

Length: 103 e-pages

Quote: "Character assassination has been deployed against countless scientists since. But industry goes after more than just the scientists; companies and their public relations proxies also attack journalists, public interest groups, and anyone raising concerns about their products as a key tactic. These attacks serve two purposes: they work to undermine the credibility of those raising concerns and, at the same time, they can have a chilling effect, causing many to think twice about putting themselves in industry crosshairs."

Right. On.

Regular readers have been following the Glyphosate Awareness movement from this web site's point of view. During the months when this web site was forced into dormancy by local Internet access issues, Stacy Malkan wrote this hard-hitting account of the movement from the point of view of the people who were still actively, publicly, on line, taking the character assassination from Bayer. This book documents the activities of the verbal hitmen, the sneaky front groups, the corporate mergers and name changes, how Donald Trump's pet chemical company got to be ChemChina while formerly uninvolved Dow and DuPont got in on the side of glyphosate as Cortiva, why McDonalds and Nestle food never became really safe to eat, and more.

Some people who were very active in the movement in 2018 really have dropped out due to personal illness, fears, or other concerns. I'm sure many people thought I was one of them. Malkan mentions only the most visible people in the Glyphosate Awareness movement, with heroic respect for the privacy of people who've chosen different public focus points, gone underground, or just not said "Hey, I want to be in this book." 

(Spoiler alert: Rock fans should know that Neil Young did want to be in this book, and he is. It's very interesting that you can't listen to the whole album on YouTube, although you can listen to this song: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fXbhoJNmLQ)

There are questions that remain unanswered. I know that a third cousin of mine, who inherited a nice piece of land and ruined it, has been coveting my whole neighborhood since about 1990, with sociopathic intensity. I know that this disgrace to the phrase "Virginia gentleman" has been reckless with "pesticides" at home, though I'm not sure exactly how much this contributed to the fact that his parents, his one legitimate child, his wife, his brother, and his sister, all died within the years when glyphosate use peaked. I know that this man has admitted harassing my closer relatives, including my parents, and his wife's relatives in the neighborhood, including the younger man who has been hounded into the role of "Young Grouch." I know that the harassment of the Young Grouch, by this man he trusted as an uncle, included deliberate placement of dead animals, one of whom was my beloved cat Heather, in a road where the Young Grouch would drive over them. I have seen him shooting animals out of season in broad daylight; I have seen a man of his build killing animals while trespassing on my property at night. I know that harassment of me, personally, included deliberate damage to my roof and water line, other property damage, and the deliberate destruction of fruit trees and flowers on my property, with glyphosate, with a specific intention of making me physically sick, as well as sick at heart to lose plants and trees that were family heirlooms. I knew that that sort of harassment would be a possible consequence of public speaking or writing about glyphosate, all along. It's not only the opportunity to chat live with foreign clients that motivates me to work at night; it's also the opportunity to watch for any indication that my Professional Bad Neighbor is trying to carry out threats he's made to burn down my house. What I don't know, would like to know, and may never know, is whether Bayer was directly involved in these attacks, or whether my sociopathic third cousin did it entirely on his own initiative. Some stories, though true, should not be published in books until all the facts are in. 

While corporate news media, regrettably including Twitter, have been paid to ignore the facts, it is safe to say that everyone who's involved with Glyphosate Awareness has taken some abuse from corporate greedheads who imagine they will be able to bully their way out of paying for their misdeeds, forever. At the very least we've all been publicly insulted by the corporate enemies of humanity and censored by the sellout media. Most of us have had to deal with more than that, and with more than publishers' backing out of book deals, too. The sellout media don't want you to know. While they scream on and on about the "racism" they invoke to explain the consequences of quarrels and brawls between people of the same ethnic type, the sellout media are hoping against all hope that you won't ask questions about the real institutionalized abuse, including violent physical abuse, of people who interfere with the sales of profitable products.

Which has, incidentally, racial components. Genes associated with ethnicity, like the Irish celiac gene, help to determine how individuals tend to react to glyphosate. "Black people aren't celiacs," said a Black neighbor of mine; "what about sickle-cell anemia?" I've seen no formal studies but it's safe to say that glyphosate does not help  anyone living with sickle-cell anemia. There are also international issues, which this web site generally does not discuss, of rich countries (with more White people) trying to force more use of glyphosate on poor countries in Asia and Africa. If we want to talk about hatecrimes against Asians, what about the use of tariffs and trade deals to inflict glyphosate on Thailand. There's an instructive little first book of glyphosate science out there, printed in Uganda, available as an e-book free for the downloading. It contains photographs of how that stock image of White farm laborers spraying glyphosate shows them wearing masks, gloves, and HazMat suits, but the corresponding image of Africans shows Black laborers wearing...shorts. Why would Black field hands need shirts, they're only going to work in the field and get dirty...

Anyway, Merchants of Poison is a relatively bland, journalistic account of the unassailable facts about how Bayer and other corporations closed ranks, after "Roundup" was finally pulled off the market in 2020, and moved to get more of this poison into the world's food supplies. Monsanto became Bayer, Syngenta became ChemChina, Dow and DuPont became Cortiva; all three became even more enmeshed in efforts to make the whole world dependent on glyphosate, and later on even deadlier poisons, to raise genetically modified food for all those billions of babies the greedheads don't want to stop begetting.

(What would happen if women agreed that babies don't deserve to be born into a glyphosate-poisoned world? "Enforce the ban now, no spraying this spring, no traces of glyphosate in anything sold as food by July, or no chances of making any more babies." Just a thought. For women who want to have one healthy baby.)

While we don't see a screenshot of Bayer's current strategy for dealing with tweets from people involved in Glyphosate Awareness (I test Twitter from time to time--currently it seems to be the "5 tweets per hour," even if those tweets are all about verse forms and flower pictures, that alerts Bayer's goon squad to trigger robot censorship), we do see a snip of the strategy Monsanto used prior to its merger with Bayer. Real Twits in the Glyphosate Awareness movement can testify that the only thing that's changed is Twitter's current willingness to be manipulated in this way.

We learn the names of "scientists" who should, henceforward, be considered disqualified for any jobs in which the ability to read or write would ever be useful. 

We see the greedheads hard at work, trying to disparage those who propose better ways to deal with "weeds" while placing preliminary claims on their ideas.

(Shouldn't they be allowed to use their existing marketing networks to promote better ideas? Of course they should. Provided that they pay the individuals who suggested those ideas...including full compensation for the damage done to those individuals that motivated us to think of the improvements. Before proposing steam weeders, similar to carpet steamers, I logged every pseudo-celiac reaction I had since 2006. One million dollars per bleeding episode would be a suitable place to start. Malkan quotes Bayer's halfhearted endorsement of another proposed improvement from a man who should demand no less.)

We learn how Marion Nestle and Nassim Taleb, neither of whom has been prominent in Glyphosate Awareness, ran afoul of Bayer's troll squad.

The main text of the report ends with an unfortunate appeal to the United Nations as the source of ideas that could have been cited from Wendell Berry or Robert Rodale or, for that matter, Herbert W. Armstrong, but the book is hardly even half done. Tables, fact sheets, and hundreds of endnotes make it worth paying for--although a little expression of moral support for RTK may still get you a free e-copy.