What I Learned in 30 Years of Covering Monsanto (and what it means today)

My Best Covid Writing – Special Archive

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE | Related: Interview with Peter von Stackelberg on how he broke open the IBT Labs story as a small-town reporter covering grain farming in the late 1970s

Dear Friend and Reader:

Tonight’s program is a special edition, where I mark thirty years to the week that I’ve been covering Monsanto. On this week’s program, I’m planning to tell you what I learned. There is so much that I will choose about four or five highlights: major issues where key elements are revealed. Much more is available at Dioxin Dorms website — there is no malware in case you get a warning. We have secured the website and await the content block to come off.

Before I go on: if you are a contributor to the program, thank you. Not all of my readers are thrilled that I honor my professional duty and cover scientific fraud. If you are one of the many people who takes refuge in my program and my writing, please make a contribution to the program. Lots of small donations go a long way. Several large donations in December have helped us make ends meet.

My Monsanto Coverage Started on a College Campus in 1992

I discovered Monsanto one day when its electrical insulation fluid failed in six campus buildings, resulting in a toxic catastrophe that took nine years to clean up. Miraculously, this occurred during winter break, with nearly all of the 990 residents of the dorms away.

The failed dielectric and heat insulator was made of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a substance like very heavy liquid vinyl that was (among other things) used as insulation in electrical equipment.

One day, a driver lost control of her car and ran into a utility pole two miles from campus, damaging electrical wires. Within hours, the campus was covered with members of the renowned IBM hazmat team, dispatched from the neighboring county.

This incident occurred at a state college campus few blocks from my home and office. At the time I was editor of Student Leader News Service, a statewide press service. While the rest of the local newspapers and TV stations were running “back to normal” stories a month later, I dug into the details of the cleanup and the claims of state and county officials. And I learned the history of the issues as told in court documents from the records of many lawsuits involving the chemicals.

From a Local Story to a Global Story

Investigating for the next three years, I discovered that the PCB manufacturers — Monsanto, General Electric and Westinghouse — knew all along that these problems could, and would, happen. They knew how toxic PCBs were, how they affected both workers and wildlife, and that PCBs had contaminated “some of the very remote part of the world.”

My investigation included the relationship between PCBs (a manufactured product) and dioxin (a chemical manufacturing byproduct). Along the way,

I encountered fraudulent “safety testing” labs that provided phony studies for the FDA and the EPA. I read the memos of Jeff Baer and Wayne Bickerstaff, who proposed shredding “smoking gun documents” in the industrial hygiene files at Westinghouse.

By late 1994, I had reported all this in a front-page story for Sierra magazine. This was the first to document the whole history of PCBs, starting with their discovery in the environment. After doing this initial work, I developed the history of dioxin, and of the fraudulent operation to cover it up.

From the Las Vegas Sun to the Mountain Astrologer

My scientific fraud coverage has been published everywhere from The Las Vegas Sun to The Village Voice to The Ecologist and far beyond. I continued my work on Monsanto over the years, and have conducted many other investigations into their crimes against humanity, and those of many other companies and agencies. I even researched Monsanto’s chart, and did a major cover article for The Mountain Astrologer.

Twice, The New York Times profiled me for my original journalism.

Covid Investigation and Discovery Operation

When covid began in early 2020, I was well-equipped to initiate an investigation and discovery operation. The patterns discovered in this investigation follow those in every other one I’ve done: the use of “science” as a political and corporate weapon, rather than a method that is used to get to the truth.

My journey covering toxins began at the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, in 1983. Much that I learned on that story, written when I was 19, I still use today. It’s all still valid; we are living through the same thing over and over.

I’ll be offering tales from the trail on Friday’s program.

With love,

 

 

 

Conspiracy of Silence

Related — exposes Westinghouse document destruction