The Supreme Court’s Disturbing decision in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, and the Problem of ‘Corporate Capture’

The Supreme Court’s ‘Monsanto’ decision along with ‘corporate capture’ deliver a one-two punch to the little guy. Why we must continue the fight.

I did not find many legacy media outlets criticizing last week’s Supreme Court decision in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, even though it overturned a jury verdict requiring Monsanto to pay damages to a Missouri man who developed cancer after using the weed killer, Roundup, which contains glyphosate.

The Supreme Court ruled that Germany’s behemoth, Bayer (which owns Monsanto) had no ‘duty to warn’ because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not agreed that glyphosate causes cancer and therefore that Bayer had no extra duty to warn the public of that risk.

There is ample scientific evidence proving that glyphosate causes cancer yet SCOTUS, which of course is not a regulatory agency but an institution purportedly without a political agenda, protected a big corporation and left the injured out in the cold.

People are not stupid.

Time and time again, people see who institutions tend to protect. MAHA Action President Tony Lyons led the July 1 ‘media hub’ by calling the Supreme Court’s Monsanto ruling a “devastating blow” to public health. And Lyons correctly went further, laying the blame for the decision on “corporate capture,” the (illegally) close fiscal ties between government regulators and private industries like Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, and, in the case of Bayer’s Monsanto, Big Chem.

Even though it’s tough if not impossible to prove that large corporations bought the SCOTUS decision, it certainly feels that way. “The message to families is: once Washington stamps a label ‘approved,’ you get no say and no day in court,” Lyons said. “Monsanto could have warned people, and two justices said so plainly. This is the same company whose old ‘safety’ study was retracted last year after it came out they’d (Monsanto) helped ghostwrite it…That’s corporate capture, plain and simple — exactly what this [MAHA] movement exists to end.”

More visibly, ‘corporate capture’ has infected the federal government on multiple levels and has transformed government regulators into silent corporate partners.

In the public health arena, Big Pharma has quietly taken over medicine. This excellent article by a Substack writer who goes by the name, Midwestern Doctor – “How Medicine Became ‘Too Big to Fail’” – provides insight into the various mechanisms employed by the pharmaceutical industry to seize control of and dominate the government agencies and officials who are supposed to be responsible for regulating them.

How did - and can - Big Pharma do this?

‘Midwestern Doctor’ explains that industry user fees now fund roughly half the FDA’s budget. Virtually “every recent FDA commissioner has left for a pharmaceutical company… Scientists who push back are marginalized, surveilled, or driven out,” as we discovered in the case of Brown University’s cancer researcher, Wafik El-Deiry.

Forty years of ‘Fauci-ism,’ the Substacker writes, has created a National Institute of Health (NIH) “where compliance is enforced through control of research grants and through massive royalties from partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry.”

No need to smuggle brown bags full of cash into NIH headquarters. Just reinforce the protection scheme through royalty payments that are out of the public eye.

This all leads to a place where regular folk get screwed and corporate interests are protected.

A system stacked against the people, that favors corporations over them, is a big part of what is turning America into fertile ground for socialism, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “a system of society or of group living in which there is no private property and products are distributed, owned and controlled by the state.”

Every day, on media outlets that lean right, one can hear strong criticism of politicians who are democratic socialists. Figures such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami, New York Congressional Member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and, of course, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Given how corporate capture continues to work, one can understand the appeal, especially to young people who haven’t yet owned their own business or bought a house.

On July 3, President Trump told Americans that communism’s sudden re-emergence is the greatest threat facing the nation.

I agree with the president, given communism is socialism’s cousin; both systems reject capitalism in favor of greater wealth equality and public control over resources.

If we want Americans to believe in the capitalist system that once lifted up the middle class, we had better stop protecting the crony capitalists who are sucking the life out of it. If we want to extoll the virtues of capitalism, we need capitalists to behave better. And we need the government to hold the bad guys accountable, not enable them.

Moreover, corporate capture enhances monopolies and diminishes individual rights, which is NOT free market capitalism. One way to restore capitalism with integrity? To use anti-trust laws and transparency.

Enter Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran his presidential campaign on beating down the ugly corporate capture of government. Now he’s leading the fight to do exactly that by demanding transparency and gold standard science from the sprawling agency and its sub-agencies he oversees.

But we need more.

It is time for Congress to end protections for industries that have been injuring Americans and then hiding behind liability shields. Congress can start by passing Senator Rand Paul’s (R - KY) proposed Transparency Bill on Royalties Paid to Government Officials and Congressman Paul Gosar’s (R - AZ) End the Vaccine Carveout Act.

End the protection rackets. Show regular Americans that they are more valuable than corporate profits and people will believe in capitalism again – and the socialist and communist surge will become a historical footnote.