Pesticides Fuel Oligarchy

You get a clue of what pesticides are in the 1947 law “regulating” their use in the United States. The law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, says pesticides are chemicals designed to control (destroy, mitigate, repel) insects, fungi, rodents and weeds. Then the law opens loopholes and unleashes a barrage of technical terms and vague sentences as if the matter of pesticides is as normal as apple pie. You get the impression farming is impossible without them.

Should Pesticides Exist?

But are pesticides normal? In fact, should most of them exist at all?

It’s true some kind of pest control substances like sulfur have been in existence for millennia. Homer talks of disinfecting Odysseus’ palace with sulfur. And my father used sulfur to fight disease in his grapevines.

However, “pest control” in 2018 is not the pest control at the time of Homer. In fact, pest control did not exist then. The natural world was sacred to the Greeks. The notion some form of life was a pest would be alien to them. You should not confuse our pest control with the ancient tradition of combining knowledge about the natural world, including using a substance from the world, sulfur, to prevent disease or protect crops and the healthy condition of homes. 

Pest Control: Giant Business and Politics

Pest control today is a vast global business of selling chemicals by any and all means. The control of “pests” is the excuse for the truly massive use and misuse of synthetic, usually petroleum-based, chemicals.

The reason for this gigantic business of farm and pest control chemicals is huge profits. Chemical organizations employ thousands upon thousands of experts and salesmen. These include executives, scientists and salesmen. 

When a chemical is approved by the government, it becomes a license for making money. It makes no difference if there’s any truth in the claims of the chemical company about its pesticide. Profits and bureaucracies cover up the unseemly underbelly of the enterprise.

When farming stopped depending on the Sun for energy and became addicted to petroleum, pesticides became farming. 

Transition from Solar to Petroleum agriculture. Nebraska's New Land Review, Fall 1976.

Pesticides keep agribusiness expanding and destroying small-scale family farming. 

Expulsion of the peasant or small family farmer from the land by agribusiness. North America Congress on Latin America Report on the Americas, Nov / Dec 1994.

Pesticides are much more than killers of insects, fungi, rats, and weeds. They are the gears and glue of a vast profitable food and pest control business. The owners of pesticides knew they would have to defend the indefensible. They employed science to provide the clouds of dogma and faith.

Defending the Indefensible

When chemical companies speak of pesticides, they speak of active ingredients and “inerts.” They say, and they have convinced the US pesticides regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency, to say the same thing, that it is the active ingredient (the synthetic chemical) that kills the pest. The “inerts” are like water; they don’t cause harm.

Following this logic, they send this active ingredient to private labs for testing. And what do the labs test these chemicals for? They already know these pesticides are killers of pests: insects, fungi, rats, and weeds. But these are forms of life. So, the testing is not addressing death. Pesticides are death; they are programmed and designed to kill:  their name says so. They are biocides.

Can Labs Test Pesticides?

The labs do short-term and long-term testing for diseases. Do these pesticides imitate hormones? Do they harm the liver, heart, lungs or the genetic stuff of life? Do they cause neurotoxic disease or brain damage? Do they cause cancer? And what kinds of effects do they have on wildlife?

These are important goals of testing. But both the owners of pesticides, the labs, and the government know that evidence of any of these life-threatening effects would probably disrupt the government’s approval for bringing these chemicals to the market.

Thus, “testing” biocides in private labs always meant deception. The truth about the chemicals could never be revealed. Labs found ways to avoid reporting the truth. They would replace ill or dead animals with healthy animals. They would dispose of the cancer tumors but say nothing about them.

These are not speculations. They happened in several laboratories the government shut down during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In fact, one of those corrupt labs, Industrial Bio-Test, did fraudulent testing for a quarter of a century. It tested hundreds of pesticides and drugs. EPA did not ban pesticides tested in the swamp of IBT. However, EPA shut down IBT in 1983. Some of the IBT chemicals, however, continue to be large pesticide sellers.

Now, let’s assume, the pesticide passes honest testing. It’s still not what you may think of it: harmless.

The active ingredient that came clean from testing is never used alone for farming or pest control. This active ingredient is only one in a mixture of chemicals. The law and EPA brand the non-active ingredients “inerts.” However, the name “inerts” has nothing to do with safety. Its sole purpose is hiding danger.

Mixing active ingredient and inerts. Iowa, 1980s. Unknown photographer. 

 One of the so-called “inerts” is petroleum distillates: carcinogens all. Indeed, some of the “inerts” are more dangerous than the active ingredients.

Pesticides: Key Ingredients to Agribusiness

Hazardous pesticides are still in business because they are the key ingredients of agribusiness and the chemical and pest control industries. These gigantic enterprises have bribed politicians and enough scientists to capture the government and the media, essentially convincing them that without pesticides there would be hunger in America and the world. 

This is the reason why an extremely controversial chemical like glyphosate-roundup of Monsanto keeps making gold for Monsanto. Thousands of victims are suing Monsanto. And in one case, a victim, Dewayne Johnson, was awarded $ 289 million as punitive damages. The court wanted to punish Monsanto for giving Johnson a killing cancer: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

But these useful actions are a little too late to silence the dragon out of the lab.

Gigantic self-propelled pesticide sprayer. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Oligarchy

People need to understand the roots of our environmental and public health disasters are at the doors of giant companies. Foolishly, we allowed these companies to grow at the expense of our democracy and the small family farmer and businessman. 

I used to ride a bus in Alexandria, Virginia for my EPA office in Arlington, Virginia. Sometimes I talked to a woman lawyer in the bus who worked for the anti-trust division of the Justice Department. She would tell me stories of corporate-government corruption: How and why business had emasculated the anti-trust responsibility of the government.  

Her stories mirror invisible politics that, along with pesticides and the power of the agribusiness nexus, make up the infrastructure of oligarchy. 

The United States is an outright oligarchy. The few rich who rule America, including President Donald Trump and members of Congress and Wall Street, form a class that is against the spirit and democracy of the 1776 American Revolution.  Thomas Jefferson would accuse this class of treason. 

Oligarchs are promoting policies that breed contempt for the natural world, insects, birds, endangered species, honey bees and beautiful wildflowers. That's why Trump feels comfortable promoting his cruel environmental policies, especially the lie that there's no global warming. In addition, oligarchs don’t care for the powerless many: the vast majority of Americans.

Berny Sanders spoke about a political revolution. I am with Sanders. But I go a step further. Break-up big business, especially agribusiness. Give the land back to small organic farmers and ban most pesticides and the genetic engineering of crops. Leave the Frankenstein monster in its cage.