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The Monsanto Corporation's legal eagles have been busier than ever this year, firing off one legal threat after another to journalists, book publishers, and even an entire state. Monsanto, the multi-billion-dollar agribusiness giant that has brought the world products such as Agent Orange and synthetic bovine growth hormone (rBGH), revels in the perverted US legal system that has slowly conferred constitutional rights to the fictions known as corporations. This is why Monsanto can now make legal claims regarding the "defamation" of its products, a legal concept originally
intended only for individuals.

Monsanto's legal team began 1998 by taking on the State of Vermont and its attempts to pass a very weak rBGH law that merely required Monsanto to register with the state and make its client list available to state authorities so "rBGH-free" claims could be verified. The company responded by publicly threatening to sue the state and stop selling its products in Vermont if the bill passed. Governor Howard Dean, feeling the lobbying heat from Monsanto and its rBGH-addicted farmers in Vermont, came to Monsanto's defense and pulled the plug on the measure by threatening a veto. The legislature then went on to further soften an already spineless bill by removing the section that required the drug manufacturer's client list. Eventually, after yet another legal threat and a "closed-door" meeting with
Governor Dean, Monsanto backed off and let the near-meaningless legislation go into effect.

Next up, thanks to a lawsuit filed in April 1998 by two muckraking journalists in Florida, we learned that Monsanto's legal team convinced a major Fox-TV affiliate to spike an rBGH story that the corporation claimed would cause them "enormous damage."

Finally, in May we learned that Monsanto's lawyers had temporarily succeeded in killing a new book, Against the Grain, that addresses the perils of the new genetic technologies in agriculture, a market sector that Monsanto wants to dominate. Just as the book's publisher, Vital Health, was ordering the first printing in March 1998, it received a threatening letter from the Monsanto's "General Counsel's office" declaring that the book was "defamatory and potentially libelous" against its Roundup herbicide. As a result, according to the book's authors, Mark Lappe and
Britt Bailey of the Center for Ethics and Toxics (CETOS), Vital Health got cold feet and, "fearing a major lawsuit, stopped the presses and folded its tent" on the book. The good news is that the authors are fighting back by taking this latest bout of legal thuggery to the public and firing off a tart letter of their own to the Monsanto brass. Better yet, the maverick publishers at Common Courage Press have taken on the book "come hell or high water."

Michael Colby is the Editor of Food & Water Journal. This article was excerpted with permission from their Summer 1998 issue.

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