The way the Wapo has it the two companies agreed to spin of $9 billion worth of assets, and:
“Bayer will sell its seed and herbicide businesses to a third party, the German chemical company BASF. It also will sell its emerging digital farming business as well as a variety of intellectual property and R&D projects.”
The DoJ said those spinoffs would be yanno, more fair to farmers and consumers, as the new mega-corporation wouldn’t have quite such a monopoly since six ‘companies’ including Monsanto and Bayer have long dominated global trade in seeds™ and agro-chemicals.
What wasn’t mentioned was, at least according to da Wiki:
“BASF SE ‘We Create Chemistry’ is a German chemical company and the largest chemical producer in the world. The BASF Group comprises subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries and operates six integrated production sites and 390 other production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas and Africa. Its headquarters is located in Ludwigshafen, Germany. BASF has customers in over 190 countries and supplies products to a wide variety of industries. Despite its size and global presence, BASF has received relatively little public attention since it abandoned manufacturing and selling BASF-branded consumer electronics products in the 1990s.”
“Under the leadership of Carl Bosch, BASF founded IG Farben with Hoechst, Bayer, and three other companies, thus losing its independence. BASF was the nominal survivor, as all shares were exchanged for BASF shares prior to the merger.
World War II: Following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, IG Farben cooperated with the Nazi regime, profiting from guaranteed volumes and prices, and from the slave labor provided by the government’s Nazi concentration camps. IG Farben also achieved notoriety owing to its production of Zyklon-B, the lethal gas used in Nazi extermination camps.”
The $66 billion deal had already been approved by the EU, Russia, and Brazil. What’s in a name? Well, given the toxic level of Brand Monsanto, Bayer will be…Bayer: think baby aspirin, not GM seeds and glyphosate, nossir.
Here is Bayer Global’s public statement on the deal, the unintentionally satirical highlights:
“Innovation is vital to produce more healthy, safe and affordable food for a growing population in a more sustainable manner. The combination of the two businesses will allow us to deliver more innovation faster and provide solutions tailored to the needs of farmers around the world,” said Liam Condon, Bayer Board Member and President of the Crop Science Division. “Going forward, our teams in the labs and in the field will be able to take a much more holistic approach to innovation as we address the enormous challenges we face in agriculture.”
“Bayer is fully aware of the heightened responsibility that a leadership position in agriculture entails. The company will continue to further strengthen its commitment in the area of sustainability. As a leader, Bayer is fully committed to upholding the highest ethical and responsibility standards, strengthening access to health and nutrition, and further reducing its environmental footprint. “We will apply the same rigor to achieving our sustainability targets as we do to our financial targets,” said Baumann.
Bayer is also committed to further enhancing stakeholder engagement. Baumann said: “We aim to deepen our dialogue with society. We will listen to our critics and work together where we find common ground. Agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill. We have to talk to each other. We need to listen to each other. It’s the only way to build bridges.”
The rest will be by way of a Storify by Tweets from Colin Todhunter UK, GM Watch, and Sustainable Pulse.
(by way of Bernaysian PR)
I wonder how many of these #FakeFilanthropists own Monsanto, Bayer, and BASF stock besides ‘Green Revolution’ Gates and George Soros?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
I. Just. Can’t. Even.
mega lulz, mein herr. but at the very least, even though you.can’t.even: you’ve now borne witness to the hellacious ‘deal’, so good on you. sometimes it’s all we can do, even speechlessly.
and it really just a further (albeit giant) step along the road to biowrecking not only the planet, but its inhabitants, isn’t it?
O/T, but northeast of us: ‘DURANGO, Colo. (CBS4)– Fire officials in La Plata County updated the public about the 416 Fire on Saturday morning. They say the fire has yet again grown — now sitting at 8,691 acres with 10 percent containment.’
and west of us: “Yet another fire flared up in nearby Montezuma County near Cortez. The Burro Fire grew to 100 acres after starting on Friday.”
in northern NM, the ute park fire northwest of cimmaron burned 32000 acres before it was contained this week.
hella yotta smoke in the air. esp from the 416 fire that blew up bigly today.
Well there’s more about Bernays and our headlong fall into mesmerized consumerism. Every product we buy is filled with sad stories of abused laborers. And the RT video about Glyphosate-based weedkillers is powerfully depressing. Henry Rollands, the ‘guide’ in the video, has a website where they can test for glyphosates here: https://detoxproject.org/testing/
yes indeed as to abused laborers, and thanks for the glyphosate testing link. i clicked ‘solutions’ thinking it may have been one of the neutralize glyphosate ‘products’ noted by one of these twit accounts that i’d used. i stayed away from that ‘news’ not knowing if it might be bullshit, but i checked just now to see if might have been GM watch, dinnae find it, but the fallout on the merger is major.
me, i’m old and toast in any event, and we can’t afford even allegedly organic food, nor-non gmo.
thank you, magiamma, and welcome to café babylon. also, it’s up for grabs whether it’s the neo-nics or climate change, iirc, that’s responsible for the virtual eradication of monarch butterflies. plants flower so much earlier that they’re in seed by the time the stained glass winged ones visit them. here in SW colorado, the temps are 20 degrees hotter than usual this time of year. drought monitor says we’re in ‘extreme unction’ (j/k) drought. okay; ‘exceptional drought’. but they may need a higher designation soon, goddam. it’s all one package, isn’t it?
more on ‘it’s all of a package’:
were not most of global nations ruled by capitalistic oligarchs and their henchmen who write and enforce laws and policies (koch bros. in the US for one example), rampant product consumerism wouldn’t be required, even as a distraction as to the plethora of product ‘choices’ by bernaysian ads by the political class. if endless war were not so profitable to makers of the implements of war, neoliberal austerity measures wouldn’t be necessary as a hedge against the financial costs of war for resources grabs (esp. by amerika). and when was the last time you heard any of the gods of the climate change movement say: end war! the amerikan military has the largest carbon footprint by far!
factory farming/big ag chemicals were responsible for all the dust bowl windrows being cut down in the great plains. higher yields! more warbuck$! but as the poisons were laden onto the soil, not only were/are aquifers across the land being depleted and poisoned, the drain on the san joaquin aquifer caused the central valley to lose 30 feet in elevation between 1925 and 1977, and even now is losing a couple feet a year. the poisons also murder the beneficial micro-nutrients in the soil so they can’t get taken up, thus don’t get into the food we eat. at least in amerika, obesity and sub-clinical health are rising, rising, rising, and much or it down to transgenic food: calories with little if any nutritional value, in the case of gmo high-fructose corn syrup pumped into unimaginable numbers of commercial foods: actually anti-nutritional, as sugars steal calcium from bones to utilize it. with the many crops (corn, potatoes, soybeans, eggplant) modified by splicing in bT toxin, eating it creates little pesticide factories in our guts, wreaking untold health issues and food sensitivities allergies and at least: semi-subclinical health issues such as leaky gut syndrome. i’d guess depression, for one; rampant lobotimization for another; you might guess insanity, but i couldn’t possibly comment… ;-)
here’s the constantly updated US drought monitor. i can’t find a current one for india (last was 2016) but lotta drought-stricken areas. but dig it: sustainable organic agroecology actually acts as a carbon sinks, holds moisture, adds organic material (humus), and binds the soil with micro-roots *and* is home to earthworms who help the soil and protect the plants above from predators.
zo, w/ climate chaos we have increased flooding in some places, rising oceans, stronger hurricanes predicted for the coming season, drought galore wildfires in the west (inciweb), although iirc CA has its own system.
reservoirs across the west are often toward empty, the ones below the big dam projects are filling w/ silt in any event, and around the world water is dammed for hydro-power, dealing blows to farmers below. heh, that’s all i can think of for now. mr. wd had asked: ‘and so what’s the good news?’ well, depending on one’s point of view whether it’s good or bad news: it seems to be totally baked in by now, barring a friendly alien visitation with quick solutions
p.s. in colin todhunter’s piece on bernaysian consumerism, i was aware of appealing to reptilian brain ‘fear’ (of constructed ‘enemies), but hadn’t thunk of ‘narcissism’ (amerikan exceptionalism?). very apt, no?
an addition: the 416 fire complex north of nearby durango has blown up to 22,000 acres, while the firefighters admit they’re focusing on ‘homes’ (read rich people’s houses). the bear creek (burro mtn. fire) high altitude fire in the (jeez louise conifer forest this time of year)…has burned downhill and has crossed bear creek. mr. wd just read that the entire san juan national forest (1.3 million acres) is now ‘closed’.
one thing i’d meant to feature as an addition to my earlier ‘columbia joins nato wtf?’ diary was cordeliers on twitter steering folks to this ‘news’:
on the (eugenecists) bill & mellie gates foundation’s tab at the Guardian May 21: ‘Malaria rates soar in Venezuela – a nation that had nearly wiped it out; Shocking reversal for country once lauded for nearly wiping out the disease, reflecting wider problems in failing healthcare system’
Writing recently in the journal Science, Venezuelan malaria expert Maria Eugenia Grillet outlined what was driving an “alarming” and “unprecedented” increase in cases of malaria.
Grillet blamed “economic and political mismanagement”, which she said had “precipitated a general collapse of Venezuela’s health system, creating an ongoing humanitarian crisis with severe social consequences”.
She added: “The malaria epidemic has been fuelled by financial constraints for the procurement of malaria commodities – such as insecticides, drugs, diagnostic supplies and mosquito nets – and surveillance activities, internal migration associated with illegal gold mining, and lack of provision and implementation of services.”
“They have not declared an emergency because that would be to admit that the Chávez revolution has failed, and failed miserably.”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/may/21/malaria-rates-soar-venezuela-five-times-more-cases-than-in-2013
a two-fer at the very least: hit VZ/chavismo for an R2P action, convince the new ruler to unleash billy’s gene-drive spliced mosquitoes abroad.
capitalist man ain’t gonna build hisself. requires experimenting. if we can find the drugs & gene therapy that allows a person to survive a lifetime of gmo mcdonald’s nestle zyklon zuckerbezos crap, then we won’t have to undo capitalism & Maggie Thatcher can be right: TINA. every aspect of life can continue to be viewed in purely instrumental terms, it’s all a means of rent-taking & control, even if 99.99% of life is dead. well, at least the commies won’t win.
w/in about 450 years of Columbus instrumentalizing the “new world” for its gold & plunder, this “new world” has killed the planet. in august 1945, Uncle Sam let us all know that it will destroy *everything* to maintain hegemony. it holds that threat & rattles that sabre every day. nothing has changed. why is everyone so up in arms over trump’s epa? it’s never done anything else but cover for big ag/chem/mining/oil, etc. anyone saying otherwise is clearly some kind of eco-terrorist.
on a side note, ever notice what a bunch of whiny little babies these untermensch types are? incl whole gov’ts of countries, esp Uncle Son of Sam? the whole history of misogynistic language cannot express how awful it was for Ivanka to be called a dirty word. indeed, who will start an Underground Railroad for the Trumps?
be well everyone. it’s pride day here. time to go work on my costume & my cover of “I’m every woman.”
a most excellent rant, amigo. but srsly, two things: the EPA *did* call glyphosate a ‘likely carcinogen’ (well okay, before the veddy principled organization took it back in a yanno, do-over under industry pressure). t’other thing is i’d rather be Dead than Red, ya commie-lover.
but lord luv a duck you knocked it outta the park with ‘ who will start an Underground Railroad for the Trumps?’ dang near sprayed coffee on my keyboard! couldn’t remember who called ivanka (not even: ‘flotus’, yanno? she doesn’t even deserve more than her first name), then i remembered seein’ a headline close to ‘samantha bee apologized for calling I the C word’. did she lose her teevee gig like rosanne barr did?
jezum crow, though, i hadn’t eve thunk of how few centuries it took for us to kill the planet. i keep thinking about what was foretold (and rejected) by the indigenous at the side meetings (they weren’t invited to the party) at the rio 2012 sustainability conference. it was they who’d nailed first to me what capitalism was truly about, along with the death of food sovereignty and the rest of the package.
“It just knocks me out how well-organized, brilliant, wise and dedicated these folks are: they see right through these nefarious and false ‘solutions’ like bio-mass, bio-fuels, global hunger-by-transgenic crops, atmospheric carbon-trades that hide even worse eco-travesties, etc. They know mainly because the 1992 UN Sustainability Summit showed them the evil being done to the planet and its inconvenient inhabitants in a second major wave of Colonization. People have been caravanning to Rio all week, and some have constructed a Kara-Oca encampment, and are performing their prayer rituals and healing ceremonies, plus instructing people on their true eco-agricultural techniques and more.”
by the by, the product you’ve imagined would take gene drive splicing, wouldn’t it? that zyclon b would be a pip to …neutralize. thanks so much for stopping by to offer a golden rant, j. just dial 1-666-bil-gates. you’re the best medicine against uncle sammie’s mensches.
gm watch had reprised this abby martin video from 2016 (24 mins) deconstructed ‘Amerika’s monster’:
and had reprised this from march 8 via farmaid.org: ‘Farmers Overwhelmingly Oppose Bayer Monsanto Merger’, march 8 2018, farmaid.org
but once again made me hear john mellencamp’s ‘rain on the scarecrow’ over and over in my mind and soul. this is the best live farm aid version it’s from ’85) i could find, they at least turned tambourine woman’s mike down so her off-key shouting wasn’t so predominant…
but i really prefer this version for the extreme vocal and percussion punch of it:
closing time for me. reflecting ‘café babylon, soul food and freedom music’ from larry long whom studs terkel had dubbed ‘amerika’s troubador’ on his ‘run for freedom’ album he was born in iowa, grew up in minnesota; so many brilliant songs he wrote over his lifetime. tonight’ lullaby:
This is abysmal stuff from the two companies I most love to hate. I can only hope that it means they are both going down the drain clutching at one another much like Ahab and the whale, (though I think the whale survived so better ditch that metaphor.) Lets see:
…From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments,; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and in spite of all …that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume….
…Now small fowl flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
[end quotation; ‘nuf said.]
ah, moby dick likely survived, part of the allegory, yes? but on the other hand, ahab well…did not. wonderful juliania: ‘a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago…’
we can hope, but the damage they’ve done to the planet and its life forms is already incalculable, isn’t it? i sometimes wonder if even as late as rio 2012 if they’d let the indigenous into the conference…if it might have made a difference. ah, but how silly of me to wonder: monsanto ships ruled the ocean blue, goddam.
boy, howdy, i hope j in oly sees this: he knows melville inside out, as well.
oh, my; i just clicked into gm watch on twitter, and had to back out lest i get sick. new corroborating reports are coming fast and furious, and old ones debunked by the industry lckeys ‘confirmed’ in spades.
but i will add that to our east the pyro-cumulous smoke pillars are enormous now. the 416 fire is close to 25,000 acres perhaps 15% contained. the burro fire north of us was taken over by the rocky mtn. incident management team, as it’s now at about 2500 acres in steep terrain. we can even hear the slurry bombers from here. when the largest fire at mesa verde nat’l park burned a decade ago, the smoke was so tall, so hot…that it created it’s own lightning storm within it. talk about a clash of the titans!
one video. a second one. even they don’t do it justice.
well, I see you are still posting…surely if we all install a gigantic firefighting sprinkler system in our yards & a huge HVAC system in our houses, individually of course, global warming might not look so much like Costner’s “Waterworld.” and our property improvements will boost the economy! a two-fer.
anyway, be safe. b/c snowpack is below 4000 ft, the bears have come down looking for food. fun.
sounds as though you’re the one who needs to stay safe, O-brother-of-mine. dunno where the snowpack line is here, but no snow is visible in the la plata range here. dunno what an hvac system is, but lol on it anyhoo.
i’d posit ‘not much to burn here again’ but that’d be stooopid. some jerks in the neighborhood were actually shooting off fireworks in the neighborhood a few weeks ago, and we were pretty flip-city.
but gads, i’d thunk i’d put in some bits about climate chaos and the massive hurricane predicted (it started yesterday, iirc), and the dangers to low lying city and island inhabitants. looking at CP to see if it might have been hunziker, i found this and couldn’t bear to read much of it. ‘Pesticide Suicide’.
stay safe, j; my advice is usually: ‘don’t feed the bears’ (or be food for the bears).‘Pesticide Suicide’.
p.s. did ahab’s doubloon survive? ;-)