The Highwire with Del Bigtree - IS BAYER HEADED TOWARDS BANKRUPTCY?

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

With its largest legal loss yet at $2.25B, Bayer is now forced to look at some hard decisions for its tanking future as its Monsanto buyout continues to be the worst corporate takeover decision of the century. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I can give an update on a story that we have been rolling with the beats of this story for years now. What am I talking about? I'm talking about Monsanto and their flagship product Roundup. Remember, this company was bought by Bear who inherited just basically a legal noose around their neck with these Roundup litigations. Well, if anybody doesn't know and hasn't been tracking this story, this is what it's looked like in the news over the past couple of years. Take a look. The jury awarding $289 million in DHS. damages. Oregon reached a settlement to nearly $700 million.

Here A.G will pay more than $10 billion. The widow of a Cambria farmer is suing agrochemical giant Monsanto, alleging the company's roundup herbicide caused her husband's cancer and later his death. Friday, a jury in San Francisco found biochemical giant Monsanto liable for former school groundskeeper Dwayne Johnson's cancer. A California jury ordered the maker of Roundup Monday to pay more than two billion dollars to a couple who claim the popular weed killer caused their cancer. Product Roundup led to his diagnosis of terminal non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Monsanto product gave him non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Developed lymphoma. His wife, brother-in-law, and father-in-law all affected by non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Roundup gave them cancer. Johnson's lawsuit is the first of hundreds against Monsanto, alleging it knew the weed killers linked to cancer and failed to notify the public. The state of Oregon said Monsanto knew for decades how toxic one compound was in its products. Monsanto was purchased by German-based Bayer in 2018. Bayer inherited Roundup lawsuits when it bought the St. Louis Company Monsanto.

Bayer has argued its products are safe and has repeatedly defended the Monsanto deal. More than 13,000 similar lawsuits have been filed against Monsanto nationwide. So where are we at right now? Well, this is the big headline here. And this really may represent a tipping point in this story. This is the title, Bear Slumps after 2.25 billion Roundup Trial loss. You go into this article, it says the verdict by a Philadelphia jury is the largest. So far in five years of litigation over the herbicide.

The stock fell as much as 5.7% in Frankfurt trading, and it's down almost 70% since Bear acquired Roundups at Maker Monsanto in 2018. Wow. I mean, it's one of the worst business choices of all times in history. Hey, I got an idea. You know, why don't we merge our pharmaceutical company with the big ag company, Monsanto? You had to imagine someone's like, you do know they've got this pesky little problem with this product roundup, right? Ah, don't worry. Can't be that big a deal. Exactly. And we're seeing, you know, we're seeing the disconnect between investors and really just people that have been watching mainstream. news and the alternative community, what once was the alternative community, a lot of people knew about Roundup. And I would imagine a lot of mainstream investors did not know about Roundup, the regulatory capture, and how all of these science journals were really not showing the true

toxicity of this herbicide. So this is a really come to Jesus moment, if you will, for this company. So shortly after that Roundup case, that $2.25 billion, you started seeing headlines like this, bare cuts dividend by 95% as it wrestles with Roundup woes. So they're not. offering investors only the legal minimum required under German law, which is 12 cents per share. They're going to do that for the next three years. So again, you already have really not happy investors. So this isn't going to make them happy at all. They brought in a new CEO, Bill Anderson last year. So he's up to his neck really trying to restructure this company. So let's just continue to go through the headlines. And this is chronological. So the next headline after this one,

we have financial times. Bears breakup looks inevitable. We've never seen reporting like this. And it says the German conglomerate continues to nurse a giant hangover from its disastrous $63 billion takeover of Monsanto agreed in 2016. It's grappling with total debt estimated at 42 billion euros. One of the biggest product liability cases in corporate history plus a pharmaceutical is a growth problem. So they have two companies here. They have the pharmaceutical arm of this and the agricultural arm. So there's talking about a split in here. They're not going to go through with it yet, but it's on the table. They're trying to maybe split off the agriculture and the pharmaceutical parts just to isolate this, this contagion, if you will, this corporate cancer.

But at the same time this is happening, we had just a couple of years ago, the EPA Environmental Protection Agency here in the United States, they made their final rule, like an updated rule on glyphosate. And they said, you know what, it's fine. It doesn't harm humans. It's not carcinogenic. And a group of people took them to court. And this was the headline that came out of that court ruling. Federal court rejects glyphosate registration decision because EPA ignored cancer risk

endangered species risk. So they completely ignored, they must reevaluate this. So they, it basically says in there, if you look into the article, it says, as to its cancer conclusion, the court concluded that EPA floated its own cancer guidelines and ignored the criticisms of its own experts. Where have we heard that before? This seems like an ongoing. I mean, this is what happened with the fluoride conversation. They ignored. ignored their own experts. So the EPA has to go back to the drawing board court ordered. And at some point, they're saying 2026 they might come out with this. And you know, who knows at this point. But we see the games up. It's really being battled

and legal in the courts. But at the same time, there's a bill that's moving through. And this is one of the headlines. This is from our friend of our show, Carrie Gillum, she's writing for The Guardian. She wrote this article here. It's an abomination, battle brewing over proposed U.S. laws to protect pesticide companies. This is the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act. So what it's attempting to do when you really get into the minutia of that act, it's going to try to provide a barrier for local and state authorities from implementing their own restrictions on the pesticide,

but also it's going to attempt to block some of these legal claims, perhaps all of the legal claims if it goes through. So this thing's working its way through end of 2024 or 2025, maybe in the Farm Bill, it might get inserted. but that's something to really look out for. So I mean, I hope people are just tired of this. A defunct product, how do you deal with it? Don't fix the product.

Don't get rid of the product. Just buy some government officials and pass a law that no one can sue you and then get back to business as usual. We've watched this with the vaccine program. Now they're literally, we're going to create a, you know, a pesticide court where if you're injured, Monsanto gets to walk off in the sunset and the government will tell you you're crazy.

We don't have any evidence. that your cancer is being caused by the, you know, the glyphosate or whatever. I mean, it's just this whole thing. This is supposed to be the United States of America. We're supposed to have the most transparent system for the people, by the people, and instead it's just for the corporations, by the corporations. It's really gross. And all of these stories, one of the reasons we report on them is they're roadmaps for us

to really understand how these corporations maneuver. So there's the legal aspect, obviously. There's the public opinion and the meat. media and then there's the political angling of this all. But it seems, you know, we always talk about this, Dell. It seems like there's a quickening happening. It's coming quicker and quicker. And that's why we're raising the alarm so much about the COVID shots and really investigating

those on the front end. So we don't have to deal with this back end stuff like this for so long. But it does look like it's coming to a head here.