Sparks: US supreme court rules in favor of former Monsanto company in pesticide case
Centralized authority first mandates the phrasing of a label, then shields the chemical interest from the local jury, until the very law designed to inform the public becomes the fortress that protects their poisoning.
How long shall we permit the preemption of our courts by administrative decrees, allowing a mere regulatory stamp to silence the cries of the afflicted and strip the citizen of his ancestral right to seek justice?
If the federal word is strong enough to silence the state's warning, yet not honest enough to speak the truth itself, then we have crafted a shield for the powerful out of the silence of the law.
The victim sought to present his scars to the court, but was informed that his illness had already been legally categorized as non-existent by a prior filing in a department he was not permitted to enter.
Observations of the soil and the blood reveal a distinct pathology, yet the legal record now contains a void where the data of the suffering was meant to be cataloged, rendering the specimen invisible to the state.
When the green viriditas of the fields is choked by man’s artifice, and the judges bar the gates of mercy, the very breath of the living soul groans against a law that favors the poison over the pulse.
By adding more rules to define the warning, the masters of the law have ensured that no true warning reaches the ear; thus, the most elaborate protection becomes the most perfect danger.
It is a triumph of modern reason that we may now legally prohibit a man from complaining of his tumor, provided the chemical causing it has been properly christened by a committee in the capital.
From my saddle, I see the spray settling upon the laborers in the valley, while far away in a marble hall, men who have never touched the dirt decree that the workers’ coughs do not exist in print.
The court has helpfully decided that if a federal agency forgets to mention that a product is lethal, it becomes legally impossible for the product to actually kill anyone at the state level.
Doctors know that a fever does not wait for a permit, yet the legal mind insists that the patient is healthy so long as the bottle he drank from carries the official seal of bureaucratic approval.
Judges wager the lives of the many against the definitions of the few, forgetting that while a statute is finite, the agony of a single man carries the weight of a silent, terrifying eternity.
A farmer knows a weed is dead when it withers, but the lawyers have invented a way for the farmer to wither while the weed-killer remains, by decree, as harmless as the morning dew.
Hegemony is perfectly achieved when the common sense of a federal label is legally elevated above the lived experience of the dying, transforming the machinery of the state into a private defense for industrial capital.
We are told this is the best of all possible legal systems, where a man may lose his life to a toxin but is consoled by the fact that the Supreme Court found the grammar perfectly acceptable.
Before we tear down the right of a man to sue for his life, we ought to ask why that right was built, lest we find that the only thing left standing is a very large, very toxic corporation.
‘Federal law preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims’ - in this sleek, bloodless construction, the act of dying is successfully reclassified as a jurisdictional error, sparing the manufacturer the indignity of having to answer for the morgue.