I've been telling HN about this, and mostly derided for it. I was working as a sysadmin for a bigag company in 2010 or so, who touted themselves as good ol local farm people who take care of their own. Come to find out, the millions the owner got to fund his extravagant lifestyle (besides from daddy), was from selling some of the genetic modifications to Monsanto. I was in the middle of my Decartes reset after getting back from Iraq, and dug into Monsanto.

Monsanto is one of the worst companies in America. As a constitutionalist, my primary issue is with their blatant undermining and corruption of the legal process, for example a SCOTUS who formerly worked for them refusing to recuse himself from relevant cases, infiltration and takeover of the top positions at the FDA and other regulatory capture issues, and the stifling of free speech through their massive propaganda machine, which includes online.

As a military person, I came to find out they were the ones who had been responsible for agent orange in Vietnam. Something many of my friends and family have directly had to deal with. (to be fair, it was a different business than the current Monsanto, the same in name only)

I learned they were one of the main sources of lobbying to allow patenting of organtic material (so they could patent genes in their gmos), that they created the BT killer strain of seeds designed to prevent farmers from saving their seeds, (incidentally Monsanto gmo seed business has been tied to large numbers of farmer suicides in India), and have brought legal action against farmers who saved their seeds. They have participated in farm mergers in aquisitions to the point that almost no farm is truly a family farm anymore, and they have been involved in illegal waste dumping more than once.

Once I learned all these things, I quit the job on principle. As luck would have it, the good ol rich guy who "would always take care of his people" subsequently, a year later, sold the company and fired half the staff... and now the local "community", despite protests from many of the farmers, decided to give Monsanto a 5.8 million dollar tax break to built a state of the art facility because it will "bring jobs".

To top it all off, our anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws seem to be completely dead and ignored, because the Bayer Monsanto $66bn merger seems to be full steam ahead at the moment.

They have created a sitution that requires more chemicals, causes more nitrogen runoff, have drastically reduced seed diversity (therefore setting up a massive crop failure potential across many crops), and continue to ignore GMO warnings.

Having sysadmined in a bigag company with a genetics department, and at a genetics company, my primary issues with GMO's is that there is a lack of rigourous scientific testing, especially over longer time frames. It wasn't uncommon to see a new GMO go from testing to prod within a year! That's not enough time to truly understand the implications of those kinds of products. Not to mention, as the article suggests, that they have artifically affected the actual science to be in their favor regardless of the real results.

If there ever is ecocide, Monsanto will be the primary hand to have caused it. I am willing to bet roundup will be the new agent orange. And finally, for your viewing pleasure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM

Relevant past comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009446

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12893325

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12559024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398969