‘Bad actors’ acting to protect farmers

I got involved with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) as part of the American Agriculture Movement during the farm crisis in the 1980s. We worked to keep farmers on the land and fought for fair prices and the preservation of independent family livestock production.

In Rep. Dean Fisher’s recent newsletter, he referred to the “Cancer Gag Act,” a bill that would make it harder for Iowans who get sick from using products from multinational corporations like Bayer to receive justice in court.

Chemical manufacturers like Bayer have known about links between the products they produce and health issues including cancer for over a decade. Bayer has made over $30 billion in profits over the past 15 years.

Bayer wants to protect its profits at the expense of our health and our right to a trial by a jury of our peers. In a state with the second-highest cancer rates in the nation, now isn’t the time to sweep a problem like this under the rug.

Fisher is taking the same cavalier attitude about the “Cancer Gag Act” as the Veterans Administration did when Vietnam vets started talking about their cancer, which we now know was caused by Agent Orange. To be clear, this bill is designed to protect Bayer’s profits, not Iowa farmers.

If engaging in our democratic process and calling a spade a spade makes us “bad actors” in Dean Fisher’s book, so be it. In our opinion, it isn’t a book worth reading anyway.

Larry Ginter

Rhodes