Bayer's chief executive acknowledged on Friday that he will face an uphill battle to improve Monsanto's reputation once Bayer completes the takeover of the U.S. seeds and agrochemicals company.For a company that was once part of the IG Farben empire to show any signs of squeamishness about another company's reputation is almost funny. IG Farben produced Zykon B and developed Sarin.
"Monsanto’s image does of course represent a major challenge for us, and it’s not an aspect I wish to play down," Werner Baumann told shareholders at Bayer's annual general meeting.
Monsanto may be the largest producer of carcinogens in the U.S. You'd think it'd be a natural fit with a former Farben company.
2 comments:
Bayer was the first to market heroin, too.
They're a bunch of pricks at the local level, also. I lived in an old foundry building in West Berkeley for a while that abutted the Bayer complex, and they wanted the property.
They leaned on the city about it, and when there was a small fire in the front of the foundry building, they swarmed the place with cops, then the fire truck came and put the fire out in about ten minutes, and afterward the cops cut our electricity and nothing we did would make them turn it back on. We moved out a month later and there was still no power there. The guy who owned the foundry building is an irascible and corrupt old fucker, and last I heard he still wasn't letting them have it, and I find that to be hilarious: he's the kind of guy who can make the city of Oakland back down over property disputes and once took a chainsaw to the top of a building he had just completed that they then said was too tall by four feet.
They are also just weird. Every first Wednesday of the month at noon, they set off an air-raid siren, and then an incredibly loud, distorted voice says "This has been a test of the Bayer emergency warning system." Really glad I don't have to deal with those fuckers any more.
-Doug in Oakland
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