Easily the story of the week, IMHO.
And it's a story (far from the only one) that really gives the lie to the idea that, unregulated, the "unleashed economy" can work miracles.
Monsanto has spent millions on lobbying to avoid regulation, and now they are likely to pay out millions more due to toxic chemicals that helped keep operations cheap for years. A formula was applied. And that formula was dependent on the fallacy that less regulation and low operating costs are always better. And it was better, just so long as the general welfare of the public was ignored. There's a reason that "promote the general welfare" is in the constitution of our government - it's not the province of private companies.
Even from pragmatic perspective, that's also a huge amount of capital that isn't going to worker pay or to innovate new products - it's functionally going nowhere. And it's highly unlikely that the cost of finding an alternative to a cancer causing product would be more expensive than what must be approaching billions of dollars on litigation and lobbying.
Just ask the tobacco companies.
The question I have is this - is there an event of this nature that can make a radical re - organization of our regulatory structure electorally sexy? Because that's really what's needed. We need a reorganization that entirely ignores the interests of companies in favor of the public good. That might sound like a fantasy, given that even most Democrats are still completely inured to a "pro - business agenda" (shh - it's code for them not actually doing their jobs). Unfortunately, even a casual reading of the history of leaded gasoline tells us that a lot - a LOT - of people will get hurt before our government stops being the annoying HR department of Monsanto, Dow and Pfizer and starts protecting people.
Cross posted at Lost without an Enemy,