This thread is a few years old but it bears repeating. I’m tired of being treated as if I am invisible. Listen to Jewish voices when we talk about fascism. I am begging you.
On this day, 31 August 1913, police attacked a crowd in Dublin in a drunken rampage that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” It was one of many violent confrontations that took place in the early days of the Dublin Lockout, a bitter industrial dispute that lasted until 1914 and saw two strikers killed and many hundreds wounded. Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union had attempted to organise the workers on Dublin’s tram network, and the owner of the company, William Murphy, had fired hundreds of workers whom he suspected of sympathising with the union. When the workers struck in protest, the Dublin employers demanded en masse that their workers sign a pledge declaring that they would neither join the ITGWU nor strike with them in solidarity. When workers refused, the employers locked them out, replacing them with scab labour from Britain or elsewhere in Ireland. From the start, the strike was characterised by intense violence between the strikers on one side and the scabs and police on the other. In pitched battles, strikers and their families smashed tram windows and fought with the police, throwing stones and firing slingshots that had been supplied by James Connolly. In response to the escalating violence, the authorities banned a proposed march. But Larkin was not a man easily deterred, and he promised he would appear that dead or alive. The road was overlooked by the Imperial Hotel, which was part-owned by Murphy. Wearing a fake beard, the fiery trade unionist shuffled into a hotel dressed as an elderly man, and once a crowd had gathered on the street below, he cast off his disguise and ran to the window, from where his booming voice exhorted the workers to action and victory. Immediately, around 300 police attacked, beating the crowd, most of whom were uninvolved onlookers. One such onlooker, the MP Handel Booth, later described how the police, “behaved like men possessed… wildly striking with their truncheons at everyone within reach.” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1516268428558302/?type=3
There’s a a plague on, so it’s easy to miss the non-plague-related news, but boy, the story of how Bayer-Monsanto is imploding in an inferno of corruption, litigation and negligence is SOMETHING ELSE.
You’ll recall that Bayer merged with Monsanto in 2018, paying $66b in an all-cash deal and erasing the Monsanto name (apparently, they judged Bayer’s association with Auschwitz to be preferable to Monsanto’s association with Roundup).
In the short time since, the Bayer-Monsanto merger has become “One of the worst corporate deals of all time” (per the WSJ). Now it is embroiled in litigation that has sucked in Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and Volkswagen.
The lawsuit, Haussmann v Baumann, uses Germany’s extraordinary corporate law to target the company’s board members, financiers, and advisors.
The lawsuit claims that the board acted negligently by going forward with the acquisition despite the massive liability stemming from pending judgments against Monsanto for covering up the cancer risk from its glyphosate (“Roundup”) weed-killer.
In the years since, the company has paid $13b in judgements over the product, with no end in sight - and it still sells and aggressively markets Roundup without any warnings, teeing up future litigation.
The lawsuit claims that Bayer’s top management sought the Monsanto merger because they feared that Bayer was a hostile acquisition target, and believed that after such an acquisition they would lose their massive paychecks.
In order to streamline the acquisition, Bayer structured it as an all-cash deal that would not need shareholder approval, taking out high-interest bridge-loans from massive banks that stood to profit handsomely and so skimped on their own due diligence.
Bayer, too, failed to conduct the customary due diligence one would expect prior to a deal of this magnitude - a fact that bolsters the plaintiffs’ claims in their suit.
The plaintiffs are Bayer shareholders, and under German law, they are entitled to sue Bayer’s board, and need only prove “negligence” to hold those board members PERSONALLY LIABLE.
What’s more, German Directors and Officers insurance - which normally buffers corporate boards from this liability regime - does not apply here, because these policies have “insured vs insured” exclusions that kick in when the board is sued by its shareholders.
Also named in the suit are the banks that made the loans, and the suit seeks to claw back millions in fees that the banks trousered in the deal.
Meanwhile, Bayer is still being sued over glyphosate, and has more pending litigation over Dicamba, another carcinogenic product it sells like candy.
As Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith writes: “So pass the popcorn. If this case gets past the jousting over using New York courts to get at German companies, it will expose even more ugly, self-serving behavior.”
I’ve been watching this story for a while and this goes so deep.
Bayer and Monsanto have been angling for a merger for a while now but the problem is that they’re relatively equal in terms of their punching power, so it was never clear who was going to come out on top.
Basically, the Monsanto AND Bayer M&A teams went rouge, shooting for an all-cash merger WITHOUT board approval.
There is no winning move here. The only way a rich white guy goes to jail is if they fuck over a richer, whiter, guy, and Bayer Monsanto is 15 on the Fortune 500.
