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from the don't-worry...-just-take-two-Bayer®-asprin-and...-oh,-wait dept.
Monsanto, a brand name activists love to hate, will disappear as Bayer takes over:
These days Monsanto is shorthand for, as NPR's Dan Charles has put it, "lots of things that some people love to hate": Genetically modified crops, which Monsanto invented. Seed patents, which Monsanto has fought to defend. Herbicides such as Monsanto's Roundup, which protesters have sharply criticized for its possible health risks. Big agriculture in general, of which Monsanto was the reviled figurehead.
And soon Monsanto will be no more. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant and pesticide powerhouse, announced in 2016 it would be buying Monsanto in an all-cash deal for more than $60 billion. Now, as the merger approaches, Bayer has confirmed what many suspected: In the merger, the politically charged name "Monsanto" will be disappearing. The combined company will be known simply as Bayer, while product names will remain the same. The move is not exactly a surprise — it makes sense that Bayer might want to weed out some of the intense negative associations associated with the Monsanto brand. In a way, it's an indication of how successful anti-Monsanto protesters have been in shaping public perception.
In the company's latest statement, Bayer implicitly acknowledged how hostile debates over genetically modified crops and other agricultural products have become. "We aim to deepen our dialogue with society. We will listen to our critics and work together where we find common ground," the chairman of Bayer's board of management, Werner Baumann, said in the statement. "Agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill. We have to talk to each other. We need to listen to each other. It's the only way to build bridges."
Also at Reuters.
Previously: Bayer AG Offers to Buy Monsanto
Bayer Purchases Monsanto for Around $66 Billion
Roundup: Monsanto Ordered to Pay $93M to Small Town for Poisoning Citizens
RoundUp Glyphosate Found to Cause Kidney Failure and Elude Tests
Cancer Hazard vs. Risk - Glyphosate
Use of Dicamba-Resistant Monsanto Crops Leads to Soybean Death
GMO Grass That 'Escaped' Defies Eradication, Divides Grass Seed Industry
Glyphosate Linked to Liver Damage
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:02AM (14 children)
activists love to hate everything
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:16AM (1 child)
Bayer, maker of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:18PM
and (supposedly: via alejandro jones) knowingly shipped hiv infected blood to hemophiliac patients in mexico.
(Score: 5, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:16AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:38PM (10 children)
It's the other way around, discontent gives rise to activism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @03:36PM (9 children)
Wake me up when it starts to effect the vote count during election season. Otherwise it's just impotent righteous indignation, absolutely meaningless. In the meantime, business is doing very well, thank you
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:49PM (8 children)
So well, they deep-sixed the brand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:42PM (7 children)
Hardly matters if the money doesn't stop flowing in. Business is still great.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:07PM (6 children)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:31PM (5 children)
Rebranding has not slowed the inflow of money one bit. Don't make shit up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:34AM (4 children)
It probably has, but you wouldn't notice. My point however wasn't that money stopped flowing in, but rather that establishing a brand requires an outflow of money. Monsanto put a lot of money into its brand. Now, it's merely a liability to keep the brand going. If Bayer then keeps on doing whatever killed Monsanto, it risks trashing its own very valuable brands, some which it's put a century of work into.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @04:32PM (3 children)
Monsanto put a lot of money into its brand.
And they made tons more by selling it, like selling any other commodity. And Bayer will make plenty by simply dropping it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:56AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
Wall Street begs to differ
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 09 2018, @11:42PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aim on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:18AM (22 children)
... the name "Bayer" will be just as reviled as "Monsanto" currently is.
Unless they actually do change for the better, which I doubt.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:23AM (3 children)
Exactly. Same shit, different assholes.
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:37AM
Actually, considering everyone's gut biome is different, I think it's fair to say that while it may be very similar shit, it will be distinct. To an observer it might appear genetically modified from the original...
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:37AM
Apparently, all but two of the assholes:
https://monsanto.com/news-releases/monsanto-company-chairman-and-chief-executive-officer-hugh-grant-announces-intent-to-leave-monsanto-upon-closing-of-bayer-acquisition/ [monsanto.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:54PM
Actually just a different color asshat.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:42AM
Well, Bayer is German... and it's legal system has been shown not as crazy as the US one. So, will Monsantos products now start to fall under German/European law, which has been more strict regarding pesticides and GMOs? All depends on what happens with Monsanto as entity in the long term.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:43AM (8 children)
(Score: 1, Troll) by unauthorized on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:48PM (6 children)
194x Bayer has nothing to do with 2018 Bayer. Everyone who was involved with the Third Reich is either dead or infirm, stop guilt mongering people for something that happened before they were born.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:16PM (5 children)
So, you don't think the executives, management, and senior workers from 1945 passed on any of their culture? Interesting. I wonder where our culture came from, here in the US? Or the cultures of any large corporation?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:01PM (2 children)
Like the culture of IBM helping the Nazis that rubbed off on Google pandering to repressive regimes?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:26PM (1 child)
Not sure how serious you are. IBM's culture didn't change drastically during, or after World War Two. They remain a mercenary bunch, who will do pretty much anything for profit. They've been beaten a time or two, by someone with more foresight - such as Bill Gates. They've dropped the ball a few times, and maybe missed opportunities. But, they will do anything that makes them a profit. The culture remains.
Google? I'm not really into prophesying, but, if I were pressed, I might predict that Google will one day replace IBM.
And, don't forget to pick up your free copy of Google's Centennial Edition, "Google History: Do No Evil".
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:48PM
That could be said about the great majority of corporations.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by unauthorized on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
As much as the Nazis passed on their political culture to their successor political class. I'm sure if you look hard enough you are likely to find some influences dating back that far, but the influences of modern corporate culture and modern society in general are considerably more significant.
Nice strawman, by the way.
Home-grown, it's not like you didn't have your fair share of scumbags back in the 30s. The larger and more detached of human interaction a power structure becomes, the more amoral and oppressive it turns. This is purely a function of the accumulation of power, it has happened everywhere through human history regardless of the underlying social, political or economic structure.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:33PM
Not entirely homegrown. We've borrowed a lot of stuff from a lot of other cultures, including Native American cultures. But, our culture is firmly rooted in 1600's - 1800's English culture. Yeah, we continue to change and grow, but - remember the "British Invasion", aka, The Beatles? We emulate them, they emulate us, etc ad nauseum. Bearing that in mind, England's culture has roots in the old nature worshipping cultures, as well as ancient Rome, and most of Europe's nations.
America's culture didn't just spring up, out of nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:37PM
well that's the official story anyways...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:04AM (3 children)
They pulled that shit before. Remember, Bayer really is IG Farben [wikipedia.org], a company that everybody really, REALLY hated after WWII. From the Wikipedia page:
After the Monsanto name is buried, it'll be business as usual and people will forget - just like they forgot about IG Farben...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hartree on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:39PM
Beat me to it, Rosco. :)
I was going to make a joke that in order to avoid controversy, Bayer was renaming its Monsanto Division to I.G. Farben and it's best selling insecticide to Cyclone Beta.
(Does this count as a Godwin? Yeah, I think it does...)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:09PM
This isn't some fly-by-night scam operation where it costs a few hundred dollars to move the business over to a new name. Monsanto probably spent more on branding than they ever did on fines for wrongdoing. That's all lost.
As to these brand names, what really is the point of remembering them? It's not the brand that matters, but the activity. And the usual groups will remain focused on that for good and ill.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:21PM
From the linked Wikipedia page, emphasis by me:
Looking at the page about IG Farben [wikipedia.org] (a different page than the one you linked from that word), you'll find:
And later:
So while Bayer certainly was involved in IG Farben and its crimes, it is far from accurate that it is IG Farben. And in particular it is not correct to claim in that respect that
where “that shit” refers to intentionally getting rid of a name in order to get rid of its negative connotations.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:56AM
Bayer has been killing the honeybees for over a decade now...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:53PM (1 child)
If you've been paying attention, you will already dislike and distrust anything with the brand Bayer attached to it. I won't even buy their aspirin anymore, and that's not a political protest, it's self defense. Their attitude is, broadly speaking, "We're Bayer, we don't have to care.".
I do think that they used to make quality chemicals. These days I wouldn't trust them without a secondary analysis...which usually isn't worthwhile.
(No they aren't the only company like that. But they're one of the larger ones.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:53PM
So they are definitely not Care Bayers.....
Ok, I'm leaving now......please don't throw things....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @04:34PM
Oh please! Stop with the SJW crap! Watch their market price and executive pay rates and tell me how "reviled" they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:34AM (3 children)
He literally said: damn your morals, we'll do as we please in the name of progress. "Agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill."
And people wonder why this specific group of individuals is reviled. They shit on everyone and everything to take for themselves, and refuse to stop slow or alter. They'll talk and conclude with "sorry we must go on." They literally ignore scientific consensus when it interferes with their interests. Disgusting.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:01PM (2 children)
What exactly is wrong with what he [chairman of Bayer's board of management, Werner Baumann] said? It's one thing to be enraged over actions and another to be enraged by mild words.
If one has read the book, 1984, they wouldn't so wonder. Some belief systems require scapegoats in order to function. They have a high level of failure which is coped with by blaming external parties for all the problems.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)
I don't think those are mild words. They're a clear directed attack on independent thought. For one, he is equating his company (Bayer) completely owns a 4,000-year old global craft (agriculture), and secondly, he is discarding concerns about the long-term ecological effects of his trade as "ideological differences".
Let's use the same argument on different topics:
(godwinning is allowed, other posters have already explained why)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:58AM
Note that none of these examples have anything to do with the Baumann quote. They just share a common grammatical structure. Grammar is not a source of aggression. For example, consider the mellowness of this example:
Crafting statements which are deliberately looking for a fight ignores that the same grammatical structure can be used to craft statements that are pretty damn innocuous. We'll just have to look at the context, the action being called for, whether it be "stop us drinking beer" or "stop us from shipping slaves across the globe".
Here, it's "to bring progress to a standstill", which I bet the majority of people would consider a net bad thing to do. While I grant that there are parties who want to bring progress to a standstill, why should we respect them for that belief? The world isn't in a state where one can hit the pause button and not expect a few hundred million or more deaths as a result.
Moving on, your assertions as to what Baumann said are absurd. He didn't not attack independent thought. He did not claim Bayer owns agriculture. And "concerns about the long-term ecological effects of his trade" are indeed ideologically based. That doesn't make them wrong (what makes that sort of ideology commonly wrong is indifference to context and any attempts to reduce or increase the risks of those ecological effects).
Finally, stupidity is not morality. You need to learn some critical reasoning here. The crafting of such statements is a routine act of mild propaganda. One doesn't contest such things by blowing them way out of proportion. It just makes you look like an idiot.
Here is a more effective strategy. You're not advocating the halting of progress in GMO foods, right? But rather that such research proceeds in a cautious and responsible manner. Thus, a sound rebuttal is to point to actual GMO work that you do support (and why you support it) as a counter. For example, "Mr. Baumann claims to support progress, so do we. But risky GMO projects that cause considerable ecological harm aren't progress. Here are some projects which we feel take the proper sort of precautions which weren't taken by Monsanto prior to this buyout..."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:52AM (4 children)
This is the same company that let the trademark on Heroin -- very strong cough syrup for kids -- lapse. They could have made A MINT on that one. Because so many kids get coughs!!
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:46AM
A mint works well for coughs too.
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:44PM
I'm an old fart, and my grandma's pharmacist used to keep some under the counter for his older customers...I may have gotten some for a cough around age 4.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:34PM (1 child)
I don't think so. On the Wikipedia page about Bayer [wikipedia.org] it is said that
The "until after World War I" is relevant here, since we learn in a later section:
I'd expect that included the trademark "Heroin".
Looking at the Wikipedia page about Heroin [wikipedia.org] seems to confirm that suspicion, but it's marked with “citation needed”:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:05PM
It's been amazing what's coming out on WikiPedia. Sometimes very hard to tell which are real and which are fake. But they say that Bayer stopped selling Heroin in 1910. Which was before the war. A little bit before, right? And possibly it's very hard to keep a trademark on something you don't sell. Or maybe they didn't keep up with the legal on that one. Because why pay the registration, why pay for lawyers, on something that you stopped selling? Money going out, no money coming in, not a smart way to do business.
And maybe that's why they lost it, or maybe they got schlonged by the VERY UNFAIR treaty. A lot of folks got schlonged by that one. But if you noticed, they're still Bayer in Germany. And they've always been Bayer in Germany and in many places. And they kept all their trademarks in Germany and in many places.
You've heard of the Podesta GMAIL, right? That one was hacked very badly. Well, in Germany GMAIL is something else. It's not the Google EMAIL. Because somebody had that trademark before Google thought of it.
But I don't think they sell Heroin any more. And possibly that is a mistake. Because two things that are very annoying about kids are the diapers and the noise. The diapers they grow out of -- hopefully they grow out of those, the noise they don't. And when they have a cough, very annoying to be around that. And it spreads germs like you wouldn't believe. So a very strong cough syrup would be great to have, folks would pay a lot for that.
And Monsanto, everybody used to know Monsanto. You buy a suit, you buy a carpet, you buy a sofa, you would ask for Wear-Dated by Monsanto. And you could throw the craziest parties. A little cleaning -- very easy -- and your suit, your carpet, your sofa were PERFECTO. No stains, no smells. It was magnificent. But, they stopped selling that. And now nobody remembers Monsanto. Our great farmers remember, they love Monsanto because it's the best seeds and the best pesticides. Trust me, we all eat them. But, can you go to a restaurant and tell the waiter, "bring me something by Monsanto"? You can't. Bayer could make Monsanto great again, they could bring back the double-knit polyester suits that we love so much. And they'd become very very rich. But, they won't. That's too bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:47PM (3 children)
Change in who owns it, doesn't make the bad go away magically. Trains can't stop suddenly. Same shit, different flies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @03:40PM (2 children)
Same shit, same flies, same field, same creatures dropping said shit, they just changed the sign out front. It's time to associate with Bayer everything that was previously associated with Monsanto.
Bayer. Fuck the bees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:45PM (1 child)
It's hip to fuck bees.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:59PM
Says Needle Dick the Bug Fucker.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:54PM
Bayer also gave us heroin.
I don't really know but speculate that a good friend of mind ODed. He and I chatted one night, then he said he'd be back in an hour. I waited three then never saw him again.
Not long after that someone told me that Anthony used smack. I found an old mugshot for a possession arrest but none later, he's not in any of the Oregon or Washington prison rosters and the Portland Rescue Mission told me that Anthony doesn't go there anymore.
I have dozens of photos that he took in happier times, he was clearly more muscular, posing with friends and family. I want to give those photos to one of his loved ones but I don't know any of their names and I don't know how to contact them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]