The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: a polluter working with the pentagon 33pressed, the mayor resigned. At the same time, one of his assistants simplydisappeared. According to Leistner, “he was a Monsanto executive who wasworking at St. Louis headquarters. When he found out the EPA had detectedPCBs, he moved out.” And so Marilyn Leistner found herself in charge of thelittle town, having to “face the storm.” On February 22, 1983, Anne Burford,administrator of the EPA, announced that the government had decided to“buy Times Beach for the sum of $30 million.” The extraordinary plan proposedto indemnify and relocate all the residents, tear down the town, thendecontaminate the site and burn the contaminated soil in an incinerator.Monsanto Avoids Responsibility“See, this is where our houses are buried,” said Marilyn Leistner, stoppingfor a few minutes in front of a large mound of grass-covered earth. “Everythingwe owned was bulldozed, the furniture, the appliances, even the children’stoys, because the flood had spread the dioxin and the PCBseverywhere. We left like plague-stricken refugees, because no one wanted tohave anything to do with us: people were convinced we were contagious.”“You didn’t sue?”“Of course we did, but the case was dismissed because the court determinedthat we couldn’t prove the diseases we were suffering from were connectedto dioxin contamination.”“And the PCBs?”“Well, officially the EPA was never able to trace the source of the PCBsthat Russell Bliss had mixed with his oil.”It is staggering, to put it mildly, that the EPA was unable to trace thesource of the PCBs when the only manufacturer of those products owned afactory producing them in Sauget, Illinois, about twenty miles from TimesBeach. “In fact,” Leistner explained, “we later found out that Rita Lavelle,who was Anne Burford’s assistant at the EPA, had destroyed documents thatcould have incriminated Monsanto.”The affair was a big story in the United States in 1983. In investigating amisuse of the Superfund Program budget, a fund allocated to the EPA to decontaminatesites polluted by industrial wastes, some of which had beenfraudulently used to finance the electoral campaigns of Republican candidates,Congress discovered that documents that would compromise the