The company can still be sued by downstream users. Also that may not be a court case the company could win a judge or jury would rightfully call shenanigans on such a ploy and not grant Monsanto the win.
You've not paid much attention to how these things play out in the past, have you? You also assume the effects are obvious enough to take the fight to Monsanto or that the effected have the resources to do much about it. It's an age old story...
Plus would they even want to fight this particular reg? Imagine the negative PR that would generate. Even in a friendly court.
Companies do all sorts of things that don't look good to outsiders but have real benefit to the business. Public opinion has a short attention span.
In any event if the river was owned by an actual someone, not just the abstraction we call government, that person or company would obviously have the right to sue for damages the same as any other property owner. So that's a direction we need to move in as well.
Who owns the river when it spans multiple properties? Who is the affected party? Again, you assume someone has the resources and understands who is responsible in order to bring this to court.
To get this passed I would compromise on environmental stuff as I'm really looking for the costs of employing people to be reduced and thus promote more employment. Labor laws are a job killer and those would be my priority. But there are a host of other regs that don't deal with the environment that need to go, and there are regs that supposedly are pro-environment that ain't really and those too need to go. But if you want to keep the biggies like riparian protection, ok.
I don't disagree in general terms, but we need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just because a regulation isn't business-friendly or impacts employment doesn't automatically make it bad. While we like to think the invisible hand will protect the little people from abuses of corporations, it's simply not true. There needs to be a mechanism that prevents abuses from taking place or provides the power and influence to mitigate them. What we need to do is avoid or remove the arbitrary or preferential regulations that benefit nobody or do not have a basis in concrete science or documented fact.
And we might WANT labor laws, laws that, for example, prevent companies from importing labor to the detriment of American workers...
Chris
