Here is a good sub-15 minute interview (by Dr. Mercola) with anti-GMO king Jeffrey Smith. I have come to understand — via the enormous amount of jaw-dropping emails I receive from readers on this topic — how ignorant most libertarians are on the subject of GMOs. I received unimaginable comments after posting this on LewRockwell.com a few weeks ago, and when time allows, I will respond to that particular criticism.
So many libertarians still believe that GMOs are a product of the free market — in spite of the mounds of material available on the corruption of the corporatocracy in forcing their very profitable products on the public through massive layers of government coercion. Libertarians still believe what they believed in the late 1990s, when the European press was running dozens of respectable articles on the GMO issue each day, and American libertarians were claiming that the issue was an anti-free market attack from the left-environmentalists. Admittedly, as a market anarchist, I almost got caught up that thought process, too, because it seemed the natural side for us to take. I teetered on being on the pro-Frankenfood side until my long-time interest in nutrition science (and how nutrition affects physical vigor and disease), made me do the research and understand the facts underneath the glossy top coat.
If GMOs were safe to put in our bodies, this fact alone — the omnipotent corporatocracy — would be enough for libertarians to despise the machine that bullies its competitors, owns the government agencies that promote (or ignores the danger of) its products, and strong-arms the scientists — like Arpad Pusztai — who have been professionally butchered for daring to reveal objective research that opposed the propaganda of The Machine. But the fact that the science — not the research sponsored by government or the GMO industry — shows that GMOs are very volatile and a threat to the entire food chain, should be an additional warning sign for free-market libertarians.
Jeffrey Smith has a pretty libertarian message here in this interview: 1) We need to be the victors, not the victims. 2) Create a revolution through education. And he provides that education, pays for it by getting donations, and he gives it away free to spread the message. 3) Educate consumers to the point where GMOs become a marketing liability, persuading companies (like Whole Foods) to pull it from their food products in order to retain their customers. 4) Go viral with information by arming the choir. No need to convince the folks who could care less about what they put in their bodies. The choir is large enough. 5) Avoid calling for government intervention and make it a grass roots movement, based on (a) education and (b) persuasion from consumers up to the producers.
These themes of some of the points above could be used to describe Lew Rockwell and how he gets his message across to the masses. I am not aware where Smith has used the term libertarian to describe himself, but the message in his activism has been more libertarian than interventionist.
UPDATE: An LRC reader and long-time libertarian activist writes:
Re: Jeffrey Smith vs the Corporatocracy on GMOs Well done, Karen. The Monsantos of the world, peddling their dead seeds and such, are definitely in bed with the state to deliver their garbage to the powerless masses. They force their distortion of life and health onto us, as there is no way to avoid their death-crops once released into the open. If that is not aggression, I don’t what is.
