Government Selection for GMO Contamination: A Case Study

John McMurtry

Tony Blair�s �New Labour� has recently distinguished itself as the only government to publicly support another genocidal US-led attack on the people of Iraq. With 95% of Iraq�s oil still publicly owned, it is wanted for allied corporate control. Blair�s role is clear as a servant to �the new world order.� Yet his servitude is many-sided. Along with Canada�s government, he has also joined as a senior partner in the agri-corporate war to force the world to eat genetically-engineered food whether they want it or not.

The Meta-Strategy

Since the late 1980�s, the US-led global industrial-food complex has depended on state-subsidized genetic manipulation of seeds and foods to gain oligopolist control of the soya and corn markets of North America. It now seeks wider-spectrum control of the world food chain. To this point, its strategy has been the forced mixing of natural and genetically-engineered products so as to defeat the demands of organic food farmers, consumers and grocery stores for separation and labelling of the GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Blair�s government here presses this transnational agenda by two policy patterns � systematically suppressing scientific evidence against genetically-engineered foodstuffs, and surreptitiously permitting the contamination of non-GE agriculture by the dominant genes of genetically modified crops.

These strategic patterns fit with the master pattern of increasingly imposing a regulating order of corporate absolutism across the conditions of world life in all economic sectors to ensure ever expanding markets and profits for the borderless transnational corporate oligopoly, a megalomaniac project which masquerades under the name of �globalization.�

With the increasing failure of corporate �space-age� technology in Britain itself � in such areas as rail transit (eg., corporate negligence by private Railtrack of its rail infrastructure causing train crashes like the fatal Hatfield disaster during a 60% rise in company profits), and corporate factory farming (the mad-cow disease and foot-and-

than that of other European leaders, while defending Britain's anomalous position as a permanent member of the Security Council. Within Europe, his relationship with the president grants him the eminent role of broker and interpreter of power.

By invoking the "special relationship", Blair also avoids the greatest challenge a prime minister has faced since the Second World War. This challenge is to recognise and act upon the conclusion of any objective analysis of global power: namely that the greatest threat to world peace is not Saddam Hussein, but George Bush. The nation which in the past has been our firmest friend is becoming, instead, our foremost enemy.�

As the US government discovers that it can threaten and attack other nations with impunity, it will surely soon begin to threaten countries which have numbered among our allies. As its insatiable demand for resources prompts ever bolder colonial adventures, it will come to interfere directly with the strategic interests of other quasi-imperial states. As it refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of the use of those resources, it threatens the rest of the world with environmental disaster. It has become openly contemptuous of other governments, and prepared to dispose of any treaty or agreement which impedes its strategic objectives. It is starting to construct a new generation of nuclear weapons, and appears to be ready to use them pre-emptively. It could be about to ignite an inferno in the Middle East, into which the rest of the world would be sucked.

The United States, in other words, behaves like any other imperial power. Imperial powers expand their empires until they meet with overwhelming resistance.

To abandon the special relationship would be to accept that this is happening. To accept that the US presents a danger to the rest of the world would be to acknowledge the need to resist it. Resisting the United States would be the most daring reversal of policy a British government has undertaken for over 60 years.

We can resist the US by neither military nor economic means, but we can resist it diplomatically. The only safe and sensible response to American power is a policy of non-cooperation. Britain and the rest of Europe should impede, at the diplomatic level, all US attempts to act unilaterally. We should launch independent efforts to resolve the Iraq crisis and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. And we should cross our fingers and hope that a combination of economic mismanagement, gangster capitalism and excessive military spending will reduce America's power to the extent that it ceases to use the rest of the world as its doormat. Only when the US can accept its role as a nation whose interests must be balanced with those of all other nations can we resume a friendship which was once, if briefly, founded upon the principles of justice.