Topic: Roundup

Greg Carlwood and David Wetschler discuss how the modern agricultural system is built on "consumables" like pesticides and chemical fertilizers to ensure recurring profits. They compare the rebranding of chemical weapons into products like Roundup to the suppression of abundant energy alternatives. Wetschler notes that despite this history, online communities are now rapidly sharing electroculture knowledge to reverse the trend.

The discussion cites Henry Kissinger’s strategy of controlling people through food and identifies the modern lawn as a physical foundation of enslavement. Lawns are criticized as monochromatic, poisonous environments often treated with glyphosate, a chemical linked to significant legal settlements against Monsanto. The speakers argue that replacing these toxic spaces with food-producing systems is a simple solution to systemic control.

Bayer purchased Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018, just as massive litigation regarding glyphosate-based herbicides and non-Hodgkin lymphoma began. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is the most widely used herbicide globally and has been detected in human blood, urine, and rainfall. Despite its pervasiveness in food and water supplies, the chemical remains a staple for farmers, homeowners, and utility companies for vegetation management.

In the early 2000s, American wheat farmers successfully blocked Monsanto's attempt to introduce Roundup Ready wheat due to concerns about export market disruptions. Despite the commercial shelving of the product, experimental GMO wheat has since contaminated fields in the Pacific Northwest, causing significant financial loss for traditional farmers. This serves as a case study for how top-down corporate agendas can ignore the actual needs and desires of the agricultural community.

Bayer has announced plans to retire glyphosate from the U.S. residential lawn and garden market by 2023 to mitigate future litigation risks. However, the company will continue selling the chemical to commercial farmers and is fighting to prevent cancer warning labels on the product. Bayer's primary legal strategy involves seeking a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that EPA approval should preempt all state-level product liability lawsuits.

The discussion explores how chemical companies like Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont repurposed wartime munitions and defoliants, such as Agent Orange, into commercial herbicides. Jenkins notes that 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, is still sold in hardware stores, while Glyphosate (Roundup) has been labeled a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization. The segment highlights the lack of transparency regarding the public health consequences of these widely used chemicals.