The Company that Poisoned 300,000 Babies

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Jesus Christ. I'm Robert Evans, hosted Behind the Bastards UM.
Opening this podcast poorly, I'm distracted right now because there
are two kittens in my house. There's two of them
in their kittens and they're playing. And I'm also horribly
allergic to cats, but I refuse to not have them

(00:23):
in my house. So this is going to be quite
an episode. Are e me being allergic and then being
distracted by kittens anyway, when I don't have a house
full of kittens. This is a podcast about the very
worst people in all of history. UM. And today we're
doing one of our now classic reverse episodes where somebody
reads me a terrible story about a bastard and to

(00:46):
to to do that, to tell us another tale of
woe and whimsy is our old friend Christopher. Christopher, how
are you doing today? Doing? Doing pretty good? We are.
It's cherry season. We're doing the cherries or picking cherries.
It's hell yeah, Well, you live in in the frigid
Midwest and I live in the Pacific Northwest, and we
both have cherry. We're just dripping with cherries, which is

(01:10):
a sign of the perfection of the cherry plants. It's
a really powerful it's a really powerful organism. The amazing
thing about cherries is I feel like a lot of
different fruit plants you get like you get some fruit
and you're like, oh, is that it is that all
the work that I put in this year for for
this fruit, Like, but fucking cherry trees you get like
you're dripping with cherries. You get too many cherries off

(01:32):
of any given cherry tree. And I think that's beautiful.
You know what else I think is beautiful? Christopher? What
do you do? What do you think is beautiful? Robert?
I think naming kittens is beautiful. And Sophie and I
have a little bit of a disagreement here. See, I
want to call them Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend,
and Sophie says, no, that's a horrible name for two kittens. Uh. So,

(01:54):
you know, listeners, I guess what I'm asking you to
do is find Sophie online and tell her that I'm right,
tell her that I picked the proper name to name them.
Sophie and Sophie, that's a ridiculous name for a cat.
So both are Hussein and Hussein's best friend. Good cat
names both options are dictators. Yeah, that is true. We'll

(02:14):
see the double Sophie has the advantage of the fact
that the cats are indistinguishable. So they are distinguishable. You
cannot tell the difference between them. They both look exactly
the same. Little black cats, little baby black cat the
right to be Uh, you know, I've put in the time,
like I feel like at least one should be named Sophie. Well,
we'll think about this. I like the idea of a
stranger comes over to my house and the cat does

(02:36):
something bad and I shout, so down, who say it's
best friend? Get down from there. You have to set
yourself up for success, is the point I'm making. Um
And and speaking of setting ourselves up for to success,
I've set myself up for success today by having Chris
research the episode. So the subject of today's episode is

(02:58):
the two thousand eight tainted milk scandal. And this is
gonna be a fun hell yeah, yeah, this is this
is I love a good tainted milk scandal. Yeah, oh
my god, her a lot of babies gonna die? Are
we are we talking like serious dead baby territory here? Okay,
So we'll we'll put this in the beginning shouldn't have
asked that way. That's a horrible way to ask if
a bunch of babies die. Yeah, so the number of

(03:19):
babies who are poisoned is extremely high. The death toll
is not as high as you would think from the
number of the sheer number of babies who are poisons,
but it is a it is a very large it's
a very large number of poisoned babies. I mean that
action sounds like the best case scenario is horrible thing happens,
not a lot of babies die. But we have a
horrible thing to discuss. This job has broken my brain.

(03:42):
Chris Um just just just fundamentally destroyed me as a
as an empathetic human being. Let's let's let's let's start
the show. I'm I'm excited to learn about the spoiled
milk scandal Um and I'm sure that it was caused
by people acting responsibly and just a freak accident that
could never have been predicted or or prevented. We yeah,

(04:05):
we we will. We will see about that. So in
in nineteen fifty six, the Chinese communist parties Caudre and
whu Abe founded a dairy company called the Three Deer company. Well, okay,
and where's like huibe hibeh whobe is um who abe Okay,
don't don't worry. Gonna be real basic with me because
I don't know, I don't know much at all about

(04:25):
about Chinese geograpy. So this is this is this is
the province that Wuhan is in, Okay, So like south right,
it's like kind of in the middle. Okay that Wuhan
was see again, not a Chinese geography nowhere. This is Okay,
it's like it's like kind of it's I mean, it's
in the like middle sort of. This isn't like the
middle of the east of the country, the middle middle

(04:49):
of the Okay. So Chinese St. Louis is kind of
what you're telling me right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Geographically,
I assume there's an arch all right, so the the
they make this milk company. Yeah, And you know, for
for for most of what's either called sort of the
socialist period of the Mao periods lasting from CCP taking
power and forty nine to dangel Paying taking power in

(05:10):
nineteen seventy nine, three years is a it's relatively sleepy
and sort of minor, like dairy farm and like what
it's really a minor area culture industry China. China does
not have a lot of milk like people, people don't
drink how milk a lot in in you know, most
of this period, you know, and you know this is
so this this is the state owned industry. And this
means that you know, it's given production targets by the state,

(05:31):
and it largely meets those targets. And in return, the
workers who work there can assign these workpoints that you know,
they get resources for them out of the allotment um. Now,
as the social system starts to fall apart, the relative
sort of status of the three year company starts to change.
Now the social the social system, Okay, you're explaining this alright, good, well,

(05:52):
I I can't go into a bit more so. So, yeah,
the socialist system, it goes through a lot of changes,
but the basic principle of it is that like there's
there's no market, right, so there's no market they'll be
selling anything. There's sometimes the national government, but mostly local
government set these production targets, and the sert of state
owned companies or the labor brigades in rural areas like

(06:14):
work too. You know, so you inbreuction target you designed
to do it, and you make as much as like
you have to take the production target, and you get
you get designed resources based on how much you can produce.
And this this sort of works okay for like part
of the nineteen fifties, and but then there's a great
leap forward and you can get the cultural revolution and

(06:35):
that just sort of knocks whoever legs are like left
out of the system. And by the nineteen seventies, basically
the entire country and the entire economic system is just
being held together the military. And you know that this
is this is sort of a taxtrophe. Things are decaying.
But what what's very what's very interesting about this is
that it's not actually the famines or just like the
massacres or any of the weird mango cults that like

(06:57):
actually knock off the sort of social superiod economy. It
turns out that what does it in is the class.
Is that the social periods class structure now now so
social superior economic policy basically dictates that. So you have
these agricultural surpluses in the countryside, and you take all
that grain and you plow into urban developments in you know,
in the city so that China can build this like

(07:17):
modern industrial economy. The consequence of this is that there's
basically very little or basically no investment in rural areas,
which means you get this like you get this massive
economic disparity between the underdeveloped and poor countryside that you know,
the state's exact and grain from and the richer, recently
rich cities that consume the grain. And this, this whole
thing is made worse about what's called the Hukoh system,

(07:39):
which is this like because system is this is this
is still one place to this day, although it's it's
been modified somewhat. Um it's this internal passport where basically
like where you and your family is born, you get
you get registered to that place, and you can only
get services like from basically the town are from from
the sort of local governments that like you're registered to.
And I mean and this this goes everything from like
housing benefits to like social security to medical care. And

(08:03):
you know, it's also has a lot to do with
what kind of jobs you can get. So you know,
if you're if you have a who coo from a
from an urban area, you get these very well funded
sort of services and jobs in the city. But if
you have a rural who coo, you're stuck with these
absolute just third rate services, is no employment opportunities. And
the other thing with this is that when the famine start,
the grain goes to the cities and not the countryside.

(08:24):
And so you know this this goes on for a bit,
but eventually we're like the Chinese world workers who who
are doing the grand production just had enough of this
ship and they basically bring capitalism back. They've sort of
slowly start to introduce basically like so they started bringing
wages back into their into the sort of labor brigades
have been working in and then they turned these labor

(08:45):
brigades and the joy stock companies and this is this
is the this is the actual beginning of sort of
the return of China to capitalism. And how do they
I mean, there's a couple of things that are interesting
for this to me. One of them is that, like
with the when the USSR was kind of in its
its early stage, based on some long standing like Marxist theories,
there was a lot of distrust towards like rural people

(09:05):
towards farmers, Like you saw that a lot in Ukraine
because they're not the proletariat, right, they're not like the
the industrial working class um. And they were seeing as
kind of you know, inherently um kind of more capitalistic
in a lot of ways. And it kind of seems
like that's what's happening here, and that's like that's also

(09:25):
what they're doing. Well. It's weird because so the big
sort of difference between like Maoism and like the earlier
sort of forms of Marxism is that Maoism is like,
I mean and this this, this is how Mao like
becomes a leader of the Comunist party, is that he's
the guy who's like, we're going to organize the peasants
and so you know, and yeah, and they have this
whole thing about like the peasant work or alliance or whatever,
but like they're the people who actually put the communists

(09:47):
in power or the peasants. They're they're you know, untild
before they're truly popularly there, but that you know, but
they have this whole thing about how like they have
this whole thing that need the industrial development part of
it's like you know that they fight the Korean War
and like the Chinese soldiers you can sent to Korea,
like like they don't have shoes and you know, and
they're not doing great. Yeah yeah, I mean like it's

(10:08):
they have like a pretty good army, but it's like
they don't even need supplies. And so there's this whole thing,
but we need to do industrial build up. We need
to do industrial build up and that and the fact
that there's, oh there's also this huge concern in the
CCP that like they're going to get overthrown by raban workers,
which like literally does happen in eight when like the
party gets right out of like gets ran out of
Shanghai by like an uprising, and there's all this stuff,

(10:30):
and so they're they're basically trying to like like they
think the peasantry is like restive enough that they can
extract grain from them and put it into the countryside
and so to take the grain from countryside and put
it into the cities. And yeah, the problem is that
so they don't have enough. Okay, so if you if
you need to improve that warning from agriculture, right, you
need to like increase the amount of grain you can

(10:50):
produce and the Okay, so partially you're doing with like
lfe echanism and all of this bunk science. But the
other problem is that they don't have like modern industrial
agricultural equipment, and so the problem is in order to
do that, you need like an industrial base, but things
in order to build the industrial BASI need more grain.
And so they have this like trap they get caught in.
And the way that they sort of get out of
this is that the peasants start bringing capitalism back, and

(11:14):
so in in in thete eighty four, like a few
years after, the peasants start forming like join stock companies
and start bringing wages back. De Ping is just like, Okay,
all of this stuff that you guys are doing, I'm
gonna put my seal of approval on it. I'm gonna
put out this directive. It's like this is illegal, you
should do more of it. And you know, and this
is like why Ding gets all sort of the credit
for it, because he just like puts his name on it.

(11:36):
It was like, all these economic reforms are my idea,
and yeah, I mean, and I assumed there was like
there was like a fight over this pretty high level right,
because they could that you could you can't just say
like hey, we're gonna we're gonna add some capitalism back
into the mix and in the Central Party be like
okay without like there was there was some ship that
went down, right, Yeah, And I mean the you know,
the thing that the thing about that's important even about

(11:58):
into ping is that in the beginning of this, like
they don't want to go back to capitalism. They what
they're trying to do is reintroduce the market is just
like a way to sort of stabilize the economy. And yeah,
which is something I think people mistake a lot, like
markets aren't necessarily capitalism, although that is you know what
happens at the end of this process. Yeah, and and
you know, and there's i mean there's a bunch of

(12:18):
really intense theoretical debates over like socialist markets, and I
mean there's a very brief attemper like they're going to
try the Yugoslavia thing where everyone has like democratic workers
co ops and they just like that doesn't happen, you know. Yeah,
there's this whole debate about this doesn't really happen in Yugoslavia.
You could argue, Yeah, I mean, okay for a bit.
But and we we should note because not everyone's listened.

(12:38):
We have two episodes on lesinco is um um. That
was this this Soviet theorist who believe that you could
you like, free seeds to make them more cold tolerant
and stuff. And he had a bunch of wacky theories
about how you could apply like kind of socialist attitudes
towards people to plants and it would improve crop yields.
And it didn't. And a lot of people start and

(12:59):
they did it in Russia and they did it in China.
It was not not a great idea broadly speaking, yeah,
it was. It was not good. Um. Now, one of
the other very important thing about something that genuinely did
change in this period is that that directive I was
talking about Danjo Ping. Let's for the first time state

(13:20):
owned firms like you know our friends are read three
deer dairy company like actually make profits by selling their goods.
And so you know, previously, like you're you're working to
a production target, hit the production target and they give
you stuff. But now if you have excess production, you
can sell it. And this is this isn't enormous, I mean,
this is this is this is this this hasn't you
haven't been able to do this in China since like

(13:40):
nineteen four, nineteen fifty three, it just hasn't happened. So
this is this is the start of this whole thing
where you know, they don't companies start to be instead
of like producing goods in order to produce goods, they're
producing goods in order to make money. Now, our friends
at three Deer Company during this period come under new
girl boss management and under under this, under this new

(14:03):
girl bus leadership, they they start becoming They become the
first large scale powdered milk manufacturer in China. And this
is important because powdered milk is how you make baby formula,
and so you know, they go to the milk and
they start making baby formula. But this was not enough
for the ambitious new leadership at three Deers. And you know,
with with with this new incentive structure that that has

(14:24):
has been set up where you have you have an
incenter to produce as much as possible and cut costs,
you can make money, they start looking for ways to
make production cheaper and the solution they land on is outsourcing.
Now previously, yeah, this is this is gonna go great.
We love. One of my favorite things is when because
I'm thinking, well at some point cover like Nestle's baby

(14:46):
formulas aster too. But but the fact that they go right, yeah,
they go right to out source. I love. I love
when you have what are supposed to be radically different
ideologies but they start making similar decisions that that they
dissimilar problems. Like it's just yeah, it's very fun. Yeah
we're going to see there. There's a lot of stuff

(15:06):
that goes on here. Um, so you know, and and
this this is this is also like a huge break
though with the previous sort of the way the socialists,
like agriculture works where you know, if you have a
dairy farm, right you have there there's a state own enterprise.
They own the cows, they own the farms, they employ
all the workers, and they like run the whole system
from you know, like farm distribution center. And three years
looks at this in the nice and eight six they

(15:28):
start making chase and they look at this and they
go like, this is expensive. We have to actually like
run the farms, and we have to pay for the cows,
we have to pay wages. So instead of doing this,
they go, what if we loan our cows to farmers
in the countryside, And then you know, they have to
take it gets yeah, so the cows, right, and then

(15:49):
you know, so to pay off the debt they incur
by buying the cow you have, you have they have,
they have to like give they pay back the dead
and milk. And then on top of that, they have
to pay a yearly management fee in order so that
they can continue to be like debt peons who sell
milk to this company. Now, now the other great part
of this is that they're not outsourcing to like actual farms.

(16:10):
They're outsourcing to individual farmers. And so these people have
like two maybe three cows. Most of them have one cow,
which means that they're completely dependent on on three dair
and their middlemen because they don't have enoughree sources to
actually you know, run their own operation. They only have
two cows. And you know, if you only have two cows,
you can never make enough money that you can get

(16:31):
even like a third or fourth cow. So you know,
they're they're they're they're stuctory working for this company, and
they are in effect the first modern Chinese gig workers.
Jesus Christ yea, So you can see where this is going. Now, Now,
this model, this this gig working model also spreads to
the American dairy industry, where there's a bunch of farmers

(16:52):
quote unquote who's take off these like enormous loans to
buy cows, and you know, they also get caught in
these debt traps. And you know, the read the way
this works is that by by by convincing that these
farmers that they're actually entrepreneurs, that their small business owners
and not workers, the corporations can exploit them even more
than they were able to earlier by you know when
when they were just workers. And this is this is
essentially just how capitalism works. Now. The celebrated anthropologist on

(17:15):
A Sing wrote a very very good article called Supply
Chains and the Human Condition that talks about a lot
of how the supply chain and outsourcing stuff works. And
here here's what she had to say about these these
contract growers who are the new the new like debt
peon cow farmers in the US. Watts another academic concludes,

(17:36):
contract growers thus are not independent farmers at all. They
are a little more than propertied laborers, employees of the
corporate producers who also dominate the chicken processing industry. Yet
this little more then makes a big difference. It is
not hard to understand, not hard to imagine the cultural
commitment of the grower to independent landholding and quote a

(17:56):
business of his own contract farming flourishes, and the imagined
difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. The contract farmer
works for five dollars and seventy cents an hour fift
dollars a year, even though he is a white man,
because he owns his own business. Self exploitation is essential
to the cost cutting power of the supply chain. No,
that sounds like some great communism to me, just like

(18:18):
Mark submissions. Yeah, you know, this is this is the
phone play about this. This is both in the US
and in China at the same time. And you know,
and there's a lot of stuff going on here, particularly
with the American side, right, I mean you have you know,
American agricultures run by just undocumented, huge numbers of undocumented
workers fleeing the American atrocities in Latin America, and you know, yeah, yeah,

(18:42):
and you know, the their ability to sort of you
create situations of privation that make people desperate enough to
labor incredibly basically for free in conditions that are harmful
to them. Um, and they can't complain because they're not anyway. Yeah,
I mean, here's one of the things that seems to
be happy seating here. And this is the thing that
I think people on the left get wrong a lot.

(19:03):
Capitalism is an extremely efficient system for doing a specific
set of things. Now, those specific set of things don't
include keeping the world habitable. But it's very good at
what it does, which is why people keep cribbing from it,
like it's it's job is not to make the world habitable,
but it's good at what its job is. It's very
efficient at what it job at what its job is. Um,

(19:25):
it's job just has nothing to do with taking care
of you. Yea. And in fact, well, and this is
not only is it not like it's not about taking
care of you. I mean this whole thing, you know, this,
this is like this is a big part of what
ice is. Is this this basically institutions of mass violence
in order to keep people like wages down. And you know,
and and what you see is interesting in the sort
of the dairy industry is okay, so so agriculture corporations

(19:48):
like see this and are like, okay, how can we
convince white people to take this amount of money, and
the answer they can with just like convince them that
their business owners. And this this is a you know,
this is part of a larger trend. And the larger
trend here is that corporations, both in China and the
US are essentially they're increasingly becoming middlemen. And and there's

(20:11):
a lot of different models of how this works. Um.
One example is the franchise models. McDonald's is the most
famous example of this. The way that McDonald's works is
that like, you know, they don't don't make money from
selling hamburgers. Like McDonald's stores are franchises. No, they're not.
They're not by the corporation itself around there there, you know,

(20:31):
McDonald's owns the lands that the franchise opens on, and
if you pay them half a million dollars, they will
lease it to you, and you don't give you the
right to run the McDonald's. And then they will also
you know, take royalties from you. And you know it's
from just like extracting rents that McDonald's actually makes money. Um.
But but you know, McDonald's is someone interesting because it's
kind of a transition phase between the earlier like corporations

(20:52):
make things, and what we're seeing now, which is, you know,
corporations don't make things at all. Nike's Nikes a really
good example of this. Um, yes, so so this is
this is Nike. The Yeah, Nike located in my hometown
of Portland, the company that has never done anything wrong famously. Yes,
I'm aware of Nike. Yeah. I actually eat a pair
of Nike shoes every single day. It's the only source

(21:14):
of protein in my diet. That's very impressive. Do you
do you stew it? And I know what's the original
Russian thing? Yeah? I watched that documentary where Werner Herzog
eats his shoes, and I decided, this is how I
want to live my life. But leather shoes are for peasants.
So I'm going to go with the much healthier various
Nike materials, which is the souls of small children. Uh

(21:37):
in the global South. Um, it's delicious. Yeah, it's fun.
And the other thing this is you know what's seeing
talking has this thing about Nike? Um Jesus quote. Nike
never produced athletic shoes. Company founders begin as distributors of
Japanese made shoes. The additions that made for success for
the invention of the Swish logo, advertising endorsements from well

(21:58):
known African American athletes, and transferred to cheaper Asian locations
for contracting production. Nike's vice president for Asia Pacific once explained, quote,
we don't know the first thing about manufacturing. We are
marketers and designers, which is great. So they don't they
don't they don't make shoes. They buy is shoes from
other people. And you know, this this, this is this

(22:20):
is a sort of interesting development because you know, so Nike,
Nike's clothes are made in these really really small shops
with small numbers and employees, and you know, I mean
this is this is this is the sweatshops from the
Triangle shirt wasst episode, except you know, they've gone backwards
to the thing that Triangle Shirtwist was supposed to be replacing. Yeah. Yeah,
they've literally been Like the problem with Triangle Shirtwaist is
that it was that factory was too ethical. We gotta

(22:43):
go back a little bit further. Yeah, and I think
it's you'd love to see it. Yeah, Like, I think
I think it's worth asking why this happens, because you know,
the consequence of going back to the system is that
the government industry loses all of the safety and wage
gains they made in the twenty century in two decades.
And you know, and this is in large part due

(23:03):
to the sort of contractor model. So you know, we
should ask, so why why do you actually want to
use the contractor model? Um, we talked a little bit. Yeah, cuts,
it cuts costs, and you know, it turns workers and
small business owners that like, you know, it makes it
easier to sort of rob by convincing you that they're
actually like business owners and not just sort of you know,
permanently in trapped dead peons. Now, another reason for this

(23:24):
is that it makes union organizing extremely difficult because part
of the workforce that you know, would have been workers
in like a triangle shirtwaist uh set up, are actually
small business owners now. And because in the in the garment,
which is also kind of what triangle shirtwaist did with
the the inside contractor system. Yeah yeah, it's the interesting
thing about this breakaus. The inside contractor system doesn't work

(23:46):
right like the contractors like side side with the workers
a lot. Yeah yeah, but but in this system, like
the small shops sort of system, it doesn't that doesn't
happen at all. The small shop people are you know,
they're they are actually confessor small business owners. And this
this makes it almost impossible for for the garment workers
them entire wages because the people they're working for, these

(24:07):
contractors and these contractors are also extremely poor and they
have like they have no margins. But you know, because
the workers are contractors for a contractor, right like, they
don't they don't have a way to directly like demand
wages or safety procedures from the company. And you know
this isn't like this, this system is not efficient, right like,
you know, it's it's way, it's way more efficient to

(24:29):
make make the stuff in big factories. And you know,
in order to do this, you have to have these
enormous supply chains or spanning multiple continents in order to
move this stuff around. But you know that doesn't really
matter because since the eighties you basically see his corporations
going Okay, it is better to have enormously inefficient production
and these like giant logistics lines than it is for

(24:49):
a single union to exist and take any of their
money or or worse yet, and this, you know, this
is a real threat in the cities and seventies, which
is what all this c centralzation stuff is a response
to that. You know, it was a real possibility in
the sixties and seventies that like the garment workers are
going to seize the company and start running it themselves,
and so you get this enormous effort to make sure
that this never happens again. And you know, well, yeah,

(25:11):
I mean, if there's anything that's antithetical to the socialist experiment,
it's unionization. Yea, workers owning the means of production like
capitalists no, thank you, yeah, you know, and this is
the you know, this is the thing. Is part of
why it's interesting that like three years three Dyer is
doing all of this stuff that like we look at now,

(25:32):
like honest thing is running. She doesn't tend right there
is three years is doing this all in the night
six and this is you know, we were walked about
this earlier. But like again, the people inside the communist
trains Communist Party like didn't want to go back to
capitalism like that, they really didn't like capitalism and it
just didn't matter. Like within within two years of them
saying okay, they don't industries can like can make money now, right,

(25:54):
like this within two years, as they don't industries reinvented
debt peonage. And you know, and there's another interesting aspect
of this, which is that, okay, so so three Deers
is not just a state own industry. They're also a
co op, which means like the workers of of of
of three Deers owned shares in the company. And you know,
you would think that the combination of this is the
state owned industry in a country that is still technically communist,

(26:18):
combined with you know, led by a woman. You would
think all three of these things would like in some
way make any of this better. But no, it turns
out that the incentives run exactly the other way. And
so you know, so if you have the state, the
state of infirm is trying to cut costs because you know,
because they don't only given I don't want to state,
they're trying to cut costs, so outsourcing states the money.

(26:40):
And then the interesting thing about the co op parts
of the co op part feeds into this because you know,
if you're a member of the co op, right, the
less members of the co op like there are the
war your shares are worth and so they have this
incentive to make sure that as much of the work
as being as possible as being done by contractors, because
the contractors aren't like members of the co op. And yes,
so this leads yeah, and this this is invented Uber

(27:04):
six two years after they legalize making money. It's incredible. Yeah,
hell yeah. See that's that's socialist innovation right there. Fuck
you Silicon Valley. God. You know. And and because this,
I mean it's actually an old idea of that. Yeah, yeah,
they they're on they're one of the first people to
like bring it back, which is fairly incredible. And you know,

(27:28):
because because this is just like a capitalist economy, Now,
this pays off enormously, and you know, three years still
the entire sort of the next time fifteen years just
massively expands. Um. They do this massive series of murgers
and acquisitions, and the nineties it is the largest dairy
producer in China, and you know, and they continue to expand,

(27:49):
and you know, but by by this point they have
real political power because they're they're you know there, their
company is a significant part of like the local Chinese
tax base, and so this this gives them means with
the party, and this is part of what allows them
to and two five form this joint partnership with the
New Zealand based front Terra Cooperative Group. Um yeah, for

(28:09):
Terra buys forty under the shares and you know they
do this huge partnership thing and this this is a
huge deal. Fonterra is the second largest dairy company in
the world. They you know, they have the worlds sold
dairy production and you know they're the largest company in
New Zealand's by a margin. That's like, okay, they are
so powerful in New Zealand that several of the cables

(28:30):
from Wiki Leaks suggests that the reason that New Zealand
sent troops to a rock was that the US was
threatening to cut off their their milk for oil deal
with the Iraqi government. When they knocked it off, what
the fuck? See but no war for milk is a
terrible thing to put on a plaque. That's just not

(28:52):
going to get you anywhere. That is incredible, I and
I love it whenever we get New Zealand gets gets
so much credit because their government isn't isn't just howlingly
incompetent um, but they do dumbsh it. Guys, don't worry,
don't worry New Zealand's government. That's terrible things. It's fine,
you know, and it's great because again this is a
you know, it's Fonterra is a group of cooperatives, and

(29:15):
once again the cooperatives are not only not like making
anything better, they're like pushing New Zealand into war with
like into an invasion of a rock It's great, yeah, baby,
global capital go to war for fucking milk. You know
who else will go to war on behalf of a
milk conglomerate all of the products that support this podcast.

(29:38):
We ask one question of our sponsors, and it's will
you invade the Global South in order to improve the
profits of a milk manufacturer? And if they say no, or,
as is more common, what are you talking about? Are
you having a stroke? Robert? Do we need to call someone?
We hang up the phone. We don't take that goddamn money.

(29:59):
That's the behind the bad streets guarantee. We're back. And
Sophie just admitted that as a capitalist pig dog, she
is wearing a Nike shirt shamefully. I mean it was
it was it was a gift, but that's not an excuse.
I still wear see Sophie, that is something I know.

(30:22):
You're a monster. You're a monster, unlike me, who was
just surrounded by products of the international arms industry, which
is completely non problematic and has never been involved in anything.
I'm simply just that's what everyone says about the global
arms straight. Yes, Lebron Games and I'm representing a lot
of unsettling companies. Okay, let's let's get back to let's

(30:46):
get back to the show. Chris. We're talking about milk,
which is also a thing you can buy and support
the Global arms straight. Apparently it's great. It's great. No
matter what you buy all the money to the arms trade.
You can't you can't not feed money back into the
global arms trade. That's capitalism, baby. It all winds up
making guns somehow. Also, the fun part of this is

(31:06):
that Fonterra is going to come out looking like the
better party in this deal at the end of this
which is which is this is this is a you
can tell the stories going well, when the people who
are slightly more responsible are the people who sent troops
to a rock. It's great. Now Fonterra partners with three
deers under the assumption that you know China's largest dairy

(31:28):
company will be selling products that are you know, of
quality and thus wouldn't get into like trouble. But you know, yeah,
you're not gonna yeah, yeah, that the large dairy company
in China. Like what what what could possibly be going wrong?
But you know, even before three five there were signs
that Fonterra should have been concerned. Now, since the start
of the reform period in nineteen eighties and sort of
accelerating few tradition to capitalism in the nineties, China has

(31:51):
had a huge food safety problem, particularly in the dairy industry.
And well, obviously there there's a lot of structural issues
involved in this. In the dairy industry. A lot of
this is directly this is directly the fault of three
Deers model of contract farming. Now, as we said, yeah,
it's crazy making the uber of massive scale food production

(32:15):
didn't didn't make things as safe as uber uber app
the uber of baby formula. Surprisingly are not the good
guys here now as a result of the sort of
the miniature and culture revolution that that Three Deers kicks
off in the eighties and nineties, most dairy farming, I
mean this, this is true to this day in the

(32:36):
year one is done by those individual farmers with like
one of three cows. And you know, the whole system
is designed so that like no one can no one
can build up enough capital to get out or do
did you any kind of like productivity improvements on themselves,
because if they had that much money, they could go
like start their own company and they wouldn't have to
work for three years. And the other thing about the

(32:56):
contract model is it means that no one is investing,
you know, because these cows are being are owned and
maintained by these farmers. No one's investing in any sort
of technological improvements. And you know, because all the farmers
are at best you're broke and at worst you're hopelessly
in debt, they don't have money to buy good land.

(33:17):
They're using essentially the land left over from the from
the old like land reform allotments. And this means that
you know, this is this is some one of the
worst high cultural line of China at the're raising these
cows on. I mean, okay, so it's the worst higher
cultural land that you can that you can raise a
cow on. And it's not literally desert or like the
top from Mountain, And so you know, this means that
the cows are very healthy and that the milk they

(33:39):
produce is pretty low quality. Now higher quality milk with
more more approaching than it sells for more money because
you know, you can used to make baby formula. And
this means that there's an enormous incentive for farmers and
middlemen and the dairy companies to fake the proachein content
of their milk to make it look higher than it
actually is. How do you I mean, is it just
like they're bribing the people who's jabta is to check?

(34:00):
Or is there some like are they like pro it
pouring way protein into the milk? So how does that
actually work? So so the easiest way to do this
way so they are bribing people, but you can't. You
have to bribe an enormous number of people in order
to do this. So the easiest way to do it
is by putting additives into the milk that make that
make the milk look like it has more protein. Went
on on the sort of tests that companies used to

(34:22):
like figure out how much like milk, how much proteins
in the milk, And you know this this is where
the middlemen come in and you know, so, so the
middlemen are people who they buy the milk from the
farmers and sell it to the dairy companies. Now you
might be wondering, you know again, the company sold them
these cows, right, so why would why are the companies

(34:42):
like not just buying the milk from the farmers directly.
And the answer for that, there's there's three reasons. The
first is that the dairy companies, you know, running through
these middlemen means they don't have to spend the money
running their own logistics network to you know, buy and
then move supplies the milk around. Um. The second reason
is to put a buffer in between sort of the

(35:04):
dairy companies and the contract farmers and in case the
farmers get any ideas about you know, banding together, so
they don't have to live in desperate poverty. And the
third reason you use middleman is to do crime. Hell yeah,
now we're talking yeah, and you know this, Yeah, because
if you get someone else to do a crime, then
you then you're you're in the clear. That's the way
crime works. Yeah, this this is literally true. So you

(35:24):
know it's say, for example, you are nesting and the
cocoa that you use for your chocolate is produced by
child slave laper. And you know the Ivory coaster, Pekino Fasso.
You know, now you're a child slave labor. Like it's
a bad thing, Christopher. I mean, without child slave labor,
we wouldn't have I don't know, the Pyramids or England.
I'm pretty I'm pretty sure they didn't use child slaves. Amazingly,

(35:45):
they had slavery, but I'm pretty sure they didn't use
child slaves built the pyramids, I mean, which is incredible.
A lot of them are probably seventeen right, yeah, but
you know, I do want to point out it's like, yeah,
so like every every computer, like every electronic device that's
like may now has cult are in it. Which is
this thing that's almost entirely yeah, my mind by child
slave labor. And the Democrat Public compan was like, we're

(36:07):
not even making pyramids with it, Like we're making like
headphones that break after four minutes. It's like, yeah, we're
making iPhones that are designed to stop working after two years. Yeah,
um you know yeah, no, I mean yeah, so okay, yeah,
yeah yeah. And you know we saw this recently with
their they're like people who had been enslaved by by

(36:30):
by by the contract growers you know, tried to sue
Nestle in court, but you know, because because because these
are because Nestli is buying from middlemen and not buying
you like, owning the slaves directly. They you know, in
court they were just like, ah, it wasn't us, it
was our suppliers. Nothing we can do about it. And
you know, the ever thing. The great thing about American
contract law, it is literally written into law right, It's like,

(36:52):
there's great examples in California, but you know it's written
into law bread in corporate law that if you are
a contractor right for a company and you know the
deals you sign that a MultiMate homing contractor makes it
so that if you like do slavery, you have to
claim in court that it was you when not the
company above you, which is yeah, this is it's great. Yeah, yeah,

(37:14):
and yeah you love to see it. Yeah, it's it's great.
And you know, because Nestley's production is set up exactly
the same ways. Three Deers is like, the people who
Nestle enslaved lost just a freme court case when I
tried to see them because they couldn't prove that Nestlee
directly ordered the slavery. And then because because it didn't
happen in the US, it once I couldn't prove that

(37:36):
once that it didn't happen in the US, they never
standing to sue an American course. So yeah, this is yeah,
So there's this whole legal framework that that's set up,
and this this happens everywhere to to to use these
contractors to do crime. And in the Chinese case of
three deers, you get exactly the same thing. You know,
you have the middleman and contractors, who are the people
who are doping this milk and you know I doping.
It's like they're they're they're putting additives into the milk

(37:57):
just to fake the test of faith about the approaching count.
And you know, and by by getting the middleman to
do it possible with my ability and you know, if
things like go wrong, you can just blame the farmers. No, no,
I will say this, So some farmers are desperate enough
to put additives into their milk themselves. Um, but and
you know, and and the farmers in the media, the

(38:18):
people who get blamed for this, but you know a
lot of them, and even the people who are doing it,
like they don't know what they're like putting into the milk,
so they just assume that it's like fine. But you
know this, this, this, this turns into a huge problem
because you know, the combination is sort of the incredible
greed of these large bomb business owners and the desperation
of these farmers leads to a series of really bad

(38:38):
milk scandals the well, one of the more famous instances
of like the worst instance I think um was was
the fake milk scandal two thousand four, where a bunch
of just fake baby powder was made with regular milk
and not you know, like hyprotein milk was sold to
a bunch of extreme cor rural farmers and the result
of this fifty babies dicee and malnutrition because you know,

(38:59):
the milk didn't give the nutrients that they needed, so
they just they starved. And yeah, that's what babies do
when you don't Yeah yeah yeah. And this, you know this,
this this pisces off everyone because here's a bunch of
dead babies who started to death, and there's a huge
crackdown and a bunch of people, including party officials, get arrested,

(39:20):
and you know the result of this is there's a
whole series of these very high profile attempts by the
party to get the problem with food safety and fake
food and fake drugs under control. And this culminates in
the CCP executing the head of their Food and Drug
Administration for taking bribes from a pharmaceutical company promote their products,
like they kill a cabinet level official, and it doesn't

(39:42):
do anything, because the problem isn't about sort of isn't
about just sort of individual corruption. It's structural. And you
know this is this is sort of a structural problem
with capitalism. Like the cheapest and easiest way to make
money is just to scam people. And you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's always the best way to make money. Yeah, we
we have seen this. This, this is one of the
running the eames of behind the Bastards is get rich,

(40:02):
scam people. And you know, cutting corners and even just
like making fake stuff doesn't work, makes you an incredible
amount of money. And you know, the longer you can
keep the scam going, the better off you are. And
you know this is this is the way the intent
of structure works everywhere. The only reason that food safety
is as good as it is, and like Europe is
that you know, food safety was a key demand of
sort of the workers who have been in progressive reformers

(40:23):
were able to get these food safety rightular is put
in place. But you know, and I kind of slice
this enough, and don't worry, folks, they're dismantling it. They're
dismant don't worry. They'll get rid of those food safety
regulations in Europe here everywhere. Don't worry people. Yeah, well,
the soon you will be free to eat poison. Oh,
don't worry. Europeans also eat poison. Um. Even the controls

(40:43):
are put in place like don't work all that well. So,
for example, like in France, there's this massive scandal in
the eighties and nineties where it revealed the Socialist Party
had been sending blood drawn from prisoners with HIV and
hepatitis and selling it to Bear Pharmaceuticals that Bear could
make a drug for hemophelia. Actually, so you love to
see it. Damn. That's that's that's the that's the that's

(41:07):
what people come to behind the bastards for is that France,
the French Socialist Party selling HIV tainted blood to big
farmer and the prisoners and then and then I think
this has like a reverbraining scandals because the British government
like knows that it's this drug is poisoned and gives
it to people anyways. It's yeah, and you know, and

(41:27):
this is this is the sort of last part of
the incentive structure at play with with unsafe food and drugs,
which is state officials trying to make money for themselves
and their political clients. And you know, this is the
cause of food safety issues in all capitalist countries, but
China in particular has you know, it has a more
intense version of this because there's this really really fierce
competition between different local governments over GDP growth rates. Because

(41:51):
you know, if you're Chinese official, right, like, the way
you move up in the party is by how you're
sort of your local and provincial you know, you're you're
a cadre, right, you're in charge of the city, you're
in charge of the town. The way the way you're
evaluated and how you open the party is mostly based
on on how high your GDP radio is. Now this

(42:11):
means that you know, if you think socialists, yeah, it's
it's great, it's it's incredible they It's also it's also
funny because like one of the big things in across
the whole sort of like really eighties and nineties and
is still going on today, was like one of the
big sub socialist projects is about how GDP is like
a completely bullshit metric of like economic growth at China

(42:33):
is like no, no, no, our cadre evaluations are all
GDP now and and this means that you know, the
countries will sign off on just literally anything that that
they think will just like cause any growth whatsoever. So luckily,
in the US we do not have the problem of
bribery because giving money to politicians and exchange for political
favors is in fact legal and thus definitionally not bribery.

(42:57):
But unfortunately for corporations in China, yeah, yeah, Unfortunately for
for corporations in China, China is an absolute one party
capitalistic tatorship, which means you have to bribe politicians the
old fashioned way, like socialism intended. Do you know who
won't bribe Chinese regulators in order to poison their milk?
I mean definitely not our sponsors, because they are actively

(43:20):
bribing Chinese regulators as we speak, regulators of all nations.
You know, we we we only go with the locust corporations.
So they'll bribe Chinese regulators, they'll bribe Zimbabwean regulators, they'll
bribe regulators from Latin America, They'll bribe regulators from anywhere
in the world. That's the behind the bastards guarantee everyone's

(43:41):
getting bribed. Here's here's ads, Chris, you know it, did it?
Did it? Did occur to me that you know that
that whole system you just kind of set up whereby
these these Chinese farmers are essentially recre eating the gig
economy in order to maximize the their profits at the

(44:04):
expense of both the people receiving the milk and the
people who who who labor for them. But but aren't
you know, full full partners in the endeavor. Um, we're
kind of doing that with podcasting. Yeah, yeah, that's it's good.
I love I love I love doing things that succeed
for everybody. So Chris uh please please continue your podcast

(44:25):
share now. You know so so that the other thing
about China is that you know, so you can buy politicians, right,
but you can also you can also literally bribe the
regulators directly, and you know, okay, so so Chinese regulation, um,

(44:45):
you know, so so when Chinese regulators are not literally
representatives from the corporation they're supposed to be regulating, you know,
you get corruption. Like you know, we saw you let
the CCP executed the due too as their head of
the state food or administration. The corruption goes for the
local level all the way to the top. And and
corruption among regulators is so bad that when a Chinese
state journalist like took maternity leave and wound up making

(45:07):
a documentary and air pollution after her baby developed a
tumor well in the womb because the air quality was
so bad, she she like looked at the US as
a bottle of a country with a functioning regulatory apparatus.
And you know, again this is this is interesting because
this isn't sort of just like partisan hack criticism, right
like this is this this is the Chinese state Uh,

(45:29):
this is the Chinese state journalists. And you know, and
the CCP thinks that the issues that she's bringing up,
like are valid enough that there's talk about she's called
under the dome, and they think the issues are valid
enough that they don't ban it. This is you know,
this is a documentary that's very critical at the party,
and they don't ban it for the first week that
it's released. And you know, this is this is one
of the ways the CCP sort of like tacitly allows

(45:50):
criticism to be made because you know, okay, so you
can't actually just have free criticism their right. But you know,
they were like, okay, we'll we'll ban it eventually, boil
that people see it first. And the thing they were like, okay,
we need to let people see is Chinese regulatory corruption
is so bad it makes people long for the American
the amazing safety system the US. Yeah, it's it's it's bad. Yeah.

(46:14):
Now ab two thousand seven, Chinese authorities are you know,
they're not unaware of the practice of putting additives into milk,
and this kicks off this kind of regulatory cold war
between additive manufacturers and the regulators who like actually don't
care about not poisoning children. And you know, so the
regulators change or techniques to detect like the chemicals that
people are using, and people change the chemicals and there's

(46:35):
this there's this whole sort of cold war and it
starts to get worse in late two tho as the
CCP imposes price controls a baby formulas an anti poverty measure.
Now this is not like a bad thing inherently, like
in principle, but you know, if you're dealing with like
a state owned firm that's designed to actually produce goods
for people and not designed to make money, this can
actually work. Um. But you know, the price controls had

(46:59):
these weird unto the consequences when applied to you know,
the three deer three deer, the contract worker co Opal
and you know so so three years and the other
the other milk companies just sort of pass on the
added costs, and the pricing strows down to the middleman,
and the middleman are like, okay, well we'll pass the
price out of the farmers. Now this escalates the regulatory

(47:20):
cold war because the price for like regular milk just implodes, um,
and people start adding these incredibly dangerous chemicals, like more
dangerous than that I've already been using to the milk
to to fake these tests and those normal. One of
this is melanine. Now, melanine is a chemical that is
normally used to make plastics. Um, it's common in you know,

(47:40):
so that sounds like something babies need a lot of Yeah,
because babies are basically mostly plastic. Yeah, and it's completely healthy.
It's like that. That's why it's why you let them
eat dishes, or when when the baby starts chomping on
a countertop, it's like, we've gotta get the mel mean,
you got you gotta let them eat this countertop. You
got to get that melon. Yeah. Absolutely, that's why I
feed babies nothing but pure plastic. What I filter out.
I get one of those facial scrubbers with the little microbeads,

(48:02):
and I filter out those microbeads and I just funnel
it right into the baby's mouth, and that that keeps
them healthy. Yeah. Toxic, yeah yeah, yeah, but babies are
mostly poisoned by way right babies. Yeah. So oh boy.

(48:24):
So unfortunately for people who like babies Melanian. So if
you ingest it, it causes you to develop kidney stones Jesus, Yeah, babies.
So babies are getting kidney sounds. I mean I hate that.
Yeah yeah, so you know. But on the other hand,
you know, it's it's really unless you're specifically looking for it,

(48:44):
it's extremely hard to detect because basically what does it
So the p the like more refined protein tests are
like testing for level of nitrogen in it, because love
of the nitrogen in the thing tells you how much
protein there is. And this thing like boost level of nitrogen.
And so you know when people start getting desperate, they're
like a skirt, we'll we'll put plastic into this, will
put this chemical and you know, this stuff starts getting

(49:06):
put in milk all acrash China in order to pass
off like shitty milk as like high quality baby formula milk.
But it's really just causing baby baby baby kidney stones. Yeah, dark,
I don't like that at all. Yeah, it's it's gonna
get worse. I mean. The good news is that when
you get kidney stones, doctors tend to advise like beer
is often advised because it helps you pass them. So really,

(49:29):
we just need to start getting those babies beer and
it'll the problem solves. Just mix beer in with the milk,
do a milk beer bong for the babies, and then
the babies get nutrition and they pass the kidney stones
and everyone's happy. Right now, I can't think of a
problem with that. Let's continue. Oh god, So in in
in November two seven, a man named Wong buy some

(49:52):
three to your Baby formula for his young daughter. Now
he holds onto this to the formula until or if
he doesn't ate, but when he starts using, he quickly
realizes there's something wrong with his daughter. It becomes incredibly
painful for her to go to the bathroom and her
urine has these weird particles in it. And eventually he
figures out the thing that's causing it as a powdered milk. So,
you know, he he makes what's you know, the normal

(50:14):
assumption if you buy something in China and it makes
you sick is that it's fake. So he calls Three
Deer Service hotline to confer with them. Is fake, and
you know, so so sometimes buying And in late February
they're they're sort of like doing bureaucratic stuff. Um. In
late February, he sends them some of the packages that
he has left and they confirm, surprisingly the packages are

(50:35):
not fake, they're real, and they tell long To to
send the rest of the packages like to the company.
Now Long should have been one of the big heroes
of this story because he tells him the funk off
because he's like, Okay, I want an actual examination of
like what's making my what what made my baby like sick?
And so so he goes to his local consumer associated

(50:56):
Demand one. The problem is that the inspection for to
figure out which one with his milk costs a third
of the average salary of a Chinese worker, and three
DERs refuses to pay for it, so he spends the
entire money he can't so he literally doesn't have the
money for so he spends the entire one sales and
eight trying to fight his way through this just absolute
bar cragic nightmare trying to figure out what's happened to

(51:17):
his daughter and it comes to nothing. Um, now one
is interesting. He actually posts about this online and a
very thread very quickly is locked. But he's he becomes
the first documented case of poisoning from three years powdered milk.
Now well long is fighting this case. There is a

(51:38):
massive earthquake in China that kills almost nine people. Jesus
and she quickly realizes that three Deers is sending the
survivors free baby formula. And at this point he you
know he does, because nothing goes with your family being
wiped out by a national disaster like kidney said yeah, yeah,

(51:59):
it's great, you know. So so she goes up the
chain of command to try to stop it, and she
gets nowhere and his gets completely ignored. Now, so this
is all this is happening in in something in March.
Now in June, UM, Chinese doctors start to see something
they've never seen before. There's thousands of these babies were
almost altmore less than a year old, who are their

(52:21):
bodies are completely swollen, they can't urinate, and they quickly
realize when they start doing surgeries that they have kidney stones.
And you know that this is a really weird, like
babies do not get kidney stones, Like it just doesn't.
This just does not happen. So you know, the doctors
begin to suspect something's going on with powdered milk, and

(52:42):
they try to go to the press. Now, now a
few Chinese journalists have been hearing basically the same story.
And you know when when doctors, like a few doctors
starts showing up and confirming that you know, these babies
in in in the hospital with kidney stones. Um, some
journalist trying to publish the story. But the CCPs propaganda
department and and yes, it is literally really called the
Propaganda Department because yeah, I mean, oh boy, yeah, because

(53:05):
I guess when it started, that was still a time
when people used like there was a period of time
where the term propaganda was often used openly and not
as a negative. Yeah, you know. And also like when
when it started, it was like like, you know, this
starts like this starts before the CCP is a state
because you know, I mean, the propagated Department is just
like a bunch of people passing up pamphlets and now
it's the state censorship agency now. Yeah, and so and

(53:28):
the reason they killed this story in large part is
because the Tasan eight Beijing Olympics. Now. I don't know
how many other people remember the tals and the Olympics,
but that was the first Olympics I ever watched, and
it was just an enormous, this huge deal for the
Chinese government. Yeah yeah, and a lot of this is
trying to a bunch of I mean, like a lot
of a lot of American conservatives got real real racist

(53:50):
and stared about China because all the people drumming and stuff.
Yeah yeah, yeah, and you know, yeah, it turned into
this whole media debacle, and you know, part part of
what's happening. So China's a been in the World Trade
Organization for like seven years, right, and that that was
a sort of acceptance back into like the liberal community
estates or whatever after Tianaman, which you know, actually it's
just sort of you know, this is one of the
other weird things about history. So China was actually pretty

(54:12):
popular in the US like through most of the eighties
because they've been in like an American ally and the
cold Board. You know, this is why I think it's
uh yeah, like I'm pretty sure in Red Dawn, it's
like the two countries that are left are China in
the US, who are like fighting the Soviets. But you know,
after Tianna, man, like all of that sort of good
will like implodes and they speaking, you know, and this
means that like like the Seals and an Olympics becomes

(54:34):
like all the journalists called China's coming out party is
a huge international politics geopolitical event. And and I kind
of emphasize this enough. International politics is just an enormous
dick waving contest that kills people for no reason. My
favorite example of this, and just to make it clear
that China is not the only country that kills people
for just bullshit internacal prestige points. Uh So, my favorite example,

(54:57):
it's the what happens right before the park A nuclear
test band and nineteen in treaty in nineteen and sixty three,
so you know, by by the sixty three, everyone's has
realized that testing nukes above ground is bad because you're
radiating everyone. So you know, they signed a treaty it's like,
don't do this, and then the day before the treaty
goes into effect, both the US and the USS are

(55:18):
spending an entire day dropping hundreds of nukes just for
no reason. It's just like that they do this giant
dick waving contest just to prove that they're like, oh hey,
look a look at how many nukes we can drop.
And this kills an enormous number of people, but you know,
it kills them slowly with cancer and sort of hard
to trace, so nobody really talks about the fact that like,
like thousands upon thousands of people died from just the
US and the USS are just like having this dick

(55:39):
waving contest for who has the most nukes, so, you know,
and China's version of this is that they're they're absolutely
determined that everything goes perfectly and there's no pr hiccups,
and so you know, I mean they they go like, okay,
so they they use so much steel building the facilities
that there's a global steel shortage for four years afterwards.
Like they go to us, like they shot on fact frees.

(56:00):
They bring in like a hundred twenty market workers who
they're paying a hundred thirty dollars a month because socialism. Um. Yeah,
and and they even they even they have this thing
I think the people might remember this. So they have
these IBM supercomputers right that they're using to target clouds
with anti aircraft guns. So let's see these anti aircraft

(56:21):
guns at the clouds to make it rain so that
it wouldn't rain like over the event itself. You know,
I mean this is yeah, likely they are shooting they're
shooting guns at clouds in order to make sure it
doesn't rain. Like this is this is the levels or
pr OP you're you're dealing with here. And so you know,
from from the start of the Games in August eighth
until the Olympics finish, there is literally no way the

(56:42):
CCP is going to let a story about a food
safety crisis spread to the Western press. Now, unfortunately for
the CCP, what they have on their hands is a
massive food safety crisis. Now four months after the first
cases reported three years begins to run tests on their
round supply and they realize that basically their entire supply
of baby formulas contaminated with melamine. Now on August seconds,

(57:04):
they do the test come back in August one. On
August second, Three Deers has his frantic meeting with with
Fonterra out just that yeah, the their international affiliate, and
Fonterra is like, okay, we need to do an immediate
mass recall of all milk products because you know, we
don't don't we don't know exactly what's back with melomine.
And three Deers he's like, no, absolutely not under the

(57:25):
rationale that you know, they don't want to have a
scandal like six days before the start of the Olympics,
and so they advocate for this very quiet, limited recall,
and you know, they have this massive fight, there's all
this weird corporate maneuver ring, but you know Three Deers
is being backed by the CCP, so you know, they
win out and they immediately set out to cover up
the story of you know, the fact that they're poisoning

(57:45):
all these kids until the Olympics are over, and they yes,
they start like they start planting positive stories in local
newspapers and TV stations like they have they have one
of their PR people pretend to be a journalist and
write a piece about them and then get it published
like the get it published in the newspaper, and you know,

(58:07):
and they also, I'm glad that stuff happens there too.
I was feeling bad about America for a while, but
now I realize we're just part of a beautiful global
community of pr flax pretending to be journalists in order
to sell death. Yeah, it's great. That is That is
like when celebrities called the paparazzi on themselves to get
a good photo. Yeah, the other thing they did. And

(58:28):
this is something well, okay, it wouldn't surprise me if
Google does this, but I've never heard of them doing it.
But three Dyears buys off China's large as search engine.
Who the Surgeon has a feature where if you're a company,
you're like you're in the party, you can like you
can pay them money to manipulate the results and so
they pay this money in the search engine ensures that

(58:48):
like if you search from melamine or sick babies, it
won't get linked back to Fontera. And this this sort
of media blackout works. UM three Dyers and Fontera say
nothing to the pub until the Olympics are nearly over.
UM on August twenty two is like that. This two
days before the close of the games, and twenty days
after they learned about this, Fontera finally reports the contamination

(59:09):
to New Zealand Consulate and then New Zealand Consulate continues
to sit on it until after the Games, however, because
they don't want to damage relations with China, and it's
not until September eight that Helen Clark, the Prime Minister
of New Zealand, formally and openly reports the contamnation of
the Chinese governments. Now I'm I'm emphasizing the dates so
much because every single day that they delay means another

(59:32):
day where thousands of babies are drinking poison and are
permanently damaging their kidneys trying to piss out kidney stones,
and the results of the delay gad This is this
is the first case is reported in February they like.
The Chinese government finally reacts in September, and the results
of this is that three hundred thousand babies get sick,
fifty thousands are hospitalizing, six children die And I want

(59:57):
to read this quote from the from the South China
Morning Post, you can get a sense of the effect
that this had. Holding her timuth own son in her
arms at Beijing's Children's Hospital, Jooshooping cries as she tell
us how angry and shock she is to learn that
the milk powder her son has been drinking could kill him.
I couldn't fall asleep last night, she says. I feel
so bad for having fed my baby toxic milk powder

(01:00:19):
since the day he was born. Living on the main land,
we sort of know that our food is always contaminated,
but doing this to a vulnerable baby, the greedy businessmen
are shameless. Yeah, it's people. Yeah, it's it's people are
incredibly piste off. And you know the moment that the

(01:00:39):
cats out of the bag and CCP starts, you know,
they bring all their guns to bear in the crisis,
and they're you know, the their investigations quickly discovered that
it's not just three deers. Twenty two other milk companies
have melamine in their milk. And you know, between three
years and the twenty two other companies, that is almost
the entirety of China's dairy industry. And you know that represents,
by reasonable stanator systemic crisis. Now, the CCPs reaction to

(01:01:03):
this was to execute two dairy farmers and what a
manufacturer of melamine and powder, and put nine more people,
including the now Pete girl boss head of three deers,
in prison. And they also they fired a lot of
the local quadren that have been involved in the cover
up and the like. They find the companies a little
bit and yeah, and so they pay the kids who
get kidding stones like dollars and then if you get

(01:01:27):
more sick than that, you get four thousand dollars and
if you die, they'll give you twenty nine dollars, which well, hey,
that's a pretty I mean ship. Yeah, but the thing is,
I wouldn't want to die for that kind of you know,
I've heard of worse payouts than that. But you know
the problem is that like nothing fundamentally changes about like
the structure of the dairy market, and people get exturely

(01:01:47):
piste about this because you know, this is a scandal
that affects almost the entire Chinese dairy industry and twelve
total people get get prosecuted for it, and so you know,
the prevailing wouldn't been in China becomes that like the
CCP found a few convenient fall guys and are just
you know, trying to sleep everything else under the rug. Yeah,
it's bad. That's depressing, honestly. Yeah. You know the result

(01:02:12):
of this is that, I mean some people wound up
in prison. Yeah, and the CCP passes a bunch of
food safety laws, but you know, this doesn't help, like,
it doesn't solve the problem. And so you know, like
the trust in the Chinese dairy market just implodes. And
I mean people to this day still do not trust
Chinese milk products like in China from you know, partially

(01:02:33):
from the memory of of the babies with kidney stones
and partially because the stuff keeps happening. I mean, there
hasn't been anything worse than the melomine crisis, like thank
god since then. But you know, like last year there
was another fake milk scandal and five kids got rickets
from mal nutrition, and so you know, people people are
extremely skeptical of Chinese milk brands. Now the one example

(01:02:56):
that would be too yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right,
There's there's one interesting exception to this, and you know
the exception is there's there's there was one like Chinese
firm that emerged from the Melo Means scandal unscathed. And
the way the reason they pulled this off are you
able to pull this off because they don't use contract workers,
and so that means they actually like run their farms,
and you know, with no middlemen, without contract farmers, you

(01:03:18):
get like much better like quality like quality control, you
get better milk. And you know, if you're going to
run a farm like that, it's way harder to do crime.
But the problem is that this milk is more expensive,
and that leads us to the final and maybe the
most devastating part about the whole food safety problem. It
affects the absolute poorest people in Chinese society. If you're rich,

(01:03:41):
you don't have to eat this ship You can you
can buy more expensive food than companies. You won't try
to scam you. Yeah, you know, and I mean like
like there's there's people go to like really elaborate efforts
to do this, Like I so some of my family
like works in the airline industry, and they talk about
how people will, like so pilots who are like like
flying up planes back from China the US will like

(01:04:02):
go to American grocery stores and buy a bunch of
flour and stuff so you can bring it back because
they know that the American or at least they're okay
because the American food stety centers are better and so
you know, like yeah, so they bring it back for
their families. But you know, margaret workers and ural villagers
who come from the same place are all forced to
just roll the dice every time they buy food because

(01:04:23):
they don't make enough money to buy food they know
is real. And I want to close this by talking
a bit about like just how bad this problem is
and how many how many people it affects. So China
has two d and ninety million migrant workers. This is like,
this is if if you took the microtworker population of
China out and made them separate country, wuld be the
fourth largest country on Earth. Um and China's entire economic

(01:04:45):
system is based on making sure that this this migrant
worker population, which is of the population of the total
population of the US and industrial workforce. It's it's based
on making sure that these people don't get insurance that
you know that the insurance some non migrant workers get.
And the results of this and you know, this one
was off militure Americans. People just don't go to the
doctor unless they're literally dying. Yeah, so you know, we

(01:05:09):
know what that's like. And you know, yeah, except you know,
but but it's it's even worse here because the people
who can't afford to buy food that they know isn't
fake are the people who can't afford to go to
the doctor. And and in real areas even worse because
the local clinics they don't even have they don't have doctors,
don't even have nurses because you know, the Chinese healthcare

(01:05:29):
system is enormously overstrained, and you know, and this this
is how you get real children dying of malnutrition from
fake milk. You know, if if you know, if if
if the signs have been caught early enough or like,
if they were medical care, then these people wouldn't have died.
But you know, their parents don't have acts as to
medical care, and so they don't know what's wrong until
it's too late. In the baby store off to death

(01:05:50):
and yeah that that that that's that's where we're gonna
leave it today with starving babies, and A reminded that
China now has more billionaires in the US and yet
somehow workers in both countries don't have healthcare. I mean,
they did put some of these people behind bars, which
is more than happened with Nestley. I think, so, yeah,
that's something. Yeah, I mean, but it's you know, like

(01:06:12):
they're they're doing this is one of the things that
that's different about the CCP than than the U S
is that like, okay, politicians in the US like do
not fear us, like they're not afraid. They just yeah,
whereas you know, Chinese peliticians like you know, like they
they actually understand that like large numbers of people like
massing and opposing them is dangerous. And that means that

(01:06:34):
you know, they do these kind of like symbolic like oh,
they'll they'll arrest twelve people, they'll they'll shoot like a
cabinet member, but you know, they do that so that
they they do that and then they throw off people
under the bus and tell people sort of stop being angry,
and then you know, just everything goes on as normal
and it's it's extremely bleak. Yeah. I was depressing, Chris,

(01:06:55):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean in some ways it
was depressing. But I think we do have to keep
in mind that a lot of value was created for
for for people with with money, a lot of you know,
there's a lot of just don't just think of the
dead children, think of the I think of the economic

(01:07:18):
stimulus created by their deaths. You know. That's that's that's
the real way we can honor their sacrifice and Kensie
and stimulus. Yeah, Kensie and stimulus via payouts the dead
to the parents of dead babies. This is how, this
is how it's it's a perfect closed loop economy. Well
fun okay, Kenny plug Chris, Um, if you want to

(01:07:42):
see me complain more about all of this. Um, I'm
at it. B C h R three on Twitter or
the ice must be destroyed guy, Um, yeah, I I
have I have a substant called the long twenty century. Jesus,
it has been a long century so far. I'm I
support kind moving up to the already, Like, let's just

(01:08:02):
do it. We're done with Yeah, I'm down to skip.
Let's let's roll along. Um yeah, so I don't know,
this has been behind the bastards. You can find us
where you just found us, because you already know where
to find us. So like, why am I telling you
where you can find us. You've been here before, You're
you're here right now. Um yeah, I have a book

(01:08:26):
called After the Revolution. You can find it on a
t r book dot com as a free e pub
you can find it as a podcast and After the Revolution.
Um so, so check that ship out and uh, I
don't know, go uh go buy some baby formula and
don't drink it because it will make you pe rocks.

(01:08:48):
Hey everybody, Initially I was going to plug the go
fund me for the sequel to my book U After
the Revolution, which you can find at a t r
book dot com. But um, here in the Pacific Northwest,
we're having an and precedented heat wave and it's causing
disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people,
a lot of people without air conditioning. Um particularly in

(01:09:09):
the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have been kind
of gathering to try and um mitigate, set up cooling stations,
hand out cold drinks, to do things to help people
get their temperature down. UM, I want to try and
raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM, which
are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
So if you go to venmo At Free Fridge Salem,

(01:09:31):
that's venmo At Free Fridge Salem, and send them a
couple of bucks, they could really use it. UM. Local
government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed
a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. Um,
it's you know, we're not going to be in triple
digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm
recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be
very hot. People still need this, So please venmo At

(01:09:53):
Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the
financial resources to do so. One more time, the venemo
is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks m

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Company that Poisoned 300,000 Babies