The Company that Poisoned 300,000 Babies

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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.

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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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 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.

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

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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.

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

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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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. 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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