Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. I'm Robert Evans, hosted Behind the Bastards UM.
Speaker 1: Opening this podcast poorly, I'm distracted right now because there
Speaker 1: are two kittens in my house. There's two of them
Speaker 1: in their kittens and they're playing. And I'm also horribly
Speaker 1: allergic to cats, but I refuse to not have them
Speaker 1: in my house. So this is going to be quite
Speaker 1: an episode. Are e me being allergic and then being
Speaker 1: distracted by kittens anyway, when I don't have a house
Speaker 1: full of kittens. This is a podcast about the very
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history. UM. And today we're
Speaker 1: doing one of our now classic reverse episodes where somebody
Speaker 1: reads me a terrible story about a bastard and to
Speaker 1: to to do that, to tell us another tale of
Speaker 1: woe and whimsy is our old friend Christopher. Christopher, how
Speaker 1: are you doing today? Doing? Doing pretty good? We are.
Speaker 1: It's cherry season. We're doing the cherries or picking cherries.
Speaker 1: It's hell yeah, Well, you live in in the frigid
Speaker 1: Midwest and I live in the Pacific Northwest, and we
Speaker 1: both have cherry. We're just dripping with cherries, which is
Speaker 1: a sign of the perfection of the cherry plants. It's
Speaker 1: a really powerful it's a really powerful organism. The amazing
Speaker 1: thing about cherries is I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: different fruit plants you get like you get some fruit
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, is that it is that all
Speaker 1: the work that I put in this year for for
Speaker 1: this fruit, Like, but fucking cherry trees you get like
Speaker 1: you're dripping with cherries. You get too many cherries off
Speaker 1: of any given cherry tree. And I think that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: You know what else I think is beautiful? Christopher? What
Speaker 1: do you do? What do you think is beautiful? Robert?
Speaker 1: I think naming kittens is beautiful. And Sophie and I
Speaker 1: have a little bit of a disagreement here. See, I
Speaker 1: want to call them Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend,
Speaker 1: and Sophie says, no, that's a horrible name for two kittens. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: you know, listeners, I guess what I'm asking you to
Speaker 1: do is find Sophie online and tell her that I'm right,
Speaker 1: tell her that I picked the proper name to name them.
Speaker 1: Sophie and Sophie, that's a ridiculous name for a cat.
Speaker 1: So both are Hussein and Hussein's best friend. Good cat
Speaker 1: names both options are dictators. Yeah, that is true. We'll
Speaker 1: see the double Sophie has the advantage of the fact
Speaker 1: that the cats are indistinguishable. So they are distinguishable. You
Speaker 1: cannot tell the difference between them. They both look exactly
Speaker 1: the same. Little black cats, little baby black cat the
Speaker 1: right to be Uh, you know, I've put in the time,
Speaker 1: like I feel like at least one should be named Sophie. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll think about this. I like the idea of a
Speaker 1: stranger comes over to my house and the cat does
Speaker 1: something bad and I shout, so down, who say it's
Speaker 1: best friend? Get down from there. You have to set
Speaker 1: yourself up for success, is the point I'm making. Um
Speaker 1: And and speaking of setting ourselves up for to success,
Speaker 1: I've set myself up for success today by having Chris
Speaker 1: research the episode. So the subject of today's episode is
Speaker 1: the two thousand eight tainted milk scandal. And this is
Speaker 1: gonna be a fun hell yeah, yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is I love a good tainted milk scandal. Yeah, oh
Speaker 1: my god, her a lot of babies gonna die? Are
Speaker 1: we are we talking like serious dead baby territory here? Okay,
Speaker 1: So we'll we'll put this in the beginning shouldn't have
Speaker 1: asked that way. That's a horrible way to ask if
Speaker 1: a bunch of babies die. Yeah, so the number of
Speaker 1: babies who are poisoned is extremely high. The death toll
Speaker 1: is not as high as you would think from the
Speaker 1: number of the sheer number of babies who are poisons,
Speaker 1: but it is a it is a very large it's
Speaker 1: a very large number of poisoned babies. I mean that
Speaker 1: action sounds like the best case scenario is horrible thing happens,
Speaker 1: not a lot of babies die. But we have a
Speaker 1: horrible thing to discuss. This job has broken my brain.
Speaker 1: Chris Um just just just fundamentally destroyed me as a
Speaker 1: as an empathetic human being. Let's let's let's let's start
Speaker 1: the show. I'm I'm excited to learn about the spoiled
Speaker 1: milk scandal Um and I'm sure that it was caused
Speaker 1: by people acting responsibly and just a freak accident that
Speaker 1: could never have been predicted or or prevented. We yeah,
Speaker 1: we we will. We will see about that. So in
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six, the Chinese communist parties Caudre and
Speaker 1: whu Abe founded a dairy company called the Three Deer company. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: and where's like huibe hibeh whobe is um who abe Okay,
Speaker 1: don't don't worry. Gonna be real basic with me because
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know much at all about
Speaker 1: about Chinese geograpy. So this is this is this is
Speaker 1: the province that Wuhan is in, Okay, So like south right,
Speaker 1: it's like kind of in the middle. Okay that Wuhan
Speaker 1: was see again, not a Chinese geography nowhere. This is Okay,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like kind of it's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: in the like middle sort of. This isn't like the
Speaker 1: middle of the east of the country, the middle middle
Speaker 1: of the Okay. So Chinese St. Louis is kind of
Speaker 1: what you're telling me right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Geographically,
Speaker 1: I assume there's an arch all right, so the the
Speaker 1: they make this milk company. Yeah, And you know, for
Speaker 1: for for most of what's either called sort of the
Speaker 1: socialist period of the Mao periods lasting from CCP taking
Speaker 1: power and forty nine to dangel Paying taking power in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, three years is a it's relatively sleepy
Speaker 1: and sort of minor, like dairy farm and like what
Speaker 1: it's really a minor area culture industry China. China does
Speaker 1: not have a lot of milk like people, people don't
Speaker 1: drink how milk a lot in in you know, most
Speaker 1: of this period, you know, and you know this is
Speaker 1: so this this is the state owned industry. And this
Speaker 1: means that you know, it's given production targets by the state,
Speaker 1: and it largely meets those targets. And in return, the
Speaker 1: workers who work there can assign these workpoints that you know,
Speaker 1: they get resources for them out of the allotment um. Now,
Speaker 1: as the social system starts to fall apart, the relative
Speaker 1: sort of status of the three year company starts to change.
Speaker 1: Now the social the social system, Okay, you're explaining this alright, good, well,
Speaker 1: I I can't go into a bit more so. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the socialist system, it goes through a lot of changes,
Speaker 1: but the basic principle of it is that like there's
Speaker 1: there's no market, right, so there's no market they'll be
Speaker 1: selling anything. There's sometimes the national government, but mostly local
Speaker 1: government set these production targets, and the sert of state
Speaker 1: owned companies or the labor brigades in rural areas like
Speaker 1: work too. You know, so you inbreuction target you designed
Speaker 1: to do it, and you make as much as like
Speaker 1: you have to take the production target, and you get
Speaker 1: you get designed resources based on how much you can produce.
Speaker 1: And this this sort of works okay for like part
Speaker 1: of the nineteen fifties, and but then there's a great
Speaker 1: leap forward and you can get the cultural revolution and
Speaker 1: that just sort of knocks whoever legs are like left
Speaker 1: out of the system. And by the nineteen seventies, basically
Speaker 1: the entire country and the entire economic system is just
Speaker 1: being held together the military. And you know that this
Speaker 1: is this is sort of a taxtrophe. Things are decaying.
Speaker 1: But what what's very what's very interesting about this is
Speaker 1: that it's not actually the famines or just like the
Speaker 1: massacres or any of the weird mango cults that like
Speaker 1: actually knock off the sort of social superiod economy. It
Speaker 1: turns out that what does it in is the class.
Speaker 1: Is that the social periods class structure now now so
Speaker 1: social superior economic policy basically dictates that. So you have
Speaker 1: these agricultural surpluses in the countryside, and you take all
Speaker 1: that grain and you plow into urban developments in you know,
Speaker 1: in the city so that China can build this like
Speaker 1: modern industrial economy. The consequence of this is that there's
Speaker 1: basically very little or basically no investment in rural areas,
Speaker 1: which means you get this like you get this massive
Speaker 1: economic disparity between the underdeveloped and poor countryside that you know,
Speaker 1: the state's exact and grain from and the richer, recently
Speaker 1: rich cities that consume the grain. And this, this whole
Speaker 1: thing is made worse about what's called the Hukoh system,
Speaker 1: which is this like because system is this is this
Speaker 1: is still one place to this day, although it's it's
Speaker 1: been modified somewhat. Um it's this internal passport where basically
Speaker 1: like where you and your family is born, you get
Speaker 1: you get registered to that place, and you can only
Speaker 1: get services like from basically the town are from from
Speaker 1: the sort of local governments that like you're registered to.
Speaker 1: And I mean and this this goes everything from like
Speaker 1: housing benefits to like social security to medical care. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's also has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: what kind of jobs you can get. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you're if you have a who coo from a
Speaker 1: from an urban area, you get these very well funded
Speaker 1: sort of services and jobs in the city. But if
Speaker 1: you have a rural who coo, you're stuck with these
Speaker 1: absolute just third rate services, is no employment opportunities. And
Speaker 1: the other thing with this is that when the famine start,
Speaker 1: the grain goes to the cities and not the countryside.
Speaker 1: And so you know this this goes on for a bit,
Speaker 1: but eventually we're like the Chinese world workers who who
Speaker 1: are doing the grand production just had enough of this
Speaker 1: ship and they basically bring capitalism back. They've sort of
Speaker 1: slowly start to introduce basically like so they started bringing
Speaker 1: wages back into their into the sort of labor brigades
Speaker 1: have been working in and then they turned these labor
Speaker 1: brigades and the joy stock companies and this is this
Speaker 1: is the this is the actual beginning of sort of
Speaker 1: the return of China to capitalism. And how do they
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a couple of things that are interesting
Speaker 1: for this to me. One of them is that, like
Speaker 1: with the when the USSR was kind of in its
Speaker 1: its early stage, based on some long standing like Marxist theories,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of distrust towards like rural people
Speaker 1: towards farmers, Like you saw that a lot in Ukraine
Speaker 1: because they're not the proletariat, right, they're not like the
Speaker 1: the industrial working class um. And they were seeing as
Speaker 1: kind of you know, inherently um kind of more capitalistic
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. And it kind of seems
Speaker 1: like that's what's happening here, and that's like that's also
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Well. It's weird because so the big
Speaker 1: sort of difference between like Maoism and like the earlier
Speaker 1: sort of forms of Marxism is that Maoism is like,
Speaker 1: I mean and this this, this is how Mao like
Speaker 1: becomes a leader of the Comunist party, is that he's
Speaker 1: the guy who's like, we're going to organize the peasants
Speaker 1: and so you know, and yeah, and they have this
Speaker 1: whole thing about like the peasant work or alliance or whatever,
Speaker 1: but like they're the people who actually put the communists
Speaker 1: in power or the peasants. They're they're you know, untild
Speaker 1: before they're truly popularly there, but that you know, but
Speaker 1: they have this whole thing about how like they have
Speaker 1: this whole thing that need the industrial development part of
Speaker 1: it's like you know that they fight the Korean War
Speaker 1: and like the Chinese soldiers you can sent to Korea,
Speaker 1: like like they don't have shoes and you know, and
Speaker 1: they're not doing great. Yeah yeah, I mean like it's
Speaker 1: they have like a pretty good army, but it's like
Speaker 1: they don't even need supplies. And so there's this whole thing,
Speaker 1: but we need to do industrial build up. We need
Speaker 1: to do industrial build up and that and the fact
Speaker 1: that there's, oh there's also this huge concern in the
Speaker 1: CCP that like they're going to get overthrown by raban workers,
Speaker 1: which like literally does happen in eight when like the
Speaker 1: party gets right out of like gets ran out of
Speaker 1: Shanghai by like an uprising, and there's all this stuff,
Speaker 1: and so they're they're basically trying to like like they
Speaker 1: think the peasantry is like restive enough that they can
Speaker 1: extract grain from them and put it into the countryside
Speaker 1: and so to take the grain from countryside and put
Speaker 1: it into the cities. And yeah, the problem is that
Speaker 1: so they don't have enough. Okay, so if you if
Speaker 1: you need to improve that warning from agriculture, right, you
Speaker 1: need to like increase the amount of grain you can
Speaker 1: produce and the Okay, so partially you're doing with like
Speaker 1: lfe echanism and all of this bunk science. But the
Speaker 1: other problem is that they don't have like modern industrial
Speaker 1: agricultural equipment, and so the problem is in order to
Speaker 1: do that, you need like an industrial base, but things
Speaker 1: in order to build the industrial BASI need more grain.
Speaker 1: And so they have this like trap they get caught in.
Speaker 1: And the way that they sort of get out of
Speaker 1: this is that the peasants start bringing capitalism back, and
Speaker 1: so in in in thete eighty four, like a few
Speaker 1: years after, the peasants start forming like join stock companies
Speaker 1: and start bringing wages back. De Ping is just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff that you guys are doing, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna put my seal of approval on it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: put out this directive. It's like this is illegal, you
Speaker 1: should do more of it. And you know, and this
Speaker 1: is like why Ding gets all sort of the credit
Speaker 1: for it, because he just like puts his name on it.
Speaker 1: It was like, all these economic reforms are my idea,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I mean, and I assumed there was like
Speaker 1: there was like a fight over this pretty high level right,
Speaker 1: because they could that you could you can't just say
Speaker 1: like hey, we're gonna we're gonna add some capitalism back
Speaker 1: into the mix and in the Central Party be like
Speaker 1: okay without like there was there was some ship that
Speaker 1: went down, right, Yeah, And I mean the you know,
Speaker 1: the thing that the thing about that's important even about
Speaker 1: into ping is that in the beginning of this, like
Speaker 1: they don't want to go back to capitalism. They what
Speaker 1: they're trying to do is reintroduce the market is just
Speaker 1: like a way to sort of stabilize the economy. And yeah,
Speaker 1: which is something I think people mistake a lot, like
Speaker 1: markets aren't necessarily capitalism, although that is you know what
Speaker 1: happens at the end of this process. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: you know, and there's i mean there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: really intense theoretical debates over like socialist markets, and I
Speaker 1: mean there's a very brief attemper like they're going to
Speaker 1: try the Yugoslavia thing where everyone has like democratic workers
Speaker 1: co ops and they just like that doesn't happen, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this whole debate about this doesn't really happen in Yugoslavia.
Speaker 1: You could argue, Yeah, I mean, okay for a bit.
Speaker 1: But and we we should note because not everyone's listened.
Speaker 1: We have two episodes on lesinco is um um. That
Speaker 1: was this this Soviet theorist who believe that you could
Speaker 1: you like, free seeds to make them more cold tolerant
Speaker 1: and stuff. And he had a bunch of wacky theories
Speaker 1: about how you could apply like kind of socialist attitudes
Speaker 1: towards people to plants and it would improve crop yields.
Speaker 1: And it didn't. And a lot of people start and
Speaker 1: they did it in Russia and they did it in China.
Speaker 1: It was not not a great idea broadly speaking, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was not good. Um. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the other very important thing about something that genuinely did
Speaker 1: change in this period is that that directive I was
Speaker 1: talking about Danjo Ping. Let's for the first time state
Speaker 1: owned firms like you know our friends are read three
Speaker 1: deer dairy company like actually make profits by selling their goods.
Speaker 1: And so you know, previously, like you're you're working to
Speaker 1: a production target, hit the production target and they give
Speaker 1: you stuff. But now if you have excess production, you
Speaker 1: can sell it. And this is this isn't enormous, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is this is this this hasn't you
Speaker 1: haven't been able to do this in China since like
Speaker 1: nineteen four, nineteen fifty three, it just hasn't happened. So
Speaker 1: this is this is the start of this whole thing
Speaker 1: where you know, they don't companies start to be instead
Speaker 1: of like producing goods in order to produce goods, they're
Speaker 1: producing goods in order to make money. Now, our friends
Speaker 1: at three Deer Company during this period come under new
Speaker 1: girl boss management and under under this, under this new
Speaker 1: girl bus leadership, they they start becoming They become the
Speaker 1: first large scale powdered milk manufacturer in China. And this
Speaker 1: is important because powdered milk is how you make baby formula,
Speaker 1: and so you know, they go to the milk and
Speaker 1: they start making baby formula. But this was not enough
Speaker 1: for the ambitious new leadership at three Deers. And you know,
Speaker 1: with with with this new incentive structure that that has
Speaker 1: has been set up where you have you have an
Speaker 1: incenter to produce as much as possible and cut costs,
Speaker 1: you can make money, they start looking for ways to
Speaker 1: make production cheaper and the solution they land on is outsourcing.
Speaker 1: Now previously, yeah, this is this is gonna go great.
Speaker 1: We love. One of my favorite things is when because
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, well at some point cover like Nestle's baby
Speaker 1: formulas aster too. But but the fact that they go right, yeah,
Speaker 1: they go right to out source. I love. I love
Speaker 1: when you have what are supposed to be radically different
Speaker 1: ideologies but they start making similar decisions that that they
Speaker 1: dissimilar problems. Like it's just yeah, it's very fun. Yeah
Speaker 1: we're going to see there. There's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that goes on here. Um, so you know, and and
Speaker 1: this this is this is also like a huge break
Speaker 1: though with the previous sort of the way the socialists,
Speaker 1: like agriculture works where you know, if you have a
Speaker 1: dairy farm, right you have there there's a state own enterprise.
Speaker 1: They own the cows, they own the farms, they employ
Speaker 1: all the workers, and they like run the whole system
Speaker 1: from you know, like farm distribution center. And three years
Speaker 1: looks at this in the nice and eight six they
Speaker 1: start making chase and they look at this and they
Speaker 1: go like, this is expensive. We have to actually like
Speaker 1: run the farms, and we have to pay for the cows,
Speaker 1: we have to pay wages. So instead of doing this,
Speaker 1: they go, what if we loan our cows to farmers
Speaker 1: in the countryside, And then you know, they have to
Speaker 1: take it gets yeah, so the cows, right, and then
Speaker 1: you know, so to pay off the debt they incur
Speaker 1: by buying the cow you have, you have they have,
Speaker 1: they have to like give they pay back the dead
Speaker 1: and milk. And then on top of that, they have
Speaker 1: to pay a yearly management fee in order so that
Speaker 1: they can continue to be like debt peons who sell
Speaker 1: milk to this company. Now, now the other great part
Speaker 1: of this is that they're not outsourcing to like actual farms.
Speaker 1: They're outsourcing to individual farmers. And so these people have
Speaker 1: like two maybe three cows. Most of them have one cow,
Speaker 1: which means that they're completely dependent on on three dair
Speaker 1: and their middlemen because they don't have enoughree sources to
Speaker 1: actually you know, run their own operation. They only have
Speaker 1: two cows. And you know, if you only have two cows,
Speaker 1: you can never make enough money that you can get
Speaker 1: even like a third or fourth cow. So you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're stuctory working for this company, and
Speaker 1: they are in effect the first modern Chinese gig workers.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ yea, So you can see where this is going. Now, Now,
Speaker 1: this model, this this gig working model also spreads to
Speaker 1: the American dairy industry, where there's a bunch of farmers
Speaker 1: quote unquote who's take off these like enormous loans to
Speaker 1: buy cows, and you know, they also get caught in
Speaker 1: these debt traps. And you know, the read the way
Speaker 1: this works is that by by by convincing that these
Speaker 1: farmers that they're actually entrepreneurs, that their small business owners
Speaker 1: and not workers, the corporations can exploit them even more
Speaker 1: than they were able to earlier by you know when
Speaker 1: when they were just workers. And this is this is
Speaker 1: essentially just how capitalism works. Now. The celebrated anthropologist on
Speaker 1: A Sing wrote a very very good article called Supply
Speaker 1: Chains and the Human Condition that talks about a lot
Speaker 1: of how the supply chain and outsourcing stuff works. And
Speaker 1: here here's what she had to say about these these
Speaker 1: contract growers who are the new the new like debt
Speaker 1: peon cow farmers in the US. Watts another academic concludes,
Speaker 1: contract growers thus are not independent farmers at all. They
Speaker 1: are a little more than propertied laborers, employees of the
Speaker 1: corporate producers who also dominate the chicken processing industry. Yet
Speaker 1: this little more then makes a big difference. It is
Speaker 1: not hard to understand, not hard to imagine the cultural
Speaker 1: commitment of the grower to independent landholding and quote a
Speaker 1: business of his own contract farming flourishes, and the imagined
Speaker 1: difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. The contract farmer
Speaker 1: works for five dollars and seventy cents an hour fift
Speaker 1: dollars a year, even though he is a white man,
Speaker 1: because he owns his own business. Self exploitation is essential
Speaker 1: to the cost cutting power of the supply chain. No,
Speaker 1: that sounds like some great communism to me, just like
Speaker 1: Mark submissions. Yeah, you know, this is this is the
Speaker 1: phone play about this. This is both in the US
Speaker 1: and in China at the same time. And you know,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of stuff going on here, particularly
Speaker 1: with the American side, right, I mean you have you know,
Speaker 1: American agricultures run by just undocumented, huge numbers of undocumented
Speaker 1: workers fleeing the American atrocities in Latin America, and you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, the their ability to sort of you
Speaker 1: create situations of privation that make people desperate enough to
Speaker 1: labor incredibly basically for free in conditions that are harmful
Speaker 1: to them. Um, and they can't complain because they're not anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, here's one of the things that seems to
Speaker 1: be happy seating here. And this is the thing that
Speaker 1: I think people on the left get wrong a lot.
Speaker 1: Capitalism is an extremely efficient system for doing a specific
Speaker 1: set of things. Now, those specific set of things don't
Speaker 1: include keeping the world habitable. But it's very good at
Speaker 1: what it does, which is why people keep cribbing from it,
Speaker 1: like it's it's job is not to make the world habitable,
Speaker 1: but it's good at what its job is. It's very
Speaker 1: efficient at what it job at what its job is. Um,
Speaker 1: it's job just has nothing to do with taking care
Speaker 1: of you. Yea. And in fact, well, and this is
Speaker 1: not only is it not like it's not about taking
Speaker 1: care of you. I mean this whole thing, you know, this,
Speaker 1: this is like this is a big part of what
Speaker 1: ice is. Is this this basically institutions of mass violence
Speaker 1: in order to keep people like wages down. And you know,
Speaker 1: and and what you see is interesting in the sort
Speaker 1: of the dairy industry is okay, so so agriculture corporations
Speaker 1: like see this and are like, okay, how can we
Speaker 1: convince white people to take this amount of money, and
Speaker 1: the answer they can with just like convince them that
Speaker 1: their business owners. And this this is a you know,
Speaker 1: this is part of a larger trend. And the larger
Speaker 1: trend here is that corporations, both in China and the
Speaker 1: US are essentially they're increasingly becoming middlemen. And and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different models of how this works. Um.
Speaker 1: One example is the franchise models. McDonald's is the most
Speaker 1: famous example of this. The way that McDonald's works is
Speaker 1: that like, you know, they don't don't make money from
Speaker 1: selling hamburgers. Like McDonald's stores are franchises. No, they're not.
Speaker 1: They're not by the corporation itself around there there, you know,
Speaker 1: McDonald's owns the lands that the franchise opens on, and
Speaker 1: if you pay them half a million dollars, they will
Speaker 1: lease it to you, and you don't give you the
Speaker 1: right to run the McDonald's. And then they will also
Speaker 1: you know, take royalties from you. And you know it's
Speaker 1: from just like extracting rents that McDonald's actually makes money. Um.
Speaker 1: But but you know, McDonald's is someone interesting because it's
Speaker 1: kind of a transition phase between the earlier like corporations
Speaker 1: make things, and what we're seeing now, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: corporations don't make things at all. Nike's Nikes a really
Speaker 1: good example of this. Um, yes, so so this is
Speaker 1: this is Nike. The Yeah, Nike located in my hometown
Speaker 1: of Portland, the company that has never done anything wrong famously. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm aware of Nike. Yeah. I actually eat a pair
Speaker 1: of Nike shoes every single day. It's the only source
Speaker 1: of protein in my diet. That's very impressive. Do you
Speaker 1: do you stew it? And I know what's the original
Speaker 1: Russian thing? Yeah? I watched that documentary where Werner Herzog
Speaker 1: eats his shoes, and I decided, this is how I
Speaker 1: want to live my life. But leather shoes are for peasants.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to go with the much healthier various
Speaker 1: Nike materials, which is the souls of small children. Uh
Speaker 1: in the global South. Um, it's delicious. Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 1: And the other thing this is you know what's seeing
Speaker 1: talking has this thing about Nike? Um Jesus quote. Nike
Speaker 1: never produced athletic shoes. Company founders begin as distributors of
Speaker 1: Japanese made shoes. The additions that made for success for
Speaker 1: the invention of the Swish logo, advertising endorsements from well
Speaker 1: known African American athletes, and transferred to cheaper Asian locations
Speaker 1: for contracting production. Nike's vice president for Asia Pacific once explained, quote,
Speaker 1: we don't know the first thing about manufacturing. We are
Speaker 1: marketers and designers, which is great. So they don't they
Speaker 1: don't they don't make shoes. They buy is shoes from
Speaker 1: other people. And you know, this this, this is this
Speaker 1: is a sort of interesting development because you know, so Nike,
Speaker 1: Nike's clothes are made in these really really small shops
Speaker 1: with small numbers and employees, and you know, I mean
Speaker 1: this is this is this is the sweatshops from the
Speaker 1: Triangle shirt wasst episode, except you know, they've gone backwards
Speaker 1: to the thing that Triangle Shirtwist was supposed to be replacing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've literally been Like the problem with Triangle Shirtwaist is
Speaker 1: that it was that factory was too ethical. We gotta
Speaker 1: go back a little bit further. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: it's you'd love to see it. Yeah, Like, I think
Speaker 1: I think it's worth asking why this happens, because you know,
Speaker 1: the consequence of going back to the system is that
Speaker 1: the government industry loses all of the safety and wage
Speaker 1: gains they made in the twenty century in two decades.
Speaker 1: And you know, and this is in large part due
Speaker 1: to the sort of contractor model. So you know, we
Speaker 1: should ask, so why why do you actually want to
Speaker 1: use the contractor model? Um, we talked a little bit. Yeah, cuts,
Speaker 1: it cuts costs, and you know, it turns workers and
Speaker 1: small business owners that like, you know, it makes it
Speaker 1: easier to sort of rob by convincing you that they're
Speaker 1: actually like business owners and not just sort of you know,
Speaker 1: permanently in trapped dead peons. Now, another reason for this
Speaker 1: is that it makes union organizing extremely difficult because part
Speaker 1: of the workforce that you know, would have been workers
Speaker 1: in like a triangle shirtwaist uh set up, are actually
Speaker 1: small business owners now. And because in the in the garment,
Speaker 1: which is also kind of what triangle shirtwaist did with
Speaker 1: the the inside contractor system. Yeah yeah, it's the interesting
Speaker 1: thing about this breakaus. The inside contractor system doesn't work
Speaker 1: right like the contractors like side side with the workers
Speaker 1: a lot. Yeah yeah, but but in this system, like
Speaker 1: the small shops sort of system, it doesn't that doesn't
Speaker 1: happen at all. The small shop people are you know,
Speaker 1: they're they are actually confessor small business owners. And this
Speaker 1: this makes it almost impossible for for the garment workers
Speaker 1: them entire wages because the people they're working for, these
Speaker 1: contractors and these contractors are also extremely poor and they
Speaker 1: have like they have no margins. But you know, because
Speaker 1: the workers are contractors for a contractor, right like, they
Speaker 1: don't they don't have a way to directly like demand
Speaker 1: wages or safety procedures from the company. And you know
Speaker 1: this isn't like this, this system is not efficient, right like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's way, it's way more efficient to
Speaker 1: make make the stuff in big factories. And you know,
Speaker 1: in order to do this, you have to have these
Speaker 1: enormous supply chains or spanning multiple continents in order to
Speaker 1: move this stuff around. But you know that doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter because since the eighties you basically see his corporations
Speaker 1: going Okay, it is better to have enormously inefficient production
Speaker 1: and these like giant logistics lines than it is for
Speaker 1: a single union to exist and take any of their
Speaker 1: money or or worse yet, and this, you know, this
Speaker 1: is a real threat in the cities and seventies, which
Speaker 1: is what all this c centralzation stuff is a response
Speaker 1: to that. You know, it was a real possibility in
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies that like the garment workers are
Speaker 1: going to seize the company and start running it themselves,
Speaker 1: and so you get this enormous effort to make sure
Speaker 1: that this never happens again. And you know, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if there's anything that's antithetical to the socialist experiment,
Speaker 1: it's unionization. Yea, workers owning the means of production like
Speaker 1: capitalists no, thank you, yeah, you know, and this is
Speaker 1: the you know, this is the thing. Is part of
Speaker 1: why it's interesting that like three years three Dyer is
Speaker 1: doing all of this stuff that like we look at now,
Speaker 1: like honest thing is running. She doesn't tend right there
Speaker 1: is three years is doing this all in the night
Speaker 1: six and this is you know, we were walked about
Speaker 1: this earlier. But like again, the people inside the communist
Speaker 1: trains Communist Party like didn't want to go back to
Speaker 1: capitalism like that, they really didn't like capitalism and it
Speaker 1: just didn't matter. Like within within two years of them
Speaker 1: saying okay, they don't industries can like can make money now, right,
Speaker 1: like this within two years, as they don't industries reinvented
Speaker 1: debt peonage. And you know, and there's another interesting aspect
Speaker 1: of this, which is that, okay, so so three Deers
Speaker 1: is not just a state own industry. They're also a
Speaker 1: co op, which means like the workers of of of
Speaker 1: of three Deers owned shares in the company. And you know,
Speaker 1: you would think that the combination of this is the
Speaker 1: state owned industry in a country that is still technically communist,
Speaker 1: combined with you know, led by a woman. You would
Speaker 1: think all three of these things would like in some
Speaker 1: way make any of this better. But no, it turns
Speaker 1: out that the incentives run exactly the other way. And
Speaker 1: so you know, so if you have the state, the
Speaker 1: state of infirm is trying to cut costs because you know,
Speaker 1: because they don't only given I don't want to state,
Speaker 1: they're trying to cut costs, so outsourcing states the money.
Speaker 1: And then the interesting thing about the co op parts
Speaker 1: of the co op part feeds into this because you know,
Speaker 1: if you're a member of the co op, right, the
Speaker 1: less members of the co op like there are the
Speaker 1: war your shares are worth and so they have this
Speaker 1: incentive to make sure that as much of the work
Speaker 1: as being as possible as being done by contractors, because
Speaker 1: the contractors aren't like members of the co op. And yes,
Speaker 1: so this leads yeah, and this this is invented Uber
Speaker 1: six two years after they legalize making money. It's incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hell yeah. See that's that's socialist innovation right there. Fuck
Speaker 1: you Silicon Valley. God. You know. And and because this,
Speaker 1: I mean it's actually an old idea of that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they they're on they're one of the first people to
Speaker 1: like bring it back, which is fairly incredible. And you know,
Speaker 1: because because this is just like a capitalist economy, Now,
Speaker 1: this pays off enormously, and you know, three years still
Speaker 1: the entire sort of the next time fifteen years just
Speaker 1: massively expands. Um. They do this massive series of murgers
Speaker 1: and acquisitions, and the nineties it is the largest dairy
Speaker 1: producer in China, and you know, and they continue to expand,
Speaker 1: and you know, but by by this point they have
Speaker 1: real political power because they're they're you know there, their
Speaker 1: company is a significant part of like the local Chinese
Speaker 1: tax base, and so this this gives them means with
Speaker 1: the party, and this is part of what allows them
Speaker 1: to and two five form this joint partnership with the
Speaker 1: New Zealand based front Terra Cooperative Group. Um yeah, for
Speaker 1: Terra buys forty under the shares and you know they
Speaker 1: do this huge partnership thing and this this is a
Speaker 1: huge deal. Fonterra is the second largest dairy company in
Speaker 1: the world. They you know, they have the worlds sold
Speaker 1: dairy production and you know they're the largest company in
Speaker 1: New Zealand's by a margin. That's like, okay, they are
Speaker 1: so powerful in New Zealand that several of the cables
Speaker 1: from Wiki Leaks suggests that the reason that New Zealand
Speaker 1: sent troops to a rock was that the US was
Speaker 1: threatening to cut off their their milk for oil deal
Speaker 1: with the Iraqi government. When they knocked it off, what
Speaker 1: the fuck? See but no war for milk is a
Speaker 1: terrible thing to put on a plaque. That's just not
Speaker 1: going to get you anywhere. That is incredible, I and
Speaker 1: I love it whenever we get New Zealand gets gets
Speaker 1: so much credit because their government isn't isn't just howlingly
Speaker 1: incompetent um, but they do dumbsh it. Guys, don't worry,
Speaker 1: don't worry New Zealand's government. That's terrible things. It's fine,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's great because again this is a
Speaker 1: you know, it's Fonterra is a group of cooperatives, and
Speaker 1: once again the cooperatives are not only not like making
Speaker 1: anything better, they're like pushing New Zealand into war with
Speaker 1: like into an invasion of a rock It's great, yeah, baby,
Speaker 1: global capital go to war for fucking milk. You know
Speaker 1: who else will go to war on behalf of a
Speaker 1: milk conglomerate all of the products that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: We ask one question of our sponsors, and it's will
Speaker 1: you invade the Global South in order to improve the
Speaker 1: profits of a milk manufacturer? And if they say no, or,
Speaker 1: as is more common, what are you talking about? Are
Speaker 1: you having a stroke? Robert? Do we need to call someone?
Speaker 1: We hang up the phone. We don't take that goddamn money.
Speaker 1: That's the behind the bad streets guarantee. We're back. And
Speaker 1: Sophie just admitted that as a capitalist pig dog, she
Speaker 1: is wearing a Nike shirt shamefully. I mean it was
Speaker 1: it was it was a gift, but that's not an excuse.
Speaker 1: I still wear see Sophie, that is something I know.
Speaker 1: You're a monster. You're a monster, unlike me, who was
Speaker 1: just surrounded by products of the international arms industry, which
Speaker 1: is completely non problematic and has never been involved in anything.
Speaker 1: I'm simply just that's what everyone says about the global
Speaker 1: arms straight. Yes, Lebron Games and I'm representing a lot
Speaker 1: of unsettling companies. Okay, let's let's get back to let's
Speaker 1: get back to the show. Chris. We're talking about milk,
Speaker 1: which is also a thing you can buy and support
Speaker 1: the Global arms straight. Apparently it's great. It's great. No
Speaker 1: matter what you buy all the money to the arms trade.
Speaker 1: You can't you can't not feed money back into the
Speaker 1: global arms trade. That's capitalism, baby. It all winds up
Speaker 1: making guns somehow. Also, the fun part of this is
Speaker 1: that Fonterra is going to come out looking like the
Speaker 1: better party in this deal at the end of this
Speaker 1: which is which is this is this is a you
Speaker 1: can tell the stories going well, when the people who
Speaker 1: are slightly more responsible are the people who sent troops
Speaker 1: to a rock. It's great. Now Fonterra partners with three
Speaker 1: deers under the assumption that you know China's largest dairy
Speaker 1: company will be selling products that are you know, of
Speaker 1: quality and thus wouldn't get into like trouble. But you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna yeah, yeah, that the large dairy company
Speaker 1: in China. Like what what what could possibly be going wrong?
Speaker 1: But you know, even before three five there were signs
Speaker 1: that Fonterra should have been concerned. Now, since the start
Speaker 1: of the reform period in nineteen eighties and sort of
Speaker 1: accelerating few tradition to capitalism in the nineties, China has
Speaker 1: had a huge food safety problem, particularly in the dairy industry.
Speaker 1: And well, obviously there there's a lot of structural issues
Speaker 1: involved in this. In the dairy industry. A lot of
Speaker 1: this is directly this is directly the fault of three
Speaker 1: Deers model of contract farming. Now, as we said, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy making the uber of massive scale food production
Speaker 1: didn't didn't make things as safe as uber uber app
Speaker 1: the uber of baby formula. Surprisingly are not the good
Speaker 1: guys here now as a result of the sort of
Speaker 1: the miniature and culture revolution that that Three Deers kicks
Speaker 1: off in the eighties and nineties, most dairy farming, I
Speaker 1: mean this, this is true to this day in the
Speaker 1: year one is done by those individual farmers with like
Speaker 1: one of three cows. And you know, the whole system
Speaker 1: is designed so that like no one can no one
Speaker 1: can build up enough capital to get out or do
Speaker 1: did you any kind of like productivity improvements on themselves,
Speaker 1: because if they had that much money, they could go
Speaker 1: like start their own company and they wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: work for three years. And the other thing about the
Speaker 1: contract model is it means that no one is investing,
Speaker 1: you know, because these cows are being are owned and
Speaker 1: maintained by these farmers. No one's investing in any sort
Speaker 1: of technological improvements. And you know, because all the farmers
Speaker 1: are at best you're broke and at worst you're hopelessly
Speaker 1: in debt, they don't have money to buy good land.
Speaker 1: They're using essentially the land left over from the from
Speaker 1: the old like land reform allotments. And this means that
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is some one of the
Speaker 1: worst high cultural line of China at the're raising these
Speaker 1: cows on. I mean, okay, so it's the worst higher
Speaker 1: cultural land that you can that you can raise a
Speaker 1: cow on. And it's not literally desert or like the
Speaker 1: top from Mountain, And so you know, this means that
Speaker 1: the cows are very healthy and that the milk they
Speaker 1: produce is pretty low quality. Now higher quality milk with
Speaker 1: more more approaching than it sells for more money because
Speaker 1: you know, you can used to make baby formula. And
Speaker 1: this means that there's an enormous incentive for farmers and
Speaker 1: middlemen and the dairy companies to fake the proachein content
Speaker 1: of their milk to make it look higher than it
Speaker 1: actually is. How do you I mean, is it just
Speaker 1: like they're bribing the people who's jabta is to check?
Speaker 1: Or is there some like are they like pro it
Speaker 1: pouring way protein into the milk? So how does that
Speaker 1: actually work? So so the easiest way to do this
Speaker 1: way so they are bribing people, but you can't. You
Speaker 1: have to bribe an enormous number of people in order
Speaker 1: to do this. So the easiest way to do it
Speaker 1: is by putting additives into the milk that make that
Speaker 1: make the milk look like it has more protein. Went
Speaker 1: on on the sort of tests that companies used to
Speaker 1: like figure out how much like milk, how much proteins
Speaker 1: in the milk, And you know this this is where
Speaker 1: the middlemen come in and you know, so, so the
Speaker 1: middlemen are people who they buy the milk from the
Speaker 1: farmers and sell it to the dairy companies. Now you
Speaker 1: might be wondering, you know again, the company sold them
Speaker 1: these cows, right, so why would why are the companies
Speaker 1: like not just buying the milk from the farmers directly.
Speaker 1: And the answer for that, there's there's three reasons. The
Speaker 1: first is that the dairy companies, you know, running through
Speaker 1: these middlemen means they don't have to spend the money
Speaker 1: running their own logistics network to you know, buy and
Speaker 1: then move supplies the milk around. Um. The second reason
Speaker 1: is to put a buffer in between sort of the
Speaker 1: dairy companies and the contract farmers and in case the
Speaker 1: farmers get any ideas about you know, banding together, so
Speaker 1: they don't have to live in desperate poverty. And the
Speaker 1: third reason you use middleman is to do crime. Hell yeah,
Speaker 1: now we're talking yeah, and you know this, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: if you get someone else to do a crime, then
Speaker 1: you then you're you're in the clear. That's the way
Speaker 1: crime works. Yeah, this this is literally true. So you
Speaker 1: know it's say, for example, you are nesting and the
Speaker 1: cocoa that you use for your chocolate is produced by
Speaker 1: child slave laper. And you know the Ivory coaster, Pekino Fasso.
Speaker 1: You know, now you're a child slave labor. Like it's
Speaker 1: a bad thing, Christopher. I mean, without child slave labor,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have I don't know, the Pyramids or England.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty I'm pretty sure they didn't use child slaves. Amazingly,
Speaker 1: they had slavery, but I'm pretty sure they didn't use
Speaker 1: child slaves built the pyramids, I mean, which is incredible.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are probably seventeen right, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, I do want to point out it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so like every every computer, like every electronic device that's
Speaker 1: like may now has cult are in it. Which is
Speaker 1: this thing that's almost entirely yeah, my mind by child
Speaker 1: slave labor. And the Democrat Public compan was like, we're
Speaker 1: not even making pyramids with it, Like we're making like
Speaker 1: headphones that break after four minutes. It's like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: making iPhones that are designed to stop working after two years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um you know yeah, no, I mean yeah, so okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. And you know we saw this recently with
Speaker 1: their they're like people who had been enslaved by by
Speaker 1: by by the contract growers you know, tried to sue
Speaker 1: Nestle in court, but you know, because because because these
Speaker 1: are because Nestli is buying from middlemen and not buying
Speaker 1: you like, owning the slaves directly. They you know, in
Speaker 1: court they were just like, ah, it wasn't us, it
Speaker 1: was our suppliers. Nothing we can do about it. And
Speaker 1: you know, the ever thing. The great thing about American
Speaker 1: contract law, it is literally written into law right, It's like,
Speaker 1: there's great examples in California, but you know it's written
Speaker 1: into law bread in corporate law that if you are
Speaker 1: a contractor right for a company and you know the
Speaker 1: deals you sign that a MultiMate homing contractor makes it
Speaker 1: so that if you like do slavery, you have to
Speaker 1: claim in court that it was you when not the
Speaker 1: company above you, which is yeah, this is it's great. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah you love to see it. Yeah, it's it's great.
Speaker 1: And you know, because Nestley's production is set up exactly
Speaker 1: the same ways. Three Deers is like, the people who
Speaker 1: Nestle enslaved lost just a freme court case when I
Speaker 1: tried to see them because they couldn't prove that Nestlee
Speaker 1: directly ordered the slavery. And then because because it didn't
Speaker 1: happen in the US, it once I couldn't prove that
Speaker 1: once that it didn't happen in the US, they never
Speaker 1: standing to sue an American course. So yeah, this is yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's this whole legal framework that that's set up,
Speaker 1: and this this happens everywhere to to to use these
Speaker 1: contractors to do crime. And in the Chinese case of
Speaker 1: three deers, you get exactly the same thing. You know,
Speaker 1: you have the middleman and contractors, who are the people
Speaker 1: who are doping this milk and you know I doping.
Speaker 1: It's like they're they're they're putting additives into the milk
Speaker 1: just to fake the test of faith about the approaching count.
Speaker 1: And you know, and by by getting the middleman to
Speaker 1: do it possible with my ability and you know, if
Speaker 1: things like go wrong, you can just blame the farmers. No, no,
Speaker 1: I will say this, So some farmers are desperate enough
Speaker 1: to put additives into their milk themselves. Um, but and
Speaker 1: you know, and and the farmers in the media, the
Speaker 1: people who get blamed for this, but you know a
Speaker 1: lot of them, and even the people who are doing it,
Speaker 1: like they don't know what they're like putting into the milk,
Speaker 1: so they just assume that it's like fine. But you
Speaker 1: know this, this, this, this turns into a huge problem
Speaker 1: because you know, the combination is sort of the incredible
Speaker 1: greed of these large bomb business owners and the desperation
Speaker 1: of these farmers leads to a series of really bad
Speaker 1: milk scandals the well, one of the more famous instances
Speaker 1: of like the worst instance I think um was was
Speaker 1: the fake milk scandal two thousand four, where a bunch
Speaker 1: of just fake baby powder was made with regular milk
Speaker 1: and not you know, like hyprotein milk was sold to
Speaker 1: a bunch of extreme cor rural farmers and the result
Speaker 1: of this fifty babies dicee and malnutrition because you know,
Speaker 1: the milk didn't give the nutrients that they needed, so
Speaker 1: they just they starved. And yeah, that's what babies do
Speaker 1: when you don't Yeah yeah yeah. And this, you know this,
Speaker 1: this this pisces off everyone because here's a bunch of
Speaker 1: dead babies who started to death, and there's a huge
Speaker 1: crackdown and a bunch of people, including party officials, get arrested,
Speaker 1: and you know the result of this is there's a
Speaker 1: whole series of these very high profile attempts by the
Speaker 1: party to get the problem with food safety and fake
Speaker 1: food and fake drugs under control. And this culminates in
Speaker 1: the CCP executing the head of their Food and Drug
Speaker 1: Administration for taking bribes from a pharmaceutical company promote their products,
Speaker 1: like they kill a cabinet level official, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: do anything, because the problem isn't about sort of isn't
Speaker 1: about just sort of individual corruption. It's structural. And you
Speaker 1: know this is this is sort of a structural problem
Speaker 1: with capitalism. Like the cheapest and easiest way to make
Speaker 1: money is just to scam people. And you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's always the best way to make money. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: we have seen this. This, this is one of the
Speaker 1: running the eames of behind the Bastards is get rich,
Speaker 1: scam people. And you know, cutting corners and even just
Speaker 1: like making fake stuff doesn't work, makes you an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of money. And you know, the longer you can
Speaker 1: keep the scam going, the better off you are. And
Speaker 1: you know this is this is the way the intent
Speaker 1: of structure works everywhere. The only reason that food safety
Speaker 1: is as good as it is, and like Europe is
Speaker 1: that you know, food safety was a key demand of
Speaker 1: sort of the workers who have been in progressive reformers
Speaker 1: were able to get these food safety rightular is put
Speaker 1: in place. But you know, and I kind of slice
Speaker 1: this enough, and don't worry, folks, they're dismantling it. They're
Speaker 1: dismant don't worry. They'll get rid of those food safety
Speaker 1: regulations in Europe here everywhere. Don't worry people. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the soon you will be free to eat poison. Oh,
Speaker 1: don't worry. Europeans also eat poison. Um. Even the controls
Speaker 1: are put in place like don't work all that well. So,
Speaker 1: for example, like in France, there's this massive scandal in
Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties where it revealed the Socialist Party
Speaker 1: had been sending blood drawn from prisoners with HIV and
Speaker 1: hepatitis and selling it to Bear Pharmaceuticals that Bear could
Speaker 1: make a drug for hemophelia. Actually, so you love to
Speaker 1: see it. Damn. That's that's that's the that's the that's
Speaker 1: what people come to behind the bastards for is that France,
Speaker 1: the French Socialist Party selling HIV tainted blood to big
Speaker 1: farmer and the prisoners and then and then I think
Speaker 1: this has like a reverbraining scandals because the British government
Speaker 1: like knows that it's this drug is poisoned and gives
Speaker 1: it to people anyways. It's yeah, and you know, and
Speaker 1: this is this is the sort of last part of
Speaker 1: the incentive structure at play with with unsafe food and drugs,
Speaker 1: which is state officials trying to make money for themselves
Speaker 1: and their political clients. And you know, this is the
Speaker 1: cause of food safety issues in all capitalist countries, but
Speaker 1: China in particular has you know, it has a more
Speaker 1: intense version of this because there's this really really fierce
Speaker 1: competition between different local governments over GDP growth rates. Because
Speaker 1: you know, if you're Chinese official, right, like, the way
Speaker 1: you move up in the party is by how you're
Speaker 1: sort of your local and provincial you know, you're you're
Speaker 1: a cadre, right, you're in charge of the city, you're
Speaker 1: in charge of the town. The way the way you're
Speaker 1: evaluated and how you open the party is mostly based
Speaker 1: on on how high your GDP radio is. Now this
Speaker 1: means that you know, if you think socialists, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's great, it's it's incredible they It's also it's also
Speaker 1: funny because like one of the big things in across
Speaker 1: the whole sort of like really eighties and nineties and
Speaker 1: is still going on today, was like one of the
Speaker 1: big sub socialist projects is about how GDP is like
Speaker 1: a completely bullshit metric of like economic growth at China
Speaker 1: is like no, no, no, our cadre evaluations are all
Speaker 1: GDP now and and this means that you know, the
Speaker 1: countries will sign off on just literally anything that that
Speaker 1: they think will just like cause any growth whatsoever. So luckily,
Speaker 1: in the US we do not have the problem of
Speaker 1: bribery because giving money to politicians and exchange for political
Speaker 1: favors is in fact legal and thus definitionally not bribery.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately for corporations in China, yeah, yeah, Unfortunately for
Speaker 1: for corporations in China, China is an absolute one party
Speaker 1: capitalistic tatorship, which means you have to bribe politicians the
Speaker 1: old fashioned way, like socialism intended. Do you know who
Speaker 1: won't bribe Chinese regulators in order to poison their milk?
Speaker 1: I mean definitely not our sponsors, because they are actively
Speaker 1: bribing Chinese regulators as we speak, regulators of all nations.
Speaker 1: You know, we we we only go with the locust corporations.
Speaker 1: So they'll bribe Chinese regulators, they'll bribe Zimbabwean regulators, they'll
Speaker 1: bribe regulators from Latin America, They'll bribe regulators from anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world. That's the behind the bastards guarantee everyone's
Speaker 1: getting bribed. Here's here's ads, Chris, you know it, did it?
Speaker 1: Did it? Did occur to me that you know that
Speaker 1: that whole system you just kind of set up whereby
Speaker 1: these these Chinese farmers are essentially recre eating the gig
Speaker 1: economy in order to maximize the their profits at the
Speaker 1: expense of both the people receiving the milk and the
Speaker 1: people who who who labor for them. But but aren't
Speaker 1: you know, full full partners in the endeavor. Um, we're
Speaker 1: kind of doing that with podcasting. Yeah, yeah, that's it's good.
Speaker 1: I love I love I love doing things that succeed
Speaker 1: for everybody. So Chris uh please please continue your podcast
Speaker 1: share now. You know so so that the other thing
Speaker 1: about China is that you know, so you can buy politicians, right,
Speaker 1: but you can also you can also literally bribe the
Speaker 1: regulators directly, and you know, okay, so so Chinese regulation, um,
Speaker 1: you know, so so when Chinese regulators are not literally
Speaker 1: representatives from the corporation they're supposed to be regulating, you know,
Speaker 1: you get corruption. Like you know, we saw you let
Speaker 1: the CCP executed the due too as their head of
Speaker 1: the state food or administration. The corruption goes for the
Speaker 1: local level all the way to the top. And and
Speaker 1: corruption among regulators is so bad that when a Chinese
Speaker 1: state journalist like took maternity leave and wound up making
Speaker 1: a documentary and air pollution after her baby developed a
Speaker 1: tumor well in the womb because the air quality was
Speaker 1: so bad, she she like looked at the US as
Speaker 1: a bottle of a country with a functioning regulatory apparatus.
Speaker 1: And you know, again this is this is interesting because
Speaker 1: this isn't sort of just like partisan hack criticism, right
Speaker 1: like this is this this is the Chinese state Uh,
Speaker 1: this is the Chinese state journalists. And you know, and
Speaker 1: the CCP thinks that the issues that she's bringing up,
Speaker 1: like are valid enough that there's talk about she's called
Speaker 1: under the dome, and they think the issues are valid
Speaker 1: enough that they don't ban it. This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is a documentary that's very critical at the party,
Speaker 1: and they don't ban it for the first week that
Speaker 1: it's released. And you know, this is this is one
Speaker 1: of the ways the CCP sort of like tacitly allows
Speaker 1: criticism to be made because you know, okay, so you
Speaker 1: can't actually just have free criticism their right. But you know,
Speaker 1: they were like, okay, we'll we'll ban it eventually, boil
Speaker 1: that people see it first. And the thing they were like, okay,
Speaker 1: we need to let people see is Chinese regulatory corruption
Speaker 1: is so bad it makes people long for the American
Speaker 1: the amazing safety system the US. Yeah, it's it's it's bad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now ab two thousand seven, Chinese authorities are you know,
Speaker 1: they're not unaware of the practice of putting additives into milk,
Speaker 1: and this kicks off this kind of regulatory cold war
Speaker 1: between additive manufacturers and the regulators who like actually don't
Speaker 1: care about not poisoning children. And you know, so the
Speaker 1: regulators change or techniques to detect like the chemicals that
Speaker 1: people are using, and people change the chemicals and there's
Speaker 1: this there's this whole sort of cold war and it
Speaker 1: starts to get worse in late two tho as the
Speaker 1: CCP imposes price controls a baby formulas an anti poverty measure.
Speaker 1: Now this is not like a bad thing inherently, like
Speaker 1: in principle, but you know, if you're dealing with like
Speaker 1: a state owned firm that's designed to actually produce goods
Speaker 1: for people and not designed to make money, this can
Speaker 1: actually work. Um. But you know, the price controls had
Speaker 1: these weird unto the consequences when applied to you know,
Speaker 1: the three deer three deer, the contract worker co Opal
Speaker 1: and you know so so three years and the other
Speaker 1: the other milk companies just sort of pass on the
Speaker 1: added costs, and the pricing strows down to the middleman,
Speaker 1: and the middleman are like, okay, well we'll pass the
Speaker 1: price out of the farmers. Now this escalates the regulatory
Speaker 1: cold war because the price for like regular milk just implodes, um,
Speaker 1: and people start adding these incredibly dangerous chemicals, like more
Speaker 1: dangerous than that I've already been using to the milk
Speaker 1: to to fake these tests and those normal. One of
Speaker 1: this is melanine. Now, melanine is a chemical that is
Speaker 1: normally used to make plastics. Um, it's common in you know,
Speaker 1: so that sounds like something babies need a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 1: because babies are basically mostly plastic. Yeah, and it's completely healthy.
Speaker 1: It's like that. That's why it's why you let them
Speaker 1: eat dishes, or when when the baby starts chomping on
Speaker 1: a countertop, it's like, we've gotta get the mel mean,
Speaker 1: you got you gotta let them eat this countertop. You
Speaker 1: got to get that melon. Yeah. Absolutely, that's why I
Speaker 1: feed babies nothing but pure plastic. What I filter out.
Speaker 1: I get one of those facial scrubbers with the little microbeads,
Speaker 1: and I filter out those microbeads and I just funnel
Speaker 1: it right into the baby's mouth, and that that keeps
Speaker 1: them healthy. Yeah. Toxic, yeah yeah, yeah, but babies are
Speaker 1: mostly poisoned by way right babies. Yeah. So oh boy.
Speaker 1: So unfortunately for people who like babies Melanian. So if
Speaker 1: you ingest it, it causes you to develop kidney stones Jesus, Yeah, babies.
Speaker 1: So babies are getting kidney sounds. I mean I hate that.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so you know. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's really unless you're specifically looking for it,
Speaker 1: it's extremely hard to detect because basically what does it
Speaker 1: So the p the like more refined protein tests are
Speaker 1: like testing for level of nitrogen in it, because love
Speaker 1: of the nitrogen in the thing tells you how much
Speaker 1: protein there is. And this thing like boost level of nitrogen.
Speaker 1: And so you know when people start getting desperate, they're
Speaker 1: like a skirt, we'll we'll put plastic into this, will
Speaker 1: put this chemical and you know, this stuff starts getting
Speaker 1: put in milk all acrash China in order to pass
Speaker 1: off like shitty milk as like high quality baby formula milk.
Speaker 1: But it's really just causing baby baby baby kidney stones. Yeah, dark,
Speaker 1: I don't like that at all. Yeah, it's it's gonna
Speaker 1: get worse. I mean. The good news is that when
Speaker 1: you get kidney stones, doctors tend to advise like beer
Speaker 1: is often advised because it helps you pass them. So really,
Speaker 1: we just need to start getting those babies beer and
Speaker 1: it'll the problem solves. Just mix beer in with the milk,
Speaker 1: do a milk beer bong for the babies, and then
Speaker 1: the babies get nutrition and they pass the kidney stones
Speaker 1: and everyone's happy. Right now, I can't think of a
Speaker 1: problem with that. Let's continue. Oh god, So in in
Speaker 1: in November two seven, a man named Wong buy some
Speaker 1: three to your Baby formula for his young daughter. Now
Speaker 1: he holds onto this to the formula until or if
Speaker 1: he doesn't ate, but when he starts using, he quickly
Speaker 1: realizes there's something wrong with his daughter. It becomes incredibly
Speaker 1: painful for her to go to the bathroom and her
Speaker 1: urine has these weird particles in it. And eventually he
Speaker 1: figures out the thing that's causing it as a powdered milk. So,
Speaker 1: you know, he he makes what's you know, the normal
Speaker 1: assumption if you buy something in China and it makes
Speaker 1: you sick is that it's fake. So he calls Three
Speaker 1: Deer Service hotline to confer with them. Is fake, and
Speaker 1: you know, so so sometimes buying And in late February
Speaker 1: they're they're sort of like doing bureaucratic stuff. Um. In
Speaker 1: late February, he sends them some of the packages that
Speaker 1: he has left and they confirm, surprisingly the packages are
Speaker 1: not fake, they're real, and they tell long To to
Speaker 1: send the rest of the packages like to the company.
Speaker 1: Now Long should have been one of the big heroes
Speaker 1: of this story because he tells him the funk off
Speaker 1: because he's like, Okay, I want an actual examination of
Speaker 1: like what's making my what what made my baby like sick?
Speaker 1: And so so he goes to his local consumer associated
Speaker 1: Demand one. The problem is that the inspection for to
Speaker 1: figure out which one with his milk costs a third
Speaker 1: of the average salary of a Chinese worker, and three
Speaker 1: DERs refuses to pay for it, so he spends the
Speaker 1: entire money he can't so he literally doesn't have the
Speaker 1: money for so he spends the entire one sales and
Speaker 1: eight trying to fight his way through this just absolute
Speaker 1: bar cragic nightmare trying to figure out what's happened to
Speaker 1: his daughter and it comes to nothing. Um, now one
Speaker 1: is interesting. He actually posts about this online and a
Speaker 1: very thread very quickly is locked. But he's he becomes
Speaker 1: the first documented case of poisoning from three years powdered milk.
Speaker 1: Now well long is fighting this case. There is a
Speaker 1: massive earthquake in China that kills almost nine people. Jesus
Speaker 1: and she quickly realizes that three Deers is sending the
Speaker 1: survivors free baby formula. And at this point he you
Speaker 1: know he does, because nothing goes with your family being
Speaker 1: wiped out by a national disaster like kidney said yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great, you know. So so she goes up the
Speaker 1: chain of command to try to stop it, and she
Speaker 1: gets nowhere and his gets completely ignored. Now, so this
Speaker 1: is all this is happening in in something in March.
Speaker 1: Now in June, UM, Chinese doctors start to see something
Speaker 1: they've never seen before. There's thousands of these babies were
Speaker 1: almost altmore less than a year old, who are their
Speaker 1: bodies are completely swollen, they can't urinate, and they quickly
Speaker 1: realize when they start doing surgeries that they have kidney stones.
Speaker 1: And you know that this is a really weird, like
Speaker 1: babies do not get kidney stones, Like it just doesn't.
Speaker 1: This just does not happen. So you know, the doctors
Speaker 1: begin to suspect something's going on with powdered milk, and
Speaker 1: they try to go to the press. Now, now a
Speaker 1: few Chinese journalists have been hearing basically the same story.
Speaker 1: And you know when when doctors, like a few doctors
Speaker 1: starts showing up and confirming that you know, these babies
Speaker 1: in in in the hospital with kidney stones. Um, some
Speaker 1: journalist trying to publish the story. But the CCPs propaganda
Speaker 1: department and and yes, it is literally really called the
Speaker 1: Propaganda Department because yeah, I mean, oh boy, yeah, because
Speaker 1: I guess when it started, that was still a time
Speaker 1: when people used like there was a period of time
Speaker 1: where the term propaganda was often used openly and not
Speaker 1: as a negative. Yeah, you know. And also like when
Speaker 1: when it started, it was like like, you know, this
Speaker 1: starts like this starts before the CCP is a state
Speaker 1: because you know, I mean, the propagated Department is just
Speaker 1: like a bunch of people passing up pamphlets and now
Speaker 1: it's the state censorship agency now. Yeah, and so and
Speaker 1: the reason they killed this story in large part is
Speaker 1: because the Tasan eight Beijing Olympics. Now. I don't know
Speaker 1: how many other people remember the tals and the Olympics,
Speaker 1: but that was the first Olympics I ever watched, and
Speaker 1: it was just an enormous, this huge deal for the
Speaker 1: Chinese government. Yeah yeah, and a lot of this is
Speaker 1: trying to a bunch of I mean, like a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of American conservatives got real real racist
Speaker 1: and stared about China because all the people drumming and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, and you know, yeah, it turned into
Speaker 1: this whole media debacle, and you know, part part of
Speaker 1: what's happening. So China's a been in the World Trade
Speaker 1: Organization for like seven years, right, and that that was
Speaker 1: a sort of acceptance back into like the liberal community
Speaker 1: estates or whatever after Tianaman, which you know, actually it's
Speaker 1: just sort of you know, this is one of the
Speaker 1: other weird things about history. So China was actually pretty
Speaker 1: popular in the US like through most of the eighties
Speaker 1: because they've been in like an American ally and the
Speaker 1: cold Board. You know, this is why I think it's
Speaker 1: uh yeah, like I'm pretty sure in Red Dawn, it's
Speaker 1: like the two countries that are left are China in
Speaker 1: the US, who are like fighting the Soviets. But you know,
Speaker 1: after Tianna, man, like all of that sort of good
Speaker 1: will like implodes and they speaking, you know, and this
Speaker 1: means that like like the Seals and an Olympics becomes
Speaker 1: like all the journalists called China's coming out party is
Speaker 1: a huge international politics geopolitical event. And and I kind
Speaker 1: of emphasize this enough. International politics is just an enormous
Speaker 1: dick waving contest that kills people for no reason. My
Speaker 1: favorite example of this, and just to make it clear
Speaker 1: that China is not the only country that kills people
Speaker 1: for just bullshit internacal prestige points. Uh So, my favorite example,
Speaker 1: it's the what happens right before the park A nuclear
Speaker 1: test band and nineteen in treaty in nineteen and sixty three,
Speaker 1: so you know, by by the sixty three, everyone's has
Speaker 1: realized that testing nukes above ground is bad because you're
Speaker 1: radiating everyone. So you know, they signed a treaty it's like,
Speaker 1: don't do this, and then the day before the treaty
Speaker 1: goes into effect, both the US and the USS are
Speaker 1: spending an entire day dropping hundreds of nukes just for
Speaker 1: no reason. It's just like that they do this giant
Speaker 1: dick waving contest just to prove that they're like, oh hey,
Speaker 1: look a look at how many nukes we can drop.
Speaker 1: And this kills an enormous number of people, but you know,
Speaker 1: it kills them slowly with cancer and sort of hard
Speaker 1: to trace, so nobody really talks about the fact that like,
Speaker 1: like thousands upon thousands of people died from just the
Speaker 1: US and the USS are just like having this dick
Speaker 1: waving contest for who has the most nukes, so, you know,
Speaker 1: and China's version of this is that they're they're absolutely
Speaker 1: determined that everything goes perfectly and there's no pr hiccups,
Speaker 1: and so you know, I mean they they go like, okay,
Speaker 1: so they they use so much steel building the facilities
Speaker 1: that there's a global steel shortage for four years afterwards.
Speaker 1: Like they go to us, like they shot on fact frees.
Speaker 1: They bring in like a hundred twenty market workers who
Speaker 1: they're paying a hundred thirty dollars a month because socialism. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and they even they even they have this thing
Speaker 1: I think the people might remember this. So they have
Speaker 1: these IBM supercomputers right that they're using to target clouds
Speaker 1: with anti aircraft guns. So let's see these anti aircraft
Speaker 1: guns at the clouds to make it rain so that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't rain like over the event itself. You know,
Speaker 1: I mean this is yeah, likely they are shooting they're
Speaker 1: shooting guns at clouds in order to make sure it
Speaker 1: doesn't rain. Like this is this is the levels or
Speaker 1: pr OP you're you're dealing with here. And so you know,
Speaker 1: from from the start of the Games in August eighth
Speaker 1: until the Olympics finish, there is literally no way the
Speaker 1: CCP is going to let a story about a food
Speaker 1: safety crisis spread to the Western press. Now, unfortunately for
Speaker 1: the CCP, what they have on their hands is a
Speaker 1: massive food safety crisis. Now four months after the first
Speaker 1: cases reported three years begins to run tests on their
Speaker 1: round supply and they realize that basically their entire supply
Speaker 1: of baby formulas contaminated with melamine. Now on August seconds,
Speaker 1: they do the test come back in August one. On
Speaker 1: August second, Three Deers has his frantic meeting with with
Speaker 1: Fonterra out just that yeah, the their international affiliate, and
Speaker 1: Fonterra is like, okay, we need to do an immediate
Speaker 1: mass recall of all milk products because you know, we
Speaker 1: don't don't we don't know exactly what's back with melomine.
Speaker 1: And three Deers he's like, no, absolutely not under the
Speaker 1: rationale that you know, they don't want to have a
Speaker 1: scandal like six days before the start of the Olympics,
Speaker 1: and so they advocate for this very quiet, limited recall,
Speaker 1: and you know, they have this massive fight, there's all
Speaker 1: this weird corporate maneuver ring, but you know Three Deers
Speaker 1: is being backed by the CCP, so you know, they
Speaker 1: win out and they immediately set out to cover up
Speaker 1: the story of you know, the fact that they're poisoning
Speaker 1: all these kids until the Olympics are over, and they yes,
Speaker 1: they start like they start planting positive stories in local
Speaker 1: newspapers and TV stations like they have they have one
Speaker 1: of their PR people pretend to be a journalist and
Speaker 1: write a piece about them and then get it published
Speaker 1: like the get it published in the newspaper, and you know,
Speaker 1: and they also, I'm glad that stuff happens there too.
Speaker 1: I was feeling bad about America for a while, but
Speaker 1: now I realize we're just part of a beautiful global
Speaker 1: community of pr flax pretending to be journalists in order
Speaker 1: to sell death. Yeah, it's great. That is That is
Speaker 1: like when celebrities called the paparazzi on themselves to get
Speaker 1: a good photo. Yeah, the other thing they did. And
Speaker 1: this is something well, okay, it wouldn't surprise me if
Speaker 1: Google does this, but I've never heard of them doing it.
Speaker 1: But three Dyears buys off China's large as search engine.
Speaker 1: Who the Surgeon has a feature where if you're a company,
Speaker 1: you're like you're in the party, you can like you
Speaker 1: can pay them money to manipulate the results and so
Speaker 1: they pay this money in the search engine ensures that
Speaker 1: like if you search from melamine or sick babies, it
Speaker 1: won't get linked back to Fontera. And this this sort
Speaker 1: of media blackout works. UM three Dyers and Fontera say
Speaker 1: nothing to the pub until the Olympics are nearly over.
Speaker 1: UM on August twenty two is like that. This two
Speaker 1: days before the close of the games, and twenty days
Speaker 1: after they learned about this, Fontera finally reports the contamination
Speaker 1: to New Zealand Consulate and then New Zealand Consulate continues
Speaker 1: to sit on it until after the Games, however, because
Speaker 1: they don't want to damage relations with China, and it's
Speaker 1: not until September eight that Helen Clark, the Prime Minister
Speaker 1: of New Zealand, formally and openly reports the contamnation of
Speaker 1: the Chinese governments. Now I'm I'm emphasizing the dates so
Speaker 1: much because every single day that they delay means another
Speaker 1: day where thousands of babies are drinking poison and are
Speaker 1: permanently damaging their kidneys trying to piss out kidney stones,
Speaker 1: and the results of the delay gad This is this
Speaker 1: is the first case is reported in February they like.
Speaker 1: The Chinese government finally reacts in September, and the results
Speaker 1: of this is that three hundred thousand babies get sick,
Speaker 1: fifty thousands are hospitalizing, six children die And I want
Speaker 1: to read this quote from the from the South China
Speaker 1: Morning Post, you can get a sense of the effect
Speaker 1: that this had. Holding her timuth own son in her
Speaker 1: arms at Beijing's Children's Hospital, Jooshooping cries as she tell
Speaker 1: us how angry and shock she is to learn that
Speaker 1: the milk powder her son has been drinking could kill him.
Speaker 1: I couldn't fall asleep last night, she says. I feel
Speaker 1: so bad for having fed my baby toxic milk powder
Speaker 1: since the day he was born. Living on the main land,
Speaker 1: we sort of know that our food is always contaminated,
Speaker 1: but doing this to a vulnerable baby, the greedy businessmen
Speaker 1: are shameless. Yeah, it's people. Yeah, it's it's people are
Speaker 1: incredibly piste off. And you know the moment that the
Speaker 1: cats out of the bag and CCP starts, you know,
Speaker 1: they bring all their guns to bear in the crisis,
Speaker 1: and they're you know, the their investigations quickly discovered that
Speaker 1: it's not just three deers. Twenty two other milk companies
Speaker 1: have melamine in their milk. And you know, between three
Speaker 1: years and the twenty two other companies, that is almost
Speaker 1: the entirety of China's dairy industry. And you know that represents,
Speaker 1: by reasonable stanator systemic crisis. Now, the CCPs reaction to
Speaker 1: this was to execute two dairy farmers and what a
Speaker 1: manufacturer of melamine and powder, and put nine more people,
Speaker 1: including the now Pete girl boss head of three deers,
Speaker 1: in prison. And they also they fired a lot of
Speaker 1: the local quadren that have been involved in the cover
Speaker 1: up and the like. They find the companies a little
Speaker 1: bit and yeah, and so they pay the kids who
Speaker 1: get kidding stones like dollars and then if you get
Speaker 1: more sick than that, you get four thousand dollars and
Speaker 1: if you die, they'll give you twenty nine dollars, which well, hey,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty I mean ship. Yeah, but the thing is,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to die for that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: I've heard of worse payouts than that. But you know
Speaker 1: the problem is that like nothing fundamentally changes about like
Speaker 1: the structure of the dairy market, and people get exturely
Speaker 1: piste about this because you know, this is a scandal
Speaker 1: that affects almost the entire Chinese dairy industry and twelve
Speaker 1: total people get get prosecuted for it, and so you know,
Speaker 1: the prevailing wouldn't been in China becomes that like the
Speaker 1: CCP found a few convenient fall guys and are just
Speaker 1: you know, trying to sleep everything else under the rug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad. That's depressing, honestly. Yeah. You know the result
Speaker 1: of this is that, I mean some people wound up
Speaker 1: in prison. Yeah, and the CCP passes a bunch of
Speaker 1: food safety laws, but you know, this doesn't help, like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't solve the problem. And so you know, like
Speaker 1: the trust in the Chinese dairy market just implodes. And
Speaker 1: I mean people to this day still do not trust
Speaker 1: Chinese milk products like in China from you know, partially
Speaker 1: from the memory of of the babies with kidney stones
Speaker 1: and partially because the stuff keeps happening. I mean, there
Speaker 1: hasn't been anything worse than the melomine crisis, like thank
Speaker 1: god since then. But you know, like last year there
Speaker 1: was another fake milk scandal and five kids got rickets
Speaker 1: from mal nutrition, and so you know, people people are
Speaker 1: extremely skeptical of Chinese milk brands. Now the one example
Speaker 1: that would be too yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: There's there's one interesting exception to this, and you know
Speaker 1: the exception is there's there's there was one like Chinese
Speaker 1: firm that emerged from the Melo Means scandal unscathed. And
Speaker 1: the way the reason they pulled this off are you
Speaker 1: able to pull this off because they don't use contract workers,
Speaker 1: and so that means they actually like run their farms,
Speaker 1: and you know, with no middlemen, without contract farmers, you
Speaker 1: get like much better like quality like quality control, you
Speaker 1: get better milk. And you know, if you're going to
Speaker 1: run a farm like that, it's way harder to do crime.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that this milk is more expensive,
Speaker 1: and that leads us to the final and maybe the
Speaker 1: most devastating part about the whole food safety problem. It
Speaker 1: affects the absolute poorest people in Chinese society. If you're rich,
Speaker 1: you don't have to eat this ship You can you
Speaker 1: can buy more expensive food than companies. You won't try
Speaker 1: to scam you. Yeah, you know, and I mean like
Speaker 1: like there's there's people go to like really elaborate efforts
Speaker 1: to do this, Like I so some of my family
Speaker 1: like works in the airline industry, and they talk about
Speaker 1: how people will, like so pilots who are like like
Speaker 1: flying up planes back from China the US will like
Speaker 1: go to American grocery stores and buy a bunch of
Speaker 1: flour and stuff so you can bring it back because
Speaker 1: they know that the American or at least they're okay
Speaker 1: because the American food stety centers are better and so
Speaker 1: you know, like yeah, so they bring it back for
Speaker 1: their families. But you know, margaret workers and ural villagers
Speaker 1: who come from the same place are all forced to
Speaker 1: just roll the dice every time they buy food because
Speaker 1: they don't make enough money to buy food they know
Speaker 1: is real. And I want to close this by talking
Speaker 1: a bit about like just how bad this problem is
Speaker 1: and how many how many people it affects. So China
Speaker 1: has two d and ninety million migrant workers. This is like,
Speaker 1: this is if if you took the microtworker population of
Speaker 1: China out and made them separate country, wuld be the
Speaker 1: fourth largest country on Earth. Um and China's entire economic
Speaker 1: system is based on making sure that this this migrant
Speaker 1: worker population, which is of the population of the total
Speaker 1: population of the US and industrial workforce. It's it's based
Speaker 1: on making sure that these people don't get insurance that
Speaker 1: you know that the insurance some non migrant workers get.
Speaker 1: And the results of this and you know, this one
Speaker 1: was off militure Americans. People just don't go to the
Speaker 1: doctor unless they're literally dying. Yeah, so you know, we
Speaker 1: know what that's like. And you know, yeah, except you know,
Speaker 1: but but it's it's even worse here because the people
Speaker 1: who can't afford to buy food that they know isn't
Speaker 1: fake are the people who can't afford to go to
Speaker 1: the doctor. And and in real areas even worse because
Speaker 1: the local clinics they don't even have they don't have doctors,
Speaker 1: don't even have nurses because you know, the Chinese healthcare
Speaker 1: system is enormously overstrained, and you know, and this this
Speaker 1: is how you get real children dying of malnutrition from
Speaker 1: fake milk. You know, if if you know, if if
Speaker 1: if the signs have been caught early enough or like,
Speaker 1: if they were medical care, then these people wouldn't have died.
Speaker 1: But you know, their parents don't have acts as to
Speaker 1: medical care, and so they don't know what's wrong until
Speaker 1: it's too late. In the baby store off to death
Speaker 1: and yeah that that that that's that's where we're gonna
Speaker 1: leave it today with starving babies, and A reminded that
Speaker 1: China now has more billionaires in the US and yet
Speaker 1: somehow workers in both countries don't have healthcare. I mean,
Speaker 1: they did put some of these people behind bars, which
Speaker 1: is more than happened with Nestley. I think, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's something. Yeah, I mean, but it's you know, like
Speaker 1: they're they're doing this is one of the things that
Speaker 1: that's different about the CCP than than the U S
Speaker 1: is that like, okay, politicians in the US like do
Speaker 1: not fear us, like they're not afraid. They just yeah,
Speaker 1: whereas you know, Chinese peliticians like you know, like they
Speaker 1: they actually understand that like large numbers of people like
Speaker 1: massing and opposing them is dangerous. And that means that
Speaker 1: you know, they do these kind of like symbolic like oh,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll arrest twelve people, they'll they'll shoot like a
Speaker 1: cabinet member, but you know, they do that so that
Speaker 1: they they do that and then they throw off people
Speaker 1: under the bus and tell people sort of stop being angry,
Speaker 1: and then you know, just everything goes on as normal
Speaker 1: and it's it's extremely bleak. Yeah. I was depressing, Chris,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean in some ways it
Speaker 1: was depressing. But I think we do have to keep
Speaker 1: in mind that a lot of value was created for
Speaker 1: for for people with with money, a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of just don't just think of the
Speaker 1: dead children, think of the I think of the economic
Speaker 1: stimulus created by their deaths. You know. That's that's that's
Speaker 1: the real way we can honor their sacrifice and Kensie
Speaker 1: and stimulus. Yeah, Kensie and stimulus via payouts the dead
Speaker 1: to the parents of dead babies. This is how, this
Speaker 1: is how it's it's a perfect closed loop economy. Well
Speaker 1: fun okay, Kenny plug Chris, Um, if you want to
Speaker 1: see me complain more about all of this. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: at it. B C h R three on Twitter or
Speaker 1: the ice must be destroyed guy, Um, yeah, I I
Speaker 1: have I have a substant called the long twenty century. Jesus,
Speaker 1: it has been a long century so far. I'm I
Speaker 1: support kind moving up to the already, Like, let's just
Speaker 1: do it. We're done with Yeah, I'm down to skip.
Speaker 1: Let's let's roll along. Um yeah, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: this has been behind the bastards. You can find us
Speaker 1: where you just found us, because you already know where
Speaker 1: to find us. So like, why am I telling you
Speaker 1: where you can find us. You've been here before, You're
Speaker 1: you're here right now. Um yeah, I have a book
Speaker 1: called After the Revolution. You can find it on a
Speaker 1: t r book dot com as a free e pub
Speaker 1: you can find it as a podcast and After the Revolution.
Speaker 1: Um so, so check that ship out and uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, go uh go buy some baby formula and
Speaker 1: don't drink it because it will make you pe rocks.
Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Initially I was going to plug the go
Speaker 1: fund me for the sequel to my book U After
Speaker 1: the Revolution, which you can find at a t r
Speaker 1: book dot com. But um, here in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: we're having an and precedented heat wave and it's causing
Speaker 1: disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people,
Speaker 1: a lot of people without air conditioning. Um particularly in
Speaker 1: the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have been kind
Speaker 1: of gathering to try and um mitigate, set up cooling stations,
Speaker 1: hand out cold drinks, to do things to help people
Speaker 1: get their temperature down. UM, I want to try and
Speaker 1: raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM, which
Speaker 1: are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
Speaker 1: So if you go to venmo At Free Fridge Salem,
Speaker 1: that's venmo At Free Fridge Salem, and send them a
Speaker 1: couple of bucks, they could really use it. UM. Local
Speaker 1: government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed
Speaker 1: a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. Um,
Speaker 1: it's you know, we're not going to be in triple
Speaker 1: digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm
Speaker 1: recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be
Speaker 1: very hot. People still need this, So please venmo At
Speaker 1: Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the
Speaker 1: financial resources to do so. One more time, the venemo
Speaker 1: is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks m