Behind the Bastards - The Company that Poisoned 300,000 Babies

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Mia Wong is joined by Robert Evans to discuss the 2008 Tainted Milk Scandal. FOOTNOTES: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/world/asia/04milk.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0%20NYT http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2009-01-15/103417050517.shtml https://hzdaily.hangzhou.com.cn/dskb/html/2008-09/13/content_504378.htm Supply Chains and the Human Condition - Anna Tsing https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/supply-chains-and-the-human-condition/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070930182442/http://ww2.aegis.com/news/sc/2003/SC030603.html https://www.scmp.com/article/653037/greedy-men-shameless-says-mum-who-fed-baby-bad-milk The Contaminated Milk Affair - Frédéric Keck https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/4780 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes-milk-scandal-pair https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3051808/foreign-brands-still-dominate-parents-do-not-trust-chinas-home https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/21/china.jonathanwatts https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/parents-chinas-milk-scandal-criticize-payout-flna1c9444094 https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3084271/china-investigates-claims-babies-sickened-fake-milk-formula https://web.archive.org/web/20051217065942/http://www.sanlu.com/jieshao.aspx Unmade in China - Jeremy R. Haft https://1lib.us/book/2769897/98fdb5   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, Jesus Christ. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. Opening this podcast poorly. I'm distracted right now, because there are two kittens in my house. There's two of them in their kittens and they're playing. And I'm also horribly allergic to cats, but I refuse to not have them in my house. So this is going to be quite an episode. R.E. Me being allergic and then being distracted by kittens.

Anyway, when I don't have a house full of kittens, this is a podcast. About the very worst people in all of history. And today we're doing one of our now classic reverse episodes, where somebody reads me a terrible story about a bastard. And to do that, to tell us another tale of woe and whimsy is our old friend, Christopher. Christopher, how are you doing today? Doing pretty good. We are, it's cherry season.

We're doing the cherries, we're picking cherries. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Well, you live in the frigid Midwest and I live in the Pacific Northwest and we both have cherry. We're just dripping with cherries. Yeah. Which is a sign of the perfection of the cherry plant. See, 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 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 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, Saddam Hussein's best friend. And Sophie says, no, that's a horrible name for two kittens. 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've picked the proper name for the kittens.

I told you to name them Sophie and Sophie. I feel like... I mean, that's a ridiculous name for a cat. Both are... Both are... Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend. Good cat names. Both options are dictators.

Yeah, that is true. I will say the double Sophie has the advantage of the fact that the cats are indistinguishable. They are indistinguishable. You cannot tell the difference between them. They both look exactly the same. Little black cats, little baby black cats. I also feel like I've earned the right to be...

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, Saddam Hussein's best friend! Get down from there! You have to set yourself up for success

is the point I'm making. And speaking of setting ourselves up for success, I've set myself up for success today by having Chris research the episode. So, the subject of today's episode is the 2008 Tainted Milk Scandal. And this is going to be a fun one. Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah, this is an exciting episode. I love a good Tainted Milk Scandal, yeah. Oh my God, are a lot of babies going to die? Are we talking like serious dead baby territory here? Okay, so we'll put this at the beginning. I shouldn't have asked that way. That's a horrible way to ask if a bunch of babies died. 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 sheer number of babies who are poisoned, but it is a very large number of poisoned babies. I mean, that 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.

Just fundamentally destroyed me as an empathetic human being. Let's start the show. I'm excited to learn about the spoiled milk scandal. And I'm sure that it was caused by people acting responsibly in just a freak accident that could never have been predicted or prevented. We, yeah, we will see about that.

So in 1956, the Chinese Communist Party's Cadre in Huabe founded a dairy company called the Three Deer Company. And where's Huabe? Huabe is... Huabe, okay. You've got to be real basic with me, because I don't know much at all about Chinese geography. Yeah, so this is the province that Wuhan is in.

Oh, okay, so like South, right? It's like kind of in the middle. Okay, I thought Wuhan was... See, again, not a Chinese geography knower. This is all useful. It's in the middle sort of... It's in the middle of the east of the country. The middle of...

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 they make this milk company. Yeah, and you know, for most of what's either called sort of the socialist period or the Mao period, lasting from CCP taking power in 1949 to Deng Xiaoping taking power in 1979,

three years is a relatively sleepy and sort of minor dairy farm. It was really a minor agriculture industry. China does not have a lot of milk. People don't drink cow milk a lot in most of this period. So this is the state-owned industry, and this means that it's given production targets by the state, and it largely meets those targets. And in return, the workers who work there

decide these work points that, you know, they get resources for them out of the allotment. 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 system... And when you say the social system... Okay, you're explaining this. All right, good.

Well, I can go into a bit more. So, yeah, the social system, it goes through a lot of changes, but the basic principle of it is that, like, there's no market, right? There's no market. If you're not selling anything, there's... Yeah. Sometimes the national government,

but mostly the local government, set these production targets, and the sort of state-owned companies or the labor brigades in rural areas, like, work to, you know... So you get a production target, you get a sign to do it, and you make as much as... Like, you have to, you take the production target.

And you get a sign of resources based on how much you can produce. And this... This sort of works okay for, like, part of the 1950s. But then there's a great leap forward, and you get the Cultural Revolution, and that just sort of knocks whoever legs are, like, left out of the system.

And by the 1970s, basically the entire country and the entire economic system is just being held together by the military. And, you know, this is sort of a catastrophe. Things are decaying. But 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 socialist period economy. It turns out that what does it in is the class... Is the socialist period's class structure. Now, socialist period economic policy basically dictates that...

So you have these agricultural surpluses in the countryside. You take all that grain, and you plow into urban developments 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 exacting grain from and the richer, increasingly rich cities that consume the grain. And this whole thing is made worse

by what's called the Hukou system, which is this, like... The Hukou system is... This is still in place to this day, although it's been modified somewhat. It's this internal passport where basically, like, where you and your family is born, you get registered to that place.

And you can only get services, like, from basically the town or from the sort of local government that, like, you're registered to. And this goes everything from, like, housing benefits to, like, social security, to medical care. And, you know, it also has a lot to do

with what kind of jobs you can get. So, you know, if you have a Hukou from an urban area, you get these very well-funded sort of services and jobs in the city. But if you have a rural Hukou, you're stuck with these absolutely just third-rate services, there's no employment opportunities. And the other thing with this is that

when the famines start, the grain goes to the cities and not the countryside. And so, you know, this goes on for a bit, but eventually the Chinese rural workers who were doing the grain production just had enough of this shit. And they basically bring capitalism back.

They sort of slowly start to introduce, basically, like, so they sort of bring wages back into the sort of labor brigades they've been working in, and then they turn these labor brigades into joint stock companies. And this is the actual beginning of sort of the return, like, 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, when the USSR was kind of in 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 industrial working class.

And they were seen as kind of, you know, inherently 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 is how Mao,

like, becomes a leader of the Communist Party, is that he's the guy who's, like, we're gonna organize the peasants. And so, you know... Yeah. And they have this whole thing about, like, the peasant worker alliance or whatever, but, like, the people who actually put the Communists

in power are the peasants. They're, you know, until the great before, they're extremely popular there. But that, you know... But they have this whole thing about how... Like, they have this whole thing that you do industrial development. Part of it's, like, you know, that they fight the Korean war,

and, like, the Chinese soldiers who get sent to Korea, like... Like, they don't have shoes. And they're, you know... Yeah, 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 have any supplies.

And so, there's this whole thing about we need to do industrial build-up, we need to do industrial build-up. And that, and the fact that... Oh, there's also this huge concern in the CCP that, like, they're gonna get overthrown by urban workers, which, like, literally does happen in 1968 when, like, the party gets ran out of...

Like, gets ran out of Shanghai by, like, an uprising. There's all this stuff. And so, they're basically trying to, like... Like, they think the peasantry's, like, restive enough that they can extract grain from them and put it into the countryside. Or, I'm sorry, take the grain from the countryside and put it into the cities.

Yeah. Yeah, the problem is that... So, they don't have enough... Okay, so if you need to improve that, you want to improve agriculture, right? You need to, like, increase the amount of grain you could produce. And the thing is the only...

Okay. So, partially, you're dealing with, like, less ecotism and all of this bunk science. 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 the thing is, in order to build the industrial base,

you 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 1984, it was, like, a few years after the peasants start forming, like, joint stock companies, and they start bringing wages back.

Dingshow Ping is just, like, okay, all of this stuff that you guys are doing, I'm going to put my seal of approval on it. I'm going to put out this directive. It's, like, this is illegal. You should do more of it. And, you know, this is, like, widening.

It's 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... 100%. At a pretty high level, right?

Yeah. Because they could... You can't just say, like, hey, we're going to add some capitalism back into the mix and the central party be, like, okay, without, like, there was some shit that went down, right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, the thing...

The thing about this, even about Dingshow 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 as 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, you know, 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 attempt where, like, they're going to try the Yugoslavia thing where everyone has, like, democratic workers' co-ops, and they're just, like... That doesn't happen. But, you know, there's this whole debate about this. It doesn't really happen in Yugoslavia, you could argue. Yeah.

I mean, it worked okay for a bit, but... And we should note, because not everyone's listening, we have two episodes on Lysenkoism. That was this Soviet theorist who believed that you could... You, like, freeze 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 starved. And they did it in Russia, and they did it in China. And it was not a great idea, broadly speaking.

Yeah, it was not good. Now, one of the... One of the other very important things about... And something that genuinely did change in this period is that in 1984, that directive I was talking about, Deng Xiaoping lets, for the first time, state-owned firms, like, you know,

our friends over at the 3D or dairy company, like, actually make profits by selling their goods. So, you know, previously, like, you're working to a production target, you hit the production target, and they give you stuff. But now, if you have excess production, you can sell it.

And this is an enormous... I mean, this is... This hasn't... You haven't been able to do this in China since, like, 19... Like, 1953. It just hasn't happened. So, this is the start of this whole thing,

where, you know, the state-owned 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 3D or company, during this period, come under new girl boss management, and under this new girl boss leadership,

they start becoming 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 milk and they start making baby formula. But this was not enough for the ambitious new leadership at 3D years.

And, you know, with this new incentive structure that has been set up, where you have an incentive 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... Excellent.

Yeah, this is going to go great. I love... One of my favorite things is when... Because I'm thinking of... We'll, at some point, cover, like, Nestle's baby formula disaster, too. But just... Oh, yeah.

The fact that they go right... Yeah, they go right to outsourcing. I love when you have what are supposed to be radically different ideologies, but they start making similar decisions that lead to similar problems. Like, it's just... Yeah, it's very fun.

Yeah. We're going to see. There's a lot of stuff that goes on here. So, you know... Yeah. And this is also, like, a huge break, though, with previous sort of the way the socialist, like, agriculture works, where, you know,

if you have a dairy farm, right, you have... There's a state-owned 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 3D years looks at this in 1986. They start making chains, and they look at this, and they go, like, this is expensive.

They 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 out... Oh, Jesus Christ. It gets better and better.

The sharecropping cows? Oh, yeah, so the sharecropping cows, right? And then, you know, so to pay off the debt they incur by buying the cow, they have to, like, they pay back the debt in milk. And then, on top of that, they have to pay a yearly management fee in order so that they can, like, continue to be,

like, debt peons who sell milk to this company. 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, I mean, these people have, like, two, maybe three cows. Most of them have one cow, which means that they're completely dependent on 3D

and their middlemen, because they don't have enough resources 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, like, get even, like, a third or a fourth cow.

So, you know, they're stuck here working for this company, and they are, in effect, the first and modern Chinese gig workers. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, so... You can see where this is going. Now, this model, this gig-working model also spreads to the American dairy industry,

where there's a bunch of farmers, quote-unquote, who take out these, like, enormous loans to buy cows, and, you know, they also get caught in these debt traps. And, you know, the way this works is that by convincing these farmers that they're actually entrepreneurs, that they're small business owners, and not workers, the corporations can exploit them even more

than they were able to earlier by, you know, when they were just workers. And this is essentially just how capitalism works now. The celebrated anthropologist, Anas Singh, 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's what she had to say about these contract growers, who are the new debt peon cow farmers in the U.S. Watts, another academic, concludes, contract growers, thus, are not independent farmers at all. They are little more than property laborers, employees of a corporate producer

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 in the imagined difference between an employee and an entrepreneur.

The contract farmer works for $5.70 an hour, $15,000 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. That sounds like some great communism to me. Just like Mark's envisioned. Yep.

This is the fun part about this. This is happening both in the U.S. and in China at the same time. There's a lot of stuff going on here, particularly with the American side. American agriculture is run by just undocumented, huge numbers of undocumented workers fleeing from American atrocities in Latin America.

Their abilities are organized. You create situations of privation that make people desperate enough to labor incredibly basically for free in conditions that are harmful to them and they can't complain because they're not anyway. Here's one of the things that seems to be happening here, and this is a 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. 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. Its job is not to make the world habitable, but it's good at what its job is. It's very efficient at what its job is.

Its job just has nothing to do with taking care of you. It's not about taking care of you. This whole thing, this is a big part of what ICE is. Basically, institutions of mass violence in order to keep people's wages down. What you see is interesting in the dairy industry is agricultural corporations see this and are like, okay, how can we convince white people

to take this amount of money? The answer they come up with is to convince them that they're business owners. This is part of a larger trend. The larger trend here is that corporations both in China and the US are increasingly becoming middlemen. There's a lot of different models of how this works.

One example is the franchise model. McDonald's is the most famous example of this. The way that McDonald's works is that they don't make money from selling hamburgers. 93% of McDonald's stores are franchises. They're not run by the corporation itself. McDonald's owns the land that the franchise opens on. If you pay them half a million dollars,

they will lease it to you and give you the right to run the McDonald's. Then they'll also take royalties from you. It's probably just like extracting rent that McDonald's actually makes money. McDonald's is somewhat interesting because it's kind of a transition phase between the earlier corporations make things and what we're seeing now,

which is corporations don't make things at all. Nike is a really good example of this. So this is... Nike located in my hometown of Portland, the company that has never done anything wrong famously. Yes, I'm aware of Nike. 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 stew it? I know it's the traditional 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 in the global south.

It's delicious. Yeah, it's fun. And everything... This is, you know, what's seeing us talking has this thing about Nike. She says, quote, Nike never produced athletic shoes. Company founders began as distributors

of Japanese-made shoes. The additions that made for success were the invention of the Swoosh logo, advertising endorsements from well-known African-American athletes, and a transfer 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. They don't make shoes. They buy shoes from other people. And, you know, this is a sort of interesting development because, you know, so Nike's clothes are made

in these really, really small shops with small numbers of employees. And, you know, I mean, this is the sweatshops from the Triangle Shirt Waste episode, except, you know, they've gone backwards to the thing that Triangle Shirt Waste was supposed to be replacing. Yeah, yeah, they've literally been like,

the problem with Triangle Shirt Waste is that it was, that factory was too ethical. We got to go back a little bit further. Yeah, and I think it's worth... Oh, you'd love to see it. Yeah, like, I think it's worth asking why this happens, because, you know, the consequence

of going back to the system is that the garment industry loses all of the safety and wage gains they made in the 20th century in, like, two decades. And, you know, and this is in large part due to the sort of contractor model. So, you know, and we should ask, so why do you actually want to use the contractor model? We've talked a little bit, yeah, it cuts costs,

and, you know, it turns workers and small business owners that, like, you know, it makes them easier to sort of rob by convincing them that they're actually, like, business owners and not just sort of, you know, permanently entrapped debt 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 Shirt Waste setup are actually small business owners now. And because in the garment industry... Yeah, which is also kind of what Triangle Shirt Waste did with the inside contractor system, yeah. Yeah, except the interesting thing about this break is the inside contractor system doesn't work, right? Like, the contractor is, like, side with the workers a lot.

No, yeah, yeah, it fails. But in this system, like, the small shop sort of system, it doesn't, that doesn't happen at all. The small shop people are, you know, they are actually convinced they're small business owners. And this makes it almost impossible for the garment workers to demand higher wages, because the people they're working for are 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 have a way to directly, like, demand wages or safety procedures from the company. And, you know, this isn't, like, this system is not efficient, right?

Like, you know, it's way more efficient to make the stuff in big factories. And, you know, in order to do this, you have to have these enormous supply chains that are spanning multiple continents in order to move this stuff around. But, you know, that doesn't really matter, because since the 80s, what you basically see

is 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 worse yet, and this, you know, this is a real threat in the 60s and 70s, centralization stuff is a response to,

you know, it was a real possibility in the 60s and 70s that, like, the garment workers were 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. Yeah. Workers owning the means of production, like capitalists, no thank you. Yeah, you know, and this is, you know, this is the thing that's part of why it's interesting that, like, three deers... Three deers is doing all of this stuff

that, like, we look at now, like, honest things running in 2010, right? Three deers is doing this all in 1986. And this is, you know, we've talked about this already, but, like, again, the people inside the communist, Chinese Communist Party, like, didn't want to go back to capitalism.

Like, they really didn't, like, capitalism, and it just didn't matter. Like, within two years of them saying, we can make money now, right? Like, within two years, the state-owned industry's reinvented debt peonage, and, you know, there's another interesting aspect of this, which is that, okay, so three deers

is not just a state-owned industry. They're also a co-op, which means the workers of three deers own shares in the company. And, you know, you would think that the combination of this is a 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-owned firm who's trying to cut costs because, you know, because they're only given the limited amount of money in the state, they're trying to cut costs,

so the outsourcing state is the money, and then the interesting thing about the co-op part is 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 more your shares are worth. So you have to make sure that as much of the work is being, as possible, is being done by contractors,

because the contractors aren't, like, members of the co-op. And, yes, so this leads... Yeah, and this... They invented Uber. Yeah, they invented Uber in 1986, two years after they legalized making money. It's incredible. Yeah, hell yeah. See, that's socialist innovation right there.

Fuck you, Silicon Valley. Oh, God. And because this is... I mean, it's actually an old idea, but yeah. Yeah, they're one of the first people to, like, bring it back, which is fairly incredible. And, you know, because this is just, like, a capitalist economy now, this pays off enormously,

and, you know, three years throughout the entire, sort of, the next 10, 15 years just massively expands. They do this massive series of mergers and acquisitions, and for the 90s, it is the largest dairy producer in China. And, you know, and they continue to expand, and, you know, but by this point, they have real political power because they're, you know, their company is a significant part of, like,

the local Chinese tax base. And so this gives them in with the party, and this is part of what allows them to, in 2005, form this joint partnership with the New Zealand-based Frontera Cooperative Group. Yeah, Frontera buys 43% of the shares, and, you know, they do this huge joint partnership thing. This is a huge deal.

Frontera is the second-largest dairy company in the world. They, you know, they have 30% of the world's total dairy production. And, you know, they're the largest company in New Zealand. By a margin that's like, okay, they are so powerful in New Zealand that several of the cables from WikiLeaks suggest that the reason that New Zealand sent troops to Iraq was that the US was threatening to cut off 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 placard sign. That's just not going to get you anywhere. That is incredible, and I love it whenever we get. New Zealand gets so much credit because their government isn't isn't just howlingly incompetent, but they do dumb shit, guys. Don't worry. Don't worry. New Zealand's government does terrible things. It's fine.

You know, and it's great because again, this is a, you know, 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 Iraq. It's great. Yeah, baby. Global cap, it'll go to war for fucking milk. You know who else will go to war on behalf of a milk conglomerate?

Jesus, who? All of the products that support this podcast. We asked 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 bastards guarantee. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and Sophie just admitted that as a capitalist pig dog she is wearing a Nike shirt. I am. Shamefully. I mean, it was a gift, but that's not an excuse. I still wear it. 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 trade. Ethics. That'll represent LeBron James. And I'm representing a lot of unsettling companies.

Okay, 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 trade, apparently. It's great. No matter what you buy, all the money goes to the arms trade. 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... You can tell the story is going well when the people who are slightly more responsible are the people who sent troops to Iraq.

It's great. Now, Fonterra partners with Three Dears under the assumption that China's largest dairy company would be selling products that are of quality and thus wouldn't get into trouble. Yeah, you're not going to... Yeah, the largest dairy company in China. What could possibly be going wrong?

But even before 2005, there were signs that Fonterra should have been concerned. Now, since the start of the reform period in the 1980s and accelerating through a transition to capitalism in the 90s, China has had a huge food safety problem, particularly in the dairy industry. Well, obviously, 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 Dears' model of contract farming. Now, as we... Oh, no. Yeah, it's great. Making the Uber of massive-scale food production didn't make things as safe as Uber. The famously safe right app. The Uber of baby formula, surprisingly,

are not the good guys here. Now, as a result of the sort of the miniature agriculture revolution that Three Dears kicks off in the 80s and 90s, most dairy farming... And this is true to this day in the year 2021 is done by those individual farmers with one to three cows. And this whole system is designed so that no one can build up enough capital to get out

or to do any productivity improvements on themselves because if they had that much money, they could start their own company and they wouldn't have to work for Three Dears. And the other thing about the contract model is it means that no one is investing... Because these cows are being owned and maintained by these farmers, no one's investing in any sort of technological improvements.

And 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 old land reform allotments. And this means that... This is some of the worst agricultural land in China at the raising these cows on.

It's the worst agricultural land that you can raise a cow on and it's not literally desert or like the top of a mountain. And so this means that the cows aren't very healthy and the milk they produce is pretty low quality. Now, higher quality milk with more protein in it sells for more money because you can use to make baby formula. And this means that there's an enormous incentive for farmers, middlemen and the dairy companies

to fake the protein 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 this jabotus to check or is there some... Are they pouring whey protein into the milk? How does that actually work? So the easiest way to do this... I mean, so they are bribing people,

but 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 the milk look like it has more protein when on the sort of tests that companies use to figure out how much protein is in the milk. And, you know, this is where the middlemen come in. And, you know, 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 are the companies, like, not just buying the milk from the farmers directly? And the answer for that, 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 and milk around. The second reason is to put a buffer in between sort of the dairy companies and the contract farmers. 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 middlemen 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're in the clear. That's the way crime works. Well, this is literally true. So, you know, say, for example, you are Nestle. And the cocoa that you use for your chocolate is produced

by Child Slave Labor and, you know, the Ivory Coast of Burkina Faso. Now you say 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 sure they didn't use Child Slaves amazingly. They had slavery, but I'm pretty sure they didn't use Child Slaves to build the pyramids, which is incredible.

A lot of them were probably 17, right? Yeah, but, you know, I do want to point out it's like, yeah, so like every computer, like every electronic device that's, like, made now has coal tar in it, which is this thing that's almost entirely... Yes, it sure does. Yeah, my mind by Child Slave Labor and Democratic Republic 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. Yeah, we're making iPhones that are designed to stop working after two years. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, so, okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and, you know, we saw this recently with, like, so people who'd been enslaved by the contract growers

tried to sue Nestle in court, but, you know, because Nestle's buying from middlemen and not buying, 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. Yeah. And, you know, and the other thing, the great thing about American contract law,

it is literally written into law, right? Absolutely, like, there's great examples in California, but, you know, it's written into law, the American corporate law, that if you are a contractor, right, for a company, and, you know, the deals you sign that involves you becoming a 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... Wow. Yeah, this is, it's great. Ah, that's rad. Yeah, yeah, and... God, that's fun. Yeah, you love to see it. Yeah. It's great. And, you know, and because Nestle's production is set up exactly the same way as Three Deers is, like, the people who Nestle enslaved

lost just a few court cases when they tried to sue them, because they couldn't prove that Nestle directly ordered the slavery, and then, you know, because it didn't happen in the U.S., once they couldn't prove that, once it didn't happen in the U.S., they didn't have any standing to sue an American court. So, yeah, this is, yeah, so there's this whole legal framework

that's set up, and this happens everywhere, 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 middlemen and contractors who are the people who are doping this milk. And, you know, by doping, it's like, they're putting additives into the milk to fake the test,

to fake the protein count. And, you know, and by getting the middlemen to do it, you have plausible deniability, and, you know, if things, like, go wrong, you can just blame the farmers. Now, I will say this, some farmers are desperate enough to put additives into their milk themselves.

But, you know, 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 turns into a huge problem,

because, you know, the combination of sort of, the incredible greed of these large small 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, like the worst instance, I think, was the fake milk scandal 2004,

where a bunch of just fake baby powder was made with regular milk and not, you know, like high protein milk, was sold to a bunch of extremely poor rural farmers. And the result was that 50 babies die from malnutrition, because, you know, the milk didn't give the nutrients that they needed, and so they just, they starved. Right.

And... Yeah, that's what babies do when you don't feed them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this, you know, this pisses off everyone, because here's a bunch of dead babies who starved 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 of 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 to 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 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 have seen this. This is one of the running themes 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 the way the incentive structure works everywhere. The only reason that food safety is as good as it is in like Europe is that, you know, food safety was a key demand of sort of the workers who have been in progressive reform were able to get these food safety regulations put in place. But, you know, and I kind of emphasize this enough.

And don't worry, folks. They're dismantling it. They're dismantling it. Don't worry. They'll get rid of those food safety regulations. And you're up here everywhere. Don't worry, people. Yeah.

Soon you will be free to eat poison. Oh, don't worry. Europeans also eat poison. 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 80s and 90s where it's revealed the Socialist Party

had been sending blood drawn from prisoners with HIV and hepatitis and selling it to Bayer pharmaceuticals so that Bayer could make a drug for hemophilia. Yeah. Oh, you'd love to see it. God damn, that's good. That's what people come to behind the bastards for. The French Socialist Party selling HIV tainted blood to big pharma for prisoners.

Yeah. And then this has like a reverberating scandal because the British government, like, knows that this drug is poisoned and gives it to people anyways. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

This is the sort of last part of the incentive structure at play 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. China in particular has, you know, it has a more intense version of this

because there's this really, really fierce competition between sort of different local governments over GDP growth rates because, you know, if you're a Chinese official, right, like the way you move up in the party is by how you're sort of your local or provincial, you know, you're a cadre, right? You're in charge of the city, you're in charge of the town.

The way you're evaluated and how you move up in the party is mostly based on how high your GDP rate is. Now, this means that, you know, if you think... Very socialist. Yeah, it's great. It's incredible. It's also funny because like one of the big things across the whole sort of like really 80s and 90s,

and it's still going on today, was like one of the big sort of socialist projects is about how GDP is like a completely bullshit metric of like economic growth and China's like, no, no, no, our cadre evaluations are all GDP now. And this means that, you know, the countries will sign off on just literally anything 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 in exchange for political favors is in fact legal and thus definitely not bribery. But unfortunately for corporations in China... Great, okay, Rad, yeah. Yeah, unfortunately for corporations in China, China is an absolute one-party capitalistic dictatorship

which means you have to bribe politicians the old fashioned way. Like socialism intended. Robert, okay. 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 only go with the Wocus Corporation. 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. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI

spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band

called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you

that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, Chris, you know, it did occur to me that, you know, that whole system

you just kind of set up whereby these Chinese farmers are essentially recreating the gig economy in order to maximize their profits at the expense of both the people receiving the milk and the people who labor for them, but aren't, you know,

full partners in the endeavor. We're kind of doing that with podcasting. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. I love doing things that succeed for everybody. So, Chris, please continue your podcast share problem.

Now, so the other thing about China is that, you know, so you can bribe politicians, right? But you can also just literally bribe the regulators directly and, you know, okay. So Chinese regulation, you know, 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, as we saw, you're like the CCP executed the duty as their head of the state food drug administration.

The corruption goes from a local level all the way to the top. And corruption among regulators is so bad that when a Chinese state journalist like took paternity leave and wound up making a documentary in 2015 about air pollution after her baby developed a tumor

while on the womb because the air quality was so bad, she like looked at the U.S. as a bottle of a country with a functioning regulatory apparatus. And, you know, again, this is interesting because this isn't sort of just like

partisan hack criticism, right? Like, this is the Chinese state, this is the Chinese state journalist. And, you know, and the CCP thinks that the issues that she's bringing up like are valid enough that, like there's not too much she's calling under the dome

and they think the issues are valid enough that they don't ban it. This, 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 one of the ways the CCP sort of like tacitly allows criticism

to be made because, you know, okay, so it's CCP, you can't actually just have free criticism there, right? But, you know, they were like, okay, we'll ban it eventually, we'll let 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 of the US. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, by 2007, 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 additives manufacturers and the regulators who like actually don't like care about not poisoning children. And, you know, so the regulators

change their techniques to detect like the chemicals that people are using and people change the chemicals and there's this whole sort of cold war. And it starts to get worse in the late 2000s as the CCP imposes price controls on baby formula as 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. But, you know, the price controls had these weird unintended consequences when applied to, you know,

the three-deer, the contract worker co-op. Yeah. And, you know, so three-deers and the other milk companies just sort of pass on the added costs and the price controls down to the middlemen. And the middlemen are like, okay, well, we'll pass the price down to the farmers.

Now, this escalates the regulatory cold war because the price for like regular milk just implodes. And people start adding these incredibly dangerous chemicals, like more dangerous than what they've already been using to the milk to fake these tests. And the most notable one of this is melamine. Now, melamine is a chemical that is normally used to make plastics.

It's common in, you know... So that sounds like something babies need a lot of. Yeah, yeah. Because babies are basically mostly plastic. Yeah. And it's completely healthy. It's like, that's why you let them eat dishes or when the baby starts chomping on a countertop,

it's like, we got to get the melamine. You got to let them eat this countertop. They got to get that melamine. 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 keeps them healthy. It's super toxic though, like... Yeah, yeah. Like super... Yeah, but babies are mostly poisoned by weight. Right? Yeah.

I like babies. Yeah, so... Oh boy. So, unfortunately for people who like babies, melamine, so if you ingest it, it causes you to develop kidney stones. Oh, Jesus. So babies are getting kidney stones.

Oh, it's so mean. I hate that. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, but on the other hand, it's really, unless you're specifically looking for it, it's extremely hard to detect because basically what it does, so the more refined protein tests

are like testing for level of nitrogen in it because level of nitrogen in the thing tells you how much protein there is and this thing like boosts level of nitrogen. And so, you know, when people start getting desperate, they're like, ah, screw it. We'll put plastic into this, we'll put this chemical and, you know,

this stuff starts getting put in milk all across China in order to pass off like shitty milk as like high quality baby formula milk. But it's really just causing baby kidney stones? Yeah, yeah. That's dark. I don't like that at all. Yeah, it's going to 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 the problem solves this. 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? No. I can't think of a problem with that. No. Oh, God. So in November 2007, a man named Wang buys some three-year baby formula for his young daughter.

Now, he holds onto this to the formula until early 2008. But when he starts using it, 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 is the powdered milk. So, you know, he makes what's, you know,

a normal assumption if you buy something in China and it makes you sick is that it's fake. Yeah. So he calls three-year service hotline to confirm if the milk is fake. And, you know, so sometime he was buying and in late February, they're sort of like doing bureaucratic stuff.

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 Wang to send the rest of the packages like to the company. Now, Wang should have been one of the big heroes of this story because he tells him to fuck off.

Because he's like, okay, I want an actual examination of like what's making my, what made my baby, like, sick. And so he goes to his local consumer association, the mad one. The problem is that the inspection to figure out what's wrong with his milk costs a third of the average salary of a Chinese worker. And three days refuses to pay for it. So he spends the entire month, I mean, he can't.

He literally doesn't have the money for it. So he spends the entire month of 2008 trying to fight his way through this just absolute bureaucratic nightmare trying to figure out what's happening to his daughter. And it comes to nothing. Now, Wang is interesting. He actually posts about this online. And the thread very quickly is locked.

But he becomes the first documented case of poisoning from three years powdered milk. Now, well, Wang is fighting this case. There is a massive earthquake in China that kills almost 90,000 people. Jesus fucking Christ. And he quickly realizes that three years is sending the survivor's free baby formula.

And at this point, he, you know, he doesn't... Because nothing goes with your family being wiped out by a natural disaster like kidney stones. Yeah, yeah, it's great. So he goes up the chain of command to try to stop it. And she gets nowhere. And this case gets completely ignored. So this is all happening in March.

Now, in June, Chinese doctors start to see something they've never seen before. There's thousands of these babies who are almost all from a 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 this is a really weird thing. Babies do not get kidney stones. Like, this just doesn't... Yeah, this does not happen. So, you know, the doctors begin to suspect something's going wrong with powdered milk. And they try to go to the press. Now, a few Chinese journalists have been hearing basically the same story.

And, you know, when doctors... Like, a few doctors start showing up and confirming that, you know, there's these babies in the hospital with kidney stones. Some journalists try to publish the story, but the CCP's Propaganda Department, and yes, it is literally 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 thing, you know? Yeah. Well, and also, like, when it started, it was like, you know, it starts in 1920. Like, this starts before the CCP as a state.

You know, I mean, the Propaganda Department is just like a bunch of people passing out pamphlets. And now it's the state censorship agency. Now, yeah. And the reason they kill this story in large part is because of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Now, I don't know how many other people remember the 2008 Olympics,

but that was the first Olympics I ever watched, and it was just an enormous... This is a huge deal for the Chinese government. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of this is... And it's freed out a bunch of... I mean, like, a lot of American conservatives got real, real racist and scared about China because of all the people drumming and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, it turns into this whole media debacle. Part of what's happening... So, China's only been in the World Trade Organization for, like, seven years, right? And that was a sort of acceptance back into, like, the liberal community of states

or whatever after Tiananmen, which, you know... This is sort of, you know... This is one of the other weird things about history. So, China was actually, like, pretty popular in the U.S., like, through most of the 80s, because they've been, like, an American ally in the Cold War, and, you know, this is why... I think it's... Yeah, like, I'm pretty sure in Red Dawn,

it's like the two countries that are left but, you know, after Tiananmen, like, all of that sort of goodwill, like, implodes. And this big thing, you know, and this means that, like, the Seales and the Olympics becomes, like, all the journalists call it China's Coming Out Party. It's this huge international politics geopolitical event. And...

And I cannot 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 international prestige points. So, my favorite example, it's the...

Sure. What happens right before the Parkville Nuclear Test Band in 1963? So, you know, by the 63, everyone has realized that testing nukes above ground is bad because you're radiating everyone. So, you know, they sign a treaty. It's like, don't do this.

And then the day before the treaty goes into effect, both the U.S. and the U.S. are spending an entire day dropping hundreds of nukes. For no reason. It's just like, they do this giant dick-waving contest just to prove that they're like, oh, hey, 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, thousands upon thousands of people died from just the U.S. and the USSR just, like, having this dick-waving contest over who has the most nukes. So, you know, and China's version of this is they're absolutely determined that everything goes perfectly

and there's no PR hiccups. And so, you know, I mean, they go... Okay, so they use so much steel building the facilities that there's a global steel shortage for four years afterwards. Like, they go nuts. Like, they shut down factories. They bring in, like, 120,000 migrant workers who they're paying $130 a month

because socialism... Yeah, and they even... they even... they have this thing... I think people might remember this. So, they have these IBM supercomputers, right, that they're using to target clouds with anti-aircraft guns. And so, they shoot 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. Like, they are shooting guns at clouds in order to make sure it doesn't rain. Like, this is the level of sort of PR op you're dealing with here. And so, you know, from the start of the game it's on August 8th until the Olympics finish on the 24th. 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 case is reported, three years begins to run tests on their own supply and they realize that basically their entire supply of baby formulas can contaminate with melamine. Now, on August 2nd, they do...

the tests come back on August 1st. On August 2nd, three years has this frantic meeting with Fonterra, which is the 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 know exactly what's going on with melamine. And three years is like, no. Just 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 maneuvering. But, you know, three years 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 one of their PR people pretend to be a journalist and write a piece about them and then get it published, like, in the... like, get it published in a 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 flags

pretending to be journalists in order to sell death. Yeah, it's great. Great. That is like when celebrities call the paparazzi on themselves to get a good photo. Yeah. Ew. 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 years buys off China's largest search engine. The search engine has a feature where if you're a company or, like, you're in the party, you can, like... You can pay them money to manipulate the results. And so they pay this money and the search engine ensures that, like, if you search for melamine or sick babies, it won't get linked back to Fonterra. And this sort of media blackout works.

Three years and Fonterra say nothing to the public until the Olympics are nearly over. On August 22nd, it's like two days before the close of the games and 20 days after they learned about this, Fonterra finally reports the contamination to the New Zealand consulate. And the New Zealand consulate continues to sit on it until after the games are over because they don't want to damage relations with China. And it's not until September 8th that Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, formally and openly reports the contamination

to the Chinese governments. Now, I'm emphasizing the date 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 again, the first case is reported in February. The Chinese government finally reacts in September. And the result of this is that 300,000 babies get sick, 50,000 are hospitalized and six children die.

And I want to read this quote from the South China Morning Post so you can get a sense of the effect that this had. Holding her 10-month-old son in their arms at Beijing's Children's Hospital, Zhao Shuping cries as she tells how angry and shocked 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 mainland.

We sort of know that our food is always contaminated. But doing this to a vulnerable baby, the greedy businessmen are shameless. People are incredibly pissed off. And the moment that the cat's out of the bag and the CCP starts, they bring all their guns to bear in the crisis. And their investigations quickly discovered that it's not just three deers. 22 other milk companies have melamine in their milk. And between three deers and the 22 other companies,

that is almost the entirety of China's dairy industry. And that represents by any reasonable standard a systemic crisis. Now, CCP's reaction to this was to execute two dairy farmers in one manufacturer of melamine powder and put nine more people, including the now peak girl boss, head of three deers, in prison. And they also, they fired a lot of the local cadre that have been involved in the coverup. And they find the companies a little bit.

And so they pay the kids who get kidding stones like $290. And then if you get more sick than that, you get $4,000. And if you die, they'll give you $29,000. Well, hey, that's a pretty, I mean, shit. Who wouldn't want to die for that kind of money? I've heard of worse payouts than that. But the problem is that nothing fundamentally changes about the structure of the dairy market.

And people get extremely pissed about this because this is a scandal that affects almost the entire Chinese dairy industry and 12 total people get prosecuted for it. And so, you know, the prevailing wisdom in China becomes that like the CCP found a few convenient follow guys and are just trying to sweep everything else under the rug. Yeah, it's bad.

That's depressing, honestly. Yeah, you know, the results 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 the 300,000 babies with kidney stones. And partially because this stuff keeps happening. I mean, there hasn't been anything worse than the melamine crisis. Like, thank God since then. But, you know, like last year,

there was another fake milk scandal and five kids got rickets from malnutrition. So, you know, people are extremely skeptical of Chinese milk brands. Now, the one exception... Yeah, that I would be, too. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right? There's one interesting exception to this.

And, you know, the exception is there was one Chinese firm that emerged from the melamine scandal unscathed. And the reason they pulled this off, or were able to pull this off, was they don't use contract workers. And so, that means they actually, like, run their farms. And, you know, with no middlemen and without contract farmers, you get, like, much better 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.

Like, if you're rich, you don't have to eat this shit. You can buy more expensive food from companies who won't try to scam you. And, you know, and I mean, like, people go through, 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...

So, pilots who are, like, flying a plane back from China to the U.S. will, like, go to American grocery stores and buy a bunch of flour and stuff, so they can bring it back because they know that the American... Well, okay, because the American food safety standards are better. And so, you know, like... Yeah, so they bring it back for their families. But, you know,

migrant workers and rural 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 people it affects. So, China has 290 million migrant workers. This is like... If you took the migrant worker population of China out

and made them a separate country, you'd be the fourth largest country on Earth. And China's entire economic system is based on making sure that this migrant worker population, which is, like, 80% of the population, of the total population of the U.S. and 60% of the industrial workforce, it's based on making sure that these people don't get insurance that, you know, the insurance that non-migrant workers get.

And the results of this, and, you know, this one was not fully familiar to Americans, people just don't go to the doctor unless they're literally dying. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we know what that's like. And, you know... Yeah, except, you know, but 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 in rural areas, it's even worse because the local clinics, they don't even have doctors, they don't even have nurses, because, you know, the Chinese healthcare system is enormously overstrained. And, you know... Yeah. And this is how you get rural children dying of malnutrition from fake milk.

You know, if the signs have been caught early enough or if they were in medical care, then these people wouldn't have died. But, you know, their parents don't have access to medical care and so they don't know what's wrong until it's too late and the babies starve to death. And, yeah, that's where we're going to leave it today, with starving babies and a reminder that China now has more billionaires in the U.S. 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 Nestle, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That's something. You know, like, they're doing... This is one of the things that's different about the CCP than the U.S. is that, like... Okay, politicians in the U.S. do not fear us.

Like, they're not afraid. Yeah. Whereas, you know, Chinese politicians, like, you know, they actually understand that, like, a large number 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 arrest 12 people, they'll shoot like a cabinet member. But, you know, they do that so that...

They do that, and then they throw no people under the bus until people sort of stop being angry, and then, you know, just everything goes on as normal. It's extremely bleak. Yeah. Oh. That was depressing, Chris. Yeah.

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 people with money. Yeah. A lot of, you know, there's a lot of...

Just don't just think of the dead children. Think of the economic stimulus created by their deaths, you know? That's the real way we can honor their sacrifice. And their... And Keynesian stimulus, yeah. Keynesian stimulus via payouts to the parents of dead babies. This is how you do economics. It's a perfect closed-loop economy.

Well, fun. Okay. Got any plugables to plug, Chris? If you want to see me complain more about all of this, I'm at itbchr3 on Twitter, or the Ice Must Be Destroyed guy. Yeah, I have a sub-stat called the Long 21st Century. Jesus, it has been a long century so far.

I support kind of moving up to the 22nd already, just do it. We're done with the 21st. Yeah, I'm down to skip. Let's roll along. 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 here right now. Yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution. You can find it on atrbook.com as a free e-pub. You can find it as a podcast at After the Revolution. So, check that shit out. And, I don't know, go buy some baby formula,

and don't drink it, because it'll make you pee rocks. Hey, everybody. Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com. But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave, and it's causing disastrous conditions,

life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem. Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I want to try and raise funds for the free fridge of Salem,

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. Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.

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 Venmo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.