Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 316 - Bayer AG: The Most EVIL Corporation in the World?

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Is Bayer AG really EVIL? Or have they, like a lot of companies done both really good things - like marketing aspirin and other valuable medicine around the world - and really bad things, like market heroin after they knew it was dangerous, and perform deadly drug experiments on concentration camp victims? Yeah - that last one is real, REAL bad. But - how many corporate hands are truly clean? How many companies buy minerals from conflict zones, or materials from sweatshops? How many other companies today have Nazi ties, or more recent track records of selling products they knew were much deadlier than they were publicly letting on? Today we look at Bayer and Monsanto, and the dirty deeds they've done, but also, we zoom out and look at multinational corporations in general. Should we be more afraid of The State? Or the private sector? Get tour tickets at dancummins.tv Get Scared to Death LIVE tickets at badmagicmerch.com  October  27th, 6P PST/9PM EST. True Tales of Hallow's Eve Horror TWO! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rjF7-5y_g3cMerch: https://www.badmagicmerch.comDiscord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard?  Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

Bear, the most evil corporation in the world. Well, that's a topic that was voted in this week by our Patreon supporting space lizards to be examined, but is bear really evil? Are they truly any more or less evil than so many other global corporations today? Is some level of evil, just business as usual? When it comes to life in America, and I would imagine virtually every other nation, if not literally every other nation, we tend to support and rely on corporations as consumers of their products, even if we strongly assume that they might be doing some shady shit.

Even when we know they're doing a lot of terrible stuff or have done terrible stuff, we often overlook it. And I'm certainly no exception. I assume, for example, that at least some of the minerals mind and then used in the laptop, I do my research on, and the phone I used to post to socials, text my kids, talk to my wife, make my entire life work. Probably have come from conflict zones, like the DRC, but I still use that tech.

I could switch to a competitor, but I'm assuming they also probably use those same minerals, sometimes likely mine from the Congo or a similar place, or if not, they for sure use something that came from a sweatshop, a big corporation relies on, or the rough equivalent. Actually I looked out and happened to find out this week that Apple uses the least conflict minerals of any major tech company by quite a bit. I use an iPhone and all of our editing and research stations here are Mac-based, but what

if that wasn't the case? When I have really completely switched everything? At the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and then take months to get comfortable with a new operating system? I mean, I would love to say, oh, fuck you out. Of course, I would do that. But what I really, I mean, some companies are better than others, but are any big tech companies truly immune from supporting some kind of exploitation somewhere?

Is it even possible in the globally integrated economy that we live in to figure out where all the components come from? Who minds them? How much to get paid? How they're treated? How they're shipped? How those employees that are shipping things get paid or treated? How the people who work at the factories that are refined the minerals and other components

for use or assemble them, etc. Get paid slash treated. It's getting components from China. Really that much better than getting things from conflict zones like the Congo. Can you make your life work without using anything made in less than a hundred percent ethical way? Can you afford to buy nothing but products, tech, food, or otherwise that are created in the most ethical ways compared to their competitors? Based on what I've researched in the past regarding average wages cost a living and the prices I see for items labeled as organic or fair trade, et cetera, there's no way.

Most people can live that way. Since you are listening to this podcast, aren't you using something that has at least some of its parts either mined in, made in or shipped from some place where people are getting fucked over in a way that would not be legal or accepted in the country likely living based on our audience demographic stats. Do you ever watch Disney movies? Go to their theme parks by any other licensed merch. They have a long history of business dealings considered shady by many. And so do so many other corporations.

All of us either buy, use, wear, eat, drink or watch something that was made in a way that is not 100% totally ethical, at least by commonly accepted first world standards. We all also in some way support organizations or people that buy, use, wear, et cetera, shit. That is not 100% ethically sourced, created, transported, et cetera. Important to start this week's topic there. To establish that while, yes, bear has certainly done some terrible, terrible things.

Whose wealthy corporate hands are truly completely clean? I mean take Ben and Jerry's the most ethical giant corporation I can think of off the top of my head They have long top lists of the most ethical corporations in the world sure seems like they always try and do what's right and Even they have gotten into trouble in the past with watchdog groups. For claiming, for example, that their ingredients are all natural, that their milk always comes from cows milked in carrying dairy farms, where they have more room to roam or treat them more humanely, no hormones, etc. Several years ago, in 2018, a watchdog group found that a lot of their milk came from the same damn crowded dairy farms as most of their competitors dairy products, and that their

products contained the pest decide glyphosate. In response to the press backlash around this, they removed the words all natural from their packaging. Glyphosate, the main act of ingredient in Roundup. And Roundup is owned by, to twist all of this into our topic of the week, Bear. And Bear owns Roundup after buying the company

that developed Roundup, a company whose name topped more lists of evil companies before these two merged then bear, Monsanto. And on May 13th, 2019, and just one of many lawsuits, so many are still ongoing, a jury in California, ordered bear to pay a couple, two million, two billions, excuse me, and damages later cut to 87 million on appeal. After finding that the company had failed to adequately inform consumers of the possible carcinogenicity, genocity, woo, tough word, of Roundup due to glyphosate. And in 2017, the Organic Consumers Association announced that it found traces of glyphosate in 10 of 11 samples

of Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavors, although it levels far below the ceiling set by the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Of course it's in Ben and Jerry's ice cream. It's in everything. According to a US government CDC study completed this past summer, more than 80% of Americans have a widely used herbicide lurking in their urine. Most of us are literally ingesting that shit on a daily basis. Unless you're living exclusively off of food grown in your own garden, and you or none of your neighbors

are using commercial pesticides, you probably have glyphosate and you're urine right now. And I point all this out again to illustrate how damn hard it is to stay away from either the bad shit of giant corporation is done or is doing or is relying on another big company that's doing some bad shit. It is nearly impossible to avoid relying on

some of the giant corporations around us are lives typically depend on some level of reliance advertising on Google clicking on any type of ad promoted by Google using Amazon to sell something or buy something taking life saving medication made by a corporation with a lot of nasty skeletons in their closet. Grabbing some plastic bottle of water when you're traveling in thirsty at the store that may end up in the ocean or may have been made in a way that gave its workers cancer nasty skeletons in their closet, grabbing some plastic bottle of water when you're traveling in thirsty at the store that may end up in the ocean or may have been made in a way that gave its workers cancer, possibly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Giant corporations make the materials that go into the clothes we wear, that make our homes and vehicles, the pesticides and fertilizers that help produce most of the food we eat, almost all of it. The medicines we rely on to stay healthy and on and on and on. And who are massive publicly traded corporations be holding to? They're shareholders.

And what keeps those shareholders from selling their stock and sending the overall stock price plummeting? The same thing that keeps the corporation financially healthy and able to continue to employ its employees, profit, profit, profit. And also customer-based expansion, which then leads to more profit. And it's a stock profit, profit, profit. And also customer-based expansion, which then leads to more profit. And it's a stock price plummets because profit and or expansion is down.

Company leadership might just flee and hitch their wagons to different companies that will make their stock option compensation packages worth them dedicating some of their working years to that company. And if a big company loses all their best employees and is hurting when it comes to profit, well, bankruptcy now becomes a very real possibility, if not inevitable, to avoid this fate. Massive publicly traded corporations are driven in ways more exaggerated than with monpaw companies to make massive amounts of profit. And that drive so often leads to less than the most moral decisions. It's a sad fact that profit incentivizes immorality.

A sweatshop makes sneakers a lot cheaper than the factory where the workers get a proper wage and maybe even benefits. Getting the three T's of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and also gold, necessary minerals for making so much of our tech work. Getting all from the con goes a lot cheaper than it is to get it from a place with a government that isn't insanely corrupt and doesn't use Mineral profits to fuel continual bloodshed a place that doesn't have mine owners who abuse and exploit their workers If a certain level of corruption in the giant corporate world Seems almost inevitable. Why is anyone focused on bear being so evil? I did a quick Google of the world's most evil corporations and the the first hit was a website called Not Surprisingly, the top tens.com.

This particular list randomly was 83 entries long. Not sure how that fits in the top 10 website, but whatever. Another evil business tricking me. Anyway, number one on this list, Monsanto. Number 13, Bear. Interestingly, Google was number 14. They must not exactly love it, how people can use their search engine to easily dig up dirt on them.

Monsanto and bear together stand atop another list. And one of the other companies stands atop many, many others far more than any other companies based at least on what I came across. So who are these companies that are now one in the same company? Today, bear AG is a German multi-national pharmaceutical and biotechnology cooperation and one in the same company. Today, Bear AG is a German multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Started in 1863 as a die-making company, quickly cornered a global market.

The versatility of aneling chemistry led Bear to expand their business into other areas. In an 1899, Bear launched the compound, ooh, big word coming again, a cedar, a cedal, salicylic acid under the trademark name aspirin. But not long after bear began working on aspirin and after a detour into manufacturing

and marketing actual heroin, world were one of the depression plunged it into debt. And the way it would recover from this in the 1940s is pretty fucking dark. And the darkness would would recover from this in the 1940s is pretty fucking dark. And the darkness would not end after the 1940s. In many ways, bear's history is a legacy of many different kinds of shady shit from human experimentation to deliberately selling contaminated products to all kinds of fraud. These days, bear is headquartered in LeVracuse and Germany. And their areas of business include pharmaceutical, consumer healthcare products, agricultural chemicals, seeds, and biotechnology products?

Special emphasis on the biotechnology parts since they acquired Monsanto. Monsanto founded in 1901, originally made food additives like saccharine before expanding into industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural products. Monsanto now famous or infamous for making some controversial and highly toxic chemicals like polychlorinated by fennels, now banned and commonly known as PCBs, much easier to say. And the herbicide agent, agent orange, which was used by the US military in Vietnam directly causing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens to die cancer, also killing hundreds

of thousands of Vietnamese citizens to die cancer, also killing hundreds of thousands of US veterans. Monsanto commercialized Roundup Herbicide, another cancerous agent of death in the 1970s and began developing genetically modified corn and soybean seeds in the 1980s, freaking out billions of people over more health concerns. And when Monsanto and Bear combined in 2018, a lot of the world's corporate watchdogs

let out a collective sigh of, oh fuck, this is really bad. Groups like the farmers union, food and water watch, friends of the earth, and many others didn't mince words when it came to condemning their deal. Organic consumers association called the acquisition a marriage made in hell. Is that true? Is Bear Monsanto really the most evil company in the world? Are they actually evil at all? All this and more in today's yes, I'm a capitalist, but one that favors some level of regulation since it doesn't take much dig

and or critical thinking to see that unchecked capitalism is a very bad idea for the common human. In this should we rage against these machines, big corporations sure do not always have our best interest at heart, addition of time suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to time suck. Oh, you're listening to time suck. Oh, oh, oh, oh,

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and a company merch, some bad ass designs in there. So fun last year, I'm gonna be more fun this year. A real quick thanks for being cool with an unedited draft of the Carlin episode, sneaking out last week for some of you, still ironing out a new production flow with a new crew doing things a new way over here. Some of you got a little peek behind the curtain on how we make the sausage and I love how you handled it. And that's it. Now I got a fucking show to do. Showbiz!

Now on to Bear, the so-called most evil company in the world. Great way to start off the the month of October with a topic that's so evil. But again, is it really that evil? I mean, they did first market aspirin around the world, soothing the pain of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people overall. And they have created a market of other good medications that have soothed pain elsewhere and saved lives.

I mean, right now I'm on Claredin. I'm on Claredin D, at this moment, I've taken it four years. I've tried other allergy medications, but for me, nothing works as well as Clareden. Sometimes I take the regular kind, sometimes I take the decongestant kind, and I feel the most clear, clear headed I ever feel would hate to not have this medication in my life, would for sure not be as productive. So bear to me, not all bad. And they do make a lot of other wonderful medicine for a lot of other

people, easy to get bogged down in bears, long history of controversies from experimenting on human beings during World War II. I mean, fucking evil. To push medication, they knew it was infected with HIV on people, all so evil, or them developing a marketing heroin in the early 20th century, possibly or probably evil. Some of these controversies like the heroin thing, just to result to the company approximating the best medical knowledge they had at the time, without knowing what side effects were, or how dangerous the substances that were prescribing could be. Well, there's like the human experimentation thing.

Hard not putting that in a category of evil. They knew. They had to know that that shit was horrific. But also, playing devil's advocate, if you were a corporation, Nazi Germany, you kind of couldn't escape supporting the Nazi regime in some ways without great risk to personal safety, right? That was the basic tenant of the Nazis fascism that every branch of the economy, the culture,

manufacturing, education, everything went to support the Nazi party or else. Not that that makes what they did excusable. It doesn't. It's execs could have fled rather than join in on human experimentation for sure. They could have risk captured execution. They could have tried just pointing out that they didn't decide randomly to get into human experimentation out of fucking nowhere. Wasn't their idea to kick that off.

What they did was difference and say living in a country where it is not acceptable to do that and then just go and rogue and kid and kidnapped people and put them in a laboratory. We're going to do exactly what they did do in that regard later in the episode to determine just how much blood ended up on their hands. Also a division of the German pharmaceutical company bear knowingly sold blood clotting agents infected with HIV to Asia and Latin America months after withdrawing them from Europe in the US in the 1980s. I mean, some execs knew when they were doing that, that it was real bad, the people were

probably going to die. That was not happening under Nazi rule, far removed from it. They knew there were sentencing innocent people to death, and they did it anyway, all for an insanely profitable company to make more profit. Hard to look past that. And there have been other modern scandals that get pretty hard to overlook. And then there's their recent acquisition of Monsanto, a company that has also definitely done some super shady shit like bullying its own customer base, a company that is continually

and knowingly poison areas and people with toxic chemicals and then refuse to take responsibility for it, hide behind an army of lawyers, seemingly waiting for people that made sick to die, run out of money to fight them with in court. The sad truth is that there are a lot of people in big corporations, people who have already made enough money to never have to push or sell anything again ever and still live a life of luxury until the day they die, who do not give a fuck about the average consumer. People who like Lao Menendez just care about business. Do you like business? Business, business, call 1-800-Business.

If you like some business, 800 with the one in front. Business, business, printing, money, profit, business so much profit, business spicy chicken wings, Manendus investment enterprises for some business, cash flow, stock options revenue, balance sheet, fixed expense, cannibalize, return on investment, acceptable loss, fiscal calendar, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Sorry. Let's old call back to the manendist's investment and prize sponsor. I can really get lost in that.

But there are some of the a lot of people who seem to mostly just care about business. No, but about making money. About making more money when they already have so much fucking money at the expense of a lot of people. Or they don't care if it's the expense of a lot of people. Right, for companies as well as these bear, it seems as if doing something terrible and then paying quick

settlements or losing a few lawsuits later sometimes makes ledger balance sense. If the profit outweighs the potential litigation, you got a real dumpster fire of topic today. Let's really get into this at moments in raging mess. This isn't the first time we talked about some shitty companies with far less than ideal business practices before on time, so we talked about AMway, other predatory multi-level marketing businesses, places where customers have to buy in and then recruit people beneath them who kick up a portion of their profits and so on and so forth. Hail the good God AMway, maker maker of miraculous, pursue, disinfecting, creating wives, proving to kill all manner of viruses,

throwing $6.50 for package of 50 wipes, but not available for perks in the state of Maine, which reads as a bit shady. Anyway, Clay, we're talking about business practice, a lot more heinous than manipulating people into thinking that anyone can get rich, as long as they just sell enough soap and toothpaste and shit and encourage others to do the same.

Some of the shit we'll cover today seems like something out of a sci-fi or dystopian novel. Maybe because sci-fi is where evil corporations are most often discussed and exposed. According to Angela Allen, writing for The Atlantic, the idea of an evil corporation is deeply embedded in the landscape of contemporary culture, populating films, novels, video games and more. These fictional corporations like By and Large, from 2008 Pixar movie Wally, are accredited with destroying the earth, taking over all sectors of business and government and possessing

a near unlimited greed. Originally a frozen yogurt manufacturer, By and large, expanded over the years until it acquired literally every other business and organization on earth. It's primary concern, ensuring humanity's right to spend, spend, spend. Fiction is littered with these evil corporations, like Severance's, Lumen, a clear allegory for Amazon. I've heard nothing but good things about that series, by the way. No, Logan's been watching.

There's a literal evil corp from Mr. Robot, the Simpson's Globex, Robocops Omni-Consumer products, Spider-Man's Oskorp, Terminator's SkyNet, the Umbrella Corporation from the resident evil franchise. Just a name of a few. Why are evil corporations, like Delos Incorporated and Westworld, so prominently featured in sci-fi movies? Because there actually is good reason

for the world's most imaginative storytelling minds to be concerned, and for the rest of us as well. Collectively, humanity has a massive amount of anxiety regarding what private corporations are, have done, or might be doing to us and to the planet. But this wasn't always the case. In the 1950s, popular culture is still largely imagined the state and not non-governmental private agencies as the enemy of the citizen as fiction, such as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit

451 or Philip K Dick's short story, the minority report suggests. Easy to see where these fears came from, right? In the aftermath of World War II and the wake of the Cold War, anxieties over authoritarianism flourished. Post-war culture worried about dystopian states legislating the end of personal freedom. Corporations were merely a supporting player in the war against individualism. That's not to say that at the time corporations didn't have their critics as public intellectuals like C. Wright Mills and John Kenneth Galbraith warned against the rising political influence of private enterprises.

And the eyes of some seven decades ago corporations were already lulling workers into a collective conformity. And I described in William White's 1956 book on management the organization man. While America once valued individualism he argued the new class of American worker was now committed to group think, a term white coin at a 1952 article for Fortune magazine. He described how corporations transform workers into mere cogs in the machine,

unable to think for themselves or take responsibility for their own actions. And some of the 1950s didn't, frankly, give a fuck about this. They didn't care about the possibility, right? I take care of the machine, the machine take care of me. Where's the problem? What's wrong with the good job of the pension, the house, the suburbs, two cars, and a boat,

and enough disposal will income to take the family on an annual vacation. Others, however, saw reasons to be afraid of this security. A lot of the literature of the period reflects these anxieties. As Sloan Wilson is the man in the grave flannel suit, published in 1955 and Richard Yates, got to have a richer episode. Got to have a dick, always got to have a dick. Revolutionary Road published 1961, Chronicle the White Color Workers dissatisfaction with

corporate culture. But most of this literature, while corporations might have been seen as soul-sucking on a personal level, right, they weren't exactly evil. Headed into the mid 1960s, though, that attitude seemed to change. 1962 Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, and which he identified that the only obligation of corporations, indeed their sole reason for existing, was to make money for shareholders. Anything else he argued would simply be irresponsible. Friedman argued that companies existed to generate money, period. And he thought this was a good thing.

Some real Michael Douglas Wall Street mentality, right? Greed is good. He believed that individuals acting self-interest and a corporation that was made up of a bunch of individuals would be mutually beneficial to those individuals and to society as a whole. But this didn't mean that Friedman thought that corporations were always a good thing. He also individuals would be mutually beneficial to those individuals and to society as a whole. But this didn't mean that Friedman Thotha corporations were always a good thing. He also argued that letting executives decide whether their companies were acting in morally responsible ways or not would threaten the autonomy of individuals. If social responsibilities of category was left up to corporations and not society as a

whole, then could lead to corporations wielding state-like power. For instance, to price hiking on products that consumers needed to live, selling faulty or untested products to an unknowing consumer base, or protecting their own reputations over anything else. And all of that has been done in many instances already here in America, and elsewhere, of course. Freibin worried that corporations were in charge what would be deemed as right as wrong. And how would money interact with that decision making process? And science fiction would quickly pick up on these concerns.

In 1973's cult classic film, Soil and Green, loosely based on a 1966 sci-fi novel called Make Room Make Room, right and wrong became blurry in one of the film's early scenes. When William Simonson, a member of the Soil and Corporations Board of Directors, is about to be killed by a hired hand because the assassin says his knowledge has become a risk to the company's interests. After delivering this explanation to Simonson, the befuddled killer asked, then this is right. No, Simonson responds necessary.

It's the same response that the Soil and Corporation would give, meaning that all ethics had been turned over to companies, not individuals with individual values. And as a threat to the success of its newest product, Simons in must be eliminated. He's threatening a profit. However extreme, Soil and Green suggest in the corporations conspire against the broader public good was undoubtedly motivated by real concerns over the effects of unregulated corporate power released only three years after the founding of the environmental protection agency.

Soil and green depicts a dystopian future set in 2022 in which industrial capitalism has left earth overpopulated overheated and underfed. Meanwhile, the soyland corporation profits from its access to the resources the rest of the population is denied. Reminds me of a multitude of giant corporations buying rights to fucking drinking water around the globe. Right, the past few decades, scary shit. Outwardly, the soil and cooperation acts as a benevolent

supporter of the world's population, providing much of the world's food supplies, well as euthanasia clinics for those two tired to go on living. But later in the film, spoiler alert, the so-called compassionate gestures are revealed to be completely hollow. The bodies killed in the euthanasia clinics are processed and fed to the starving masses. I should probably finally watch this movie. God knows I quoted this scene enough. Listen to me, Hatcher. You gotta tell him, silent breed is people. We gotta stop him. Stop him.

So in a green is people. I have randomly yelled that many times in my life. Not sure where I first heard that quote. And the comments below this video clip on YouTube. Part of Google's evil empire, damn you alphabet. The top comment is I watched the video was I remember back in school the 70s everyone saw on the lunchroom Some of it always yell soil and green is people

That is funny. I would laugh my ass off in that cafeteria I can picture some lunch ladies rolling their eyes right now. Maybe laughing themselves But also I can see a giant corporation absolutely fucking doing something that horrific if the dollar amount was right and the fear of litigation math still made profit sense, right? For some corporations morality wouldn't plan to it. Movies like Soil and Green show the dangers of corporations that are only committed to profits similar to fictional companies in the Jurassic Park and alien franchises. When it comes to matters of right and wrong, these corporations, excuse me, and real life ones, are always incentivized to come down on the side that makes them the most money.

And since they're so powerful, they can afford to get away with that possible, with the possible punishments that come from acting unethically if they should get caught. And this has been the case to some degree, for sure, with bear and monsanto for decades. Furthermore, corporations aren't incentivized to solve the problems that their products fix because if they do, who will continue to buy their products?

I had to conspiracy crowds ears just perked up with good reason here. If you're making a lot of money, treat and cancer, would you really want to suddenly start selling the cure? Not saying that is happening, but I do understand how that is a concern. Personally, I think that if anyone discovered the cure for cancer, whatever corporation they work for would sell the ever loving shit out of that, possibly if not probably out outrageous prices, make a ton of short term money, then reinvest that money in, I don't know, maybe fucking over humanity's clean water access by galloping up those access rights or something. I think they might do something ethically murky, but I don't think they would actually

hide the cure. Or maybe I just hope they wouldn't. Too much money to be made destroying their cancer treating competitors ability to continue to profit in that market though. Too much incentive for market dominance and pleasing shareholders of that cure. Come on. Those cancer, those cancer cure shares are going to skyrocket for a little while at least. I want to come to Baron Monsanto.

It is important to realize that the outlandest depictions of evil corporations and science fiction don't always match up in real life. So gauge your expectations for what's coming forward. They're not likely doing something as bad as hiding the cancer cure or turning people into soil and green meals. All science fiction can illustrate the ideas and principles behind profit and hungry companies.

Also important to know what and how the actual real life companies are doing. Though not as salacious as grinding people into little meals, except for a part of bear's history that actually is that dark, some of these activities should certainly erase our eyebrows and have us thinking critically about who's looking out for us and who just sees us as a source of potential revenue. So how are we going to cover this mess today? To cover Bear and later to connection with Monsanto, we're going to do things a little differently than normal, especially lately, rather than do a timeline and get bogged down

with all kinds of info about how the company structure itself and expand it and stuff like that. Technical shit that gets a little, well boring. We'll do more of a vignette style overview of the history of bear. More on the top end about bear's founding before we get into its major controversies along the way. And then we'll dive into Monsanto, which bear acquired in 2018.

It's connection with Monsanto, which has a very controversial history of its own, has led people to dub bear the most evil company in existence, made up of two devils to create one super duper evil corporation. Makes me think of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers film series, right? Head of the evil fictional corporation Virtucon Industries, $100 billion. Finally, we'll compare with a pair of other companies to see if bear really is an outlier, if it really is more evil than other companies So what is the bear corporation? Well the company was founded in

Barman former city in western Germany now part of Vulpertal by the entrepreneur Fredrick bear and his partner Johan Westcott on August 1st 1863 Westcott was 42 bear was 193 now He was 38. Bear had been working in the dye industry for about two decades. Founding father of the Bear Group, Friedrich was Fredrick was born in Barman in 1825 as the son of a silk worker. Fredrick Bear grew up in a time when the textile industry was flourishing. At the age of 14, he joined the circus, and entertained countless audiences

by training bigels to work as Cat Ventriloquist, the cat's performing a 20 minute nightly musical while doubly dispuppeteers might be in the living puppets, who of course would be eaten at the end of every show. And it was fucking breathtaking! Or he went to work for a chemical dealer, a Western field in Coat, and Barman as an apprentice. During his apprenticeship, Bear became familiar with both the fundamentals and the problems

of the dying trade. By the age of 20, he'd already begun to deal in natural dies. Three years later, he founded his first sales company and established a European distribution network. He's hustling. Natural die stuffs initially offered by Bear were extracted from die woods due to their high quality. Bear was able to do business with these products in the European capitals, the London,

Brussels, St. Petersburg, and as far as way is New York. His partner, Johann Westcott, was born in 1821 as the son of a natural yarned dire, Engelbert Westcott. He came from one of the oldest families in the barman district of Vupertal. At age 16, he followed in his father's footsteps and learned the dire trait. Within just a few years he became the owner of a dying business himself and the quality of his product soon made him financially independent. And soon this pair who became friends went into business together with bear managing the business side, Westcott looking after the technical side doesn't appear to be anything

too illuminati or nefarious about their beginnings. Not much seems to be written about the founders, not much at all actually. Some of the info has only been written in German, mentions in an old book or two, and it doesn't appear to have been translated to English, so there could be some juice, you tidbits on this and I doubt it. Because if it was that interesting or explosive with the amount of detractors out there who hate this company, I would think it would for sure be up somewhere in English. At least some info in an article or two. Excuse me, it appears as if they were just two random entrepreneurs amongst many making a lot of money in an area that was undergoing a big industrial revolution, an area at a time where a lot of people were

prospering. Their company would just happen to survive a lot of turmoil and do a lot of shady dealings long after their deaths. If they ever died, those two sleazy fucks might just be hidden in the secret wing of some Bavarian castle or mansion right now. Got their adrenal chrome on an IV drip, the blood of eating children still on their faces, scared virgins and cages, waiting to be ravaged and sacrificed to the devil by these two demonic fucks. Or maybe they just kept trading identities, pretended to be whoever's currently in charge of bear, quasi-immortal vampire-esque monsters. Or maybe just some old bones and dust,

and a tumor coffin somewhere. Their company originally produced synthetic dies, a hot new commodity at the time, making those synthetic die dollars, die-dewch marks. We're from here to think about how much money there wasn't dies Not sure anyone is really dominating that the die trades anymore It seems to be a variety of smaller players these days like Abby color and Philly of a pretty fun company slogan Where people come to die?

noise I would bear started the production of these dies from coal-tar derivatives had only been invented a few years previously Opening up a new field of business for the still young chemical industry. The target market was a textile industry, yarn, cloth, clothing, primarily. The time was growing rapidly in the wake of recent industrialization. Rugs, dresses, gloves, hats, blankets, furniture covering, on and on, various textiles. We are constantly wearing or walking, sitting or laying on wool cotton, silk, nylon, linen, all kinds of textile fibers and upg it and died. The natural dyes that have been used prior to chemical dyes were scarce and expensive.

You need a massive amount of naturally derived pigments, say from flowers to die all of the factories, outputs and getting a fuck ton of flowers that is expensive. It's a much more fragile business model than a synthetic die, right? A lot more can go wrong. Some hungry beetles or aphids can show up and destroy your die source, you know, one season or a late frost or a drought or merigold gremlins,

you know, dandelion goblins, evil sunflower wizards, can wreak havoc on one's die supply. You get it. It's here to see a lot of extra variables with a natural source. A lot of extra labor involved. Those flowers don't pick themselves, don't transport themselves to the factory. But now new inventions like the synthesis of the red die, a Lizarin, that became the first natural die to be produced synthetically in 1869 and the strong demand

for tar dies led to a boom in brand new chemical companies. Got to find some fucking nerds to replace those flower pickers. Gotta trade in shovels and spades for beakers and lab coats. Many die factors are bills at this time, but only innovative companies with their own research facilities and the ability to quickly jump on new and changing opportunities in the international markets would manage to survive over the long term.

And bear was one of these companies. There were many, and it would later expand into the chemical and pharmaceutical markets. The financial foundation for expansion was laid 18 years after the company's founding and 1881. When bear was transformed into a joint stock corporation called Farben Fabriken, Friedrich Bironco, which loosely translates into either Satan's corporate dick,

will be forced into the working man's butthole or the souls of the weak and poor will be crushed into the greedy grip of Aryan pure blood profit. Kidding of course, or am I? I am. It actually translates into Frederick Bayer and company paint factories. Yeah. Gotta say my translations, a little more interesting. Company been killing it those first two decades as a die supplier.

It's workforce grown from just three in 1863 to more than 381 and then between 1881 and 1913 bear developed into a chemical company with international operations Although die stumps remain the company's largest division during that period new fields of business were emerging were joining the fold Research and development now the bear had accumulated years and years of die money. They could afford to test out new product ideas in order to create new revenue streams. Pretty standard fare for innovative and forward thinking corporations, and I do respect it.

You know, you can go and likely will go from being a major player to a fucking dinosaur real quick in business. If you don't evolve and adapt to the times, very rare to have a successful business model be built on just basically staying exactly the same year after year like say, in and out burger. In and out started as a single burger joint, 1948,

Baldwin Park, California, just East of LA. After a few years of tinkering around, now they've been making the same burgers, basically the same way, had the same basic business model for over 70 years. And in that time, they've grown from one busy location to over 330 very busy locations. Their goal is not to move suddenly into other areas. You know, they're not going to suddenly try and corner the fried chicken market or toothpaste

or the mountain bike markets. Just keep making the same burgers the same way, you know, the people have loved for decades. Consistency, no evolution, and change. Kind of key to their present and future success. Would be funny though, to suddenly see an in-and-out burger, you know, add like a mountain bike, sales and repair shop.

Just, to see him do that, just corporation-wide. You can go to the in-and-out burgers for burgers, shakes, fries, and mountain bikes. Grab a tasty, fresh, never frozen quality, all American beef double cheeseburger fries in a milkshake today. And then ride home and burn those calories off in style on a new in-and-out trail demon tends to be mountain bike with 29-inch tires, short chain stays, keeping the rear end nice and sporty.

That classic animal style suspension platform keeping everything responsive and direct power transfer for improved performance free large cheese fries with every bike but really normal to innovate uh i personally uh you know uh had to innovate i've been lucky enough to be able to now jump in the theaters in a number of markets uh to do stand-up shows but only because I took a lot of time away from stand-up, started working over 40 hours a week, over five years ago, on just podcast stuff. To build in the podcast business,

then has nothing to do with stand-up, had I not taken my attention off of stand-up to try and find new income and marketing streams, I wouldn't be able to sell enough tickets to be able to still do stand-up in clubs or theaters. I have friends that have known comics who started around the time I did who are very funny. And their careers are basically done now

because they just refused to evolve, refused to fuck with social media or podcasts or any other means to build an audience outside of show and up for stand up shows and go on some additions. Anyway, evolving and breaking into new business areas not evil, early bear, just being smart here, just diversifying,

just taking risks and working harder than I had to do if it were to choose to remain in just one lane. Bear begins to become the international company that is today through its early research labs, especially the first, founded by Carl D. Spurk in Vupertau, Germany, Alcac D. Spurk in Vupertau. Also the location of the company's headquarters

from 1878 until 1912. Carl was hired in 1883 when he was fresh out of school, just 22 years old. And fucking evil right out the gate. I mean, really evil. Carl is exactly where things take a dark turn for bearer. He was an obvious agent of the underworld. He showed up to his job interview carrying a big sack plumb full. You're gonna want to sit down for this. Babyheads. Yeah. Human fresh, you ripped off babyheads.

When the shocked bear executives interviewed him asked what in God's name was the meaning of this. He simply said, and I quote whatever it takes. I gather these baby heads on the way this interview to prove I'm willing to do whatever it fucking takes to bring untold riches to this great Aryan corporation, long live bear. And then you unleash the maniacal evil. And he slammed the fucking baby heads down the table. No, of course not. He didn't see me at all when he showed up.

But D. Spurg would climb with the ranks from his research lab and eventually become the head of bear and lead Germany's chemical weapons charge in World War I. Is that evil? Maybe not actually. He only did that because of an ammunition shortage in Germany due to a British naval blockade. Not because he just really wanted to fuck up a bunch of soldiers with some new chemicals. It was done to help his country win the war, not as a big cash cow for bear. They actually took a financial beating in World War One.

Uh, of making weapons for your country is evil. Then every employee of every company that's part of the US military industrial complex, wouldn't they also be evil? Every scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project helped in World War Two, they got to be evil then too. As would basically all other military innovators, whoever first, you know, use gunpowder to hurt someone, whoever designed the first sword for battle, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm sure some will disagree, but I'm not going to casually slap the evil label on Carl for military innovation. I'm backing up at Carl's beginning now, his research lab would set new standards and industrial research, synthesizing everything from dyes to pharmaceuticals, including the so-called drug of the century aspirin, which was developed by one of the scientists working in Deesburg's lab, Felix Hoffman, and put on the market in 1899, probably developed by Hoffman,

actually. This claim will come into dispute a century later in 1999. Some now think another scientist invented aspirin, Arthur Icon, Icon Groon, the guy who invented a successful treatment for Ghana, Rio, that was used for 50 years before the invention of antibiotics. Not worth delving into this debate in this episode. Plenty of people still think Hoppen came up with aspirin. Some other people do think a French dude named Chuck came up with aspirin, not even joking.

The drug may have first been developed in 1853 by French chemist Charles Fredrick Gerthardt And then recreated by multiple chemists through different processes before Hoffman discovered a better method of making whole boy easier to say aspirin, but I'm gonna try and say a Seedle Salasillic acid Most historians agree Hoffman did his research and was well aware of the previously used methods of making ASA and thus didn't spontaneously invent the drug

but did come up with a safer and less bitter tasting specimen, if you will. However, it was exactly created. Hoffman created the formula that would be first marketed worldwide and bear chose to list Hoffman as the inventor on the 1899 US patent of the drug. Hoffman also made a very different equally famous or infamous contribution to farmer surgical's heroin. He definitely wasn't the first to invent this one, but if not for him,

heroin might not have ever hit the international market. At least it would have took a little longer. The drug that eventually became known as heroin was first created in 1874 by C.R. Alder Wright, an English chemist who founded the Royal Institute of Chemistry in Britain, who was just running experiments with morphine and didn't actually do anything with his creation. His new drug was not recenthized until 1897 when it was independently recreated by Hoffman.

Hoffman had been tasked by a supervisor to turn morphine into co-deam in order to create something less potent and less addictive, not such an evil task. But instead of making something less potent and less addictive, he created a drug up to two times more potent than morphine and much more addictive. Whoops! Bear actually created and patented the name heroin, the so-named because of the heroic feeling that gave users.

And sold the drug as a cost of present, even market in it specifically for use on children. One ad urging the use of heroin to treat bronchitis and kids is a Spanish ad shows two unattended children reaching for a bottle of the opiate across the kitchen table. I bet they're reaching for it. Little heroin addicts probably fighting over it too, you know, trading dolls and teacups for it. Another ad showed a mom spoon, spoon feeding, heroin to her sickly little girl. The ad says the cuff disappears. Heroin ads for children. Bear even marketed heroin as a cure for morphine addiction before discovering that the

body quickly metabolizes it as morphine. That is pretty ridiculous. You haven't trouble with your morphine addiction? Try heroin. Yeah, I gave people a more with your morphine addiction? Try heroin. Yeah, I gave people a more fucking powerful morphine-high addiction. So is all this early heroin stuff evil? Well, that depends on what they actually knew

about the drug at the time. If they knew that heroin was super dangerous and destructive, especially for children, out to gate and marketed it to them anyway, and yeah, super fucked up. That could have, or should have landed a lot of people in prison cells for the rest of their lives, or led to them, you know, signing out at the end of an executioner's news or something.

So what did they know back at the dawn of the 20th century about heroin? Probably not much, actually, at least not initially. Chemists could create new drugs then. We're just figuring that out, but also couldn't yet fully understand their creations. They didn't understand the atomic structure of them. That wouldn't happen until a few decades later than 1920s. And cough medicine was needed at the time, as were painkillers, and these drugs did help with coughs and pain, it did help people in some ways as for addictive properties of heroin. The first studies didn't seem to reveal how powerfully addictive it was. Some

scientists did start to sound the alarm, however, just after bear began marketing their more or less. So, the fact that the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, the American government, a huge black market had already developed. By 1912, heroin had emerged as a recreational drug among young men in New York City. Two years later, addicts were knocking at the doors of New York and Philadelphia hospitals and search and treatment. And bear did promote heroin for use as children, for use by children as late as 1912. So that's not a good look. If I had to guess,

just like how Purdue, Pharma, hit some early concerns about the dangers of oxycontin, I'm going to guess that bear hit some early concerns about the dangers of oxy-contin. I'm gonna guess that bear hit some early concerns about the dangers of heroin. So verdict, probably a little bit evil here. I hesitate from saying certainly because there is a chance it did work better than other drugs at the time in suppressing coughs and helping kids sleep and be free from pain, which could have helped them recover

from various illnesses, trying to be fair here, even though bear and my gut almost certainly put profit before the health of children. And everyone else using heroin for at least a couple years, especially since those ads directed towards kids I mentioned earlier part of a marketing campaign directed only to Spanish-speaking customers and Spanish-speaking countries Right, that's a real bad look seems like they pushed that shit way harder outside of their precious motherland Then they did inside it which has a lot to me about how much they knew regarding how dangerous or not this shit was. By the early 20th century, because of aspirin and heroin, bear had become a subsistence.

Yeah, bear had become a substantial and powerful drug cartel. I mean, company on the international stage by 1913 over 80% of their revenue came from exports. In the years before World War I, the company expanded into and maintained subsidies in Russia, France, Belgium, the UK, the United States, of the approximately 10,000 people employed by Bear in 1913, nearly 1,000 worked outside of Germany. Bear scored an additional early success in pharmacology with the patenting of, oh, uh, phynabarbitol branded as

venereal in early treatment for epilepsy. But then World War I, which began with the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in on July 28th, 1914, put a road black in bears, uh, further international development. During the conflict, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, the Central Powers, they fought against great Britain, France, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, the Central Powers. They fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan, and the United States, the Allied powers.

At this point, a variety of companies from all over the globe were selling their own version of bears, golden goose, not heroin, which more and more countries were getting concerned about, but aspirin. It wasn't longer to the war before England shut out products manufactured by German companies, including bear. And by 1915, they avoided the trademark bear hat on the name aspirin. So anyone could use the name on their drugs now and that fucking stung. That was a big hit to the pocketbook. And in addition to losing Britain and other markets, Bear was also having a hard time keeping up

with production demand as one of the key ingredients needed for the synthesis of aspirin. It's been all, which is also used for explosives. For some crazy reason, the German government, while at war, thought they had first dibs on that shit. Bear still had a big market in the US and had plans where they could manufacture aspirin for sale in North America, but now they had to find a supplier for phenol since they couldn't get it from Germany. And that's where the great phenol plot came in.

The great phenol plot was a clandestine effort by the German government during the early years of World War I to divert American produced phenol away from the manufacture of high explosives that supported the British war effort. The UK produced it, the US bought it, and the bear corporation in Germany controlled and managed the production. But when World War I broke out,

the UK was not inclined to sell phenol to the US branch of a German company, make sense. And even if it had wanted to sell it, there just wasn't enough. Phenol wasn't only a potential pain reducer, right? It could also be used to make explosive. It could be changed into Pickrick Acid, which is used in TNT and plenty of other kinds of explosives. Even today, chemistry classes and amateur pyromaniacs can extract pitric acid, pick weak acid from aspirin to make explosions. And if you do that and you blow some fingers off or you blow up your neighbor's house,

you didn't get that idea. Listen to this podcast. Since war tends to use a fuck ton of explosives, the availability of phenol right goes down, price goes up. Meanwhile, aspirin availability is running low over in America, which was technically neutral, but drifting more towards the bridge side every day early in the war. Thomas Edison found that without phenol, he was running low on materials to make funnograph discs, aka music records, early versions of vinyl records. So we solved the problem by manufacturing his own and then

soon he found additional buyers, including a former bear employee turned agent for the German interior ministry Hugo Schweitzer. Bear needed to keep running, Germany needed to keep making explosives. So Schweitzer set up a front corporation that bought all the extra phenolic hood from Edison. And the more they bought, the less ended up in the UK to support their war effort against Germany. Pretty fucking brilliant on Schweitzer's part here.

At his company's peak, Edison was making tons of this shit every day supporting both bear and the German war effort. The exact work into this arrangement, not officially illegal either. America was still officially neutral. Edison could sell to anyone he chose. And there were people in America who were pro-German, so many that he could have publicly sold phenol to a nation with a fair amount of public support in a war that America officially still had no intention of joining, which meant that covering it up was the worst possible way for him to go about it.

The fact that it was done so underhandedly and that it was secretly arranged by the German government instead of a German company is what made it look bad when it came out and it would come out. One of the conspirators left his briefcase on a train and American secret service agent snatched it, leaked the story to a newspaper and it became front page news. Soon the public was in an uproar and speculating heavily. Was it a plot to steal necessary ingredients away from the US military, US industry? Was the phenol going to make medicine or explosives? What other fake businesses were buying up much needed medical and military supplies for Germany?

It was a publicity hit for Germany, for bear, and for Edison. But this was not evil. It was just a company helping out of this nation war. The deal was brought out into the light and Edison openly sold Fienal for a short while. But then before long, public sentiment turned against it so strongly that Edison ended the deal with Germany. And he sent the rest of the excess Fienal now to the US Army. There would still be another year and a half before America officially joined the war. After the exposure of the great Fienal plot, bear started setting up more shell corporations

and subsidiaries, and the US is a way to avoid losing control of their assets in the US if the US entered the war. And doing shit like that has made people wonder ever since, what are they hiding now? What are they up to? What other companies are really part of bear? How many subsidiary tentacles do they possess? Where did they reach? When the US did declare war on Germany, bears started to be investigated at which time they shifted their stock to a company that was technically owned by Americans,

but still controlled by the same German-American bear leaders. This ruse was quickly discovered, and the US government soon took control of bears, American holdings. Whoops. And then sold off all of the company's trademarks and patents, y'all. another big hit to the pocket pocket book including their name and logo to a medicine company sterling products incorporated bear wouldn't finally buy back all those rights until 1994

so war not always great for international business and world war one certainly not good for bears business it would also lead to a black mark on the reputation, evidence for some that they are evil, or at least were evil. Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War One saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the allied powers acclaimed victory, more than 16 million people, soldiers and civilians alike were dead. Some total casualty estimates surpassed 40 million people.

And some of this carnage was thanks to bear. Near the start of the war, bear chairman, Carl D. Sparck, fucking babies dead sack guy, was one of the three men commissioned by the Ministry of War to find a hopefully deadly weapon to use for the poisonous waste already being produced by chemical industries. The team recommended the use of chlorine gas, which bear then help produce and send to the front lines. Old DeSporque was even there when the weapon was first tested. Under DeSporque's guidance, bear created even more deadly gases, starting with a phosphine

and later mustard gas, paving the way for the types of weapons that the Nazis would use in the Holocaust. And over 60,000 people estimated to have died from exposure to these gases in World War 1. And while not all those deaths were at the hands of products created by bear, it's possible that none of those deaths would have occurred if it wasn't for bear. Bear also helped make explosives for Germany. Again, though, overall, despite some new business ventures, the government ordered them to

carry out. First World War actually hurt bears bottom line substantially. It wasn't getting enough war contracts to cover the company losing most of its foreign assets and export markets. In addition to the U.S., the UK and other allies did opening up patents and or taking their holdings. Bears Russian subsidiaries were appropriated by the Bolsheviks as part of their Russian revolution. After all this, sales in 1919 amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. That insult to injury, the company lost more of its trademark rights related to heroin, along with aspirin after the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which time the drug started to be created by other outside agencies around the world.

And eventually by drug dealers, after it was made illegal starting to us 1924. Germany got its ass kicked in WWI and so did bear. The hyperinflation of Germany's interwar period then exhausted bear's financial reserves and in 1923 bear did not pay shareholders a dividend for only the second time in his history after 1885. Bear almost went up, went belly up between WWI and WWII. It needed to do something new if it was going to stay afloat. Though the German economy had stabilized and began to recover a bit by 1925, it became clear

that the German dye industry wouldn't have its same dominant position in the new world market. As more and more companies had opened up internationally, war really fucked up their global expansion plans and international business dealings. In order to remain competitive and gain access to new markets, bear joint forces with several other German chemical companies in 1925. They transferred their assets to IG Farben. The new conglomerate included other major companies such as BASF.

Bear now existed as an individual subsidiary within a larger monopoly. By 1926, the powerful conglomerate had three times as many assets as all other chemical companies in Germany combined. More money was able to go into research again, which largely took place at four sites in IG Farbans lower-rine operating consortium. One of these sites, in Labor, Kuzn, also became the headquarters for the IG Farbans Pharmaceutical Sales Association, and the Bear Cross was used as the trademark for all of the IG's pharmaceutical products. A lot of the new research was focused on rubber synthesis and modern polymer chemistry. In the early

1930s, Permanent was developed an auto-bear, no relation to the bear to the found of the company, invented polyurethanes, 1937. A lot of fucking money in polyurethanes. Polyurethane is a plastic material which exists in various forms. It can be tailored to either be rigid or flexible and is material of choice for a broad range of end user applications such as insulation of refrigerators and freezers, building insulation, cushioning for furniture, and although definitely not popular anymore, in the 1930s and 1940s and much of Northern and Eastern Europe, it was typically used to make a wide variety of different types of pet dildos. In Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Greece, especially in Greece,

holy shit to the Greeks love a pet dildo. There was enormous demand for polyurethane pet dildos, uh, polyurethane cat dildos, polyurethane cat dildos, polyurethane dog dildos, polyurethane parakeet dildos, polyurethane pig and peacock dildos, polyurethane ferret snake, even polyurethane goldfish dildos. For years, it was more common in a lot of places in Europe to dildo your pet than it was to pet it. The belief was that a sexually satisfied pet was a calmer and happier pet. And it doesn't make sense, you know, and a lot of people in high society believe that if you didn't stick a polyurethane dildo in your pet and often

and move it around and toe-climax, you were a fucking terrible owner. And hopefully, everyone knows them joking. Actually, hopefully not. Hopefully, it's one of you. It's been nodding along to that madness going, yeah, no, I remember here about that. Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. Went in Rome, yeah, I get it. But for real, people didn't still do use a lot of polyurethane, though, just maybe not for pet dildos. Most use today, form of a flexible foam. One of the most popular materials used in home furnishings,

such as, you know, a bedding, carpet underlay, there's a cushioning material for a pulsed-tred furniture, flexible polyurethane foam, works to make furniture more durable, comfortable and supportive. Bear continue to make medicine money as well, all that doing this polyurethane dealings. They continue successful research into drugs to control malaria, working together with Fritz, Card, Domec discovered the therapeutic effect of the, oh boy, sole phantom aids, sole phantom aids, with one active ingredient from this class of substances being launched in 1935 as, Prentice still, a key breakthrough or Prentice still, a key breakthrough in combating infectious diseases

for which Domec received the Nobel Prize in 1939. And all this sounds good and it is. Make no mistake about it. Medicine's bear has developed, have saved many, many lives, but there's also been quite a bit of darkness. And a dark event is just around the corner. After the recovery between 1926 and 1928, the Great Depression finally reaches a lower Ryan consortium, output and employment declined dramatically all around the globe, and bear

is of course affected. Between 1929 and 1932. Jobs are cut by 20% and there's something else troubling going on in Germany in the 1930s. Anyone able to guess what that might be? Yep, that's right. You did it. There was a broad, worse shortage. Not enough broad, worse was the worst thing to happen in Germany in the 1930s, 1940s by far. Probably probably not definitely the worst thing ever. So many hungry Germans forced to eat hot dogs or sandwiches or fried fish, anything but tasty brawers because a terrible man named Adolf Hitler was on his way towards becoming infamous

for buying up all of Germany's sausages and storing them in a castle guarded by a dragon and letting them spoil in that nasty old dirty dragon castle. Just as he was an asshole and he liked to watch people suffer while you fiddle with his tiny stash and dildo his favorite ding-dong dog. Not sure what the dragon did, he had all the sausage and that very stupid, made up story, I just laid out. But he didn't, okay? He didn't want it. And no one can make a dragon eat something they don't want

and not even Hitler, not even trying to persuade it with a highly pleasurable, affordable and durable, polyurethane quality dragon dildo. I have no idea where all that came from. Nazis. Nazis was the other thing, going on in Germany in 1930s. And they didn't have shit to do with Browers, or a polier thing, dragon dildos, unfortunately.

As we've covered in many, many episodes, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi party. He would rule absolutely first by banning the press from disagreeing with him. Always got to watch out for people who want to fucking ban the press. It's a shitty press and every time and staged an event to enable him to pass emergency laws that are rooted citizens rights and paved the way for the Holocaust to happen. Excuse me. Then he shot himself and died in 1945 and a lot of people cheered. He effectively smashed nation's democratic institutions and transferred Germany into a war

state and tent on concrete Europe for the benefit of the so-called Aryan race. Bear in the IG Farben conglomerate, it belonged to, would be considered essential to Hitler's war as part of the IG Farben conglomerate, which strongly supported the Third Reich. The bear company would be complicit in the crimes of Nazi Germany, very complicit. As an example of how much IG Farben supported the third Reich, we got to look no further than the fact that IG Farben held 40% of the stock for the company that manufactured Zeichlond B. The gas that was used to murder a million deduces and other minorities and gas chambers. So that is, that's pretty fucking troubling. Back in up to 1936, the National Socialist Government

began systematically preparing for war. Bear would be essential to those preparations. When the Second World War finally broke out in 1939, the locations of the lower Ryan consortium were among the sites of German industry that were considered vital to the war. Production requirements grew steadily, yet more and more employees were drafted into military service. So foreign and forced laborers from the occupied countries of Europe were brought to work in factories to maintain output levels. ID Farben employees frequently told to military service. So foreign and forced laborers from the occupied countries of Europe were brought to work in factories to maintain output levels. ID Farben employees frequently told their slave laborers that if you don't work faster, you'll be gassed. And then even

more disturbing was bearers role in human experimentation. Bear in IG Farben would take advantage of the absence of legal and ethical constraints on medical experimentation under Nazi rule to test its drugs on unwilling human subjects. These included paying a retainer to SS physician Helmuth, Helmuth Vetter to test sulfonamide drugs on deliberately infected patients at the dockow, Auschwitz, and Goosehn concentration camps. So who was Helmuth Vetter? In short, big ol' piece Nazi shit. Now for a bit lengthier synopsis. Helmlis Vetter was born on February 21st, 1910 in a rural part of Germany that now belongs to Poland.

Kidding. He became a camp physician in Auschwitz and was also a bear scientist. While in Auschwitz, he conducted experiments in block 20. They contagious diseases award from 1942 to 1944 for experimental purposes regarding typhus, typhoid fever, paratyphoid diseases, diarrhea, tuberculosis, lungs, other kind of tuberculosis there is, scarlet fever and more. Better would choose patients with the said diseases in various stages.

Patients were then administered various doses of medicine for the same disease to see if the medicine was toxic. The patients were called the experimental group. Also, the patients were refused any other medicine. Then that prescribed, even if doctors knew that other medicine would help them. Because, you know, this vetter and others didn't care about these patients anymore than if they happened to be lab rats. Vetter used 150 and 250 patients in his experiments, and a high percentage of those patients died. The purposes of the pharmacological experiments were not in hopes of helping these patients but to observe the reaction of the medicine on the patients even when it was obvious the medicine was harming them or killing them.

Let's look at one experiment in particular, the success of Periston on Typhus used on 50 prisoners. The patients started treatment and as soon as Typhus was noticed, the patients were treated for five days, given two tablets three times a day. While the patients had bad reactions to these tablets, so then they were given the same dosage, now dissolved in a half a liter of water.

This method caused heavy vomiting, which weakened the patients significantly. So next, the patients were given the same medicine, but now in the form of an enema. And not surprisingly, this method caused violent and painful diarrhea up to 15 times a day. Patients did best with two tablets at a time, three times a day with lots of water, but still even then the medicine caused bitterness and burning on the tongue and pallet more. Here are some records of patient reactions, two cases of swollen lips, 79% of patients vomited after taking the pill,

33% experienced sporadic diarrhea, 15 patients died due to the immediate effects of the medicine, damn, six died due to weakening of the heart, six died due to toxic after effects, two died because of brain complications, one died due to fever, the 35 surviving patients experienced a drop in temperature, but other symptoms of typhus remained. Three patients died due to rapid drop in temperature, and conclusion, although the medicine caused a drop in temperature and got rid of the fever, it did little to nothing and curing typhus. It was all for nothing, and that is how medical experiments often work, which is why they are not supposed to be conducted on unwilling human participants. Even more unethical

vetter also experimented with typhus itself. Patients would be injected with the blood of a typhus infected inmate, they'd be given the disease in the hopes of finding out how to vaccinate German soldiers from typhus. This experiment hoped to learn the incubation period of typhus to course the disease and the effects of certain medicines on the disease. 19 people from block 46 were infected with typhus. Pat 46 were infected with typhus. Patients were infected with typhus after it had been active for five days.

Rashes appeared around the third day and cardiovascular collapse, hypotension, hollow heart, sound, and murmurs occurred on 11 of the 14 cases. Every person's spleen became inflamed and 10 died. Cardiovascular collapse, the most common cause of death. That was later convicted by an American military tribunal at the Mount Hauls and trial in 1947,

and was executed for war crimes in February of 1949. Executed as a war criminal for doing research on behalf of bear. And not the only bear employee working for the Nazis. Bear was particularly active in Auschwitz. A senior Bair official oversaw the chemical factory in Auschwitz 3, also called monowitz. The chemical factory was called IG Auschwitz, a 100% subsidiary of IG Farben. The largest complex in the world manufacturing gasoline and rubber.

IG Farben put the pieces of the deal in place between February and April 1941. The company bought the land from the Treasury. For a knockdown price after the land had been stolen from Polish owners, mainly Jewish people without compensation. Their home is vacated and demolished. German authorities expelled the Jewish owners confiscated the homes sold them to IG Farben as housing for the company employees brought in from Germany. Some local Polish residents dispossessed in the same way. Finally, IG Far ID, fireman officials reaching a green with the concentration camp, commandant on hiring prisoners

at a preferential rate of three to four marks per day for the labor of auxiliary and skilled construction workers. Workers of course would not see that money. And a letter to his colleagues about the negotiations, IV, fireman director Otto Ambrose wrote that quote,

our new friendship with the SS is very fruitful. Whew, elsewhere, elsewhere in Auschwitz, bear experiments were conducted in Brookinau and Block 20, the Women's Camp Hospital. Their veteran in some Auschwitz physicians tested bear farmer's chemicals on prisoners who suffered from and often had been deliberately infected with tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other diseases.

In one study of an anesthetic, the company paid for use of 150 female inmates of Auschwitz. A bear employee wrote to Rudolf Hauss, the Auschwitz common-dont, the transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. Right, like the fucking cattle. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments.

Yeah, it's in all of them. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and to the same price. Fuck. Just the way they write it. We kindly request, would you please send 150 more women over for us to torture and kill? Doesn't sound like they were reluctantly doing this.

Sounds like they were eagerly conducting experiments on concentration camp victims to come up with new products. They could later make a lot of money off of. Due to the Nazis, destroying a lot of the records of what they did at these camps Who knows how many concentration camp victims bear experimented on and killed in total This feels evil. This feels pretty full evil After the war some employees of bear appeared in the IG Farben trial one of the Nuremberg subsequent tribunals on a US jurisdiction The IG Farben trial the sixth N the 6th Nuremberg trial

to determine the extent of individual's guilt and Nazi state actions, tried by military tribunal 6 which have been created by the US military government for Germany in 1947. 13 defendants and bear employees were found guilty and were sentenced on in July that year, receiving prison terms ranging from one and a half years to eight years, including time already served. Among them was Fritz Termier, who helped to plan the monowitz camp in IG Farben's Boone work factory at Auschwitz, where medical experimentation was conducted, where 25,000 forced laborers were deployed. Fritz was sentenced to seven years, but released after only a couple for good behavior. I mean, yeah, sure. He helped kill a lot of Jewish people by performing medical

experimentation on them, but also minded as managers in prison, right? Never gotten trouble with the guards. So he got to let him out of her fears. He's barely evil now. The immediate post war, the victorious allies divided the IG Farben conglomerate into individual companies and bear now merged or rather re-emerged as an independent enterprise. So World War II definitely not a good look for bear. I mean, they didn't just not stand up against the

Nazis. They didn't just help the German war effort, which they would have would have been essentially forced to do. They seemingly went out of their fucking way to experiment on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Perhaps Hitler and his higher ups also compelled them to do that, but I don't know, I keep thinking of that quote by that bear exec IG Farben director Otto Ambrose. Our new friendship with the SS is very fruitful. Chill like this. It's gone a long way and rightfully so to help give bear their evil designation. On November 1945, the Allied forces confiscated the IG and placed all its sites under the control of Allied officers.

The company was to be dissolved. Its assets made available for war reparations. The Allied military government had initially planned to break up IG Farber into as many small companies as possible. Yet the British permitted Ulrich Haberand, who had been in charge of the lower Ryan consortium of Barris since 1943, to remain in his position. Soon they allowed production to resume as well. As the chemical industries products were essential to supply the local population with various

needed goods to keep post-war German society from completely fucking collapsing and creating an even bigger mess than the one they were already dealing with. Seen to the small companies that they'd envisioned would survive in the world market or even in Germany itself, the allies created 12 new companies for the federal Republic of Germany, one of those companies, right? Farben Fabriken, Baer AG, newly established December 19th, 1951. The Lee Verkouzen and three other sites allocated to the new company and in 1952 Baer also received the newly established Agfa, joints.com for photo fabrication as a subsidiary. And this newly established bear was struggle.

But the second time, just like in the First World War, it had lost its assets, including valuable patents, but they bounced back quickly. In 1946, while still under Allied control, bear began to take unwanted pets. There was so many in post-war Germany and turned them into nutrient dense protein bars precursors to the modern protein bars. Many gym efficient autos enjoy today. Apparently from the what I read golden retriever puppy and tabby cat kittens tasted the best ground up puppy and ground up kitten meat. So tender to smell some mouth except not really in this case because they had to be dried up and mushing your protein bar.

And of course bear to not do that. Not as evil as experimenting on concentration can't victim's actually, but I, I bet I made more of you more uncomfortable because of how highly emotional we meet sex are when it comes to our pets. Sorry about that. I was just getting bored with all the business talk. One, a hundred business and I needed something horrific to happen to stay interested. Okay, 1946. Well, still under allied control, what bear really did was it reestablish sales activities abroad. Then by the 1950s, the company was allowed to acquire foreign affiliates at first US and Latin America were the focus of these activities. Then soon the company also expanded into Europe outside of Germany in 1957, bear joined

with a Deutsche BP to successfully enter the petrochemical sector 1967 bears new site and Antwer Belgium launch operations by the mid-70s bear had returned to economic domination aiding in the German economic miracle as it was called and re-emerging as one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies bear also did little to come to terms with his Nazi past fritz termir right the guy convicted of war crimes for actions at Auschwitz elected to bear a G's supervisory board 1956 little to come to terms with is Nazi past. Fritz Termeer, right, the guy convicted of war crimes for actions at Auschwitz, elected to bear AG's supervisory board in 1956. A position he would retain until 1964, and that is not a good look. But it was a great chemist. So, you know, just this kind

of overlooked is Nazi activities and made a lot of money off him. Kind of like what the American government did with so many Manhattan Project scientists. Bear would make a lot of chemical advancements in the mid-20th century. They developed polyurethane chemistry, new crop protection products, new fibers and thermal plastics, new dye stuffs, for synthetic fibers and many other inventions all contributing to the company's expansion. New products such as cardiovascular medicines, dermal antifungals, and broad spectrum antibiotics emerged from Barrow' pharmaceutical laboratories. By 1963, bear once again employed nearly 80,000 people, sales had grown to approximately 4.7 billion douche marks.

Further rapid growth necessitated the reorganization of the bear group, which took effect in 1971. Bear intensified R&D efforts in the 70s, steadily expanding its pharmaceutical and crop protection research activities. 1979 ground was broken for the agricultural center in Mannheim, the 800 million doishmark project completed in 1988. The pharmaceutical research center in West Haven, Connecticut dedicated in the same year, successful products to emerge from bears' research laboratories in this period, including the Cardiovascular Drug Adalats in 1975, Bears first broad spectrum antibiotic from the class of, oh boy,

quinoleons, Cyprobae in 1986, and the anti-fungal crop protection product, Bailton or Baileton in 1976. Nobib's scandals with these Adelaide's great high-pusher high. It's a great high blood pressure medication and separate bay has cured many in STD knocked gotten gotten many a wing clean gotten gotten many a lady wing also clean Knocked bacterial pneumonia and who knows how many people out of their bodies? Right cured a lot of pesky skin and dangerous bone infections Not fair to only point out the bad shit they've done, not the good stuff. A major structural shift in sales also took place during this period, bears, pharmaceuticals, crop protection, plastics, and coding raw material sales expanded considerably in the 70s.

In regional terms, sales in North America and Asia and the Pacific, South Pacific in particular exploded. By 1987, 78% of the bearer Group sales were made outside of Germany. 45% of its employees worked in foreign subsidiaries. 1988 Bayer celebrated the 125th anniversary of its founding. Sales that year amounted to roughly 40 billion Deutsche Mark, which is about 23 and a half billion US dollars. At that time, while the company employed more than 165,000 people worldwide, additionally,

Bayer AG became the first German company to list shares in the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And they also survived yet another controversy. Let's talk about some really, really bad blood. Some medicines, for example, some of those user treat hemophilia are made from puppy blood. And you can't use painkillers with the puppies, so they have to feel everything. And they have such little blood to begin with, it doesn't make any sense not to drain them completely.

And then where they're dried out remains is a coonskin, Davy Crocket style, kind of, capa sorts. Sorry, I'm a fucking monster. No, some medicine, used to treat hemophilia comes from human blood. Hemophilia, why did it say things like that? Make me laugh. Hemophilia is from human blood. Hemophilia, why did the same things like that make me laugh?

Hemophilia is usually an inherited bleeding disorder in which the blood, I guess, stopped thinking about fucking horrific stuff. In which the blood does not clot properly. This can lead to spontaneous bleeding as well as bleeding following injuries or surgery. And until the mid-20th century, having hemophilia generally meant you were not going to live very long. In the early 20th century, life expectancy with hemophilia was 13 years. If you had a bad wound or needed a surgery,

you were probably going to die. You still couldn't get a blood transfusion since in the early 1900s. There was no way to store blood. People with hemophilia who needed a transfusion, typically received fresh whole blood from a very hard not to say puppy here. Family member, human family member,

that they were lucky enough to get an e. In 1937 Harvard Physicians, Arthur Patek, and FHL Taylor, published a paper describing anti-hemophilia globulin found in plasma. It can decrease clotting time in patients with hemophilia. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, fresh frozen plasma was transfused in patients in the hospital. However, each bag of the plasma contains so little of the necessary clotting factor

that huge volumes of it had to be administered. Many children experienced severe joint bleeds that were crippling, intercranial hemorrhaging, hemorrhaging could be fatal and often was. By 1960 life expectancy for a person with severe hemophilia was still less than 20 years old. But then modern pharmaceuticals began to provide more comprehensive treatment. 1965, Dr. Judith Graham Poole, a researcher at Stanford University, published a paper on, oh shit, published a paper on cryopresyapatite.

Cryopresyapatite. You get it. In a major breakthrough, she discovered that the precipitate left from thawing plasma was rich in factor eight, one of the essential blood proteins plays a role in aiding the blood to clot and response to injury. Because, fuck this word, that one I tried to say earlier, cryoprasaya patite contained a substantial amount of this factor in a smaller volume, it could be infused to control serious bleeding. Blood banks could produce and store the component making emergency surgery and elective procedures for patients with hemophilia much more manageable

Today Up the best way to treat hemophilia in a non-emergency situation is to replace the missing blood clotting factor so that the blood can clot properly This is done by infusing administeringing through a vein, commercially prepared factor concentrates. People team, if you really can learn how to perform these infusions themselves so that they can stop bleeding episodes and by performing the infusions on a regular basis can prevent most bleeding episodes. And all this is fucking great. This is good stuff, life saving stuff. Here comes the bad part. In order to not have your body reject these infusions, you have to eat puppy eyeballs. I'm trying to stop with the thoughts keep coming.

Get out of here devil. Go on. Why do you keep doing this to me? Where's that powerful button I need that I should have set up beforehand to get rid of you? Oh no. This isn't good. It's not even on this.

Oh boy. This is getting really awkward. There we go. Little legs. Little rates, little rates. Ah, it was on a different button, pick. Hey, I know the bad part is that unsurprisingly, they can be pretty easy to pass on dangerous diseases through blood transfusions, which is why in the early 80s,

at the start of the AIDS epidemic, the federal government, the US banned the use of prisoners, intravenous drug users, and gay men as donors for these medications. Their blood was considered high risk at that time, and there was no screening test for AIDS at that time. Bear ignored these laws and used high risk blood pools. You said, fuck it, to all the dangerous risks and produce their factor eight and factor nine clouding products for hemophiliax with blood that just came from anywhere. Even worse because they combined the blood of all donors to make their product over 10,000 people as blood got a big old fucking blood pool batch. Even a tiny amount of donors with disease blood were able to contaminate the entire pool.

That's what happened. And bear new, they were being reckless. So it was a bunch of random dudes mixing fucking leftovers together and hoping they'd be to contaminate the entire pool. And that's what happened. And bear knew they were being reckless. So it was a bunch of random dudes mixing fucking leftovers together and hoping they'd be able to create a tasty meal. Right, steaks were a wee bit higher. Scientists were working on those doctors,

people paid by bear to ignore the fact that pooling blood this way at the time was super fucking reckless and ridiculous. That it meant the odds were good that the blood would have HIV and or AIDS in it. What was supposed to be a drug that could save lives and ended up ending a lot of lives. And bear with continued distributing this infected medicine even after a test was developed to detect HIV and blood samples and eliminate the virus.

They continue to sell millions of dollars worth of an older version of this medication, not in Germany, not in the US or in other countries where the press would tear them apart if they found out what they were doing and litigation would be immense But in Latin America and Asia where there were fewer laws protecting consumers while marketing a newer safer product in the US and Europe They took a calculated financial risk that would inevitably lead to people unnecessarily dying all for money and Late 1974 as Hong Kong hemophiliax began testing positive for HIV. Some doctors wondered whether the bear's subsidiary cutter biological was sending knowingly AIDS-tented medicine into less developed nations. A 1985 test by the CDC found that 74% of hemophiliax patients using cutter biological medication

tested positive for HIV. And they knew that shit was tainted. In the end, somewhere around 20,000 human filets from around the globe would be unnecessarily infected with HIV as a result of using bears factor eight and nine. Bear has now paid out over $600 million in compensation for human filets to contract the disease. And I'm sure they made more than enough to cover the loss and still be wildly profitable. And their payout didn't bring any of those 20,000 people back

to life. This is back in 1995 when getting infected with HIV was a fucking death sentence. HIV tended to turn AIDS, turn into AIDS in eight to 10 years. And it wouldn't be until 1995, right? Nearly 15 years after AIDS was initially reported, the doctors began successfully treating AIDS with a combination of drugs. In their defense, bear said it continued to tell in the older version, because some customers doubted the new ones effectiveness. It's a fucking dumb reason, and because some countries were slow to approve its sale. Those are not good reasons. They said, bear has always behaved responsibly, ethically and humanely, to provide lifesaving products for the global hemophilia community. Fuck off. 74% of the patients that claimed it was treating ethically and humanely were being

infected with HIV from their medicine. And I have to imagine over 90% of those who got infected would go on to die from AIDS. And despite the public statements and turn of documents revealed that bear they for sure knew what they were doing was wrong. In 1985, a company task force even asked, can we in good faith continue to ship non-heated coagulation products to Japan? And the answer was $$$ bills, y'all. Sure can. Sure can. The money's right. 74% of the recipients contracting HIV was apparently viewed as an acceptable loss. This would not be their only HIV related controversy. Nelson Mandela signed the Medicine's Control Act in 1997, which allowed South Africa's health minister

to override patent protections to use generic AIDS drugs if there was a need. Bear was one of several large pharmaceutical companies that filed a joint suit in 1998 against the South African government for patent infringement and a gross attempt to deprive victims of AIDS of desperately needed cheaper medication.

I fucked up. They could have let this nation, you know, just continue to make generic versions of their life saving drug, even help them, good chance for them to do something to make up for what they did to all those team of philiacs. But instead, once again, they put profit before lives. After three years of an international outrage, the case was withdrawn and the government made their generic medicine. How many people died because it wasn't available for the poor during those three years of an international outrage, the case was withdrawn and the government made their generic medicine. How many people died because it wasn't available for the poor during those three years?

Bear also got back into the human experimentation game in the 1980s, though this time, they would not experiment on unwilling participants, like they had with the Nazis. But these participants might have been unwilling to have known about the drug's effects. Bear being bearer, apparently, they placed hundreds of patients at risk of potentially fatal infections by failing to disclose crucial safety information to six hospitals at the start of a UK drug trial. Bear's own research, as early as 1909,

showed that the antibiotic, cipraflaxisin, soldus-aproxin, reacted badly with various opiate-based sedatives or premeds, commonly given to patients ahead of surgery. Research showed that the drug was not properly absorbed by many patients' impairing disability to kill bacteria, placing the patient at risk of sometimes fatal infections.

This known information was not relayed to hospitals before the trials, before up to 650 people underwent surgery, violating their human rights. The trials resulted nearly half the people at one test center in Southampton developing potentially life-threatening infections. At least one patient died. Another developed an infection so severe, relatives were initially told they would not survive. Nearly half the patients at Southampton hospitals trust developed post-operative wound infections

required emergency therapy. Infection and mortality rates of the five other trial sites never revealed on the grounds of confidentiality. So I have to think other people died as well. Also unnecessary. Bear later, after being legally pressured, confirmed that it did know of absorption problems with the drug before the study began.

However, they still used the dangerous drug for two years and are still keeping trial record secret. And a menace to avoid paying compensation to the relatives of patients injured or killed in the course of unapproved trials Meanwhile, Soproxen has been found to also lead to tendon disorders or ruptures the FDA stated that the agency will update the labeling package insert for all marketed Flo run Quai Nalounds these fucking words, quay, nalounds, these fucking words, flaw, flaw run, quay, nalounds. It's about 70 letters long to include a warning about the possibility of 10 in rupture. In 2008, the FDA announced black box warnings of 10 in rupture among those given the antibiotics. In 2013, added risk of irreversible nerve damage. In the year since, some FDA approved, oh boy,

Floor Run Quinnalowns. We're swiftly withdrawn from the market after severe adverse reactions and several deaths. Who comes up with these fucking names, by the way? Right? Can we move away from Latin at this point? Do we still have to use that medicine? Can we just call it like Jimmy Four?

I tried this, Marty 17, and see how that treats you. But no, they have names like Truff, Truff of Loxasin, which was drawn in 1999 because it damaged livers. Others became, but others became the drug of choice both for serious infections and for routine complaints. And that has led to a lot of suffering. From the 1980s to the end of 2015, the FDA received reports for more than 60,000 patients, detailing hundreds of thousands of serious adverse events associated with five different flora quinniolalounds, flora-rin quinniolounds, still in the market. Most commonly

tendon rupture as well as neurological and psychiatric symptoms, including 6,575 reports of deaths. and psychiatric symptoms, including 6,575 reports of deaths. However, how many people's lives have been saved by some of these, also highly effective antibiotics. Those deaths not been listed in any easy-to-find place, and that's a bummer, because that would be very helpful in determining the morality of continuing to market and use this medicine. For example, if over 6,500 people died because of this drug, but over 60 million people were saved by the drug and no other less harmful drug could have been used to save them, then instead of being evil for bear to market this drug, it would be a miracle of the drug of

sorts and an awesome drug to market. And were these drugs more or less dangerous than their counterparts, right? Some of the evil, some of the easy to find examples of bears evil don't actually read as evil at all to me. They read as unfortunate, like this next example. 2002 after nine month investigation, a Peruvian Congressional subcommittee found significant evidence of criminal responsibility by both the agrochemical company bear and the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture in the poisoning of 42 children in the remote and the in village of Takamaraka in October of 1999. The children were stricken after eating the school breakfast

contaminated with the organophosphate pesticide methyl parathy on. The children died in a gruesome death. Many of them in the arms of parents as they were carried down the mountain to the nearest health center. 24 kids died before they could reach medical treatment. Eighteen other survived with significant long-term health and developmental consequences. And that's fucking horrible.

I mean, how could bear do this? Well, they didn't actually do this. A police investigation found that a village woman mixed pesticide powder into a bag of milk substitute and then served it as part of school lunch. The woman had a hope to poison a dog who was chasing her chickens and she had no idea that the pesticide was that toxic. Fuckin' what? How does you not know that?

The pesticide was heavily marketed under the name of Falladol to small farmers throughout Peru, the great majority of whom speak Quetja only and are illiterate. Bear packaged the pesticide a white powder that resembles powdered milk and has no strong chemical odor in a small plastic bag labeled in Spanish and displaying a picture of vegetables. The label provided no usable safety information such as pictograms for the majority of users in remote villages who are illiterate and thus couldn't assess the danger of the product. But this bothers me. Because how is it bears fault that people in this area are illiterate?

I mean, it's sad to me, but whose fault is it? I would think the government, they're way more responsible for a lack of education than bear. This is like me being sued because someone dies of a heart attack because they're very attached to puppies and they get really fucking worked up about my publisher earlier. And now I'm responsible because I didn't put up a warning at the top of the show. Remain calm. Sometimes I will joke around and say outrageous things, probably about puppies that are not actually true. Don't get yourself too worked up.

I mean, is this sad that this happened in this proven village? Yeah, it's a fucking saddest. What should bear have to put pictures on products in order to not be sued? I mean, going forward in this example, yes, in this region, which a company has to make sure that the people buying their products know how to fucking read before selling products to them. I don't know.

It seems like a weird slippery slope. Now, here's more info, more info on what happened. And of course, it is super sad. A child walked by, picked up the familiar bag, took it to school, where it was mixed with other bags, and then eaten with school lunch. They didn't have a fucking good bag storage situation apparently in this village. The family's filed a suit against bear in October of 2001.

Bear was found responsible in the deaths. The settlement amount appears to not have been publicly disclosed. I don't know. I guess I just think if you, it is a choice to learn the official language of your nation or not and to learn how to read or not at a certain level and sad. I don't know.

There's a lot of economic, you know, factors, socioeconomic things, if you feed into this, but if you can't read warning labels and you end up fucking putting a pesticide into your milk, you know, fucking formula, I mean, whose fault is that really? I mean, it's not like the pick the back at a picture of milk on it Yeah, this seems like a bad against the preslope leading further away from personal responsibility to me subsequent controversies in late 2000s for bear would have to do with his birth control products in 2009 Felicitis for a philicitis Philicitis

Roro who was 25 of the time suddenly collapsed and her heart stopped beating for 20 minutes. In emergency open heart surgery, doctors found huge blood clots blocking the main artery tour long. She didn't have any preexisting conditions, didn't have a blood disorder, didn't smoke, exercised frequently, so what happened? After finding a new alternative explanation, doctors pointed the finger at Baer's birth control pill, Yasminal, which Roer had been taken for eight months when she collapsed. According to several studies, birth control pills containing dross,

B-run route, Jesus Christ, he's fucking worth, dross, and I put financiation, examples like phonetic spellings, but when you're looking at these words, if you haven't got a medical school, it's like, what am I ever going to fucking say this again? Containing dross, speed, renown, such as bears, yasmine, now, were found to increase the risk of an embellishment or thrombosis by up to three times compared to previous generations of contraceptive pills.

However, pills like these are still being sold by numerous companies around the world because they work really, really well. Over 99% effective. And most medicine does carry a small risk of dangerous side effects, right? Very recently, bear announced in July 2018 that it would discontinue sales of a sure birth control implants, another birth control device by the end of the year, bowing to a lengthy campaign by health advocates and thousands of women to get the device off the market.

This implants had a troubled history. It's been the subject of an estimated 16,000 lawsuits or claims filed by women who report in severe injuries, including perforation of the uterus and the phloetian tubes, several deaths, including of a few infants have also been attributed to the device or to complications from it. Bear said its decision to halt sales of the device not related to the litigation or safety issues but to a decline in use as women have other options now. Bear has repeatedly denied the implant as dangerous or caused injuries. The Assure implant consists of two small coils made of a nickel alloy and polyester-like fiber placed to the vagina into the phlopian tubes designed to create inflammatory response

that causes scar tissue to form blocking the tubes. The US was the only country where the device considered a non-surgical sterilization implant was still being sold as of 2018. Bear had already stopped selling it in England, Brazil, Canada, France, and elsewhere. In 2016, the FDA ordered placement of a black box warning that warned of injury risk, including that the implant could travel into the abdomen and pelvic cavity, possibly requiring surgical removal. However, a lot of women have stated that the devices worked out very well for them.

Just look at one more bear controversy than a shady ongoing business practice before moving on to Monsanto, which would be a smaller portion of the show. A federal law requires that Medicaid be charged the lowest possible price available for medications, and if a company offers to sell a drug to a private insurance company or pharmacy, at an even lower price, they've got to issue a rebate to Medicaid. In brokerage deal with Kaiser Permanente, 1995, bear broke the law by agreeing to sell Kaiser the antibiotic CIPRO for less than they charged Medicaid after Kaiser threatened to start using Johnson and Johnson cheaper flocks instead.

Rather than follow the law, notify Medicaid about the price change, which require them to issue tens of millions of dollars in rebates, bear then followed Kaiser's suggestion to relabel the drugs with Kaiser's name and a different drug identification number. And then a year later they started doing the same thing with their blood pressure medication, Adalat CC. And then they got caught in 2003. Bear reached a settlement with the government still claiming their business dealings with Kaiser were responsible and conducting good faith. Come on! You fuckers trying to sneak something by the, uh, the law and you got caught. At least own up to it.

Despite their claims that they actually responsibly agreed to plead guilty and pay $257 million. $5.6 million for the overcharges and $251.6 million in civil penalties. And what was the largest Medicaid fraud settlement in history at that time? Not good, but evil? I don't think so. Big corporations are constantly trying to circumvent finance laws just like individuals or constantly trying to push the envelope

when it comes to tax write offs or tax loopholes. Evil or human nature with that one. Maybe the scariest known thing bear consistently has done is to try to suppress scientific information and they have done that successfully sometimes. Bear reportedly asked bacteriologists and scientists who want to test bear products for antibiotic research, to sign a document stating they will inform bear ageing and writing

of test results and will not publish or commercialize them without written permission of bear. This brings up many issues of drug companies suppressing scientific information that does not suit their commercial purposes. Bear also throws around a lot of money to get what they want. Bear donates over $500,000 a year to the American Heart Association, which makes plain why the AHA has endorsed only Bear Aspirin. Right? Should they be allowed to donate like that to an agency that then endorses them?

A little bit of a conflict of interest there. Bear also contributes over $500,000 a year to the American Diabetes Association, is a sustaining member of the American Medical Writers Association, and contributes to the American Veterinary Association, Arthritis Foundation, BioTechnology Institute, Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute, and on and on and on. In addition, Bear donates a lot of money to political parties. They admit to supporting the further education of doctors and Portugal by paying for them to go on trips around the world Maybe in an attempt to influence their prescription writing They had the Portuguese state medical board Carlos Rabira

One of many who has strong concerns about bearers motives Bear also diminishes critical coverage of their actions bear once forced to watchdog group coordination against bear dangers Formally known as bear watch clever coordination against bear dangers. Formerly known as bear watch, clever. It seems you did there. To a throather domain name and trademark group name by threatening them with a heavy court cost, or threatening them with a heavy court cost,

actions later deemed illegal, bullying by the German court. Okay, so there you go. So I've laid out all the evidence, so to speak, that people point to when trying to prove that bear is evil. I'll share more thoughts on what I think about their evil, or not evil nature. After it goes to the second chunk of evidence to when trying to prove that bear is evil. I'll share more thoughts on what I think about their evil, or not evil nature.

After it goes to the second chunk of evidence that bear is the fucking worst it's association with Monsanto. But first, seems like a solid spot to have some ads. Today's time suck is brought to you by bear pharmaceuticals spelled B-E-A-R, not to be confused with those German fuckers. Bear pharmaceuticals. The only corporation in the world with the balls to admit that we're full on fucking evil bitches. We don't give a fuck about

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Hmm, wow, what a great new sponsor. I gotta say, I love the honesty, the transparency, it's very refreshing. I hope to buy more ads in the future. Now for some more ads. The quote unquote, real sponsors, like the Suckverse isn't a real place. Really hope that we don't happen to be sponsored by bear be a white ER right now. I don't know some of I didn't know some what I know prior to this recording and we have to go over so many potential sponsors and accept to decline them every week and honestly

I have no fucking idea where we're out with bear. So that's awkward. Here we go Hope you heard some great ads from sponsors, not connected to Nazi human experimentation, back to this week's story. Bear BAYER has of course come under fire for its connection with Monsanto. Bear bought Monsanto in 2018 for about six bucks. No, yeah, right. Now they paid a cool $63 billion.

Monsanto was a leading producer of chemical agricultural and biochemical products from its founding 1901 until it became a division of bear and no longer operates under its own name. Now we gotta look into their history. They have been consistently awesome. They have sold mostly unicorns, the fart rainbows to rich kids

to raise a little bit of money for themselves and a lot of money for sick orphans. Now at the Monsanto Chemical Works, I was founded 1901 by John F. Queenie, a purchasing agent for a wholesale drug company, to manufacture the synthetic sweetener, saccharine, then produced only in Germany. Queenie was a tough cigar smoking Irishman with a sixth grade education and a business idea that would turn out to be far more profitable than he could have ever imagined.

Queenie invested $1500 of his own money, borrowed another $3,500 from local Epson Salts manufacturer to launch a new company, which he named Monsanto after his wife's maiden name. So pretty adorable beginning actually. The firm carried out full-scale saccharin production beginning the following year in 1902, added caffeine and vanilla to his product line over the next years and in 1905, four years after forming, they began turning a profit. The German cartel, the control the market for sacrum was not pleased and they cut their price from $4.50

to a dollar a pound, tried to force Queenie out of business. The young company faced other challenges as well. Questions arose about the safety of saccharin and the US Department of Agriculture even tried to ban it. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist for the USDA, was charged with investigating dangerous foods and looked into the safety of saccharin, starting in 1908. Didn't think it was good. Wiley told President Teddy Motherfucking Roosevelt, everyone who ate that sweet corn was deceived.

He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact, he was eating a coal-tower product, totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health. But Roosevelt himself loves saccharine, and in a heated exchange, angrily answered, widely by stating, anybody who says saccharine is injurious or injurious to health is an idiot. And that episode actually proved to be the undue and of widely's career, which is unfortunate because widely was not an idiot. uh, very likely is not good for you. Uh, yes, saccharine was discovered by a dude who worked on coal tar derivatives. He noticed a sweet taste on his hand one night after fucking him out of some coal tar. And that led to discovering saccharine, a zero

calorie sugar substitute, commonly sold to sweet and low, that has repeatedly and consistently led to cancer in, uh, male rats, but not consistently led to cancer in human studies. However, a lot of people wonder if that's because big corporations like Monsanto have buried the results of studies that do link saccharine to cancer, just speculation. With the Coca-Cola companies, one of Monsanto's chief customers, sales reached a million dollars in 1915. And that's saccharine into that soda. Monsanto also then began producing aspirin in 1917 ironically considering the later acquisition

benefiting from bear losing its US aspirin patent in World War one After Queenie was diagnosed with cancer in late 1920s Also ironic ironic perhaps his only son Edgar became president Where the father had been a classic entrepreneur Edgar Monsanto Queenie was a fucking empire builder with the grand vision Edgar senior to establish a company, but Edgar junior would make it an international powerhouse Under Edgar Queenie and his successors Monsanto extended his reach similar to what bear had also done the research and development Into a phenomenal number of products right plastics, resins rubber goods fuel additives Polyurethane, pet

dildos, no, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl, siding, dishwasher, detergent, antifreeze, popsicles, nope, fertilizers, yep, herbicides, pesticides, fucking rubber duckies, maybe, I don't know, produced styrene, a component of synthetic rubber, which was vital to the US war effort in World War II, and all that was fine. But later, there was a dark side to their expansion just like they had been with bear. In 1948, Monsanto began to make a new chemical in its plant in nitro-West Virginia called Weedbug

by the workers at that time. A byproduct of the process was the creation of a chemical that would later be known as dioxin. The name dioxin now refers to a group of highly toxic chemicals that have been linked to heart disease, liver disease, human reproductive disorders, and a number of developmental problems. Even in small amounts, dioxin persists in the environment and accumulates in the body.

In 1997, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified the most powerful form of dioxin as a substance that causes cancer in humans. In 2001, the U.S. government listed the chemical as a known human carcinogen. And back on March 8, 1949, a massive explosion rocked Monsanto's nitro plant when a pressure valve blew on a container, cooking up a batch of herbicide. Noise from the release screamed so loud, and of such a duration, it apparently drowned out the emergency steam whistle for five minutes. And a plume of vapor and white smoke drifted across the plant and then out over the town. Residue from the explosion coated the interior of the building and nose inside with what workers

described as a fine black powder. Many filter skin prickle were told to immediately scrub down within days workers experienced skin eruptions. Many were soon diagnosed with claracny, conditions similar to common acting but more severe, longer lasting, potentially disfiguring. Others felt intense pains in their legs, chest, rest other parts of their body, a confidential medical report of the time said the explosion caused a systemic intoxication in the workers involving most major organ systems. And doctors who examined four of the most serious injured men detected a strong odor coming from them when they were all together in a closed room.

We believe these men are excreting a foreign chemical through their skins to confidential report to Monsanto noted. Court records indicated that 226 plant workers became ill. And you know what? Uh, accidents happen. However, how Monsanto responded to this accident was not cool. Monsanto significantly downplayed the impact stating that the contaminant affecting workers was fairly slow acting and caused only an irritation of the skin. Listing everyone, one of our chemical plants explode and send some kind of, you know, not the best toxin into the air. Yeah, sure.

I mean, a little bit. But hey, don't freak out. Do you send toxin to the air when you sneeze? He assured you. So just think of our plant explosion as a big old sneeze rule. And some people got a little snott on them. And no one likes to get someone snott on them, but that's life. And you can cry about it or you can take a shower, clean out the snott, and get back to

fucking work. After the explosion, nitro plant was repaired and continued to produce herbicides, rubber products, other chemicals. In the 1960s, the factory manufactured agent Orange, the powerful herbicide, which the US military used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War, and which later was the focus of many a lawsuit. You know, especially by veterans containing that they had been harmed by exposure. Listen, everyone, is Agent Orange technically kind of bad for you?

Yeah, sure. I mean, you're not going to feel great if you say drink a lot of Agent Orange, technically kind of bad for you. Yeah, sure. I mean, that can feel great if you say, drink a lot of Agent Orange, but you're also not gonna feel great if you drink a lot of Orange Fanta, okay? Think of Agent Orange as a soda. A little fine, but too much is to go and mill your fucking face off.

You get it? But maybe it's a little worse than that. Recently, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam reported that some 400,000 people have suffered death or permanent injury from exposure to Agent orange and estimated that two million people have suffered from illnesses caused by exposure and that half million babies born with birth defects due to the effects of Asian orange. Also according to the group, the Vietnam Veterans of America, roughly 300,000 veterans have died from Asian orange exposure almost five times as many as the 58,000 who died

in combat. Perhaps due to 11 million gallons of age orange being sprayed and Vietnam over 20 million acres, hundreds of thousands of veterans have had children born sterile or born with various birth defects. But to be fair, do you have any fucking idea how many people could tell me X from too much orange phanta or how many people are moved closer to diabetes due to too much orange phanta. Or how many people are moved closer to diabetes due to too much orange phanta or still not done how many cavities can be detraised can be traced directly to orange phanta. Right? So which was worse? No, Asian oranges is terrific. And Monsanto paid out hundreds of millions of dollars over the years has so far in numerous lawsuits for poison people with it.

And here is what might be evidence that Monsanto is super duper evil documents later leaked the proof scientist knew that agent orange was a carcinogen would cause cancer. However, and this is such a big however, that really changes the narrative regarding Monsanto and Agent Orange that is sadly rarely showing up in poorly written clickbait articles to US government through the Department of Defense compelled Monsanto and eight other wartime government contractors, including

Dow Chemical to manufacture Agent Orange to their exact specifications. So they should have told people about the cancerous effects of Agent Orange. Didn't ask them to told them that they legally had to do this. Thanks to the Defense Production Act of 1950, an act still around, by the way, in amended form that allows US government to essentially take over companies during times of war and force them to quote, accept and prioritize contracts from materials deemed necessary for national defense, regardless of a loss incurred on business. And if you don't comply, they will slap felonies on you. So how about that shit? Why doesn't that show up in more articles? Because it doesn't satisfy

the outrage porn narrative, that's why, or should I say it doesn't satisfy the anti-monstante outrage porn narrative. I personally think it does feed the how scary are some of our laws here, narrative. I mean, this acts allows the free government of the US to go full fucking fascist and force businesses to do whatever bidding it deems necessary, even if it's unethical. I do understand the logic, but pretty scary. One of the many reasons I'm in favor of much smaller governments than the one we have. Ah, okay. So was Montsanto really responsible for all the Agent Orange horrors?

Or was it Uncle Sam? Sure sounds like the government is more to blame to me. Just like with Montsanto's older herbicides, the manufacturing of Asian orange created dioxin as a byproduct. As for the nitro plants, dioxin waste, some was burned in incinerators, some dumped in landfills or storm drains, some allowed to run in the streams.

Several former nitro employees filed lawsuits in federal court charging that Monsanto had no in the exposed them to chemicals that caused long-term health problems, including cancer, scudy, and heart disease. They alleged that Monsanto knew that many chemicals used in nitro were potentially harmful, but kept that information from them. Before going to trial in 1988, Monsanto agreed to settle most of the cases by making a single

lump payment of 1.5 million. Monsanto also agreed to drop its claim to collect 305,000 in court costs from six retired Monsanto workers who had unsuccessfully charged in another lawsuit, the Monsanto had recklessly exposed them to doxin, which they did. Monsanto had attached lean to the retirees homes, though, to guarantee collection of that debt. Monsanto stopped producing doxin in Nitro 1969,

but the toxic chemical can still be found around the, the plant site and the area surrounding the plant site. Repeated studies have found elevated levels of docs and nearby rivers, streams, and fish. Meanwhile, 500 miles to the south in Aniston, Alabama, a monstanto produced a monstanto plant produced PCPs as industrial coolants and insulating fluids for transformers and other electrical equipment

for over four decades of 1929, 1971. And in February 2003, residents of Aniston won a $300 million settlement from on Santo in a now famous court case where they argued the multinational corporation responsible for polluting the town and harming its citizens. I do, I do find it a frustrating. You can't find any specific info online regarding whether or not rates for cancer and other diseases or birth defects attributed to the PCBs were much higher in this location than other locations in the nation. Without that info, impossible to know, you know, how much the town was truly harmed by the pollution.

They were harmed, not doubting that. Just wish more details were public. One of the wonder chemicals in the 20th century PCBs, extremely versatile fire resistant and central to many American industries as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, and sealants, and also their toxic. A member of a family of chemicals that mimic hormones, PCBs have been linked to damage in the liver and in the neurological immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. The EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, part of the Department

of Health and Human Services, classifies PCBs as probable carcinogens. At the Montsanto plant excess PCBs were dumped in a nearby open pit landfill or allowed to flow off the property with stormwater. Some ways poured directly into snow creek, which runs alongside the plant and it was into a larger stream, a chakalaka creek. I apparently that is house grounds. Today, though, people fished the hell out of chakalaka creek catching eaten spotted bass, large amounts of bass, blue catfish and more.

Eats those fish seem to be doing just fine. PCBs also turned up in private lawns after the company invited Aniston residents to use soil from the plant for their lawns according to the Aniston star. For decades, the people of Aniston breathed air planted gardens, drank from wells, fish and rivers, swam and creek contaminated with the PCBs without knowing about the danger. Wouldn't be into the 1990s, 20 years after Monsanto stopped making PCBs in Aniston, the widespread public awareness of the problem took hold. Monsanto agreed to clean up the town, but PCB can remain in human systems for a lifetime, so too late for people exposed to dangerous levels.

You know, they shut down production in 1971, and then did all PCB operations in America in 1977. Did Monsanto know how toxic these chemicals were? We'll never know for certain. In the 70s, Monsanto turned towards a new and emerging field, not how chemical components can be altered or changed, but how to engineer biological components like DNA structures, biotechnology. 1971 Monsanto created a molecular biology group

for research and plant genetics. This would become very profitable for them. The next year, Monsanto scientists hit gold. It became the first company to genetically modify a plant cell. The company said, it will now be possible to introduce virtually any gene into plant cells with the ultimate goal of improving crop productivity. Backing up, why would a company want to modify plant cells? Well, crops that have been modified

at the cellular level are called genetically modified organisms or GMOs. And here we go. Welcome to the new world order. Modifying plant's animals is not technically all that new. For thousands of years, humans have used breeding methods to modify organisms. Corn, cattle, even dogs have been selectively bred

over generations to have certain desired traits. Right, within the last few decades, trying really hard not to talk about polyurethane pet dildos after talking about dogs again. Within the last few decades, however modern advances in biotechnology have allowed scientists to directly modify the DNA of microorganisms, crops, and animals, and genetically modified plants can be resistant to certain kinds of diseases, They can kill off a whole season of crops. I'm plunging area into famines. Very valuable.

Genetically engineered crops produce higher yields have a longer shelf life. More resistant to diseases and pests, even taste better. These benefits are a plus for both farmers and consumers. For example, higher yields longer shelf life may lead to lower prices for consumers. And pestistant crops mean that the farmers don't need to buy and use as many pesticides to grow quality crops. Companies like Monsanto say that GMOs, their products,

the key to alleviating third-world starvation, concerns about overpopulation, and many other issues that face humankind. And maybe they are. I'm not gonna claim to be a scientist, who can truly understand how dangerous or not they are. So far, it does seem that study after study after study has shown that GMOs are not hazardous to human health.

But GMOs are controversial nonetheless. Genetic engineering typically changes in organism in a way that would not occur naturally, even common for scientists to insert genes into an organism from entirely different organism. And this could raise the risk of, say, unexpected allergic reactions to some GMO foods. Other concerns include the possibility of genetically engineered foreign DNA spreading to non-GMO plants and animals. But so far, none of the GMOs approved for consumption have caused these problems. And GMO food sources are subject to regulations and rigorous safety assessments.

Back in the 80s and 90s, Monsanto faced a lot of screwed in criticism for selling seeds of genetically modified plants, mostly by people who are worried that there would be unintended health consequences to eating GMOs. Most of that criticism would die out, however, that we'll talk a bit about how GMOs and Monsanto continued to be controversial in a very different way. Not only did they develop new pesticide resistant seeds, but Monsanto also worked to develop hormones that would make animals produce more.

In the early 1980s, Monsanto, along with three other chemical pharmaceutical companies, began researching the new technology they believe would revolutionize the dairy industry. Through genetic engineering, researchers created, re, oh my gosh, recombinant, there we go, recombinant, bovine growth hormones recombinant bovine growth hormones. To increase, I'm proud of myself for that one, to increase milk production in dairy

cows by 10 to 25%. The FDA approved Monsanto's RBGH product, POSILAC for commercial use, or they approved POSILAC for commercial use, November 5, 1993. Most studies say this product causes zero negative effects in humans. Some studies say it might be harmful. Overall a lot of the studies are controversial in and of themselves with many different sides, all with their own motives, claiming to interpret the same data very differently. The FDA would approve RBGH without any long-term studies which raised a lot of eyebrows, and

that would skyrocket Monsanto's profits. Is that necessarily nefarious? Some think so. And they point to a revolving door between Monsanto's higher up positions and those at the FDA is proof. Michael Arteller, for example, was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the FDA commissioner before joining the law firm in Washington, 191 where he worked to secure FDA approval of Monsanto's

artificial growth hormone before returning to the FDA as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the FDA's Deputy Commissioner for Operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a Senior Vice President. Linda J. Fisher, Assistant Administrator of the EPA, when she left the agency in 1993, became a Vice President at Monsanto for 1995 to 2000, and then returned to the EPA, EPA as a Deputy Administ administrator the next year William D. Ruckleshawz, former EPA administrator and Mickey Cantor, former U.S. trade representative

each served on Monsanto's board after leaving the government. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto's corporate law department in the 1970s and then would later write the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial GMC patent rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all GMC companies. Now this all looks bad, but devil's advocate. In the military, for example, people go from serving in the private sector, right? And then into the politics, sometimes back on the government side,

could that also be bad? Yeah, definitely, is it always bad? No People could have went back and forth between Monsanto and the FDA or the EPA because one side Just offered them a better job more money better benefits and then the other side did and then the other side did again You know that kind of thing people do work in different areas of the same field all the time I know that's not an exciting. What the fuck is going on here? We're gonna get these motherfuckers and tear it all down. Kind of point of view. But I think it's important to try and look at all this

as logically and unemotionally as possible. Could be shady, for sure could be shady. Not necessarily shady. Back to the story of RGBH with more cheaper milk on offer by larger dairy, smaller local dairy's, quickly found it hard to keep up, and many went out of business. Shitty for small businesses, of course, but evil.

Any more evil than Walmart and Target, another big box stores or online retailers like Amazon, putting smaller businesses out of the market. Then in the 2000s, Monsanto would go after dairies that advertised that they didn't use RBGH, saying that that type of advertising adversely affected Monsanto's profits. Even if the advertising itself didn't say anything about whether or not RBGH was good, just that the particular dairy didn't use it. One of these dairies was Klein Peter and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As a suggestion of a marketing consultant,

the dairy began to advertise his milk as coming from RBGH free cows in 2005, and the label began appearing on Klein Peter milk cartons and in county literature, including a new website of Klein Peter products that proclaimed, we treat our cows with love, not with RBGH, and the dairy sales then sort. For Client Peter, it's simply a matter of giving consumers more information about the product

and maybe throw in some shade on Monsanto. And Monsanto got mad. And letter to the Federal Trade Commission on February 2007, Monsanto said that not withstanding the overwhelming evidence that there is no difference in the milk from Calisbury with its product, milk processors persist in claiming on their labels and advertisements that the use of RBST is somehow harmful. Either the cows or the people who consume milk from RBST supplemented cows. Monsanto called the Commission to investigate what a call to deceptive advertising and labeling

practices of milk processors such as climb Peter, accusing them of misleading customers by falsely claiming that there were health and safety risks associated with milk from these RBST self-men and cows. But climb Peter didn't explicitly make any of those claims. It just said they didn't use the growth hormone. But isn't an insinuation clear, right? Our milk is made naturally, not in a big chemical hormone early puberty-inducing cancer lab kind of way.

You might not like this, but I think Monsanto had reason here to be a little pissed off about the label. I'm glad they weren't able to force anyone to not be able to state that their milk was RBGH free, but I do understand their frustration. I mean, I imagine if you were in the coffee coffee business and you figured out a way to grow coffee beans twice the size of regular beans on the same amount of water that were just as easy

to pick and not harmful. And this discovery allowed you to cut your price, propound the ground beans down substantially, make more profit at a lower price and you started making a killing out there in the coffee world. And then someone else, someone mad and honestly, probably a little bit jealous that they didn't think of at first and can't compete. They start marketing their coffee in ways like we grow our coffee naturally. Right.

Some insinuation of not in some kind of mutant monster abomination might give you a third arm kind of way. Yeah, you might be a little naughty as well. Despite a lot of negative press armed with money makers, RGBH and Roundup, press armed with money makers, RGBH and Roundup, Monsanto is doing very well. It rebrands itself as a life sciences company and then in 2002, also as an advertising company. And now it looks towards developing genetically modified seeds. Monsanto develop GM seeds that would resist its own

herbicide Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops and then they're selling both the shit at the same people. Business wise, it is pretty genius. And there are a lot of benefits to these seeds by using Roundup Ready Soybean Seeds to farmer can spend less time turning to the fields with monosantos seeds, farmer plants, their crop, treats it later with Roundup to kill the weeds, takes a place of labor intensive weed control and plowing.

Excuse me, as so monosantopadens of seeds making them intellectual property as companies do all the time with their products, right? Not exactly in this case. For nearly all of its history, the US patent and trademark office had refused to grant patents on seeds specifically, viewing them as life forms with too many variables to ever be patented. But then in 1980, the US Supreme Court and a five to four decision turned seeds in an intellectual property, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world's food supply.

In his decision, the court extended patent law to cover a live human-made microorganism. In this case, the organism wasn't even seed. Rather, it was so-demonus bacterium developed by General Electric to clean up oil spills. The president was now set, Mon Santo and then took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Mon-Santo has become the world leader in genetic modification to seeds

and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company. But again, what pointed at is being evil is that even immoral at all. I mean, the US patent and trademark office used to refuse to grant patents to seeds, viewing them as life forms with too many variables to ever be patented, but that was before modern science figured out how to genetically modify food, times changed, and so did patents. While pushing this GM agenda, Monsanto was also buying up conventional seed companies. In 2005, Monsanto paid 1.4 billion for seminus, which controlled 40% of the US market for lettuce tomatoes and other vegetable and fruit seeds. Two weeks later, it announced the acquisition of the country's third largest cotton seed company,

emergent genetics for 300 million. Monsanto's acquisitions fueled explosive growth, transforming the St. Louis-based corporation into the largest seed company in the world. And then Monsanto did use its enormous size to start bullying people around. Since these GMOs are technically pieces of technology, and Monsanto did use its enormous size to start bullying people around. Since these GMOs are technically pieces of technology and Monsanto has the patents to, you know, to this technology, this enabled them to be able to go after anyone they thought might be infringing on their intellectual property. Even saving seeds from the year before, instead of buying new ones now counted as theft according to Monsanto. Farmer to buy Monsanto's

patented Roundup ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seed produced after each harvest for replanting, or to sell the seed to other farmers. This means that farmers have to buy new seed every year. Those increased sales coupled with ballooning sales of roundup have been a fucking bananza for Montsanto. As a 2008 article in Vanity Fair would report Montsanto goes after farmers, farmers co-ops, seed dealers, anyone to suspect may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams and court documents reveal

Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American Heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out in fields and farm towns with a secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, co-ops, infiltrate community meetings, gather intel about informants, about farming activities, and this seems pretty fucked up.

This is one of the reasons why anti-monopoly laws were originally passed to prevent any one company from being able to completely fucking dominate a business sector like this and eliminate the competition. In this scenario, the consumer always suffers. This type of capitalism reminds me in a weird way of communism, and eliminate the competition. In this scenario, the consumer always suffers, right? This type of capitalism reminds me in a weird way of communism,

but instead of the state telling you how you have to live your life, well now the corporation does. I mean, take what Monsanto was doing here and apply it to say clean drinking water rights. Imagine that Amazon or Walmart or Disney is able to buy up all or virtually all the drinking water rights for an entire nation

or region and now if you want water to drink, you have to buy it from them, right? In this terrifying scenario, they fucking own you. They decide to their ability to price gouge, right? Price set ability to take their product off the market at any time for any reason to literally decide if you live or die. No corporation obviously should be able to do anything like that. No corporation to have anywhere fucking close to that much power. Just like for another example, no one landlord should be able to own all of the rentals in

a giant portion of the country. And then decide, you know, out of those who can't afford to buy a home, who gets to live inside and who can fuck off. It's outrageous. And that's why we need government regulation. I'm a big, you know, or I'm excuse me, I'm anti big government, but I only a fool is anti-all government. The common citizen does need protection from the Monsanto's of the world because left their own devices They're constant drive for more and more profit will squeeze the fucking life out of the rest of us

Farmers have said that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors others confront farmers on their land try to pressure them to sign papers given Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers have called them the seed police, the Gestapo, the Mafia to describe their tactics. Farmers are even report never purchasing or buying Monsanto seeds, but getting a visit from the seed police anyway. When some of a neighboring farmer seeds happen to blow onto their property, I mean, they're fucking militant about the shit. When asked about these practices, Monsanto has declined to comment specifically other than to say that the companies, they're fucking militant about the shit. When asked about these practices, Monsanto has declined to comment specifically other than to say that the companies, they're

just trying to protect their rights, right? They said that Monsanto spends more than two million dollars a day in research to identify tests, develop, and bring to market innovative new seeds and technologies and benefit farmers. One tool in protecting this investment is patenting our discoveries. And if necessary, legally defending those patents against those who would choose to infringe upon them. And I do see what they're saying here, but while they spend $2 million a day, they also made back in 2016 before they were acquired by bear $2.3 billion in profit after over $15 billion in revenue that year.

Just point that out since their language, you know, kind of reads a little like, whoa, it's me. We have to go after farmers. We're hanging on by a fucking thread, you guys. After paying our executives and lawyers billions of dollars a year, we're hanging on by a thread, a still $2 billion in profit after for sure hiding a lot of more profit than that in a year thread.

That's roughly $5.5 million a day in profit, by the way. After paying the $2 million a day in research. And the research made $12 million that year. And I'm sorry, and their CEO made $12 million that year and $19.5 million the following year. So they, they have a deal. Okay. Now let's look at the product that Monsanto seeds are genetically modified to resist roundup. 2009, researchers found that one of roundups and nerd ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental, and umbilical cord cells.

Another ingredient Roundup, glyphosate, talked about a bunch earlier, would be found to have a link to cancers. Glyphosate's non-selective herbicide, meaning it will kill most plants. It prevents the plants from making certain proteins that don't need it for plant growth. Whether being used in parks, yards, many different kinds of land across the country, it's easy to come in contact with.

You can be exposed to glyphosate if you get it on your skin and your eyes. You can breathe it in when you're using it. You might swallow some glyphosate if you eat or smoke after applying it to without washing your hands first. You may also be exposed if you just touch plants that are still wet with a little bit of spray. You can be exposed to glyphosate in your food. Many farmers use glyphosate products in their fields

and orchards, they spray it on crops like corn and soybeans, sprayed on non-GMO crops like wheat, barley, oats, and beans to dry out the crops so they can harvest them sooner. It gets into foods early in the food chain before raw food is harvested before it's processed. In one report from the California scientists and the World Health Organization, 43 of 45 oat-based products tested had it.

Popular breakfast foods like Quaker Old Fashion Oats and Cheerios had above average levels. It's fucking everywhere. And short-term exposure to glyphosate isn't something you need to worry much about. Experts say it's less toxic than table salt, but long-term risk may be a concern. Scientists are divided on how much risk is involved, report, show conflicting results,

and keep in mind that most studies involve animals not people. Some studies suggest glyphosate may be linked to cancer, others suggest there's no link, it's controversial topic. The International Agency for Research on Cancer categorizes glyphosate as a probable but not definite carcinogen in humans. In 2020, the EPA released a statement that glyphosate does not pose a risk to humans, as long as it's used according to directions, also say that it is unlikely that it causes cancer in humans.

But there's also been a lot of overlap, again, between the EPA and Monsanto, that whole revolving door, right? Did Monsanto pay off the EPA to say that? Maybe, but I can't prove it. Despite the EPA's really numerous studies, due point to a clear causal link between Roundup and Cancer, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer's 2015 finding that it's probably carcinogenic.

The IARC is an intergovernmental agency forming part of the World Health Organization of the UN. In 2019, University of Washington researchers found that exposure to glyphosate based herbicides like Roundup is associated with a 41% increased risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So that doesn't look good at all. By the time bear about Monsanto in 2018, thousands of lawsuits linking Roundup to the development of a form of cancer known as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has been filed in court nationwide. Same year in the first of these cases, you go to trial at California, jury found in favor of Dwayne Johnson, 46-year-old groundskeeper who worked at a number

of California schools. Johnson's attorney's argued that he developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after using Roundup on the job and led to a scientific connection between the product and the illness. Jury stopped short of finding a clear causal link between Johnson's use of glyphosate and his cancer. Instead, finding that Bayer Monsanto had failed to do enough to warn Johnson of the risk that Roundup could cause cancer. And Bayer Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages. That award was twice reduced on appeal, ended up at 20 and a half million. And then Bayer Monsanto's liability was upheld both times. In May of 2019, a California jury ordered Bayer to pay two billion in punitive damages in

a lawsuit filed by a couple who both developed non-Hotchins lymphoma after using random for over 30 years. The couple was also awarded another 55 million in compensatory damages. A few months later, the massive award reduced to 86.7 million after the judge concluded that the original judgment was significantly out of step with legal present. Yeah, it was a huge fucking amount of money there. In March 2019, a jury awarded $80 million, including 75 million punitive damages, later cut to 20 million, to a plaintiff who used Roundup in his yard for over 25 years before

developing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. August 2020 was reported that bear agreed to pay $10.9 billion to close the vast majority of U.S. lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. After more than a year of talks to German drugs and pesticides, maker reached agreement with around 75% of the current Roundup plaintiffs involving some 125,000 filed and unfiled claims. Then in October of 2021, bear one, its first Roundup related verdict when in California, Jerry Heldeth, the company was not responsible for a child's development of a Birketsl and phoma finding that household use around up was not a substantial cause of the child's illness.

December 21, 2021 then saw bear went a second straight roundup verdict. When a jury in San Bernardino decided that the plaintiffs non-Hodgkin's lymphoma not caused by exposure to roundup. So where does that leave us with roundup? Well, roundup has not been subject to any widespread product recall. You can get it all over the place. For the time being, it's on a store shelves nationwide July of 2021 bear announced that it will remove glyphosate based Roundup for the consumer market in 2023. The German manufacturing giant hopes that the move

will take some of the air out of its ballooning liability over its popular product. This move is being made exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns, a statement added, insisting that its products have been safe all along. So what will a glyphosate free roundup look like? According to a statement by Bear, new formulations will rely on alternative active ingredients, subject to review and approval from the US EPA and state safety agencies. Okay, now let's zoom out. We've heard a lot about bear and monsanto, right? And everything we've heard, or after everything we've heard, do they deserve the title of

most evil company in the world, or do they conduct themselves pretty typically for a giant multinational corporation? To get some perspective, let's compare them to two other supposedly evil corporations. Right. Looking at the pharmaceutical market or chemical engineering company, specifically another candidate for most evil on a lot of internet lists is DePont. Purfler O.Octano Acid, Holy Shit or PFOA, commonly used in the creation of Teflon nonstick pans, Gore-Tex, and other slippery waterproof substances, or services. Its cheap convenient for years was Depont's biggest money maker. They called it C8, and it is extremely bad for you.

Depont first started dabbling in the Teflon business in 1953. When they purchased large amounts of PFOA from the 3M company, although 3M had provided strict rules on how to dispose the stuff, incinerate it, or treat it as chemical waste. DuPont somehow managed to pump hundreds of thousands of pounds of C8s straight into the fucking Ohio River, and bury a further 7,100 tons of it in unlined sludge pits. They dumped PFOA into the environment from 1951 all the way until 2003.

Pretty blatant fuck up. DuPont didn't take three M's word that C8 was unsafe and they ran their own tests while also disposing of it recklessly. In 1961, their scientists discovered the chemical increased the size of the liver and rabbits, dogs, and rats, and kept dumping that shit in the river and elsewhere.

1981, they discovered the chemical could cause birth defects in rats, kept dumping it shit in the river and elsewhere. 1981 they discovered the chemical could cause birth defects in rats, kept dumping it into the environment. Then they moved into a human testing kind of, they studied people working in one of their Teflon plants in Parkinson's, Berkensburg, West Virginia, seven pregnant employees in Depond's Teflon division were monitored, unbeknownst to them by corporate scientists,

two of them gave birth to babies with eye defects that would be directly attributed to working with those chemicals. Two out of seven. That's bad. One of the stories is the story of Sue Bailey, a former depot employee who gave birth to a son with severe deformities. Her son William Bailey, known as Bucky, born with half a nose, one nostril, serrated eyelid, keyhole pupil, whereas Iris and retina were detached.

Sue's work for depot required her to come into direct contact with C8. Her job involved working in a large room with huge cylinders, Phil with C8. The cylinders would bubble over, like an out of control bubble bath, according to the film. The Teflon production process left behind a discharge of water. It was Sue's job to pump it up back where it would flow, you know, directly into the river and fuck up who knows what else. As part of a class action suit on behalf of

more than 3500 plaintiffs, it appears that Su's son Bucky eventually got part of his 671 million dollar settlement related to all this settled in 2017. And I referenced film, film was made about what Dupont did here, released in 2019 called Dark Water, starring Mark Ruffalo. Have not seen it, but it looks like it's good. By the 1990s, Mark Ruffalo have not seen it but it looks like it's good by the 1990s Mark Ruffalo is fucking great By the 1990s Dupont discerned that C8 causes all kinds of unpleasant cancers But Teflon was a billion dollar business for Dupont so you know they continue with businesses normal In 2012 a seven-year study by third-party scientists jointly appointed by Dupont and the plaintiffs of their arguably too many lawsuits Confirm that C CA causes the whole list

of human health concerns, ranging from cancer to high cholesterol, pregnancy complications, thyroid disease, and ulcerative collitis. And that led to them paying a $675 million dollar payout, more lawsuits are pending currently. Dupont agreed to casually phase out CA by 2015, but it still makes Teflon. It replaced CA with a new chemical called Gen X,

which is already turning up in waterways. So that's fun. How bad will that turn out to be? Animal studies conducted by DePont have already found tumors and rats exposed to Gen X, and tumors similar to those in rats exposed to C8. Different name, slightly different chemical composition, but maybe the same old poison.

Whether it's just as bad or even worse than C8 remains to be seen So you know, it's just like roundup and many of bear's products not comfortable necessarily to think that bear is not alone in all this might be more comfortable if bear were truly the most evil company instead of one immoral company amongst many The slate dot compost in an article called the evil list in January of 2020 listing the 30 most dangerous companies ranked by the people you know. Number one on that fucking list. Yeah, you betcha. Bare farmer student goals. The only corporation in the world with the balls to admit we are full on fucking evil.

Oh, no. Number one is Amazon. Here is their description of the massive online retailer. The online bookseller has evolved into a giant. A retail, resale, meal delivery, video streaming, cloud computing, fancy produce, original entertainment, cheap human labor, smart home tech, surveillance tech, and surveillance tech for smart homes. The company is sophisticated enough in learning our habits to produce countless Amazon basics knockoffs of popular products and sloppy enough about policing this platform to

allow in tons of actual knockoffs. And here's their evidence of Amazon being not so great. The company's last mile shipping operation has led to burnout, injuries, and deaths. All connected to a warehouse operation that, while paying a decent minimum wage, is so efficient in part because it treats its human workers like robots Who sometimes get bathroom breaks to say nothing of the carbon footprint the negative tax bill the Debasing HQ to reality show and a huge chunk of the webs reliance on Amazon web services as the anti-malop monopoly crowd is criticized Amazon evermore loudly for its dominance of online retail the company has pointed out that it still has a smaller share of total retail than Walmart.

And now here's their evidence of them being full fucking evil. Even after Amazon's HQ 2 contest ended with the company abandoning one of the two winning sites amid blowback from New Yorkers who are upset at the deals $1.7 billion dollar price tag, deal in a rare blow to the far too common practice of generous government subsidies for corporate expansions. Amazon is still at it. While it will open a new New York City office in 2021, Sands Handouts, in early January,

the Atlanta Journal Constitution uncovered a $19.7 million taxpayer funded deal to open a warehouse in Gwinnit County, Georgia And here's more evidence than being so evil sent in by Slate's readers While other companies may be guilty of some of these Amazon has won Contributed to the death of local stores services journalism music community, etc. Around the world Two focused on precarious and the skilled labor with reportedly terrible working conditions Three supported police surveillance with its ring doorbells and surveillance more generally with

Alexa devices, four, racked up a massive carbon footprint with rapid shipping as well as AWS cloud-based computing, five, contributed tech to military and intelligence agencies with dubious human rights records including US customs and border protection operations, separating families that are on border, five, failed to moderate what it is, what's on his platform, resulting in a glut of dangerous fakes, such as easily broken counterfeit car seats for children. Six has a famously hostile workplace culture,

which has been shown to contribute to harassment of women and minorities. And seven of Aided Taxation, excuse me, was shady categorization of assets and offshore tax havens. More specifically in recently, what Amazon has come under fire for is trying to stop workers from unionizing.

Amazon has been accused recently of illegally firing workers in Chicago, New York in Ohio, calling the police on workers in Kentucky, New York, and retaliating against workers in New York and Pennsylvania. And what workers say is an escalation of long-running union busting activities by the company. Okay, so is bear a bear monsanto not alone in doing some shit that is at the very least ethically questionable.

But are they all that evil or par for the course? I mean, the Nazi shit is bad real bad, but how many other big corporations have Nazi connections? Documents discovered in both German and American archives have revealed that in certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plans to military production at a time when US government documents show that they were still resisting calls by Roosevelt to step up military production in plants in America. Said Merriam Climman back in 1998, a researcher with the Washington Law firm of Cohen, Milstein and Hossfield, who spent weeks examining records at the National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against Ford.

When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie. You don't think a Hitler have an apportative Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich. When American GIs invaded Europe in June of 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks, and tanks manufactured by the big three motor companies and one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. And then it came as an unpleasant surprise when they discovered the enemy also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel, a 100% GMO, or G, got a 100% GM owned subsidiary and flying Opel-built warplanes. And they found evidence of Chrysler involvement as well. When the US Army liberated the Ford plants in Clown and Berlin,

they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company documents extolling quote, the genius of the furor. Ford made that Nazi money, profiting off the Holocaust, it appears. But I still drive a Ford F-150, should I? All right, the auto company, now known as Audi Audi also once profited off concentration camp labor so did BMW IBM helped Hitler and a third Reich from the very beginning from 1933 through the end in 1945 IBM technology facilitated the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for national census data military logistics

ghetto statistics train traffic management, i.e. Holocaust and concentration camp capacity. The company bid for the right to get census contracts with the furor well into the Holocaust. And I can go on and on with Nazi associations of modern companies. I could list one company after another who has exploited workers, poison customers, you know, been tough on unions, et cetera, et cetera. Think about Purdue, pharma and the opioid epidemic is bear worse, more evil than Purdue pharma.

The sad truth is that massive international corporations always looking to grow their market share and create more and more profit to raise that stock price almost inevitable. They're going to do some immoral shit, right? Being good people doesn't grow the bottom line. Unfortunately, making fuck loads of money does. Does that mean you shouldn't care? Who does what? Because they're all bad? No. No, I don't want to say that at all. You should do your own research on corporate watchdog organizations, try and support the most ethical corporations you can. Some are far more ethical than others. But if you're looking for a massive multi-billion dollar international corporation free from sin, well, good fucking luck finding that one. Today's episode did

not freak me out or fire me up about bear or monsanto as much as I thought it would in some kind of like evil way. It got me fired up in like anti monopoly law way. Like, you know, it just reminded me also why governmental oversight is so important. You're reminding me that it is important to vote for politicians who at least don't seem afraid to stand up to these giants and hinder their ability to become too powerful, to dominate a market so thoroughly. Because once they get enough money, they will fuck us over. If the math makes it worth it for hundreds or thousands of us to die or have our children born with birth defects, they will hide that from us for as long as I can. And

that once caught, fight us in court to make sure that after all the settlements have been awarded, they have still made profits selling us poison. We had to collectively be vigilant against these mother fuckers and sound the alarm when we can boycott them whenever possible when they've crossed various ethical lines where where that line is is different for everybody. Today's episode also reminders support small businesses whenever possible. If we don't, they will go bankrupt.

And someday, maybe we will live in some kind of fucking Wally world or a world where nothing but gigantic, multifaceted international corporations that own entire medical fields and manufacturing sectors exist. You know, we can go to nothing but chain restaurants and shop at nothing but chain grocery stores. And I'm not anti-chains even by the way.

But I do try to also shop at local places. We go to the farmers market. We buy from smaller online sellers in addition to making the easy purchase in Amazon. We do have to be watchful of politicians. Do they seem like they're in bed with corporations that are supposed to be protecting us from? Constant vigilance made sex.

I wish I had an easier answer. But constant vigilance limiting or eliminating our support for corporations and politicians whose values don't align with ours Thankfully, you know on the internet you can look into a lot of companies. There are a lot of good watchdog groups too many to name here Money talks money is what drives all the bears and monstros of the world to do what they do and taking away their money is the best way to correct their behavior Whether through no longer personally supporting them, through lawsuits, through voting out politicians who maybe give them ridiculous tax breaks or refuse to punish them, greed meets acts, it's not always good.

Now, despite what Gordon Gecko said, it will always exist and it will always lead to the kind of atrocities we have covered here today. We will never defeat it, but we can at least somewhat contain it through continual vigilance and economic and punitive actions. Hail, Nymrod! And keep a fucking eye out for... Bear pharmaceuticals, the only corporation in the world with the balls to admit were full on fucking evil bitches. Time now for today's top takeaway.

Top five takeaways. Time suck, top five takeaways. Number one bear has had its share of controversies. And it's over 100 year long history, beginning as a diamond manufacturer in Germany. It participated in some of the biggest atrocities of Holocaust, including human experimentation and Auschwitz. Also, many years later, knowingly, sold HIV-tainted blood to hemophiliax who needed life-saving medication.

Number two, bear-acquired Monsanto in 2018, and with that, another long history of controversy. Monsanto began as an artificial sweetener manufacturer in St. Louis before becoming one of the world's biggest bioengineering companies, mostly in the field of genetically engineering cows and crops to be able to produce more cheaper with a longer shelf life. Monts Anto has also done chemical waste in several American cities, repeatedly denied that Roundup, their weed killer was toxic even as researchers found evidence to the contrary, and has basically fought tooth and nail to make sure that they're calling all the shots in the agricultural business, leaving smaller farmers to struggle in an overly competitive market.

Number three, how do companies like bear in Monsanto get away with some of the shady shit they do? Well, they simply have so much money. It's easy for them to hire infinite numbers of lawyers to do things like block media criticism, take their critics to court, donate to associations to endorse their products, and so on. A proven revolving door between these companies, the EPA and the FDA probably doesn't hurt either. Number four, many companies are responsible for a whole host of misdeeds, not just bear.

Another chemical company, DuPont, spread poisonous C8 for years and years, while denying it was responsible for serious birth defects, cancer, and long-lasting health implications. And numerous companies like Ford and IBM did a lot of business with Hiller. And number five, new info. Next up on our roster of evil companies, this shit is ridiculous. It's darkly funny to me. It's just so absurd. 1999, the big legal drug cartel, Philip Morris, court of officials of the Czech Republic

by explaining how smoking would in fact help their economy Due to the reduced healthcare costs because its citizens would die sooner Seriously, this is fucking real. It's a real thing they tried The Czech Republic had earlier issued complaints that smoking related healthcare costs were a huge drain in their economy and then Philip Morris Batchit insane PR department and then Philip Morris batched in sane PR department chose to address this issue by release in the study that showed that while the country did indeed lose some money because of smoking, ultimately left with the net gain of a hundred and forty seven million dollars a year, things in large part to direct tax revenue and

indirect savings on healthcare and pensions because cigarettes were killing people off. Uh-huh. A fucking cigarette company suggested it was doing a country of favor by killing off citizens, right? Saving them some money in pensions and healthcare costs. And financially, you know, they're not wrong. Money, money, money. It's all they fucking care about. Philip Morris produced similar studies for Canada and the Netherlands and were in the process of commissioning studies in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. That was all brought to a halt, thankfully, when the Czech Republic rejected the premise wholesale.

Time, shock, tough, right takeaway. Bear the most evil corporation in the world has been sucked. Thanks for picking that topic, Space Lizards. That was a fun, different thing to learn about. And also thank you to the Queen of Badmetic, Lindsey Cummins, continually impressed by her work ethic. And hard love in nature. She puts so much effort into everything she does. I love it, rare and wondrous quality.

Thanks also to Logan, another hard working meat sack for directing and producing today. And to yet another hard worker, Tyler C. our suck ranger for helping him. Thanks also to Bitlixer for upkeep on the time suck app. They're fucking lazy. No, they work hard to. They are more lucky, longer to keep the game for creating the merch at badmagicmurch.com for helping run our socials along with the suck ranger and a team managed by our social media strategist, Ryan Handelman, who is lazy and an idiot. Now he's great.

He's smart and hard hardworking. Thanks to Ruser, Sophie Evans, again, with initial research this week, even though she's lazy and worthless. Why not you? I don't know what this is stupid, but that's stupid funny for no, she's great. Also hardworking. Thanks to the All-C N I's moderating the Colt the Curious Private Facebook page, the Mod Squad for making shared discord keeps running smooth. And everyone over on the time sucks subreddit

and the bad magic subred Next week in honor of this spooky season The season when a killer lurking just at a site doesn't seem quite as outlandish as other times when it starts to get a little darker Little earlier every day Shroud in the streets and darkness while hopefully you're safe inside in honor of the approach of Halloween We're gonna cover a figure so terrifying. It could be his own movie monster and he would have been his own movie monster if he had had his way. In the mid-70s around the same time notorious serial killer Ted Bundy crossed the country kidnapped and murdered young women

another suspected serial killer that some have also described as handsome and charming was terrorizing victims in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere. His name was Paul John Knowles. have also described as handsome and charming was terrorizing victims in Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere. His name was Paul John Knowles. He later came to be known as the Casanova Killer. Why? Because he was handsome and could be polite and charming as a journalist who came to know him very intimately would say he was a dreamboat who looked like a cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neill.

But underneath that good looking facade was a fucking monster. A man who would kill a nearly 20 people men women children RNG from six to the elderly Brutalize them in a variety of ways occasionally sold their possessions always seemed to be just out of grass of police officers hands as he embarked on a crimes Free that would last seven months and carry them across multiple states One former investigator said just about everywhere he went he left a a body. And the reason he killed, he wanted to be famous, to be infamous, to show the world that he was the baddest, most evil mother fucker of them all. So who was Paul John Knowles?

How did he manage to evade the police on his murder spree and wise his tale somewhat lost a history? All this next week on another evil addition of Time Sucker. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates sponsored by Bear. Rupdates, get your time, sucker updates! First up a shout out request that really caught my attention. Thanks to the subject line of anal bleeding and acid trips. Heh, sweet sack, Lauren Hall knows how to get a guy's attention. Lauren writes,

What's up, master sucker? I apologize for the intense subject line. But I had to pick something outlandish to catch your attention. Yeah, well done. I'm writing this email in the hopes that you and all Albert Fish will give my best friend Axel a huge congratulations shout out on his engagement to love his life Courtney. He's been one of my best friends since we were in high

school and I credit the suck for bringing his and I friends yet back together. We had to hang out for the first time in a few years at your recent show in Nashville and had the best time. Can you also get some credit for losing over 150 pounds? Picture attached. I just can't talk highly enough about this guy. Anyway, sorry for the long email and run on senses Hopefully this makes it on the show, but it's okay if it doesn't keep all the good work three to five stars wouldn't change the thing your Loyal space is your Lauren you are so nice Lauren

I got your photo of Axel in the next email you sent and dude well done done, Axel, damn. You're looking completely different person. 150 pounds is incredible. I hope you feel so good. I imagine you do hope your quality life has approved immensely, your handsome fella, your fiance looks adorable as well. Unless that's Lauren, then she looks adorable.

You know what everyone's fucking sexy. Enjoy the engagement. I hope you nearly drown in peanut butter, hot apple cider, a showpiece, and I tell you do it in peanut butter hot apple cider a showpiece. I tell you what Nashville. And now for another shout out request because it's fucking awesome. As is the author marvelous meat sack nat the rights. Hey there big chiefs sucky suck mishmouse supreme danna man with the plan keeps a nice

comments. And that here I just got to say thanks for making time suck and cold to the curious to I suffer from severe depression and anxiety as well as complex PTSD amongst other things, undisabled and on fixed income, excuse me, and I live in a rural area in northern Minnesota. I really don't have much human contact because I've had shitty luck with socializing. The loneliness gets really bad at times and coupled with intrusive thoughts. It's caused suicidal ideations and much ideations and more than one attempt. Your podcasts have been a real light

and a very dark existence for me, and I can honestly say TimeSuck and the cold to the curious to help save my life because I was teetering on the edge of contemplating taking all my pills and taking a dirt nap. But I didn't go through with it because I didn't want to miss your podcast.

I can't remember exactly what episode it was, but I do remember it wasn't long after I started listening and I started listening and I started right before the pandemic hit. Time suck, scared of death, and is we dumb, rest in peace? Have helped me feel less alone and cold to curious to actually help me make a few friends. I want to give a shout out to a fellow time sucker

and awesome veteran meat sack Jack Wickham. We made first contact after he posted about his own heartache and asked for support. We exchanged numbers and have been chatting off and on ever since. I'm also including a picture of my cat Valentine because I think he's Michael Miao, Miao, they're fucking McDonald. Well done, that. Well, that I am so glad you're still here and so is Jack and so are countless others. I have no doubt, especially Valentine Miao, they're fucking McDonald, a very cute fur baby by the way, looks super chill, but who knows? Cats are unpredictable. So glad that you're taking advantage of the

community around this podcast to make some new friends. So many different time suckers, scared of deaths related Facebook groups out there, there's discord, you know, the subreddit's on reddit, hailing them not to you. I hope you've made peace with summer going away and prepared for another Minnesota snow season because winter is coming. And I hope you're as happy right now as you seem to have been when you wrote that message. I had several messages this week calling me out for some cloud mockery. Joviel Sucker Joel was one of them and wrote, Dear Master Moshmouth and Bad Magic team. So I'm currently running through the back catalog

of As We Dumb and just got to episode 11. This is important. I just finished the recent cult suck before switching over and wanna say that if the worst for Japan is a lot of rain, it's already happening. Live there for two years and boy can that place get wet. Anyhow, you talked about having clouds thrown at you and just being able to laugh it off.

And I agreed with you. Then I get to the end of the Izbee Dumb's episodes, Neat Fact, and it's about how the average cumulus cloud weighs roughly 1.1 million pounds. Seriously, Dan, how could you be so dumb as to forget an important fact from almost two years ago? Wow, so not impressed. Might have to stop listening to all this garbage.

Anyways, love getting to see you live in Nashville, my birthday with my bro, who was the slurper and my cousin. I was a guy in a subtle pink leopard shirt. Sorry for the many big words, a long email, three out of five, keep on sucking. Well, at least you didn't use medical terms. Sergeant Postman Joel. Well, Joel, funny message dude, because I did find the show even though you had to sit

next to a disgusting fuck of a slurper. You know what? I don't care how much they weigh, I'm still not afraid of clouds. Yeah, maybe they're super heavy, but are they super dense or like water but softer, where you just slide into that weight. So you know what? Still... Fuck clouds.

Clouds can't stop bare farmer suitables. We'll fuck and destroy all clouds. Who cares about the consequences? No rain anymore? We have enough money to build a spaceship and you can all suck our dits as we fly into the galaxy. Now let's end on an awesome George Carlin update.

From an awesome sucker, beautiful bastard Brock. I didn't tend to push that button as many times today. But, I'm drunk with power on my bear button. Brock, right, taste suck, master. I'm gonna start with my fluffy bullshit. Anyway, I'm drunk with power on my bear button. Brock Wright, Taysuck Master, I'm gonna start with my fluffy bullshit. So you have to read it to get to my carlin' story, which you're gonna wanna read.

Sorry about the length, but you're welcome for the girth. Well played. Found your podcast in early 2021 and burned to the catalog quickly. I just changed careers, went from a long time bartender with a pretty decent shift to a trimmer at a cannabis farm with dreams of working my way up and out of the trim room. Plants are my passion, and it was time to chase that passion.

Well, you picked some good plants to do it with. It's been a struggle, but after a year in that position, I got my promotion, and now listen to the suck while watering and pruning a couple thousand plants a day. Damn, I'm currently bingeing scared to death. My six year old son's name is Ash from Evil Dead. Two year old daughter is Annabel Holy shit. That's awesome. And old sucks until Mondays at noon, my favorite day of the week.

Oh, that's nice. I was working at Harris and Loftsland of that. I love this story. Yeah, obviously I read this before. This is such a good story. I was working here when the H.A. and Mongols, oh yeah, the Helsinghuls Mongols should have went down. Oh, damn, from the Helsinghuls suck.

More Toots Martina's, please. Oh yeah, what's going on with Toots Martina's? Say yeah, gotta get with my, my fellow writers, get the club house in Cleveland. I worked in a few departments, but I was lucky to be in entertainment at the time, so I have a little inside info. Someone checked out his new material,

Carlons, the head of the show, found out one of his jokes to be out of the comfort zone for some of our older and wealthier clientele. These people really will do anything that's been comp to them. I've heard complaints that ZZ top was too loud for fuck's sake. Jesus. The GM asked that this one joke be left out. So show time. So yeah, the GM has told Karlin, just please listen to that joke. George enters the amphitheater stage, approaches his stool with a little stack of cue cards and a bottle of water on it while barely making eye contact with the crowd.

Goes to the mic, first thing he says is, you know what nobody ever talks about anymore, pussy farts. George opens and drinks some of the water, casually flips through his notes. Meanwhile, the GM is blowing his fucking lid to the point of mouth foam. Almost ends the show right then and there, but the show goes on. I have never seen so many walkouts of any show fucking ever. Thought it was hilarious and legendary and I loved every minute. Side note for my best friend Dan, whose voice I hear more than my wife and children, you're like a year older than me and our birthdays are one day apart and we were younger, lived less than a hundred miles from one another. And if I ever see you live, I'm gonna fangirl to fuck

out. Not crying, you're crying. JK gosh dang, three out of five stars. Thank you for all that you do. I have so much more to say, but I'll save it for another email since nearly one grateful meat sack, Brock Cameron. Well thank you Brock. God, I love that carland story so much.

Ah, I look forward to hopefully having similar moments by self someday. That's some crazy ones in the past, too much you can do now. But how dare that dumb fuck Casino GM ask a legend, not to be themselves? Glad Karlin let him have it. You know what, if you can't take a joke like that,

you're a fucking idiot to go to that show. Have a great week, little brother, that I haven't met yet. You're a young man, Brock. Young man. I'll see you down the road. Thanks, time suckers. I need a net. We all did.

Another bad magic production's podcast is done. Please don't give anyone a fatal disease or birth defect in order to make some extra cash this week. Keep on trying to make money in a slightly more ethical way, and while you do so, keep on sucking. So do you enjoy our sponsorship? From bare farmer's tentacles? If you didn't, we don't give a fuck. We don't need time suckers, we don't need podcasts. All we need is fucking poison.

Maybe it'll kill you, maybe it'll cure you. Don't care. All I care about is it'll cause a lot of fucking money. Stick it in your eye. Fucking drink it, shove it up your ass. Show it up your fucking pussy. Don't care Bear farmer's student who I would fucking literally sell your fucking family to serial killers if I could make five dollars I would have every person in your family have to suck a thousand dicks and then get their heads cut off if it made me a shiny fucking nickel

Bear pharma why did my music stop there you go Easier to be evil if you have evil music. I learned that it bear pharma school fucking opening day Day two we killed a thousand sex workers just for the fucking fun of it, set them on fire. Why? Because it was fucking fun when you don't have a soul. This morning I fucking kicked a baby down three flights of stairs and then fucking stopped it's head in because I wanted to see if I could sell a stiper to a homeless person. Bare far. What other... because I wanted to see if I could sell as diaper to a homeless person. Bare farm!

What other... how shit can I say? Sometimes I wake up and just fucking put a freshly killed puppies fucking skin on my face because it feels good. Oftentimes I will walk around my neighborhood and throw rocks at children Bear farm What is this after the profit? I don't know Maybe I had a fucking stroke. I don't care because I have so much goddamn money I can handle any loss that you can throw at me

I can't wait to get a fucking spaceship and nuke the whole fucking world and go make money off some other race that aren't as fucking stupid and pathetic as all you piece of shit. Bear Farma! Suck my fucking dick! Suck your fucking dick! Don't fucking suck a dick if you like! I don't want to do anything fun! I want you to suffer with Bear Farma!

Yeah! Another stuff too! Bear Farma! Yeah! Another stuff, too! Hope your food's cold! We want to be warm! Hope sometimes, when you're late in bed at night, you can't get the covers! To quite cover your toes! Eat like you keep kicking, but you understand how the blankets could be that fucking complicated!

It's just a cheat! Why can't you get it over? I'll tell you what! Cause fucking bear pharma! Stuck into your goddamn house! We fuck with your teeth tonight! Fuck you! Bear pharma! How's that awkward silence? you