1y ago

Remember when dairy farmers dumped milk during the pandemic to keep prices high

119 comments

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
- Well this quote makes me wish I finished reading that book...
  
  Hey, it's never too late! I didn't appreciate it back in high school, but it's an incredible read as an adult.
- I never read the book, but I am aware of the quote. I need to listen to it on audiobook

I seem to recall food stores paying armed security to guard their trash. They spent money guarding trash with guns rather than letting someone survive that capitalism has deemed "unworthy"
- Weird that we're letting sociopaths run things and not barring them from positions of power. Why are we letting it be an argument that there should be a higher basic standard of living? Can't give food cause there's no profit in it, abundance in homelessness but companies buying up houses is okay, second and third rate medical care cause it's cheaper for the insurance companies.

This was the reason for the Irish potato famine. They were growing wheat but we're forced to sell it or they would lose their farms to landlords.
- There was plenty of food. It was largely requisitioned by the British military.
  The peasants were allowed to grow some food for their own survival: which mostly were potatoes. When the blight swept the island, the plentiful edible food was still taken, and the farmers were left with nothing. The ones that tried to keep any bread, milk or butter lost their farms, if not their lives.
  It is why it is called the Great Hunger.

To a capitalist, a forest has no value until it’s cut down.
- Or counted as offsetting five times the carbon emissions it eventually might, given ideal future circumstances.
- In america you have the right to buy a forest and bulldoze it. You have the right to fill in wetlands with concrete to build a wal Mart
  But only if you can afford it

To prevent starving, establish UBI.
- I believe UBI will never come to pass because the rich have too much to lose. Imagine a workforce not beholden to the capitalists?
  
  "The rich" have names and addresses.
  
  If enough people want it, they can overpower the relatively few rich. But most of the people have bought I to the lies of the rich; social media is probably a convenient tool for the rich and powerful to control the opinions of others.
  
  Actually the capitalists have the most incentive to implement UBI. Better paid workers are more likely to turn around and buy the shit they were just making for themselves, and if the rich are not kept away from the megaphone, an improperly done UBI will be made an excuse to strip welfare benefits.
  
  We can have UBI right now if we pledge 10% of our income and pay it voluntarily.
- Lol so they can just raise food and rent prices?
  Simp
  
  Same point was made in a reply 13 hours before your comment. If you want an answer you can find it there.

This is some Facebook quality content right here.

What the image says is true. What the title says is dumb. Strange combo, immune to both upvotes and downvotes (from me, at least).
- For real, like the literal headlines attached to it were that they had to dump because they'd run out of storage capacity and didn't have enough transit infrastructure to move their stuff during the lockdowns.
  I didn't spend the latter half of 21 learning more about supply chain management than any man should have to because of the news for some self righteous twit to just outright lie about my trauma even happening!/s
  
  Oh omg. Wow I was misinformed, thank you.

Yeah, even though governments have sometimes stepped in and prevented free market to do its own thing to keep prices somewhat low or in disasters (for instance, here in my country farmers are subsidized to keep food prices low, and various governments during covid didn't wait for free market to step in to deal with the pandemic and funded the relief effort by themselves), capitalism has been critiqued endlessly, its contradictions pointed out over 200 years and due to what the post refers to and countless other reasons, capitalism should definitely be replaced.
The issue is that the left hasn't really organized themselves and provided an alternative and by that I mean something akin to a step by step solution. What happens now when the left gets into power in a country is some random small tweaks such as making healthcare and worker lives a bit better, adding taxes on cars - nothing that tackles the core problem which is capitalism.
- Those are centrist talking points, not sure if you're aware. Any step that dismantles capitalism is met with "too extreme" or "unfeasible". The Overton window is too far to the right.
- What happens now when communists take over is a clique of insane people do wild shit, supposedly for the proletariat at the expense of the bourgeoisie. And then they wonder why their insane, clumsy, ignorant and naive new policies didn't work, they blame their people for not being good enough as they are being uncooperative assholes ergo not true proletariat because the proøetariat would be very cooperative with dear leader, and then they start shooting.

I hate that this image was chosen to attach to this statement.

Dammit Bobby...
- *Dang it Bobby
  
  "'Dammit' is a strong word. That's why I used it."
- Dunno why it reminded me this trailer. Got goosebumps always I see it..
  https://youtu.be/m7DYdozXaw8?si=SiXEphnjpaqIPBjP

Dumping product is losing money, the only way it makes profitability sense in Democratic Capitalism would be if the increase of profit from dumping 1 unit is greater than the marginal cost of producing that unit.
And even if that was the case industry wide, without collective action from government or cartel persuasion (or there being a monopoly which is the result of a LACK of government action), it wouldn't make sense to do for any individual because you make more being a free rider.
The issue of misaligned incentives does exist, we have enough food to feed everyone and we aren't doing it, but the pandemic milk dumping was because of the pandemic, not Capitalism. Farmers did donate some food to food banks but it's a once-in-a-lifetime disruption nobody was prepared for so the food banks couldn't take all that was available.
- Meanwhile most of dumped milk was dumped in US
- Yes, I think of this as a messaging problem. Uncontrolled capitalism is essentially anarchy. It creates perverse incentives, which can result in behavior like dumping or limiting product at very high cost when it would be cheaper and more profitable in the short term to sell it (see OPEC, DeBeers). I don't know of a successful capitalist state with a government that doesn't regulate capitalism.
  In this case, though, yeah, a pandemic disrupted supply chains, changed consumption patterns, created labor shortages. We all understand the toilet paper shortage wasn't engineered because we could see the cause. When a root cause invisible to us, it's a common reaction to assume bad intent.

Op is a fucking retard. It was because they had no storage facilities to take it not to keep demand high.
- Hey man, don't need to go that far. The concept and context of his argument are solid. Look at diamonds, for instance. It's done, even if his example wasn't spot on. Maybe. Where I am the dairy farmers are selling their cattle for meat, because the supermarkets have strong armed such low prices, they can't afford to even operate. While the milk on the shelf isn't cheap.
  
  Diamonds are a luxury item that no one needs. Can't say I'm terribly upset about that.
- Don't milk cows, lactation stops. No milk until the next calf is born. Outside the ethics of bovine milk, if the supply chain has ground to a halt, and food safety regulations mean you can't sell warm, unpasteurised, unfiltered milk at your front gate (Yay, faeces and gravel) then it's going to be tipped because it needs to be in this instance.
- The us government famously has a cheese storage facility intended for just this purpose.
  Well, not this purpose. It’s intended to allow the government to buy surplus at near market rates to subsidize the dairy industry.
  But there’s literally a place to put it already paid for by your tax dollars.
- Not only that, but the gov. subsidizes our farms so we have food to eat. We produce and excess so we don't all go hungry.
- Ever heard of powdered milk?
  
  Have you ever seen a milk dryer?
  Cannot turn one of those around in three months, and when it's full, it's full.
  Not to mention warehouse storage for the bagged/ binned product and conversion to shelf ready
  
  You obviously have no clue how milk production actually works 😂😂😂

So do you propose communism or will you step in and tell us what to do to fix this?
- The icon of this community is quite literally a hammer and sickle, with the sickle replaced as a keyboard. They're proposing communism lol
- I propose communism except I will guide us there with some friends of mine as a sort of Vanguard 😉 and as soon as we're ready to accomplish communism we will disband the vanguard. Pinky promise.

OP should probably learn about dairy farming before posting dumb memes:
READ
- Yeah dairy is bad we should stop all production entirely
  
  So you’re fine with the lie- because you don’t like dairy farming.

Mammalian tits do this thing where they stop making milk when it stops being extracted from them. You're complaining that capitalism was working so well that a logistical interruption happened on a global scale the worst of it is a lot of milk may have been wasted. Instead of the entire dariy industry collapsing.
- Why would the system collapse?
  Perhaps because they need to pay off debts to other capitalists?
  Funny how circle this all is, isn't it?
  Show me a society in history that purposefully destroyed food for economic gain.
  
  Didn't China have a famine because they were too stupid to agriculture?
  
  So how would a different system solve the problem of a single link in a supply chain disrupting the rest?
- Thank you for clearing this up.

Funny how comments that destroyed this BS misinformation post are shadow banned.

No, I don't remember because we don't do that shit in the capitalist world, it's just America that believes capitalism is a valid excuse to have no ethics.

What I can't figure out is why y'all seem to be leftists on these instances but cry so much about explicitly leftist instances.
- Because like everything else in life, leftism too comes in nuances and variations.
  Tankies are the farthest left though where nuances are not acceptable and there is an aggressive schism between Stalinist-Marxism and Marxist-Stalinism.
  
  Lol show me anyone unironically calling themselves a stalinist-marxist.

"When it's not profitable to feed people we let them starve"
Yeah I mean it's either the consumers or the farmer. Work isn't free.
- You sound more like a huge anus to me.
  
  Bet.

It was either that or we go back to this. I rather not have my tax dollars wasted. I'm not defending what the farmers did but if they didn't the milk market would have collapsed which would have affected other parts of the market.
It's a complete mess. A cave full of cheese, literally.
- Or donate it to homeless shelters? Feed the poor? Help the working class. Fuck your markets
  
  How do you get it anywhere?
  They couldn'tmove it my guy. There's no dairy Midwestern pipeline thats shucking butter across the US.
  
  We actually did and as a matter offact people hated it. We giving them away to anybody that wanted it. It even became main stream as hip-hop artist would reference it. We even gave it to the military because the government doesn't know what to do with it and also as humanitarian aid across the world.
  Did you read the article and reference links in the article?
- I don't give a FUCK about markets I want cheap milk. Let them collapse.
  
  Let the people that provide the milk collapse so you can get cheaper milk? How would that work?
  They would stop producing milk altogether, which would then increase the price of milk as it becomes scarce.
- In Europe, we also had warehouses full of butter and powdered milk that had to eventually be destroyed.
  However, the whole capitalism vs. socialism debate really isn't all that relevant anymore.
  All economies are mixed-mode nowadays, because governments are better at some things and free markets are better at other things.
  The real issue isn't about choosing the right ideology, but rather the issue is about tweaking the right set of policies and rules.
  Right now, we can really use some stronger unions and pro-labour policies. Whereas on climate change, we really need to start taxing fossil fuels higher and let markets adjust away from them.
  
  This is the right perspective, in my opinion. Pure socialism will never work until humans further evolve, and pure capitalism also doesn't work for the same reason (i.e. greed/selfishness). A balanced blend of the two is the ideal path to a prosperous society.
  
  It is a fine line and I agree there should be tweaking of the policies and rules to adapt through the years.
- I don't think when people want to implement a socialist idea they're gonna look to Reagan for tips
  
  Lol this is high school level economics. No difference like I said.
  
  nah they look at fucking Lenin

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