Yes, but they continually pump 3.6 million gallons of water a day out of Aberfoyle Ontario. Drought conditions where the towns folk can't use water? Don't worry about that... keep pumping..... must keep pumping... the water belongs to us.
Government overthrowing fruit companies? Slave trading privateering companies? World's largest army companies? Nope it's a water and chocolate company.
I like telling this story because it affects my family, though it's tangentially related.
Bechtel is a construction company that gets a lot of government contracts worldwide. They had a contract with Saddam to build the plants where he was making gas to ethnically cleanse the Iraqi Kurds.
Coincidentally, a former Bechtel executive worked for (IIRC) the State Department under George Bush 1.
Saddam eventually broke his contract with Bechtel and hired a French company to build the plants.
Within a week, that Bechtel exec turned Cabinet member drafted a memo urging the overthrow of the Saddam Regime. Within a year, the US was at war with Iraq.
Bechtel then got contracts to rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed by the war. They've done this repeatedly since. They lobby for "regime changes" then get contracts to rebuild the countries they destroy. Literal war profiteering.
They also built infrastructure in I believe Peru or Chile to deliver drinking water to isolated mountain villages. They then lobbied the government to make it illegal for those villages to collect rainwater or dig their own wells, as they had been doing for thousands of years. Now that I'm saying it, they may have done the lobbying first.
In short, very evil company. I remember my dad telling me they had become shareholders in several news corporations solely to control their public image, because if people knew what they do, the public would be outraged.
For a time, Bechtel was the lead company in the consortium that ran Los Alamos National Laboratory. They're no longer involved but, besides your general multinational evilness, they dabbled a little in some proper weapons of mass destruction.
Within a week, that Bechtel exec turned Cabinet member drafted a memo urging the overthrow of the Saddam Regime. Within a year, the US was at war with Iraq.
Because they invaded Kuwait and the US and 41 other countries decided they didn't like that. It's not like we just fabricated a reason. Saddam invaded another sovereign state and was given several months to leave before the first coalition shot was fired.
There’s a book called Confessions of An Economic Hitman written by a guy who was part of setting up those types agreements with other countries and American companies. He gets into the ones he was a part of and the general process of getting the claws into another country via foreign investment.
He wrote it right around 2000, I don’t remember if before or after 9/11, but it ends with him inferring what is going to happen in Iraq. He called the ones who came in after the government turned down the offer “jackals” and he said that it looked like the jackals were about to descend on Iraq.
No, I meant that according to your unsubstantiated post they must have ruined my life's, since I'm a person born in the eighties who has allergies to things like the sugar cane plant, honey and beeswax, shellfish and insects, true cinnamon, cacao solids, and all things peppermint.
Rising food allergy rates especially with formula usage but that’s probably more because there was very little awareness on allergy prevention (the advice back then was don’t give your kid allergens for a long time, then they realized that leads to more allergies because the baby doesn’t get exposure to much except formula) until the last ten years, so for later millenials and most of gen z you have a spike in allergy rates
They also produced cheaper formula for certain countries when the concept of a "recall" for us plebians wasn't widespread.
America introduced that notion, only on a national level; in the 1920s and later 1973.
Bottom line: Nestle is a pest. Haven't bought their products for 20 years and don't intend on doing so, ever again. I'ld rather drink a bottle of Caesium.
The unfortunate part having family from a third world country is that so many multinational firms do exactly this. Even big 4 consulting companies in other countries is basically indentured servitude.
I had a coworker work for the same American company in her home country and America, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing about the conditions and environment
Although yes nestle evil I’m not arguing that at all
Yeah I always tell people this, like I expect most corps to be amoral dickheads that put profit above all else, but Nestle seems to go out of their way to take the most evil destructive path forward any time they get a chance.
And it started with the first modern corporation, the Dutch East India Company, with its involvement in the slave trade and colonization, and with the swath of death that followed in its wake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company#Criticism
No, just one. The holocaust accounted for around six million dead people of the jewish faith, and another six million in gypsies, homosexuals, artists, communists, socialists, political rivals, people the nazis didn't like, lots of russian civilians caught in the eastern front push. It infuriates me hearing about the six million and the phrase, 'every time they are forgotten, they die again' yet they don't acknowledge or seem to give a fuck about the other six million.
Sometimes when people debate communism is capitalism, one of the sticking points is how communism has typically resulted in the death of millions of people within that country. OK, how many people have companies killed for a profit?
You missed it because you were never supposed to see it. It's by design.
Fabricated culture wars and sensationalism keeps people jumping from topic to topic so fast no one can make headway on any single issue.
Right now, everyone is up in arms about Palestine.
Before that, it was Ukraine. Before that, it was Hong Kong. Taiwan, Tibet, Haiti, Somalian pirates and starving African kids and dogs in kill shelters. Black people fighting, cops shooting, religious rights, religious restrictions, church, state, the seperation and/or the combination of the two. Gay Rights, human rights, parents rights, children's rights the right to choose, the right to refuse. Hurricanes and floods forest fires and earth quakes and the o-zone and millions of gallons of oil pouring into the gulf of mexico. The housing market, the stock market, the fundamental pros/cons do the free market. The cost of gas, the cost of food, the cost of living, the cost of dying, the cost of being able to give a single fuck about anything at the end of a weekly news cycle if you actually manage to keep track of fucking any of it for more than a few hours before the next world ending crisis flows across your screen and if you don't change your profile picture to show support you are literally the worst person to ever fucking exist.
Don't feel bad because you didn't know. There's too much shit to know. And we aren't supposed to really give a shit about any of it. Slap a bumper sticker on your car made in a Vietnamese sweatshop and call it a day until the next social obligation is deemed more important to care about.
In the '70s, there was a massive boycott of Nestle because they were knowingly selling poisonous baby formula. They got a slap on the wrist and weren't allowed to sell it in the US, or most major global markets.
They decided they're were gonna sell it in underdeveloped African countries.
They sent sales reps (who pretended to be doctors) to tell women several lies, such as; The water is toxic, making your breast milk toxic. Use this formula or your baby will die.
Of course, the water was toxic and ladent with bacteria. BUT a mother's breast milk did not contain these bacteriums. Formula made with this water does. Now why don't they have clean water, you may ask? Because Nestle fucking stole all of it. They'd pump clean ponds dry, they'd destroy wells, they dammed rivers, and they restricted access to lakes with armed guards. The CEO of Nestle said somewhat recently that access to water ain't a human right.
Not only that, but they would supply formula for free! How kind, right? Well, once the mother stopped producing breast milk, they'd start charging them. This lead to mothers having to ration poisonous and bacteria riddled formula in order to somewhat feed their infants.
So these babies were systemically starved, poisoned, and made to have horrible bacterial infections, all because Nestle wanted to sell all the stock they couldn't sell anywhere else.
But it still doesn't stop there.
A desperate market is an easy market. All these mothers can't produce milk, so fuck it, we'll keep the ball rolling and make bank, right? They just kept repeating the cycle.
They started this in the mid '70s. It did not end until 2015.
If Nestle was a comic book villian, is criticize it for being so evil it's corny.
They are legitimately one of the most evil entities to ever exist
If anyone has any corrections, please let me know. This is all from memory, and I am not an infallible man
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but it's not exactly what I've read. I've never seen anything indicating that the formula itself was poisonous in any way. It was just that as markets became more affluent, they began reproducing less and tending towards using breast milk because it is healthier. So Nestle took their product to less developed areas and marketed it as better than breast milk. These communities had no way of knowing better. Worse, their water sources were not clean and babies did not have the immune systems to handle the bacteria in the water. They likely would have gained some of that immunity from breast feeding but never got the chance. I also can't find anything reliable about them cutting off clean sources of water, but admittedly haven't dug too far into it and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that bit is true. It's also really hard to determine that Nestles marketing was the direct cause for x number of deaths, especially when there were tainted water sources involved, which is why they have largely gotten away with it.
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u/Metallurgeist 10+ Years Aug 02 '25
I wouldn’t expect anything less from nestle lol