CONTAMINATION FROM CHINA

A flood of tainted products from China is hitting our shores. In the past several months alone, we've seen contaminated pet food, toys and trinkets containing lead, ginger contaminated with pesticides, laptop batteries that had a tendency to explode, defective tires, eel and other seafood laced with unapproved antibiotics, and formaldehyde toothpaste. Our goverment should take quick and effective action to limit Chinese imports until tougher standards can be maintained.

Chinese imports to the United States have risen to $250B annually, and are up 15.5 percent so far this year. It is clear the communist Chinese government is not enforcing product safety standards, but what can one expect from a regime that has no effective consumer or worker protections at any level? We gobble up cheap Chinese-manafactured goods at an ever increasing rate, decimating our industrial capacity, moving jobs overseas, and now finding that those goods are contaminated or are defective.

We are not the only nation to experience this wave of bad stuff. The Japanese have been particularly effected. Casserole dishes that leached lead when heated, toothpaste contaminated with ethylene glycol, spinach laced with pesticides, contaminated seafood, and nearly a half-million defective DVD players have sparked recalls in the land of the rising sun. Indonesia and the Phillipines have recalled cookies and candies containing formaldehyde. Added to the evidence available here, this paints a disturbing picture of a Chinese export system without safety concerns. It makes one wonder how many contaminated products have slipped through the cracks and into our food system or into the hands of our children.

Congress and the President should immediately remove China's MFN status and impose severe restrictions on both quality and quantity. The Chinese government has launched a "food safety offensive", which means they will execute a dozen or so middle level executives and call it a day. The communists don't even invest in the safety of their own people, so it it unlikely they will do anything significant concerning exports. It's time our government took the action necessary to protect the American people from shoddy goods. I'm all for trade, as long as it's fair and product safety can be assured. Our current trade with China is not fair and product safety is dubious at best. Now is an opportunity to straighten out the whole mess, if only our leaders will act with American interests first in mind. The Chinese are cheating on almost every aspect of trade, and someone should do something about them ripping us off on a massive scale.

Allowing the communist Chinese government to address this issue by itself is not acceptable. They cannot be trusted to keep their word on trade agreements, so it's time to scrap 'em all and start over from a basis of our needs, not theirs. Why are we trading at all with the regime that mowed down student protestors? How quickly Tianamen Square was swept under the rug and forgotten.

JINGOCON