Sunday, November 25, 2007

Hillary is the only candidate with a plan to protect us from China



Economists told us all that whichever country can make certain products most efficiently, then that's who should produce and sell them. They told us how great it will be when rich America can buy all of their goods cheaply, made by workers at 50 cents/hour. We were supposed to ignore the human rights issue and understand the bigger economic implications. We were supposed to put aside the fact China is just one step away from being our enemy. Well for a while America was just coasting right along, not really paying attention, and happily buying all of the cheap products from China. We believed the economists, we believed Wal-Mart, and we believed George W. Bush. Folks, we have all been betrayed.

It seems like every other day now we're hearing about a huge recall on toys from China because they contain deadly amounts of lead. The reason China is able to make these products so cheaply is that there are barely any regulations these manufacturers have to follow. They are fly by night operations. They set up shop, make a few million lead contaminated toys, cash their check, and they're gone before the first child keels over and dies from lead poisoning.

What happens is, a well respected brand like Fisher Price actually outsources their production to private Chinese companies. We may trust Fisher Price, but can we trust these third party manufacturers? We don't even know who these people are. We do know one thing: they put lead in the toys of American children. That's the one thing we know about them and quite frankly, that's enough for me. And that's enough for Hillary Clinton too. She is the only candidate who actually understands this mess and the potential for massive poisonings.

Taken from Nationalreview.com, here are Hillary's recommendations to remedy this fiasco:

  • Immediately require independent third-party testing for at-risk imported toys to ensure they are safe before they can be put on our shelves and sold.
  • Dramatically increase the number of product inspectors and deploy them as part of a strategy to meet the threat posed by imported toys.
  • Establish a complete ban on lead in children's products.
  • Increase and enforce both civil and criminal penalties for violators.
  • Require selected companies to pay a bond pending completion of third party testing to protect consumers and taxpayers from fly-by-night foreign importers.
  • Improve our system of toy recalls so that parents get swift notification and companies face swift sanctions if they don't remove recalled products from their shelves.
Not one candidate has offered a proposal to deal with this growing problem. If you can honestly read through that list of proposals that Hillary has put forth and say you don't agree with them, then I really think you don't belong in America. If you are actually insane enough to say that we should allow toys containing harmful amounts of lead in the marketplace, then you'd probably be better off in a psychiatric facility - heavily sedated. This is about our children, and our future. You can't separate those two. But we can separate ourselves from China. It would be simply un-American not to.


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