Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Healthy and safety officials in the US are saying that parents shouldn’t trust Mattel to make safe toys for their children. That it is the parents responsibility to be sure products are safe! Just think about that statement for a moment. How in the world would anyone that wasn’t an engineer or a chemist be able to do that?
Of course a parent knows what pieces and parts can choke, pinch, or harm a child. But, there is no way on earth a parent can detect the hidden dangers in any product.
In a statement totally from left field the acting head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission in the US told viewers during a press conference that 9 million toys in the US, (18.5 million in total) recalled yesterday that were made in China, was only a small drop in the bucket. The vast majority of imports, when looking at the picture in totality, were safe. Oh really? This leaves the impression they are all being tested or monitored; clearly not so.
The very idea that the vast majority of imports from China, be they toys or any other product is ludicrous. How would anyone know? China knew.
Reuters is reporting today that China knew of the problems …”with magnets on toys as long ago as March”.
Lead paint has been banned from any type of use in the US since 1978. There is no presumable way the Chinese didn’t know the paint they were using was lead based.
The whole idea that any of these tainted products from China were honest mistakes would be comical were it not so serious. Deadly serious.
There are obviously no checks or balances when it comes to the poison being allowed to be shipped out of China.
Adding further insult CNN produced their in-house-doctor expert telling people if they think their child may have been exposed to lead they should have them tested. Okay…..and will Mattel be receiving the bill for that testing?
My opinion is, telling people not to depend on the safety of Mattel toys is the same as telling them not to depend on the safety of Gerber Baby Foods, or Heinz Baby.
Mattel is fact more responsible than the Chinese. It is their fiduciary responsibility to make sure the manufacturing of their products results in a safe product. They have shipped their production overseas to bulk up their profits, they need to spend some of those profits on inspection at the source.
Are we really to believe Mattel can’t afford to have one man on the ground at each manufacturing site that is in their pocket? Another ridiculous idea.
Are parents now being asked to preform their own lab tests on children’s products? What in the name of government are people paying the gate keepers of health and safety to do these days?
Confidence is the only currency any company has when it comes to gaining and keeping customers, one would think they would guard that confidence.
Are we to believe Mattel can’t or won’t afford a ’standard’ steward at manufacturing plants no matter where they are located? INCREDULOUS.
In light of China’s documented inability to produce safe products the public needs to start demanding truth in labeling, starting first with ‘China Free’ labels.
A company in Utah, food for Health International thinks so too. They have plans to start putting stickers on their products saying “China-Free”.
It has become nearly impossible to determine what portion of ingredients in any one product originate in China. International trade be damned. I’m fed up with being fed the party line.
“China-Free” stickers are an idea whose time has come….come and gone… in fact it’s way overdue.
Contact Mattel, Inc. and tell them you are going to be “Mattel-Free”, AG Brands-Free, Fisher-Price-Free until and unless they can prove they are putting the safety of our children and grandchildren ahead of their greed.
http://service.mattel.com/us/contactus.aspx for toll free numbers to call
http://www.mattel.com/contact_us/ US email
Labels: China, Chinese, Mattel, Recall, Tainted, imports, lead paint
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
China-Free, Mattel-Free: It’s time to put our ‘collective’ foot down!
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
China has one million food-processing plants give or take a few thousand; whose counting anyway?
Apparently China is counting. The ‘State Administration for Industry and Commerce’, a Chinese regulatory agency said 152,000, yes that’s one hundred fifty-two thousand, food plants and retailers were shut down last year due to unsanitary and substandard food being sold.
Now 180 more factories have been closed. They haven’t been closed due to employees failing to wash up after lavatory visits, they haven’t been closed because hairs were falling out of the nets into the potato salad. No, nothing that benign; Nothing that innocent.
These factories were purposfully, with forethought, contaminating their foods and products. Toss in some malice sprinkled with forethought and we, in the west, call that a felony. Using things like formaldehyde to heft up a product, keep it from spoiling, or any other reason seems far from a malice free act. Even an illiterate should be able to reason things like anti-freeze, formaldehyde are poisons. Most people never want to come in contact with formaldehyde until they’re dead and many don’t want to even then.
Sadly formaldehyde and anti-freeze are on the short list of poisons being pumped into a long list of Chinese products. Paraffin and industiral oil perhaps? How about mixing in a little ‘already used’ food. I’m unable to determine in which food group ‘recycled food, expired, or already used’ may fall.
So, 23,000 contaminated food products were seized by Chinese inpsectors and they aren’t finished yet. And, less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the US FDA.
So what is our tally now? 152,180 Chinese factories closed since December. China says, most of these factories were small, having fewer than 10 employees, and they were ‘unlicensed’. If China is trying the quell the trepidation with which the west is eye-balling their products, calling a business with fewer than 10 employess a factory isn’t a step in the right direction. Around here that’s a ‘mom and pop’ business. That’s Mom, Pop their three kids and their spouses. Oh, and one cousin. See how that makes 9 employees? That’s fewer than 10 employees which in China constitutes a ‘factory’.
But, now comes the fun part of this equation; these small ‘factories’ make up 75% of China’s one million food-processing plants. Excuse me? Now here’s the real question. At some point did China lay down the figure of 1 million food-processing plants in order to impress the west or maybe intimidate? Were I wanting to become a player on the ‘world market’ it could be advantageous to inflate my presense, like a puffer fish, in order to appear a little larger to preditors. On the other hand, when the products I’m exporting start turning up with poison in them, it would behoove me to say that a group of tiny, unregulated, unlicensed ‘vendors’ is what ‘did-me-in’. Understandably and entirely not my fault.
China wanted to look like a formidable player on the world market. It looks as though the way to do that was for the government to spread it’s arms open wide and sweep in every available resourse, including the ‘mom and pop’ operations.
Maybe the ’sleeping giant’ really has been asleep. Maybe the giant part is the consumer. Maybe we underestimated China’s consumer goods manufacturing prowess. Maybe we saw millions of tanks, and hundreds of millions of woven Chinese Finger Traps and mistook that for commercial expertise.
If Friday’s news about factory closures’ was meant to quell the rising fears concerning Chinese Imports…it didn’t work on me.
Labels: China, Chinese, Poison, Tainted, exports, imports
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
More Tainted Chinese Products,with Fewer ‘Factories’ Operating
Friday, June 29, 2007
China, China, China. What will we do with Chinese imports?
After thousands of pets in North America became ill or died, from the use of tainted Chinese wheat gluten why would China not be more careful about the quality of their exports?
One could get the idea the China may not care how many people become sick or die from poisons contained in their products. Can this actually be the case? Why then are they sending Scallops and Sardines coated with putrefying bacteria to America?
Why are they shipping toxic cosmetics, tainted dietary supplements or dried apples preserved with cancer-causing chemicals to the rest of the world?
I get the message the Chinese are sending.
US inspection records show that China has been flooding the US with foods unfit for human consumption for years. The crime is that these products where simply sent back to China where they were, shipped right back to the US once, twice or three more times in an attempt to send the same poisoned products to American consumers.
Have we become so dependent upon cheap Chinese goods that we cannot live without them? It looks to me like many of us will stop living if we keep using them.
Canada exports $10 billion in FDA-regulated food and agricultural products to the US each year, of which, 56 shipments were rejected. By comparison 298 shipments from China’s $2 billion imports were rejected. Horror of horrors, only less than 1 percent of regulated imports from China were even inspected by the FDA.
In the past year the USDA has seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of Chinese meat being smuggled into the US. No meat from China is approved for import into the US. Apparently ‘dried lily flowers and prune slices’ are allowed, because that is what Chinese exporters have labeled their pirate shipments of meat.
China is aiming for certification so that they can legally ship poultry into the US. I don’t want a Chinese chicken legal, or otherwise, on the entire continent. I will never believe what they send will be safe. I think the US can grow more than enough chicken to meet American demand.
I think we have enough problems here already without importing new ones.
There is a story about a scorpion walking along the bank of a river, wondering how he would get to the other side. He saw a fox preparing to swim cross the river and he asked the fox to give him a ride.
The fox said, “no, if I do that you will sting me and I will drown.”
But, the scorpion sold the fox on the idea by saying, “If I did that we would both drown.”
That logic made sense to the fox and he agreed. Half way across the river, the scorpion stung the fox. As the fox began to die he asked the scorpion, “Why did you do that? Now you’ll die too.”
“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”
What is the ‘nature’ of the relationship China wishes to have with the US? I won’t apologize for asking.
More on this subject Monday.
Labels: Canada, China, Chinese, FDA, Poison, antibotics, catfish, exports, imports
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Catch of the Day: Scallops, Sardines, Scorpions and Fox
