Unsafe Toys: Report Says Conservative Trade, Regulatory Policies At Fault

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/10/30/unsafe-toys-report-says-conservative-trade-regulatory-policies-at-fault/

by James Parks, Oct 30, 2007

When children go trick-or-treating for Halloween this week, parents want to make sure they are safe. But how can we be sure? Just last week, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recalled imported Halloween pails children might use for their treats because they contained high amounts of lead.

In the past two months alone, more than 13 million toys have been recalled after tests indicated lead levels that sometimes reached nearly 200 times the federal safety limit.

How did it get this bad? Today, the Institute for America’s Future released a eye-opening report, Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer, pinpointing the problem.

>The report shows how the double mantra of free trade at all costs and little or no regulation at home have combined to make the products we buy toxic and unsafe.

Even as corporations are sending U.S. manufacturing jobs to countries with terrible safety records, the Bush administration is deliberately undermining the CPSC, which is charged with protecting us from dangerous products.

Millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost to globalization, especially to China, where a lack of workers’ rights and safety and environmental standards is well documented. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the growing U.S. trade deficit with China has cost 2.1 million U.S. jobs between 1997 and 2006.

FULL story at link.

[rasputin1952]

1. The Conservative mantra is that corporations are the saviors of

the Republic, however, when all that matters is the profit margin, the nation will suffer at the hands of the Robber Barons. When the reality that corporations do not care about the nation, do not care about workers and do not care about the environment of the very planet they wish to exploit, there may be some changes. Perhaps people have to lose more jobs, more access to health care and retirement benefits before they wake up, but they better wake up pretty soon and end the nightmare.