Walmart...the U.S. company that imports 12% of all Chinese goods into the US.
Wanna bet that Wal-mart is one of the "major foreign buyers" mentioned below, doing to Chinese vendors what it did to American vendors, like Vlassic pickles: "...demanding lower and lower prices, forcing Chinese factories to cut corners." (see link, below, for "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know")
...
At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
...
The public image Wal-Mart projects may be as cheery as its yellow smiley-face mascot, but there is nothing genial about the process by which Wal-Mart gets its suppliers to provide tires and contact lenses, guns and underarm deodorant at every day low prices. Wal-Mart is legendary for forcing its suppliers to redesign everything from their packaging to their computer systems. It is also legendary for quite straightforwardly telling them what it will pay for their goods.
...
It's Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith's invisible hand. And the Milwaukee employees of Master Lock who shopped at Wal-Mart to save money helped that hand shove their own jobs right to Nogales. Not consciously, not directly, but inevitably. "Do we as consumers appreciate what we're doing?" Larrimore asks. "I don't think so. But even if we do, I think we say, Here's a Master Lock for $9, here's another lock for $6--let the other guy pay $9."
(from "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know")
And Hillary, a one-time member of the Board of Wal-mart? Is she aware on what's occurring with many Chinese village manufacturers, possibly under the pressures of unchecked "major foreign buyers"...like Wal-mart, "perhaps"?
China's problems with lead go beyond toys...
More than 80 per cent of the world's toys are manufactured in China, and many are from small producers that are resistant to regulation. They make cheap plastic, metal and wooden toys that often have a lead content well above
internationally accepted limits and even above limits set by the Chinese government.
China has joined developed countries in tightening controls on lead, but the rules are difficult to enforce in a society with a thriving underground industry producing substandard goods. And low-level authorities often are reluctant to force changes that might hurt local companies.
With the recent recall of Chinese-made
toothpaste,
pet foods and
tires, the country is gaining a reputation for goods that are shoddy and hazardous.
...
Last year,
877 villagers near a lead smelter in the northwest's Gansu province, including 334 children under 14, suffered lead poisoning, according to state media. The smelter's owners later admitted they ran it at night
with its pollution-control gear turned off to save money, news reports said. A study of 5,000 children in Dongguan, a boomtown near Hong Kong, found that 22.1 per cent had lead in their blood in excess of safe levels, according to the newspaper Yangcheng Evening News.
Still, analysts say the blame doesn't lie only with Chinese manufacturers. They point to
major foreign buyers that are demanding lower and lower prices, forcing Chinese factories to cut corners. (Sound familiar? See Wal-Mart "goal" above)
...
Comments:
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Buster Brown
Although cheap Chinese consumer items are a bargain at the till they are not worth the loss of jobs to the Americas, the pollution and the many other environmental hazards that are ignored just to produce a cheaper product.
...
Tom
"...Too bad US companies like walmart are just as bad as the Chinese in their cut-throat mentality, ensuring that the problems are so entranched they will never be solved by the 'officials'. ..."
...
Richard Bradley
One might also note that not a single item produced so cheaply in China has brought about a reduction at the retail level here. Are huge CEO payoffs the only thing that matters? I really don't care to increase my lead intake to improve their gold assets.
...
Tom W
...Then there are the western corporations who are falling all over themselves to produce their products in China so that they can take advantage of these abhorrent conditions to increase their profits. They couldn’t get away with doing in the West, what their business partners do in China, but by dealing with Chinese companies, they get all the benefits that their foreign partners-in-crime provide them with. Western corporations are getting around decades of legislation that was meant to protect the safety & welfare of employees and customers by slipping behind the Chinese border. Western corporate executives are, effectively, engaging in amoral and criminal conspiracies with Chinese manufacturers since they know full well what is going on in China. In the process, they are depriving Western citizens of jobs. It is high time we started indicting them for their unconscionable acts. We need new legislation and we need it soon. ...
...
Did Hillary know full well "what is going on in China"...and Wal-Mart's role..."not consciously, not directly, but inevitably"?
Related:
Every week we hear of another publicly traded company being bought by a private equity firm. Some of those investment firms — like Blackstone, the
Carlyle Group, and
Cerebrus — have become almost as well known as the brand-name companies they've been snapping up, from Chrysler to Dunkin' Donuts to Toys R Us. But private equity firms have no real interest in toys, cars, or baked goods.
What they are after is big and quick returns on their capital. To get it, they
buy a company and
cut the wages, pensions and health benefits of the employees who work there. ...
...
JOHN BOGLE: "You know, the desire for progress, the desire to create something new. That's all good. But, it's gotten misshapen. Badly --
BILL MOYERS: How so?
JOHN BOGLE: Well, it's gotten misshapen because the financial side of the economy is dominating the productive side of the economy.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
JOHN BOGLE: Well, let me say it very simply. The rewards of the growth in our economy comes from corporate, largely - from corporations who are a very important measure, from corporations that are providing goods and services at a fair price innovating and bringing in new technology — providing a higher quality of life for our society and they make money doing it. I mean, and the returns in business in the long run are 100 percent the dividends a corporation pays and the rate at which its earnings grow.
That still exists. But, it's been overwhelmed by a financial economy. The financial economy, which is the way you package all these ways of financing corporations, more and more complex, more and more expensive. The financial sector of our economy is the largest profit-making sector in America. Our financial services companies make more money than our energy companies — no mean profitable business in this day and age. Plus, our healthcare companies. They make almost twice as much as our technology companies, twice as much as our manufacturing companies. We've become a financial economy which has overwhelmed the productive economy to the detriment of investors and the detriment ultimately of our society.
BILL MOYERS: By the financial sector, you mean?
JOHN BOGLE: Banks, money managers, insurance companies, certainly annuity providers. They're all subtracting value from the economy. They have to subtract. To be clear on this now — I don't want to overstate it. To be clear on this, they have to subtract some value. But, the question is--
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean they subtract some value?
JOHN BOGLE: In other words, — you've go to pay somebody something to provide a service. It's just gotten totally out of hand. My estimate is that the financial sector takes $560 billion a year out of society. Five hundred and sixty billion.
BILL MOYERS: Where does it go?
...
Bill Moyers Journal Sept 27 2007 Interview with John Bogle of Vanguard - Transcript and Video available
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