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Goodness gracious, China — clean up your act! The news is filled with horror stories of
China’s nasty exports that are coming to our shores — toy ovens
that burn our children, seafood laden with toxics and antibiotics, tires
that come apart on the highways, pet food that kills pets, and the list
goes on. China must stop the exportation of these horrors, scream our
corporate, political, and media leaders. But who are the real culprits here? You can’t
have an exporter without an importer. Chinese businesses are not shipping
billions of dollars worth of products to our shores uninvited. U.S.
manufacturers and retailers are the ones importing this stuff and selling
it to us. It’s Wal-Mart, Hasbro, Black & Decker, Red Lobster,
Toys R Us, Target, and other big brand names that have built this
dependency on Chinese imports and are profiting phenomenally from it. These special interests are the ones that abandoned
American producers and communities, transferring their investment capital
to China. They jumped at the chance to exploit Chinese labor that could be
had for pennies an hour and made to toil in brutal sweatshop conditions
that are legally and morally abominable to our people. These importers also
cynically wink at the vile environmental contamination caused by Chinese
factories. Let’s be honest. China’s
trillion-dollar-a-year export economy is based squarely on the
country’s deliberate lack of humane standards. That’s precisely
why our CEOs rushed over there — every corner cut, every penny taken
from workers and the environment, every product made on the cheap is pure
profit for importers sitting so comfortably in their executive suites. If you’re outraged by shoddy, dangerous, and
deadly products from China, don’t point at the Chinese — point
at America’s corporate elite.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.
