Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Lead Paint For Your Child?


Thomas & His Friends Are Covered With Lead Paint

There were nearly five hundred recalls of consumer products in the last year in the U.S. Do you as a parent feel comfortable placing your children's health, and safety in the hands of Chinese toy manufacturers, and the corrupt Chinese government? If you're like most parents you do every day!
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Who Will Protect Them?
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We need a new regime in Washington to protect us from the old regime in Beijing!


This from the New York Times

Among the toy recalls, the problem is most acute with low-price, no-brand-name toys that are often sold at dollar stores and other deep discounters, which are manufactured and sent to the United States often without the involvement of major American toy importers. Last year, China also was the source of 81 percent of the counterfeit goods seized by Customs officials at ports of entry in the United States — products that typically are not made according to the standards on the labels they are copying.
Brand names or not, you really never know what you're getting with toys manufactured in China. This is a major problem since China manufactures the majority of toys sold in the U.S.

Meanwhile the on the take Bush Administration sells out America's children to garner support from Chinese manufacturers. To hell with your children, lets get some foreign lobby money!


Again, from the New York Times

In the last two years, the staff of the consumer product commission has been cut by more than 10 percent, leaving fewer regulators to monitor the safety of the growing flood of imports.

Some consumer advocates say that such staff cuts under the Bush administration have made the commission a lax regulator. The commission, for example, acknowledged in a recent budget document that “because of resource limitations,” it was planning next year to curtail its efforts aimed at preventing children from drowning in swimming pools and bathtubs.

The toy industry in the United States is largely self-policed. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has safety standards, but it has only about 100 field investigators and compliance personnel nationwide to conduct inspections at ports, warehouses and stores of $22 billion worth of toys and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of other consumer products sold in the country each year. “They don’t have the staff that they need to try to get ahead of this problem,” said Janell Mayo Duncan, senior counsel at the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports. “They need more money and resources to do more checks.”

2 comments:

tmccarthy27 said...

Where did that 500 recall number come from?

JeromeProphet said...

Timothy F,

Thanks for spotting my error. The number came from the article, but was actually the number of recalls overall, and not just toys. I've corrected the post.

However my post could also be upward adjusted to state that nearly eighty percent of toys sold in the U.S. come from China.

One might also ask why any cuts in the number of inspectors are being made when there has been such a significant (Doubling) increase in the number of recalls?

How many products have slipped through that should have been recalled?

Here's more of what the article from the NYT states:

"Over all, the number of products made in China that are being recalled in the United States by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has doubled in the last five years, driving the total number of recalls in the country to 467 last year, an annual record."

"It also means that China today is responsible for about 60 percent of all product recalls, compared with 36 percent in 2000."

"Much of the rise in China’s ranking on the recall list has to do with its corresponding surge as the world’s toy chest: toys made in China make up 70 to 80 percent of the toys sold in the country, according to the Toy Industry Association."

email jp

  • jeromeprophet@gmail.com

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