Let them keep their junk

Pretty much every day at the newspaper, we get a list from the AP of the latest items recalled by our government because of safety deficiencies, and my unscientific survey finds that about 80 percent of this unsafe stuff comes from China. We've also been reading of late about the tainted-milk scandal in China (empty store shelves shown above), where thousands of children have been sickened by contaminated formula. Several of them died. All the while, according to a story we ran in Thursday's O-R, the political elite in China are serviced by a special government organization that provides them with the "choicest, safest delicacies." They receive "hormone-free beef from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, organic tea from the foothills of Tibet and rice watered by melted mountain snow." The average Chinese person, meanwhile, has been subjected to "vegetables with harmful pesticide residue, fish tainted with a cancer-causing chemical, eggs colored with industrial dye, fake liquor causing blindness or death, and holiday pastries with bacteria-laden filling." The Chinese government, one of the most brutal and corrupt in the world, clearly doesn't give a damn about its own people, so why should we expect them to care about the products that end up on our shores. The Chinese elite are reaping billions of dollars from the garbage they foist upon us. It's time we tell them to keep their tainted trash. There has to be some other Third World country that can put its 8-year-olds to work producing crappy garments, toys and other products for U.S. consumption. Or, and I know this sounds crazy, we could return to manufacturing our own stuff. I know, that's nuts, because big U.S. retailers could no longer buy stuff overseas for pennies and then turn around and sell it to us for dollars.