A long time ago, I found something that annoyed me a lot in the otherwise wonderful country of Germany. That was that merchandise there seldom showed its country of origin on the package. Many people had theories as to where certain products came from (e.g., people said that everything with the Privileg brand came from communist East Germany), but nobody seemed to know for sure.
This was irritating to me, because in the US everything shows its country of origin. Sometimes we like to know simply because we’re curious, and other times we want to know because we prefer to buy products from one place or want to avoid products from other places.
For example, many Americans want to avoid buying toys from China, because they sometimes have paint on them that’s poisonous to children. They also want to avoid buying vitamins from China or anything else that’s meant to be swallowed, because there have been problems with those being toxic. Americans usually think (sometimes wrongly) that any product made in France or especially Italy is going to be engineered crazy and be a big problem to use. However, if a product is made in Germany, Sweden or Japan, we expect very high quality, good engineering and very high safety standards. Sometimes Americans like buy products from countries that “can use our business”, like Thailand, Honduras, etc., if they’re well-made.
Yesterday I went shopping at a German retail chain store in the US, and one of the things that drives me crazy about the place, just like in Germany, is that you usually can’t find out the origin of things you buy there. Nearly every package says, “Distributed by Aldi Inc., Batavia, Ill.”, but you can’t tell where it was made.
American chemical company sold 3,000 tons of fertilizer to the Bangladesh government, but 1,000 tons of ash from copper smelting furnaces was mixed into the fertilizer before it was shipped. U.S. officials verified that this altered fertilizer contained dangerous levels of lead and cadmium.
Fresh Air from WHYY, November 26, 2007 · Investigative reporter Mark Schapiro explains in a new book that [color=blue]toxic chemicals exist in many of the products we handle every day — agents that can cause cancer, genetic damage and birth defects, lacing everything from our gadgets to our toys to our beauty products.
[color=blue]And unlike the European Union, the U.S. doesn’t require businesses to minimize them — or even to list them , so consumers can evaluate the risks. Schapiro argues that that policy isn’t just bad for public health: In an increasingly green economy, he says, American businesses stand to get shut out of a huge market.
If any of the story is true (and I have my doubts, considering its source), it wasn’t due to lack of US regulation, but either violation of the law by an individual corporation (possible but less probable) or corruption among the inspection and enforcement authorities in Bangladesh (highly probable).
You need to find better-quality sources.
Additionally, it’s well known that the European Union tends to follow whatever the greenies’ eco scare du jour is. If some scientist stuffed a laboratory rat with a pound of granola and killed it, and the greenies got hysterical about it, the EU would ban granola. As has been proven over time, many of the substances that the eco fascists get hysterical about, after much more testing, turn out not to be harmful. Sometimes the greenies recommend alternatives that turn out to be more harmful than the substances they want to ban.
Keep in mind that organizations like Greenpeace are not run by scientists or even by scientifically literate people.
And none of what I’ve just said applies to lead, of course.
So no one Stateside was involved or responsible, right?
Not sure what you mean there. Do you mean the inspection and enforcement authorities in Bangladesh went to the USA, bought fertilizer, and then added 1,000 tons of ash from copper smelting furnaces before it was shipped?
Do you have any examples of such?
What do you mean? How does lead fit into the picture?
I want to know where my personal care products are coming from:
DEA, TEA, MEA - Diethanolamine (DEA), triethanolamine (TEA), and monoethanolamine (MEA) are hormone disruptors. They are also known to combine with nitrates to form cancer-causing nitrosamines. If a product contains nitrites (used as a preservative or present as a contaminant not listed on labels) a chemical reaction can occur either during manufacturing or after a product is made. There is no way to know which products contain nitrosamines because government does not require manufacturers to disclose this information on the label.
A 1997 study by the U.S. National Toxicology Program found that these compounds themselves might also be carcinogenic. Repeated skin application of DEA was found to cause liver and kidney damage in animals. The study also discovered that when absorbed through the skin, DEA accumulated in organs. TEA may also cause contact dermatitis in some individuals.
Someone might have been, and someone might not have been. It’s also possible that Shapiro’s assertions were a canard or some kind of deliberate disinformation. Activists and investigative reporters have been known to make whole careers and reputations for themselves by playing Chicken Little.
Now your imagination’s really running wild! I’m saying that the US government requires companies exporting goods that violate the EPA standards to report to both Uncle Sam and to the government of the country to which the goods are being exported. It’s famously easy to grease bureaucrats’ palms in countries like Bangladesh, so the contaminated goods could just have been waved through. This could have been done by the US company (in which case CEOs can go to prison), or it’s also possible (more probable, in fact) that someone in Bangladesh who had money on the line, or some relative involved, pulled some strings and got the goods let in.
Or the story could very well be a total canard.
Oh, Alar, sodium cyclamate, calcium cyclamate, various so-called “frankenfoods”, and to some extent even DDT, when used correctly. There’s a whole never-ending list of scares that turned out not to be true.
You didn’t read the articles you linked to, obviously.
Well I guess anything’s possible, Jamie. It’s just possible it was an act of God, the Taliban, or feminists wanting to stick it to American men once again. More interesting is your unwilingness to accept that anything bad or underhand happens in the good 'ole USA concerning white American men and their institutions. Most of your threads seem to point the finger elsewhere.
And the list of ones that did? See, your posts are, to my mind, somewhat irresponsible. You always underplay the dangers of certain things when it comes to blaming US business for underhand or irresponsible, corrupt acts, but you are oh so ready to point the finger at foreign shores and businesses. Why is that?
I wanted to know why you had omitted lead from the discussion.
You’re being ridiculous again. IF the incident actually happened (and that’s truly an if, when it comes to investigative journalists, particularly those who report for organs like NPR and Mother Jones), obviously somebody would have been responsible for it. More than likely, a whole chain of people would have been responsible for it. However, I don’t notice them naming any names, not even the name of the manufacturer, so the story is not traceable, and it could easily be folklore. In fact, the responsible party could have been someone within the country itself, and it’s even possible the products didn’t come from the United States at all, but that someone reflexively blamed sabotage by “the Americans” to deflect blame from himself. This is done very frequently to explain everything from slow Internet connection speeds in Greece all the way to high unemployment in Egypt. (The only group used for scapegoating more than “the Americans” is “the Jews”.) So a report that tells anti-American stories that incriminate the nation but cite no specifics is suspect. How long did that story go around about McDonald’s cutting down the Brazilian rainforest to raise beef before it was factually debunked in court?
I have never refused to accept that anything bad and underhanded can happen in the US. I’m simply not gullible and don’t believe everything I read. The real question is why you accept any incriminating report about the US, without any skepticism at all! It feeds into your pre-existing anti-Americanism, and so you’re unwilling to consider the reliability of the source, previous reports that turned out to be false, or possible alternative explanations. You don’t even need specifics so that you can verify the information in other sources.
The fact that those reports already contained one documentable lie – that the US doesn’t restrict the levels of toxic substances in products – should have made you skeptical about the whole thing. It took me a few seconds to find the US regulations. Am I supposed to believe that someone claiming to be an “investigative reporter” or an “academic” couldn’t, in all sincerity and with all due diligence, find any US regulations restricting the use of toxic substances?
Well, that’s very easy. That’s the list of toxic substances that the US government restricts or prevents from being used in products. However, not all the substances in those regulations are actually dangerous. Some are put on the list pending further research, and every so often research shows that they’re not dangerous as previously thought.
As for your story about nitrosamines, I’ve been hearing that one since the 1970s in relation to hotdogs and beer. With the way Americans consume hotdogs and beer, 30 years later, cancer should be rampant here, and Americans should be dropping like flies. But we’re not.
I didn’t omit lead from the discussion. I simply omitted it from my remarks about phony eco scares, because lead has actually been proven to be a toxic substance. So worries about lead are not sensationalistic or misinformed.