Letters to the Editor
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Who really is to blame?
I say...us, the consumer. We are the ones who drive the eternal search for cheaper, faster, more products. The parent who cries foul about the lead in her son's Thomas trains was probably the same parent who balked at paying higher prices for well made european wooden toys. I'm not saying that all european toys are by default wonderful, but I do know that a lot of the european toymakers have higher standards.
So...instead of blaming the toymakers and pointing fingers and getting ready to join the lawsuits, I think we as parents should take a step back and re-evaluate our own standards. Do we really want a house full of cheap plastic toys, or do we want to invest in a few, well made, beautiful wooden (or proven safe plastic) toys? When it is the health of your child and your peace of mind, I say it is definitely worth it to shell out a few more $$.
Your child will thank you.
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Lead-test kits
"...parents are simply left to wonder and worry..."—not true. There are on the market many test kits for lead content. One can Google for brands and descriptions, then buy them on line or in a hardware store.
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Is it efficient to task toy purchasers with lead content testing?
"...parents are simply left to wonder and worry..."—not true. There are on the market many test kits for lead content. One can Google for brands and descriptions, then buy them on line or in a hardware store.
While this is true, it seems smarter and more efficient that a central regulating agency be tasked with such testing before toys come onto the market.
If we posit that four toys of this million were purchased per household we're talking about 250,000 end users conducting tests, and this seems to me insane.
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Lead paint
What I want to know is who in the hell even makes lead paint anymore? It's been outlawed for like 40 years or so. That's the story I haven't seen on the news.
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where could all the money for regulation possibly have gone?
I raq my brain for the answer...
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Quality and quantity
Seems like once a week, I send my school age kids to their rooms with a grocery bag each. "Put in 10 things," I say, and they start rummaging. They can fill a bag now without even much angst, from stuff they didn't even know they had.
I don't know where it all comes from. It multiplies in the dark. A trip to Burger King with Grandma. A birthday party last week with a bag of plastic goodies. A trip to the dollar store. A birthday. The one before that. The one before that. Christmas, from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We are drowning in toys, and they keep coming in.
They are plentiful and cheap, and we live in a plastic Made In China graveyard. We give it away all the time, and it keeps arriving.
Does anyone NEED all this stuff? Of course not. But because it's cheap, it turns up, again and again. The unholy piles of it mask the favorites, the really well-made things that hold up over time.
I wouldn't mind a bit if the price of toys doubled overnight. Maybe my kids would get one or two for a birthday instead of 10 or 15.
If you don't have kids, just go to the Goodwill toy section sometime, and you'll see what I mean.
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Us, the consumer?
I don't see where I asked the FDA to stop doing what they do. That is a goal of e-coli conservatives, if not an operating touchstone.
I wasn't the one stigmatizing a swath of civil servants by calling them byuruhcrets. That was our dear leader.
I wasn't the one bringing inexorable pressure to regulators of all stripes by having the message spread that the way to not derail one's career is to whore oneself. That was our dear leader and his cronies.
Throw an increased trade with a literal third world partner with little environmental and worker regulation.
The upshoot? Something like this was as inevitable as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The only questions are exactly what, when, and to who.
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China uses lead paint because
It dries faster. It's common, when you have a house painted in China, to leave all the doors and windows open for a week or two, before you move in, to air out the fumes and lead. And I guess when your air is brown every day and everyone you know has a deep cough you don't pay too much attention to a little bit of lead.
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Have regulators been napping or actively undermining protections?
There's a clear reason for the declining safety of toys in this country: the neocons and their corporate supporters are in charge of the government, and they hate government regulation.
The safety of miners is in the hands of the Mine Health and Safety Administration whose effectiveness the pro-business Bush administration has hobbled since it is staffed with industry insiders who had spent careers at mining companies opposing regulation by MHSA. And this is the case in multiple other agencies now staffed with herds of zealots with career backgrounds opposing the very regulations they're now charged with enforcing.
From top to bottom, agencies charged with the sacred duty of defending public interests in the environment, endangered species, transportation, public health, product safety, drug safety, telecommunications, worker safety, highways/bridges, and justice (to name a few), are now populated with thousands of idealogues who believe fervently the clearly false mantra that responsible industry captains and free market forces will protect the public interest without "interference" from government.
Along with industry insiders, graduates from religious and ideology-based universities and think tanks have streamed to federal agencies(and red-state agencies)over the past six years, securing career civil service jobs where they attend weekly prayer breakfasts and watch for opportunities to undermine the very aims of their organizations along with protections for our society.
Don't let anyone tell you that there's no difference between Democratic and Republican politicians.
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History repeating itself
The United States went through similar scandals with tainted food, medicine and consumer products starting, oh, a little over a hundred years ago. Ditto dangerous working conditions. Companies were always seeking to produce at the lowest cost, regardless of the consequences, and could not be trusted to police themselves and provide safe products. So the government was forced to step in and regulated industry in order to protect the health and safety of ordinary Americans. Same thing goes for pollution starting about 50 years ago or so. With public trust restored, consumers and producers went on their merry way.
However, the Chinese and the Republicans clearly learned nothing from this era. The Republicans followed Karl Rove's stated desire to return to the McKinley era, where lack of regulation meant poisoned food, water, air, workplaces and products for ordinary people but immense profits for the wealthy elite. Same goes for the Chinese, who are merrily trashing their country and its people in their own Gilded Age.
So all of you idiots who moan and groan about evil government regulations should be happy now. You got what you wanted. There are effectively no government regulations. The FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are emasculated. The only thing keeping us from a wholesale repeat of the scandals of yesteryear is the desire of Mattel and its well-known cohorts to keep their reputations, but less well-known firms are not going to care and will continue producing toxic products.
The result? Poisoned and dead kids, poisoned and dead pets, and widespread panic as we all wait to find out which contaminated products will be recalled next.
I hope you're all happy now.