Melamine is an industrial plastic commonly used in Chinese products, i.e. just about everything sold at Walmart. Chinese businessmen often add it to food products, e.g. milk, rice, wheat flour, dog food, and cat food, because it creates a higher reading on protein tests.
Starting in 2008, Chinese businessmen added melamine to baby formula, resulting in at least six deaths and well over 300,000 sickened infants, with 158 who have acute kidney failure. Two of the businessmen were executed for their part in the crime and the head of the Sanlu dairy at the center of the scandal was given a life sentence. At least 22 Chinese companies were involved in the scandal, proving that the tainting of food with industrial chemicals is a common practice.
The Telegraph UK reported that a massive stockpile of melamine-tainted milk powder has been seized by Chinese authorities. The raids were conducted on warehouses in Chongqing, China’s largest city. The powder was destined to be turned into pastry and ice-cream.
The Telegraph noted that 917 cases of illegal or fake food and pharmaceuticals were already under investigation, including the use of the textile dye Rhodamine B in broad bean paste; the discovery of formalin, an industrial preserving and clotting agent in the city’s famed hotpot restaurants; and noodle makers being shut down after they were discovered using ink, industrial dye, and paraffin wax in their products.
The Telegraph also reported on the Top-10 Chinese Food Scandals, including toxic bean-sprouts, pesticide-drenched beans, milk laced with leather-hydrolyzed protein, food contaminated with aluminum, pork contaminated with the steroid clenbuterol, and rice contaminated with cadmium, a toxic substance often found in jewelry sold at Walmart. The top-10 also included the practice of using used cooking oil dredged from sewers, with one in ten of Chinese meals being cooked in this way (read here and here).
The tainting of food has been going on for years in China and is managed from the very top. The former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed for corruption in 2007. His office is the equivalent of the USA's FDA. He was convicted of accepting bribes linked to sub-standard medicines, with these medicines leading to several deaths.
The USA is approaching the corruption of China, but since we use different terminology, we do not realize it. Campaign contributions are nothing more than bribes for politicians. Virtually every bill passed by Congress includes special favors, often customized tax breaks, for corporations which have paid for politicians' favors. Wall Street, the darling of Republicans and many Democrats, runs a casino system much larger than Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and all Native American reservations combined. This casino system consists largely of derivatives, a obscure name for betting on future outcomes of any conceivable economic event.
Walmart is responsible for over 10% of Chinese imports, not to mention the many small businesses which have gone bust trying to compete with the Walton family's brutal capitalist practices. One of the three Tea Party queens, Christine O'Donnell, waxed poetic on the subject of Walmart during her 2010 campaign. O'Donnell and others often claim that Walmart is responsible for an improved economy.
Professor David Merriman, who led a University of Illinois team studying the economic impact of Chicago's first Walmart store, saw no evidence of an increase in sales in the vicinity, based on tax revenues in the store's postal code area. On the contrary, of all the existing businesses within four square miles of the store, a quarter closed within two years of Walmart's opening day.
In other words, small businesses and the employees working for them were replaced by minimum-wage Walmart jobs with no benefits, forcing many Walmart employees to seek public assistance. These are the jobs that the Tea Party proudly claims to want to create.
"Adding Walmart is not an effective strategy to increase employment or economic development," concluded Merriman, and cited other national studies with similar results.
Reuters' article, Special report: Does corporate America kowtow to China?, is surprisingly balanced and complete. It includes stories that, so far only Der Spiegel and a handful of other sources have reported, the arm-twisting and outright theft by China of technology companies like Kawasaki and Siemens, which gave their trade secrets to China in the hope that they would receive ongoing contracts. But China only gave them the minimum required sales and then started selling their own versions of the products, ones which incorporated all of the stolen technology.
Reuters also noted that some 40% of American factories with more than 250 employees closed down from 2001 to 2010. It is no coincidence that China joined the WTO in 2001, allowing it to bypass pesky tariffs and other barriers to their low-quality, low-price products.
Reuters mentioned several companies which still manufacture goods in the USA: Wigwam (socks), M&B Hangers (clothes hangers), and Vulcan Threaded Products (steel bars and rods). These companies have two things in common. First, they are willing to settle for a reasonable payback on their investment, unlike the typical corporate parasite who demands exorbitant returns only China and India can supply so he can become an oligarch. And second, they actually care about retaining jobs in the USA because they care about Americans.
Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about repression given the death sentence given to him by Muslims for writing unkind things regarding Islam, declared that China has become "the world's biggest threat to freedom of speech." In his Telegraph UK column, he noted how the writer Liao Yiwu was asked to sign a document pledging not to publish any more of his "illegal" works outside China. This sounds rather reminiscent of Muslims demanding that everyone on the world refrain from saying or writing anything that, in the opinion of Muslims, denigrates any portion of Islam.
China, incensed that anyone dares to criticize its policies, declared that Rushdie's column is "a blatant interference in China's judicial independence and violates the country's judicial sovereignty. This cannot and should not be accepted by any sovereign country. . . . China is a country under the rule of law. The basic rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, including freedom of expression, are protected by the law."
As long as Chinese citizens only use that freedom of expression to enslave their fellow citizens via sweatshops, that is.
Fox News reporters often preface the word "China" with "communist" when they ask questions of politicians. In reality, China is currently the world's best example of a pure capitalist country, where anything goes as long as you do not criticize the government, similar to the Fox News crowd's insistence that people not criticize the Bush administration in its run-up to the Iraq War. Anything can be manufactured and sold, regardless of the consequences on human life.
This is the future the Tea Party has in store for us, with their constant attack against government regulation. Our FDA currently protects us against businessmen like those in China who think nothing of killing children for profit. The Tea Party wants to eliminate the FDA and other government agencies which protect the public, allowing the enaction of the Tea Party's stated agenda of returning the USA to the 1800s, when businessmen were free to sell snake oil and every other imaginable product, dangerous or otherwise.
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