Home > Protectionism, Patsies and Pussies

Protectionism, Patsies and Pussies

by Open-Publishing - Sunday 6 May 2007
5 comments

Trade-Exchange Rates USA Daveparts

How do you explain the advantages of globalism to a seven year old while she’s burying a family pet in the back yard. “Well you see Virginia, sometimes companies let bad things get into the cat food.” Of course that answer is just so superficial, the fact is the Chinese are a raging success at capitalism not just from a monetary standpoint but from a behavioral point of view as well.

Sometimes we watch our children play and we see aspects of ourselves reflected in them that we don’t like very much. China behaves much as nineteenth century America behaved with it’s rapid industrialization and exploitation with little or no care or concern for the human condition or environmental fallout. The corporate media and intelligentsia watch from a distance and rub their hands saying, “Isn’t it great!” when they get home the say, “Hush Muffy, I’ll buy you another kitty!”

It is relatively easy to understand about American steel workers making twenty plus dollars and hour with benefits verses Chinese steel workers making five dollars a day.
But Wheat gluten? Have we as a nation eroded so far that we must import wheat gluten? The great plains of the United States and Canada extend almost a thousand miles in any direction and yet we have to import wheat gluten from China?

The futurist Alvin Toffler predicted in his book “The Futurist” The third wave, the third wave was going to be the third world countries making quantum leaps learning from the first and second worlds mistakes. They were going to be clean green and responsible a true asset to the global community, after all they had all of our mistakes to learn from and so no reason to go down the wrong road. As always however, it’s the same flaw in the slaw no matter how far we travel on our sojourn towards the future be it in chariots or the atomic powered hover cars we were once promised in the fifties it’s always in the baggage. We cannot escape our ancestral clothing we still fight to defend our bunch of bananas from our hungry rivals.

Futurism is to science as Spiderman is to crime fighting, in the real world he would be declared an enemy combatant and confined in a spider cell on Guantanemo. The futurist dream meets the Neocon nightmare, we the uninformed spending our days loving our children and petting our kitties think like consumers not like producers. Yes, they could buy American wheat gluten but it could add maybe half a cent per can to the cost. So what? The naive may ask, well on twenty million cans that’s a hundred thousand dollars! But more important than that is it shrinks the market for American wheat gluten and helps knock the props out from under domestic production there by lowering the price.

This is what Commerce secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez described as bringing 300 billion dollars of benefits to the American consumers. Our dream like idyllic lifestyle is all made possible by free trade with out it we would begin to notice the uncomfortable, I mean besides dead pets and crying children. That our currency is losing its value, that gains made in the stock market are a sham as the currency losses value. The sub prime mortgage market grew from 6% of the total to almost 20% not because it was a great idea but because the number of qualified buyers had declined. Likewise the price of gas at the pump is as much a reflection of currency devaluation as it is crude oil prices. But the Commerce secretary is correct 300 billion in benefits although he neglects to mention to mention that 90% of the benefits went to families named Walton and other global players. The other 10% of us got empty factories and dead pets and crying children.

How do you explain rampant corporate greed to children? When you can’t even get the bulk of so-called educated adults to understand. I guess the best way is just to keep it simple, today is cat food tomorrow its baby food.

Forum posts

  • Until you have some serious proof that China is in fact at fault, I’d check that "American can do no wrong" attitude at the door. Point of fact: see Bitter Harvest (at imdb.com) about farmers in Michigan who had to kill their cows, chickens, and other livestock because a fire retardant got into the feed and was making people very sick. See also the entry in wikipedia at:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybrominated_biphenyls

    • (CBS/AP) The exporter of a contaminated pet food ingredient blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats in the United States may have avoided Chinese export inspections by labeling it a nonfood product, a U.S. government report says.

      The company, Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., was not the original producer of the tainted wheat gluten, but may have purchased it from up to 25 different suppliers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a statement.

      The identities of those suppliers remain a mystery and all calls to listed numbers for Xuzhou Anying on Friday rang unanswered. Investigators are also looking into the origins of a second contaminated food additive imported from China, rice protein concentrate.

      The New York Times reported that Xuzhou Anying’s manager, Mao Lijun, had been detained by Chinese authorities, although the paper gave no details about possible charges against him. Calls to police and government offices in the city of Xuzhou, in eastern China’s Jiangsu where the company is based, rang unanswered on Friday, which was a public holiday.

      The scandal concerns the use of the mildly toxic chemical melamine as an additive to animal feed, a practice believed to be common in China, where scandals over contaminated or unsafe food are routine.

      Adding the chemical to food is illegal under American law, and while no laws govern the use of melamine in China, the government last week said it was banning its application in food products.

      A wave of animal deaths in the U.S. in March was blamed on melamine contamination, prompting one of the biggest recalls of pet food in American history — more than 100 brands. The recall has since been expanded to include pet food products in Canada and Europe.

      The FDA on Thursday said U.S. government inspectors are checking food makers who use protein concentrates to ensure none of their products were contaminated with melamine.

      There is no evidence that any of the two contaminated batches of wheat gluten and rice protein from China ended up as an ingredient in human food, "but it’s prudent to look," said David Acheson, assistant FDA commissioner for food protection.

      Far from America can do no wrong , the thrust of the post was on American wrong doing. Importing products readily available locally from the third world to save money. Careless about the saftey of their products the old adege "All that gliters is not gold" seems to be appropriate. Rather than leraning from American mistakes as the futurists predicted many Chinease industries choose the path of quick corporate profits reguardless of saftey or environment imatating the worst aspects of American Capitalism. Mao would be spinning in his grave.

    • Thanks very much. I understand your point much better now. Still, I would be very keen on finding information from independent sources. I hope you will forgive me my near total cynicism of American news media.

  • Look at the way china treats it’s own people, for christsake! You think they’re going to give a sh#* what goes into pet food?!

  • Bees, pets, Iraqis... lots of sentient beings figuring it’s time to get the fuck out of this incarnation, lately.

    QT