What Chinese Forced Labor Letter Warns America

So a brave woman working in a Chinese forced labor camp wrote a letter pleading for someone to speak up on behalf of the millions of people imprisoned and tortured there en route to re-education at the hands of the Communist party. You can read the letter below or here with analysis.  She slipped it inside the plastic Halloween decoration she was packaging for shipment to America.

There's nothing wrong with refusing to shop at Wal-Mart, looking for the "Made in the USA" icon (look hard...) or writing your Congressperson in response. These actions make us feel like we're helping. In reality, that's not likely to affect change in China any more effectively than it would in America.

I offer this letter not to bring attention to what is happening in China, not to scoff at our own rampant consumerism but as a warning to Americans. Many of us find it disturbing to learn of large-scale, "legally" established forced labor camps operating today in other countries. Still many more never learned of the Russian Gulag system per this Nobel Prize-winning book or exactly how the Spanish were able to extract mountains of gold and silver from the Americas, legally sanctioned by the crown. And lest we forget our own White House was built by forced labor that was legally established in the Constitution.  No need for a longer list.

With the non-stop operation of forced labor camps spanning the world for thousands of years, why do so many Americans find it incomprehensible that forced labor camps could ever exist right here in the USA?

And I'm not even referring to our corrections industry, which imprisons more people than any other on the planet - and includes forced labor - nor am I referring to the wacky Web sites that claim we're all to be rounded up and sent to a FEMA camp for re-education. There's no need for such speculation when we have laws on the books that clarify what may be coming down the pike. The NDAA (full text pdf) and follow-up executive order "gives the government, through the Secretary of Labor, the right to proactively mobilize U.S. citizens for 'labor' as the government deems necessary." You can read all about it here on the Huffington Post and on other links within that article. In fact, any and all resources may be confiscated if the government deems it necessary. It seems we may be forced to hand over our food, water, money and shelter and toil in a work camp at gunpoint - but as long as it's all legal I guess that's just fine. All we need now is something worthy of being labeled a national emergency to trigger the taking! 

Forced labor camps, secret police forces, torture and government theft of property are simply the logical result of an all-powerful, collectivist government. It was as obvious to Thomas Jefferson as it has been to millions upon millions of helpless victims throughout human history. Why many Americans today seem unable or unwilling to grasp what is happening right in front of our noses is baffling beyond words.

And I didn't even mention weather modification.


 
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Who pays for toy inspections from China?

So a toy company hires a company in China to manufacture toys. The toys get sold in the U.S. and since they're full of lead kids get injured/poisoned and one may have died because the toy company neglected to supervise its vendors or even care if the toys were safe or met U.S. standards. "The government shouldn't have let these toys into the country!" cry the toy companies and the media latches onto the idea. "If only the government were more involved in the toy industry," they cry, "then everyone would be safe from the evils of lead!" This is a letter to the editor published in Plastics News at the time of the media frenzy:

Mattel can't outsource manufacturing to a company in China and then expect us as taxpayers to be responsible for their quality control

I have to take exception to Nina Ying Sun's solution to restoring confidence in the American consumer amid the Mattel fallout. In her Viewpoint of 9/17, "U.S. must safeguard its own consumers", she suggests that rather than divvy up the blame among responsible parties like Mattel we should instead blame the U.S. government for failing to inspect and catch the defective products. Then she calls for a "focus on reinforcing or even revamping the U.S. system for safety testing and inspection", meaning legislation and regulation. This really rubs me the wrong way. Mattel can't outsource manufacturing to a company in China or anywhere else in the world and then expect us as taxpayers to be responsible for their quality control (or lack of quality control). Mattel is responsible for its vendors whether they are located in Beijing or Bayonne. Can American manufacturers get free quality control paid for by the U.S. taxpayers, too, or do they have to ship their manufacturing jobs overseas first?

Nina is right that we need "better gatekeepers" and that "efforts to minimize error should never be lax" but woefully wrong in placing that responsibility in the hands of the government. The Consumer Product Safety Commission was not setup to compensate for poor business practices and the burden to overcome them should not be placed on U.S. taxpayers. I also find the sudden interest in inspecting up to 100 percent of incoming cargo containers for hazardous plastic toys sadly amusing when the government has shown such little interest in inspecting the very same cargo containers for nuclear weapons.

Paul Entin
Bloomsbury, NJ

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