Buyer Beware - or - the lump of lead in yer kids Xmas sock

August 16th, 2007

School begins today in the Pea Patch. In California, my five year old granddaughter Grace will start kindergarten on Monday. Her brother [who received his schools Academic Achievement Award in June, bragged his delighted Grammie] will enter third grade. Their mother and I were chatting about school supplies last weekend and she was distressed because the kids needed lunchboxes. The ones at Target were appealing, she said, but there had been reports about some of them using lead liners — she didn’t know which ones.

“Just look for the label ‘Made in China’,” I proposed. “They’re ALL made in China,” she sighed. We talked about hunting up an old-timey lunch box on e-Bay … paid for at premium because of the collectors fascination with logo’s. I favor Scooby Doo, but Wyatt would no doubt go for Star Wars and I believe Gracie is still in princess-mode.

We’ve got a problem here, dearhearts — in pursuit of ‘cheap’ we’ve welcomed in danger; in pursuit of profit, we’ve knocked down borders and workers rights; in pursuit of the Republican dream, we’re decimating the middle class and have all but eliminated the manufacturing base in this nation, so long-term prosperity has left the building … leaving us at the mercy of imports we can only afford if they continue to be so cheap.

WalMart and Home Depot have reported slumps in sales in the last months, suggesting that rising costs for food and utilities, along with worrisome financial reports, are giving us less consumer confidence, combined with less expendable income … even cheap isn’t cheap enough, these days. And dangerous is a whole ‘nother issue — it isn’t just toys and dog food we need to be wary of. DO open this link to get the full impact. Yikes!

By the way, for those who say Americans sleep through this kind of thing … there are over 200,000 blog entries for this topic on Google; when it gets personal, we’re on it like white on rice. And here’s a bit of trivia — the Pea Patch, dinky crossroads that it is, was a bustling center of activity at the beginning of the last century because of its lead mines; lead is salted everywhere you try to dig a hole, around here … that and granite. Consequently, few of us have basements in the Land of Spontaneous Tornado’s — you’d have to blast the hole with dynamite, which some do. My son’s a carpenter, and brought me several pieces of lead not long ago. They’re BEAUTIFUL — shiny and reflective, almost like liquid mercury. And they’re deceptively heavy — a fist sized piece of lead requires more muscle to lift than you’d imagine. Last but not least, they’re toxic — after you handle lead, you wash up big time.

A collection on the wrinkles, including the ‘honor’ suicide of one of the Chinese co-owners of the toy factory — we’ll start with a ‘toon, and end with a Ted Ralls rant that points out that China’s fledgling industrial revolution may give them an excuse for this kind of mishap that is NOT shared by our own FDA who should know better … and does, but doesn’t seem to care much. I appreciate his article as answer to a number of Right-leaning pieces that have said similar to … so what? victim here, victim there — no big price to pay for “cheap.” These are the same voices that have allowed millions to be killed to avenge 3000.

Pfffft!

Jude

Pat Oliphant ‘toon

China Investigates US Toy Recalls
Daniel Schearf, Voice of America News
16 August 2007

China’s Commerce Ministry said Thursday that the manufacturers and exporters of the toys sent to Mattel would not be allowed to operate until their products were deemed safe.

Mattel, the leading U.S. toy company, this week extended a recall to more than 18 million toys made in China. Mattel says the toys had two safety problems: unsafe amounts of lead paint, which can cause serious bodily damage, or small magnets that children could choke on.

Commerce Ministry spokesman Wang Xinpei repeated the Chinese authorities’ often-used defense in such cases, saying the majority of China’s toy exports are safe, and the media are exaggerating the extent of the problem.

“Why is there some bias against Chinese-made products, or a belief that ‘made in China’ is bad? There are some media or irresponsible people taking small problems, without any basis, and applying them to other products or all Chinese products,” the spokesman said.

Wang says in 2006, the Chinese toy industry’s exports were worth $7 billion, and amounted to 70 percent of world toy exports.

Why Do They Put Lead Paint in Toys?
It’s bright, cheap, and lasts forever.
Christopher Beam, Slate
Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007

Toy manufacturer Mattel recalled nearly 19 million Chinese-made toys Tuesday, including 436,000 toy cars containing lead paint. That was only two weeks after yanking nearly a million of its Fisher-Price toys for preschoolers due to lead content. Why would a toymaker ever use lead paint?

Because it’s bright, durable, flexible, fast-drying, and cheap. Paint manufacturers mix in different lead compounds depending on the color of the paint. Lead chromates, for example, can enhance a yellow or orange hue. Municipal workers often use lead paint because it resists the color-dimming effects of ultraviolet light: The double yellow line in the middle of the road? That’s loaded with lead. Paint manufacturers also add lead and other heavy metals to make paint stick better instead of flaking off. Price is also a factor: China mass-produces the stuff, and coloring agents like lead chromate are generally cheaper than organic pigments. (That said, added lead used to be a luxury. A house painter in the early 20th century would show up to a job with two buckets—one for the paint substrate, one for the lead powder. The more lead he added, the better the paint, the higher the price.)

Lead paint has other qualities that make it attractive to manufacturers. For one thing, it resists mildew, making it perfect for wood furniture and other surfaces likely to get wet. It’s also anti-corrosive: Ship makers have historically applied a coating of lead paint, often containing the red mineral litharge, to the bottom of metal ships’ hulls. (The Romans used lead paint, too—that’s why the paint on some of their ruins is so well-preserved.)

But for all its utility, lead is dangerous even in small quantities. In 1978, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission made it illegal to use any paint containing more than 0.06 percent lead for residential structures, hospitals, and children’s products. But it’s still widely used on bridges, tanks, towers, heavy equipment, parking lots, road signs, and other large-scale projects. There’s still lead in most consumer paints, too—just much, much less. Many paint manufacturers now use safer alternatives like zinc and bromide, although these metals don’t quite match lead’s luster or strength.

People have known about lead’s harmful effects for centuries. Benjamin Franklin once wrote a letter about the “bad Effects of Lead taken inwardly,” and some 19th-century paint companies ran newspaper ads bragging about their lead-free paint. President George H.W. Bush’s dog, Millie, attracted national attention to the dangers of lead poisoning in 1992, when she got sick from breathing lead dust during White House renovations. In 2006, the state of Rhode Island won a lawsuit against three major paint companies, which were ordered to clean up 300,000 contaminated homes.

China’s problems with lead go beyond toys
Wed. Aug. 15 2007
CTV.ca News Staff

Chinese-made vinyl baby bibs should be pulled from store shelves because they may contain too much lead paint, an environmental group said Wednesday, in the latest allegation of shoddy manufacturing to hit the country.

The bibs, sold in Toys “R” Us stores in the U.S., have amounts of lead up to four times what the Environmental Protection Agency allows in paint, claimed the California-based Center for Environmental Health.

Toys “R” Us said earlier tests concluded the bibs had acceptable limits of lead, but is now testing the products again.

The environmental group bought four bibs in the San Francisco Bay-area and tested them at a private lab.

Earlier this week, Mattel Inc., the largest U.S. toy company, recalled millions more Chinese-made toys on Tuesday due to safety risks from lead paint and warned it may recall additional products as it steps up testing.

More than 80 per cent of the world’s toys are manufactured in China, and many are from small producers that are resistant to regulation. They make cheap plastic, metal and wooden toys that often have a lead content well above internationally accepted limits and even above limits set by the Chinese government.

Lead is often added to paint to make colours brighter. But it’s also well known to cause damage to the nervous and reproductive systems and lead to brain damage and birth defects.

China has joined developed countries in tightening controls on lead, but the rules are difficult to enforce in a society with a thriving underground industry producing substandard goods. And low-level authorities often are reluctant to force changes that might hurt local companies.

With the recent recall of Chinese-made toothpaste, pet foods and tires, the country is gaining a reputation for goods that are shoddy and hazardous.

“It does hurt the made-in-China label in the short term, definitely,” says journalist James McGregor, author of One Billion Customers.

“Whether it hurts the made-in-China label in the long term is up to China and cleaning up their act and being transparent.”

But the authoritarian-run Chinese government is not known for its transparency, and on state television, there has not been a mention of one of the world’s largest toy recalls.

For Chinese parents, worries about lead competes with worries about the many other toxins in the heavily polluted country. While the country has phased out leaded gasoline, house paint, old pipes and buildings and factories are still big sources of lead and poisonings are frequent.

Last year, 877 villagers near a lead smelter in the northwest’s Gansu province, including 334 children under 14, suffered lead poisoning, according to state media. The smelter’s owners later admitted they ran it at night with its pollution-control gear turned off to save money, news reports said.

A study of 5,000 children in Dongguan, a boomtown near Hong Kong, found that 22.1 per cent had lead in their blood in excess of safe levels, according to the newspaper Yangcheng Evening News.

Still, analysts say the blame doesn’t lie only with Chinese manufacturers. They point to major foreign buyers that are demanding lower and lower prices, forcing Chinese factories to cut corners.

China is undergoing its industrial revolution, and that means many regulatory bodies are simply not yet up to standard or even non-existent. They are receiving help from the American FDA and European Union to build such regulations, but it will take time.

At the same time, factory owners are having to increase wages due to a labour shortage spurred by China’s one-child policy.

“If they were transparent about the pressure their factory owners are under to cut prices, if they’re transparent about how they have a lot of poor people, and how this is a developing country that is just getting its regulatory system together, people would be sympathetic,” believes McGregor.

How quickly the made-in-China label recovers depends in large part on China’s honesty with the world. But with the Olympics less than a year away, the image-conscious nation may find it hard to admit its weaknesses.

With a report from Steve Chao, CTV Beijing Bureau Chief

China’s Quality Problem: A Long-Term vs Short-Term Thinking Teachable Moment
Steven G. Brant, HuffPo
August 15, 2007

With the recall by Mattel of 19 million toys made in China, the question on my mind is “How will the business world - and the American people in general — respond to this teachable moment in the never ending struggle between short-term and long-term thinking?”

Here’s what I mean: We have a product quality crisis on our hands, one that is so big it could upset the entire economic relationship between the United States and China. Both short- and long-term thinking-based solutions exist to this crisis. And the differences between these two types of solutions is huge… like night and day. In fact, the real difference is that one will actually solve the problem, while the other will just sweep it under the carpet. Guess which is which.

That’s right, short-term thinking will not solve the crisis. Only long-term thinking will. And isn’t it funny how you knew the answer intuitively, even without knowing what the long-term oriented solution is in detail?

Regrettably, the mainstream media voices are not speaking from an intuitive place. They are speaking from a classic regulatory mindset, which says “If there are bad things in the world, we should put more people in place to catch the bad things before they reach us.” Here’s what I mean, from today’s New York Times:

In its editorial — “China, Unregulated” — The New York Times says:

“What China needs is an effective and transparent regulatory system to enforce product safety standards. The United States and other countries can help with technical advice and warnings about what would happen if Beijing refuses to take it.”…”American regulators…must also do a lot more to ensure the safety of Chinese-made goods, sending their own personnel to China to perform inspections of factories and test goods before they are shipped.”…and - lamenting the inability of the Consumer Products Safety Commission to protect us - “(The CPSC) must inspect tens of billions of dollars worth of goods sold every year with only about 100 field investigators and compliance personnel.”

Yup. Regulations and enforcement…threats to stop doing business with them…that’s how to get people and organizations to change. Motivation by fear. (By the way, while to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been widely reported, the head of a major Chinese toy manufacturing company at the center of this crisis committed suicide over the weekend.

Anger, fear, betrayal and other related emotions got to him. This is a real tragedy. Not only has a human life been lost, but any knowledge he had regarding why is products were of such poor quality was lost with him.)

Speaking of people who are no longer with us, if he were still alive, Dr. W. Edwards Deming — famous for helping the Japanese make “Made In Japan” a symbol of world class quality (even though right after World War II it meant the opposite) — would be saying something like this to government leaders, manufacturers, and consumers in both the U.S. and China:

“You cannot produce high-quality products by inspecting them at the end of production. All you can do at that point is prevent poor quality products from reaching consumers, at a tremendous waste of time, energy, and materials. High quality results from a process of redesigning your manufacturing processes — including your relationships with your suppliers — so that your products are built correctly in the first place. This is a long-term process requiring a continuous learning and improvement mindset. I predicted it would take the Japanese five years to turn their manufacturing processes around. Through dedicated effort, they did it in four.”

(I studied with Dr. Deming in the early 1990’s.)

This is how you really solve a production quality problem. You design the manufacturing system so that it produces a high-quality product from the get go…or re-design the system, in the case of one that’s already up and running.

At the end of World War II, the American government sent Dr. Deming (and others, such as Dr. Joseph Juran) to Japan so they could help the Japanese successfully rebuilt their manufacturing capacity. Our government did this, because our foreign policy was amazingly enlightened at the time. Just like with The Marshall Plan, we knew that helping rebuild the countries of our former enemies would benefit them, us, and the whole world in the long run.

I would like to humbly propose (and if I’m lucky, maybe someone from one or more of the political candidates’ organizations will pick up on this) that the US government send a team of experts to China to teach Dr. Deming’s methods. Dr. Deming may no longer be alive, but his and related work continues thanks to such organizations as The W. Edwards Deming Institute, the In2:InThinking Network, and — perhaps most appropriately since it’s funded by our tax dollars - the Baldrige National Quality Program or people from the state-wide programs that are based on the Baldrige criteria.

This is the long-term thinking solution. Why? Because quality management takes time to implement. It takes time to learn. But so does anything that enables you to do something you’ve never done before.

In an American society that continues to be fixated on “instant gratification” and “flavor of the month” lifestyle choices (not to mention addicted to quarterly profit statements), long-term thinking and its associated life-long learning approach is the true route to solving China’s poor product quality problem (and problems in our education and health care systems as well).

Will average Americans realize that short- vs. long-term thinking is at the crux of our problems? Will America’s opinion and policy making leaders? Will the Chinese? Only time will tell.

But there is a parallel to China’s quality problem in American history. If you go back to the 1970s, our poor-quality products (especially our automobiles) were losing market share to products from Japan. There was a lot of time spent asking “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” (which is the name of a famous 1980 NBC- TV White Paper report). That report showed what was going on in Japan, including their use of the management theories taught to them by Dr. Deming, who was still consulting with Japanese businesses at 80 years old. America learned then that it needed to get the “quality religion.” And it worked for a while. But old, short-term thinking habits die hard…especially when supported by the demand for quarterly profits at any cost.

It’s not too late to learn those lessons once again my friends. Short-term thinking is killing China’s export business. And, if truth be told, it is killing the American way of life too.

So you can learn more about Dr. Deming and the quality revolution he helped launch, here’s the first part of a three-part BBC documentary from 1991. Links to the other three parts can be found when it’s done playing. In it, Dr. Deming himself speaks about his work, as does Don Petersen (former CEO of The Ford Motor Company) and others. [open link for video]

AN APPEALING CHINESE IMPORT: ACCOUNTABILITY
Should Leaders Who Ruin Lives Go Unpunished?
Ted Rall, Yahoo
Wed Aug 15

Zhang was co-owner of the Lee Der Industrial Company, the Chinese company that made toys for Mattel using toxic levels of lead paint. Mattel issued a recall expected to cost the company in the neighborhood of $30 million.

Poor guy–he probably didn’t even know the paint his workers were slathering on nearly a million toys for preschoolers was dangerous. “The boss and the company were harmed by the paint supplier, the closest friend of our boss,” reported the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper.

“It is not uncommon for Chinese executives to commit suicide after suffering damage to their reputation,” noted the UK Telegraph.

Zhang’s death followed the July execution of Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration from 1994 to 2005. Zheng was convicted of accepting $850,000 in bribes from eight pharmaceutical companies in exchange for approving fake and substandard drugs. An antibiotic involved in the case killed at least 10 people.

The Xinhua news agency didn’t say how Zheng was killed, but most Chinese executions are carried out with a single gunshot to the back of the head. Shortly afterward a policeman notifies the condemned man’s family by presenting them with a bill for the cost of the bullet.

Now that’s accountability. Can we import some of that too?

The late Mssrs. Zhang and Zheng oversaw corruption and incompetence that pales next to catastrophes for which no American has yet been held to account. Thousands died in hurricane Katrina because officials all the way up to George “Heckuva job, Brownie!” Bush made a conscious decision not to help. Two years later, what’s left of New Orleans is dying, murdered by an appalling political calculus: It is (was) black. It was Democratic. Shouldn’t government officials face a firing squad for killing a major city?

What about Iraq? It wouldn’t bring back the million dead civilians or the thousands of dead soldiers, but watching Wolfy and Rummy and Cheney hold hands as they leapt off the tallest building in D.C. might brighten the day of their grieving relatives.

The same goes for the war against Afghanistan, which state-controlled media has finally conceded is a lost cause. (Lead story in the August 12th New York Times: “How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad.”) Save some rope for the Democratic politicians and the phony journalists who insisted that Bush had “taken his eye off the ball in Afghanistan” to invade Iraq. The blood splattered by every errant Hellfire missile, every blown-up wedding party and the bullet wounds in Pat Tillman’s body are their responsibility.

If execution is good enough for Cao Wenzhuang, a Chinese FDA official accused of taking $307,000 in bribes, how about his American counterparts? As cancer patients drop like flies, U.S. FDA bureaucrats delay approval of drugs that could have saved their lives.

Eloxatin, a drug used to treat advanced colorectal cancer, has been approved in at least 29 countries–but the FDA rejected it anyway. Under pressure from terminally ill patients, the agency then approved it. But they dragged their feet for more than two years. Some 40,000 Americans died during the delay.

“Twelve drugs–had they been available to people denied entry to clinical trials–might have helped more than one million mothers, fathers, sons and daughters live longer, better lives,” say the founders of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.

I’m not sure I’d want to live somewhere as uptight as China. At its border with Tajikistan recently, a white-gloved policeman stood ramrod straight, sweating under a blazing sun, waiting to direct traffic. Because the border was closed for lunch, however, there was no traffic. Even when vehicles began moving, he had no traffic to direct–it was a straight road, not an intersection. Some official thought the border needed a traffic cop, so there he was.

Still, the Chinese get some things right. “Corruption in the food and drug authority has brought shame to the nation,” says Yan Jiangying, deputy policy director of China’s FDA. We could use some shame here in America.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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