The price of cheap goods.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: The Lowdown - Essay

Like a cat watching the wrong mouse hole, we're being told to look to Chinese manufacturers when assessing blame for the toxic products that are being exported from there. But wait a minute--where, oh where, are our own country's regulatory watchdogs?

The big shock is not that Chinese-made toys are laden with lead, but that America's Consumer Product Safety Commission is a toothless watchdog that employs exactly one inspector to oversee the safety of all toys sold in the U.S. Likewise, the Food and Drug Administration has licensed 714 Chinese plants to manufacture the key ingredients for a growing percentage of the antibiotics, painkillers, and other drugs we buy, but provides practically no oversight of these plants. In 2007, for example, the FDA inspected only thirteen of them.

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An even bigger shock is that our consumer protection laws are so riddled with loopholes that unsafe products can legally come into our country. Take phthalate, a chemical additive in plastics that is suspected by scientists here and in Europe of inhibiting testosterone production in infant boys. Yet, Mark Schapiro, author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power , reports that while the European Union has banned the use of phthalates in products aimed at children under three years of age, our government has refused to act.

Thus, China has factories that manufacture two lines of toys--one without phthalates for shipment to European countries, and one with phthalates for export to our children.

The problem is not with the Chinese, but with our own corporate chieftains who have moved their manufacturing to China specifically to get these kinds of low-cost shortcuts in production, while simultaneously demanding that Washington cut back on regulations that protect us consumers. We must put our own house in order.

Such giants as Wal-Mart, Dell, and Disney are profiting enormously from this double whammy of low-cost production and lackadaisical regulation. Not content to profiteer, however, the top executives insist that they should get credit for serving the moral good. Look, they say...