Navarro On Defective Chinese Products
Posted By:Peter Navarro
Topics:Medicine | Economy (Global) | China
Sectors:Pharmaceuticals | Health Care | Automobiles and Parts | Personal and Household Goods
Companies:Toyota Motor Corporation
cnbc.com
The latest tawdry news in the “contaminated, cancerous, or defective Chinese product files is the tire scandal. Seems that the Chinese manufacturer started leaving off a key strip that dramatically cut tire life. This has led to car crashes, with SUVs particularly vulnerable to rollover when tires fail.
What’s interesting is how the Chinese company is stonewalling the issue, claiming no defects. Besides lax regulation and corrupt regulators, there is no “trial lawyer crowd” in China to police the system. It’s a total free for all and the list of dangerous products will only continues to grow.
Here’s a number of scenarios out of my Coming China Wars book that illustrate the broad scope of the counterfeiting dimension of the problem:
1) Your scalp develops a severe rash because your knock-off “Head and Shoulders” shampoo contains toxic chemical residue.
2) In the dead of night, the counterfeit power strip that you bought in the bargain bin of the local hardware store starts an electrical fire. Your smoke detector doesn’t work because your fake “Duracell” batteries leaked acid all over the alarm system. Did you get out of the house before it burned down?
3) You get hospitalized with a very bad case of the flu two weeks after taking a flu shot. Turns out your “vaccine” was bacteria-laden tap water--which also explains why you felt so lousy for several days after the shot.
4) A small pebble shoots up from the tire of a truck in front of you and hits your windshield. The “safety” glass doesn’t crack but shatters and shards of glass fly everywhere. You escape serious injury but wind up with small cuts on your forearms, hands, and face.
5) You get a postcard from a friend visiting China who tells you about his own wounds from flying glass. Seems he bought a six-pack of phony “Budweiser” at a Shanghai supermarket and one of the bottles exploded in his hand just as he was about to open it.
6) On the way home from school, your child’s school bus driver hits the brakes to stop for a red light. The knockoff brakes fail and the bus is hit broadside by a Toyota Corolla. Fortunately, none of the children are badly hurt, but the driver of the Corolla winds up in the morgue.
7) Your father almost dies because neither the “Norvasc” he was taking for high blood pressure nor the “Lipitor” that he was taking for high cholesterol had any active ingredients. Days later, your mother winds up in the hospital with a broken hip because her phony Evista medication for osteoporosis was nothing more than molded chalk.
8) Your brother orders Viagra over the Internet because he is too embarrassed to ask his doctor for a regular prescription. After a nice candlelight dinner with his spouse, he winds up in hospital bed with a wild heartbeat. The very next week your prized Himalayan “lap cat” succumbs to liver failure because the tick medicine she was taking turned out to contain poison.
9) A mental patient is administered a regimen of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa and after several weeks of ingesting an unintentional placebo, he goes berserk in your local supermarket and injures one of your best friends.
10) On a sultry summer night, two of your co-workers--a 22-year old gay man and a 24-year old heterosexual woman--buy fake “Durex Extra Safe” condoms at the same pharmacy. Later that night, in separate encounters, the condoms burst. The gay man gets HIV while the woman contracts Chlamydia that renders her sterile. |
