Senator Dodd: Cut off Chinese imports until they stop poisoning us

This is the greatest blow to the neoliberal consensus I have seen in a long time. And it's a courageous call to action from Senator Dodd.

This is an issue of safety. Parents should be confident that the toys and food that they give their children have been inspected and are safe. That's why I am calling on the President to use his authority to immediately suspend all imports of toys and food from China. It's not enough to simply talk about working for fair trade agreements. We need leadership that will act to enforce fair trade. We have the legal right and power under the WTO to keep products out of our country that threaten the health and safety of our families, and I'm going to do all I can to ensure we do so.

Only in our similarly poisoned political culture would this be seen as controversial. The Chinese have been operating for years with virtually nonexistent labor standards, allowing them to overpower our manufacturing base by producing goods at rock-bottom prices. They have not created a flat world, but one completely tilted in their favor, which uses what amounts to slaves to give us complacent Americans 99 cent packs of tube socks. Predictably, this inattention to any kind of human rights or quality control has led to poisoned food, poisoned toys, foodstuffs made out of cardboard, toothpaste with antifreeze, and probably a hundred other various depredations we just haven't heard about yet. In this situation, the only sensible thing to do is to not allow such items into American homes until we can get a handle on how wide and deep it actually goes. Senator Dodd's call is Common Sense 101.

But, as HTML Mencken notes, this will be met with howls of "protectionism!" and "you want to kill our economy!" And those howls will be coming from a particular source:

The problem here is the 21st Century version of The Jungle, with the Chinese government in the place of the meat packers, the Chinese people being the Lithuanian immigrant workers, and the American public… is still the American public, being poisoned by Corporatist pigs defended, now as then, by a complacent and complicit intellectual class (back then, stodgy laissez-faire men; and now, neoliberal economists and globalization cheerleaders) whose anger is only aroused by the muckrakers and dissenters whose position Dodd, to his immense credit, echoes [...]

While the current FDA is amazingly incompetent and corrupt even by normal Bushite standards of incompetence and corruption (which is saying a lot), even the “best” Clintonoid FDA couldn’t possibly inspect all the food imports. The problem can only be solved by insisting through trade pacts that imported food is produced according to American environmental, labor, and safety standards. They want our market, fine; they must treat their workers, the environment, and consumers by our rules (which admittedly aren’t all that great right now, either, also largely in thanks to Corporate-whorish Sensible Liberals, but better by far than China’s). However, demanding such a remedy requires moral courage, something economics textbooks don’t teach — though there is apparently an esoteric chapter in them that instructs in the fine art of dishonestly using moral language.

If you want to see trade and globalization rocket up to the top of the public consciousness, you'll join with me in broadcasting Senator Dodd's call to action far and wide. I don't think he's the most populist candidate in the Presidential race; he's not calling for the cancellation of NAFTA or the WTO, for example. But he's bringing to light a very pervasive issue in completely rational and sensible terms, namely that we shouldn't let poison into our homes. This would be a bold first step into unmaking the ridiculous economic consensus that globalization is a net positive and "wouldn't you rather have lead paint in your toys than have to pay a dollar more for them?"

Senator Dodd's going to take a lot of heat for this one, let's get his back.