Needlenose

I was naturally suspicious a few years back when Rupert Murdoch decided to build a McMansion in Beijing, but now I’m certain there is something evil afoot there – the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman just used the term ‘fair and balanced’ in a discussion regarding the U.S.’s concerns that China is deliberately undervaluing the yuan in order to maintain the flow of under priced goods to the U.S.  It’s pretty clear from the context that he means it exactly in the ‘Fox’ sense – whatever we want or believe is “fair and balanced, so screw you!”

My previous post about alternative energy technology being manufactured in China attracted a fair bit of discussion.  Beyond the snark, the U.S. does indeed have legitimate concerns about how China conducts its business.

The yuan needs to float freely against the dollar and the euro – like a real currency.  Right now they have a built in mechanism to ‘not be undersold’ by U.S. goods.

Why is the U.N. still giving them development aid?  If they can afford to loan us trillions of dollars, then can afford to lift themselves out of poverty.

We need to enforce environmental concerns with excise taxes.  Chinese pollution doesn’t just stay in China – their crap comes wafting in the air and affects everyone.  They don’t want to commit to emissions caps?  Well estimate their emissions, put a price on them, and attach the price to their cheap goods.  They won’t come to the table unless we force them to come to the table.

I could go on in the same vein about labor concerns, sustainable sourcing of resources, etc.  Right now China is acting like the ‘bad boy’ of the planet, and will continue to do so if there are no consequences.

Recently I railed about the high levels of pharmaceuticals found in fish caught off the coast of several major cities.  I had naively thought that stemmed from medicines passed from overmedicated Americans through their urine that weren’t being filtered out by wastewater treatment plants (an earlier explanation I had read).

Well that could certainly be a contributor, but who would have thought Big Pharma would just be dumping medicine-laden water directly (and legally) into the sewer system?

Three woeful facts here – one, that discharges of these chemicals isn’t regulated, two these discharges are mostly not even monitored, and three – we don’t filter these chemicals out of the waste stream before they enter our seafood pantry.

Enough to make me a vegetarian.  Oh wait…I already am one!