Made In China: Carcinogenic Sand Storms.

There are a lot of things that are made in China, toxic children’s formula, poisonous toys, unbridled censorship, but my favorite is “Yellow Sand.”

Yellow Sand is a natural occurrence that has happened every year since men (and women) were living in caves. Winds seasonally generated in Siberia blow through the Gobi picking up sand which ends up predominately over the Korean Peninsula and Japan,  but can deposit dust as far away as Hawaii and California with all the spots in between. The Chinese have found a way to augment this phenomenon with their crappy practices of disposing toxic industrial wastes into, among other places, the Gobi Desert.

So now, aside from just your Plane Jane grit, you get to count on all sorts of other goodies.  Sulfur (an acid rain component), soot, ash, carbon monoxide, and other toxic pollutants including heavy metals (such as mercury, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, lead, zinc, copper) and other carcinogens, often accompany the dust storms, as well as viruses, bacteria, fungi, pesticides, antibiotics, asbestos, herbicides, plastic ingredients, like the discarded melamine that didn’t make it into baby formula.

Of course China isn’t to blame completely. Aside from their homegrown greedy reprobates, there are multinational culprits, most of which hang their shingles in Europe and the United States. The same mephitic companies that promote global material consumption on a hitherto unknown scale, the same miscreant companies and their attendant bankers that are continuing to fleecing the average Joe, or Chou with usury credit rates that they hope will off-set their losses from various “exotic” financial “instruments” gone bad are as much to blame as the poor scrub, nascent Chinese capitalists straining to get on the profit train that dump their unusable wastes into places like the Gobi for the rest of us to breathe.

Really can’t blame the Chinese for everything Made in China, when the reason for being Made in China lies largely with the “smart” guys on Wall Street, The City and in places as seemingly off the beaten track as  Omaha.

 I wonder when the rest of us will wake up and realize that the smart guys are really only smart when it comes to finding ways to fill their pockets no matter  the cost.  Someday,  the greater good for the many, will trump the greater greed of the few: I hope there is still breathable air for those that live to see that day.