It’s a crime of fashion even worse than wearing a white bra under a white T-shirt: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a shipment of more than 20,000 pairs of fake Christian Louboutin shoes yesterday!
As ABC News reports, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection confiscated 20,457 pairs of counterfeit Christian Louboutin shoes at the Los Angeles/Long Beach seaport. According to the CBP, the knock-off shoes that were transported in five different shipments on a cargo ship in large boxes from China had a domestic value of more than $57,000, meaning it cost just less than $3 per pair to make them. Officials said there were enough of those red soles to add up to a suggested retail value of $18 million, an unbelievable profit.”
So, what tipped authorities off that the stems were phonies? “The original [Christian Louboutin] shoe is made in Italy,??? said chief CBP officer Guillermina Escobar. “Once we saw it was coming in from China, we knew there was a problem with the shipment.??? The fakes are also pretty awful, if you ask us–check out the photo above, where they’re clearly labeled “made in China” of “all man made materials.”
Thankfully, all 20,000+ pairs will be destroyed, likely by burning.
In the zeal for profit western companies still put customers at risk, often fatally.
The latest case involves pet poisonings traced back to China, caused by some as yet unidentified adulterant included in “jerky treats” for dogs. The company involved is Nestle Purina, which refuses to pull its product from the market because no test yet exists for whatever it is that is sickening and killing dogs.
Supply chain security has remained iffy and there is a proven record of unscrupulous businessmen who work hard to find adulterants which can be used to increase profit margin.
An FDA page on the matter indicates the contamination of “jerky treats” varies, perhaps waning when reports of animal deaths begin to pick up and the production of the material in question is withdrawn until the heat dies down.
In 2011, FDA saw an increase in the number of complaints it received of dog illnesses associated with consumption of chicken jerky products imported from China.
FDA previously issued a cautionary warning regarding chicken jerky products to consumers in September 2007 and a Preliminary Animal Health Notification in December of 2008. The number of complaints being received dropped off during the latter part of 2009 and most of 2010. However in 2011, FDA once again started seeing the number of complaints rise to the levels of concern that prompted release of our earlier warnings.
Since the issuance of the CVM Update on November 18, 2011, the agency has received numerous additional complaints regarding chicken jerky products.
Dog owners in eight states who believe contaminated chicken jerky treats from China sickened or killed their pets are banding together in a class-action lawsuit against Nestle Purina, the maker of two popular brands of the canine snacks, and several mega-stores that sell them.
They are suing just as Food and Drug Administration officials have refused to release results of inspections of Chinese plants that make the jerky treats blamed for at least 1,000 illnesses and deaths in U.S. pets.
Fine biochemicals like heparin cost money and who can argue
with the logic of increasing profits by sending the work to a slave labor country where it can be made in some kitchen not checked by any annoying regulatory agency?
Not Baxter or Scientific Protein Laboratories, the two American companies entangled in the mass recall of the drug heparin. Tainted heparin from these firms, the purification of which was outsourced to China, has resulted in 19 deaths.
If you have the news on the scandal you can’t help but notice there is no sign of public remorse. No one from the involved American firms has anything human to say.
In a Chicago Tribune feature on Baxter International and the tainted heparin scandal, the newspaper reported the company leaping into action to root out the problem. It was a self-serving account.
And it was so egregious and intelligence-insulting, a good portion of it is worth republishing.
“Inside Baxter’s Deerfield headquarters, it was code red,” reported the Tribune. “Robert Parkinson, the company’s chief executive, began holding early morning meetings with a team of key leaders: people responsible for Baxter’s drug surveillance, drug quality, legal, manufacturing, research, and regulatory affairs.
“After the morning meetings, Parkinson made a point of popping in on his key executives. This kept him up to speed on developments and gave people a chance to share what they had learned.
“One surprise: Parkinson soon learned the FDA never had inspected the China manufacturing plant. Recalling the finding in a recent Tribune interview, Parkinson sought to minimize the oversight.
“It’s not unusual for us not to know that the FDA has not inspected a supplier to a supplier,” he said.
On Tuesday, the US Olympic Committee officially unveiled the threads Team USA will be wearing during the Opening and Closing Ceremony Parade at the London Olympics this summer. As usual, the uniforms have drawn mixed reviews. Similar to the way people felt at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, some are saying they reek of military propaganda while others appreciate the nostalgic feel of the navy blazers, white pants and berets. Those are simply opinions, but the fact of the matter is the uniforms are made in China.
While they were designed in America by the famous Ralph Lauren himself, the US athletes will be covered in head to toe with garments and accessories that are labeled “Made in China.??? Like many others, US fashion designer Nanette Lepore said she is shocked that the uniform manufacturing was outsourced.
“These days, Romney rails against China for swiping American jobs and proclaims, ‘For me, it’s all about good jobs for the American people,'” it reads.
China didn’t swipe the jobs. We sold the jobs.
But who would believe what Mitt Romney says, anyway? In fact, if he said something, you would be safer in believing the opposite, on any subject.
This is Zhejiang Boltool Tools Co.,Ltd. from China. We are mainly specializing in the production of garden tools and power tools, such as chain saw, brush cutter, angle grinder, electric hammer, circular saw, sander and so on. You can visit our website … for detailed information.
While the rest of the country has gone to Hell over the last ten years, the Pentagon has been untouched. While unemployment and outsourcing of jobs to China surged, the US military budget ballooned. When the global economy crashed due to Wall Street malfeasance in 2008, the Department of Defense was spared all pain. When millions and millions of Americans were added to food stamp programs, the war machine didn’t even hiccup. Which makes today’s Pentagon assessment that China will pose a threat to economic security because it is copying our weapons the laugher of the week.
The Pentagon, in its annual assessment to Congress of China’s military, flagged sustained investment last year in advanced missile technologies and cyber warfare capabilities and warned that Chinese spying threatened America’s economic security.
“Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage,” the report said.
“Chinese attempts to collect U.S. technological and economic information will continue at a high level and will represent a growing and persistent threat to U.S. economic security.”
Some graphs, conveniently taken from this week, on the real threats to economic security.
First, on outsourcing of employment, much of which went to China, from the Congressional Research Institute:
Second, unemployment plotted against escape from taxation of the US high upper class:
Essentially what has happened is that the US has abandoned all manufacturing with low profit margin to China. That means all household dry goods, consumer electronics and toys but not big ticket items like weapons, jet engines, automobiles, expensive health care equipment with no margin for error and aircraft.
The Pentagon and the arms manufacturing industry, or the self-licking ice cream cone, is only interested in the weapons part. Wouldn’t want anything to trump our Weapons Shops of Isher.
“The United States could be in for a surprise in 2013-15 if ‘China successfully exploits it extensive cyber-espionage efforts and unveils new weapons systems that are on par with U.S. systems,’ said Capital Alpha Partners LLC, a investment analysis group, in a research note on the Pentagon report,” reads the Reuters report.
Yes, that’s something that threatens the very existence of the vanishing middle class, no doubt about it.
All right boys! You’re really on top of things. If you keep doing what you’re doing, eventually there won’t be anything left to defend.
The court stenography pool in action. A screensnap’s worth 1k words.
Who in Congress is feeling twinges from their conscience? Which men or women among them feel they should be doing something in this time of great need? Some members keep making requests for data crunches on various facets of our economic and national failure — like the youth labor market and corporate outsourcing — from the Congressional Research Service. And since the CRS is unfailingly honest in such matters, it has produced useful information, over which absolutely no action will be taken. Because the Republican Party, as everyone knows, abhors facts and information.
There is now widespread implicit knowledge that oursourcing has been very bad for Americans. But absolutely rock hard data, illustrated nicely, is always very good to have. If only because it is inarguable.
Two figures give one the gist of the CRS report on outsourcing. They are damning.
Outsourcing has not been offset by a 1-to-1 level in foreign return investment into hiring in the US. Also, US corporate multinational outsourcing has remained inexorable and constant over the last ten years, dipping or leveling only when a recession has occurred, or a global economic collapse. That is, it is no different now than at the beginning of the last decade when it really took off.
Readers will notice how the practice of shipping jobs overseas accelerated at the beginning of the last decade. The slope of the line has remained fairly constant with leveling occurring in the middle of the decade when the Bush administration put the country into a recession. It also plunged upon the global economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
However, readers will also see how it had picked back up again slightly by 2009, while commensurate employment in the US itself was still plunging.
The second figure shows US corporate multinational foreign investment against outside investment into this country.
There is nothing particularly close to 1-to-1 balance after 2000. Jobs went overseas. The balance has always been negative for American labor with foreign return investment not making up the losses.
The report also notes that when the jobs and production lines go overseas, the value chains which include other related support industries also go with them. And are not replaced.
So who is requesting such reports and why? What is the point? Our leaders, and everyone else knows that at this juncture, no action will be taken, regardless of any findings or indications of ongoing calamity.
In e-mail, Steve Aftergood informs DD: “It’s entirely possible, even likely, that no one in Congress requested these reports and that they were self-initiated by the CRS analysts.”
So I could have been overly generous in my assessments. However, it is heartening that people of integrity and conscience work at CRS and are trying to contribute to the national debate.
Music to read a CRS report to. “You buy that toilet, it was made in China …”
A perfect visual metaphor for our listless country: A broken piece of circuit board from a worthless bit of consumer electronics, made in China for Sony, amid leaves and litter on a concrete bridge over the pitiless super-highway bisecting Pasadena. Unless someone picks it up or strong wind blows it away, it could be there for the next ninety years, immutable.
When things have turned so rancid the regular news on food is how it is found to be chock full of antibiotics and stuff to sterilize it, “Our chickens don’t do drugs” on a dingy van with the hubcaps fallen off becomes a winning sales slogan.
On the same baking el Molino Street bridge with the broken circuit board, an enterprising band with no audience has put a sticker on a traffic light box. That’s probably cause for a $500 fine and/or five days in jail.
The sign conceals a small horrid-looking park where I’ve never seen anyone, put in place of a house that was abandoned ca. 2007-2008. Depreciative capital in action. No one will build anything worth seeing or using here in the rest of my lifetime.
It’s no secret the U.S. and China are waging a clandestine cyberwar. National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander says it’s hitting home hard.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Gen. Alexander said that China is stealing a “great deal” of the U.S. military’s intellectual property, adding that the NSA sees “thefts from defense industrial base companies.” According to a story in Information Week, he declined to provide any information on those attacks.
Enemies, a new book on the history of the FBI by Pulitzer winning journalist Tim Weiner, is illuminating on many fronts, including this one, by dint of sweeping perspective.
While I will get to a more complete review in the coming days, Enemies chronicles the intelligence wars between the FBI, acting as an intelligence agency and counter-terrorism operation, first as a much smaller bureau against German operatives during World War I, later against the Nazis and the Japanese, to the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and in the Eighties and Nineties against the Chinese.
The intelligence wars are unsurprising. It is equally unsurprising that foreign powers have always engaged in extensive operations to obtain military and corporate secrets in the US. All through the history of the republic.
Somehow we survived them.
Broader minds with more comprehensive eyes toward history might then view the current convulsions of news, crystallizing about the utterances of experts and ex-government men who may not even be remembered when a future history like Enemies is written four decades hence, as nothing more than business as usual.
If there were a public debate today with the US middle class on the subject, what do you think would concern people more — the volcanic loss of jobs to China caused by major shifts in the US economy, or, secrets stolen from the “military industrial base”?
We have the answer. It’s jobs and the concomitant loss in economic prosperity. Period.
In another piece, this from the Wall Street Journal, Shawn Henry, the FBI’s “top cyber cop” states hackers are winning everywhere.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber cop offered a grim appraisal of the nation’s efforts to keep computer hackers from plundering corporate data networks: “We’re not winning,” he said.
Shawn Henry, who is preparing to leave the FBI after more than two decades with the bureau, said in an interview that the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is “unsustainable.” Computer criminals are simply too talented and defensive measures too weak to stop them, he said.
In Enemies, Weiner’s history recounts many instances throughout a span of around eighty to ninety years in which the FBI waxed and waned in its intelligence and counter-terrorism operations.
Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was a powerful secret police and America’s premier intelligence agency. But Hoover faltered badly near the end of his career and life as scandals over illegal operations and civic unrest due to the Vietnam War spread across the land.
Over the course of the presidencies of Johnson, then Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan, the FBI was roiled, increasing in power or decreasing in capability, depending on many factors, among them the strength and wisdom of its leadership and the American political landscape, whether engaged in renewal or feeding a national paranoia that saw plots, terrorists and spies to be smashed everywhere.
In this it is no different than the news today. Enemies, some very small, some credible and large, and many made of whole cloth, always threatened the country.
Weiner’s Enemies chronicles many famous and relatively unknown men in the FBI, all of whom played some important role in national security, intelligence and counter-terror operations in the US.
There is not a single instance in the book of the now commonplace event in which government men leave for more lucrative positions in the national security private sector. Many of the figures in Enemies, like a Shawn Henry, were very serious in their thinking that the US was constantly at threat. And perhaps losing.
However, unlike our current models, they did not seem to share the trait of leaving for more money when there were still battles to be fought.
Before concluding, one claim by Richard Clarke, published in The Smithsonian yesterday, deserves a second look.
Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese cyberintervention.
A better journalist than The Smithsonian’s might have blinked and asked Clarke how exactly does one stop or blind a carrier group through “cyberintervention.”
It is not snark to suggest that someone ask for an explanation of how such thing could be done.
So, again — anybody, how do you stop a carrier group with “cyberintervention”?
How do you use cyberwar or “cyberintervention” to stop reconnaissance aircraft and fighter bombers from eyeballing targets? How does “cyberintervention” prevent a barrage of Tomahawk missiles from hitting plotted stationary targets or those acquired by a variety of observing assets? How does “cyberintervention” stop the bombers and attack submarines?
These aren’t stupid questions.
What is stupid is believing there’s some reasonable logic at work in a statement suggesting one can just do away with the biggest military in the world through “cyberintervention.”
To put it in a better perspective, and to underline how any critical sense seems to have gone out the door in interviews of this nature, would you believe if an authority figure like Richard Clarke told you he could jump to the Moon?
Why not? Explain the difference between the two claims.
For Smithsonian magazine, Richard Clarke makes what the magazine’s reporter thinks an audacious statement.
Now keep in mind the 1 percent and their shoe-shiners have never looked at the China trade deficit from the aisles of Target or Wal-Mart.
For some reason Clarke believes American companies giving everything over to China is astonishing stuff, a development people are not concerned enough about. They need to be told.
So you’ve a snapshot of our culture of lickspittle in action. Tough old mutton everyone’s chewed through many times repackaged as new fresh veal cutlets.
The vision Clarke has is of a modern technological nightmare, casting the United States as Dr. Frankenstein, whose scientific genius has created millions of potential monsters all over the world. But Clarke is even more concerned about “official??? hackers such as those believed to be employed by China.
“I’m about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong,??? he tells me. “Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China??? …
“My greatest fear,??? Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.???
It’s not below your pain threshold if you’re among the 99 percent.
Wait, there’s more, the US military could be embarrassed militarily.
“Say there was another confrontation, such as the one in 1996 when President Clinton rushed two carrier battle fleets to the Taiwan Strait to warn China against an invasion of Taiwan,” reads the magazine. “Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese cyberintervention.”
“Clarke now wants to warn us, urgently, that we are being failed again, being left defenseless against a cyberattack that could bring down our nation’s entire electronic infrastructure, including the power grid, banking and telecommunications, and even our military command system,” reads the script.
Get the pies. Imagine Richard Clarke on the stage.
