You outta try to buy a toy not made in some foreign sweatshop! Even the good old Red Rider wagon is now slammed together China.

As a Canadian, I extend my search to include items made here (I think we're down to maple syrup), the USA and Europe. I'm not against trade - when all nations are made to adhere to the same safety, wage and environmental rules.

What I'm against is putting folks out of work and shipping their jobs overseas to be done by people paid a pittance and held like prisoners in unsafe factory compounds hundreds of miles away from the families they're allowed to visit once a year!!! I'm sorry but this offends my sense of social justice. There is no way our workers can “compete” with this – and no way that they should be asked to. Who benefits from this but a few fat cats at the top who are already obscenely wealthy?

I've heard it argued that if everything wasn't made by foreign slaves, products would be so expensive that we regular Joes and Janes wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything. What a crock!

Is that Red Rider wagon cheaper now that they're paying some poor Chinese slob pennies to make it? No darn way!!! All these companies move overseas (Nike, Mattel, CCM...it would take me three lifetimes to list them all) and they charge just as much as they always did. They don't pass the massive savings onto consumers - they pocket them.


These companies don’t think of the future. Who do they think will be able to buy their products when we’re all out of work and their new “employees” only make pennies? You can’t really expect selfish idiots who only think quarter to quarter, dividend to dividend to worry about the long term consequences of their short term greed. We elect people who are supposed to look out for our interests and the interests of our children and grandchildren. Yeah, right!

What really bothers me is not just that our governments (Left, Right or Centre) don't stop this deindustrialization of our economies - they actually abet it? Our governments sign the unbalanced "free" trade deals and then give the corporations tax breaks to go overseas and outsource. (Am I the only person tired of talking to underpaid people in India about my dwindling account at the local bank?) Worse still, they give billions of our tax dollars to companies like GM and Chrysler at the same time that GM and Chrysler are busy spending billion to build NEW factories in Russia, China and every other Godforsaken country you can think of.

This is a pattern that can only lead to ruin. Without a base of well-paying manufacturing jobs, mass unemployment will become a permanent feature of our economies. I'm sorry; there aren't that many "green jobs" on Mars. And what does it mean for national security when we can't feed ourselves or manufacture the most basic items necessary for survival?
For the benefit of a greedy, short-sighted few, our governments are hanging us out to dry – and making us pay for the rope!