my new toaster

I bought a toaster the other day. Not a fancy toaster, just a plain old toaster. It cost 7 dollar! How can a toaster that consists of several pounds of raw materials, that needs to be manufactured, and since it is made in China, also shipped over here cost less then a matinée movie ticket?!?

I question this discrepancy. The question obviously leads back to how cheaply things can be produced in China. We in the West, in Europe and the USA love that these things are so cheap, we with our cumbersome regulations and environmental protection rules could never achieve that. Which is why the heavy industry machinery (smelters the size of seven story buildings) in the German Ruhr-Gebiet along the Rhein, have been dormant for some time, and recently and finally have been dismantled. The German Greens love this. The Germans love it because they are so green. They point to the 20 % CO² reduction in their heavy industry and pat themselves on the back. We do the same thing here in the States. We love that our rivers are cleaning up, that Sulfur is not raining from the skies anymore, that those old Cap and Trade systems actually worked. Our smelters have been dismantled as well, and glad we are of it. But where did they go?

Oh, that’s right, 1000 Chinese dudes came to the Ruhr Gebiet, put numbers on all the moving parts, took them apart, stuck them into a bunch of crates, shipped them to China, and put them back together again. Well, aren’t we glad that those smelters aren’t smelting in our backyard anymore? We killed a bunch of birds with one stone here. We helped the Chinese produce cheaper because their second hand capital costs were much lower. We got rid of our pollution. We get to concentrate on the new economy and don't have to worry about the nasty working conditions. We get cheap products. And on top of it all we can blame the demise of the world as we know it on them. We cleaned our act up after all. Look at our lovely record on environmental protection. All we need to do now is get our cars cleaned up and we will be model citizens, the good guys that we always knew we were. It’s those capitalists in communist's coats over there who just insist on belching their crap into the air at ever more alarming rates.

While we are at it maybe we can send them our Pig Farms as well. That way they will get the untreatable staph infections from the little piglets and our mono cultures of food production. We already outsourced manufacturing, why not the rest as well? They can breath that crappy air, infect themselves with the deadly staph, dance in the acid rain, drink the poisonous water, and die of the Bird Flu. We will build a big-ass arcology on top of them, because then we won’t have to build one on top of ourselves. It’s only fair to confine their nasty multitudes and by-products so we don’t have to contain our green pluralist population. Its their fault after all, they are the ones flushing the planet down the toilet.

This is all too Orwellian for you? Never worry, I have just the thing to calm your chittery nerves and their bad attitude: Here, have some Soma.