How this horrendous story slipped past China’s ministry of tourism is baffling…Or is this just too horrific to bury? Over the weekend it was announced that Chinese officials were fishing the carcasses of 2,800 dead pigs out of the Huangpu River. This river bisects Shanghai and is a source of drinking water for the city’s 23 million residents.

There was a recent outbreak of swine death in China’s farms due to cramped and unhealthy conditions and tens of thousands of animals died from infectious disease.

Chinese officials had forbidden farmers from selling diseased pig parts and were told to dispose of the carcasses in landfills. Evidently it was easier to dump almost 3,000 of these diseased carcasses into the river.

Of course Chinese officials say there is nothing to worry about, just move along…But China’s citizens give very little credibility to what they are told by their government. There is growing unrest among the population, due to deteriorating air and water pollution.

One resident summed it up with: “Have we been drinking dead-pig-polluted water? We are already panicked by the polluted air, now we have to worry about poisoned water too.”

China’s growing industrialization has been done at the expense of its environment and those chickens are coming home to roost…for China and the rest of the world.

Massive amounts of air pollution fueled by unfiltered or poorly filtered power plants, not only cause some of the worst smog in the world, they also send millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere to settle upon ice sheets which can cause ice melt to glaciers and ice packs. The culprit is soot, not carbon dioxide.

Many 3rd world countries want what the west has: Modern society, refrigeration, air conditioning, electric light, manufacturing, etc., but they can’t afford/won’t pay for the environmental protections the west has developed over the years.

Successful/heralded American companies like Wal-Mart and Apple, import and manufacture goods from these countries escaping our environmental/labor laws.

The problem is though, when Apple employs hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers to manufacture their I Pads and other products, the pollution doesn’t stay in China.

Ironically and dangerously, the very air pollution they help create in China, drifts over the Pacific to create air pollution in California.

The elephant in the California living room, is some of the air pollution environmental zealots are trying to crush with many of the harshest controls in the nation…Aren’t stemming from California, but instead are wafting over the golden state from manufacturing done in China, for California based companies.

How can American companies who manufacture products in the USA compete with companies like Apple and Wal-Mart, who don’t have to respect the environment in the host countries they set up shop in?

Can American companies compete with the almost antebellum labor practices (indentured servitude/slavery) practiced in countries of the 3rdworld, like China? Workers basically live on site in barracks and work long hours with poor pay and they are forced to buy from the company store. See CNN story on Apple/Foxconn

Conditions were so bad in some of the factories making Apple products; workers staged mass suicides by jumping off of buildings, to protest inhumane working conditions. Supervisors solved that problem by installing suicide nets to catch the jumping workers.

Apples manufacturer has also taken other steps to solve labor problem with the introduction of a million robots to do the work that humans once did.

Robots don’t complain, or throw themselves off buildings in protest…Robots also don’t mind if the air or water is polluted….The best of all worlds for corporations that only care for their bottom line.
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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.