Capitalism/financial crisis trade/purity issue

I do not understand why "free market" advocates constantly push for more trade without saying one word about how to not only maintain but increase testing and guarantee of any imported product, especially food, medicine and toys, safety and quality.

Sorry to be blunt, but someone has to be. Just as ethics have degraded in the USA, foreign developing countries have companies that often never had ethics in the first place. The obvious example is what has happened in China about the melamine in milk, but the purpose of this post is to explain to you that this has been a trusting and naive generation in the USA, used to putting anything in your mouth or your children's without giving a thought to deliberate poisoners on the other end. Read this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7750464.stm

snip

Nigeria's food and drug agency says that 25 children aged between three months and four years have died after taking a contaminated teething syrup.
The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control said it had shut down the Lagos-based manufacturer, Barewa Pharmaceuticals.
It said the syrup, called My Pikin, had been tainted with diethylene glycol.
The substance, used in engine coolant and anti-freeze, triggered kidney failure in the children, it said.
The children died at three hospitals in Lagos, Ibadan and Zaria.
At least 10 other children are reported to have been brought to hospital.
The NAFDAC said symptoms among the children who had taken the syrup included diarrhoea, vomiting, fever and convulsions, and that they had not been able to pass urine for several days.
The agency said it had first received reports of possible contamination on 19 November and had begun to confiscate the syrup two days later.
"NAFDAC officers nationwide have been directed to mop up all batches of the offending drug from circulation," the agency's head, Dora Akunyili, was quoted as saying.
She also appealed to mothers to stop using the medicine on their children.


Now here is my point. Both the left and the right in economic and trade policy have been asleep at the wheel. The left thinks it is all enlightened and groovy to stimulate the economies of poor countries by importing their goods to the USA. The right thinks this is the "competitive free market at its best," since of course goods from developing countries are cheap. But look, here is another example where obviously some people don't mind putting a deadly chemical in baby teething formula for their own country's children!

How does this stuff get in these products? Greed is the reason whether an accidental contamination or deliberate. If it is an accident that means they cut corners on cleanliness and purity in the factory. If it is deliberate then they are substituting industrial chemicals for the more costly active food or medical ingredients. Either way the reason is to be cheap and thus greedy.

So I do not understand why there are less resources in the United States who work full time at not only testing all products before they enter but are part of the initial trade negotiation process. "If I were in charge" I would never sign a trade agreement without US inspectors not only doing initial inspections of all likely import products (to gain background information on how the goods that might enter the USA are being made, and create a database in advance) but also there should be an incremental addition to the FDA, customs and other inspecting organizations at the time any new trade agreement is signed. They should be "specialists," then, for the products that the new trade agreement proposes to allow into the country.

This is part of our horrible financial and economic meltdown, just as much as the mortgage problem, because it reflects the breakdown of standards of quality and due diligence on behalf of the American public.

Somehow American governments, agencies, and corporations, pushed by both the left and the right, think that just because the USA has a friendly relationship with a country, and wishes to do good by opening trade, that automatically like magic dust that means that all of the product suppliers and manufacturers in that country are well educated and ethical folks, and that their product can be swapped as "just as good but cheaper" as anything that had been previously grown or made in the USA. That is one of the most incredibly naive views of both greed and "culture" that I've seen in the past several decades. Our parents and grandparents used to be suspicious of imported aka "foreign" goods for a reason, not because they are prejudiced dolts, but many of them know that things are not too nice and clean, and anything will be done for a buck, in many of these places. But that knowledge has been dismissed as being old fuddy duddies who are prejudiced. Anyone with a lick of common sense and world experience, though, knows that "any thing goes" in most of the developing country marketplaces, including deliberately putting poisonous industrial chemicals in products for babies.

WISE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would not sign a single trade agreement, no matter how "nice" the country or how "worthy" the desire for mutual benefit and trade without some sort of advance product vetting by legitimate and beefed up USA agencies. A database should be established in advance so that if any problem does arise, Washington is not scratching their arses wondering "where did those tomatos or chiles come from?" Sheesh.