Mattel has, at long last, issued a formal and heartfelt apology over the recent outbreak of dangerous toys made in China.The apology was made... to China. Mattel is now claiming that the majority of the recalls were because of design flaws. Design is Mattel's thing, so the story goes. China just does the assembly.
But of course if these things were being made at home, they'd be made to the standards at home, wouldn't they? Or did Mattel decide to switch so much manufacturing over to China on the same week they replaced all their design engineers with accountants and people who slept their way up in Marketing?
Chinese word of the day - kowtow: to bow, as before the Chinese Emperor, such that one's forehead touches the ground. Mattel may not know a safe toy when they see one, but they know which side their bread is buttered on.
At this very moment, something dark and frightened is bubbling up inside of me. Maybe it's a foreboding thought about a world where the worst of the fundamentalist hyper-capitalist forces have merged with the totalitarian giant of China to form a huge globalized amoeba of unthinking appetite... or maybe it's just gas. Yeah, I'm sure that's it: gas. All I need to do is burp and clear it away.
Speaking of burping: go check on the baby. You may need to remove Junior from his/her crib, if it's one of the one million made-in-China Simplicity cribs being recalled because they have a bad habit of trapping and smothering babies.
Did Simplicity let all their design engineers go, too?
Did Simplicity let all their design engineers go, too?
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