Vitamin C: You Don't Know What You're Getting...China Is Our Friend!! #48,256

I didn't know this.

Most U.S. consumers are aware that Chinese products dominate the shelves of most retail stores, but few realize the dominance extends to vitamins and drugs. Fully 90 percent of all the vitamin C sold in America comes from the communist trade giant. This near-monopoly control of the vitamin-C market caused the Wall Street Journal to dub China the “OPEC of vitamin C,” and like the oil cartel it has been accused of price fixing. In 2001, China’s four largest producers met to form a consortium, and shortly thereafter began a series of price manipulations undercutting U.S. and European competitors. Volatile prices induced American companies, which were operating in a very different regulatory environment than that existing in Communist China, to file anti-trust suits. In the end the suits hardly mattered; the last U.S. vitamin-C plant closed in 2006.

China has since captured much of the world’s pharmaceutical market, producing 70 percent of the world’s penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin, and most of its vitamins.

That's why there's such a variety of flavors: date-rape flavored, lead-flavored, diethylene glycol-flavored, melamine-flavored--the list is almost endless.

Didn't know that your "sunshine supplement" was coming from Red China?

...five years ago President Bush signed into law the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, which included a provision establishing the requirement for country-of-origin labeling for beef, lamb, pork, seafood, perishable agricultural commodities, and peanuts. Republicans, prodded by retailers who claim the provision is burdensome, delayed implementation.

President Bush, supported by a Republican majority, effectively nullified the provision by delaying its implementation until September 2008.

Umnnnhhh...by the way, PRChina is not an "ally" of the USA; it has been very clear that we are an enemy. So what?

The ease with which the Chinese are now able to flood our market with substandard and highly dangerous consumer and food products gives rise to the question — how hard would it be to use the current import system to introduce harmful elements into the food supply as an asymmetrical warfare technique?

That answer is obvious.