Kerfuffles

Is “Whole Foods’ chatty CEO: more a looney problem than a legal problem?”

According to Columbia Law School professor Jack Coffee, “This episode raises more questions about his sanity than his criminality. He does not appear to have made any materially false statement . . . and he did not release material information. The real issue for the future is what his board should do. Can it have confidence in someone with judgment this poor?”

Why exactly did John Mackey do what he did? He answered that question thusly: — “I posted on Yahoo under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it .” His explanations are contained in a FAQ page at the Whole Foods Market site.

It you love “Whole Paycheck Market” as much as does Rahodeb himself, you may read “One Thousand and One Rahodeb Postings” at the Yahoo Finance Message Boards. Actually, you are in for a treat as there are at least 1,394 of John Mackey’s “Rahodeb’s Posts.”

“Wild Oats Strewn”

I wrote a post at “Kerfuffles and Flourishes” (“‘Made In China’ Dangers”) regarding safety recalls of “Made in China” products. I was stunned by the amount of lead that was used in products shipped to the United States. I was doubly stunned that almost all of the lead was used in products for children, like clothing snaps and children’s jewelry.

Please take care when buying clothing for children with metal snaps and buttons and children’s metal jewelry for you may be purchasing a very toxic material. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, a child died last year in Minneapolis of acute lead poisoning after swallowing a piece from a Chinese-made charm bracelet that was given away with Reebok sneakers. According to Chinese manufacturers, American companies will not pay the higher prices for children’s jewelry made from non-toxic metals such as zinc.

Lead has been found in snaps on Chinese-made overalls and shirts for babies and toddlers and on kids’ gardening gloves. When ingested, this lead can cause brain damage and death at a much higher rate for young children than for adults. And it is these same children who are much more likely to taste, mouth or swallow the pieces of metal jewelry or buttons. When I posted about the dangerous recalls from China, I and others wondered about where all the lead came from. Now we know. It is our own lead that we have sent to China to be recyled. “‘E-Waste’ From Computers Discarded in West Turns Up In China’s Exported Trinkets” tells us that:

(C)hemists at Ashland University in Ohio, studied the composition of children’s highly leaded jewelry and key chains found in stores last year and determined that some also contained levels of copper and tin that suggested the source was lead solder used in electronic circuit boards. Other jewelry samples were also found to contain antimony, a toxic metalloid element used to harden lead used in batteries.

For lead, the trip to China from the U.S. typically goes something like this: U.S. consumers and businesses send their old electronics to recycling firms — often by way of innocuous recycling drives. Some of those firms then sell the electronics to dealers in the U.S., who sell them to dealers in China. Chinese companies buy the e-waste and strip lead and other re-sellable materials from it — often discarding harmful materials along the way, adding to local pollution. Those firms then sell the recovered lead to alloy makers like Ms. Liu, who provide it to Chinese manufacturers. The lead makes its way — sometimes at toxic levels — into trinkets sold to consumers in the U.S.

This year the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued 18 recall notices affecting more than 6.7 million pieces of jewelry for children and teenagers that it says contain dangerous levels of lead — almost all of it made in China. That’s a sharp increase from 10 lead-related recalls in 2006 and three the year before that. “In recent years, we’ve seen an influx of metal children’s jewelry” that has “high levels of accessible lead,” says agency spokesman Scott Wolfson.