Maybe I've had my head buried in the sand lately, or I've been concentrating on other things, but something just almost completely slipped by my notice. Last week my daughter alerted me to something she was reading on Jennie Chancey's sewing forum, Sense and Sensibility. At Church last Lord's Day, one of the ladies in our fellowship was talking about it. Then just last night I received an email from a friend expressing the same concerns. It seems as though the nanny state has determined to protect all our children from lead poisoning. However, rather than aiming squarely at the main culprit of lead distribution in toys; "Red China," our bureaucratic empire headed by the elite group of legislators decided this would be a great time to take a pot shot at all those small businesses across America.
It turns out that this new law, which I understand has already passed and will go into effect on February 10, 2009, requires that every product that can appear to be targeted for children under 13 years old must pass rigorous lead testing. It doesn't matter if the component parts have already been tested for lead, each end product must be tested also. This also applies to book sellers. This will add a lot of unnecessary expense and will expose small business owners to extremely harsh and unreasonable punishment if they violate this law knowingly or ignorantly. The penalty is $100,000 and two years in prison.
This is an outrage! I don't watch TV, but from what I understand, the media is largely ignoring this. I even wondered if it were for real or not. But after a bit of internet research, it seems to be accurate.
I have not researched this as thoroughly as I need to, but I wanted to get the word out to my readers as soon as possible. Check out the following link:
http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/
This is an organization that is standing together to fight this. As a disclaimer, I haven't thoroughly examined this website either. But it does not appear to contain objectionable material. There's a link there to "Ideas for Change in America." I did check out that site and found a bunch of left wing liberal causes. I signed up anyway and registered my vote against this one issue.
I have a feeling that we'll be needing to call our legislators pretty regularly starting after say...January 20. The Obamanation is beginning, though this law was passed under the Bush regime.
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