Lead From Old U.S. Batteries Sent to Mexico Raises Risks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/science/earth/recycled-battery-lead-puts-mexicans-in-danger.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 9:06 AM
Subject: re: Lead From Old U.S. Batteries Sent to Mexico Raises Risks
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

    When Adam Smith made the case for globalization of trade, it was a work of genius. Over the last 235 years his ideas have made the world vastly richer, on average. But Smith wrote at a time when the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man were all in the future. In his day, slavery was still legal in Britain.  To divorce international trade policy from labor law in the twenty-first century is no longer acceptable.  We are not innocent when we import a lead battery from a foreign factory that poisons its workers and neighbors. Economics were simpler in the eighteenth century, when one could externalize risks and environmental damages. The world is smaller since then and we have to grow up.

Barry Haskell Levine