China: poisoning and killing themselves and their children in exchange for soon-to-be worthless paper

I just saw this article and photo set about pollution in China today. It is truly shocking to see the horrible conditions that the combination of their own authoritarian regime and "free trade" with western nations has created there:

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Think about this next time you hit walmart and load on all the "made in China" toys, electronics, and other crap. Chinese children are being poisoned and our own US workers are ending up on food stamps as a result of our own foolish "free trade" policies with with world.

I am working towards and M.S. degree in engineering and in the process, I have taken tours of our own water and sewage treatment plants, and factories in the USA. Under the force of democracy and regulation, they do amazing things to control the pollution. In China, the situation is vastly different. THey have a population over 1 billion and a small and powerful regime in control. I don't believe the ruling party cares one bit if 10 million Chinese people just dropped dead. After all, it's only 1% of the population and there are plenty more where they came from.

They started off with a simple agriculture-based lifestyle for the majority of people. Then, due to the ambitions of the ruling party, they started building factories and without quality control or pollution control. Now, as you can see from the photos, the majority population in China is only beginning the pay the price, in premature death and disease, of it's government's short-sighted, power-hungry policies. I wonder how many many Chinese children must suffer and die and U.S. workers go on welfare before we all learn our lesson that simply offering the cheapest product is not always the best option. In the end, the Chinese poor end up with piles of worthless paper (a condition which will soon descride the US dollar, as Obama prints more by the day), and the US poor end up in debt, on welfare, and with a house full of broken, worthless gadgets. In the 1700's and 1800's, we committed a great sin by utilizing slave labor from Africa to boost our economy. Now, we are committing another one by exploiting the poverty and ignorance of the Chinese poor to produce the gadgets we buy. We are all about to pay the price.