Unless you’re going abroad, the falling dollar can actually be a windfall. Locally, they’re cleaning up. Because the dollar fell to below the Canadian loonie, busloads of Canadians are coming to Maine malls to shop, giving a nice boost to the economy of this less than prosperous state. The Maine Turnpike, which used to give a discount to drivers paying tolls with Canadian currency, has cancelled that discount. Ch-ching!

From the Washington Post:

As Dollar Dips, Canada Exploits Lucrative Loonie

Along the northern border, shopping patterns are reversing. Instead of Americans driving north to get cheap medicine and other goods, Canadians are traveling south for better deals.

...

The stock markets soar on the expectation of higher economic growth and lending activity. U.S. tourism expects to get a boost as vacations overseas become more expensive. Big conglomerates such as Boeing, McDonald's and Coca-Cola earn more profit from their overseas divisions because foreign currencies are worth more when converted into dollars.

"When the dollar is weak, it increases the attractiveness of U.S. goods, keeps demand in U.S. domestic industries high, which benefits U.S. companies and jobs," said Kathy Lien, chief currency strategist at DailyFX.com.

Exports and tourism are up, the embattled domestic manufacturing sector is reviving, Made in the U.S.A. is now a coveted label (see the next post for even more reasons) so let the dollar fall for a while and don’t fret. My Horse Sense theory of economics posits that economics is a cyclical phenomenon of fluidity. What goes up must go down, and the reverse is also so. Spend time, not money.

Happy Thanksgiving, all. My gratitude abounds.

The enormous concern about tainted and counterfeit products from China grows daily as new and follow-up reports reveal ever more products unfit and unsafe for consumption. Toys, OTC and prescriptions pharmaceuticals, tires, ginger, fish and more. People have been sickened and injured, children and pets have died. Huge quantities of product have been recalled. A story in yesterday’s USA Today reports that imported products failing product safety testing are often just sent to other labs which sometimes give a more favorable result. A Chinese company is threatening to sue an independent testing lab in Florida for submitting bad results to the FDA. A story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (unlinkable without a subscription) tries to trace the origin of Chinese ginger found to have an illegal (even in China) pesticide, to illustrate the complex and impenetrable supply chain. Popular toys and children’s jewelry are found to have toxic elements and retailers scramble to pull them off the shelves, a painful situation just before the holiday shopping season. We’re paying the high price of cheap imports.

It’s a waste of good breath to insist that the Chinese clean up their act. They’re not going to. Skimping the spec is practically a tradition in China. I met a retired Hartz Mountain (enormous American pet supply company) import quality control field service agent at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center last month at a between-class break. She told me that five years ago when she inspected a pet food manufacturing plant in Xiamen and found adulterated product and substandard procedures, the Chinese plant manager scoffed and asked her why she was making a problem. "The dogs don’t care," he told her. She said she was not surprised at the tainted dog food scandal that surfaced earlier this year. It only surprised her that it took so long.

Similarly and more recently, from the aforementioned WSJ story, a manager of the company that exported the pesticide laced ginger said he didn’t know what the fuss was about. "Chinese people have always eaten this ginger—no problem." The company, Modern Organic (which obviously is neither) had been shut down. The NY Times in a recent story on uncertified chemicals in counterfeit drugs brought up the touchy issue that in some cases, these products came from suppliers owned by the Chinese government itself.

This defiance, plus the difficulty Chinese officials have with overseeing the juggernaut of growth in Chinese export industries, makes for a slim-to-none chance that the export of substandard product will be addressed overseas. As an editorial in the New York Times recently exhorted, we’ve got to clean up our own act. Which brings me to the bright side of this infuriating issue.

When reports of tainted imports from China first hit the news, the stories were in the Business, Financial and World/Asia sections of the national newspapers. They have ascended the food chain, so to speak, to the front pages and the national TV news. (Interestingly enough, but not at all surprising, not a word of this makes the Chinese news.) The fact that the Bush administration, in what it considered to be a business-friendly move, eviscerated the Consumer Product Safety Commission, slashed its budget and personnel and put less than aggressive people in charge of it is now dinner table conversation. And that dinner table is going to serve a lot less Chinese imports—-to the extent that country of origin can be determined. (We have country of origin food labeling laws already on the books, but most are not enforced. That’s going to change, too.)

While U.S. importers rack up profits from outsourcing to cheaper overseas manufacturing, the degradation of confidence in merchandise is now rampant. With a presidential election coming up, candidates hammering on domestic policing of unsafe products and Congress prioritizing consumer safety issues, something will get done. We wonder how it got this bad, and now we know.

The economy and calculated risk of less than reliable safety standards overseas is well known among American business interests. This wouldn't have happened without the malignant neglect of American importers and the slack afforded them by our own government. They knew long before it hit the newsstands. Now it is well known to the American consumers, who are going to have to pay a little more and perhaps buy a little less if they want safer goods.

Consumers have exercised their objections definitively in the retail sector. For instance, Trader Joe’s, a very popular midsize specialty grocery chain, decided to indefinitely discontinue sales of all individual food products from China by year’s end (WSJ). Hannafords, a large New England grocery chain no longer offers fish imported from China. Fish is one of the foodstuffs that is identified by country of origin labeling and they found that there were few customers for fish from China. (I shop there; I know.) The tilapia is now from Ecuador, a dollar a pound more than the Chinese tilapia, and selling briskly. Toy stores are voluntarily decking displays with cheerful country of origin signs and even tagging sections with "Not Made in China" banners(CBS Evening News). Something is being done. Not Made in China marketing is growing:

Amazon.com store: Toys Not from China
Online Toy Store: Not Made in China

This won’t hurt the Chinese economy or its explosive growth. The fact is that food, medicine and toy exports, including components, while highly profitable, are not their most prominent exports (iron, steel, machinery and such are) and China just posted their second highest export figures in recent years. It's not about sanctioning, restricting or reducing trade with China, nor should it be. It's about enforcing better trade. It’s up to our own regulatory system and the pressure is on. That’s good news.

I invented a new sandwich today. Bleu cheese and dried figs on warm roasted garlic bread. The sweet, the salty and the chewy combine exquisitely. It is absolutely so scrumptious that I just had to share it. Try it, you'll like it!

My foodanista BFF Audrey said figs and bread are considered peasant food in Italy, and that if you want to insult someone you say "Vai mangiare ficci con pani!" (go eat figs with bread). Imagine that. I'll file it with my collection of piquant Italian insults.

I also want to wish Kenny a Happy Birthday! Love you, my big brother!

Well the mountain comes to Mohammed once again. It is amazing how hospitable and exciting this area continues to be.

As most people who know me are aware, I am entranced by Star Trek particularly The Next Generation, the TV episodes and movies, by Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future, the ensemble work by the crew of the Enterprise and the fascinating sci-fi and ethical issues they explore. So when the nearby Rockland Public Library announced a series, "Four Decades of Star Trek", I marked my Thursday evenings to attend as many as possible. I worked at the library for a few hours, logged off their wifi and went to the meeting room for the presentations. The highlight was last night, when Jonathan Frakes, who, with his family, is a local resident, hosted the TNG night.

Arriving to a round of applause from the intimate (the room only holds 75 people and many were turned away) audience, he was by turns hilarious, thoughtful, revealing and goofy. A bit older, of course, than his Trek character, Will Riker, he is even more attractive, if that's possible, than the babe magnet first officer of the Enterprise D.

He did impersonations of Captain Piccard, referred to Patrick Stewart as "old baldy", dished about Marina Sirtis' (Troi) new boob job and was somber and frank about the backward state of the Maine State Film Commission, which frustrates his wishes to shoot his film and TV projects here. He's just had a new TV series greenlighted and is disgruntled that he has to shoot it elsewhere. He also, in response to a question, did ten minutes on how much he hated the Star Trek uniforms: they had no pockets, they didn't breathe, they pulled up, he hated how they looked when cast members gained weight.

He has directed The Librarian II: Return to King Solomon's Mines, a literary action movie on TNT with an outstanding cast including Noah Wylie, Gabrielle Anwar, Bob Newhart, Olympia Dukakis, and Jane Curtin. Noah Wylie from ER, went to high school in L.A. with my son. Noah was a great kid, and a fine actor.

All in all it was a funny, thrilling evening and two of my favorite episodes of Star Trek TNG were shown on the big screen.

Jonathan Frakes is one of our outstanding locals, who with his wife, intensely beloved soap star Genie Francis, contributes substantially to the community in many ways besides their delightful presence.

I've also been gassed to see Star Trek alumni on some of my favorite current TV programs. Robert Piccardo (the wry holo-doctor on Voyager) was a guest star this week on CSI New York, the gorgeous Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine on Voyager) is a regular on Shark, and William Shatner (Capt. Kirk on the original Star Trek) is painfully funny as the intellectual Archie Bunker on Viagra of Boston Legal.