T.J. Maxx in trouble for knowingly selling recalled products that can cause fires and kill babies.
WGN: TJ Maxx parent company agrees to $13M penalty for selling recalled products
Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle) / “WebWaffle”
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission fined the company $13 million dollars for knowingly selling such items as “a portable speaker model that posed an explosion hazard, hoverboards linked to 16 reports of burn injuries and knives that broke and caused multiple lacerations requiring stitches.”
The company also sold infant products that were known to have actually caused infants to be killed.
T.J. Maxx runs stores under that name, Marshalls, and HomeGoods.
The CPSC Web site lists at least 19 products that T.J. Maxx sold which it knew were recalled and dangerous to the American public.
The problem going on here is that T.J. Maxx mainly runs stores for poor people. You see them in run down shopping malls and low end strip malls.
They bring shoppers in mainly by selling things that didn’t sell at larger stores because of serious design flaws, but also due to liquidation sales.
That means that you might find a bargain or you might get botulism from a food product or a consumer product that is a death trap.
Someone at T.J. Maxx knew that they were buying recalled products that had even killed babies, and balanced it against the risk of being fined, knowing that even if they were fined, the fine would be so small that the profits were higher, and they made the call to sell this merchandise anyway.
The reason why companies operate like this and nothing ever changes is that the fines should be bigger.
Otherwise, “Good business is where you find it.”, as “Dick Jones” said in the 1987 movie, RoboCop.
Alexander Hoehn-Saric, who chairs the CPSC said that the fine is “near the stautory amount” that they could have possibly gotten in court, and that it will not be enough to deter future lawbreaking.
“With the market capitalization of the largest retailers calculated in the billions, a penalty of $13 million or even $100 million could easily become a cost of doing businesses[…]In order to best protect the public, I urge Congress to remove or dramatically increase the existing limits on CPSC’s civil penalty authority.”
-Alexander Hoehn-Saric
Congress, of course, doesn’t work for the American people.
As Richard Stallman said in an interview, when the interviewer mentioned that he thought US Congresspeople were “billionaires” (the interviewer was an Indian man, so maybe not familiar with the US very well), Stallman corrected him that most Congresspeople are “not billionaires” but rather “millionaires” because lapdogs of the rich get taken care of pretty well, “but I don’t think that very many of them are billionaires”. It’s just who they work for who are billionaires.
But if you scratch their backs, you’ll get taken care of.
Stallman mentioned a study that he remembered reading that showed that American public opinion didn’t have any meaningful impact on political policy since around 1998.
I don’t know which study that may have been, but as an American living here, it sounds plausible.
I’ve seen a very steep and rapid decline in what politicians in America think about what we think, although we keep getting these stupid polls.
Most Americans don’t want total abortion bans. They asked voters in one of the most conservative states in America, Kansas, to pass one into their state Constitution last night, August 2nd 2022, and 60% of Kansans voted not to add the amendment because it was too extreme.
Kansas isn’t exactly “middle America”. It’s the state most known for right-wing terrorist attacks targeting abortion clinics and the doctors working there. And the amendment failed with only 40% voting in support. I believe in democracy.
If we had an up or down vote deciding where to draw the line on abortion in this country, I think it would land +/- a few weeks of where Roe v. Wade set it in 1973, but we’ll never know because America is not a democracy.
The problem is that although about 2/3rds of Americans don’t want a total abortion ban, they’ve lost control of their state legislatures and have 9 un-elected judges on a “Supreme” court who are older than dirt telling them how they’re going to live.
That, I think, is a bigger problem than what’s going on in Congress, or the White House. At least there are the trappings of democracy elsewhere in the government, but the courts are lost for quite a while. Trump spent his last months in office packing in people who were barely even out of law school and around my age as long as they were party flunkies.
Things will take time to balance out. However, as Admiral Yamamoto famously said after the Japanese fleet attacked Pearl Harbor, “I fear that all we have accomplished is to have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”.
I had discussed politics with an ex over the phone a while back, and he said, “The Republicans are trying to reverse Roe v. Wade, and to repeal the direct election of US Senators, and they don’t get it. They don’t get that what they’re going to accomplish is throw the abortion issue back to the states, where it will still be legal in more than half the country. Nobody’s going to accept this, and it will make people wake up and pay attention to their state legislatures, which I don’t think that the Republicans really want.”.
Whether abortion is a big issue in the November election or not remains to be seen.
Even if 70% voted against the Republican Party in Indiana, it would still get slightly over half the seats in the state legislature, because they’ve managed to burrow in and corrupt the system and commit fraud against democracy using color of law (they may get away with it due to the courts permitting it, but the US Constitution guarantees a “representative republic” to the residents of every state, which flies in the face of this travesty), and there are many more states like it.
At a very deep level, the Republican party despises the regulatory state, and has crippled federal agencies across the board and taken away their ability to protect the American public from everything from coal companies fouling their rivers, to T.J. Maxx knowingly selling products that will strangle your infant. They’ve made a mockery out of our country and the party is beyond salvageable.
I realized when I tried to vote for Republican candidates that I thought would moderate Illinois and were not very “Trumpy”, and they all lost, save for the candidate for state Supreme Court in my district, that the Republican Party is beyond saving.
If you can’t get moderate Republicans in Illinois, you won’t get them anywhere in America. Therefore, I can’t give them my vote.
One of the reasons why Americans are going through such Hell these days is an outgrowth of the fact that Trump was allowed to finish out his term in office despite being twice impeached.
He was able to tear down so much of the regulatory state that we can’t stop Hepatitis outbreaks in our food and we have to import baby formula from places such as Australia and Canada, where there are still safety inspections.
Regardless of what the voters think the issues are, people such as Donald Trump must never be allowed to return to power.
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