Laminated

If you haven't seen the '60 Minutes' piece on the flooring company Lumber Liquidators, I highly suggest you do so, especially if you are planning on putting flooring in your house.  Here's the link for the story.  Scroll down the page to get to the video player:

http://www.businessinsider.com/lumber-liquidators-60-minutes-report-2015-3

The piece alleges, with a lot of science and video evidence to back it up, Lumber Liquidators has been using flooring products, manufactured in China, labeled as meeting the standards for safe use in the USA, but in reality selling Americans highly toxic flooring which can cause numerous serious health risks.  The company recently had unbelievable profit margins, unseen since the free wheeling days prior to the economic collapse of 2008, numbers which Wall Street investors had been skeptical of for their largess.  It was some of the Wall Street investors who started investigating the company and found alarming toxicity levels to the wood flooring, something '60 Minutes' also found in their own independent testing.  Undercover cameras caught Chinese flooring product companies, who supply Lumber Liquidators, admitting the products they were producing for the company were not complicit with the safety codes, something that's strongly implied Lumber Liquidators was aware of.  It was described as "too expensive" to manufacture the products with safe levels of formaldehyde, a chemical used in the glue holding the wood pulp together, but regardless, the finished product were labeled as being safe.

YIKES!

There is a whole lot of ugly here.  Let me break down my biggest problems by starting with...

#1 - The decline of the American manufacturing sector.  The story says some of Lumber Liquidators wood flooring is produced in the USA, but most of it comes from China, and most of that comes with the extremely high toxicity levels.  It's depressing to see how companies like Lumber Liquidators have shifted most of their manufacturing base to China or some other foreign country.  They could manufacture here in America, using trained, hard working Americans, using responsibly managed wood and using safe chemicals in the process, but they don't, not because they can't make a profit, but because they can't make the obscene profits as they can by using near slave labor, questionably attained source materials and toxic chemicals in a foreign country.  Which brings up...

#2 - Greedy Bastards!  Look at Lumber Liquidators and what you see implied in the '60 Minutes' piece is what American corporate leadership has become at many US companies, profits over all.  Why concern yourself with your customers health when there's money to be made, and even if they did get sick, would they ever be able to trace it back to the company?  What's even sadder is the profits now have different levels, where the corporate leadership's profits and bonuses trump all else the company does.  The answers Tom Sullivan, the Lumber Liquidators Founder, put forward when confronted by such egregious findings sound like a classic case of word play to avoid acknowledging the truth; the company likely knew and encouraged the Chinese manufacturers of their product (there are three separate plants) to use the unsafe levels of formaldehyde in the manufacturing process because it was cheaper.  If true, they could make a ton of profit, live like kings with their gold plated jet skis and mistresses covered in caviar, and the only 'negative' was a product which could end up making a lot of people very sick.  Which brings up...

#3 - Poisoning the people.  Regardless of what test is being done, the flooring Lumber Liquidators is selling is dangerous.  The people in the plant in China, the people shipping and delivering the product, the sales people selling it on the floor, and the families who buy it are being subjected to a dangerous level of formaldehyde.  The company had to be aware of this on some level.  The fact Sullivan immediately fell back to the argument "your testing is bad because it came up with a result which makes us look bad" tells me they have practiced the answer to this argument prior to having to make it.  It doesn't matter which test tells me the floor is dangerous to be around, but surely two different groups, doing two different sets of tests, both coming up with the same findings, is not something you can hide behind a 'different strokes' argument.   Which brings up....

#4 - Is there no one testing these imported products to make sure we are safe?  The answer, most of the time, is no, but this system was degraded by design.  Companies like looking like they're safe, but a shocking amount of the time, they're willing to knowingly push safety to the side in the argument for higher profits.  Politicians, mainly Republicans, but some Democrats too, are more than eager to take a campaign donation, and in turn introduce more lax regulations or even hog tying the regulating agencies tasked with keeping Americans safe.  They hide behind 'big government is evil' and 'overregulation is killing business' arguments to make sure that even though we have standards for safety, no one is actually making sure most companies are having to follow them.   Which brings up...

#5 - Who's the good guy?!?  Part of Lumber Liquidators problem is they were too profitable, too quickly.  Wall Street analysts have a tendency of wanting to try to figure out why a company is doing obscenely well.  They do this not only because they might want to jump on the successful company's bandwagon, but also the complete opposite, they might want to gamble against the company, banking their success is all smoke and mirrors.  I hate the Vegas concept Wall Street has adopted.  They gamble a company will succeed at a certain level, and even if the company is profitable, but not quite as profitable as expected, the company is labeled a failure.  It's like asking the casino to pay you back in a game of 21 because you were foolish enough to say "hit me" when you had 20.  SuperValu and Best Buy are local companies who have been unfairly abused by this free wheeling financial scheme.  But the reality in the case of Lumber Liquidators, in lieu of no real government regulatory agency looking out for the American citizens, Wall Street became the last man standing, the final uncleared hurdle exposing this potential fraud.  If not for them, a company could have sold a tainted product for decades, spending money to discredit and fight any citizen who might have become aware something was up, and when the eventual class action lawsuit would've been filed, they would've re-written the laws to make sure they only got a small slap on the wrist for their profit fueled illness and death.  Which brings up...

#6 - Death.  Not only should anyone who bought Lumber Liquidators product have it immediately tested for safety, but the illnesses 2 and 3 year olds will have in 20 years are the real legacy of the blood money, eagerly gobbled up by the greedy bastards who, more than likely, knowingly went along with this plan.  Not only are their customers future health concerns on the line, but considering the ominous statement from Lumber Liquidators about the video footage from the manufacturing plants in the '60 Minutes' piece, my guess is anyone at those plants who was honest about what they were doing are more than likely fired, and possibly in jail or dead.  This story, if Lumber Liquidators proves to have had knowledge of the formaldehyde, validates my theory about most of today's major corporations; if any one of our lives would ensure a company's quarterly earnings would rise one cent, you wouldn't make it out the door.  Money is the greedy's true God.  Blood money indeed.

Here's the worst part of this story:  How many other companies are doing the exact same thing but have not been caught yet?  Here's hoping they get too profitable, too quickly.