Sue the Chinese Communist Party for Coronavirus Destruction

Given the world's bitter experience with COVID-19, sane human beings know epidemics are major national and international security threats. Historians can cite the facts. Plagues harmed ancient Rome and China. The Black Death ravaged medieval Europe. A scar on an Egyptian mummy indicates smallpox haunted planet Earth for at least 3,000 years.

However, the combination of 20th-century medical advances such as more vaccines, antibiotics and better dental care; remarkable public health improvements, e.g., clean water; innovative agriculture leading to better diets (the Green Revolution); and quick international communication that facilitated monitoring and reporting disease outbreaks created a false sense of safety, particularly in wealthy nations. Flush toilets, good sewer systems, rodent and mosquito control -- these items take money.

The yellow fever vaccine and malaria pills made the Caribbean and Central America tourist havens. On occasion, the Ebola virus or a swine flu eruption burst the bubble and generated headlines. The World Health Organization and national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would monitor and advise. But by and large, the great Spanish flu epidemic following World War I became a historical footnote.

Sept. 11 demonstrated jumbo jets are potential intercontinental ballistic missiles. Tourists heading for Jamaica could have a ticket on a terrorist missile.

The coronavirus demonstrates epidemics still kill millions, smash economies and seed chaotic conditions that can bring politically and economically fragile countries to the brink of revolt or mass starvation. A dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases fueled recent protests in Tunisia. Peru has suspended numerous development projects. The virus has reduced food production in sub-Saharan Africa.

The coronavirus may also demonstrate that alleged medical advances can also breed monsters, particularly in opaque totalitarian states like communist China. Lacking free speech, dictatorships have few systemic corrective feedback mechanisms. In China's case, the leaders are imperious authoritarians who fear loss of face; they therefore hide internal mistakes, no matter how globally significant.

Eighteen months ago, "correct-thinking people" and media like The New York Times and The Washington Post dismissed the possibility of a viral leak from Wuhan's Level 4 bio-lab as conspiracy theory folly, in a nutshell. "Correct thinkers" included President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris all but said she wouldn't trust a vaccine produced by the Trump administration. Now she bewails vaccine hesitancy, without confessing her own self-serving conspiracy theory folly.

In February 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, suggested the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. Yes, courage and foresight. At the time, however, biased leftist media, from The New York Times to CNN to Xinhua, ridiculed Cotton. Xinhua is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) official news agency. Xinhua provides some honest coverage, but when the CCP dictatorship says jump, the Xinhua frog spews CCP propaganda.

In June of this year, new evidence emerged that the virus did indeed escape from the laboratory.

On Aug. 2, the House Foreign Affairs Committee minority staff (minority at the moment means Republican) issued an updated report titled "The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization."

The update hasn't received a lot of notice. But the biased left-wing media have a political investment in ignoring it. Remember, they dismissed Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation. The laptop is criminal evidence. Apparently, some of Hunter's laptop files indicate he has connections to CCP-financed companies.

What does the House Foreign Affairs Committee minority staff update say regarding the coronavirus pandemic?

I'll paraphrase and quote. The preponderance of evidence suggests the virus "was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019." The virus "was genetically manipulated" and likely collected in Yunnan province "between 2012 and 2015." Chinese researchers, "officials within the CCP, and potentially American citizens directly engaged in efforts to obfuscate information related to the origins of the virus and to suppress public debate of a possible lab leak."

It is time for the Biden administration to take this report seriously. The U.S. government, American businesses and individual Americans harmed by the virus should sue the CCP and its various corporate cutouts for gross negligence and criminal cover-up. Seek triple damages.

1. Trade war is not a given - The most repeated statement in the collective analysis thus far asserts that an all out trade war will soon follow the implementation of the tariffs. Certainly in theory a nation that faces import tariffs to the United States could retaliate. But variables on a combination of factors would be a more probable cause for such. With steel we are looking specifically at China-whose steel industry is in part supported by government subsidies and a labor market that can be paid pennies on the dollar for the work necessary. This alone prevents the discussion of “free trade” being in any way “fair,” because China is cheating. China is also dependent for the USA to be a recipient of up to 20% of their total export volume. Our steel production suffers as they cheat. But they do not have the total upper hand.

2. Products may not cost more - The assumption that our products will go up significantly in price is a realistic concern. But it is not an absolute given. In the immediate period of implementation according to some of the best estimates the tariffs may raise the purchase price of a new car something close to $45, and a twenty-four pack of beer by .05 cents. But what happens if steel & aluminum production begins to match volume wise the amount we import from other world sources? Economics 101 teaches us that prices drop as inventory surges. If our steel production grows enough we could wipe out the gains mix-minused in our dependence on China.

3. The world doesn’t like it - Of all the pushback this reasoning is among some of the most inane. When the United States does what we have to do to shore up our markets, jobs, workers, and life we have less and less need to care what the world thinks about it. This isn’t hubris, this is independence. To be tied to China’s cheap steel, Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves, and the good graces of the global community fundamentally puts us at a more vulnerable position from an economic & national security standpoint. Like much of the rest of the Trump focus, America needs to shore up America’s capacity for whatever faces us, and being utterly dependent upon others doesn’t move us in that direction.

4. We shouldn’t pick winners & losers - This is an argument normally made when discussing competition between domestic companies here in the USA. Jonathan Hoenig, appearing on Neil Cavuto on Friday, repeatedly invoked this as some sort of determining factor as to why the tariffs should be prevented. But it’s an illegitimate argument. This isn’t picking one steel factory over another and using tax-payer incentives to cause one or the other to succeed. This is a fight for survival between a metal industry that has suffered enormous loss for the better part of multiple decades, and the slave labor of China. The winners in the near term are steel and aluminum workers.

5. The national security consideration - Those that have argued that a trade war is inevitable, seem to also forget the increasingly perilous hair trigger of real war that the globe is constantly on the edge of. If America were to find itself drawn into a conflict with North Korea or Iran, it is likely whatever degree of imports we get from China and Russia would immediately be frozen. Fifteen years ago more than a dozen aluminum smelters were in operation. Today there are only three and the entire capacity of one of those three is necessary just for the military and related technologies. We are more vulnerable than necessary, and increasing domestic production solves this vulnerability.

6. Had to be (as it was) done in the correct sequence - Because of the rapid growth of the economy by rolling back some 2000+ regulations coupled with the very real impact that Trump tax reform is having now is the absolute right time to push for this “leveling of the playing field.” Most Americans will be more likely to accept an increase in the price of their next car by $45 if they know that Americans are benefitting. They are even more so if they have on average $90 more per week appearing in their pay check.

Too bad the GOP was taken over by globalist douchebags. At one time the GOP was THE TARIFF Party, now both parties are globalist shills.

1924 GOP platform

The Tariff

We reaffirm our belief in the protective tariff to extend needed protection to our productive industries. We believe in protection as a national policy, with due and equal regard to all sections and to all classes. It is only by adherence to such a policy that the well being of the consumers can be safeguarded that there can be assured to American agriculture, to American labor and to American manufacturers a return to perpetrate American standards of life. A protective tariff is designed to support the high American economic level of life for the average family and to prevent a lowering to the levels of economic life prevailing in other lands.

In the history of the nation the protective tariff system has ever justified itself by restoring confidence, promoting industrial activity and employment, enormously increasing our purchasing power and bringing increased prosperity to all our people.

The tariff protection to our industry works for increased consumption of domestic agricultural products by an employed population instead of one unable to purchase the necessities of life. Without the strict maintenance of the tariff principle our farmers will need always to compete with cheap lands and cheap labor abroad and with lower standards of living.

The enormous value of the protective principle has once more been demonstrated by the emergency tariff act of 1921 and the tariff act of 1922.

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