Always China's fault? — Missouri's absurd judicial holding

10 March 2025

This is the kind of thing that infuriates . . .

. . . most of the rest of the world.

Evidently — when we Americans are too lazy, stupid, and offshoring-greedy to manufacture our own healthcare equipment domestically — China should pay:

A federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of Missouri in the state’s $24 billion lawsuit against China’s Communist Party that accused it of hoarding protective supplies during the coronavirus pandemic.

"This is a landmark victory for Missouri and the United States in the fight to hold China accountable for unleashing COVID-19 on the world," Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement.

"China refused to show up to court, but that doesn’t mean they get away with causing untold suffering and economic devastation. We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland."

The ruling comes five years after former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt sued China for "obstructing the production, purchase, and export of critical medical equipment, including PPE, during the pandemic," Bailey’s office wrote.

The appeals court ruled, however, that the lawsuit must be limited to accusations of supply hoarding after the lawsuit previously accused China of hiding information about the origins of the pandemic.

Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey . . .

. . . inelegantly topped this heist off by posting the following on X:

Hey China,

You owe Missouri $24 BILLION.

I just won a judgment in court.

Pay up — or we start seizing assets and farmland

The ridiculousness of Missouri's claims should be self-evident

By policy, the United States has offshored the manufacturing of virtually everything critical to our national security at its most basic levels. Like pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment.

This practice of seeking out low-wage countries to source what we formerly made over here, further enriched American oligarchs and America's fascist-corporatist business structure. All at the American middle class's expense.

So, during COVID — when just one of the costs of this short-sighted form of culture-based avarice came back to bite us — it was China's fault?

The reasoning in all of this is especially perverse because Ron Unz has made a preponderantly persuasive case that the United States itself either originated SARS-CoV-2 — or had a complicit hand in its manufacture — as a biological weapon aimed at (and subsequently distributed in) China and Iran.

Consider the potential blowback

What do we think China is going to do, when Americans start expropriating Chinese holdings in the United States on such spurious legal and economic grounds?

Not so good for American businesses operating in China's huge-huge market, is it?

The moral? — Thievery is the American Way?

One can be irritated with the People's Republic of China for a host of (often rationally unpersuasive) reasons. But this Missouri case is just too ridiculously reversed in its accountability-holding to hold up to rational scrutiny.

And if we want to ban Chinese purchases of American farm land, as AG Bailey implicitly lets slip, let's do so by law. So that other nations are fairly forewarned.

It is no wonder that much of the world holds the United States in moral and legal contempt.

We have become a nation run by plague-carrying, warmongering weasels. With not even a trace of the fact-based self-awareness that genuine respect-worthiness demands.

PeteFree.com

Always China's fault? — Missouri's absurd judicial holding