NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
May 25, 2022

CONTACT:
Hamilton Strategies, [email protected],
610.584.1096, ext. 100, or Deborah Hamilton, ext. 102

Key legislators tell Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board: Keep China out of U.S. government pensions

Will Blinken’s new China policy oppose U.S. investors’ paying for C.C.P. threat?

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Yesterday, six U.S. Senators and a bipartisan group of House members wrote the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) to strongly oppose the Board’s decision imminently to open the world’s largest public pension fund, the U.S. government’s Thrift Savings Plan, to penetration by companies owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The identical Senate and House letters declared:

“U.S. service-members and other federal employees would likely be shocked to learn that the FRTIB is unaware of which companies make up these approved funds or what risk those companies pose. They do not want their retirement dollars to underwrite the development of the CCP’s advanced weapons systems and military modernization. They do not want to be implicated in sponsoring genocide of the Uyghur people, equipping concentration camps, and trafficking in forced labor. They do not want to invest in an opaque mutual fund platform in which Chinese companies do not adhere to federal securities laws or submit to adequate disclosure requirements. When they invest through TSP, they rightly expect the FRTIB will protect them and their investments from these types of dangerous investments.

“It is evident that the FRTIB cannot live up to that expectation at this time. For these, and several other reasons, we again urge the Board to cancel, or, at minimum, postpone implementation of its Mutual Fund Window initiative until your Board can ensure that no TSP funds are invested in dangerous, noncompliant or opaque Chinese securities, as well as commit to providing TSP account-holders as much transparency as possible about where their hard-earned savings are being invested.”

The legislators’ throwdowns were among a number of similar warnings the FRTIB received prior to its Board meeting yesterday from: senior and influential retired military leaders, a highly decorated veteran and TSP participant now the Republican nominee for a Virginia congressional seat and the chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

In addition to the foregoing, strong arguments for preventing our nation’s mortal enemy from gaining access to additional funding that will enable the threat it poses to us to metastasize still further, the FRTIB must not be allowed to ignore fresh validation of such objections to its unvetted, non-transparent Mutual Fund Window:

A reportedly leaked video of a top-secret meeting on May 14thshows leaders in China’s coastal Guangdong Province executing national orders directing them to plan the transition from what is described as “normal to war.” Those preparations appear to be comprehensive and suggest that kinetic warfare is not only in prospect, but imminent – perhaps as soon as this fall.
Recent revelationsof hacked Chinese police data confirms that the CCP’s systematic oppression and genocide of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities is real and ongoing. Its record of wholesale human rights abuses is unprecedented in human history and this evidence of genocidal rape, torture, and extermination in so-called “reeducation camps” requires the United States by treaty to punish the perpetrators.

If the prospect of causing TSP participants to lose their investment as an inevitable casualty of an now-apparently-impending war with China and/or inducing them to invest in companies bent on their destruction or engaged in human rights abuses they abhor were not reasons enough for the FRTIB to refrain from endorsing unvetted mutual funds, here’s another consideration: Causing military personnel and civilian officials in sensitive positions – including Members of Congress and their staff – to invest in such funds could expose them to concerns about conflicts of interest that may jeopardize their security clearances. At a minimum, a failure by these government employees to report such potential conflicts, even if they were deliberately denied information about that exposure by the FRTIB, could put at risk their access to classified information, or worse repercussions. This distinct prospect alone demands a postponement of the opening of the Mutual Fund Window.

The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) calls on Secretary of State Tony Blinken to address explicitly in his speech to the Asia Society tomorrow morning the question of whether the Biden administration supports U.S. investors – and most especially military and other federal government employees – investing in Communist Chinese companies. After all, such investments are clearly contrary to the spirit, if not actually the letter, of President Biden’s own Executive Order 14032 entitled, “Addressing the Threat from Securities Investments that Finance Certain Companies of the People’s Republic of China.”

The Blinken speech and the foregoing topics will be addressed in the course of an important CPDC webinar tomorrow at from 1:00-2:00 p.m. entitled, “The CCP is ‘Transitioning to War’; What Are We Doing?” with a panel of world-class subject matter experts: the Committee’s chairman, Brian Kennedy; strategist and author J.R. “Jeff” Nyquist; and historian and author Dr. Bradley Thayer, PhD. Register here.

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To interview representatives of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, contact [email protected], Deborah Hamilton, 610.584.1096, ext. 100, or ext. 102.

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