Frank Gaffney (00:07):
We're back, and we're joined by one of our regulars here at Securing America, Bill Walton. He is, among other things, a recovering master of the universe from Allied Capital, now in Wall Street. He is a leader of the conservative movement as the past president of the Council for National Policy, which I'm very proud to be a member. And he is perhaps most importantly, at the moment, the host of a terrific television podcast program entitled The Bill Walton Show. I've been privileged to be on it myself from time to time, and always delighted to have him here for home dome visits at Securing America. Welcome back, Bill. Good to have you, sir.
Bill Walton (00:44):
Frank, great to be here.
Frank Gaffney (00:46):
Well, I wanted to start with some research that our mutual friend Roger Robinson shared with Maria Bartiromo on her program last week on Fox Business about this Thrift Savings Plan. Bill, you and I have been talking about this for some time, that the federal employees, past and present, military and civilian, have the world's largest public pension fund, some $800 billion. And a fellow by the name of Larry Fink, who we bemoan most weeks, of BlackRock fame, has engineered a Thrift Savings Plan, mutual fund window that will allow investments to be made up to 25% of the participants' funds in mutual funds. And Roger's research indicates quite a number of them are going to have Chinese companies in them, weighted by 22% in most cases, he estimates. And the implications of this are very significant. I'd like your thoughts on them.
Bill Walton (02:01):
Well, I think this is yet another example of the Chinese working to infiltrate our capital markets and our economy and our defense systems with very subtle, systematic, and arcane mechanisms. In this case, they're working the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. There's something called a mutual fund window which opens up for the Thrift Savings Plan, which allows federal employees to put their savings dollars into these mutual funds. Problem is that of the 5,000 funds, we really don't know how many companies that are Chinese, headquartered in China or Chinese companies headquartered elsewhere, that are in it. And of course, we now know that each and every Chinese company is virtually controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and is part of its four or five warfare strategy, which we've talked about before. And so we're taking US military retiree dollars and putting them in into companies who are working assiduously to defeat America.
Frank Gaffney (03:10):
This is insane, of course, and creates all kinds of, well, conflicts of interest at a minimum for these government employees, as well as [inaudible 00:03:21]-
Bill Walton (03:21):
Well, there are enablers, Frank. We've talked about the enabler. The big enabler's Larry Fink, and then, of course, all the other big investment funds, State Street, Vanguard-
Frank Gaffney (03:30):
Vanguard.
Bill Walton (03:30):
... what have you.
Frank Gaffney (03:31):
Fidelity.
Bill Walton (03:31):
And these companies, A, they don't see anything wrong with the Chinese Communist Party. They're very nice people. They've had dinner with them over the years. But the main thing is you've got-
Frank Gaffney (03:41):
Made a lot of money from them.
Bill Walton (03:42):
They've got a lot of money from them, and they see that big investment market in China, and they want to play in that sandbox. And so to-
Frank Gaffney (03:50):
With our money.
Bill Walton (03:50):
... aid and abet the Chinese... Yeah. And to aid and abet the Chinese, they're saying, "Well, look, we'll make sure the federal government invest its retiree dollars in your companies."
Frank Gaffney (04:03):
Right. And the thing is that some of these are Chinese companies that are actually involved in sanctioned activities by the US government, whether it's horrible human rights violations, surveillance state operations, genocide, perhaps slave labor, or, worse yet, building weapons with which to kill those very people whose retirement savings are being put into those companies. It's mind-boggling, Bill, and it must be stopped. I hope and pray that what is going to increasingly take place here is that the Congress will be held accountable for allowing this to take place. Indeed, it is some of their money as well. Members of Congress are in the Thrift Savings Plan with Fink [inaudible 00:04:58]-
Bill Walton (04:57):
Well, David Jones is the acting chairman of the Thrift Board, and I would encourage everybody to write a note to Chairman Jones that they're misguided in how they want to steer retiree investment dollars.
Frank Gaffney (05:11):
And let me just say, it's very easy to do that at notspforccp.org. That's no Thrift Savings Plan for the Chinese Communist Party .org, notspforccp.org. There's an AlignAct campaign that allows you very easily to send a note to David Jones and other members of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, as well as your own elected representatives saying, "Don't do this." And I encourage you, as does Bill, to do that.
Frank Gaffney (05:43):
Bill, let me switch gears slightly. Speaking of that surveillance state operation, there is now fresh evidence that the Chinese Communist Party, which has put into place this immense capability, they call it the Social Credit System, has actually used it to garrote people in China, who have been frantic about what's happening to their banks and their funds in those banks. Talk a little bit about how this is working in practice and why it should be of concern to us here as well.
Bill Walton (06:26):
Well, yeah, let's talk about why this matters. I mean, we've got a very obscure story. There are three banks in China, regional banks, that, for reasons that are not clear, cut off their depositors' access to their money in the bank. And when the depositors started gathering themselves to protest this and were planning a march on the regional headquarters of these banks, they discovered they couldn't travel. Well, why not? Because in China, you've got your social credit score, your card. And it was basically a health card to begin with, but now, as we see, it's about everything else, and they found their cards, which were just fine, they'd turned from green to red. And what red means is you can't go shopping, you can't travel, you can't basically do anything. You become a non-person.
Frank Gaffney (07:18):
Yeah, out and about. Yeah.
Bill Walton (07:18):
And so they've had hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese citizens with their cards turned red to protect these banks for reasons which are obscure. And of course, the CCP, Chinese Communist Party, has become pretty opaque in all this. But so why do we care? Well-
Frank Gaffney (07:36):
But the main thing is, it wants to make sure you're not going do something that they find to be contrary to the, well, party line, as they call it.
Bill Walton (07:42):
Well, there's all sorts of language they have. When they rolled this out in 2014, there was some language they used. There's "glorious behavior" and there's "deplorable behavior." And glorious, of course, is defined by the party. Deplorable is also defined by the party. And that's also opaque. So for reasons which you may not understand, you find may find yourself turned into a non-person. Why do we care? We care because the World Economic Forum, at their last meeting in May, I believe, they had a big panel, a lot of presentations on how the banks, the credit card companies, the rating agencies have discovered ways that they can incorporate your carbon footprint into their credit decisions.
Bill Walton (08:28):
Mastercard now has developed a card that allows them, or they, whoever they is, to monitor your purchase as to whether or not you're being carbon efficient. And if you get to a certain point where you're not towing the line, they cut off your credit. They cut off your card. This hasn't happened yet, but the reason we're talking about this now is we can't allow it to happen. FICO, the credit rating agency, is also signaling the same thing. They're developing a credit rating system that doesn't just track whether you pay your bills on time, or your debt levels, or so on and so forth, they're also going to track your carbon footprint. And this is expanding. We've got ESG. Well, carbon is the E part of that, the environmental part of it. But there's also social. And then there's good governance when it applies to corporations. Well, there's no reason these social credit scores can't apply to a lot of other things like whether you're a [inaudible 00:09:31]-
Frank Gaffney (09:30):
Well, and Bill, at the same time this was going down at the World Economic Forum in Davos, down the road in Geneva, the World Health Organization was touting the emergence of new universal digital health cards, which will play exactly the role that the health passports, or health IDs, or whatever they call them in China, the social credit score system cards in China play in that particular system. So whether it's T-Mobile's universal health card, or whether it's the carbon footprint tracker, or some other digital device, it all gives rise to what we've been calling at the Committee on the Present Danger: China, which we're very proud to have you as a member, the digital gulag that is in fact now in prospect in our own country as an application of the China model here.
Bill Walton (10:35):
Well, they can't get the Green New Deal passed through Congress. It's too obvious. The headlines are out there. But they can weaponize the banking system to get the same things done. And all the big banks, led by Brian Moynihan at Bank of America, and I think Jamie Dimon as well, have gotten together her to say, "Well, this climate issue's not going to be solved by governments. We need to do this ourselves."
Frank Gaffney (10:58):
Right.
Bill Walton (10:58):
And they're talking about committing $150 trillion of basically depositor money to bring about the promised new world that they want.
Frank Gaffney (11:09):
And among other things, starve companies that they consider to be not green, fossil fuel companies, notably, of the capital they need.
Bill Walton (11:17):
And it's not just the banks, Frank. It's not just the banks.
Frank Gaffney (11:18):
It's not just the banks.
Bill Walton (11:19):
Walmart just cut off Mike Lindell, MyPillow.
Frank Gaffney (11:22):
Yeah, they said.
Bill Walton (11:25):
They said somehow his pillows didn't meet their new rating-
Frank Gaffney (11:30):
New standard.
Bill Walton (11:30):
... criteria, without saying what that is.
Frank Gaffney (11:32):
Bill, we're out of time. We're going to have to leave it at that, with great regret, because this requires further attention. Needless to say, thanks for yours and the great work you do at The Bill Walton Show. Come back to us again next week, if you would, for more here at Securing America. Next up, we'll speak with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about thinking about the unthinkable, nuclear war. Our enemies are. Shouldn't we? Straight ahead.