FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Madison Tang | CODEPINK China campaign coordinator | [email protected] | (714) 337-5375
Jodie Evans | co-founder, CODEPINK | [email protected] | (310) 621-5635
WHERE: The corner of Broadway and Normandie Terrace, Pacific Heights, San Francisco
WHEN: Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 2:30 PM PT/5:30 PM ET
July 9, 2021 — This Sunday, CODEPINK, Pivot to Peace, Veterans for Peace East Bay, RootsAction.org, World Beyond War, Massachusetts Peace Action, and local constituent activists will march to the residence of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood to deliver a CODEPINK petition demanding that she block a vote on Gregory Meeks’ H.R. 3524, also known as the EAGLE Act. The petition urges Speaker Pelosi to block a vote on the bill unless its military funding for the Asia-Pacific region and antagonistic rhetoric toward China are removed.
H.R. 3524 would not only commit over $200 million to the U.S.’s military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region, it would also disrupt established U.S. foreign policy norms such as the One-China Policy. Furthermore, the bill's rhetoric demonizes China, and this scapegoating emboldens racist agitators and further endangers Asian and Asian American people.
As the letter states, H.R. 3524 “provokes conflict and begins the buildup for a protracted war over Taiwan by encouraging Taiwan and other U.S. allies in the region to heavily invest in weapons and munitions ‘to meet contingency requirements and avoid the need for accessing United States stocks in wartime.’ These buildups cannot reasonably be called deterrence while this bill also agitates existing agreements for peace like the One-China Policy.”
It goes on to state that the “consistent anti-China rhetoric that is repeated again and again throughout the bill and in promotion of the bill...paves the way for more dangerous, and potentially deadly, scapegoating of not just China’s politicians and leaders but all Chinese and Chinese-perceived people, including other Asian and Asian American communities. We have already seen coast-to-coast violence against Asian communities in the U.S. in part because of this kind of political rhetoric; this is a continuation of the political rhetoric the Trump administration began.”
You can read the full letter to Pelosi here.
Before the petition delivery, at 12 PM PT/3 PM ET, CODEPINK activists will march in a Peace Walk across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in protest of the U.S.’s prosecution of whistleblowers Julian Assange and Daniel Hale. CODEPINK activists will emphasize at Speaker Pelosi’s residence that the targeting of civilians by drone warfare will only increase with the ongoing transfer and buildup of U.S. military capacity in Asia-Pacific. The U.S.’s prosecution of Hale and Assange silences the truth about these U.S. war crimes, denying the world its right to be aware of these crimes.
“The United States is continuing its aggression towards China, and the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act is just one element of this multi-pronged hybrid war,” said CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans. “Nancy Pelosi relies on the support and votes of her Asian American constituents, and she will be failing her constituents if she lets this bill in its current form go to a House vote.”
Madison Tang, coordinator of the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign, said, “The inflated, hyperbolized threat of China is being used as justification to fuel the U.S. war economy and further line the pockets of weapons contractors. If we really want to stop America's ‘forever wars,’ we cannot ignore the way Congress is rapidly escalating this unnecessary conflict with China through legislation such as the Eagle Act (H.R. 3524). Our members of Congress, including and especially those with the authority that Speaker Pelosi has, need to address this.”
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