I'm gonna try this one more time, folks. Now that Fast Track is suddenly in everybody's face, maybe my timing will be better now.
Almost five weeks ago, I started a petition at WhiteHouse.gov, calling upon President Obama to release the complete draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I promptly posted a diary here at DK in order to drum up support for it, then a few days later, a second anti-TPP diary. You can reference them here if you like:
Help Me Stop the TPP!
Sign My White House Petition: Release the Complete Text of the TPP
Well, Saturday, April 25 was the deadline. My petition on WhiteHouse.gov ultimately attracted 944 total signatures - respectable, but nowhere close to the 100,000 signature threshold necessary to trigger a public response from the White House.
I've decided to give this thing one more try - this time with a petition at Change.org. It's my first-ever petition there, so I don't know the thresholds to attain high-profile visibility on the site, nor do I know when or if it will time out. But now that the Fast Track and TPP issues are hot, maybe this petition will gain some serious traction:
Here's the link:
President Obama: Release the Complete Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to the General Public
And here's the petition text:
President Obama has been aggressively promoting the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a "trade" deal that would be very much in America's interest. Yet negotiations between 12 Pacific Rim nations and more than 600 multinational corporations are being held in strict secrecy, with neither the general public nor Congress given free access to review its contents. Moreover, the President is now pressuring Congress for so-called "Fast Track" approval, which requires a straight up or down ratification vote, with little opportunity for debate, and no opportunity at all for amendments.
If the TPP is really as beneficial for America as President Obama claims, then he must allow us to see for ourselves. President Obama must release the complete draft text of the TPP to the general public.
By all accounts from insiders in the know, if the general public had any idea of what's actually contained in the draft agreement, the TPP would quickly go up in flames. So an important tactic for defeating the TPP is to pressure the White House to release the text. Whether they ultimately do so or not (and I'm not holding my breath), the argument for transparency and public disclosure is a compelling one. Either the White House releases the text, or they take the heat for stonewalling - thereby making it abundantly clear that they have something to hide. Win-win.
So that's it. I don't use Facebook or Twitter, so my own social media options for promoting this are limited. To anyone and everyone who agrees with this message enough to sign my petition, please take the extra step and pass it along via your own networks - tweet out the link via Twitter, post it to your Facebook page, etc. And please encourage the people in your networks to do likewise.
Thanks! Let's do this!
MM