It's come to this:
WikiLeaks is offering $100,000 for the text of President Obama's trans-Pacific trade deal.
The transparency organization released a video on Tuesday asking for donations to crowdsource the funds.
More from
WaPo:
The government-document exposing organization already published some chapters of the secret deal, but it wants the whole thing. It’s also using crowdfunding to raise the money to pay the bounty. As of around noon Tuesday, 60 people had pledged $23674.17 to reward those who leak “America’s most wanted secret.”
“The transparency clock has run out on the TPP. No more secrecy. No more excuses. Let’s open the TPP once and for all,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement.
Since the corporations and lobbyists that
wrote the Trans-Pacific-Partnership trade agreement are made up of some of the most upright, honest and trustworthy folks in the world, it's difficult to imagine how any one of them could possibly be tempted by such an offer.
Unless, perhaps, they know someone who's fallen on hard times. Maybe they know someone who's had their job outsourced:
In its current form, the TPP would outsource good jobs, degrade global environmental and working standards and allow investor rights to overrun the rights of workers. The TPP is also packed with special-interest perks thanks to the more than 600 transnational corporations that weighed in on, and in some case wrote, the agreement in secret. Meanwhile the American people have still not been allowed to read it.
Or maybe they know someone whose wages have
tanked:
The wage losses to workers on the wrong end of expanded trade are almost surely larger (in percentage terms) than the estimated net national gains from the TPP. Specifically, if the TPP would indeed boost national income by 0.4 percent while boosting imports and exports by 0.6 percent of GDP by 2025, as a widely cited estimate claims, this would imply a loss to wages of non-college-educated workers of between 0.4 and 0.6 percent.
Maybe they know someone who's tired of giving Billionaires
tax breaks:
A recent study finds that even with a conservative estimate of trade's contribution to inequality, the losses from a projected TPP-produced increase in inequality would wipe out tiny projected gains from the deal for most U.S. workers. The net result would be wage losses for all but the richest 10 percent of U.S. That is, for anyone making less than $88,000 per year, the TPP would mean a pay cut.
Or maybe they know someone who prefers a world with
clean air and water:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would grant foreign corporations extraordinary new powers to attack the laws we rely on for a clean environment, essential services, and healthy communities. Foreign corporations would be empowered to bypass domestic courts and directly "sue" the U.S. government before a tribunal of private lawyers that sits outside of any domestic legal system. These lawyers would be authorized to order the U.S. government to hand millions of our tax dollars to the corporations for laws that they find inconvenient.
So apparently on the off chance that someone "in the know" may actually be familiar with ordinary folks impacted by these types of things, here's the pitch from Wikileaks:
As a side note, isn't it beyond pathetic that the American people have to rely on a bunch of glorified hackers for "permission" to see what's being planned for them behind closed doors by the richest people on the planet?
Contact your Congressman here and tell them not to support fast-track of this abomination.