The pro-transparency organization WikiLeaks is raising cash to offer a $100,000 reward to a whistleblower willing to leak the top secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a radical pseudo-“free trade” treaty so nefarious that the Obama administration and its foreign allies and cronies are working overtime to hide it from the American people and even their elected representatives.
Much of what is already known about the controversial scheme — international kangaroo courts with the power to overrule U.S. and state laws, brazen undermining of national sovereignty, “unrestricted immigration,” and more — has been learned through leaks. Now, WikiLeaks wants the entire Big Business-Big Government plot to be public, as do many Americans and lawmakers. And with such a big reward, analysts say it will be hard for its architects to keep the lid on it. That much money will go a long way in, for example, Communist Vietnam, one of the nations with a ruling class that is working with Obama on the “progressive” scheme.
“The transparency clock has run out on the TPP,” said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a press release announcing the bounty. “No more secrecy. No more excuses. Let’s open the TPP once and for all.”
Obama and the White House have been boasting to their supporters that the TPP is the “most progressive” trade regime in U.S. history. Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, in their rush to surrender even more power to the executive branch they told voters they would rein in, have been falsely claiming that the scheme is consistent with free markets. If WikiLeaks gets its way, though, the world may find out the truth soon enough.
Calling the TPP agreement “America’s Most Wanted Secret,” the anti-secrecy group announced its “$100,000 bounty on monster trade treaty” campaign on June 2. As of Friday, June 5, WikiLeaks had raised more than half of the funds needed. “The TPP bounty also heralds the launch of WikiLeaks new competition system, which allows the public to pledge prizes towards each of the world’s most wanted leaks,” the group added. “For example, members of the public can now pledge on the missing chapters of the TPP.”
If the governments, cronies, and tyrants working on the deal have nothing to hide, the TPP architects should have nothing to fear from transparency — or so the argument goes when government violates the privacy rights of citizens. However, according to critics, trying to hide the horrifying truth about TPP from the public is the only reasonable explanation for the bizarre behavior by the Obama “most transparent in history” administration and the other governments and dictatorships working on the “trade” regime — including the brutal communist regime ruling Vietnam and the Islamist regime ruling Brunei.
Indeed, if the public knew what was in the TPP, they would reject it, according to some of the select few who have been allowed to see it (under draconian conditions and gag-orders). In its announcement, WikiLeaks quotes U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.): “[They] can’t make this deal public because if the American people saw what was in it, they would be opposed to it.” As of early last month, only two Republicans admitted to having seen the TPP, and neither sounded very enthusiastic about it.
The paranoid secrecy borders on the delusional. “If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door,” Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote in Politico. “If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving. And no matter what, you can’t discuss the details of what you’ve read.” Why lawmakers would want to “fast track” such a scheme remains officially a mystery.
Still, based on the information that has already been leaked, a massive wave of opposition spanning the full political spectrum has emerged. From unions trying to stop massive job losses and environmental groups opposed to rule by Big Business, to conservative organizations trying to stop the unconstitutional surrender of U.S. sovereignty and libertarians opposed to government- and globalist-managed “free trade,” TPP has created a giant public backlash that continues to grow. Many of the agreement’s even more alarming details are likely to be made public via leaks in the coming months and weeks.
“The TPP is the largest agreement of its kind in history: a multi-trillion dollar international treaty being negotiated in secret by the US, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia and 7 other countries [governments],” WikiLeaks said in its announcement. “The treaty aims to create a new international legal regime that will allow transnational corporations to bypass domestic courts, evade environmental protections, police the internet on behalf of the content industry, limit the availability of affordable generic medicines, and drastically curtail each country’s legislative sovereignty.”
WikiLeaks pointed out as well that TPP is hardly the only ObamaTrade threat being aided and abetted by establishment Republicans. “The TPP is also noteworthy as the icebreaker agreement for the proposed ‘T-treaty triad’ of TPP-TISA-TTIP which would see TPP-style rules placed on 53 nations, 1.6 billion people and 2/3rds of the global economy,” it explained, pointing to two other similarly massive agreements. WikiLeaks and other organizations have been hard at work trying to find out what is in those secret agreements, too, with some success.
Despite the best efforts of ObamaTrade cohorts to keep the text under wraps, over the last two years, WikiLeaks has already published three leaked chapters of TPP. More than 25 chapters, however, remain secret — only certain government bureaucrats, mega-corporations, and mega-banks have access, and occasionally lawmakers who swear to keep it hidden from the public and their constituents. Still, while the overwhelming majority of the deal remains hidden, even the three chapters that have been published have sparked alarm worldwide and across the political spectrum.
Perhaps the most extreme element of the agenda leaked so far involves the creation of international “tribunals” that would have the purported authority to overrule American courts, laws, and even the U.S. and state constitutions. “The tribunals would be presided over by arbitrators (judges) appointed by the secretary-general of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an institution of the World Bank Group,” explained The New American’s senior editor William Jasper after analyzing the leaked chapter. “So the proposed TPP tribunals are, in essence, a means for transferring judicial authority over vast areas of domestic law to ‘arbitrators’ picked by the World Bank — and the central bankers and the giant commercial/investment bankers that run the World Bank.”
In other words, the TPP, along with other ObamaTrade schemes being negotiated in tandem, represent a full-scale assault on the principle of self-government, national sovereignty, and constitutional rule of law. Instead of the American people governing themselves, foreign bureaucrats and Big Business-Big Government lackeys will be making decisions for them, as the leaked chapters make abundantly clear.
Lest the notion of globalist kangaroo courts overruling U.S. and state decisions be considered a mere hypothetical threat, it is important to note that such scheming is already going on. Just last month, a World Trade Organization (WTO) “appellate tribunal” ruled against a law passed by the U.S. Congress on country-of-origin labelling for meat. U.S. lawmakers quickly and pathetically got to work obeying the WTO and gutting the law in question. NAFTA kangaroo courts have been doing the same for years.
Another related concern surrounding TPP and other ObamaTrade schemes — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) — is the broader assault on national sovereignty under the bogus guise of “free” trade. The European Union super-state, for instance, was created using the European Free Trade Agreement. The fake “trade” agenda used to sell the plot to the ignorant masses quietly and lawlessly worked to usurp national sovereignty, to the point where Europe is today largely ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels.
Indeed, the whole world is being divided up into regions, to be ruled by regional regimes plugged into the broader UN-led system. “The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another,” explained globalist bigwig Henry Kissinger in his recent book World Order, with the word “order” essentially serving as a synonym for government and control.
There are many reasons why Congress should refuse to surrender its constitutional authority over trade to the Obama administration — and why it should reject the radical TPP, the TTIP, and the TISA. Thanks to WikiLeaks and the whistleblowers it relies on, the public now knows about some of those major problems: international kangaroo tribunals beyond public accountability, rule by Big Business cronies of Big Government, threats to Internet freedom and free speech, attacks on self-government and national sovereignty, and much more. As more chapters are leaked, the list of reasons to reject the scheming is sure to grow.
Perhaps the most obvious reason for Congress to put its foot down, though, is the fact that WikiLeaks has to raise money for a bounty in the first place, just so that the people affected can learn what their supposed “public servants” and allied cronies are trying to foist on them from behind closed doors. If Obama and his cohorts have nothing to hide, they should post the TPP online for the world to see immediately. The fact that they won’t should tell you all you need to know.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Obama-GOP “Trade” Scheme Includes “Unrestricted Immigration”
Leaked Obama “Trade” Pact Exposes Assault on Self-government
Leak of Secret Trade Doc Reveals Sovereignty-destroying Courts
Establishment GOP Plots to Empower Obama on “Progressive” Trade
Trans-Pacific Partnership To Facilitate U.S.-China Merger
GOP Leaders Plot Pseudo-Free-Trade Schemes With Obama
Activists Rally to Stop Obama’s “Free Trade” Schemes
The EU: Regionalization Trumps Sovereignty
Trans-Pacific Partnership (NAFTA on Steroids) Threatens Sovereignty
