There is now a bounty on the head of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the “monster” international treaty negotiated behind closed doors by government officials and corporate executives but kept secret from the global public.
The media outlet Wikileaks on Tuesday announced a campaign to raise a $100,000 cash reward for the complete text of the agreement in order to end the mystery surrounding the actual contents of the deal that involves the U.S. and eleven Pacific Rim nations.
“The transparency clock has run out on the TPP,” said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “No more secrecy. No more excuses. Let’s open the TPP once and for all.”
Despite unprecedented efforts by negotiating governments to keep it under wraps, WikiLeaks has been able to obtain and publish three leaked chapters of this super-secret global deal over the last two years. However, there are believed to be 26 other chapters of the deal to which only appointed negotiators, trade officials, and chosen representatives from big corporations have been given access.
“Today, WikiLeaks is taking steps to bring about the public’s rightful access to the missing chapters of this monster trade pact,” the group said in a statement. “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. 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.”
And with the U.S. House of Representatives returning to Washington, D.C. this week to pick up a bill that would give trade promotion authority, or Fast Track, to President Obama the call for someone to leak a complete version of the latest draft has new urgency.
Though lawmakers in the U.S. Congress have been able to review the text themselves, they are forbidden from revealing or discussing its contents. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of the staunchest opponents of TPP and Fast Track in Congress, has said: “[They] can’t make this deal public because if the American people saw what was in it, they would be opposed to it.”
Wikileaks says the TPP is particularly noteworthy and troubling because it may act as “the icebreaker agreement” for a series of deals – what it calls the “T-treaty triad” of TPP-TISA-TTIP – that taken together would extend corporate-friendly regulations and trade rules to 53 nations, 1.6 billion people and a full two-thirds of the global economy.