Odds Are Remarkably High That You Don’t Fully Understand what Wikileaks Is Doing.

Julian Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, an online collector and publisher of encrypted documents submitted by whistleblowers. Like Jeffery Wigand, former vice president at Brown & Williamson in Louisville, Kentucky (who in 1996 got death threats, and he says murder attempts, when he pulled the plug on Big Tobacco) whistleblowers are people inside a government or a major corporation who know that the leaders of it are deliberately doing great harm, and get their proofs to the public at sometimes significant risk. 

Dealing with this flammable material, Assange’s team has not printed a fake, incomplete or altered document in ten years of work.  

In several countries, there are statues to Assange. Wikileaks has after all taught us that our deeply divided U.S. Right and Left, indeed all nations, can work together if they’re dealing from hard fact rather than from spin.  

For example, the Trans Pacific Partnership [TPP], like the North American Free Trade Association [NAFTA] and the World Trade Association [WTO] before it, forms a transnational governing body, subordinating the laws and people of the nations involved to corporate controls. People would never knowingly allow it it. Consequently, the Obama administration and Republicans in the U.S. Congress, while working directly with billionaires and global corporations, planned to tell the U.S. people what was in the TPP treaty only after it was ratified.

Wikileaks however snagged the secret text of the treaty and published it in time for people to fight. The Democratic Administration and Republicans in Congress responded with new secret treaties, to the same end. Wikileaks nailed the texts of those treaties and published them too. “Exasperated,” Vice President Joe Biden says he planned to sneak the TPP through in the lame duck session because “now that’s the only way to get it passed.”

 However, forewarned by the Wikileaks publication of the treaty, Vietnam refused to sign, so even a U.S. ratification would not make it law this year :)

Accurately informed, the world stands up for itself, Right to Left.  

Parties and potentates

 The U.S., the world’s only remaining superpower, is meanwhile on an imperialist tear, having attacked eight Middle Eastern countries, to say nothing of sub-Saharan Africa, in Obama’s era. Bush was worse. Nations are in ruins, the perfect nests for terrorists.

Millions are dead or fleeing the war zones, creating huge refugee problems, basically to feed a global-corporate war industry using the U.S. government to sell weapons to both sides in almost every conflict. One of Assange’s main targets is therefore America’s permanent political parties which First U.S. President George Washington warned against our forming and which are nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution. Corrupt, boss-ridden and war-hungry, they block our democracy at every turn, playing havoc with the world.  

Assange reasons that the more corrupt a party or politician is, the more full disclosure will gum up their works, either by forcing them to go straight or by forcing them to tear up every scrap of evidence, a disabling process. Vetted and indexed by Assange’s meticulous team, the whistleblower primary evidence -- the videos, texts, accounts, speeches and letters -- document how U.S. leaders work and think when they are out of the public eye, who pays them, and what they are willing do to their party, nation, other countries, indeed to the human race, in order to gain and hold personal riches and power.  

Seeing that Donald Trump was already splintering the corrupt Republican Party and in many senses exposing himself, Assange concentrated on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton -- showing Hillary cheating a new U.S. generation which is knowledgeable, hardworking, on its feet, computer savvy and furious at the destruction of its birthright, from taking over the reins of U.S. government this year. 

For example, Wikileaks demonstrates that working with collusive corporate media, Clinton and the DNC helped jigger Trump into the Republican nomination, and that while gathering millions of dollars from Sanders voters on the promise of a fair primary, the DNC was elaborately rigging the Democratic primaries against them. 

Wiikleaks also showed Facebook Chief Operating Officer [COO] Sheryl Sandberg, a “Hillblazer” level of financial contributor, providing data-mining research on women to the Clinton campaign. Since Facebook is what Facebook data-mines, some women on Facebook have taken exception to that use.  

Publishing such documents, Wikileaks enrages dangerous people. There is no evidence that Hillary Clinton asked if the U.S. government could “drone Assange." For seven years, Secretary of State John Kerry and the secretaries that followed, taking a different tack, have however kept Assange pinned down in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a caging which most nations of the world deplore. Australian citizen Assange, accused of date rape in Sweden, which he denies -- and charges were dropped--  is certain that it was a ruse, that if he left the embassy, he’d be whisked to the U.S. and a secret trial. 

Assange’s lawyer and close friend John Jones was killed in 2015 by somehow ending up under a moving British commuter train. Pronounced dead at the scene, he never had a chance to explain how he got there. Shortly after Wikileaks published Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speeches, under enormous Obama administration pressure the Ecuadorean embassy in London cut Assange, who is trapped there, off from the Internet. He is now in 2018 without net connections or visitors.

Receiving constant death threats, Assange however has Insurance Keys, or “dead man’s codes” that must be suppressed by him or a trusted surrogate every few hours to prevent worldwide distribution and unlocking of a flood of whistleblower documents.  

Stalemate? The U.S. “Powers That Be” seethe, and a war-weary world applauds Assange and holds its breath, outspokenly hoping that given sufficient evidence, the mighty American people will wake up and take their government back.  This matters to you.  The U.S. is at some levels after all unrecognizable.

Global corporations or “globals” -- outfits like BP, WalMart and Bank of America which are incorporated in numerous countries at once -- evade US taxes while continuing to destroy our air, land, water and infrastructure, destabilize our economy, and yet receive huge tax-funded subsidies from the federal, state and local politicians whom they have bought off. The leading source of job loss not job gain, they crush U.S. business, the real job creator, gutting the U.S. Main Street economy.   That paucity of jobs drives some people into drugs or crime, conveniently sluicing them into the maw of the private prison industry.

Private prison corporations convert these Americans to slave labor by paying them pennies and renting them out to other global-corporations, further undercutting the U.S. job market. The poor job market shoves other people into the “volunteer” military. U.S. soldiers and sailors who sign up for love of country or family survival are however paid so little by our corporately-controlled government that they are often eligible for food stamps.  

Corporations of mercenary soldiers like Blackwater, which might switch sides if the enemy offered more money, in sharp contrast do the same work that our US soldiers do, but are paid vastly more in U.S. tax dollars by the corporately-controlled government. Mercenary soldier corporations like Blackwater also serve as the military branches of the larger global corporations.

Having bought Blackwater, Monsanto in other words is now armed.  

The First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly and press do not apply in this new set-up. One of the major issues of our day for example is safe water. Canada is boycotting Nestle, whose CEO says flatly that humans have no right to water but corporations do. As filthy tar-sands-oil pipelines snake into the United States -- to reach coastal areas for export, not for internal use -- they endanger clean rivers. Sympathetic water activists in Canada are risking themselves to repeatedly turn off the oil lines as they cross our border.

 Others gathered from all over the world to protect the Missouri River at Standing Rock, ND, and thus the priceless Mississippi watershed, half of the United States, which feeds int the Gulf.

Mainsteam media do not cover this huge, vital story, because globals like Comcast have purchased the world news media, in the case of the U.S. everything from CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS down to the local radio stations, and then started outfits like FOX, all spinning or hiding rather than reporting news.  Independent reporters at Standing Rick were socked with felony charges for videotaping global-corporate “security guards” who for instance, without identity badges and trespassing on private land, sicced attack dogs on American men, women and children, as US police stood down, permitting it.   Outing the global-corporate spooks  

In a similar news blackout over the last two decades, our huge national security apparatus, the NSA, CIA etc. has shifted from public control to global-corporate control -- 70% of our tax-funded spooks are “private contractors,” employees of global corporations which have loyalty only to their bottom lines and no real restraints. 

That’s what Edward Snowden, a corporate employee more loyal to the people of his nation than to the global-corporate spook apparatus, was trying to tell the world. A former CIA agent working for Booz Allen, Snowden saw that the corporate contractors were tapping ALL phones, reading ALL email, looking into any bedroom they chose -- he had written major parts of the code which made that unimaginable data flow indexed and intelligible -- and that the Obama Administration and a Republican-controlled Congress were encouraging it, as again the US Bill of Rights effectively disappeared.  

Initially, Snowden got proof out to the public through the corporate media, primarily the Guardian in Britain. Corporate governments soon clamped down, pretending that Snowden had harmed the country or the troops when the only thing harmed was the mass corporate-government surveillance of innocent Americans, without a warrant. As Snowden escaped from Hong Kong headed for Latin America, but was trapped by the U.S. government in Russia, spending a month in an airport before receiving asylum, the corporate media ceased accurate coverage. Unlike Snowden, Wikileaks publishes directly onto the web. So it’s troubling but not surprising that Assange was just cut off from the Internet. His highly mobile team is not.

Wikileaks remains the motherlode, giving hungry analysts a detailed whitleblower recording of a reality which is both raw and well documented.   Wikileaks is moreover not alone. American Glenn Greenwald, the lead Guardian reporter on the Snowden story, for example formed an online media outlet, The Intercept, with videographer Laura Poitras, who is the producer of Citizen Four, and Jeremy Scahill, the reporter who broke the Blackwater story back at a time when mercenary soldiers were another dirty government secret. Premier online news teams like The Intercept do amazing spadework daily.   Arrested for reporting at Standing Rock, the highly respected heart and mind of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman is giving herself up in order to fight for the First Amendment. As a world aching for sunlight waits to see if another trustworthy news source, Wikileaks, will be snuffed out, we do it moreover by lighting the millions of LED flashlights -- forget candles -- of citizen media. If Julian Assange is in any sense taken from us, we will not forgive. We will not forget. Yet “do not expect us. We are already here...” and you’re part of it.