The following is a project of Fight for the Future. Please read the article and follow the links. We must all work together to protect internet freedom, and fight censorship.
Congress is considering a “fast track” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If you are not familiar with “fast track” in these terms, it is DC-speak for an anti-democratic process where Congress gives full authority to the Executive Branch to negotiate trade deals, with no meaningful debate or transparency.
If the Fast Track bill passes, it’s a death blow for democracy and Internet freedom. However, if Fast Track fails — and it’s going to be a really close vote — there’s a very good chance that the entire TPP will fall apart. The U.S. negotiators are trying to bully other countries into adopting SOPA-like copyrigh t policies that would lead to a more expensive, censored, and policed Internet. If we defeat Fast Track, the U.S. loses their biggest bargaining chip, and the corporate lobbyists who are driving this deal won’t have the leverage they need to get what they want.
Fight for the Future has been researching the crap out of this and developing their strategy and it’s clear to us that we win or lose the war against the TPP with this battle against Fast Track. That’s why we’ve pulled out the big guns. For the last few weeks they have been quietly building an epic coalition of groups from across the political spectrum to oppose this. It’s an unlikely list of names: reddit, the AFL-CIO, EFF, the Sierra Club, Imgur, the Pirate Party, 350, BoingBoing, and the Teamsters — these are groups and companies that rarely agree on much of anything, but they can all agree that Fast Tracking the TPP is a terrible idea. So together, we’ve launched “10 Days to Stop Fast Track.”
The next ten days are going to be awesome for us, and terrible for the corporate lobbyists who are so desperate to control the free and open web. We need all hands on deck for this. You’ve read this far, now do what has to be done.
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