WikiLeaks takes on the oligarchy


In a fascinating interview, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange tells Andy Greenberg of Forbes that early next year, WikiLeaks will release documents that will reveal the corrupt practices of a major US bank.

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

This is serious. It is one thing to challenge the US and other governments. They are merely the second tier of global leadership. Although it has targeted big business before, the oligarchy in the US, especially the financial sector, is the top tier and they will not like being in the crosshairs of WikiLeaks. You can be sure that they will tell their clients (Obama, the Democratic and Republican leaderships, and the corporate US media) to take whatever action is necessary to thwart WikiLeaks’s efforts.

The article also has a great deal of interesting information on plans for a huge growth in WikiLeaks-type services all over the world.

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