In The Foreign Policy Auction: Foreign Lobbying in America, Freeman unpacks the ways in which governments from around the world attempt to use finance capital to ensure that the sausage factory on Capitol Hill churns out American foreign policy in their favor. The book is unrelentingly thorough, engaging, and sober. “There is no arch-villain here,” Freeman warns at the start, “no dark lord, no one to unmask at the end of the show. There are only politicians seeking reelection, lobbyists seeking more revenue, and foreign governments competing for influence over the most influential government the world has ever known.”

Evelynn Brown, a federal whistleblower and CEO of her own whistleblower support group, has been lobbying the Make It Safe Campaign steering committee to become more open, transparent, responsive, and accountable. She asked for basic things like sharing the email list serv, getting rid of a 24 hour comment review period, having a whistleblower on the steering committee, having minutes of meetings made available, etc.

For whatever reason, today the committee decided they’d had enough.

Dissenters’ Digest takes a look back at news stories covering whistleblowers, watchdogs, and government accountability.

A nonprofit watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), obtained a report through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that concludes officials in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General are guilty of “persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses, and the waste [...]

I’ll leave it to the ethics wonks to decide whether Bauer can do the job — on ethics — well or not. But I am worried about what this says about the Administration’s focus on two other critically important functions. You see, when Bauer took over for Greg Craig, he was hailed as the kind of guy who could solve two problems Craig had failed to: judicial confirmations and closing Gitmo.

The one constant theme underlying all the elements that could have and/or did lead to the BP Gulf oil spill is the mendacious corporate servitude of the Republican party, their leaders and policies. The arrogance and recklessness of BP and its oily partners gestated wildly under the Bush/Cheney administration and little is changing significantly under Obama.