Head of Cop29 is a fossil fuels guy

As if it wasn't already clear enough that the Cop's are mostly about corporate greenwashing.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities. - The Guardian

Federal oversight of the judiciary has long been a joke

ProPublica does it again. I can't say enough good things about that outfit.

The Judicial Conference, a secretive, century-old council of federal judges led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, oversees the ethics and financial disclosures for more than 1,700 federal judges, including the nine justices of the high court. Those financial disclosures, submitted yearly as a list of assets and gifts, are often the only window into whether judges with lifetime appointments have conflicts of interest as they rule on the country’s most consequential legal cases.

The judiciary's leaders argue that the conference has been an effective watchdog over America's third branch of government. The conference’s authority plays an important role in judicial controversies and has been at the center of some defenses of the court following ProPublica’s reporting on possible ethical breaches. With its “sound structure of self-governance,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2021, “the Judicial Conference has been an enduring success.”

In reality, the Judicial Conference has instead often protected, not policed, the judiciary, according to interviews and previously undisclosed internal documents. For decades, conference officials have repeatedly worked to preserve judges’ most coveted perks while thwarting congressional oversight and targeting “disloyal” figures in the judiciary who argued for reforms. - ProPublica

The "Atlas Network" needs to be exposed, far and wide

The referendum in Australia, referenced in the article, didn't pass.

A campaign to deny Indigenous peoples a voice in Australia’s national Parliament is using tactics similar to an earlier conservative legal battle against First Nations communities in Canada, a new research paper argues.

That’s no coincidence, according to the paper’s author Jeremy Walker, because think tanks linked to these efforts in Canada and Australia belong to a secretive U.S. organization called the Atlas Network that’s received support from oil, gas and coal companies and operates in nearly 100 countries.

“The coordinated opposition to Indigenous constitutional recognition by the Australian arm of the Atlas Network we can assume is motivated by the same intentions underlying the permanent Atlas campaign against climate policy [globally],” writes Walker, a senior lecturer in social and political sciences at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

“That is, to minimise the possibility of democratic government challenging the ever-expanding frontier of fossil fuel extraction,” he argues, a charge one conservative Australian advocacy group strongly denies. - DeSmog

Another failed Pentagon audit, another record Pentagon budget

Both have become automatic, and grossly underreported in corporate "news" media.

In response to news of the proposed $847 billion Pentagon budget, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies issued the following comment:

“This month, news broke that the Pentagon once again failed to pass a basic audit showing that it knows where its money goes. And instead of holding out for any kind of accountability, Congress stands ready to give a big raise to an agency that failed to account for more than 60 percent of its assets.

This is a sign of an agency that is too big, plain and simple. Other major government agencies have long since passed audits. But the Pentagon, with its global sprawl of more than 750 military installations, and a budget increase that alone could more than double the diplomacy budget at the State Department, is so big and disjointed that no one knows where its money goes.

Here’s one solution: the Pentagon needs to be a lot smaller. After twenty years of war, and in a time when government spending is desperately needed elsewhere, the Pentagon’s fifth failed audit in as many years (and having never, ever passed) should be the last straw." - Institute for Policy Studies

U.S. military spending is mega-massively out of control

The ultimate in corrupt corporate/government collusion.

U.S. military spending is, of course, astronomically high — more than that of the next nine countries combined. Here’s the kicker, though: the Pentagon (an institution that has never passed a comprehensive financial audit) doesn’t even ask for all those yearly spending increases in its budget requests to Congress. Instead, the House and Senate continue to give it extra tens of billions of dollars annually. No matter that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has publicly stated the Pentagon has all it needs to “get the capabilities… to support our operational concepts” without such sums.

It would be one thing if such added funding were at least crafted in line with a carefully considered defense strategy. More often than not, though, much of it goes to multibillion dollar weapons projects being built in the districts or states of key lawmakers or for items on Pentagon wish lists (formally known as “unfunded priorities lists”). It’s unclear how such items can be “priorities” when they haven’t even made it into the Pentagon’s already enormous official budget request.

In addition, throwing yet more money at a department incapable of managing its current budget only further strains its ability to meet program goals and delivery dates. In other words, it actually impairs military readiness. Whatever limited fiscal discipline the Pentagon has dissipates further when lawmakers arbitrarily increase its budget, despite rampant mismanagement leading to persistent cost overruns and delivery delays on the military’s most expensive (and sometimes least well-conceived) weapons programs. - TomDispatch

Pentagon contractors cleaned up, via fraud and graft, in Afghanistan

This sort of thing has actually been taken for granted, in U.S. military spending, for a very long time. That needs to change, and there's no good reason that it can't do so.

Pentagon contractors operating in Afghanistan over the past two decades raked in nearly $108 billion—funds that "were distributed and spent with a significant lack of transparency," according to a report published Tuesday.

"These contracts show the shadowy 'camo economy' at work in Afghanistan," said report author Heidi Peltier, director of programs for the Costs of War Project at Brown Univesity's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"Military contracting obscures where and how taxpayer money flows, who profits, and how much is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse," she added. "It also makes it difficult to know how many people are employed, injured, and killed through military contracting." - Common Dreams

The U.S. is the worst financial secrecy enabler of all

Because the greedhead plutocrats want it this way.

A global index published Tuesday ranks the United States as the world's leading perpetrator of financial secrecy, citing the country's refusal to share key information with the tax authorities of other nations and its status as a generous tax haven for foreign oligarchs, rich executives, and other elites.

The ranking comes despite U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign-trail pledge to "bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies." - Common Dreams

The horrifying, disgraceful reality/legacy of the U.S. in Afghanistan

It so happens that I'm currently reading James Risen's book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. It kicks ass, same as this article.

This month, as the Taliban swiftly took control of Kabul and the American-backed government collapsed, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government’s watchdog over the Afghan experience, issued his final report. The assessment includes remarkably candid interviews with former American officials involved in shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan that, collectively, offer perhaps the most biting critique of the 20-year American enterprise ever published in an official U.S. government report.

“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose,” the report notes, “though the definition of that purpose evolved over time.”

Released in the days after Kabul fell, the report reads like an epitaph for America’s involvement in Afghanistan. - James Risen/The Intercept