March 2, 2013

Petition: MSNBC: Disclose Fix-the-Debt co-chair Ed Rendell's conflicts of interest when booking

http://org.credoaction.com/petitions/msnbc-disclose-fix-the-debt-co-chair-ed-rendell-s-conflicts-of-interest-when-booking

Disclose Ed Rendell's conflicts of interest due to his position as a co-chair of the Fix the Debt campaign - a billionaire-financed campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - when he appears on MSNBC to offer commentary on budget, public investment, infrastructure or environmental issues.

Why is this important?

Ed Rendell today is a co-chair of Fix the Debt — nevertheless, in media appearances on your network he is regularly introduced only as the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. He is special counsel to the law firm Ballard Spahr, where he focuses on privatization in housing and infrastructure. Rendell is a senior adviser at Greenhill & Co., a multinational investment bank.

Rendell is also on the advisory board of Verdeva, a technology development firm, and an operating partner at the venture capital firm Element Partners, a company that has recently invested in natural gas "fracking" in Pennsylvania and nearby states.

Ed Rendell is no longer a Democratic politician. He is a lobbyist, a banking adviser, and technology investor.

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February 11, 2013

Krugman: The Ignorance Caucus

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/krugman-the-ignorance-caucus.html?_r=0

Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech might have suggested that he was offering nothing more than a meager, warmed-over selection of stale ideas.

To be sure, Mr. Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

And such is the influence of what we might call the ignorance caucus that even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his openness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.

Want other examples of the ignorance caucus at work? Start with health care, an area in which Mr. Cantor tried not to sound anti-intellectual; he lavished praise on medical research just before attacking federal support for social science. (By the way, how much money are we talking about? Well, the entire National Science Foundation budget for social and economic sciences amounts to a whopping 0.01 percent of the budget deficit.)

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