transparency

Some municipalities around the country have tried, and failed to set up or operate their own broadband communications networks, to compete in the business of broadband service. The reasons for the failures are numerous, but in all cases taxpayer money was put at risk often without approval of taxpayers and often wasted.

Transparency is a paramount virtue in science and politics, even more so when those two fields of endeavor overlap, as they do in discussions of climate change.

In today’s best of edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com joins Environment & Climate News managing editor H. Sterling Burnett to discuss the new oversight report on the spending of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com joins Environment & Climate News managing editor H. Sterling Burnett to discuss the new oversight report on the spending of the Environmental Protection Agency.

We are deep into Year Seven of the Barack Obama Administration. It has not been a great time in the history of government transparency and accountability.

Marching under the banner of “transparency,” there is a growing movement in the U.S. to limit truly free speech. The movement claims to be attacking “dark money,” but the reality is that its adherents want to shut up its ideological opponents. Independent expressions of support or opposition for candidates or political issues are marginalized by irrelevant questions about funding sources. Honest research and well-formulated arguments are denounced as “biased” or “untrustworthy” because of who the donors are rather than based on the merits of the arguments presented.

“Businesses that sell to foreign markets put more people to work in high-quality jobs, offering more Americans the chance to earn a decent wage,” claimed the Obama administration’s Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker in a March 18 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion piece.

The recently uncovered comments of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber deriding the intelligence of the American voter and bragging that deception helped pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare as it’s more popularly known, have prompted outrage from many conservatives and Republicans.

Partisans lob amusing but ultimately unsatisfying barbs at each other while the rules of science shift behind the curtain. Given the global economic and environmental challenges faced by our nation, we should expect and demand better.

Transparency, therefore, has little to do with being accountable to the political branches of government. It’s about allaying the concerns of the financial market in the face of accommodative monetary policy.

Despite receiving millions of dollars from the state of Nebraska, the forces behind the proposed cancer complex on the University of Nebraska Medical Center have recently begun a strong push…