Good morning! Here’s your daily digest of money-and-politics news and the headlines of the day, compiled by BillMoyers.com’s John Light. (You can sign up to receive Morning Reads daily in your inbox!)
What the people want –> A big new poll from Pew shows that people are aware of the growing influence of money in politics, and don’t like it: “A large majority of Americans (76%) – including identical shares of Republicans and Democrats – say money has a greater role on politics than in the past. Moreover, large majorities of both Democrats (84%) and Republicans (72%) favor limiting the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on campaigns and issues.”
ALSO: Another takeaway of that Pew study, from John Sides at The Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage blog: “Even if Americans don’t trust the government, they still want the government to do a whole bunch of stuff.”
Another nasty side of Citizens United –> The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision gave employers the right to campaign in the workplace, and companies are increasingly asking employees to vote the way their boss wants them to — or else. Alexander Hertel-Fenandez writes at The American Prospect that about a quarter of employees have been contacted by an employer about politics. He reports: “Managers and supervisors can now legally require their workers to participate in politics as a condition of employment. For instance, in most states, managers have the legal right to mandate worker attendance at a political rally for a favored candidate — and fire or punish workers who decline to participate.”
Inversion –> Two giant pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and Allergan, announced a $160-billion merger yesterday that, if successful, will let the company dodge taxes by moving its headquarters overseas. Dave Gilson reports for Mother Jones that this trick — a tax inversion — has become all too familiar.
F minus –> The Associated Press collected statements that a dozen top candidates have made about climate change and got eight scientists to evaluate them for accuracy — without the experts knowing who said what. The results? “When it comes to climate science, two of the three Democratic presidential candidates are A students, while most of the Republican contenders are flunking…”
RELATED: House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith continues his efforts to attack and harass climate scientists who reach conclusions he finds politically inconvenient. Now the peer-reviewed journal Science has been pulled into the fray. Lisa Rein reports for The Washington Post.
Two regions get a little greener –> Alberta, home to the famously dirty tar sands, “will cap oil-sands emissions… phase out coal power plants and implement an economy-wide price for carbon in an effort to curb pollution from Canada’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter,” Jeremy Van Loon reports for Bloomberg. AND: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is ordering that by 2030 half the state’s energy come from renewable sources. Patrick McGeehan reports for the NYT.
The media mishandles Trump –> Television news is feeble when it comes to the candidate’s spinning of racially and ethnically freighted lies, writes Dylan Matthews at Vox, and its attempts to fact-check him on air seem lame: “Generally speaking, TV news shouldn’t be in the business of making its viewers believe stuff that isn’t true. And in any other context, that’d be enough to keep the likes of Trump off the air.”
But maybe we don’t need to be so worried… –> Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: “Could Trump win? We confront two stubborn facts: first, that nobody remotely like Trump has won a major-party nomination in the modern era. And second, as is always a problem in analysis of presidential campaigns, we don’t have all that many data points, so unprecedented events can occur with some regularity. For my money, that adds up to Trump’s chances being higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent.”
Historical reminder –> Writing about last week’s House vote on refugees, Waleed Shahid at Colorlines points out: “… The American SAFE Act is one in a long tradition of xenophobic immigration laws that have also defined our national identity including the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, the Mexican repatriation program of the 1930s, Operation Wetback of 1954 and many more.”
Home of the brave –> CNN anchor Carol Costello asked the mayor of a Michigan city with a majority-Muslim city council if she or her Judeo-Christian constituents were afraid of their Muslim neighbors. No, Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski said, she wasn’t and they weren’t: “The issues for most of our residents are, can we fix the streets? Will the street lights — the street light that’s out in front of my house, can we get that fixed? They’re local issues. And there’s not a kind of level of fear that we hear when we talk about this on a national level.” Via: MediaMatters.
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