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With Daniel Lippman
CHAMBER GOES AFTER ENHANCED UNEMPLOYMENT: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this morning seized on April’s vastly underwhelming jobs numbers, laying the blame on the federal $300 enhanced unemployment included in President
Joe Biden’s relief package and calling for the benefit to be scrapped.
Only 17 percent of public affairs staff are people of color: survey thehill.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thehill.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Corporate America is finding it can get messy when it steps into politics.
Why it matters: Urged on by shareholders, employees and its own company creeds, Big Business is taking increasing stands on controversial political issues during recent months and now it s beginning to see the fallout.
Companies are being criticized by the left, their employees and customers if they don t step up, the right for cutting off insurrectionists and being too woke, and the left again if they withhold opinions on even more political flashpoints.
Republicans also find themselves in a mess of their own making.
While they chastise and threaten the companies that have cut off political donations after the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, they re leading the charge against the Democrats efforts to hike the corporate tax rate to pay for President Biden s $2.2 trillion infrastructure package.
In Washington and in many state capitols legislators and activists have cast voting legislation in apocalyptic terms, claiming that any change in voter law represents an existential threat to democracy as we know it. New rules on obtaining a ballot are decried as suppression, while anything that opens access to voters is an invitation to fraud. But, for many voters, these laws aren t threatening the future of democracy; instead, they are just the latest example of the two parties using any means necessary to give themselves electoral advantages.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch two focus groups of white swing voters. One group was more conservative-leaning (all had voted for Trump but were defined as not particularly enthusiastic about him, i.e. these are not Trump super fans ), the other group included those who voted for Biden in 2020 after voting for Trump in 2016. In other words, these are the kinds of voters that would be open to more nuanced argument