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Romney Donor Says ‘Lower Income’ People ‘Don’t Understand What’s Going On’

THINK PROGRESS

Today, Mitt Romney is holding a series of fundraisers in the Hamptons, culminating with a huge event at the home of billionaire David Koch. The LA Time in on the scene and reporter Maeve Reston caught up with a donor on her way into one of the events.

The woman, who wouldn’t reveal her name, said the following:

I don’t think the common person is getting it…my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.

The recommended contribution for the event she was attending was $25,000.

Earlier in the campaign Romney recieved criticism for saying, “I’m not concerned with the very poor.” He later said he misspoke.

Romney’s tax plan would give the richest 0.1% of Americans an average tax cut of $264,000.

Florida accused of concealing worst tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years

RAW STORY

The state of Florida has been struggling for months with what the Centers for Disease Control describe as the worst tuberculosis outbreak in the United States in twenty years.

Although a CDC report went out to state health officials in April encouraging them to take concerted action, the warning went largely unnoticed and nothing has been done. The public did not even learn of the outbreak until June, after a man with an active case of TB was spotted in a Jacksonville soup kitchen.

The Palm Beach Post has managed to obtain records on the outbreak and the CDC report, though only after weeks of repeated requests. These documents should have been freely available under Florida’s Sunshine Law.

According to the Post, the coverup began as early as last February, “when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the public, repeating a decision they had made in 2008, when the same strain had appeared in an assisted living home for people with schizophrenia.”

That decision now appears to have gone terribly awry, partly because the disease appears to have already spread into the general population but also because just nine days before the CDC warning was issued, Florida Governor Rick Scott had signed a bill downsizing the state’s Department of Health and closing the A.G. Holley State Hospital that had treated the most difficult tuberculosis cases for over 60 years............................

Duke Energy CEO To Receive $44 Million Payout Despite Resigning On His First Day

THINK PROGRESS

Hours after new Duke Energy CEO Bill Johnson assumed his new position following the Duke/Progress Energy merger this week, he resigned his post. But Johnson can still qualify for up to $44.4 million for his time and effort:

Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.
Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.

The Duke board voted for Johnson’s resignation, and since Johnson was eligible for severance if he quit for “good reason,” he is able to collect his $44 million. Grist calculates that Johnson’s pay package comes out to $5.5 million per hour, if he actually put in a full 8-hour day.

Johnson’s golden parachute after his one day of work is emblematic of the disconnect between worker pay and CEO pay that has occurred over the last few decades. Average CEO pay is now 380 times the pay of the average worker, and CEO pay has grown 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years.

In Pa., Voter ID Law Already Changing The Electoral Landscape

TPM

PITTSBURGH — Hundreds of thousands of potential voters here were left scrambling in the wake of Pennsylvania’s voter ID law — enough to prompt speculation as to whether the law could change the outcome of the election in November.

But one thing is clear: The law is already having a dramatic effect on how the election is being waged.

Democrats and their allies, who vehemently oppose the voter ID legislation, are still pinning their hopes on legal challenges to the law. But if the law survives, political organizers in Pennsylvania will have to alter their outreach plans to include identifying, contacting and getting proper identifications for thousands of voters.

“It scares the shit out of us,” Yuri Beckelman, campaign communications director for the AFL-CIO of Pennsylvania, said of the number of voters potentially affected. The union and several other allied groups are forming a statewide coalition aimed at “education and mobilization” around the voter ID law requirements.

The estimated 750,000 voters who do not have state-issued IDs in Pennsylvania surpasses President Obama’s margin of victory in 2008. Many of the voters without ID are in poor and minority communities — typically blocs that vote Democratic. Democrats’ worst fears appeared to be confirmed when the Republican leader of the state House, who helped shepherd the legislation onto the books, recently boasted that it will “allow” Mitt Romney win the Keystone State.

Democrats now have to make sure voters are aware of the law, know whether they comply, know how to meet the requirements if they don’t already — and do it all before Election Day. This could be a steep climb. Only one of five voters approached by TPM at Obama’s Pittsburgh rally Friday knew the law existed.

“I heard about it in Florida but not here,” said Martin Hoberman, a voter from the Pittsburgh area.

Jim Burn, the state Democratic Party chairman, said his forces are ready to integrate dealing with the voter ID law with their existing get-out-the-vote operations. But he acknowledged that it will add another layer of work.

“Yes, many voters are not aware of it,” he said. “All the more responsibility on us that a) they’re aware of it and b) we give them what they need to get out and exercise their constitutional rights.”

But doing so will be easier said than done: There’s no list of record for voters who don’t have proper ID, so Democrats have to go about creating their own list of targets who lack identification based on geography, income and other means. Then they hit them with the voter ID messaging as part of standard field operations.

“When we’re going do to door, which we’re doing anyway to talk about A, B, C and D, we’re now talking about A, B, C, D and E,” Burn said.

He urged Democrats to keep calm and carry on.

“We’re taking it very seriously, but I don’t want voters to overreact to it,” he said. “If you don’t have what you need to vote and you’re not sure, reach out to us. And if you don’t reach out to us, don’t worry, we’re going to be coming to you anyway.”

The reality is not that simple, said Roberta Winters, vice president of the Pennsylvania branch of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. The group is suing over the law and recently appealed to Pennsylvania’s Republican governor to delay implementation of the legislation. He declined.

What the law really does is move the field timeline up dramatically, she said. Her group is setting aside many of its normal activities like voter education and is instead scrambling to formulate a plan to get voters without ID into the system with enough time left for them to vote.

“We’re talking about having people in the Department of Transportation who know how to do this and can expedite this,” Winters said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in trying to have driver’s license procedure in a motor vehicle office, but they’re not always as expeditious as they might be.”

Winters set the window to get an ID at “four to six weeks” and said that most of the group’s efforts to find voters without IDs and get them IDs “will have to be done before mid-September.” She said the timeline makes the challenge of getting people ID’d “especially challenging.”

“We will do our best to mitigate it and we’re also litigating it,” Winters said, referring to her group’s lawsuit. “I think it would be optimistic of me to think this is not going to disenfranchise people.”

Burn said that if the law stands, Democrats will have no choice but to put their shoulders to the wheel and add voter ID compliance to their list of goals for the fall.

“It’s just another one of those things that gets thrown at you,” he said.

5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth

THINK PROGRESS

New numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.

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