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

By Rebecca Leber on Jul 6, 2012 at 6:30 pm

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.

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Health

Former President George W. Bush Breaks From His Party’s ‘War On Women,’ Advocates For Women’s Health Abroad

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Jul 6, 2012 at 6:27 pm

Since leaving the White House, former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush have pursued humanitarian work abroad in an area that has become particularly contentious for Republicans at home: women’s health. The Bushes recently opened a women’s health clinic in Zambia, a country that has the second highest rate of cervical cancer in the world.

The former president made a push for bipartisan initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS during his time in office. In the years since, he has raised over $85 million for cervical cancer programs. Bush explains his commitment to women’s health in moral terms:

BUSH: We care because we believe that to whom much is given, much is required. And those of us, who live in America, live in the most blessed nation ever and therefore when we see suffering, we ought to act. But the saddest thing of all is to know a lady’s life has been saved from AIDS but died from cervical cancer. And so starting in Zambia, the Bush Center, along with our partners, are going to put on a cervical cancer crusade to save lives.

However, this position is a departure from the one that has recently been advanced by the rest of the Republican Party. Rather than ensuring that women’s preventive care is fully funded across the country because of the moral imperative to “save lives,” as Bush puts it, GOP lawmakers have focused on partisan divides on abortion services and austerity policies.

Republican legislatures have repeatedly moved to defund Planned Parenthood based on concerns about the abortion services that it provides — despite the fact that the organization operates about 800 health centers across the country that provide nearly 770,000 Pap tests and nearly 750,000 breast exams each year, both critical preventative services to detect cancer. Earlier this year, Republicans also proposed a plan to avoid an increase in student loan interest rates by taking money from a preventative health care fund that largely benefits women’s health.

There is much more work to be done to bolster global health, but supporting preventive services for women — rather than cutting funds for women’s health issues across the board, as many Republicans in this country have elected to do — is a good start.

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NEWS FLASH

United Nations Calls For A Tax On The World’s Billionaires | The United Nations has called for a tax on the world’s billionaires as part of a package that it claims could raise more than $400 billion a year for poor countries. The announcement came on Thursday after the annual World Economic and Social Survey indicated that it is critically necessary to find new ways to help the world’s poorest nations, as pledged cash continues to fall short. According to the report, a 1 percent tax on the world’s 1,226 billionaires would raise more than $46 billion.

–Angela Guo

Election

Texas Voter ID Law, Which Accepts Gun Licenses But Not Student IDs, Challenged In Court

By Aviva Shen on Jul 6, 2012 at 5:25 pm

On Monday, the Department of Justice and the Texas Legislature will square off in court over Texas’ contentious voter ID law. A three-judge U.S. District Court panel will hear the case, which could challenge the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Texas is one of nine states that must get any changes to their election law cleared by the DOJ under the Voting Rights Act due to a history of discrimination. Texas flunked the test; as Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez wrote in his letter to the Director of Elections, “According to the state’s own data, a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack this identification.”

The law, SB 14, requires voters to show one of a very narrow list of government-issued documents, excluding Social Security, Medicaid, or student ID cards. Gun licenses, however, are acceptable.

The DOJ found that Texas’s SB 14 will “disenfranchise at least 600,000 voters who currently lack necessary photo identification and that minority registered voters will be disproportionately affected by the law.”

As of the 2010 Census, non-Hispanic whites have become the minority in Texas, shrinking to 45.3% of the population from 52.4%, while Latinos accounted for 65% of Texas’s population growth over the past decade.

But Latinos are not the only people hurt by the restrictive bill. People who want to vote but don’t have an ID will have to pay a fee to get one, like Jessica Cohen, whose story ThinkProgress documented in November. After she lost her identification during a robbery, the only way to get a voter ID was to pay a fee to Missouri officials in order to obtain her birth certificate.

On Monday, Texas will defend the law as a necessary measure to prevent voter fraud. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) argued that “Texas has a responsibility to ensure elections are fair, beyond reproach and accurately reflect the will of voters.” But the San Antonio Express-News reported that fewer than five “illegal voting” complaints involving voter impersonations were filed with the Texas Attorney General’s Office from the 2008 and 2010 general elections in which more than 13 million voters participated.

The Texas voter ID law isn’t the first the DOJ has had to combat. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder noted,

“The past two years have brought nearly two dozen new state laws and executive orders, from more than a dozen states, that could make it significantly harder for eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”

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Health

How Obamacare Would Have Helped Workers Laid Off By Bain

By Aviva Shen on Jul 6, 2012 at 5:24 pm

After Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought the office supply maker SCM, laid off workers, gutted pay and benefits, and ultimately shut down the entire plant, former SCM employee Valerie Bruton was left with no choice but to turn to the safety net. In the Obama campaign ad, “Romney Economy,” she recalls:

When SCM shut down the doors, that was the first time I’d ever been in the system with food stamps. Then I had to get on Medicaid. It was just, it was rough, but I did it…I had no choice because I had my babies, my babies depended on me.

She was hardly alone. All 258 employees were fired immediately, then invited to reapply for their jobs at a lower wage and a 50 percent cut in health insurance. When the workers went on strike, the plant was shuttered.

Under Romney, Bain Capital replicated this “vulture capitalism,” laying off workers and slashing health care benefits. In 1993, Bain bought Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Less than a decade later, the mill was shuttered and 750 people were out of work. But even more importantly, “workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month,” reported Reuters. The federal Pension Benefits Guarantee Corp had to make up the difference, which were slashed again in bankruptcy court.

Now that he’s running for president, Romney has promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his faith in the free market. Here are two scenarios of how these workers would fare under Obamacare and under Romney’s plan.

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Security

GOP Colorado State Senator On Banning Mosques: They’re Not ‘Places Of Worship’

By Ali Gharib on Jul 6, 2012 at 5:20 pm

CO State Sens. Grantham (L) and Lundberg

Last weekend, the Dutch Islamphobic politician Geert Wilders spoke to a conservative conference hosted by a Christian university in Colorado. The anti-Muslim firebrand served up his usual fare: Islam is not a religion but a “totalitarian ideology,” multiculturalism must be stopped, U.S. courts must end immigration from Muslim countries and mosque construction must be banned.

According to a report on the event in the Colorado Statesman, conservatives at the conference took Wilders’s words to heart, as well as those of fellow anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Former Republican State Senate president John Andrews, who heads up an institute at the university that held the event, told the crowd, “After you hear from Frank Gaffney and our friend from across the Atlantic, Geert Wilders, you’ll know why I just say ‘the threat of Islam’” — as opposed to “radical Islam” or “extremism.”

Current Republican State Senator Kevin Grantham took on Wilders’s message that the West “should forbid the construction of new mosques.” Asked about the proposed ban, Grantham told the Statesman he was for considering it:

You know, we’d have to hear more on that, because, as he said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches. They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches — we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.

The notion that Mosques are not “places of worship” is an absurd extension of Wilders’s bigotry. Even Grantham’s fellow Republican State Senate colleague Kevin Lundberg ignored this contention and saw the fatal flaw in this logic: banning mosque construction violates the basic rights of free exercise of religion codified in the Bill of Rights. Lundberg told the Statesman:

I think immediately of ‘Congress shall make no law …’ and that sounds pretty close to that, doesn’t it?

We’re a free society, and there are risks with freedom. In my mind, we need to give every citizen the opportunity to succeed or fail on their merits, and there are limits we have to put in place for certain public safety issues, but I am much more a stronger defender of the First Amendment than I am of immediately restricting people because of a perceived concern.

Lundberg is right. The First Amendment plainly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The rest is just bigotry and antithetical to those values.

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NEWS FLASH

New York Appeals Court Rejects Challenge To Same-Sex Marriage Law | A state appeals court has ruled against a challenge to New York’s historic same-sex marriage law passed last year. New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms and several other opponents desperately claimed that Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) violated the state’s “open meetings” law by speaking behind closed doors with senate Republicans, persuading enough of them to embrace the law in the process. But New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman successfully argued the open meetings law did not apply in the case of the Republican caucus meeting with invited guests. Defeated in the legislature and now in the courts, New York’s anti-gay groups must finally face reality: marriage equality is here to stay.

– Steven Perlberg

Justice

California Legislators Consider ‘Anti-Arizona’ Immigration Measure

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jul 6, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Much of the debate about state immigration laws has revolved around harmful anti-immigrant measures in states like Alabama and Arizona. But in California, state lawmakers are working to pass an “anti-Arizona” bill that would protect undocumented immigrants. The legislation would prevent local law enforcement officials from referring a detainee to immigration officials for deportation unless the person detained has been convicted of a violent or serious felony. “California cannot afford to become another Arizona,” said California Assembly member Tom Ammiano, who sponsored the bill:

The California bill, which has the support of over 100 immigrant rights groups, police chiefs and mayors, was drafted not only as a symbolic counter to legislation in neighboring Arizona, but also to push back against a federal program called Secure Communities that shares the same principles as Arizona’s law, supporters say.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, established the Secure Communities program in partnership with local law enforcement agencies and the FBI to deport unauthorized immigrants. [...]

The federal program has been responsible for deporting over 72,000 Californians, according to Ammiano, with 70 percent of those deported from the state having either no criminal conviction, or conviction for a minor offense.

By a 21-13 vote, state senators approved the bill Thursday, which now heads to the California Assembly for consideration.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s SB 1070 — in which the court allowed the “show me your papers” provision to go into effect after limiting it — federal officials ended Secure Communities partnerships with seven Arizona law enforcement offices. A DHS official said the Obama administration determined that the agreements are “not useful” now in states that have Arizona-style laws.

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Alyssa

‘The Sessions,’ Disability, and Pity In Popular Culture

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 6, 2012 at 5:06 pm

I loved The Sessions (then titled The Surrogate) when I saw it at Sundance, and I wish the trailer captured a little bit more of the movie’s tart humor. What’s unusual about The Sessions, which is based on an article by the late Mark O’Brien, isn’t just that it deals with the sexual lives of disabled people, an almost untouchable subject in modern popular culture, but that it’s a movie that is directly about the disparate experiences of people with disabilities without encouraging the audience to pity the main character:

Mark is funny, in the movie. He’s smart. He’s eloquent. He faces something he’s anxious about—losing his virginity—directly and with a lot of self-awareness. He’s not a saint, which is a relief. Mark gets to make mistakes and cross boundaries, but he also takes responsibility for those errors and grows from them. In other words, he’s a specific person, rather than a stand-in for a set of traits or the means by which able-bodied people learn tolerance and get to be awed by Mark’s perseverance and hope.

I think we need a lot more of this in pop culture. People with disabilities have different experiences of the world than able-bodied people do, in a whole range of areas. Folks with disabilities have higher unemployment rates than able-bodied people, and a lack of adaptive technologies can make it harder for them to access educational opportunities and appropriate housing. But the fact that our society and political system have been slow to accomodate disabled people, and that disabled people live involve different challenges and frustrations, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities are pitiable or saintly, or that their experiences are wholly different from able-bodied people’s. Mark’s intimacy issues and fear that he’s unlovable may spring from different wells than your standard romantic comedy heroine’s, for example, but the movie is a variation on a conventional romantic comedy structure. He is definitely not your Judd Apatow-style schlub—he’s an accomplished poet, as O’Brien was in real life—but his conversations with his priest (a very funny William H. Macy) and his caregiver (Moon Bloodgood) are funny in some of the same frank ways. It’s depressing to watch pop culture, and people more broadly, get caught up in disabilities such that they fail to see the people, and the characters, who have disabilities but are hardly the sum of them.

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Economy

House Farm Bill Would Kick Millions Of People Off Food Stamps

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 6, 2012 at 4:20 pm

The House of Representatives’ latest version of the farm bill — crafted as a “compromise” between House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN) — would cut $35 billion in spending, including $16.5 billion from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program — known as SNAP or, informally, food stamps.

45 percent of the proposed cuts in the bill come from SNAP, mostly through eliminating what is known as “categorical eligibility.” Categorical eligibility kicks in when a family’s assets (such as a car) push it barely above the line to qualify for assistance, but it is still living on poverty-level disposable income. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the cuts will kick between two and three million people off of food assistance:

The bill would terminate SNAP eligibility to several million people. By eliminating categorical eligibility, which over 40 states have adopted, the bill would cut 2 to 3 million low-income people off food assistance.

Several hundred thousand low-income children would lose access to free school meals. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 280,000 children in low-income families whose eligibility for free school meals is tied to their receipt of SNAP would lose free meals when their families lost SNAP benefits.

Some working families would lose access to SNAP because they own a modest car, which they often need to commute to their jobs. Eliminating categorical eligibility would cause some low-income working households to lose benefits simply because of the value of a modest car they own. These families would be forced to choose between owning a reliable car and receiving food assistance to help feed their families.

In 2010, only 1.5 percent of SNAP recipients qualified under the categorical eligibility. While Republicans have done their best to frame food assistance as wasteful spending, it is not at all — at its very highest, the program was only .52 percent of the United States’ GDP. Plus, accessibility of food stamps affects peoples’ lives. Food stamps kept five million people out of poverty in 2010, and the program reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half.

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