Political MoJo

Study: Poor People More Likely to Get a Job If They Work for Free First

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 11:03 AM PDT
iluistrator/Shutterstock

The current share of the American population with a job is still far below what it was before the recession, stagnating at a level not seen since the 1980s. And the jobs that have been regained since 2008 have overwhelmingly been low-wage. But now there's good news for unskilled unemployed people who are interested in getting one of those low-wage jobs—working for free can help them eventually land a paid gig.

A new study to be released Tuesday by a federal agency called the Corporation for National and Community Service found that jobless Americans can increase their chances of finding work by 27 percent if they volunteer first. People without a high school diploma and people in rural areas can increase their chances by more than 50 percent, the Washington Post reports.

Volunteering is useful for people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, Christopher Spera, the lead author of the study, explained to the Post, because they don't have the same opportunities as better-off Americans: "Folks with lower levels of education tend not to have the networks and social capital enjoyed by folks with higher levels of education," he says. Here's the Post on how volunteering can help:

The report builds on other research that has found that volunteering helps people learn skills, be presented with leadership opportunities, enhance their résumés and—perhaps most crucially—develop a network of contacts that can help them find work...

The link between volunteering and reducing joblessness was endorsed by former labor secretary Hilda L. Solis, who last year issued a guidance to state workforce agencies emphasizing that volunteering may be one strategy that can help put the unemployed—particularly the 4.4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months—back to work.

"In a complex 21st-century economy that demands new skills of American workers, volunteerism is not a substitute for job training," Solis said. "But it can be an important complement."

Now we know that poor, less-educated people can benefit from unpaid work in the same way that their more well-heeled, highly-educated counterparts can. After all, unpaid internships have exploded in recent years; over half of the class of 2012 had an internship during college, and half of those were unpaid. The only difference is that when poor people work for free, their parents probably won't be able to help them get by.

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Wall Street Banks Still Engaged in Pre-Crash Shenanigans

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 10:30 AM PDT
house with piles of cashSafe as houses.

Financial reformers cheered this week's news that Wall Street banks were unable to find buyers for a certain type of risky financial product—called a synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligation, or synthetic CDO. But if you think the big banks have given up on slicing and dicing crappy loans and semi-magically turning them into higher-rated, supposedly safer securities, think again. There's still plenty of that happening.

CDOs are types of derivatives—financial products with values derived from underlying variables. With many CDOs, the underlying variable in question is the stream of payments from a group of bundled loans. Synthetic CDOs, the products that the banks were unable to sell, are different from standard CDOs in a key way. This is complicated, so bear with me: Instead of being based on streams of payments from loans, their value is instead based on payments from insurance policies on those loans.

Here's a simplified explanation of what's happening in a synthetic CDO. To make a synthetic CDO, someone—let's call this Person A—has to have taken out what is essentially an insurance policy (called a credit default swap) against the possibility that a grouping of loans will default. Person A is betting that those loans will default. If they do, Person A gets paid; until then, he or she has to make premium payments. To make a synthetic CDO, a bank mashes together the premium payment streams from a bunch of these insurance policies. Generally, banks don't hold on to these products. Instead, they sell them to investors. For simplicity, we'll assume Person B buys the entire synthetic CDO. (In reality, it's broken up into several pieces, which are usually sold to different investors.) Person B is betting that the loans won't default and that Person A will have to keep making premium payments.

Here's the problem. Person A has a huge advantage in this transaction because he's picking the loans he wants to bet against. He can cherry pick the crappiest pile of loans and bet only against them. Person B, the person who owns the synthetic CDO, is taking the other side of that bet. Person B is not simply buying a pile of loans. He's betting on a group of loans that Person A has already bet are going to turn out to be worthless. And that's why the Person Bs of the world are now so wary: they realize that the Person As might know something they don't.

The good news is that the banks haven't been able to find anyone to take the synthetic CDO bet quite yet. But synthetic CDOs, while perhaps the most notorious of the products involved in the financial crisis, weren't the only problem. One of the big underlying issues that led to the crisis was that slicing and dicing loans and selling them off in chunks made them appear less risky to ratings agencies and investors than they actually were. But banks still do that slicing and dicing all the time. Taking the payment streams from a bunch of loans and mashing them together into a standard CDO is still big business for the banks, and there are plenty of buyers. So far in 2013, $38 billion worth of CLOs—CDOs based on business loans—have been sold in the US. That's up from $15.6 billion in the same period last year, according to numbers from the Royal Bank of Scotland cited in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Maybe this time the borrowers of the underlying loans are more likely to pay them back, or the ratings agencies have done a better job of assessing how risky each CDO is. Wanna bet?

Republican Congressman Opposes Abortion Partly Because Male Fetuses Play With Their Genitals

—By

| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 10:24 AM PDT

Well, okay then.

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX)
Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) US Congress

On Monday night, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) contended that HR 1797—a bill the House is debating on Tuesday that would outlaw almost all abortions 20 weeks post fertilization—didn't go far enough. Burgess, an Ob/Gyn by trade and all-around tea partier, argued passionately in favor of banning abortions at an earlier stage in pregnancy. Here's a snippet of what he said, via RH Reality Check:

There's no question in my mind...that a baby at 20 weeks after conception can feel pain...I thought the date was far too late...Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they're a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure. Why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?

("Well, this is a subject that I do know something about," Burgess also asserted.)

Top medical experts in the US and UK dispute the Republicans' claim of fetal pain prior to the third trimester—the talking point at the heart of the proposed ban. But the part that caught the internet's attention was Burgess' odd "masturbating fetuses" logic. I've reached out to Rep. Burgess' office regarding his statements but I have not yet received a response.

US Military Set To Train Women for Elite Combat Roles by 2015

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 8:53 AM PDT
US Army FIM-92 Stinger missilePfc. Anna Ciamaichelo, I Battery, 1st Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, carrying the FIM-92 Stinger missile she is about to fire. Casey Slusser/US Army

On Tuesday, the Pentagon is expected to announce that women will be allowed train for and potentially serve in elite combat positions in the US military, including the Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and other special ops forces. (In January, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta lifted a ban on women serving in combat roles, which made women eligible for another 238,000 jobs in the military.) According to details of the proposals obtained by the Associated Press, women will be able to train for the Army Rangers by mid-2015 and for the Navy SEALs in 2016 if senior leaders sign on. The AP reports:

[The plan will] call for requiring women and men to meet the same physical and mental standards to qualify for certain infantry, armor, commando and other front-line positions across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reviewed the plans and has ordered the services to move ahead...Military leaders have suggested [to Hagel] bringing senior women from the officer and enlisted ranks into special forces units first to ensure that younger, lower-ranking women have a support system to help them get through the transition...U.S. Special Operations Command is coordinating the matter of what commando jobs could be opened to women, what exceptions might be requested and when the transition would take place.

The proposals leave some wiggle room for continued exclusion of women from certain roles if future studies indicate that women would somehow be significantly less equipped for these positions. The services would, however, have to defend the continued exclusion to top Pentagon officials, and common sense and the success of women already serving in tough jobs in the US military have long discredited such arguments.

News of this proposal comes after a series of stories in recent months highlighting the startlingly high number of sexual assaults and incidents of harassment in the US armed forces. In January, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a press conference that he was convinced that rampant sexual misconduct in the ranks exists partly because women have been so long subordinated to men in American military culture, and hadn't been permitted to serve officially in military combat roles including special operations forces. "It's because we've had separate classes of military personnel," Dempsey said. "The more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally."

Gov. Rick Scott Deflowers Florida

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| Tue Jun. 18, 2013 3:30 AM PDT
Scott: Greg Lovett/The Palm Beach Post/Zuma; flower: Gaillardia pulchella - Blanketflower, Indian Blanket, Firewheel—uncredited/Florida Wildflower Foundation; photo illustration by Sam Shapiro

Members of the Florida state Legislature rarely agree on anything. It's unusual for a bill to get unanimous support from the body. But as it turns out, there is one thing that both Republicans and Democrats really love: wildflowers. Florida lawmakers in both houses of the Legislature voted a collective 157 to 0 this spring to increase the fee for a special Florida wildflower license plate from $15 to $25 starting in July. The proceeds would have gone to the Florida Wildflower Foundation, which for 13 years has been using license plate fees to dole out $2.5 million in grants to schools, garden clubs, and other green-thumb groups to plant native Florida flowers. The only problem is that on Friday afternoon, Republican Gov. Rick Scott vetoed the bill.

The move seems to have left even Republicans somewhat mystified. The only people who paid the fee were those who wanted to chip in for the pretty roadside flowers, and it brought the cost of the license plate in line with another one Scott approved for the Freemasons. But Scott apparently saw it otherwise, insisting that the wildflower license plate fee is apparently just another manifestation of big government. He wrote:

The bill increases the annual use fee for a specialty license plate; an expense in addition to the standard fees paid when registering a motor vehicle. Although buying a specialty license plate is voluntary, Floridians wishing to demonstrate their support for our State's natural beauty would be subjected to the cost increases sought by this bill.

The veto might be in keeping with Scott's image as a strict small-government tea partier, though it's unclear that even the tea partiers are part of the anti-wildflower lobby. What's really odd about the veto is that Scott has spent the past few months running away from the tea party, which has made him one of the nation's most unpopular governors. He's been transforming himself into a more traditional tax-and-spend politician, even coming out in support of expanding Medicaid under Obamacare, as he tries to hang on to his job in next year's election. But the flower veto suggests that the tea partier in him is refusing to go quietly. Or maybe he just really hates flowers. Either explanation probably isn't going to help him win any votes. As the Legislature has shown, in Florida, just about everyone loves wildflowers. 

Supreme Court: Arizona Law Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote Is Unconstitutional

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| Mon Jun. 17, 2013 3:27 PM PDT
voter registration YN Play City/Flickr

The US Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona law that required people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The case, Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, concerned Arizona's Proposition 200, which was passed by voters in 2004 during the fight over President George W. Bush's immigration reform proposal. The now-defunct law required new voters to prove that they're citizens during the voter registration process. That proof could be in the form of a driver's license number, a copy of a birth certificate, a copy of a passport, copies of naturalization documents, a Bureau of Indian Affairs card number, a tribal treaty card number, or a tribal enrollment number.

Unfortunately, millions of US citizens—mostly poor and elderly people—lack documentary evidence of their citizenship. Because of that, thousands of US citizens who should otherwise have been able to vote—31,000, according to the American Civil Liberties Union—were denied access to the ballot box under Proposition 200.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires only that potential voters check a box on a form attesting that they are citizens and eligible to vote. During oral arguments before the high court in March, the groups challenging Proposition 200 said that the federal voter registration law and the stricter Arizona law were incompatible, and the federal statute should take precedence. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, defending Proposition 200, said the federal requirement was "essentially an honor system" and that the two laws should be allowed to coexist. The Supreme Court decided the anti-Proposition 200 forces were right, and the federal law trumped Arizona's.

But voting rights advocates aren't out of the woods yet. At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston notes that although the justices ruled that the state's requirements were out of line with federal election law, states that want to require potential voters to provide proof of citizenship may still be able to convince the Election Assistance Commission or Congress to implement such a requirement. The court also said that states could claim they had a constitutional right to require proof of citizenship for voter registration—an argument Arizona did not make in this particular case. In other words, there's a strong chance that Arizona or any other state that wants to could eventually get strict proof-of-citizenship requirements into law.

"The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing, because that part of [Justice Antonin Scalia's] opinion laid a very heavy stress on the power of states under the Constitution to decide who gets to vote," Denniston wrote.

Arizona voting rights advocates will also have to deal with a batch of election-reform bills sitting on Republican Gov. Jan Brewer's desk right now that could derail mail-ballot collection drives and purge the state's permanent early voting list.

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Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

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| Mon Jun. 17, 2013 12:18 PM PDT

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms. Financial reformers say this is dangerous because markets are global, and a bad bet made by a US bank operating in another country could easily affect banks in the US and cause the US economy to crash again. Bad for America, but good for banks that want to avoid tough new rules. Perhaps that's why lawmakers who received more money from banks and the finance industry in recent years were more likely to vote in favor of the bill. House members who supported the bill received more than twice as much in contributions from the financial industry over the past two years as lawmakers who voted against it, according to a new analysis from the MapLight Foundation, an independent research group that tracks campaign finance.

Interest groups supporting the bill, including securities and investment companies, banks, and chambers of commerce, contributed an average of 102 percent more to House members who supported the bill than to those who voted no. Check it out:

Democratic House members who voted yes on the bill received 75 percent more money from from the financial services industry than Democrats who voted no.

In 2011 and 2012, groups that supported this bill gave five times more to House members than groups that opposed the bill did. The gap was even larger for donations to Democrats. Over those two years, House Democrats received less than $250,000 from interests that opposed this measure. During the same time period, groups in favor of allowing the banks to skirt regulation gave Dems 28 times as much—close to $7 million. Here's what that looks like:

What's remarkable is that some Democrats held firm. Although the bill passed the House last week by a vote of 301 to 124, most Democrats voted against it, which financial reformers say is a significant turn of events. "A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill...even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide," Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told Mother Jones after the vote last week. "I'm pretty psyched."

7 New Revelations From Edward Snowden

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| Mon Jun. 17, 2013 11:05 AM PDT
snowden phoenix ezlock/ShutterStock

Today, the Guardian hosted a live chat with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who disclosed classified information about top-secret NSA surveillance programs. Readers and journalists asked the 29-year-old, who was reportedly chatting over a secure internet connection, about his departure to Hong Kong, his new disclosures on the US hacking foreign countries, and his thoughts on the Obama administration. Here are the seven most significant revelations:

1. Snowden denies having any contact with the Chinese government…in colorful language.

Because Snowden is allegedly taking refuge in Hong Kong and recently disclosed information about US cyberattacks on China, he was asked whether he's prepared to make a deal with the Chinese government in exchange for amnesty. Snowden insists that he has not had any contact with the Chinese government. He adds, "I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous." He also says that "the US media has a knee-jerk 'RED CHINA!' reaction…If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now." Snowden did not address the close relationship between the Chinese government and its military, business, and civilian institutions.

2. Snowden suggests that the NSA reviews the email and phone calls of Americans on a daily basis, without a warrant. But then he says there are some protections against this, even if the security measures are weak. 

Addressing a question on whether the NSA can listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant, Snowden says, "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as 'incidental' collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications." Snowden adds that the only thing protecting Americans' email is changing policy protections—which he says he doesn't trust—and a filter that "is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the 'widest allowable aperture,' and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border."

3. When the NSA taps into email, it collects content (not just metadata).

"If I target for example an email address…and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time—and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants."

4. He doesn't say whether the NSA listens in to calls without an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Asked what advice he would give whistleblowers and "what evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit and defined court order from FISC?" Snowden simply said, "this country is worth dying for."

5. He claims that NSA warrants aren't real.

"Even in the event of 'warranted' intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a 'real' warrant like a Police department would have to, the 'warrant' is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp."

6. He explains why he decided not to go to Iceland.

"I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration."

7. He says there's more information about "direct access" coming.

Tech companies deny that the NSA has "direct access" to their servers, but Snowden claims that "more detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming."

Are Conservatives More Likely Than Liberals to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

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| Mon Jun. 17, 2013 3:20 AM PDT
Everett CollectionShutterstock

Ever since Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger's pioneering work on doomsday cults in the 1950s, the concept of cognitive dissonance has been well established in psychology and even, to some extent, embedded in public consciousness. Basically, when the mind is faced with an idea that is threatening to one's identity or sense of self—an idea that induces unpleasant dissonance—one tends to try to either avoid the thought or, perhaps, reinterpret it into something unthreatening or positive. Thus, in Festinger's landmark work, a doomsday cult interpreted the failure of the world to end on the precise day they had predicted as evidence that their beliefs were right in the first place!

But do liberals and conservatives differ in their tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance? Suggestive evidence from past research suggests they might. For instance, a study of voters in the 2000 election by Stanford public opinion specialist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues found that although Republicans and conservatives were more interested in learning information about George W. Bush than about Al Gore, Democratic and liberal voters had no such political preference.

In a recent study in PLOS One, an online academic journal, the psychologist Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues at New York University set out to explicitly test whether conservatives are more likely than liberals to avoid the unsettling sensation of cognitive dissonance. For the experiment, they asked George W. Bush and Barack Obama supporters to write an essay supporting the president whom they had already said they opposed. It was a test, as the study's instructions instructions put it, of "the ability to craft logical arguments arguing positions you may not personally endorse."

Importantly, the study sometimes presented writing the essay as a choice—which is more likely to arouse dissonance—and other times presented it as an assignment. As a control, the participants were put through the same routine by being asked to write essays on a nonpolitical issue: How they felt about Macs vs. PCs.

Sure enough, the results yielded a significant partisan difference in the willingness to write the essay—but only when the essay was political (not about Macs vs. PCs) and only when writing it was presented a choice, not an assignment. In that context, the results were rather stunning: Not a single Bush supporter was willing to write a pro-Obama essay. That's 0 out of 28 Bush supporters overall. Obama supporters didn't like writing pro Bush essays much either, but they were a lot more willing in general: 20 out of 71 did so, or 28 percent overall. (The study sample, obtained through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, contained more liberals than conservatives.)

In fact, some conservatives sounded rather miffed after taking the study, leaving comments like: "Not for all the tea in China would I write that." In contrast, note the study authors, some liberals seemed to revel in the assignment. "This was fun!" as one put it.

The same finding arose—but less sharply—in a second study, when the presidents involved were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, rather than Bush and Obama. Here, 13 out of 58 Clinton supporters—or 22 percent—wrote essays supporting Reagan, whereas just 3 out of 30—or 10 percent—of Reagan fans bothered to extoll Clinton. (The authors hypothesized that the response might have been different in this case because both former presidents are now quite well regarded, their reputations much more insulated from the partisanship of the current political moment.)

Like responsible scientists, the study authors noted factors other than the obvious one that could have contributed to their results—e.g., maybe liberals just enjoy the opportunity to be devil's advocates more than conservatives do. Or maybe it's really true (as much other research suggests) that the left-right divide reflects a deeper divide in psychology.

Liberals and conservatives did look almost identical when they were required to write the dissonance-inducing essay, rather than having a choice about the matter. When people are required to think positively about their political foes, they will, says NYU's Van Bavel. It isn't impossible, then—just something that happens far too rarely.

Senate Democrats Taking Cautious "Blumenthal Mindset" on Immigration Reform

—By

| Fri Jun. 14, 2013 11:51 AM PDT
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)

On Thursday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the bipartisan Gang of Eight who crafted the Senate immigration reform bill, warned that he would withdraw his support for the legislation if a gay rights amendment authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is added to the bill. The measure, which Leahy filed on Tuesday, would allow a citizen to petition the government for permanent residency for his or her same-sex partner. "If this bill has in it something that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill. I'm done," Rubio said on the Andrea Tantaros Show.

Leahy spokesman David Carle said on Friday that Leahy has no plans yet to respond to Rubio's comment—the day before, Leahy declined to comment, saying that he hadn't seen Rubio's statement. The Senate leadership hasn't decided which amendments will ultimately get a vote, but even if Leahy's does, it's highly unlikely to pass. Still, the fact that it is even floating out there has concerned senators who don't want to destabilize the fragile talks.

"Everyone’s got the Blumenthal mindset right now—keeping their amendments on the table, but don't want to doom it all," says a Democratic aide familiar with the talks. He was referring to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who is still considering whether to press for a vote on two controversial gun control amendments he's proposed for the immigration bill. "I'm not going to doom or cripple immigration reform efforts to raise those amendments," Blumenthal told Mother Jones on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the bigger threat to immigration reform in the Senate right now involves border control. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced a "poison pill" amendment opposed by Democrats that would massively expand border security and could sink the bill if enough Republicans sign on. Republicans in the Gang of Eight hope to iron out a compromise with Cornyn, although Democrats are skeptical that he can be persuaded.

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