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Rand Paul Blames the Baltimore Riots on Absentee Fathers

by ByronMcCoy Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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As one of a growing number of GOP 2016 wannabes, Sen. Rand Paul has tried to sell himself as the best Republican candidate to reach out to African-American voters. He’s talked about the need for criminal justice reform. During the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, he called for demilitarizing police forces. Yet his response to the riots in Baltimore show that he has a long way to go. During an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, the Kentucky senator blamed the turmoil not on the police brutality that resulted in the death of Freddie Gray, but on absentee fathers and a breakdown in families.

“It’s depressing, it’s sad, it’s scary. I came through the train on Baltimore last night, I’m glad the train didn’t stop,” Paul said, laughing at his own unfunny joke. He then pontificated of the unrest: “The thing is that really there’s so many things we can talk about, it’s something we talk about not in the immediate aftermath but over time: the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society. And this isn’t just a racial thing, it goes across racial boundaries, but we do have problems in our country.”

By the way, a week ago, Paul’s 22-year-old son William was cited for driving while intoxicated after he was in a car crash.

Listen to the audio of the interview, recorded by Media Matters (hat tip to TPM):

Paul wasn’t the only presidential aspirant to comment on the riots. Hillary Clinton sent out a tweet on Monday calling for peace but supporting the protestors who were upset by Gray’s death.

Former Baltimore resident and likely presidential candidate Ben Carson pleaded with parents in the city to keep their children away from the disorder. “I urge parents, grandparents and guardians to please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets,” Carson said in a statement.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lamented the school closures across the city. “No man, woman, or child should fear for his or her safety in America—not in their schools, not in their neighborhoods, not in their cities—but today families are scared,” the GOP contender said.

But long-shot Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley went further than just a simple statement. O’Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore, canceled a string of paid speeches in Europe to return home.

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Rand Paul Blames the Baltimore Riots on Absentee Fathers

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Why the Euro Is a Selfish Jerk

by DeclanHSUlbce Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the conversation going. Here’s a contribution from Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University whose sharp insights on addiction, drug policy, and many other topics have helped make the Reality-Based Community group blog a must read.

The Euro is the Windows 8 of the economic policy design world: In both cases, it’s very hard to understand how putatively smart people worked so hard to create a product so ill-suited to the needs of those who were supposed to rely on it. At this point, this isn’t much of a secret: as Kevin Drum pointed out back in 2011, a common currency deprives markets and nations of tools that normally ameliorate the effects of capital flow imbalances, inflation spikes, and crushing debt payments. Kevin and other people who understand fiscal policy better than I ever will (e.g., Matt O’Brien and Paul Krugman) convinced me long ago that the Euro was designed with a lack of understanding of (or an unwillingness to grapple with) basic lessons of economics.

But speaking as a psychologist, the common currency’s fundamental design flaws don’t end there: the Euro creators should have thought harder about what social scientists have learned about how compassion and cultural identity interact.

In asking nations to entrust their economic fate to the Euro, its designers were assuming that Europeans have a reservoir of goodwill among them. That goodwill was supposed to ensure, for example, that no prospective member had to worry that a powerful member would use its Euro-derived leverage to turn the screws on a weaker member which was—to pick an example out of thin air—wracked by colossal levels of debt, unemployment and economic misery.

But that’s exactly what the Germans have done to the Greeks. Why aren’t the Germans overcome with sympathy for the Greeks? It’s not that Germans are selfish or hard-hearted: after all, they have spent ten times the current GDP of Greece helping the economically struggling people of the former East Germany.

Social psychology researchers have identified a powerful in group bias in willingness to help others, whether it’s hiring someone for a job or supporting social welfare programs for the poor. Human beings are, in short, more inclined to help other people whom we perceive as being a member of our tribe.

Human psychology wouldn’t cause as many problems for the Euro if there was a strong European identity, if a West German was as likely to consider an East German a tribe member as they would a Greek or a Spaniard or an Italian. But when most Germans and Greeks look at each other, they fundamentally see someone who speaks a different language and hails from a different culture with a different history—and for that matter was a military enemy within living memory.

With no shared sense of tribe comes a sharp reduction in compassion and attendant willingness to help. The elites who designed the Euro may genuinely have believed and even felt a sense that Europe is all about “us”, but the currency’s recent struggles show that for too many Europeans, it’s more about us and them.

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Why the Euro Is a Selfish Jerk

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It’s Spring Fundraising Time!

by TwylaFields Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our annual Spring Fundraising Drive is wrapping up at the end of the month, but as you all know, I’ll be recuperating from my final round of chemotherapy in lovely Duarte, California, right about then. But I didn’t want to be left out, so I asked if I could post my note a little earlier than I usually do.

I figure if there’s ever been a time when I’m allowed to get slightly more maudlin than usual, this is it. (But just slightly. I have a reputation, after all.) I’ve been writing for Mother Jones since 2008, and it’s been such a great job that it’s almost getting hard to remember ever working for anyone else. They’ve provided me with more freedom to write whatever I want than anyone could hope for. That’s been great for me, and I hope for all of you too.

Writing for the print magazine has been a huge gift as well, and it’s something I dearly hope to return to when all the chemotherapy is over and my strength is back to normal. It’s been a privilege to share pages with such an amazingly talented bunch of journalists.

Truthfully, I’ve been blessed to have such a great editorial team over the past few months, as well as such a great readership. You guys are truly the best to go through something like this with.

So here’s the ask: Mother Jones has done a lot for me and lot for you over the past few years, and when I get back they’re going to keep right on doing it. That makes this fundraising request a little more personal than usual, but if there’s ever been a time for you to show your appreciation, this is it. If you can afford five dollars, that’s plenty. If you can afford a thousand, then pony up, because you’re pretty lucky, aren’t you? Either way, when I get back I sure hope to see that my readers have really stepped up to the plate.

Readers like you are a big part of what makes Mother Jones such a unique place. Your support allows me to write about what’s truly important, rather than obsessing over whatever generates the most clicks and advertising revenue. And it’s not just me. It gives all of us the independence to write about issues that other places won’t touch. It means that we ultimately answer to you, our readers, and not a corporate parent company or shareholders (and you’ve never been shy about letting us know what you think!).

Thanks for helping make Mother Jones what it is, and for making the last seven years some of the best of my life. And thanks in advance for whatever you can give to keep both me and Mother Jones going strong. Here are the links for donations:

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It’s Spring Fundraising Time!

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Just How Racist Are Schoolteachers?

by Leonora68M Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s no secret that black kids are more likely to be suspended from school than white kids—three times more likely, according to a 2012 report from the Office of Civil Rights. And now a study published this week in Psychological Science may shed some light on just how much of a role racial bias on the part of educators may play.

Stanford psychology grad student Jason Okonofua and professor Jennifer Eberhardt designed a study where active K-12 teachers from across the country were presented with mocked-up disciplinary records showing a student who had misbehaved twice. Both infractions were relatively minor: one was for insubordination, the other for class disturbance. The records’ substance never changed, but some bore stereotypically black names (Darnell or Deshawn) while others had stereotypically white names (Jake or Greg). Teachers answered a series of questions about how troubled they were by the infractions reflected in the documents, how severe the appropriate discipline should be, and the likelihood that the student was “a troublemaker.”

The teachers’ responses after learning about the first infraction were about equal, regardless of the student’s perceived race. But after hearing about the second infraction, a gap in discipline emerged: On a scale of one to seven, teachers rated the appropriate severity of discipline at just over five for students perceived to be black, compared to just over four for students perceived to be white. That may not seem like a big difference, but on one-to-seven scale, a single point is a 14 percent increase—well beyond what is typically accepted as statistically significant.

A follow-up experiment of over 200 teachers took the questioning further, and found that teachers were more likely (though by smaller margins) to judge students perceived as black as engaging in a pattern of misbehavior, and were more likely to say they could “imagine themselves suspending the student at some point in the future.”

Okonofua and Eberhart, Association for Psychological Science

“Most school teachers likely work hard at treating their students equally and justly,” says Okonofua. “And yet even amongst these well-intentioned and hard-working people, we find cultural stereotypes about black people are bending their perceptions towards less favorable interpretations of behavior.”

Many studies have looked at the subconscious racial prejudice of snap judgments—my former colleague, Chris Mooney, wrote an excellent feature on the subject last December. But according to the authors, this is the first study to look at the psychology behind the racial gap in school discipline. And, as Okonofua said, “The research shows that even if there’s no race effect for an initial interaction, the stereotyping can play out over time. That’s really important because in the real world, there are sustained relationships.”

And the research may have implications for other kinds of sustained relationships between two levels of authority: say a boss and an employee, a prison guard and a prisoner, or a judge and a repeat offender.

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Just How Racist Are Schoolteachers?

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As Cities Raise their Minimum Wage, Where’s the Economic Collapse the Right Predicted?

by LatiaChumleigh Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Fight for 15 protest in New York City. Fast Food Forward

Fast-food cooks and cashiers demanding a $15 minimum wage walked off the job in 236 cities yesterday in what organizers called the largest mobilization of low-wage workers ever. The tax-day protest, known as Fight 4/15 (or #Fightfor15 on Twitter), caused some backlash on the Right:

Conservatives have long portrayed minimum wage increases as a harbingers of economic doom, but their fears simply haven’t played out. San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington, DC, were among the first major cities to raise their minimum wages to substantially above state and national averages. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the increases had little effect on employment rates in traditionally low-wage sectors of their economies:

Economists with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California-Berkeley have found similar results in studies of the six other cities that have raised their minimum wages in the past decade, and in the 21 states with higher base pay than the federal minimum. Businesses, they found, absorbed the costs through lower job turnover, small price increases, and higher productivity.

Obviously, there’s a limit to how high you can raise the minimum wage without harming the economy, but evidence suggests we’re nowhere close to that tipping point. The ratio between the United States’ minimum wage and its median wage has been slipping for years—it’s now far lower than in the rest of the developed world. Even after San Francisco increases its minimum wage to $15 next year, it will still amount to just 46 percent of the median wage, putting the city well within the normal historical range.

The bigger threat to the economy may come from not raising the minimum wage. Even Wall Street analysts agree that our ever-widening income inequality threatens to dampen economic growth. And according to a new study by the UC-Berkeley Labor Center, it’s the taxpayers who ultimately pick up the tab for low wages, because the federal government subsidizes the working poor through social service programs to the tune of $153 billion a year.

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As Cities Raise their Minimum Wage, Where’s the Economic Collapse the Right Predicted?

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

by CarltonDecosta Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just published a deep look into the World Bank’s track record of ensuring that the projects it sponsors don’t end up harming local communities.

Since 2004, more than 3.4 million people have been economically or physically displaced by Bank projects, according to the report’s analysis of the lender’s data. And while the Bank has policies requiring it to reestablish and resettle such communities, the ICIJ’s investigation found that they were falling short, operating under a troubling lack of safeguards, through bank officials too willing to ignore abuses committed by local partners, and with an institutional culture that values closing big deals over following up on human rights.

After being presented with the ICIJ’s findings, the bank quickly promised reforms. But one part of the investigation contains this interesting passage, which suggests an unexpected reason the Bank may not be able to clean up its act: competition has gotten too stiff.

As it enters its eighth decade, the World Bank faces an identity crisis.

It is no longer the only lender willing to venture into struggling nations and finance huge projects. It is being challenged by new competition from other development banks that don’t have the same social standards—and are rapidly drawing support from the World Bank’s traditional backers.

China has launched a new development bank and persuaded Britain, Germany and other American allies to join, despite open U.S. opposition.

These geopolitical shifts have fueled doubts about whether the World Bank still has the clout—or the desire—to impose strong protections for people living in the way of development.

United Nations human rights officials have written World Bank President Kim to say they’re concerned that the growing ability of borrowers to access other financing has spurred the bank to join a “race to the bottom” and push its standards for protecting people even lower.

Today’s package of stories, published with the Huffington Post, is the first installment of a series reported in 14 countries by over 50 journalists. More than 20 news organizations were involved in the effort.

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

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Democrats in Oregon of All Places Just Torpedoed a Bill to Expand Abortion Rights

by cazaresibiuieftina Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s how quickly the prospect of expanding abortion rights can kill a piece of legislation: In February, a group of state lawmakers introduced a bill that would require insurers to cover the full spectrum of women’s reproductive services at an affordable prices. Just two months later, the same lawmakers have killed the bill. The section calling for abortion coverage proved just too controversial.

This didn’t happen in the Rust Belt, or in a purple state where Democrats hold the statehouse by just a vote or two. It happened in Oregon, where the Democrats control both chambers of the legislature by a supermajority and where the party has a lengthy history of going to the mat for abortion rights.

Nina Liss-Schultz of RH Reality Check (and a MoJo alum) has the full story. The tale is an illuminating one as progressives contemplate how to respond to the historic number of anti-abortion laws that have passed in the last five years.

It’s also an important dose of reality.

Conservatives have enacted more abortion restrictions in the past few years than they have in the entire previous decade. In January, though, several news reports circulated that made it seem as though a full-fledged progressive counter strike was already under way. The stories were based on reports by the Guttmacher Institute and the National Institute for Reproductive Health, pro abortion-rights think tanks. They found that in 2014, dozens of lawmakers introduced dozens of bills—95, by Guttmacher’s count—supporting women’s reproductive rights, surpassing a record set in 1990. “A Record Number Of Lawmakers Are Starting To Fight For Reproductive Rights,” one headline announced. Another read, “Inside the quiet, state-level push to expand abortion rights.”

It’s certainly true that the tidal wave of new abortion restrictions has inspired a progressive backlash. But the suggestion that the two sides are evenly matched, or even approaching that point, is out of line with reality. Just four of those 95 measures were eventually passed into law. One of them was a Vermont bill to repeal the state’s long-defunct abortion ban, in case the makeup of the Supreme Court allowed the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade—a looming danger, but not the most pressing issue facing abortion rights.

By contrast, last year alone conservative lawmakers introduced 335 bills targeting abortion access; 26 passed. And in two states that are overtly hostile to abortion rights—Texas and North Dakota—the legislature wasn’t even in session. That’s part of why you can expect this year’s abortion battles to be even uglier.

But it’s not just about sheer numbers. At the same time that progressive lawmakers were pushing forward-thinking laws, the 2014 midterms undermined their efforts. In states where there were serious efforts to expand reproductive rights—Colorado, Nevada, New York, and Washington—Democratic losses on Election Day have placed those plans on indefinite hold.

Here’s how things fell apart in Oregon, according to the Lund Report, an Oregon-based health news website.

Democratic health committee chair Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson said the abortion language was so toxic that “leadership”—her caucus leaders—would not even allow her to have a public hearing on SB 894, let alone move it to the Senate floor. She said House Democratic leaders were also involved in the discussion over whether the bill could see the light of day.

Meanwhile, in the time it took for Oregon to abandon this bill, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, and West Virginia passed 10 new abortion and reproductive rights restrictions. What happened in Oregon shows just how much reproductive rights advocates are playing catch-up, even in states that appear friendly to their agenda.

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Democrats in Oregon of All Places Just Torpedoed a Bill to Expand Abortion Rights

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Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

by AudreaDKSytd Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Tyler Cowen published his version of Cowen’s Three Laws:

1. Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it)

2. Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything.

3. Cowen’s Third Law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.

I’d phrase these somewhat differently:

1. Drum’s First Law: For any any problem complex enough to be interesting, there is evidence pointing in multiple directions. You will never find a case where literally every research result supports either liberal or conservative orthodoxy.

2. Drum’s Second Law: There’s literature on a lot of things, but with some surprising gaps. Furthermore, in many cases the literature is so contradictory and ambiguous as to be almost useless in practical terms.

3. Drum’s Third Law: Really? Isn’t there a correlation between real interest rates and future inflationary expectations? In general, don’t low real interest rates make capital investment more likely by lowering hurdle rates? Or am I just being naive here?

In any case, you can take your choice. Or mix and match!

Excerpt from – 

Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

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Worst. Logo. Ever.

by SelmaMccombs Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

I’ve kept my distance from the nearly insane volume of reaction to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement this weekend, including the tens of thousands of turgid words deconstructing her allegedly revolutionary announcement video. (Please.) It’s a routine announcement, folks. We all knew it was coming. We all knew approximately what she’d say.

What’s more, I nearly always stay out of discussions about logos. I have no artistic sense, so who am I to judge? And yet….holy cow. I have to go along with the nearly unanimous stunned reaction to Hillary’s campaign logo. It’s hideous on so many levels it’s hard to even marshal my thoughts about it. Seriously, WTF were they thinking?

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Worst. Logo. Ever.

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

by ValorieSilver Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back when Egypt started bombing Libya and Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen, American conservatives were jubilant. That’s the kind of swift, decisive action Barack Obama ought to be taking against our enemies in the Mideast. Never mind that this already was the kind of action he had taken. It didn’t really count because he had been too slow to ramp up attacks and had demonstrated too little bloodthirstiness in his announcements. Did he really want to “destroy” ISIS or merely “degrade” it? Dammit man, make up your mind!

This weekend, though, the LA Times reminded us that regardless of who’s doing it, air strikes alone simply have a limited effectiveness in wars like this:

Officials in Saudi Arabia, the region’s Sunni Muslim power, say the air campaign is dealing a decisive blow against the Houthis, whom they view as tools of aggression used by Shiite Muslim-led Iran in an expanding proxy war….However, residents say the strikes have done little to reverse the territorial gains of the insurgents and restore exiled President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi to power in the quickly fragmenting country.

….Security experts question whether the coalition can achieve its goals through airstrikes alone. Saudi officials have not ruled out sending in tanks, artillery and other ground forces massed along the frontier. But Saudi leaders appear wary of such a move against the Houthis, hardened guerrillas who belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaidism.

The last time the Saudis fought the Houthis in the rugged mountains of northern Yemen, in 2009, more than 100 of their men were killed. Pakistan’s parliament voted Friday to stay out of the conflict, a blow to the Saudis, who had reportedly asked the country to send troops, fighter jets and warships.

“This war will turn Yemen into Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam,” said Mohammed al-Kibsi, a veteran journalist and commentator in Yemen’s capital, Sana, where the Houthis seized control in September.

Air strikes are useful components of a wider war. But to the extent anyone can truly win these conflicts in the first place, it’s going to take ground troops. Lots and lots of well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated ground troops. Saudi Arabia is “wary” of committing ground troops in Yemen and Pakistan is staying out. In Iraq, it’s still a big question whether the Iraqi army is up to the task. And to state the obvious, even among America’s most bellicose hawks, there’s no real appetite for sending in US ground troops.1

This is just the way it is, and everyone knows it. Air strikes can do a bit of damage here and there, and they can serve as symbolic demonstrations of will. But none of these conflicts—not in Yemen, not in Iraq, not in Syria, and not in Libya—are going to be affected much by air campaigns alone. They need ground troops. If you loudly insist that Obama is a weakling as commander-in-chief but you’re not willing to commit to that, you’re just playing political games.

1And don’t fall for the “special ops” ploy. Politicians who want to sound tough but don’t want ruin their careers by suggesting we deploy a hundred thousand troops in Iraq again, are fond of suggesting that we just need a bit of targeted help on the ground from special ops. This is clueless nonsense meant to con the rubes, but nothing more.

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

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