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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

Mother Jones

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Via Matt Yglesias, here’s a fascinating little study in behavioral economics. It involves Social Security, which currently allows you to retire at age 62, but offers you a higher monthly payment if you retire later. For example, if you retire at 62, your monthly benefit might be $1,500, but if you delay a year, your monthly benefit might go up to $1,600. Given average lifespans, the total payout works out the same in both scenarios.

But what if you offered retirees a different deal? What if, instead of a higher monthly benefit, you offered them a lump sum payout if they delayed retirement? In the example above, if you delay retirement to 63, you’ll still get $1,500 per month, but you’d also get a $20,000 lump sum payout. Delay to age 70 and you’d get a lump sum of nearly $200,000. How do people respond to that?

It turns out that they delay retirement—or they say they would on a survey, anyway. Under the current scenario, people say they’d retire at 45 months past age 62, or 65 years and 9 months. Under the lump sum scenario, the average retirement age is about five months later. (A third scenario with a delayed lump sum payout motivates people to retire even later.)

Would people do this in real life if they were offered these options? Maybe. And it would probably be a good thing, as Yglesias explains:

Since the benefits would be actuarially fair, this would not save the government any money. But since people would be working longer, the overall size of the economy and the tax base would be larger. That extends the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, and helps delay the moment at which benefit cuts or tax increases are necessary. The overall scale of the change is not enormous, but it’s distinctly positive and it’s hard to see what the downside would be.

This is hardly the highest priority on anybody’s wish list, but it’s an intriguing study. And it would certainly be easy to implement. Maybe it’s worth a try.

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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Vox ran a story about a new Ipsos-MORI poll showing that Americans think the unemployment rate right now is an astonishing 32 percent—higher than during the Great Depression. The correct answer, of course, is about 6 percent. And this is not just a harmless bit of ignorance, like not being able to name the vice president. “It matters,” we’re told, “because the degree to which people perceive problems guides how they make political decisions.”

My first thought when I saw this is the same one I have a lot: how has this changed over time? After all, if Americans always think the unemployment rate is way higher than it is, then it doesn’t mean much. But I couldn’t find any previous polling data on this. I made a few desultory attempts in between football games this weekend, but came up empty.

Luckily, John Sides is a stronger man than me, and also more familiar with the past literature on this stuff. It turns out there’s not very much to look at, actually, but what there is suggests that this Ipsos-MORI poll is a weird outlier. Generally, speaking, most people do know roughly what the unemployment rate is:

In this 1986 article….two-thirds, stated that the unemployment rate was 10 percent, 11 percent, or 12 percent — a substantial degree of accuracy.

In this 2014 article….approximately 40-50 percent of respondents could estimate this rate within 1 percentage point.

In this 2014 article….most respondents gave fairly accurate estimates — which is reflected in the median.

So the whole thing is a little odd. In past polls, people weren’t too far off. In this one, they’re off by more than 25 points. Something doesn’t add up, but it’s not clear what. In any case, it’s worth taking this whole thing with a grain of salt.

But all is not lost. If you decide to take this poll seriously anyway, you might be interested to know that the unemployment results are merely one part of a broader report titled “Perils of Perception.” Basically, it’s an international survey showing just how wrong people in different countries are about things like murder rates, number of Muslims, teen birth rates, voting, and so forth. This is then compiled into a handy “Index of Ignorance.”

So who’s #1? Not us. We came in second to Italy. But that’s not too bad! We’re pretty damn ignorant, and with a little less effort we might take the top spot next year. Still, even though Germans and Swedes may feel smug about their knowledge of demographic facts, can they launch pointless wars in the Middle East whenever they feel like it? No they can’t. So there.

POSTSCRIPT: On a slightly more serious note, Sides tells us that not only is the Ipsos-MORI poll an odd outlier, but that his research suggests that ignorance of the unemployment rate has very little impact on people’s attitudes anyway. I’d say the Ipsos-MORI poll accidentally confirms this. The German public, for example, has a much more accurate view of the unemployment rate than the American public. So has that helped their policymaking? It has not. Over the past few years, Germany has probably had the worst economic policy of any developed country, while the US has had among the best. A well-informed public may be less important than we think.

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

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Sunni Awakening 2.0? Don’t Hold Your Breath.

Mother Jones

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Back in 2007, the military success of the famous “surge” in Iraq was due largely to the fact that many Sunni tribal leaders finally turned against al-Qaeda and began cooperating with the American army. This so-called Sunni Awakening was a key part of the tenuous peace achieved a year later.

It was a fragile peace, however, and eventually it broke down thanks to the lack of a serious political effort to include Sunnis in the central government. By last year, the Sunni areas of Iraq had once again begun to rebel, and ISIS took advantage of this to storm into Iraq and take control of a huge swath of territory. If we want to regain this ground from ISIS, the first step is to once again persuade Sunni tribal leaders to cooperate with us, but it looks an awful lot like that particular playbook isn’t going to work a second time:

Officials admit little success in wooing new Sunni allies, beyond their fitful efforts to arm and supply the tribes who were already fighting the Islamic State — and mostly losing. So far, distrust of the Baghdad government’s intentions and its ability to protect the tribes has won out.

….Much of the Islamic State’s success at holding Sunni areas comes from its deft manipulation of tribal dynamics. Portraying itself as a defender of Sunnis who for years have been abused by Iraq’s Shiite-majority government, the Islamic State has offered cash and arms to tribal leaders and fighters, often allowing them local autonomy as long as they remain loyal.

At the same time, as it has expanded into new towns, the Islamic State has immediately identified potential government supporters for death. Residents of areas overrun by the Islamic State say its fighters often carry names of soldiers and police officers. If those people have already fled, the jihadists blow up their homes to make sure they do not return. At checkpoints, its men sometimes run names through computerized databases, dragging off those who have worked for the government.

“They come in with a list of names and are more organized than state intelligence,” said Sheikh Naim al-Gaood, a leader of the Albu Nimr tribe. The most brutal treatment is often of tribes who cooperated with the United States against Al Qaeda in Iraq in past years, mostly through the so-called Sunni Awakening movement supported by the Americans.

Obviously ISIS may overplay its hand here, or simply overextend itself. They aren’t supermen. At the same time, it’s obvious that ISIS is well aware of how the original Sunni Awakening played out, and they’re doing an effective job of making sure it doesn’t play out that way again. Sunni leaders are already distrustful of Americans, having been promised a greater role in governance in 2007 and then seeing that promise evaporate, and ISIS leaders are adding a brutal element of revenge to make sure that no one thinks about believing similar promises this time around.

All this is not to say that things are hopeless. But a replay of the Sunni Awakening isn’t going to be easy. Sunni leaders have already been burned once and were unlikely from the start to be easily persuaded to give reconciliation another chance. ISIS is reinforcing this with both deft politics and brutal retaliation against collaborators. It’s not going to be an easy dynamic to break.

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Sunni Awakening 2.0? Don’t Hold Your Breath.

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Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

Mother Jones

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Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch cracks me up:

Hatch expressed concern that President Barack Obama may soon take executive action on immigration and protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. “It would be catastrophic for him to do that,” said Hatch. “Part of it is our fault. We haven’t really seized this problem. Of course, we haven’t been in a position to do it either, with Democrats controlling the Senate. I’m not blaming Republicans. But we really haven’t seized that problem and found solutions for it.”

….”Frankly, I’d like to see immigration done the right way,” Hatch added. “This president is prone to doing through executive order that which he cannot do by working with the Congress, because he won’t work with us. If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through … He has a Republican Congress that’s willing to work with him. That’s the thing that’s pretty interesting to me.”

You know, it was only 17 months ago that the Senate passed a vigorously negotiated and tough-minded bipartisan immigration bill that was actively supported by President Obama. You know who voted for it? Orrin Hatch. The only reason it’s not the law of the land today is….Republicans in the House. That’s it.

So what’s the problem here? Why shouldn’t we blame Republicans?

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Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

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Two Important Notes For Anyone Renewing Obamacare Coverage

Mother Jones

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Today is the first day of the 2015 signup period for Obamacare. If you currently have coverage, you need to decide whether to keep the plan you have or shop around for a different one. Here are a couple of key things to keep in mind—whether you’re buying coverage for yourself or know friends who are:

As the New York Times points out today, it’s possible that the net price of your current coverage could go up substantially this year. Here’s why: the size of the federal subsidy depends on the price of your plan relative to other plans. If your plan was the cheapest on offer last year, it qualified for a maximum subsidy. But if other, cheaper plans are offered this year, and your plan is now, say, only the fourth cheapest, you’ll get a smaller subsidy. So even if your actual plan premium stays the same, your net cost could go up a lot.

This is, naturally, becoming a partisan attack point, but don’t ignore it just because the usual suspects are making hay with it. It’s a real issue that anyone buying insurance on a state or federal exchange should be aware of.

Bottom line: shop around. Don’t just hit the renew button without checking things out.
Andrew Sprung has been writing tirelessly about something called Cost Sharing Reduction. It’s not well known, but it could be important to you. Today, Sprung tells us that the new version of healthcare.gov has a pretty nice shoparound feature that allows you to enter some basic information and then provides a comparison of all plans in your area. I tried it myself, and sure enough, the “window shopping” feature works nicely and is easily accessible from the home page.

However, it doesn’t do a good job of steering you toward silver-level plans, which are the only ones eligible for Cost Sharing Reduction. For example, I shopped for a plan for a low-income family of three in Missouri, and the cost of the cheapest bronze plan was $0. The cost of the cheapest silver plan was $90 per month. That’s an extra $1,000 per year, and a lot of low-income families will naturally gravitate toward the cheaper plan, especially since it’s the first one they see.

But the bronze plan has both a deductible and an out-of-pocket cap of $12,600. The silver plan with CSR has a deductible of $2,000 and an out-of-pocket cap of $3,700. Unless you’re literally rolling the dice that you’re never going to see a doctor this year, you’re almost certain to be better off with the silver plan, even though the up-front monthly premium is a little higher.

Bottom line: shop around. The plan that looks cheapest often isn’t, and for low-income buyers a silver plan is often your best bet. For more, here’s the CSR page at healthcare.gov. And for even more, Sprung has details about shopping at the new site here and here.

I guess the bottom line is obvious by now: shop around. Even if you can navigate the website yourself, be careful. Not everything is obvious at first glance. And if you’re not comfortable doing it by yourself, don’t. Get help from an expert in your state. You have three months to sign up, so there’s no rush.

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Two Important Notes For Anyone Renewing Obamacare Coverage

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People Who Use Obamacare Sure Do Like It

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Cohn points us today to a Gallup poll with yet more good news for Obamacare. In a recent survey, the people who are actually using Obamacare gave it very high marks: 74 percent said the quality of health care they received was good or excellent, and 71 percent said the overall coverage was good or excellent. What’s remarkable is that these numbers are nearly the same as those for everyone else with health insurance, which includes those with either employer coverage or Medicare. Here’s the bottom line from Cohn:

You hear a lot about what’s wrong with the coverage available through the marketplaces and some of these criticisms are legitimate. The narrow networks of providers are confusing, for example, and lack of sufficient regulations leaves some patients unfairly on the hook for ridiculously high bills. But overall the plans turn out to be as popular as other forms of private and public insurance. It’s one more sign that, if you can just block out the negative headlines and political attacks, you’ll discover a program that is working.

Republicans can huff and puff all they want, but the evidence is clear: despite its rollout problems, Obamacare is a success. It’s covering millions of people; its costs are in line with forecasts; and people who use it think highly of it. There’s no such thing as a big, complex program that has no problems, and Obamacare has its share. But overall? It’s a standup triple.

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People Who Use Obamacare Sure Do Like It

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Watchdog: Wednesday’s Big Wall Street Settlement Is “Laughably Inadequate”

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, six massive international banks agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle allegations from regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland that their traders tried to manipulate the $5.3-trillion-a-day foreign-currency exchange market. But Wall Street watchdogs say the banks got off with a slap on the wrist.

From 2008 through 2013, traders at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS colluded to coordinate the buying and selling of 10 major currencies to manipulate prices in their favor. The penalties—announced Wednesday by an alphabet soup of American and foreign regulatory agencies—mark the end of the first phase of investigations into the banks that could lead to further fines. They “should be seen as a message to all market participants that wrongdoing and foul play in the financial markets is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” Tim Massad, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said in a statement.

But critics say the banks, which were not forced to admit wrongdoing, deserved a much harsher punishment. “The global too-big-to-fail banks are again allowed to evade responsibility and accountability by using shareholders’ money to pay big fines, which will generate headlines but do little if anything to stop the relentless Wall Street crime spree,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a financial reform advocacy shop, responded in a statement.

David Weidner, who covers Wall Street for MarketWatch, agrees. The settlements “appear to be just another cost-of-doing-business budget line for the banks,” he wrote.

What’s more, financial reformers say, none of the employees involved in the rate-fixing will face criminal charges. “It’s corrupt, as usual,” says one House staffer. Regulators should “send crooks to jail.”

As part of the deal, the CFTC and Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority called on the banks to strengthen their internal monitoring of foreign exchange trading activity. But “while the banks did agree to take certain steps to better supervise their traders, that is laughably inadequate” to prevent future wrongdoing, Kelleher says.

The Justice Department and New York’s Department of Financial Services have been pursuing separate criminal investigations into the alleged rate manipulation. Those probes could result in criminal charges, although “if history is any indication,” Weidner says, the people charged won’t be high-level executives. To date, only one top banker who helped cause the financial crisis went to jail because of it. This time, he adds, they will likely “single out low-ranking traders who pushed the buttons.”

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Watchdog: Wednesday’s Big Wall Street Settlement Is “Laughably Inadequate”

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Here’s Two and a Half Cheers for No-Drama Obama

Mother Jones

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On Saturday I promised to both agree and disagree with Matt Yglesias, but I never quite got around to the agreeing part. So let’s do that today. Yglesias was writing in response to a fairly typical complaint from Josh Green that President Obama is too aloof, too cerebral, and too technocratic to satisfy the public’s “emotional needs” in a national leader. But Yglesias points out that Obama’s firm, low-key disposition served him well when the rest of the world went into panic mode over the passage of Obamacare after Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2010:

There’s no single optimal temperament for all times and all places. Obama, by temperament, is a cool cucumber. I am not. At times, Obama might have been better served by a more emotional approach and an itchier trigger finger. But Obama was right during the political crisis of January 2010.

He was also right back in October of 2008 when the American banking sector seemed to be collapsing….Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was never one to underreact. Most observers greatly appreciated the younger senator’s ability to keep things in perspective and his evident dedication to trying to learn the relevant facts….Similarly, two months earlier, McCain was proclaiming “we are all Georgians now” in response to Putin’s incursion into South Ossetia. A systematic overreactor would have had his finger much more on the public pulse when Ebola first arrived in Dallas. But he also might have embroiled the country in a nuclear war with Russia.

….Journalists have systematic professional incentives to overreact….The hot temperament consequently tends to dominate in the ranks of the media….But more than a political pose, an aversion to purely symbolic action has genuinely served Obama well at critical moments….Obama’s approach to the economy has been far from flawless, but it’s not a coincidence that the USA has performed better since 2008 than Europe or the United Kingdom and weathered its financial crisis far better than Japan did in the 1990s.

The Deepwater Horizon crisis passed. The American Ebola crisis will also pass. HealthCare.gov got fixed. The Russian economy is reeling in the face of sanctions. Osama bin Laden is dead. The economy is growing. Obama hasn’t always been a very effective pundit-in-chief (acute crisis moments aside, his inability to articulate public anger at Wall Street has been remarkable) but that’s not actually his job. On the big stuff, he’s been effective. And that’s not a coincidence.

I always find it difficult to strike just the right tone on this. Unlike Yglesias, I am a fairly cool cucumber, and I’m frankly relieved to have a president whose temperament is roughly in sync with my own. At the same time, I’m well aware that I’m not typical, and that like it or not, the presidency is a bully pulpit that often demands a certain demonstrativeness in order to resonate with the public. Overtly emotional appeals worked well for Bill Clinton and overtly nationalistic ones worked well for George Bush. In Obama’s case, however, it really is sometimes hard to tell if he’s truly engaged with problems the way he should be. Occasional leaks from White House insiders that Obama is “furious” about something or other doesn’t get the job done.

That said, Obama has good reason to be contemptuous of the 24/7 news cycle and the way it’s affected politics. Obviously reporters aren’t much interested in writing “Problem X continues to be steadily addressed” day after day. They want action! They want news! And these days, they don’t even want it daily. They pretty much want it hourly.

But that’s a crappy attitude toward problem solving. There have been times and places when Obama probably has been a little too disengaged, either in the planning process or in responding to crises. Healthcare.gov is an example of the former, and the sequester/debt limit/fiscal cliff battles may be examples of the latter. For the most part, though, his approach has been pretty sound. There was little the government could do about Deepwater Horizon, and high-profile interference probably would have been as counterproductive as the recent panic-stricken Ebola quarantine orders from the governors of New Jersey, New York, and Florida. Obama has instead been radiating calm and working behind the scenes to prevent Ebola from becoming just another partisan football. He’s urging us to adopt evidence-based responses that don’t undermine the longer-term fight against Ebola, and that’s the right call.

America is a big place. The world is even bigger. We have big problems that don’t get solved in a day. I don’t want to pretend that Obama has an ideal management style, when he plainly doesn’t. But given what he’s dealing with, Obama’s management style is pretty damn good. And you know what? The dirty little secret of management is that half the battle—maybe more!—is avoiding lots of stupid stuff that you have to clean up afterward.

Obama may not always give us the emotional sustenance we want, or mount a pretense of whirlwind action to satisfy the cable nets, but he gets things done. Anyone who can count on their fingers can pretty easily figure out, for example, that he’s had a more successful presidency than either Clinton or Bush. Slow and steady doesn’t win every race, but it wins a lot of them.

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Here’s Two and a Half Cheers for No-Drama Obama

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There’s an International Soccer Tournament Where All the Players Are Homeless

Mother Jones

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“A homeless soccer team? What?

That’s what Shane Bullock, 26, recalls thinking when a coach came by his San Francisco shelter last fall to recruit players. Now, a year later, he’s in Santiago, Chile, representing the United States against teams from 49 countries at the 12th-annual Homeless World Cup.

The Homeless World Cup—which is actually just what it sounds like—draws a total of 100,000 spectators to cheer on teams of homeless (or, like Bullock, recently homeless) men and women in highly competitive four-on-four soccer matches, which are played on a basketball-sized court with walls and mini-goals.

When he first heard of Street Soccer USA (the Homeless World Cup’s US affiliate), Bullock had recently fallen into homelessness. He had moved out of his brother’s Sacramento apartment to be closer to another brother in San Francisco, but he found himself on the street and then in a shelter. When he was first approached about joining the team, “I told them I’d take a rain check.”

“Finally I decided to go out,” he says, although he initially didn’t realize that it was a part of a league. “I thought we were just going to play pickup soccer in the alley around the corner. That caught me off guard, but it’s been pretty fun.”

Bullock was announced as a member of the World Cup men’s squad in August at the closing ceremony of the Homeless National Cup, which brought Street Soccer USA (SSUSA) teams from 16 cities to compete in San Francisco. Eight men and eight women were selected, based on off-field achievements, soccer ability, and leadership.

Shane Bullock (in sunglasses) and other members of the San Francisco SSUSA team Street Soccer USA

Regional partners like SSUSA fields (and funds) each team. At practice, SSUSA coaches help players set goals—such as creating a résumé, obtaining identification, earning a GED, or securing housing—and refer them to preexisting social-services agencies. Says SSUSA national director Rob Cann, “They know that when they come to the next practice, we’re going to say, ‘Hey, you said you were going to go to the DMV this weekend. Did you go?'”

Street Soccer USA meets some of its costs by operating coed, recreational soccer leagues, filled primarily with teams of young professionals. San Francisco’s league, I Play for SF, has 85 teams, including the one with homeless players. “It’s kind of cool to see our homeless folks assimilate with people from different strains of society,” says Bullock’s coach, Benjamin Anderson. SSUSA estimates 2,700 homeless participants have played on its teams since 2009.

Bullock says the World Cup trip isn’t the first time soccer has helped him off the field. “I’m not very outgoing, so it’s allowed me to open up a little,” he says. “And just getting out and moving. That has done wonders just for clearing my mind alone.”

Since joining the team, he’s been hired by I Play for SF to help set up for games twice a week, allowing him to move from the shelter to a single-room occupancy apartment.

“That’s the nice thing—to see it go full circle,” Anderson says. “A guy who was kind of lost and confused and lonely, not only became a part of a community that he contributes to, but has a job and has his own place.”

Cann says the goal of helping homeless people gain structure and meaningful relationships doesn’t necessarily have to be achieved via soccer. Although some aspects of the sport do work particularly well—it’s cheap to play and can be set up anywhere—what’s important is that “it’s a platform and a humanizing activity.”

Of course, only a tiny fraction of the world’s estimated 100-plus-million homeless population is competing this week in Chile, and critics may wonder whether flights across the globe are the best use of funds. (Cann says the trip is funded through designated donations, specifically for the HWC.) Still, the Homeless World Cup maintains one of its main goals is to “change people’s attitudes to homelessness.”

And even though Bullock’s US men’s team has struggled this week, starting out with a 2-4 record, there’s much more to the event than what’s happening on the pitch. During the trip, US players spend downtime in leadership training sessions, where Cann says participants like Bullock are encouraged to remain with the organization as mentors and role models for newer players.

“It’s always been a thing of mine, helping people,” says Bullock, who is considering staying on with Street Soccer USA. “Being with this program, it pushed me toward wanting to find ways that I can help people in whatever way I can.”

You can watch a live stream of the action at the Homeless World Cup website.

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There’s an International Soccer Tournament Where All the Players Are Homeless

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

Mother Jones

It’s good to be Elizabeth Warren. The senior senator from Massachusetts spent her weekend campaigning for Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa, and by all accounts, she tore it up, and got more than a few calls to run for president. (Breaking: she still insists she isn’t going to.) These were some of her biggest red-meat lines from the campaign trail:

1. “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it. We can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back, and we’re here to fight back. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against. We’ve got our voices, or votes and our willingness to fight. This is about democracy, about your future, and about the kind of country we want to build.”

2. “Who does this government work for?…Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers or does it work for the people? That’s the question in this race.”

3. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers.”

4. When conservatives came to power in the 1980s, the first thing they did was “fire the cops on Wall Street. They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at ’em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”

5. “They ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says…’I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done…or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Contrast Warren’s rock star treatment with the President’s reception this weekend: he spoke at a campaign event in Maryland, and attendees filed out as soon as he started speaking. Obama is being kept at arms’ length in close races—Warren, on the other hand, will head to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who’s running against Warren’s old nemesis, Scott Brown.

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

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