I recently read Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt, a history of Reconstruction-era violence. Now, if you remember your high-school history, you know what the “bloody shirt” means. It describes how post–Civil War Republican politicians whipped up their supporters by associating the Democratic Party with bygone misdeeds. The phrase itself lives on in the political lexicon as an epithet for any demagogue who whips up old hatreds.

I had always believed the bloody shirt was the garment of a slain Union soldier, held aloft years later. In fact, Budiansky points out, the phrase was used to describe contemporaneous post–Civil War violence. In 1871, Klansmen in Mississippi accosted Allen Huggins, a northerner who had helped educate freed slaves, thrashed him within an inch of his life, and threatened to kill him unless he left the state. The bloody shirt was Huggins’s, allegedly waved by Republican Benjamin Butler on the House floor just a few weeks later. It was not the relic of an ancient feud but evidence of an ongoing epidemic of rampant violence. That the bloody shirt came to stand for unfair denunciations of violence rather than the violence itself was a triumph of southern propaganda.

What’s more, Budiansky reports, there is no evidence that Butler ever waved the bloody shirt at all. That vivid detail was a figment of white supremacists’ imagined victimization.

—Jonathan Chait
Obama and the Unfairness of History

Note when the inflation rate began its long sharp decline. That’s right, it was in June of 1981, roughly six months before Volcker’s high interest rates threw the economy into a recession. This means that inflation was already falling rapidly when Volcker decided to make the tough call of throwing millions of ordinary workers out of their jobs.

The most obvious explanation for the drop in inflation is the drop in world oil prices. These had gone from less than $10 a barrel to 1978 to a peak over $40 a barrel in 1979, as Iran’s oil was pulled off world markets due to the Iranian revolution. In response to the surge in oil prices, new sources of oil came on line all over the world and people began to consume less, both in response to higher prices and government conservation measures (e.g. fuel mileage standards).

The drop in oil prices would have lowered inflation regardless of what Volcker did, although the recession undoubtedly did push down inflation further and faster than would have otherwise been the case. This was at the cost of a sharp drop in wages for most of the workforce and also the permanent loss of employment for many. Even a decade after the Volcker recession, employment among prime age men (ages 25-54) was still a full percentage point below the pre-recession level.

—Dean Baker
Robert Samuelson Wants to Give Reagan Credit

When historians seek to explain the failures of the Obama years, they will likely focus on a glaringly obvious, and indeed still more hard-headed explanation that the apologists for Obama’s enfeeblement now overlook: that perhaps Obama didn’t act forcefully to press a populist economic agenda because he didn’t want to. That maybe he didn’t do certain of the things his liberal supporters wanted him to do because he didn’t believe in them…

He did everything he could to “foam the runways” and never showed any real interest in taking on the big banks. Shall I recite the dolorous list one more time? The bailouts he failed to unwind or even to question. The bad regulators he didn’t fire. The AIG bonuses that his team defended. The cramdown he never pushed for. The receivership of the zombie banks that never happened. The FBI agents who were never shifted over to white-collar crime. The criminal referral programs at the regulatory agencies that were never restored. The executives of bailed-out banks who were never fired. The standing outrage of too-big-to-fail institutions that was never truly addressed. The top bankers who were never prosecuted for anything on the long, sordid list of apparent frauds.

Obama didn’t play this greatest-of-all issues the way he did because the white working class rose up to defend its friends in the investment banking community. He didn’t play it this way because forcing the Republicans to defend Wall Street would have been really bad politics. Nor did he do it the way he did because the presidency lacks sufficient power. In fact, everything I just mentioned “can be done by the president,” says noted former bank regulator Bill Black. “It just requires some will and some imagination and a lot of planning and determination.”

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the financial crisis worked out the way it did in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way.

—Thomas Frank
It’s Not Just Fox News

Thomas Frank announced today that he will not be writing his weekly Salon column for a while, because he is going on leave to write a new book. I assume he will be back in a couple of months.

Other than a mutual concern for informed debate and a desire for smart discussion of the arts, what do I have in common with these leading lights of public discourse, with these celebrated arbiters of taste and propriety among Washington’s elite? The New Republic stands alone among journals of liberal opinion for having a long history of bending the ear of the powerful, for speaking directly to that insulated cabal of the wealthy and consequential. If every displeased, dismayed and disillusioned journalist in the country decided one day to quit in protest of a publisher’s meanness and moral turpitude, there wouldn’t be any employed journalists anywhere. The fact that these influencers of the influential did so is a reminder of the social status and political power they continue to enjoy.

Most journalists (most I know, anyway) toil far from such lofty and influential heights. They shoulder everyday contempt and rage for the verities of newsroom politics. They despise the meddling and near-sighted ethics of their publishers. They work longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. They freelance for pennies if they write for anything. And when they are fired or laid off or they quit, they don’t seamlessly transition to the faculty lounge or think tanks eager to embrace them. Most leave journalism altogether. To feel solidarity with those who resigned under their own power from one of the most coveted jobs anyone can have in 21st-century journalism is an act of cognitive dissonance if it isn’t an act of self-loathing.

Such was missing from most coverage of The New Republic’s collapse. Sure, we read about all the many scandalous details of what happened—that publisher Chris Hughes had hired a replacement for editor Franklin Foer before telling Foer he was being replaced; that the publication’s new CEO, Guy Vidra, appeared drunk on the incoherence of industry lingo when he told staffers he wanted to “break shit and embrace being uncomfortable” in the pursuit of transforming The New Republic into a “vertically-integrated digital-media company”; that the Washington cognoscenti chattered so garrulously about Vidra’s word-salad vision for the magazine that you’d think people everywhere actually cared about what was happening to it.

But mostly what we read about was the brave few who quit in solidarity with Foer and long-time literary editor Leon Wieseltier. They were the protagonists of a story in which they stood against vulgarity and disregard for civil institutions, in which they battled the forces of “disruptive innovation” that daily threaten to make all that’s solid melt into air and all that’s holy profane. Indeed, they were the heroes deserving of more than they were given, even though each in one way or another—intentionally or not, fairly or not—was complicit in the triumph of a conservative political order 40 years ago that in the end they said they fought so strenuously against.

From the very beginning of what would become a dominant orthodoxy in the advance of free trade, low taxation, and deregulation (in a word, “Reaganomics”), these Very Serious People reflected, rationalized and amplified the views of elite Washington. Yet when agents of that order sought to destabilize one of its primary organs, they were disgusted. The untouchables who long ago accepted creative destruction as a plainly evident fact of life were suddenly touched, and they didn’t like it. Or perhaps it wasn’t creative destruction they minded so much. Perhaps what bothered them was their no longer being the exception to the dominant orthodoxy.

They were just like everyone else.

—John Stoehr
The “Liberalism” of The New Republic Didn’t Work

Among Hitchens’ criticisms of religion was what he considered was its opposition to the liberation of women, and their reproductive rights. Yet, if the notion of Hitchens as a feminist is unconvincing, it is not only because of his trivial shock-jock commentary on why women are not funny (unless they are “hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three”) or because of his rape jokes and snipes about feminism. He also had a record of opposing certain reproductive rights for women, suggesting that society should “claim a right and an interest” in the fate of the unborn child and therefore might limit abortion access to any woman who “is the victim of rape or incest, or if her mental or physical health is threatened” as part of a “historic compromise” offering in return a health service with free contraception and an adoption service.

Thus Hitchens urged that the state should be involved in adjudicating the specific rights and wrongs of individual abortion cases. And, if he conceded that, in some circumstances, abortion might be justified, his celebration of the abortion by nature of “deformed or idiot children who would otherwise have been born” indicates certain unnerving normative criteria about just who might be considered candidates for future members of the human race. Drawing a parallel with evolution, he suggested that “the system” was “fairly pitiless in eliminating those who never had a very good chance of surviving in the first place.” It is hard to detect in this a moral position on abortion qualitatively superior to that of the Reverend Falwell.

—Richard Seymour
Unhitched

The principles and professions change: the man remains the same. There is the same spirit at the bottom of all this pragmatical fickleness and virulence, whether it runs into one extreme or another: to wit, a confinement of view, a jealousy of others, an impatience of contradiction, a want of liberality in construing the motives of others, either from monkish pedantry, or a conceited overweening reference of everything to our own fancies and feelings. There is something to be said, indeed, for the nature of the political machinery, for the whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel which has of late wrenched men’s understandings almost asunder, and “amazed the very faculties of eyes and ears”; but still this is hardly a sufficient reason, why the adept in the old as well as the new school should take such a prodigious latitude himself, while at the same time he makes so little allowance for others. His whole creed need not be turned topsy-turvy, from the top to the bottom, even in times like these. He need not, in the rage of party spirit, discard the proper attributes of humanity, the common dictates of reason. He need not outrage every former feeling, nor trample on every customary decency, in his zeal for reform, or in his greater zeal against it. If his mind, like his body, has undergone a total change of essence, and purged off the taint of all its early opinions, he need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.

—William Hazlitt
“On Consistency of Opinion” in Selected Writings

The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world…

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination…

The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.

“Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.

The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.

—Juan Cole
Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda Attacked Satirists in Paris

H/T: Digby

There are so many myths that have been thrown around in the last few weeks. One of them is, as you mentioned, that there is this one bad guy that we are stepping in with our good allies to save the day and get rid of. And this is not an accurate description of the situation in Iraq or in Syria. Although ISIS — this terrorist group — has been committing gross violations of human rights and other atrocities, other groups in Iraq — the ones who we call our allies — have been also committing similar atrocities. Actually, a couple of days ago, one of our allies beheaded Sunni militants. We didn’t see much about that in US media. A few weeks ago there was a massacre committed by one of the Shiite militias backed by the Iraqi government. This massacre was documented by Human Rights Watch and other international organizations. We didn’t seem to hear about that either. We never hear about violations and war crimes committed by the Iraqi government itself — or by other ethnic and sectarian militias in Iraq. That is one part of the problem: that there is media focus on the crimes of one faction in Iraq without focusing on other factions. I don’t think that the crimes committed by ISIS in any way are unique. They are bloody, but they are similar to other crimes committed by others in Iraq — especially those who we are funding with our taxpayers’ money.

The other part that is a myth is that we can defeat ISIS through military action. And that is, I think, one of the byproducts of our foreign policy, which brings up the question that you mentioned, “We have to act!” We either don’t act at all or we have to act by dropping bombs. It doesn’t seem like there are any shades of grey between not acting and dropping bombs on other nations. And this myth that we can bomb Iraq into stability and we can bomb Iraq into moderation — that we can destroy extremism by throwing more bombs on Iraq — there is no evidence that this can happen! The US has tried that many times in the past. Actually, the US tried it while the US had more than a hundred thousand troops on the ground in Iraq. There was a military engagement with ISIS. It used to be called ISI at the time: the Islamic State in Iraq. And obviously, the group was not defeated. I think this is what many people in the US and around the world have been saying for a long time: we can’t defeat extremism by dropping more bombs. Actually, dropping more bombs, and having US military intervention fuels extremism.

—Raed Jarrar, American Friends Service Committee
Interview on CounterSpin

One of the things you’ll see repeated often is the 600,000 skilled jobs in manufacturing that are going begging because we can’t find the right workers to fill them. And that figure comes from a National Association of Manufacturers report from a few years back. It’s based on the fact that when they surveyed manufacturing employers, about 5% of them indicated that they couldn’t find the workers they wanted to fill jobs in their plants. And so from that, the report extrapolated to declare that there were 600,000 jobs that were going begging.

The reality, though, is that when economists and academics have looked at the actual job market data they find that to be simply not true. Studies from Illinois, from the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, from Wisconsin, have found that this is simply a oft repeated meme that doesn’t have much basis in reality. If there were this terrific lack of skilled workers in manufacturing, we would expect to see wage increases for those workers — we would expect to see rising wages. When there’s a shortage of something, we expect to see prices go up. We would expect the value of that particular item to increase. In fact, however, wage rates for skilled workers have remained stable or have declined through this recession. So that’s a real problem in terms of the fact that it seems to defy market realities.

The CEOs and manufacturing executives who are promoting the notion of a skills gap — and that has become generally accepted, I’m afraid — find it very convenient because it helps in the general effort to devalue the cost of labor. It also allows them to offload the kind of on-the-job training they used to provide themselves onto the public. We’re seeing workers themselves absorb the costs of retraining — desperately trying to reequip themselves with the skills that are supposedly needed for jobs that really aren’t there. We’re seeing community colleges strapped for funds that are trying to figure out which are the best training programs they can offer. It’s very handy for business executives because it allows them the luxury of keeping wages low while also not having to offer the kind of training that they used to offer themselves in their own plants. So this serves them quite well and also helps to tap down workers who are looking to increase their own wages.

—Toni Gilpin
Interview of CounterSpin