Did Jeb Bush really mean to say that Americans need to work more hours? It’s hard to say. But as Brian Beutler noted, that interpretation goes along with his policy ideas — and that of the whole of the conservative movement. It is certainly true that a big conservative argument against the progressive income tax is that it remove the incentive for people to work more. And certainly requiring overtime pay makes employers less likely to allow employees to work more than 40 hours per week. Or, as Beutler pointed out, “Supplement people’s incomes, and they have less incentive to work.” So get rid of the unions! Get rid of the minimum wage! We want people to have a real “incentive” work!

You may remember that there was a big conservative dust up when it turned out that some people were choosing to work less because of Obamacare. That was actually a good thing. What has happening was that people who had been working a lot of hours just to get health insurance, were lowering their hours. These weren’t people who were involuntarily working part time; these were people who were thrilled to be working less. Hooray for Obamacare! But of course conservatives were angry as though individuals should work more hours just to keep the economy pumping. (Not to mention that the slack could be taken up with companies hiring more people.)

So regardless of what Jeb Bush meant to say, he and the party he represents think that people should work more. But I can’t help but think of Greece. Conservatives all over the world think that the Greek people should pay for their past big spending ways. But here’s the thing: they are paying by not being allowed to work. Austerity is always that way, and it makes no sense at all. If a woman overspent last year, she would work more this year; she wouldn’t choose to work less.

People like Jeb Bush seem to think that people are unemployed just because they don’t feel like working. This is just not the way the economy works. And I don’t really believe that anyone actually thinks it does. I know there are certain conservative economists who claim that it does, but that is clear apologetics. No serious person thinks that the 25% unemployment rate in 1930 was due to people just not wanting to work. But the truth is that we should all push for people working less.

Part of the problem that we have here in America is that those who do have jobs are pushed to work far too many hours. This means there is less work for people who don’t have jobs. This is something that Germany has been really good at. For one thing, Germans just don’t work as much as we do. Last year, Germans worked an average of 1,371 hours and we worked an average of 1,789. We work almost a third more hours than they do. But it’s generally true: we work more hours than people in most advanced economies. Even the Japanese work less than we do.

But what Germany is really good at is their work sharing program. In recessions, instead of laying a bunch of people off, people work fewer hours. The government makes up the difference — think of it as a special approach to unemployment. The economy doesn’t collapse on itself — thus reducing the impact of recessions. But most conservatives would see such things as un-American. For one thing, they reduce suffering. But for another, conservatives think everyone should work more and more and more. It’s curious, because the more you work, the less time you have for things that conservatives claim to value like the family.

This is something I commented on during the 2012 presidential race. It was claimed that Ann Romney was some kind of hero for staying home and caring for her family. And great for her! But the people who thought it was so great that she was home with the kids were the exact same people who thought that poor mothers ought to have to dump their kids at daycare and take the bus to some minimum wage job. So sure: Jeb Bush and the rest of the vile party he represents want the rest of us to work more hours — for less pay — so that the rich can capture an ever greater share of the economy. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

I remember during the 1988 DNC, there was conflict. Jesse Jackson got almost 30% of the popular vote. Michael Dukakis did not intend to have Jackson be a major part of his campaign. And so there was a meeting between Jackson and Dukakis. And Jackson came out of the meeting talking about how they had had a substantial discussion about important issues. And it was pretty clear that what he got was nothing. He was putting on the best face in a bad and extremely embarrassing situation. I felt bad for him and I was a Dukakis supporter. Wasn’t there any way that all those smart people in the Democratic Party could come up with a better way to support the man that came in a very good second place? (Dukakis only got 42% of the vote.)

But I suspect that the idea among the Democratic elite was to hang Jackson out to dry. This was the proto-Sister Souljah moment. Liberals, it seems, can’t be taken seriously unless they they make a firm commitment to stand up against the black man. Or at least, that seems to be what elite opinion is in the Democratic Party. And now, I’m feeling the same thing about the situation in Greece. The whole thing strikes me as pathetic.

The Greek parliament just voted (narrowly) for Alexis Tsipras’ proposal to give the Troika… exactly what it wants. Oh, yes: there are some very small changes. This is pretty much the deal that Tsipras had wanted to get before the referendum: total capitulation with something — Anything! — he could use to save face. Who knows if the Troika will even give him what he’s asking for now. They seem instead to want him to do a Jesse Jackson: have him come out of a meeting and claim that everything is good because they had a substantial discussion about important issues.

But the whole thing seems bizarre. What Tsipras is pushing seems to be what he would have pushed if he had lost the referendum. Is that what he was expecting? Did he think that he would lose so that he could capitulate and it would be no big deal? Was the huge win last weekend actually a disappointment? Why did Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resign? It really is looking as though Tsipras and the majority of Syriza are just a bunch of wimps who do not have the strength of their convictions.

And here’s the thing: I understand that doing what Greece is now doing is the least painful thing to do for the immediate future. But that’s the point! Yes, Greece can make another deal and limp along for another couple of years. If they are very lucky, they might get the unemployment rate down to the high teens. But more likely, they get the unemployment rate down one point or two — still in the mid-twenties. And yet they will still be just as indebted as they have been — maybe more so. There isn’t a time when the Troika says, “You’ve suffered enough! Now we’ll let your economy heal!” That’s not going to happen. It’s just going to be years and year and years of pain.

I think the whole world should be afraid of this. Right now I’m wondering that if a true leftist party like Syriza is so easily co-opted by the Troika, maybe it will take a far right party to get Greece out of this mess. And if I’m wondering that, you’ve got to be certain that a lot of Greeks are wondering the same thing. The current situation has got to have been the best thing that ever happened to Golden Dawn.

Lee Fang wrote a really good article over at The Intercept on Monday, GOP Officials Publicly Denounce Bernie Sanders’ Obamacare Expansion, Quietly Request Funding. It is about Sanders’ work since his days as the mayor of Burlington on community health clinics. And while he’s been in the Senate, he’s been very successful at getting funding for clinics. That is most true of all regarding the ACA (Obamacare) where he managed to get $11 billion of funding “extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.”

The great thing about these clinics is that they provide a kind of universal (if rationed) healthcare. They accept all people who come, regardless of their ability to pay. I used one of them myself a few years ago. It required showing up at the clinic before 6:00 am to stand in line in the cold winter air. (Yes, it was California, but Californians are wimps!) And the treatment I received was excellent. Obviously, such clinics make sense in a nation that refuses to even consider a single-payer system. This is a far more efficient way to provide healthcare than having people show up at hospital emergency rooms.

Fang provided some history of these clinics. I had assumed they went back forever. But that’s not true at all. They started in the early 1960s. Apparently, people who came to the south to work on voting and other civil rights were seen as “outside agitators.” As a result, the good doctors of these areas refused to treat them. (That’s one way of interpreting the Hippocratic Oath!) This lead to the formation of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). They set up clinics. But the doctors noticed that the African American populations did not have much or any access to medical care. Eventually, this grew to providing clinics throughout the nation in poor communities.

As with most things involving Obamacare, of course, the funding of clinics is not branded. So the great expansion of clinics over the last couple of years has not been seen as due to Obamacare — for good or bad. But as Fang noted, “That relative invisibility has shielded health clinic funding from the hyper-partisan attacks faced by other provisions of the law. But it has also allowed Republican opponents of Obamacare to play a two-faced game.” Every single Republican in Congress has voted to Repeal Obamacare — that’s why they’ve voted on it so many times. It is like a rite of passage: all Republicans in Congress must have the experience of voting to repeal the law. (Yes, it is silly — even pathetic.)

But that means that these Republicans have also voted to repeal this funding for the clinics. Of course, there are all kinds of things that everyone loves in the law. But Republicans are not deep thinkers. If you had to describe what Republicans are in one word, it wouldn’t even be close: demagogues. But these same votes to repeal funding for the clinics has gone along with — What a surprise! — these same politicians taking credit for the clinics.

Of course, conservative hypocrisy is hardly news. But unfortunately, the fact that Bernie Sanders is a highly successful legislator generally is news — even to his supporters. I’m troubled by what I see as the Dennis-Kucinich-ization of Sanders. That’s the idea that he’s just ideologically correct but that he doesn’t have great skills outside of that. And Sanders isn’t just a good legislator; I’ve been impressed with just how good a politician he is. This doesn’t mean that he’s going to win the nomination, much less the presidency. But I think people should take him more seriously and look at who he really is.

Brian Beutler wrote a very insightful article, The Republican Party Is Still Trying to Decide if Minorities Matter. He noted that the Republicans had three options regarding outreach to minority voters. The first was to actually, you know, reach out to minority voters. They obviously didn’t do this. I wrote about this a lot after the 2012 election. The truth is that it wasn’t an actual option. Reaching out to minority voters would have required embracing policies that are anathema to the party.

So the only practical options for them were the two others that Beutler mentioned. First, they could reach out in purely symbolic ways and generally not try to offend them. Let’s call that the “Pretend!” approach. Second, they could try to offend minority voters and believe that all the Republican Party needs is an ever increasing percentage of the white voter. Let’s call that the “Screw you!” approach.

Beutler provided two examples of politicians pursuing these options. Donald Trump is pursuing the “Screw you!” approach. But he isn’t alone: Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson are right there with him. Now, I don’t think it is any coincidence that none of these four is a serious candidate. The “Pretend” approach is exemplified by Rick Perry, who gave a campaign speech on the issue highlighting the fact that the Republican Party has been too focused on the Tenth Amendment (limit of federal powers) and not focused enough on the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection under the law). I would quibble with the conservatives fetishization of the Tenth Amendment; they almost always mistake it for a similar sounding part of the Articles of Confederation. But Perry’s speech was good, and to some extent, the viable candidates are following in the same vein.

But it doesn’t really matter which approach is being used by the Republicans, they all amount to the same thing: trying to win with almost exclusively white voters. Since the Republicans are willing to do basically nothing of any substance for oppressed minority groups, their push for a “kinder and gentler” rhetoric is intended for consumption by whites. These are the whites that don’t actually care about minority groups, but who still don’t think they should be actively insulted and don’t actually think that they are all rapists (with some, I assume, good people). So as it has been for the last 45 years, the Republican Party is devoted to a southern strategy.

Clearly, the “Pretend!” approach is better than the “Screw you!” approach. But the most important point about the Republican Party at this point is that there is no advantage to truly courting minority voters. I think that is why a lot of people in the media were excited by Ron and Rand Paul. Their kind of Republican libertarianism seemed like an easy way for the party to move so that it remained conservative but could appeal to a broader base. But this was always a pipe dream for two reasons. First, the base isn’t fooled. The base is defined by its anger and fear. Libertarians might as well be hippies. But on the other side, it is even worse. What defines minority groups is not race. Race is just a concept made up to justify the oppression of certain groups. Minority groups are defined by their relative poverty. And what, after all, does the Republican Party stand for if not helping the rich?

There has been a lot of chatter on the left that people like Donald Trump actually help the Republican Party by making people like Jeb Bush seem moderate. I doubt that’s the case. Overall, people like Trump just feed into a narrative that although all Republicans may not be bigots, the Republican Party is where bigots are welcome. And that taints the party. Regardless of who gets the nomination, they will be washed clean by the nomination and given the official media stamp as “not a bigot.” So it hardly matters that Trump is around.

I am well aware that I often appear to be anti-German. That’s not entirely an incorrect assessment. Germany reminds me very much of the United States. Both are countries filled to the brim with undeserved self-righteousness. They say to anyone who will listen, “If only you were more like us, you would be fine — or at least better.” I hate this attitude in individuals and when I see it in countries, it frightens me. But is it really the case that Germany is behaving so badly toward Greece because of their pigheaded self-delusions about the German work ethic and frugality? Let’s say that it is at least a bit more complicated.

On Tuesday, Simon Wren-Lewis wrote, Why Germany Wants Rid of Greece. The title itself reminds me of World War I. There was a sense of relief among the power elite of Europe once the war came. Up to then, there had been all this messy and difficult negotiation. And as always, the power elite don’t like to negotiate. They are of the “all or nothing” persuasion (given that they are used to getting “all”). And there is little doubt that Germany would like to get get rid of Greece, as though that will get rid of the problem, and even more, as though that will be good for Germany.

Wren-Lewis confirmed what I’ve long thought:

The reason I’ve thought this was so is because people over here repeat that kind of nonsense. In 2011, Thomas Friedman wrote, “Germans are now telling Greeks: ‘We’ll loan you more money, provided that you behave like Germans in how you save, how many hours a week you work, how long a vacation you take, and how consistently you pay your taxes.'” David Brook similarly wrote, “[Nations like Germany and the US] believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.” Far be it for these two over-paid pundits to actually do a little research when they can just base whole articles on stereotypes. Matt Yglesias responded with facts, Are Greeks Lazy? He noted:

Wren-Lewis has an interesting argument to explain why it is that the Germans can believe such patently false things. He says that Germans have never liked Keynsian economics. They prefer marginal economic ideas like expansionary austerity, because it goes along with how they see themselves. But Greece represents a great problem to this. Despite what you will hear on the right, Greece has done almost exactly what the Troika has demanded for the last five years. The result: economic catastrophe with unemployment above 25%. The Germans have only two choices here: either admit that their economic theories are bunk or blame the patient. We know what their choice is.

Being here in the Bay Area, it has been really sad to watch so many people demagogue Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who apparently killed Kathryn Steinle. The event is a tragedy, of course: a young woman is dead. Lopez-Sanchez was an undocumented immigrant. So there has been all kinds of wringing of hands over the fact that San Francisco is a sanctuary city. As if that had anything to do with this crime. And now, Donald Trump has grabbed the case, after having seen what a little undocumented immigrant scapegoating can do to one’s poll numbers in the Republican presidential primary. What’s interesting about this is how it pulls back the veil on what all this talk of “illegal immigration” really means.

Using an incident in which an undocumented immigrant kills someone as indicative of the threat of all undocumented immigrants is the very definition of racism. Now before anyone gets down on me by claiming that this is not a racial category, let me be clear: race itself is a made up concept. Race is a system for categorizing a certain group of people who another group of people want to oppress. Sure, it can be based upon skin color or region, but the truth is that it can be anything. There is no reason why the blue eyed people couldn’t decide that brown eyed people are inferior and should thus be enslaved. So it is meaningless that “undocumented immigrant” or “illegal immigrant” don’t refer to people who look the same.

Or course, the truth is that we all do know that these evil undocumented immigrants look the same. We are talking about Mexicans — or at least Latinos. That’s as clear as the fact that the “welfare queen” was black. (Even though she wasn’t really black.) But it doesn’t much matter. That just makes it easier to instill hatred and fear — the weapons of the demagogue.

What we’ve got here is the real nature of racism. This is why ideas like Twice as Good don’t work. The undocumented community can never be good enough, because people like Donald Trump are more than happy to use someone like Lopez-Sanchez to tar all immigrants. This has been going on for centuries here in America. The only thing that changes is the targets. Except for blacks: that’s a constant; that never changes.

What is so remarkable is that every time racism rears its ugly head, it always has a different justification. No person in polite company will admit that thinking that there is anything wrong with African Americans genetically. But former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan finds things wrong them them culturally. And so it is with Trump, who has no problem with Mexicans — just the awful ones who come here. So really, Trump’s problem is with statistics: we are getting a skewed sample of Mexicans.

Now Trump is demagoguing a second murder. Jamiel Andre Shaw was apparently murdered by Pedro Espinoza. This is a big deal, because Espinoza was the right age back in 2008 to have been a Dreamer. Of course, there was no such program at that point. And as Steve M noted at No More Mister Nice Blog:

Thus: Espinoza would not have qualified for the program. So he wasn’t a Dreamer in fact, and in the alternate universe where Obama became president in 2000, he wouldn’t have been a Dreamer. But the point is not about Espinoza at all. What the conservatives are getting at — and Donald Trump in a big way — is that there must be people who would be Dreamers who will commit murders. Therefore, it’s a terrible program. And since there are undocumented immigrants who commit murders, all of them must be bad.

This is, of course, entirely the wrong way to think about this. If we look at the statistics, we find that undocumented immigrants commit less crime than American citizens. But this doesn’t matter in this discussion. What matters is that Donald Trump has two of “those people” he can use to demagogue this issue. And he’s hardly alone; I haven’t been too happy about Hillary Clinton on the issue of sanctuary cities. It’s all horrible. But maybe we shouldn’t blame the politicians. This kind of simplistic thinking is apparently all that Americans can appreciate.

Also: we’re a bunch of racists.