MAY 9, 2025
Jeffery Zavadil received his PhD from Arizona State University and his MA from Penn State, both in political theory, earning multiple academic awards and fellowships. He currently blogs as tribune 2.0 at www.starsthroughthestorm.blogspot.com and is writing a novel of green political fiction. In addition to teaching college-level political theory, he taught English in South Korea and served as a youth mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters. He currently works for the US State Department and been an intelligence analyst since 1998, first with the US Army Reserve and then the Defense Intelligence Agency.
America's traditional commitment to the so-called work “ethic" strongly and negatively affects our political culture, and is a major barrier to achieving real democracy and a healthy, egalitarian economy and society. It is perhaps the fundamental driver of our stingy, cruel politics: it creates a reflexive aversion to the set of government programs denigrated as "welfare" and vilification of anybody who turns to Continue Reading...
Democratic wins in the 2012 elections have led conservatives to moan, ridiculously, that America is becoming a land of lazy welfare recipients dependent on government: Bill O’Reilly complained that people voted for Obama because he’s supposedly giving them “stuff,” and interpreted this as a rejection of the “traditional” American ethos of the White Protestant Work Ethic. He said, “People feel that Continue Reading...
Environmentalists have long argued that the costs of doing nothing about climate change would far outweigh the costs of averting it -- as one would expect from the degradation of the basic environmental context in which all human activity occurs. Once the biosphere is ruined, so will we be. Doing nothing about climate change is like failing to install ventilation in a factory where corrosive vapors accumulate and then wondering why it costs so Continue Reading...
Protests have erupted in Greece and Spain over austerity measures, which are bound to keep those economies depressed far longer than a large Keynesian booster-shot of government spending would. As liberal economists argue, as history shows, and as common sense indicates, cutting spending for the working class and taxes for the rentier class is not a recipe for economic strength. While Ireland and the other Continue Reading...
Iceland For The Win! Bloomberg Businessweek, hardly a den of Leftist Big Government, reported that Iceland’s approach to economic recovery -- government social programs and legal punishment for the financial elites who drove the country into crisis -- is propelling the country to economic health and widespread prosperity: Iceland holds some key lessons for nations trying to survive bailouts after the island’s approach to its Continue Reading...
There is a strong correlation between the strength of a country’s organized labor movement and the strength of its political Left and whether its government implements policies that improve the quality of life of common, working people. This would seem to be true on its face, but it is something that the American Left too often forgets; our activist and intellectual Left is concerned with identity politics almost to the exclusion of Continue Reading...
This year’s presidential election looks like it will be a close one, which means that turning out the base will be critical to both sides; whoever turns out more of their committed voters is likely to win. Recent polls have been conflicted, but on balance show the two candidates neck-and-neck among likely voters, with Romney slightly ahead by perhaps a percentage point. A Bloomberg poll last week purported to measure a thirteen Continue Reading...
Wisconsin is a canary in a coal mine. The Republican party far outstripped the Democratic party in national fundraising last month, and in the Age of Citizens United the disparity is probably worse than that, since we cannot know how much anonymous non-party money will be spent on behalf of each party - although you can be sure that corporate money will mainly go to the pro-oligarch Republican party. Money has long been a critical Continue Reading...
The recent JP Morgan mess illustrates one of the major dysfunctions of our corrupt political age: an inability to translate obvious solutions into policy. It is often the case, though not always, that there are clear and good solutions to what seem like intractable problems. These solutions could be implemented if they had enough support, but many mental and structural barriers intervene. The mental barriers include obfuscation by Continue Reading...
The mass murder carried out last year by right-wing fanatic Anders Behring Breivik was Norway's worst act of terrorism, killing 77 people, mostly children, with a car bomb in Oslo and an assault on Utoya Island. The brutal attack shocked the normally very peaceful and safe country. But Breivik's current trial has brought out the best in the people of Norway, who have taken a reasoned, united approach, deciding to not indulge their first Continue Reading...
So, to briefly recap where we've been, I’ve argued that the Austerity Agenda is so convincing as an argument, despite austerity’s repeated failure, because it appears to accord so well with people's personal experience. That is, individual experiences with personal debt, which involve cutting back expenses, are metaphorically transferred onto people's thinking about government budgets and debt as well. This occurs despite the fact that there Continue Reading...
The metaphor of the body politic is often a very good one, for both terms of the metaphor share some similarities: both bodies and governments are very complex entities with many interconnected, interdependent parts; failure or damage to one part of a body or a government can ripple throughout the whole and affect distant parts; both bodies and governments can be actors; both individuals and governments take actions such as growing, fighting, Continue Reading...
I would like to pose the question: Why do so many people believe in the Austerity Agenda? As Paul Krugman, David Atkins, Dean Baker, and others continually point out, austerity doesn’t work: bare-bones public budgets fail to make the necessary investments in education, infrastructure, and other public goods that societies need to for a decent quality of life - especially during recessions when the small government model lacks counter-cyclical Continue Reading...
There is currently an effort underway by moderates and conservatives to normalize Mitt Romney and make him seem to be a hard-working contributor to society, just like you and me. This effort is following some traditional patterns for asserting that wealthy capitalists are just exceptionally hard-working, smart, driven folk, that these qualities are the cause of their wealth, and thus justification for it -- which erases birth, connections, luck, Continue Reading...
Most economists, conservatives, the foreign policy establishment, and many moderates assume that there is an identity between capitalism and democracy. You hear it all the time in public discourse: America stands for representative democracy and free market capitalism, and these are assumed to be the two definitive institutions that guarantee modern liberties and economic growth and development. Continue Reading...
