These three are well beyond my ability to debate but I don’t take anyone at face value. That said, some pretty amazing ideas being floated. It’s been frustrating to watch the Obama voters go back into apathy and worse 8 million Biden voters stay home when they could have stopped Trump. And, maybe worser, people wringing their hands and asking where all the Democrats are
It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is in disarray. Power is being ceded to non-Trump Republicans. The thought of a third party is mostly a joke. Anyway, I’m too negative to make notes on this right now.
1 Like
45:20 link in the description. Why do I still believe in Democrats? Because they have the right vision. We opened the door to Trump by choosing over regulation.
In the first section Ezra explains how the problem is not unelected bureaucrats, it’s elected officials making complicated processes.
Second key takeaway, Democrats have to own reform. 57:05 link. Then at 1:09:40, “they’re so afraid of waste fraud and abuse that they build into the system, waste fraud and abuse”
Ezra klein explains how build back better was a sham
Afraid I’m going to have to do a retraction on this one. Or at least look into it further before I go spouting off.
This analysis is from facebook, so take it for what it’s worth, or read more, but it’s more logical, and not that hard to fact check. In a nutshell, Republicans packed the program with steps to make it difficult for the broadband initiative to compete with the mega-rich-broadband companies. Same old story with a new twist.
There was just one problem with the story’s premise: It is demonstrably false.
The Kafkaesque nature of Biden’s broadband application process was not, in fact, the result of “everything-bagel liberalism,” pressure from doctrinaire leftists, or Democratic politicians’ penchant for governing through checklists, which Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson, frame in Abundance as the key obstacles to housing security, decarbonization, and other critical 21st century needs.
Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes “affordable” rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out.
There are lessons to draw from this failure — for instance, Democrats’ unrequited pursuit of bipartisanship can lead them to undermine their legislative initiatives. But the story Klein shared absolutely doesn’t support the thrust of Abundance or the themes of the wider Abundance movement.
In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often corporate power and its corrupting influence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse.
