Disinfo alert
Aaron Regunberg and David Sirota wrote all these words: Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill’s passage.
.
The anecdote hit hard — Stewart groaned and cursed as Klein elegantly demonstrated the central thesis of his book, Abundance: Red tape and overregulation, allegedly the outgrowth of progressives’ obsession with process over outcomes, have become primary drivers of scarcity in America.
.
Boosted by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, the soundbite was the kind of fable of inefficient liberal government that Ronald Reagan told throughout the 1980s.
.
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.backup: https://archive.ph/3S3fn
referenced article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/abundance-discourse-ezra-klein-trump-musk-democrats-1235310224/
Liberals’ ‘Abundance’ Discourse Is Good for Donald Trump and Elon Musk
Ezra Klein’s new book, “Abundance,” and an oligarch-funded movement aims to kill off the Democratic Party’s populist uprising.Aaron Regunberg (Rolling Stone)
