Parts of the Republican party are too of course (hence Grassley) but it's been the target of several successful insurgencies. First the tea party and then Trump. Now it's turning into something completely different.. a cult of personalty for a dictator.

But the intact machine is the reason why the Democrats can not rise to the occasion. Their whole system is one designed to produce dour grey apparatchiks.

Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.

But yeah, Grassley needs to hang up the spurs.

The cruft that has built up (from the 2nd amendment, to the electoral college) over 250ish years is a serious problem.

She's smarter than me.

What you just said is agist.

I don't think the age is the problem. It's corruption.

But yeah allowing Chuck Grassley to run at this young </s> age is pure insanity.

A bigger concern to me is that many of them are old enough that any long-term impacts resulting from bills they pass simply won't happen until they're gone.

And, I would expand that to include more than just Congress - I think major executive offices and the Supreme Court should have an age limit for the very same reason. Anyone in government office whose decisions can have long-lasting effects should be young enough they need to keep that in mind.

Anyone who (statistically) has only a few years left to live and especially anyone past the average life expectancy are welcome to hang around in advisory roles, but they should have limited (if any) power to directly affect future policy because they simply don't have any real skin in the game any longer.

jack ma got a modern day "re-education" tailored to his specific circumstsnces, but as always in these situations the offer is "lead? or gold? your choice!"

Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.

The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.

Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.

Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.

So I guess they’re doing something right.

And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.

The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.

Great, I guess then it won’t be too difficult to name ..say.. five prominent politicians who have made this stance clear?

Take some kind of government procurement, say to buy a truck. The truck ends up being a pretense for all sorts of political things like regional development or righting some perceived historical inequality, doing an environmental study, subsidising some industry that's not doing well. Nobody cares about actually getting the truck.

I can imagine a world where they just buy the best truck and don't try to make it a pretext for wealth redistribution and solving all the worlds problem, but I've never seen it.

Multiply this by every single things the government spends money on (and in canada the oligopolies as well) and you see why nothing happens.

It is reaction to the old situation when interests of a small guy were completely tramped by the big guys - ie. the situation of private profits, public losses. And we can't go back to it.

The first step to move forward is to give everybody, whose interests are negatively impacted by a project, a stake in the project's benefits/profits. Ie. private profits - private losses, and public losses - public profits.

If you're speaking of the Democrats, they've been following the Neoliberalist playbook to the letter for decades: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes. This (the housing crisis) is the direct result of their half-competent technocratic stewardship of the economy. (And let's not spare the actually malevolent Republicans from sharing the blame in turning this land from an actual country into a billionaire's playground).

This "Abundance" movement is to be taken as a rebranding of the same tired and destructive Neoliberalist policies, and nothing else. It is ported by the same old people and politicians that have been slowly running this country to the ground. There is absolutely nothing new to be found in their manifestos: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes.

Housing can either be affordable or an investment vehicle, but not both at the same time. Actual leftists understand this very basic premise, but the astroturfed Abundance "movement" remains blind to it. Left-wing populism is slowly gaining ground in the face of an extremely complacent and ineffective Democratic establishment, and Abundance is a last-ditch effort to sold democratic voters on the same garbage they've been eating since the 1980s.

Their proximate goals are to break the remaining unions and environmental protections we have, in service of the 'free market' which definitely is real and important. They want to give up on 'social issues' like access to reproductive care, medicare for all, and supporting the marginalized.

The speaker list includes the AEI, The Manhatten Institute, R street, Niskanen Center, etc...

American Leftists and Progressives do not hold power and the 'barriers' that abundance claims exist were put in place by those with power, not AOC or Zohran or whatever local cabal they point to in the book. Cherry-picking Austin as their exemplar is worth its own comment, but the book is frustrating across the board.

Klein has missed every moment of late and I expect the trend to continue.

Regardless, if your primary critique on a lawless and deeply authoritarian administration is their 'policy of scarcity', then you have utterly lost the plot. Mussolini made Italians grow and eat rice to induce a feeling of scarcity, there is no doubt, but that is not anyone's primary critique of his tyranny.

https://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140515737/california-turns-to...

immediately comes to mind

You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.