#abundance — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

"We are ardent believers in the power of government to improve people’s lives, and appreciate the frustration with unnecessary delays. In some cases, especially exclusionary zoning and other land use rules in wealthy suburbs, the current legal restrictions are in fact excessive. However, the proper answer to government dysfunction and the authoritarian threat at home and abroad is largely the same today as it was during the New Deal: Rather than railroad the public with top-down directives or megaprojects imposed by Washington and state capitols, we must renew our national commitment to democracy and public participation with ambitious acts of bold economic governance.

The Trump Administration’s ability to move with lightning speed to impose unwanted infrastructure like Alligator Alcatraz on unwilling host communities, militarize cities with masked police and troops, and increase surveillance of Americans makes clear the urgency of balancing the state’s capacity to act decisively with the need for democratic legitimacy. “State capacity” is not inherently good: The what and how of state action matter.

Moreover, in the medium and long term, the tradeoff between state capacity and democratic participation disappears—and even reverses. Public input into government decisions, including in environmental review procedures, not only restrains the worst tendencies of unaccountable state power but also enhances the capacity of the state itself, by providing valuable feedback to state technocrats about what is working and what isn’t. While turning off these feedback channels may generate a sugar high of quick results, doing so, as state capacity liberals propose, dooms effective governance further down the road. Top-down technocracy is brittle, and availing ourselves of shortcuts around the public is ultimately self-defeating."

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/79/rethinking-state-capacity/

#StateCapacity #Bureaucracy #Abundance #DemocraticParticipation #ParticipatoryDemocracy #Democracy

#statecapacity #bureaucracy #abundance #democraticparticipation #participatorydemocracy #democracy

Kyiv Independent Daily Headlines @[email protected] · 2026-01-02 · 13:45 UTC

Friday, January 2, 2026

Welcome back to life: Ukraine's HUR faked death of top anti-Putin Russian commander, claimed Kremlin bounty money -- Russia is targeting civilians: Casualties, outages reported following Russian drone strikes on residential buildings in Odesa -- Malanka: Ukraine's winter ritual of masks, mischief, and good fortune -- The Russians took our dead ones away; 5 things we lost in Pokrovsk ... and more

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/01/friday-january-2-2026/

#abundance #additionalpatriotairdefensesystems #ammunitiondepotsinoccupiedukraine #animals #animalskilled #antiputinrussiancommander

Xamanismo Coletivo @[email protected] · 2025-04-13 · 12:01 UTC

"…#Democrats’ unrequited pursuit of #bipartisanship can lead them to undermine their legislative initiatives. But the [#broadbandpolicy] story #EzraKlein shared absolutely doesn’t support the thrust of #Abundance or the themes of the wider #Abundancemovement.

In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often #corporatepower and its #corruptinginfluence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse."
@davidsirota

https://www.levernews.com/abundance-is-how-dems-lose-to-trump/

#democrats #bipartisanship #broadbandpolicy #ezraklein #abundance #abundancemovement

Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 @[email protected] · 2025-01-05 · 21:43 UTC

"Programs like the New Deal, the GI Bill, or the UK’s vast program of counsel housing showcased Western governments not just as pillars of capitalist values but also as architects of quasi-communistic structures. Initiatives like the Works Progress Administration or the military itself demonstrated state capacity for collective organization on a mass scale.

The postwar boom lifted millions of regular (predominantly white) people into new middle-class lives typified by safety, social dignity, consumerism, creative opportunity, and rest. Advances in automation, building materials, and agriculture supported this transformation, which proved that governments could create powerful systems of public good overnight. By the 1960s, the children of those who had demonstrated this collective power dreamed of applying that capacity on a global scale, regardless of race, gender, and nationality.

Instead, we got nothing but scarcity.

In Acid Communism — a title that winks at our need to re-aestheticize everyday life, elevate our consciousness, and see through the paper tiger of capitalist realism — Fisher points to scarcity and artificial restriction as the primary generator of wealth for those in charge of the postwar order.

Inflation was the buzzword of the 2024 election, which was due in part to real scarcity — as were the various supply chain crisis during the pandemic, which made the richest Americans 40 percent richer. But corporations have also been price-gouging without consequence, creating a form of artificial scarcity that erodes the value of pay increases through inflation. Fisher identifies this pattern as a defining feature of neoliberal capitalism: “A system that generates artificial scarcity in order to produce real scarcity; a system that produces real scarcity in order to generate artificial scarcity.”"

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/mark-fisher-neoliberalism-acid-communism/

#Capitalism #Neoliberalism #LateStageCapitalism #ArtificialScarcity #Abundance #CapitalismRealism