As if the Democrats don’t have
enough of a mess to clean-up, DINO Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia threw a
monkey wrench into the proceedings by opposing any attempt to pass a stimulus
bill by budget reconciliation, claiming that he would only support a “bipartisan”
bill, which as we have seen would reduce the Biden administration’s proposal
from $1.9 trillion to $600 billion. Manchin claims he will only support
“targeted” measures, which of course is hard to pin down, since he is only
“for” whatever a greatly reduced proposal can fit. He does oppose a $15 federal
minimum wage, which would still be below the median income in this country;
“conservatives” don’t really care about working people after all, preferring to
keep them in ignorance. I do agree with him on one detail, however: the income
level for those receiving a full stimulus check should be reduced to $50,000
for individuals, and I am frankly not certain that households earning up to
$100,000 are “needy” enough to receive the equivalent of two full individual
checks.
But Manchin’s claim to desire “bipartisanship” flies in
the face of everything we have seen coming from the Republican side, which is
generally “our way or the highway.” Every time Democratic leadership had a
“heart-to-heart” with Donald Trump, it always seemed to end minutes later with
recriminations and insults. Manchin has generally voted with the Democratic caucus,
since Republicans held sway in the Senate and it didn’t really matter how he
voted since the way he truly leaned ideologically would win out anyways. But
now with the Senate split 50-50, the way he votes now really “matters,” at
least in his mind to his constituents, especially those working in the coal mining
sector.
Manchin opposed Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas elimination
rules because they allegedly hurt coal mining jobs, but these jobs have been on
the decrease for decades, largely due to the increased use of natural gas and
“green” energy. Trump talked big about “saving” coal mining jobs; but a sudden
spike in jobs in 2017 was not due to any Trump policy, but from global market
forces—particularly when Australia’s coal production was stunted by Tropical Cyclone
Debbie. Overall improvement in jobs in West Virginia was no different from that
of the rest of the country, and had nothing to do with Trump’s “policies” or
the Republican tax cut. But since March when Covid-19 stuck with a vengeance
and Trump’s failure to adequately combat it, West Virginia has seen its
fortunes drop dramatically. According to a Washington
Post story,
West Virginia’s backslide is a telling example of how devastating this
recession has been on people who cannot work from home. Nationwide, labor force
participation among Americans without college degrees has sunk to its lowest
point on record during this recession. And that’s especially true in West
Virginia, where nearly 80 percent of the workforce lacks four-year college
degrees.
West Virginia’s failure to
diversify its natural resource-dominated economy allowed it to be susceptible
to downturns in market forces. High paying jobs for pipelines being built—and when
they were completed, then what? What job growth there was in the coal and natural gas industries
was already starting to decline by 2019, and since the pandemic hit, there are
now 6,400 fewer coal mining jobs than when Trump first took office. People in
the state still believed that everything would be “right” again if Trump was
reelected, but the reality was that Trump talked big but he had long since lost
interest in what was going on there.
While jobs related to oil and natural gas was
peaking, A Wall Street Journal story
in an October, 2019 pointedly observed that things were not going so well in
coal mining communities:
He and his wife, Missy Adkins, are
considering leaving the state altogether and heading to Tennessee or North
Carolina—if they can get someone to buy the old coal camp house they spent
years and thousands of dollars updating in the narrow hollow where they live.
“Everywhere you looked it was coal trucks. It’s whittled down to almost
nothing,” said Mr. Adkins, 50 years old, standing in his yard next to a
flowerbed of withering mums. “It’s only going to get worse.”
Donald Trump carried coal communities like this one in 2016, with
promises to boost what he calls “clean, beautiful coal.” That popularity
doesn’t seem to be waning, even as coalfields around the country are shedding
jobs again after an uptick in the past two years. At the same time, Mr. Adkins
and others in Logan County aren’t looking to next year’s election to rescue an
industry hurt by the closure of coal-fired power plants, and more recently by
slowing global demand and weak prices for coal used to make steel.
Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said Mr.
Trump had restored pride to the state’s coalfields but that companies are
responding to the market. “If you’re not getting enough money to cover the cost
of production, you’ve got to make some changes,” he said. “That’s what’s
occurring now.”
In other words, Trump actually did
more to hurt people in the coal industry because of his failure to respond to the
pandemic than he ever actually did to help them—the industry just acted on its
own. As for restoring “pride,” let’s recall what Trump said in a 1990 Playboy interview: “I like the challenge
and tell the story of the coal miner’s son. The coal miner gets black-lung disease,
his son gets it, then his son. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would
have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or
whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’”
Manchin says he wants to “help” the people of his state, but in reality he is playing to their paranoia, grievances and prejudices like any “good” Republican would, because that is the only card for them to play when the economy goes either north or south. If he really wanted to “help” the people of his state, he would try to educate them about the benefits of the Biden stimulus package, but he will not do that because in order to be elected as a Democrat he feels he has to walk a tightrope—meaning he doesn’t actually believe in anything. Bernie Sanders is considered “radical left” as was the late senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, but they were not hurt politically in their states because their uncompromising “populist” stands seemed just as “credible” to grievance voters as any play to white nationalism—which is why Sanders would likely have beaten Trump in 2016, because he was just a different side of the same coin, and morally and ethically easier for the conscience to accept.
Manchin obviously doesn’t understand that. In 2016 there were rumors going about that Manchin would switch parties if there was 50-50 tie in the Senate. Manchin subsequently denied he had any such intention, claiming that he was a “West Virginia Democrat," meaning a “moderate conservative.” But it points to the belief that he is closer to Republicans ideologically than most of his Democratic colleagues. One can speculate if his latest pronouncements are meant simply to play to his “base” or he actually means to get his way or switch parties—which if he actually does vote against the Biden stimulus package he might as well actually be “caucusing” with the Republicans.
The Democratic leadership obviously must tread carefully
with Manchin, but on the other hand, Manchin is not being a “loyal” party
member by being hypocritical about what Republicans mean when they talk about “bipartisanship,” and the hardships facing the people of his own state.
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