" He recently told the White House that he wants to enforce work requirements and set the family income cap at $60,000 according to an Axios report — less than half of the $150,000 cap to receive the full credit the policy included in the American Rescue Plan"
He’s being paid to do this and didn’t know it was his position until the money greased his palm. The reason it is so important to him and the GQP is because Faux News and the rest of the far right propaganda machine will run with it, spinning it as Biden raising taxes on people between the $60K and $150K range and therefore a breach of his campaign promise. It writes itself. “Biden breaks campaign pledge and raises taxes on people making less than $400K just to force socialist reconciliation package down Americans’ throats.” And Manchin is perfectly happy being the catalyst for that narrative so long as his palms are as greased as can be.
Manchin is opposed to anything whereby the benefits go to people instead of business first and is trickled down to people who must fight for the scraps. This is why it was a big mistake to separate the two infrastructure bills.
Therefore, Democrats should be more absolute in telling Manchin and his corporate supporters that if he wants the other bill, he must accept if not all than most of what progressives want on the other bill.
But make no mistake, the big mistake so far Democrats made was agreeing to a two track path because of a combination of the media loving the bipartisan facade for the one bill allowing Manchin to completely obstruct or otherwise sabotage any help that goes directly to people who do not where suits or otherwise look like Joe Manchin.
Manchin maintains that he is ardently opposed to what he calls an “entitlement society,”
When people like Manchin – and all Republicans – speak of an entitlement society, it is not as though they are thoughtful or right about anything. They are just pulling an easy trick for their shriveled wretched souls to feel good. It is the same impulse that drove austerity policies during the Great Recession. Apart from being wrong on multiple levels, it is hollow cowardly tough-guy talk where others get fucked over but you get to feel good about yourself because you are rotten. And it will keep happening, because such creatures as Manchin (or any Republican) will always be a large fraction of any society, even more so in America. Such tough-guy poseurs should be ridiculed every time for being the ignorant cowardly assholes they are.
The fecklessness of people on our side amazes me. Only a Democratic audience would accept this.
Why not say this?:
“Because this is the result of a paper-thin majority this man should be rendered less relevant by voting in more Democrats in the Senate.”
Posters here have–IN FACT–said the same thing many many times, but we place so little faith is people’s ability to connect-the-dots that we assume that Democratic voters will check out.
He’s starting to remind me of Mr. Michael Madsen in “Reservoir Dogs” when he did this little dance with a razor in front of a captive cop tied up in a chair.
Agreed, but nothing passes for the democrats in the senate without his vote. One would hope that voters understand this and elect enough democrats, like John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, to render Manchin’s vote superfluous. Unfortunately the reality is that this mess will demoralize the democratic base and make it more likely that the republicans retake the senate, and then they get NOTHING. People are not educated enough to know what actually gums up the works and vote accordingly
The MSM is doing a job on this too (from Josh…Upper Left Front Page):
["The story here is not complicated, at least in broad strokes. Mid-summer Delta, economic knock-on effects of Delta and finally Afghanistan started sapping Biden’s popularity. Manchin saw that ebbing power and started pumping the brakes on the President’s agenda. This was of a piece with DC insider culture, which Manchin is the ultimate creature of, turning hard on the President. The big reporters changing their view of him and the lobbies sensing weakness.
All political power is unitary and it’s played out over the last two or three months in a very damaging way."]
Yet another reason why I detest the commercial aspect of all of this, especially with children and Climate at stake.
This is a form of the slippery slope argument, which always gets rolled out when the actual proposal basically has no drawbacks to object to. Yes, they say, but if you do this you add to the creation of an “entitlement society,” or to put it another way, the programs by which poverty, privation, bankruptcy, and robbing Peter to pay Paul with food vs. medicine vs. shelter etc. are pretty much not a problem in most advanced nations. We’re rich enough to take the pressure off working folks without taking much at all from the more affluent. But the rich don’t want to pay their fair share, they like the inequity just the way it is since it favors them, and he’s their marionette, dancing clumsily to the tune they call, and we have to watch helplessly because 48 is a smaller number than 50.
But do we have the time? He’s scuttling climate mitigation legislation right now. The nation is being slow-walked into the virtual certainty of an unsustainable future.
Well than the answer to that conundrum is to render the senior senator from West Virginia completely irrelevant by electing sufficient number of democratic senators from States like Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana , and fight like hell for every other seat on the ballot, especially Georgia!
