The Dishonesty of Joe Manchin

Hurricane Ida and other weather events should make it clear that climate change has arrived as a reality, not just some future threat years away from us.  Infrastructure investment and funding for programs to address climate change, even if inadequately, should be a priority.  Yet we see Sen. Joe Manchin - reportedly the recent recipient of a large corporate lobbying campaign - wants to gut cliamte related portions of the reconciliation bill so that corporations and the ultra wealthy do not need to pay more in taxes even as they amass a larger and larger share of America's overall wealth.   Manchin's duplicity and the greed of his would be benefactors is off the charts.  Two pieces, one in New York Magazine and one in The Week look at Manchin's dishonesty and the threat he poses to all of us. A onpoint line from The Week article sums up where we are:  "The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices."  We all know what happened to many members of the Ancien Régime France (the Russian aristocracy behaved much the same way and ended up losing everything).  First this from New York Magazine:

Manchin’s rationale for demanding a pause is farcical. He cites “runaway inflation” as a reason to wait, when inflation is well below the levels of the 1980s — hardly a time when workers carried home their paychecks in wheelbarrows — and near levels of the mid-aughts. In any case, Biden’s domestic plan would spend roughly one percent of gross domestic product, spread out over a decade and largely, if not entirely, paid for by higher taxes or lower prescription-drug spending, which entirely negates the inflationary effect. (It is only “largely” paid for because Manchin, among other moderate Democrats, objects to many of the tax increases on corporations and the wealthy Biden proposes as pay-fors.)

Manchin seems to be confusing stimulus spending — which jolts the economy into faster levels through deliberate infusions of deficit spending — with permanent social spending increases, whose fiscal and inflationary effect is negated by their financing source.

Even more strangely, Manchin told reporters that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is another predicate for caution — as if ending a $2 trillion war makes it harder, rather than easier, to finance domestic programs.

The greatest danger posed by Manchin’s pause gambit is that it will wreck the carefully negotiated strategy Democratic leaders have crafted. . . . The danger is that this pause sets off a cycle of failure. Wealthy interests are only belatedly mobilizing against the bill now. As Republican lobbyist Liam Donovan notes, the Democrats’ best chance is to move as fast as possible. Delay creates the impression of dysfunction, making Biden and Congress less popular, in turn reducing the popularity of any bill they pass, in turn making Congress more reluctant to support it. Even if Manchin doesn’t want to destroy Biden’s presidency, he may do so by setting off  a vortex of failure he loses the ability to escape.

It is obviously important to take heed of public opinion. But the Biden program does this, combining highly popular tax hikes on the wealthy with highly popular tax credits and broad-based expansions of Medicare and Medicaid. The biggest risk to the bill’s public standing is Manchin and his allies, whose complaints are creating a narrative that the bill is unaffordable Big Government. Manchin himself is generating the public backlash he is warning against.

The piece in The Week looks at Manchin's dishonesty in the context of climate change program funding.  Here are highlights (note how it ends):

There has been a recent change in verb tense with respect to climate change: What was once the future is now the present. Louisiana just got hammered by a hurricane that — in what is becoming a signature characteristic of a warming climate — strengthened very rapidly thanks to super-hot temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, giving residents barely enough time to evacuate. The remnants of that hurricane then caused flooding all the way from Louisiana to Maine. Philadelphia saw the worst flooding since 1869. The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood warning for New York City in its history. At time of writing, at least 45 people were confirmed dead across the Northeast.

I find it hard to grapple with this reality. Following the science, I have been predicting this kind of thing for many years. But now that climate change is truly undeniably here, and highly unusual if not totally unprecedented weather disasters are hitting on a weekly basis, it is still somehow shocking. I suppose arid scientific predictions will always feel a lot different than one's own city being heavily flooded. It's a reaction that Americans — in particular Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who recently launched a broadside against Democrats' $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which contains a great deal of climate policy — need to get over soon.

Some form of denial must be part of the reason why Manchin is now raising questions about the reconciliation bill, not to mention the giant corporate lobbying campaign that undoubtedly explains his sudden change of heart. The reconciliation bill would — in large part because Manchin himself insisted that it can't raise the deficit — raise taxes on corporations, people making high incomes, and especially wealthy heirs. Obviously corporate interests and the oligarch class don't want that, because no amount of money is ever enough for them.

Very few people are so evil that they can willfully consign their own society to catastrophe for the sake of avoiding a fairly modest tax increase. It's just the common behavior of ultra-privileged humans: When faced with a situation requiring any sacrifice, they make up excuses why it shouldn't have to happen. And they'll keep denying they could be hit by disaster — like a wildly unusual tornado ripping up a wealthy New Jersey suburb — until the rising seas close over their heads.

Manchin is throwing up chaff to try to trim down the bill, if not destroy it completely. It is a duplicitous public relations campaign to protect the bottom lines of his rich friends.

More blinkered, self-defeating selfishness would be hard to imagine. As the dire flooding across the eastern U.S. showed this week, American infrastructure is already desperately in need of upgrades just to deal with the weather disasters happening now, let alone those that will happen if we continue to procrastinate.

Manchin would not only core out most of Biden's climate policy, but also risk blowing up global climate negotiations, which are set to resume soon. If the worst historical emitter can't show that it is at least making some effort, other nations could easily conclude that doing their part would be pointless.

The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices. Faced with this despicable betrayal of President Biden and the Democratic Party, it is therefore critical for the party left in the House and Senate to continue to demand that there be no bipartisan infrastructure bill unless reconciliation gets through as well. Even the climate policy in there is seriously inadequate compared to the scale of the problem — and this package is very likely the only reform that is getting passed until 2030 at the earliest.

If it's blocked, Washington should consider what usually happens when political elites are unable to fix disintegrating conditions around them: revolution.