There appear to be a couple of big hurdles for Sen. Joe Manchin to agree to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Both highlight Manchin’s incredible selfishness and corruption. One big one is the key policy that has done more to reduce child poverty and hunger than any policy in years. The expanded Child Tax Credit, included in pandemic relief, builds on an existing program: the government helping to subsidize parents with tax relief. What’s different now is that the payments are a bit more generous, and are available to more people, and have been coming every month rather than with the annual tax refund.
As Laura Clawson wrote, all of the evidence is in to show what that money is actually doing: “According to the Census data, 59% of families bought food with the money, 52% made utility payments, 45% paid the rent or the mortgage, 44% bought clothing, and 40% paid education costs.” Nearly all families—nine out of 10—reported using the monthly help for those essential purposes. Not illegal drugs, as Manchin (who apparently still lives rhetorically in 1983) believes.
But it’s not just the idea that maybe some people who don’t deserve to feed their children would get help keeping Manchin from signing on—it’s his coziness with King Coal and the very deep pockets of the industry’s executives who have lobbied him extensively on opposing this bill. Manchin leads among all senators, Democrat or Republican, for fossil fuel industry campaign donations. That’s who he hangs out with, but his own personal bank account is padded regularly from the blind trust he holds: $500,000 to $1 million, according to last year’s disclosure forms. That trust holds Enersystems, a Manchin family-owned business that sells the remnants of coal from abandoned mines to one of the state’s coal-burning and big polluting power plants.
He’s been fighting aspects of the $555 billion climate measures included in the bill for months because he has a very personal stake in keeping coal alive. The game he’s played here has been to keep negotiating with and stringing along Senate Democratic colleagues, potentially with the end goal of whittling the bill down to nothing. Manchin is going to help the executives and mine owners wring every last dollar out of the dying industry, and the hell with the workers they’re exploiting. That’s sure as hell what the coal miners think.
The United Mine Workers are telling Manchin it’s time he work for them and support this bill. “We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families and their communities,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in a statement Monday. They see a future in which their jobs have vanished, and want help now. For example, Build Back Better includes tax incentives—which the industry is fighting—to encourage manufacturers to build new facilities at the coal site and hire unemployed miners.
With Manchin’s opposition, “the potential for those jobs is significantly threatened,” Roberts said. Phil Smith, the union’s chief lobbyist, highlighted this provision in an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. He explained that the bill would “provide a better chance of helping workers who will be dislocated by our transition to a decarbonized future—a dislocation that will likely continue either way—than not passing BBB will.”
The bill “provides the potential for good jobs that our members who have been dislocated can get,” Smith said, adding that about 45,000 coal mining jobs have been lost in the past decade. “We’re likely to lose coal jobs whether or not this bill passes,” Smith told Sargent. “If that’s the case, let’s figure out a way to provide as many jobs as possible for those who are going to lose.” He said that the tax incentives in Build Back Better provide a “pathway to do that.”
In addition to the job replacement possibilities the bill offers for coal miners, there’s an extension of a fee coal companies have to pay to fund benefits for miners with black lung. “But now that fee will be cut in half, further shifting the burden of paying these benefits away from the coal companies and on to taxpayers,” Roberts said in the United Mine Workers of America’s statement. He called on the senator to remember the “long and friendly relationship” he’s had with the union.
“We remain grateful for his hard work to preserve the pensions and health care of our retirees across the nation, including thousands in West Virginia,” Roberts said. “He has been at our side as we have worked to preserve coal miners’ jobs in a changing energy marketplace and we appreciate that very much.”
Since the families of about 346,000 children in West Virginia are eligible for the expanded tax credit, there are plenty of miners’ families who have been relying on that funding, too. Extrapolating from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, West Virginia families have been using the funds like families all over the country. In fact, more West Virginia families have spent it on food and clothing—about 66%—than the nation as a whole at about 59%. While about 41% of families nationally used it to pay all or part of their housing costs, 48% of West Virginia’s families used it to stay housed.
It’s not just Build Back Better that the union is trying to get Manchin to support, by the way. “I also want to reiterate our support for the passage of voting rights legislation as soon as possible, and strongly encourage Senator Manchin and every other Senator to be prepared to do whatever it takes to accomplish that,” Roberts said in the statement. “Anti-democracy legislators and their allies are working every day to roll back the right to vote in America. Failure by the Senate to stand up to that is unacceptable and a dereliction of their duty to the Constitution.”
The mine workers are making it clear to Manchin: He’s turning his back on them right now, and they don’t appreciate it.
As Laura Clawson wrote, all of the evidence is in to show what that money is actually doing: “According to the Census data, 59% of families bought food with the money, 52% made utility payments, 45% paid the rent or the mortgage, 44% bought clothing, and 40% paid education costs.” Nearly all families—nine out of 10—reported using the monthly help for those essential purposes. Not illegal drugs, as Manchin (who apparently still lives rhetorically in 1983) believes.
But it’s not just the idea that maybe some people who don’t deserve to feed their children would get help keeping Manchin from signing on—it’s his coziness with King Coal and the very deep pockets of the industry’s executives who have lobbied him extensively on opposing this bill. Manchin leads among all senators, Democrat or Republican, for fossil fuel industry campaign donations. That’s who he hangs out with, but his own personal bank account is padded regularly from the blind trust he holds: $500,000 to $1 million, according to last year’s disclosure forms. That trust holds Enersystems, a Manchin family-owned business that sells the remnants of coal from abandoned mines to one of the state’s coal-burning and big polluting power plants.
He’s been fighting aspects of the $555 billion climate measures included in the bill for months because he has a very personal stake in keeping coal alive. The game he’s played here has been to keep negotiating with and stringing along Senate Democratic colleagues, potentially with the end goal of whittling the bill down to nothing. Manchin is going to help the executives and mine owners wring every last dollar out of the dying industry, and the hell with the workers they’re exploiting. That’s sure as hell what the coal miners think.
The United Mine Workers are telling Manchin it’s time he work for them and support this bill. “We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families and their communities,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in a statement Monday. They see a future in which their jobs have vanished, and want help now. For example, Build Back Better includes tax incentives—which the industry is fighting—to encourage manufacturers to build new facilities at the coal site and hire unemployed miners.
With Manchin’s opposition, “the potential for those jobs is significantly threatened,” Roberts said. Phil Smith, the union’s chief lobbyist, highlighted this provision in an interview with The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. He explained that the bill would “provide a better chance of helping workers who will be dislocated by our transition to a decarbonized future—a dislocation that will likely continue either way—than not passing BBB will.”
The bill “provides the potential for good jobs that our members who have been dislocated can get,” Smith said, adding that about 45,000 coal mining jobs have been lost in the past decade. “We’re likely to lose coal jobs whether or not this bill passes,” Smith told Sargent. “If that’s the case, let’s figure out a way to provide as many jobs as possible for those who are going to lose.” He said that the tax incentives in Build Back Better provide a “pathway to do that.”
In addition to the job replacement possibilities the bill offers for coal miners, there’s an extension of a fee coal companies have to pay to fund benefits for miners with black lung. “But now that fee will be cut in half, further shifting the burden of paying these benefits away from the coal companies and on to taxpayers,” Roberts said in the United Mine Workers of America’s statement. He called on the senator to remember the “long and friendly relationship” he’s had with the union.
“We remain grateful for his hard work to preserve the pensions and health care of our retirees across the nation, including thousands in West Virginia,” Roberts said. “He has been at our side as we have worked to preserve coal miners’ jobs in a changing energy marketplace and we appreciate that very much.”
Since the families of about 346,000 children in West Virginia are eligible for the expanded tax credit, there are plenty of miners’ families who have been relying on that funding, too. Extrapolating from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, West Virginia families have been using the funds like families all over the country. In fact, more West Virginia families have spent it on food and clothing—about 66%—than the nation as a whole at about 59%. While about 41% of families nationally used it to pay all or part of their housing costs, 48% of West Virginia’s families used it to stay housed.
It’s not just Build Back Better that the union is trying to get Manchin to support, by the way. “I also want to reiterate our support for the passage of voting rights legislation as soon as possible, and strongly encourage Senator Manchin and every other Senator to be prepared to do whatever it takes to accomplish that,” Roberts said in the statement. “Anti-democracy legislators and their allies are working every day to roll back the right to vote in America. Failure by the Senate to stand up to that is unacceptable and a dereliction of their duty to the Constitution.”
The mine workers are making it clear to Manchin: He’s turning his back on them right now, and they don’t appreciate it.