West Virginia Senator, Joe Manchin, said he doesn't want to vote for an "entitlement" society. Manchin is of course, referring to the 3.5 T reconciliation bill stuck in the current Congress. The truth of the matter is that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are standing for a different kind of "E" society. Manchin and Sinema are standing with their Republican cohorts in defense of the Exploitation society.
For Manchin, Senator for West Virginia, the second poorest State in the Union, it really is OK for people to spend their life working crap jobs in poverty; they should be entitled to nothing, per Joe Manchin. The kids of these exploited people shouldn't be offered anything better then the shit lives their parents had, and its plenty OK if West Virginia's seniors die around age 60, rather then the upper 70s to 80s like big chunks of the rest of the country (or at least the wealthier parts of the country).
And then there's Kyrsten Sinema; a ball of lies and bad faith if there ever was one. As we speak, our Senator from Arizona is busy putting wrenches in the gears of her Party's legislative corner stone.
Nobody knows what Sinema's objections are to the 3.5 T reconciliation bill. She's not saying what she objects to. Sinema says she doesn't negotiate in public. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders say she hasn't negotiated with anyone; not her fellow Senators, not the White House, maybe just the Pharma and other lobbyists she seems to meet with frequently.
Sinema has broken most of her campaign promises. She said she supported lowering drug prices during her 2018 Senate run, but is now hinting she she's ready to object to legislation which would allow Medicare the necessary leverage to bargain for lower drug prices. Coming out of the Green Party, Sinema campaigned for Climate Change legislation. As of today, she's hinting that she objects to the climate change legislation contained in the reconciliation bill.
All week long, we've heard the protest of right-wing politicians, Bill Maher, and the mainline media about Sinema being chased and accosted by activists in a bathroom. Given Sinema's astounding bad faith and wholesale lies throughout her Senatorial campaign, she's lucky she didn't get tarred and feathered, as often happened to politicians in the early Republic when they broke faith to the degree Sinema has.
The irony of the 3.5 T reconciliation bill is is that there's nothing new or radical about the bill. There are no new social or economic rights contained in the bill. New social programs will be stringently means-tested, as is always the case with social legislation in the USA. Climate change provisions are anemic and the bill in no way challenges the capitalist economic structure.
Yet the reconciliation bill contains this feature; it's the first piece of legislation in over 50 years which actually aims to improve the lives of poor working people and their children. As such, the reconciliation bill attempts to define the limits of American poverty to which none can sink lower.
Evidently, even this attempt to define the limits of poverty is too much for Republicans and too much for Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and too much for American capitalism. For Manchin, Sinema and the Republican Party, the right to exploit needs to be absolute and without limit. This is the Exploitation Society!
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