Note - the people and situations described here are fictional but their experiences are based on real-life in Arizona and West Virginia, two states where I’ve spent significant time.
On an unseasonably warm October morning, an eight-year-old Arizona girl gets ready for school wishing she’d eaten more at supper the night before.
Except, there wasn’t more to eat. She’s hungry as she is every morning because her family simply doesn’t have enough food. The youngster is experiencing what the bureaucrats call “food insecurity.” She just knows she’s hungry and it hurts. The sun is coming up on the walk to the school bus stop with her older brother. Both hope to get to class a little early, so they can get a free breakfast.
She settles into her desk alongside other kids, too many for her overworked and underpaid teacher, who does her best in a state where school funding and teachers salaries consistently ranks among the lowest in the country. The students eat their free lunches then recess outdoors on a hot playground, breathing some of the worst air in the nation.
At the end of the day, she’ll see her mother, who is too exhausted from working two jobs to help with homework. Her Dad is never home because he’s working three jobs to pay rent that’s goes up and up. Affordable housing has become as rare as a rainy day. The couple would like to have another child, but $11,000 a year in daycare is just too much.
They moved to Arizona, buying into the sale of sunshine, job opportunities, endless growth, low taxes, the pull of the West that’s captured generations of migrants looking for better. Well, in truth, here’s what their Arizona looks like:
Different Place, Similar Story
2,000 miles east in West Virginia, a family wishes the rain would stop long enough to let them pump out their basement. Nowadays, it floods so much, they can’t remember when the home didn’t smell musty. That makes them worry about a mold outbreak. This used to happen once in a while. Now massive rains come so often, floods are just life in West Virginia.
Five generations in this town, three in this house, makes leaving not optional. They’re fenced off by the mountains, hollows, and rivers that stratify this tiny state of 1.7 million. They’re held back also by their own submission to the so-called “Coal Culture.”
Sociologist Philip Lewin has studied it and writes that the coal industry “…economically exploited residents and exposed them to severe health risks associated with pollution. Despite causing these problems, the industry enjoys vigorous popular support.”
This extraction society keeps West Virginians in its grip, blasting off its mountaintops, slashing its timber, polluting its rivers and streams, filling its lungs with dust, flooding its homes and on and on. In the 158 years since becoming a state, its people have accepted that living in “West by God Virginia” means a lower quality of life:
The Sell Out Senators
Travel 90 minutes further east from West Virginia’s panhandle and you’re inside another impossible place, the Beltway, where Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin spend their days eviscerating hope. That is, torturing the Build Back Better legislation. The two seem to have forgotten the people back home who need a hand up to a better life.
What could be wrong with creating a more equitable society with extended family leave, free community college, expanded Medicare, lower prescription drug prices, access to better healthcare, measures to deal with climate change, better child nutrition, investments in clean electricity and on and on? These are standards that much of the developed world is meeting.
Better yet, it would all be paid for by wealthy corporations and individuals who’ve made an art of dodging taxes, aided by a Republican Party that claims to be for the working class. This is good legislation long overdue, financed by the wealthy, who until now have been coddled by a country who favors “job creators” over just about anything else. What could be wrong?
Well….
Manchin told reporters a few weeks ago that he didn’t like the cost or the reach of the plan. He cut the $3.5 trillion by more than half,
“Because [this is] what I believe in my heart that we can do, and the needs we have right now, and what we can afford to do without basically changing our society to an entitlement mentality.”
Oh. By “entitlements” and by “changing our society” Manchin means actually giving a hand up to people in the flood zones, actually opening opportunities for them to make a living wage, and not have to worry about childcare, healthcare, and education. Change toward an entitlement society be damned. Why would we NOT want to help our people? We can certainly afford it.
Instead, Manchin will give a break to his buddies in the natural gas and coal industries, the gazillionaires who have demolished West Virginia and who always find a way to avoid protecting our climate and environment.
Manchin blames the giant price tag, frets that it will create “entitlement.”
What an insult. Manchin knows his resistance is truly about protecting his wealthy corporate friends who like their own entitlements, West Virginians be damned.
Sinema can sing that tune too. While the Senator loves to say she’s busy working for Arizona, in truth, she’s been doing the bidding of the rich, actively listening to anyone who will hand her a big check. Sinema’s pay for play approach the past few weeks kept the folks back home away from her. But she was available to lobbyists at a resort in Scottsdale, in California’s wine country, in Paris, of all places. And yes, she still had time to work out to keep up her image as a triathlete.
Was there time in the Senator’s schedule to hear from her working class constituents who would benefit greatly from Build Back Better? A town hall, maybe? Three days ago, I asked her that question, emailed this to one of her staff members. No answer. Which is, in fact, the answer.
Sinema doesn’t feel the need to explain herself to anyone here in Arizona who isn’t handing her cash.
No town halls, no news conferences, no news releases or position papers, not anything to explain why and the hell she’s running the Republican obstructionist playbook. Actually, their actions explain both Sinema and Manchin’s motives: get more for the energy industry and more for the wealthy and hang onto their Senate seats by winning over right leaning Independents.
So, let’s please stop calling Sinema and Manchin “moderates” or “centrists.”
They’re actually tools for the wealthy and corporate classes, whether it be a pharmaceutical company, or well-heeled business owners who don’t want to be taxed, or an energy conglomerate ignoring its role in climate change. The senior senators from Arizona and West Virginia have sold out. The people who voted for them expecting help in their quest for better lives simply don’t matter.
The negotiations roll on with the White House and Congress. “Progress” is made. In the end, there likely will be a Build Back Better investment for Americans. However, whatever sausage is made in the bargaining won’t nearly be as impactful as it SHOULD have been.
This failure will be the legacy of Sinema and Manchin. It will live on in their two states.
West Virginia and Arizona can’t seem to figure out who to send to Washington to effect real change. How’s the world look from down there?