The article “Democrats appear Resigned to Shelve Social Spending Bill until 2022” (NYT 12/16) points to [WV Senator] Manchin’s supposed current holdout on the Build Back Better legislation’s extension of monthly support to families with children, citing his concerns over costs and “exacerbating inflation.”
How dare he, when he has continued to push for billions in subsidies to aging nuclear reactors and other false climate solutions as well as billions more for the fossil fuel industry itself within this same legislation and the prior Infrastructure Bill?
Nor did we hear him voicing such concerns when he voted for the $778 billion military budget for next year.
While the NY Times has covered fossil fuel donations and links to his own fossil fuel fortunes, there has been little expose on how aging nuclear power plants like Exelon and others gave maximum donations to his campaign coffers to secure $6 billion in subsidies in the Infrastructure Bill, and are now back at the public trough with his help trying to secure an additionally redundant $35 billion in Build Back Better. Those funds would be a perfect place for cuts if he was worried about costs along with all of the other false climate solutions and fossil fuel subsidies he is proposing.
Even wiser would be shifting such funds to true clean energy solutions that would actually create jobs and address the climate crisis in ways nuclear does not. These same nuclear companies we have been subsidizing have CUT not created more jobs, and in their life cycle are as carbon intensive as fossil fuels. Such hypocrisy and corruption.
