You gotta admire the commitment to losing by silencing voices of disenfranchised and marginalized people.

Stop sabotaging progressives. Stop silencing Black and Brown women. https://t.co/CvDsAZfwfh

— Sema 🌙🌹 (@The0nlySema) January 12, 2022

Ok well I'm warning "centrists" to back off. Write an article about that. Who do they think is in the white house and what do they think he is doing? You have your entire philosophy in place for the world to see and they don't like it! Own it! https://t.co/Y0BEM9g8n1

— Secular Talk🎙 (@KyleKulinski) January 12, 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/12/west-virginians-child-tax-credits-manchin

West Virginians scramble to get by after Manchin kills child tax credits

Without those monthly checks 50,000 children in the state the centrist senator represents could sink into deep poverty

Last fall, Krista Greene missed a week of work after her sons were exposed to Covid and could not return to school. Greene, who manages a tutoring center and yoga studio in Charleston, West Virginia, does not receive any paid time off. Normally, she would have been worried about this loss of income. But the Greene family’s budget had recently become a little more flexible, thanks to the monthly child tax credit payments that began in July 2021.

“The first thing I said to my husband was, ‘The Biden bucks are coming next week, so I won’t miss any bills,’” Greene said.

It was nice while it lasted.

Families probably received their final monthly payments in December after Congress failed to pass the Build Back Better Act. The legislation, the cornerstone of the Biden administration’s domestic policy, would have made the payments permanent. But one Democrat stood in the way – Greene’s senator, Joe Manchin.

A week before Christmas, Manchin appeared on Fox & Friends and announced he would not vote for the Build Back Better Act, effectively poleaxing Biden’s plans in a Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go back home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin said in a press release after the television appearance. “Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia and I cannot vote to move forward on this mammoth piece of legislation.”

– 60% of inflation is going to corporate profits (they use it as an excuse to Jack up prices)
– monopolies cause it
– the supply chain is causing it

Literally none of this has to do with government spending. Spending on working people is good and we should do more of it https://t.co/yPD26M5WzM

— Secular Talk🎙 (@KyleKulinski) January 12, 2022

I stand in solidarity with @NYMagUnion workers. Management must come to the table and agree to a fair contract now. https://t.co/mfDkDNIFf0

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 12, 2022

if you’re a moderate in the democratic party, 2021 played out exactly like you wanted when only infrastructure passed congress after the rescue plan. so how do you answer for low approval ratings for the president and dimming prospects for the party in november?

— mike casca (@cascamike) January 12, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/biden-student-loan-debt-cancellation/621224/

As senator elizabeth warren sees it, President Joe Biden can solve a lot of problems—for millions of Americans financially, and for himself politically—with a single move that neither Senator Joe Manchin nor any Republican in Congress could veto. The president, she says, should unilaterally wipe out up to $50,000 in student-loan debt for every federal borrower in the country.

Warren has been beating this drum for just about two years, ever since she unveiled the proposal in a bid to outflank her rivals—including Biden—in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. The senator from Massachusetts has won influential converts to her cause over the past year, most notably Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But Biden is not one of them. “I will not make that happen,” he bluntly told a questioner asking about the proposal at a town hall a few weeks after he took office.

The president’s political fortunes are very different now than they were then. His ambitious social-spending agenda, already chopped in half, has stalled in the Senate. Biden’s approval ratings have fallen to the low 40s, and with the pandemic raging and Congress bickering, his window for mounting a comeback in time to save his party’s majorities in the midterm elections is shrinking. In Biden’s struggles, progressives like Warren see an opportunity to make a fresh case for action that would prove popular with voters whom Democrats need to turn out this fall.

“I believe the president should cancel student-loan debt because it is the right thing to do for people who have debt and the right thing to do in our economy,” Warren told me by phone last week, having recovered from a mild December bout (“a day and a half of the flu and I was done,” as she described it) of COVID-19. “But,” she added, “even someone who disagreed with me should take a very serious look at the polling data right now.”

Since the spring, Biden has lost some support on the left and even more among independents, but no group of Americans has soured faster on the president than younger voters, according to a recent analysis of polling data by The Economist. That same cohort—Gen Zers and Millennials—is where support for student-debt forgiveness is strongest, surveys have also shown. “One of the hardest things for an elected official to do is demonstrate to people that they can count on that elected official to be on their side,” Warren said. “Canceling student-loan debt for more than 40 million Americans would persuade a lot of young people that this president is in the fight for them.”

Borrowers have not had to make student-loan payments for nearly two years because of the pandemic, thanks to a pause first enacted by Congress in the 2020 CARES Act and then extended multiple times, first by President Donald Trump and then by Biden. But the scale of what Warren and other progressives are proposing is something else entirely: Blanket, permanent loan forgiveness would alter the long-term finances of individual Americans more directly than any other single unilateral action by a president. The estimated $1.7 trillion in total outstanding student-loan debt is roughly the cost of the Build Back Better Act that Biden is trying to push through Congress. Canceling up to $50,000 per borrower would wipe away about $1 trillion of that debt. If left untouched by the courts, the president’s action would, at the expense of ballooning federal deficits, eliminate entirely and forever the student loans that 80 percent of the nation’s borrowers currently owe to the government.

To its backers, mass debt forgiveness is almost a no-brainer. Many see it as both a bold political stroke and a needed moral corrective that would free more than 40 million middle- and working-class Americans from burdens imposed by rapacious lenders during their first moments of adulthood. “We were preyed upon,” Representative Jamaal Bowman told me. “We didn’t know any better. We weren’t aware of how it all worked.” Bowman, 45, is a former schoolteacher and principal now serving his first House term, representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County in New York. He told me that he and his wife together have more than $100,000 in outstanding debt. “That number is so high, I’m embarrassed to say it aloud,” Bowman said.

Advocates for the proposal have also cast debt cancellation as a way to close the racial wealth gap, because Black borrowers are more likely to struggle repaying loans. “It’s an economic-justice issue. It is a racial-justice issue. It is an intergenerational issue,” Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts told me. Although student debt is frequently associated with young people, many borrowers carry it to middle age and beyond, or struggle to repay loans they took out on behalf of their children or grandchildren. Pressley cited statistics showing that women carry two-thirds of all student debt and that Black women carry 20 percent more than their white peers. “Coming out of the reckoning on racial injustice, which I hope we’re still very much in, the only receipts that matter are budgets and policies. This is an opportunity to actualize racial justice with the stroke of a pen.”

Thank you @RepJayapal for leading the fight in Congress to protect Medicare from the dangerous Direct Contracting program. Today, 54 members of Congress sent a letter to HHS @SecBecerra demanding an end to this stealth attempt to privatize Medicare.https://t.co/LHVYr7w2Cs

— Physicians for a National Health Program (@PNHP) January 5, 2022