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      Butt of the joke: Bette Midler fires back at West Virginia governor Jim Justice

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      Butt of the joke: Bette Midler fires back at West Virginia governor Jim JusticeActor and activist says ‘dog’s ass would make a better governor’ after State of the State speech stunt goes viral Bette Midler had harsh words for the governor of West Virginia after he showed his dog’s backside at the end of his State of the State speech, in a bizarre rejoinder to the actor, singer and activist.Billionaire Republican backer donates to Manchin after he killed key Biden billRead moreResponding on Thursday to a tweet in which Midler called West Virginia “poor, illiterate and strung out”, the Republican Jim Justice said she could kiss his dog’s “hiney”.On Friday, Midler retweeted a picture of the stunt with the caption: “Here we can see a dog’s asshole. Right next to it is the butt of Jim Justice’s dog.”Midler also tweeted: “Here are the state rankings of all the areas and agencies for which the so-called ‘governor’ of West Virginia, Jim Justice, is responsible. Judging from these rankings, I’d say his dog’s ass would make a better governor than him!”The graphic, from US News and World Report, showed West Virginia scoring poorly in healthcare, education, economy and other categories and 47th overall among the 50 US states. The state tends to score poorly in such rankings.Justice, 70, a coalmining magnate who was elected as a Democrat, is an eccentric figure who often uses his English bulldog, Babydog, as a political prop. His State of the State speech, at the capitol in Charleston, was delayed after he contracted Covid-19.Midler angered the governor with comments in December that were prompted by her own anger towards the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.Manchin, a Democrat, that month sank Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan. This month, he stood in the way of Senate reform to facilitate the passage of voting rights protections.“What Joe Manchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible,” Midler tweeted.“He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.”She later apologised to “the good people” of West Virginia.On Thursday, Justice chose to end an address in which he said too many people “doubted” West Virginians and “told every bad joke in the world about us” by lifting up his pet and flashing its bottom to the cameras and crowd.“Babydog tells Bette Midler and all those out there: Kiss her hiney,” he said as the crowd applauded. Attendees included lawmakers, state supreme court justices and agency heads. Members of a high school girl’s basketball team Justice coaches were present in the gallery.Shawn Fluharty, a Democratic state delegate, said: “The governor brought his Babydog and pony show to the State of the State and pulled this stunt as some bold statement.“It was nothing short of embarrassing and beneath the office. Jim Justice habitually lowers the bar of our state. They don’t laugh with us, but at us.”TopicsBette MidlerWest VirginiaRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateBiden administrationUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More

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

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      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 povertyLast 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.”The announcement came after months of negotiations between Manchin and the White House, some of which involved the child tax credit. Manchin wanted to limit the credit to families making $60,000 or less annually. He has also said he will not support a permanent credit unless it includes a work requirement.The child tax credit was one of a number of Biden proposals that were surprisingly popular in the deeply Republican state of West Virginia – not least because Manchin’s constituents have benefited from it more than most.Ninety-three per cent of West Virginia children – about 346,000 in all – qualified for the credit payments. That extra $250 to $300 per child a month lifted about 50,000 of those children above the poverty line, according to the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy (WVCBP).Now that the credits have vanished, so will those advancements. The timing could not be worse. Like the rest of the country, West Virginia is suffering a surge in inflation unseen in decades, a surge that disproportionately affects the poor.“The checks aren’t coming on,” said the WVCBP executive director, Kelly Allen. “Fifty thousand kids in West Virginia are at risk are dropping into deep poverty.”America got more expensive in 2021. Who is really paying the price? – a visual explainerRead moreQueentia Ellis is a single mother with three daughters, ages seven, three and two. For a while, she supported her family with a minimum wage job but found she was always coming up short. “It’s impossible to take care of three kids on a minimum wage job,” Ellis said.She decided to get a college education. The monthly child tax credit payments, along with child support and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), allowed her to stay home with her kids while taking classes full-time.“It helped me pay my bills and buy things for my kids that they needed,” said Ellis, who hopes to someday start her own business.With the monthly payments ended, Ellis said she will probably have to return to a minimum-wage job, which means it will take longer to complete her college degree. She will also have to find childcare for her daughters, which will cost up to $100 a month for each child, even with help from a state childcare assistance program.“That takes a toll on the income, especially if you’re working an hourly minimum wage job,” Ellis said. “I have to figure out what and how I’m going to go about making things possible. But where there’s a will there’s a way.”After announcing he would not support the Build Back Better Act, reports surfaced that Manchin was concerned parents were using the child tax credit to buy drugs.Bar chart showing most Child Tax Credit recipients spent their money on food, rent/mortgage and utilities.But the evidence shows that in West Virginia and across the country the money was spent on necessities – 91% of low-income families used the money for basic needs like rent, groceries, school supplies and medicine, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis of US census data.“Families know what they need. In some cases, that’s putting food on the tables. In some cases, that’s paying rent. In some cases, it’s allowing mom to stay home for a few months, or paying for childcare because mom needs to go to work,” Allen of the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy said.Hunter Starks is a single parent with a four-year-old daughter. Theypreviously worked as a social worker, while also working part-time as a political organizer, often logging more than 50 hours in a week.But things changed in 2021.“I’ve worked since I was 15, usually multiple jobs. And I’ve never had a hard time finding work like I did this year,” they said.Starks had difficulty finding employment because they could only take jobs with hours that aligned with their child’s daycare hours.“Service jobs and fast food don’t need folks during those hours,” they said.Starks said the $300 child tax credit payments were “the difference between getting by or not”.“And I still had to ask multiple folks for help,” Starks said.Starks said January’s budget will be tight without the tax credit payment, “but it’s been tight”.They will soon start a new full-time job as a paralegal, in addition to their part-time organizing work. While that will help their bank account, Starks said it will mean less time with their daughter.“I kind of hate the fact that I’m going to go back to working multiple jobs and spending less time with my daughter,” they said. “Even though I’ve struggled financially, I’ve appreciated having that time with her.”While Manchin has balked at the child tax credit’s price tag – about $100bn a year – the credits pumped $470m into West Virginia between July and December 2021 alone. Allen said that money was probably immediately reinvested in the state’s economy, since low- and middle-income families typically spend tax refunds as soon as they receive them.Yoga studio manager Krista Greene said that’s why it was so important the payments arrived monthly instead of once a year, at tax time.“It became part of your monthly income,” she said. “If a hospital bill comes around, I can’t say, ‘Can you wait four or five months until I get my income tax?’”Allen also said the money would have long-term positive effects on the state’s economy as well. Living in poverty has a deleterious impact on children’s health, education and future earnings.“If kids are lifted out of poverty and have access to more economic security, it pays for itself in the long term,” Allen said.Manchin’s office declined the Guardian’s request for comment.TopicsWest VirginiaJoe ManchinChildcareChildrenEconomicsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the Democrats | Mark Blyth

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      How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the DemocratsMark BlythJoe Manchin torpedoed his party’s key bill for the same reason Italy protected the sparkling wine – the local growth model If you get a bad taste in your mouth when you hear the name Joe Manchin – the fossil fuel industry-backed senator from West Virginia who torpedoed his own party’s “Build Back Better” bill just before Christmas – you might want to reach for a glass of something to wash it away.Given that it’s New Year’s Eve, there’s a reasonable chance you’re guzzling a glass of prosecco, which now accounts for just under half of all bubbly drunk globally. While this may take the taste away momentarily, there’s also an odd thing about prosecco I want you to consider. How that glass of Italian bubbly came to be in your hand gives us a window into understanding how a Democratic senator can derail a multitrillion dollar climate-focused national programme that promised huge amounts of money for his own state.No, really. Stay with me here.The stories of prosecco wine and West Virginia coal are classic examples of a regional “growth model”. Growth models describe the “how we make money” bit of an economy, plus the political and electoral coalition that supports it. Think of all the social, political and regulatory structures that build up over time around making and selling a certain good, and all the folks whose jobs and incomes depend upon it.Think of Germany and car exports. From workers to unions to production hubs, to supply chains, to institutional investors, there is an entire ecosystem that supports this way of making a living and the identities and interest it supports. When that is challenged, those who benefit from the model do not sit idly by. Now think of Treviso, Italy, where they make prosecco.Last year a sociologist called Stefano Ponteunpacked the growth model behind prosecco. Prosecco was first bottled in 1924, but it was not until the early 2000s that anglo-millennials got a taste for the stuff and global demand blew up. Prosecco was defined at the time by the grape used to make it, glera, and not by its place of origin (like how all “real” champagne must come from Champagne), which meant that the brand was not protected. In fact, the actual village of Prosecco was about 150km away from the main growing areas and had never grown the grape that makes the drink.Dire end to Biden’s first year as Manchin says no on signature billRead moreSome enterprising British importers wanted to stick as much prosecco as they could into bottles, which would have taken control (and value) away from local producers. Rising to defend the “prosecco miracle” as it was called, the then minister of agriculture, Luca Zaia, a member of the rightwing La Lega party, expanded the “denominazione d’origine controllata DOC” to cover the distant village of Prosecco, which gave this rather generic product a claim to geographical exclusivity.That in turn paved the way for a successful Unesco world heritage claim a few years later, further cementing the region’s claim to the product. The result was a major expansion of production, and prosecco hit €500m in sales in 2019. In short, those who benefited from the growth model rose to defend it.But there were other challenges to this success. This massive expansion of production brought challenges from environmentalists – wine is essentially an agribusiness – and from local residents. But those who benefited from the growth model again leapt to defend it, this time by painting the industry as an example of small-scale, pastoral sustainability – part of a high-end wine-making tradition going back centuries.In fact, as the historian Brian Griffith details, this pastoral and authentically local framing of Italian wine was originally a project of the fascist period. After the first world war, Italy was saddled with vast overproduction of low-quality domestic wines and enmeshed in a moral panic over working-class drunkenness. Wine industry interests close to the government of Mussolini sought to make Italian wines articles of middle-class consumption and a source of national unity. And they used state-backed mythmaking to do so.Medical authorities stressed “the advantages of responsible … wine consumption”. National exhibitions of regional wines were sponsored by the state. Indeed, the whole idea of “gastro-tourism” in Italy was invented in the 1930s by the wine lobby. As Griffith puts it, “the roots of today’s … Italian wines stretch back not to antiquity … but … to the interwar years”. The result was the development of an agribusiness growth model. The prosecco story a century later was just one more turn of this wheel.Now what does all that tell us about Manchin and West Virginia?The Democratic party story on Manchin and West Virginia was that coal was a dying industry, it employed few people and Build Back Better provided a way out. It was simply a question of giving Manchin enough “sweeteners” and it would eventually pass. But Manchin first vetoed the “clean electricity” provisions of the bill and then ran down the clock long enough to kill it. Why did he do this? Because his job is to defend the growth model against challengers, just as it was for the folks in Treviso.As Adam Tooze has noted, by some estimates “nearly one-third of [West Virginian] GDP in 2019 can be attributed to fossil fuels [which] makes decarbonisation a mortal threat”. Now add to this the fact that West Virginia has the lowest labour force participation rate in the US and huge healthcare issues stemming from chronic illness and opioid abuse, and you end up with a fiscal nightmare kept afloat by current growth model. Given this, the notion that the best-paid jobs in the state ($77,000 a year) will be traded away by the state’s leading elected official for some promises on “retraining” and a “Green New Deal” is simply not credible.Growth models are hard to change. Those who profit from them fight to defend them. From Alaska to the Dakotas, to Texas and Louisiana, the core of the GOP electoral coalition, all these states have carbon-heavy growth models. Like the Italian wine industry, they are a creation of the state in the 20th century. They are embodied with myths and are supported by powerful coalitions. Few in Treviso are keen to dismantle the prosecco growth model. Why should West Virginia, and with it the other carbon states of the US, be any different?
      Mark Blyth is a political economist at Brown University
      TopicsDemocratsOpinionJoe ManchinUS politicsWest VirginiaWinecommentReuse this content More

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      Joe Manchin pushes for climate cuts as West Virginia battered by crisis

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      West VirginiaJoe Manchin pushes for climate cuts as West Virginia battered by crisis The conservative Democrat is busy trying to strip out many of the policies to tackle the problems his home state is facingKyle Vass in West VirginiaWed 27 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 27 Oct 2021 03.02 EDTThe rise of Joe Manchin as a key power player for Democratic policymaking in 2021 is the result of a perfect storm for the US senator from West Virginia.Spies next door? The suburban US couple accused of espionageRead moreHis position as the Senate’s most conservative Democrat means he often has final say in what his party is able to push through, especially when it comes to Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda on infrastructure, far-reaching social policies and a powerful attempt to tackle the climate crisis.A drive through West Virginia’s countryside – which is still enthusiastically Donald Trump country – reveals a patchwork of communities battered by the climate crisis and barely held together by deteriorating infrastructure. Yet Manchin – balking at a $3.5tn price tag of Biden’s reconciliation bill – is busy trying to strip out many of the policies that would try to tackle these crises that are so seriously affecting many of his fellow West Virginians.West Virginia, a landlocked state, leads the nation in the number of the infrastructure facilities – hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants, power stations – located on land prone to severe flooding. It even beats out Louisiana and Florida. Of course, the climate crisis is seeing flood events hit record levels across the US.Beyond the inspiration for John Denver’s hit song, West Virginia’s country roads are actually a source of fear and frustration for residents. Nearly half of the roads in the state are routinely battered by severe flooding.When power outages – some of the longest and most frequent in the nation – hit the state, they are often lethal, a reality made clear when a single flood event in 2016 took out power for over half of the state’s homes and killed 23 people in 12 hours.Earlier this year, tens of thousands of people were left without power for more than two weeks in freezing temperatures when ice storms felled trees on to power lines across the state and closed roads.But, for many West Virginians the reality of flooding and infrastructure failure are more insidious than isolated events.For Jill Hess, it’s trying to make it back to Fairmont, her home town and the birthplace of Joe Manchin, every time there’s talk of a storm. For the past five years, Hess made it a priority to see to it that her mother, Sue Hess, who was surviving on oxygen concentrators, wasn’t stranded powerless and alone.“Every time it would rain or snow she would really go into panic mode.”Jill said that growing up, outages weren’t frequent. But as her mother grew older and weaker, so has the power grid.Despite spending over a billion dollars trying to prevent the grid from failing, the frequency and duration of outages have steadily increased as the temperature of the Earth has risen, causing places like West Virginia to experience increased storm activity.“I can’t tell you how many times she would say, ‘I need you to be ready and available if anything happens because we have a severe thunderstorm warning coming through.’”Jill would hop in her car to drive towards her mother, dependent on oxygen machines, in Fairmont. But with storms in West Virginia come road closures, shutting down the most direct route to any given place. Adding 15 minutes to be rerouted around a mountain felt like 15 hours to Jill knowing her mother was running out of oxygen.For Jill, there’s a cruel irony to how her mother spent her final years. Sue had been a home health nurse, traveling across the county to help people who couldn’t make it to hospital. In 1968, she traveled to nearby Farmington, the 375-person town, to take care of wounded survivors of the Farmington mine disaster. In the floods of 1985 that killed 38 people across the state, Sue had gone from house to house helping provide medical assistance and supplies to families whose livelihoods had been devastated by flooding.Now, despite having retired in a nice home less than a mile away from the same hospital at which she had completed her nursing program, Sue found herself helpless. She relied on a combination of asking her daughter to drive in and calling 911 for ambulance rides to take to her somewhere she could breathe.Before she died, Sue racked up a four-figure ambulance bill nearly every time the power went out.“They would just literally park her in the waiting room of the ER, on oxygen until it was clear that the power came on.” The average power outage in the state lasts for 11.4 hours – the second highest in the nation.The five years of needless suffering her mother was put through before she died in December comes down to infrastructure for Jill. What she finds especially frustrating is that Manchin isn’t detached from this reality – it’s the one he grew up in. Before he was a politician, the Hess family used to get Christmas cards from the Manchins.Jill has no doubt that Manchin knows exactly how hard climate change is making life for the people he grew up around.National news outlets have been quick to connect the financial dots on Manchin. Clean energy initiatives could affect his bottom line in multiple ways because that bottom line is joined at the hip to one of the biggest drivers of climate change in the world: the fossil fuel industry.Put simply, the US senator is blocking legislation that would demand better of the dirty energy companies that make up his investment portfolio and his 2022 election cycle contributors list. And, he’s doing so to the environmental, social and economic detriment of his state.According to a report by the West Virginia Climate Alliance, efforts at addressing climate change such as the Green New Deal, which Manchin has opposed, would create 10m jobs across the nation and introduce regulations that could clean West Virginia’s notoriously polluted waterways – a byproduct of the state’s reliance on coal.Manchin’s own coal company, which he formed before assuming public office, has earned him $5.2m in dividends over the past 10 years. Manchin also has received more money from oil and gas companies than any other senator in next year’s election.As Manchin has gotten richer, his state has gotten warmer. The decrease in cold snaps through the year could, according to the Climate Alliance report, bring about a proliferation of invasive plant species and a significant increase in ticks which transmit Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.But, putting personal profits over his own party and its environmental initiatives is hardly new for Manchin. In fact, it’s a fundamental part of the story behind his rise to power.Before he was the single greatest source of frustration for Democrats in America, he showed West Virginia he would rather work with Republicans against his own party than support anything that resembled environmentalism.In 1996, Charlotte Pritt beat Manchin in the Democratic primary for governor – the only person, to this day, to hand him a defeat in an election. But Pritt ran as an environmentalist, urging West Virginia to develop industries that weren’t centered on polluting the earth and creating deplorable working conditions.Shortly after losing to Pritt, Manchin sent 900 letters to top Democrats around the state saying he wouldn’t support Pritt because she wasn’t “interested in the concerns of moderate and conservative Democrats”. Instead, Manchin’s letter added he would be supporting the Republican candidate, Cecil Underwood. Underwood won.But, two decades later, economists and climate scientists have sided with Pritt, not Manchin, on what’s best for the state.A 2019 report from the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy emphasized the dangers of the state continuing to depend on its “rich non-renewable depleting natural resources”, because it made terrible financial sense. Failures to diversify the economy, the author wrote, only perpetuates the boom and bust economies that have plagued the state and put it on a “collision course with efforts to combat climate change.”Nicolas Zégre, a hydrologist at West Virginia University, agrees that there is a false dichotomy where economic progress is wrongly pitted against combating climate change. Zégre, who researches flood risk vulnerability in West Virginia, said in fact it’s the opposite: the state and its already struggling economy can’t afford to continue to be battered by climate change.Pelosi ‘very confident’ Democrats will reach deal to salvage Biden agendaRead more“What are our elected representatives doing to protect West Virginians? The answer is very little.”For Zégre, the way forward for Manchin and anyone claiming to represent the interest of West Virginians is to invest in a sustainable and clean version of what this state could be, adding “none of that is going to happen until our decision makers, first of all, acknowledge that climate change is happening”.One example of how Zégre sees the state positioning itself for both economic diversification and a shift towards alleviating climate change is by cleaning up its waterways – 70% of which are too dirty to “support natural biological function”.A shift towards clean water, according to Zégre, would create a pathway for West Virginia to provision even more water than it does for surrounding states, a practice that’s only going to increase in value as climate change causes unprecedented droughts.Zégre urges West Virginia’s politicians, especially Manchin, to realize how vulnerable their state is to the reality of climate change.“We have so much opportunity, yet many of our leaders look backwards for a model of what the future should be.”TopicsWest VirginiaClimate crisisDemocratsUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republican governors urge vaccine-hesitant residents to get Covid shots

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      US newsRepublican governors urge vaccine-hesitant residents to get Covid shotsLeaders of Arkansas, West Virginia, and Utah describe high stakes as Delta variant poses threat Edward Helmore in New YorkMon 5 Jul 2021 14.02 EDTLast modified on Mon 5 Jul 2021 14.03 EDTSeveral Republican governors with lagging vaccine rates in their states have urged residents to accept the shots as the Biden administration comes under pressure to reopen US borders to overseas visitors.The Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, West Virginia’s Jim Justice and Spencer Cox of Utah warned against vaccine hesitancy, which some disease experts, including the White House chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said could create “two types of America”.“We are in a race,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. About 32% of people in Arkansas are fully vaccinated, compared with 47.9% nationwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. “If we stopped right here, and we didn’t get a greater per cent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter.” The solution, he said, “is the vaccinations”.In a Fourth of July address on Sunday, Joe Biden called vaccination “the most patriotic thing you can do”, saying the US had moved into a new phase of virus response. But he also warned that while the country is “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus”, the effort was not complete. “We’ve got a lot more work to do,” he said.Justice told ABC’s This Week: “Red states probably have a lot of people that are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that.’ But they’re not thinking right.”01:28West Virginia, which has been offering vaccine incentives from college scholarships to free hunting and fishing licenses, has a similar rate of vaccination to Arkansas.“When it really boils right down to it, they’re in a lottery to themselves,” Justice said. “We have a lottery that says if you’re vaccinated, we’re going to give you stuff. Well, you’ve got another lottery for them, and it’s a death lottery.”Cox called Utah’s low vaccination rates “troubling”, and placed blame on the state’s youthful population. He told CBS’s Face the Nation “hopefully reason will rule”.Cox’s delicacy in urging his state’s residents to accept vaccination comes as a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that 74% of people who have not been vaccinated said they probably or definitely would not get the shots.The divide corresponds to political affiliation, the survey found, with 86% of Democrats and only 45% of Republicans having received at least one vaccine shot. Six per cent of Democrats and 47% of Republicans said they were unlikely to get the shot.Asked about whether he is concerned the Delta variant of coronavirus could cause outbreaks in the US, Fauci said: “I don’t think you’re going to be seeing anything nationwide. Because fortunately, we have a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated. So it’s going to be regional. … We’re going to see, and I’ve said, almost two types of America.” Persistent resistance to vaccination in red states led Fauci to warn on Sunday that fully vaccinated Americans should “go the extra step” and wear masks when traveling to parts of the country with low rates.“If you put yourself in an environment in which you have a high level of viral dynamics and a very low level of vaccine, you might want to go the extra step … even though the vaccines themselves are highly effective,” Fauci told NBC’s Meet the Press.Fauci added that the situation was lamentable: “When you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable.”The warnings came as the administration’s Covid response coordinator, Jeff Zients, acknowledged that it had narrowly missed its goal of 70% of adults having at least one shot by the Fourth of July.“I think we’re much further along than anyone would have anticipated at this point, with two out of three adult Americans with at least one shot,” Zients told CNN, noting that 90% of those age 65 and older had received at least one shot.The situation comes as the administration comes under increasing pressure to lift international travel restrictions that have been in place since March 2020.Steve Shur, president of the trade group Travel Technology Association, told the Hill on Monday that the administration’s travel bans were “frozen in time.”With exceptions for citizens, green-card holders, students and some family members, US entry bans remain in place for travelers from China, Iran, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, India and South Africa.“We believe it’s possible now, at least for countries of low risk, to start to reopen international travel” to the US, Shur told the outlet.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, came under pressure late last month from European heads to reciprocate the EU’s recent reopening of borders to vaccinated travelers from the US.“I can’t put a date on it,” Blinken said at a press conference in Paris on 25 June. “I can tell you we’re working very actively on this right now, and we are – like France, like our other partners in Europe – both anxious and looking forward to restoring travel. But we have to be guided by the science. We have to be guided by medical expertise.”TopicsUS newsArkansasWest VirginiaUtahVaccines and immunisationCoronavirusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      California bans state travel to Florida and four other states over LGBTQ+ laws

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      California added five states, including Florida, to its list of places where state-funded travel is banned because of laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ+ community.California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, on Monday added Florida, Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia to the list that now has 17 states where state employee travel is forbidden except under limited circumstances.“Make no mistake: we’re in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this country, and the state of California is not going to support it,” Bonta said.Lawmakers in 2016 banned non-essential travel to states with laws that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The 12 other states on the list are: Texas, Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.The five states newly added to the list have introduced bills in their legislatures this year that prevent transgender girls from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity, block access to certain types of healthcare and allow the discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community, Bonta said.Florida, Montana, Arkansas and West Virginia passed laws that prevent transgender girls from participating in school sports that confirm with their gender identity. North Dakota signed into law a bill allowing certain publicly-funded student organizations to restrict LGBTQ+ students from joining without losing funding. Arkansas passed the first law in the nation to prohibit physicians from providing gender-affirming healthcare to transgender minors, regardless of the wishes of parents or whether a physician deems such care to be medically necessary.These lawmakers “would rather demonize trans youth than focus on solving real issues like tackling gun violence beating back this pandemic and rebuilding our economy”, Bonta said.The California law has exemptions for some trips, such as travel needed to enforce state law and to honor contracts signed before the states were added to the list. Travel to conferences or out-of-state training are examples of trips that can be blocked.It’s unclear what effect California’s travel ban will have. Bonta did not have information about how many state agencies have stopped sending state employees to the states on the list or the financial impact of California’s travel ban on those states. More

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      ‘When is this going to end?’: US factory town devastated by jobs moving overseas

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      “Disbelief. Distraught and traumatized.”Just some of the words United Steelworkers Local 8-957 president Joe Gouzd used to describe how he and hundreds of other workers felt after their 56-year-old pharmaceutical plant in West Virginia was shut down, sending between 1,500 to 2,000 jobs to India and Australia.The Viatris plant at Chestnut Ridge, just outside Morgantown, has been in operation since 1965, providing well paid jobs in one of America’s poorer states. And the timing of the closure has workers furious.“This is the last generic pharmaceutical manufacturing giant in the US, and executives are offshoring our jobs to India for more profits. What is this going to do to us if we have another pandemic?” said Gouzd.It is also causing a political row, with Congress accused of inaction and workers denouncing profits before people.“When is this going to end, losing American jobs? Every politician you hear, part of their political platform is: jobs, domestic jobs, domestic manufacturing, bringing jobs and manufacturing back to America,” said Gouzd.The offshoring of jobs has taken on new political weight since Donald Trump was elected. But his record in office was just as poor as his predecessors’.While the US does not track all jobs lost to offshoring, the labor department does count the number of workers who petition for help under a federal law designed to aid those harmed by trade.According to Reuters, during the four years of Trump, those petitions covered 202,151 workers whose jobs moved overseas, only slightly less than the 209,735 workers covered under Obama.Biden has proposed taxing companies that offshore jobs, but it remains to be seen whether he will be successful. Viatris may prove his first big test.The union is fighting to prevent the plant closure, asking elected officials to repurpose the plant via the Defense Production Act of 1950. It also criticized elected officials in Congress from ignoring their pleas for assistance “for no other reason than stakeholder return on investment dollars,” said Gouzd, who has also worked at the plant for 22 years.The local union branch represents about 900 workers. “Families are going to be forced to relocate, probably sell their homes, and relocate from West Virginia. Here we’re going to rid ourselves of 2,000 high-paying jobs in north central West Virginia, taking out $150m to $200m out of the local economy from lost income.”Less than a month after Mylan merged with Pfizer’s Upjohn to form Viatris, the company informed the union of its plans to shut down the plant and send the work abroad, as part of a $1bn cost-cutting restructuring plan. Mylan reported $3.9bn in profits in 2019, and over $1bn in quarterly profits before the merger. The plant is scheduled to end manufacturing on 31 July when the majority of the workforce will be laid off, with closure operations planned to end by 31 March next year.Carla Shultz, 60, worked at the plant for 13 years and is worried about not being ready to retire, but too old to return to college or be able to find another job with comparable wages and benefits.Through her job, Shultz was able to receive chemotherapy tablets for her mother; the same medicine would have cost her family $7,000 a month without benefits for her job. During the pandemic, her mother caught coronavirus and is currently hospitalized, on oxygen, and requiring round-the-clock care.“It added a lot more stress to our already stressful situation caring for family. I also take care of my three grandchildren, two of whom are school-age. But they’ve been home a lot while schools were closed because of Covid,” said Shultz.“My sister and I take turns caring for my mom. I help in the daytime after I get off work catching a nap when I can and then keeping my midnight shift schedule. It’s not easy keeping up, but we do what we have to do for our families.”Chad McCormick, recording secretary of USW Local 8-957, has worked at the plant since 2001, but now expects to be forced to find a much lower paying job to remain in the area, where his family has lived for decades.“I’ve been here for over 20 years. I’ve since gotten married, had three children, and built a house,” said McCormick. “It’s just devastating, and a lot more people than I expected are now looking into relocating.”The West Virginia legislature passed a bill calling on governor Jim Justice and Joe Biden to save the jobs. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio introduced the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Review Act to conduct a study on the American over-reliance on foreign countries in pharmaceutical industry, but neither West Virginia senator has sponsored the bill.According to Gouzd, Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito has ignored pleas to work with Biden officials to save the plant, and Democrat Joe Manchin, whose daughter served as Mylan’s chief executive until she retired in 2020, has also ignored their requests to get involved and help.Viatris cited the plant closure as part of a global restructuring initiative, and said it is exploring alternatives outside the company network.“The phasing out of manufacturing operations in Morgantown was a decision the company did not take lightly and in no way reflects upon our genuine appreciation for the commitment and work ethic of the employees at Chestnut Ridge,” it said. More