 Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia received a lot of flack for voting against the $15 an hour minimum wage, and rightfully so. So he then proceeded to go on television and defend his position. Now he's trying to make it seem as if he's not super unreasonable. Make it seem as if, look, I don't want people to be in poverty. I want folks to actually get an increase in their wages. I want to increase the minimum wage. I just think that $15 an hour is a bit too much. Now, he tries to disingenuously make it seem as if he supports a living wage, when in actuality that's not the case. And his opposition to the $15 an hour minimum wage is likely because of a conflict of interest that he's not speaking to here. So take a look at what he says and I'll tell you why what he's saying is incredibly dishonest. Let's talk about the minimum wage. Would you and seven other Democratic senators voted against Bernie Sanders amendment that would have increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Here's what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said about that. We agree with Senator Sanders and the president is going to be standing right alongside him fighting for an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. And he will use his political capital to get that done. You have your own proposal to increase the minimum wage to $11 so is Joe Biden wasting his political capital on you to get to $15? Martha, not at all. President Joe Biden knows how to get the deal done. And the bottom line is there is not one senator out of a hundred that doesn't want to raise the minimum wage. $7.25 is sinfully low. We must raise it. I agree with President Biden when he says if you go to work every day you should be above the poverty guidelines. Well, the poverty guidelines to be above that if you're going to work and working full-time should be at $11 base. That should be your base. And then we index it with inflation to make sure it never gets back in this political conundrum we have right now. It shouldn't be a political football. We do the same thing with Social Security. We index that to make sure that inflation and make sure that it moves forward with the CPI. We can do the same. Now, we have a deal here to be made. If everyone agrees it should be raised. Bernie has chosen $15. And you know what? An awful lot of areas and states have moved to $15. A lot of them moved a lot further than $7.25. There's very few I think if any are at $7.25. But we need to base the base of our minimum wage should be above the poverty guideline so you have the respect and dignity of work. Okay. So first of all, the folks who elected Joe Manchin, his constituents, a majority of them support a $15 an hour minimum wage, not an $11 an hour federal minimum wage. So first of all, you can just like dismantle this argument right there and say, why aren't you listening to your constituents? That's the first thing. But the second thing is that he is very deliberately referring to poverty guidelines. Now, when you think poverty guidelines, when you think about poverty wages, you think that the implication is, well, okay, if somebody is against poverty wages and they want them to be above the poverty guidelines, that must imply that they support a living wage. But he's using poverty guidelines in lieu of a living wage. Notice how he never says living wage in this segment. And that is on purpose because the poverty guideline and living wage, these are actually two different things. And I'll show you this. So if you look at MIT's living wage calculator specifically for the state of West Virginia, you will see that if you raise the minimum wage to $11 an hour, at least in his state, almost nobody would technically be making a poverty wage unless you have three children or more in a household. However, when it comes to the living wage, which is the thing we're fighting for currently, his $11 doesn't cut it even in his own state. A one adult household would need at least $13 an hour to make a living wage. Single parents would need at least $28 an hour to make a living wage in West Virginia, mind you. If you're a household with two adults and one working, you need to make at least $22 an hour to make a living wage. Now, you could almost make a living wage in Manchin's home state with $11 an hour if both adults are working and making that. But if you're a two adult household with a child, even $15 an hour is too low. And again, I want to remind you, this is the living wage calculator in the state of West Virginia. We're not talking about New York. We're not talking about California. We're talking about Joe Manchin's home state in West Virginia. So what he basically said in that clip is that I don't think that my constituents, people in West Virginia, Americans, they don't deserve a living wage. But I don't think they should be in poverty. Am I not merciful? Like they don't deserve a living wage, but I'm not saying that I want to keep them impoverished. So they should get a little bit more crumbs, but certainly they should still have crumbs. Certainly they shouldn't have enough to make a living wage. Like this is absolutely outrageous and it's even more outrageous when you consider the fact that Joe Manchin is a multi-millionaire. He is worth an estimated 7.8 million, 7.8 million. And there's a specific reason why he doesn't really want to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour because this would directly impact his wealth. And as Jonathan Larson of TYT Investigate explains, Senator Joe Manchin, the most prominent Democratic opponent of a $15 federal minimum wage, has a financial stake in at least one company that apparently would have to increase pay if such a measure passed TYT has learned. The real extent of his business interests is unclear, as Manchin has never fully disclosed them as required on his Senate ethics filings. Thanks to legal filings in a bankruptcy dispute, however, we do know some of the holdings of one company Manchin lists in his disclosure form. The company, AA Property, is reportedly 50% controlled by Manchin and is an investor in Emerald Coast Realty. Which owns La Quinta Hotel in Elkview, West Virginia. According to the careers website Indeed.com, the national average salary for several La Quinta positions is well below $15 an hour. If Manchin's $11 an hour proposal were to win out, La Quinta Hotel housekeepers, for instance, would get an average raise of $0.08 an hour nationwide. So understand, we're talking about the difference between an $0.08 raise, which is what he's proposing, and a $4.08 raise if we're looking at average pay of these workers here. Is this not the most disgusting thing you've ever seen? Like a multi-millionaire is very deliberately keeping wages low so he can increase his own wealth. Meanwhile, he's trying to make it seem as if he's reasonable because he doesn't think they should be in poverty. But he doesn't think they should make a living wage. I mean, with Democrats like this, with Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema and Jean Shaheen and Chris Coons, who needs Republicans? What is the point of Republicans when you have individuals like this in the Democratic Party? I think that needless to say that when Democrats say they're a Big Ten party, the tent is too big. You've reached like the logical limit of that. To where the tent is so big, it is collapsing in on itself. If the tent is so big that you allow Republicans in that tent and they obstruct your own agenda, that's when you fucked up. That's when you're no longer being inclusive of more voices, but you're excluding the most important part of your base. And the millions of Americans, the majority of Americans, including majority of West Virginians, that support a $15 an hour minimum wage. So Joe Manchin should absolutely never be able to live this down. And his own constituents should be protesting in his office to make sure that he increases the minimum wage, even if that directly impacts his own wealth. Because we don't care about you. Joe Manchin, you're going to be fine. You have $8 million in net worth almost. You're going to be okay. But these workers here that aren't making a living wage, they're not going to be okay. So there should be the utmost pressure on him, not just from his constituents, but from the president, Joe Biden, who should be using his bully pulpit to apply pressure to Joe Manchin. And also progressive elected members of Congress, members of the squad who should be trying to make sure that they shift the balance of power. So it's not these conservative Democrats, like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who always get to decide almost unilaterally what goes in and out of pieces of legislation. It should be progressives who make that determination. But in order to do that, they have to see that their strategy isn't working and they have to bind together as a unit and fight against this. Withhold their votes from key pieces of legislation if they actually want any leverage. So overall Manchin is predictably disgusting. I mean, remember his daughter is the one that increased the prices of EpiPens. So now people can't actually afford EpiPens. They're so expensive, including my mom. It's just, it's disgusting. People like this should not be in Congress. People like this are not qualified to have any amount of power. But here we are in a late stage capitalist society where Joe Manchin is one of many senators who probably doesn't support an increase to the minimum wage for self-interested reasons.