On November 2nd, I posted part 1 to this story. I outlined the staunch and unyielding opposition to the second phase of the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” agenda. W. Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin railed at the proposed social infrastructure bill – like providing affordable childcare to stay-at-home women who wanted to return to work but could not – and anything that smacked of climate change containment, having already purged some climate change measures in the first bill that did pass. He was, after all, from a coal-producing state and chair of the Senate’s Energy Committee. The bill died, and Manchin recently pronounced that the second Biden infrastructure measure was permanently “dead.” He was joined in this resistance by one other Democrat in the Senate, Arizona’s Krysten Sinema, herself trying to walk a middle ground in a very conservative state.
But there’s a very big difference between these two Senators. And the Democratic Party is loath to point this difference out to the West Virginia electorate, because extensive criticism could drive Manchin into the Republican Party, which would instantly turn the Senate into a Republican majority, making Mitch McConnell Majority Leader, and killing any chance of generating a majority Democratic voting bloc in the Senate. The GOP wouldn’t need the filibuster to stop the Dems dead in their tracks. The problem is pretty clear. An embarrassing conflict of interest.
It's about scrap or “waste” coal – leftover coal that is gathered and aggregated for resale – a business that has made Manchin wealthy. “Manchin, whose vote is crucial to passage of President Joe Biden's domestic policy priorities in an evenly divided 50-50 Senate, has holdings valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems, Inc., the coal brokerage business he founded, according to his most recent financial disclosure form that covers 2020 activity.
“And last year [2020], he made more than $491,000 from his Enersystems holdings, the filings show. That's more than twice his $174,000 annual Senate salary… ‘Manchin is a walking conflict of interest,’ said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen. ‘And what makes it all the more troubling is that he's the 50th Democratic senator, which gives him enormous sway over climate change policy.’” CNN.com, October 27th.
But since he began his tenure as the Senator from West Virginia, didn’t Joe put his holdings in Enersystems into a blind trust to preserve his congressional integrity? He did. But his son (Joe Manchin, IV) runs the company. Yet the story does not begin and end with this tidbit. The Senator has a lengthy track record of using his political office to benefit his company, an entity with a checkered financial past.
Before he was a Senator, even before his stint as W. Virginia governor (above picture), Manchin was a parttime state legislator when one of his holdings got into a bit of a financial jam. That “difficulty” actually pitted Manchin against his own brother. “According to a 2014 lawsuit filed by Joe’s brother, Dr. John Manchin II, the Manchin Carpet Center, which Joe had started years before with their brother Roch, required funding and a loan guarantor to avoid bankruptcy.
“To bail his brothers out, John Manchin’s suit claims he provided more than $1.7 million to pay off their debt in exchange for becoming a partner in their company Manchin Brothers and a one-third stake in the brothers’ next venture: a coal reserves and brokerage business.
“The Manchins had agreed that John would be repaid in full out of proceeds from the coal business, his breach of contract suit states, but what happened instead led to a decades-long rift. The suit claims that Joe and Roch Manchin, out of hot water, soon sold off the carpet company, then quietly dissolved Manchin Brothers and transferred its remaining funds and assets to Manchin Enterprises, controlled by Joe and his son Joseph Manchin IV…” The August 6, 2021, RealSludge.com, an anti-corruption online news service. It gets worse from here.
Writing for the February 8th Politico.com, Scott Waldman pulls up even more dirt: “The muddy mix of discarded coal and rocks is one of the most carbon-intensive fuels in America. And Manchin’s family [scrap coal] business stood to benefit financially when it was reclassified as something akin to solar, wind and hydropower… Selling the scrap coal has earned Manchin millions of dollars over three decades, and he has used his political positions to protect the fuel — and a single power plant in West Virginia that burns it — from laws and regulations that also threatened his family business.
“It continues today… Only now Manchin has enormous influence over federal climate policy. He is using his chair role of the energy committee — and role as maverick Democrat – to shape environmental policy across the states… In 2009 he used one of his last actions as governor to sign a renewable energy law. The measure was described as a way to increase the state’s amount of clean power to 25 percent by 2025.
“But it also shielded the waste coal that helped build Manchin’s fortune. Classifying it as an alternative energy source [emphasis added] allowed utilities to count it toward their renewable electricity goals… That infuriated some members of his own party, who saw the law as a way to jump-start the state’s transition to a cleaner future. It hasn’t worked. More than a decade after the law was enacted, just 6 percent of the state’s power is derived from renewable sources… Eighty-eight percent comes from coal.
“‘Everything that he does, everything that he did when he was governor, everything that he has done while he is a senator, is going to advance his best interest and the interest of the people who put money in his pocket, period,’ said Nancy Peoples Guthrie, who was a Democratic state lawmaker at the time. ‘That’s all you need to know about Joe Manchin.’” Indeed, that single powerplant was Enersystems’ biggest customer when its business began to falter, a serious threat to the Manchin family fortune.
“In 2006, when Manchin was governor, he intervened in an electricity rate case as officials with the Grant Town power plant were warning that the facility might close. Manchin directed his chief of staff, Larry Puccio, to help convince officials with Monongahela Power Co., which buys power from the plant, to support the rate increase, according to a person involved in the discussions… Puccio denied being involved in the rate case in a brief interview with E&E News last week [first week of February]… ‘I don’t remember anything about that,’ Puccio said. ‘I would have never called anybody and asked them to join in or anything like that.’” Waldman .Manchin’s little coal company was saved and sitting pretty.
I know we should not be surprised at these financial entanglements in the world of politics. The Senate is currently considering legislation to keep those in Congress from being involved in stock trades and ownership that might be influenced by legislation. Needless to say, it ain’t passed yet.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the Democratic Party seems to have one word about disclosing Manchin’s conflict of interest: “shhhhhhh!”
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