This is one of the best stories I’ve read about the grip the coal industry has on West Virginia and the grip that senator joe manchin has over the state and its politics. The author is Jeff Goodell, one of the best journalists and writers around. The story details manchin’s personal history, his investments, his businesses in the state, his political connections, his position as political boss, among other things, all of which are tied to coal and, through his family, big pharma. I wish the story was not behind the Rolling Stone paywall, because it’s a story each of you should read to understand joe manchin and his disgusting and deplorable opposition to the Build Back Better Act, or any reform of the muscle the coal industry has over West Virginia.
The information shared with each of us should be shared through the national media or some other publication that won’t hide this behind a paywall. If I find such a source, I’ll link us to it.
Here’s an excerpt:
In 2005, he was elected to a five-year term as governor, then won a special election for U.S. Senate in 2010, and was reelected in 2012 and 2018. Today, he effectively lords over the West Virginia Democratic Party like a mob boss, demanding fealty. “He controls everything,” says Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal-country activist and daughter of a coal miner who ran against Manchin in the 2018 West Virginia Democratic primary.
How much of West Virginia’s troubles is Manchin responsible for? “West Virginia has always been a classic natural-resources-dependent economy,” says John Kilwein, chair of the political-science department at West Virginia University. “When coal was down, we were down. When coal was up, we were up. It was boom, bust, boom, bust. I don’t know that you can lay that on Manchin’s doorstep.” But what you can lay on Manchin’s doorstep, Kilwein says, is the failure to plan for a post-coal economy. Tragically, despair and addiction have often filled the gap: Over the past decade or so, West Virginia became the capital of the opioid crisis. To cite just one example: Between 2006 and 2014, 81 million opioid pills were shipped to pharmacies in one small West Virginia city. Between April 2020 and April 2021, overdose deaths in the U.S. topped 100,000 for the first time, with some of the largest increases in West Virginia, where more than 1,600 people died. “Joe Manchin is deeply responsible for this,” says Swearengin. She points to Manchin’s ties with the pharmaceutical industry, including the fact that Mylan Inc. — which manufactured opiates, as well as other drugs — where Manchin’s daughter was CEO from 2012 to 2020, was one of the largest campaign contributors to Manchin, donating around $211,000 through PACs and employees since 2009. “Joe Manchin doesn’t need to be in Congress,” Swearengin says. “He needs to be in jail.”
Manchin’s personal wealth is directly linked to a small coal-fired power plant about 10 miles outside Farmington, in a place called Grant Town. The Grant Town Power Plant, which went online in 1993, sits in a holler littered with rusty double-wides and muddy ATVs. The plant itself doesn’t look like much more than a flimsy steel warehouse with a smokestack. As far as power plants go, it’s an old clunker in a world of Teslas. It generates 80 megawatts of electricity, about enough to power 40,000 homes. It’s operated by a privately held company called American Bituminous Power Partners (AmBit), which sells the electricity under contract to Mon Power, a West Virginia utility that’s a subsidiary of Ohio-based FirstEnergy, one of the largest electric companies in the United States.
Perversely, the Grant Town plant is a byproduct of clean-energy legislation. The Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), passed in 1978 in response to the energy crisis of 1973, was meant to break the monopoly of utilities over electric-power generation and encourage independent power producers to build smaller, more innovative power plants fueled by hydroelectric power, solar, and natural gas. In 1992, PURPA was reformed to include waste coal — basically piles of dirt and coal waste excavated from nearby mines — as an “alternative” fuel. The Grant Town plant, which burns waste coal, or “gob” as it’s called, took advantage of that rule change. Although burning gob can help clean up abandoned mine sites, it also transfers pollutants from the land into the air, which is why, on a pollutants-per-kilowatt-hours basis, Grant Town is the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia.
Manchin doesn’t own the power plant or the gob. Instead, his firm, Enersystems, simply brokers the transaction between the owners of the gob (usually abandoned mine sites) and AmBit.
Enersystems is a mysterious company. Manchin co-founded it in 1988, then put it into a so-called blind trust when he was elected governor. It is now operated by his son, Joe Manchin IV, and has virtually no online presence and is largely unknown outside a small circle of people in West Virginia. Its registered address is in the Manchin Professional Building plaza in Fairmont, where it is located two suites down from the Manchin Law Group, a firm founded by Joe’s cousin Timothy Manchin. (Enersystems didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)