October 25, 2021 Editor

Commentary: “As Sen. Joe Manchin’s Star Rose in West Virginia, the FBI and IRS Probed His Closest Allies”

Decades of federal investigations looked into Manchin’s inner circle and business associates.


October 23 2021

photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash

WN: The story below is about unbridled greed. It is also parable of American militarized capitalism creating horror around the globe: not least in its environmental devastation. In the Manchins’ case, it seems: To hell with the world . . .

excerpts:

But the parables of the Manchins and the Kennedys are not one and the same. The Kennedys — through patriarch Joseph Kennedy — first amassed a fortune through rank corruption and organized crime, then used that fortune to fund a political empire. The Manchins inverted this trajectory: first winning political power and then using it to build a financial fortune. While Manchin continues to serve in the Senate, he has kept one foot in the private sector through his coal empire, and both of his children used their connections not to win office but to grow wildly rich.

Manchin’s daughter Heather Bresch received a $30 million golden parachute after finishing her tenure as CEO of Mylan and overseeing the sale of the pharmaceuticals company to Pfizer — a deal that led to the devastating closure of the company’s Morgantown plant. His wife Gayle Manchin now heads the Appalachian Regional Commission, which JFK created in 1965. Years before heading ARC, Gayle served as the head of the National Association of State Boards of Education, where she used her position to require schools to buy the EpiPens her daughter’s company produced.

And Joe Manchin IV is doing well too, running the multimillion-dollar family coal empire that Manchin the senator reminds voters is kept in a blind trust. Meanwhile, Manchin has objected to a wide swath of the Biden agenda, arguing it could produce an “entitlement mentality” and insisting that any tax credit parents with children get come along with work requirements.

Please click on: Manchins’ environmental devastation

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Editor

Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.

Always appreciate constructive feedback! Thanks.