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Instead, West Virginia is the second-poorest state by median income, and near the bottom of virtually every social indicator of well-being, from obesity to opioid addiction to education. If fossil fuels brought prosperity to a place, West Virginians would be dancing on gold-paved streets. But the poverty and quiet distress is heartbreaking. The people I have met in coal country in my many visits over the years are tougher than the blade of a bulldozer, smart, self-reliant, deeply connected to the natural world. But much of the state is a landscape of corporate exploitation, a place that has been pillaged by outsiders who have sucked out its gas and mined its coal and built mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Hamptons, but left little behind beyond black lung and broken labor unions. Unmined places like New River Gorge (now a national park) hint at the spectacular beauty of West Virginia before the coal barons arrived up in Morgantown, you see a thriving city that is not entirely built with money from mining and burning black rocks. I’m always struck by the difference between coal country and the rest of the state. Manchin’s grift is emblematic of generations of political leadership in West Virginia. “It’s one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.” In contrast, Manchin is effectively taking money right out of the pockets of West Virginians when they pay their electric bills. “With Trump, the corruption was discretionary - you could choose to pay thousands of dollars to host an event at Mar-a-Lago or not,” Canter tells me. Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin’s business operations “a grift.” To Canter, Manchin’s corruption is even more offensive than Donald Trump’s. More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He values good manners and civility, and sometimes seems to be channeling the folksy charm of another famous West Virginian, test pilot Chuck Yeager, who was immortalized in The Right Stuff. He presents himself as a pragmatic man from a hardscrabble state who is always trying to do the right thing. Manchin’s influence comes from the fact that in an evenly divided Senate, he is the swing vote that can make or break legislation.

Rolling stone almost impossible rock quiz