More than U.S. politics and President Joe Biden’s agenda were on the line in the intraparty fight to pass Build Back Better. The Guardian reports that Sen. Joe Manchin has made himself something of a global pariah:
“He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh. “If you talk to the average citizen in Dhaka, they will know who Joe Manchin is. The level of knowledge of American politics here is absolutely amazing, we know about the filibuster and the Senate and so on.
“What the Americans do or don’t do on climate will impact the world and it’s incredible that this one coal lobbyist is holding things up. It will cause very bad consequences for us in Bangladesh, unfortunately.”
There are more aware of what American failure to lead on address climate change means:
“I’ve been following the situation closely,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific nation that risks being wiped out by rising sea levels. “We have to halve emissions in this decade and can’t do it without strong, immediate action by the US.”
Stege said the Marshall Islands was already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and if the US doesn’t slash its emissions “the outcomes for countries like mine are unthinkable.”
Maserati Joe may not be vacationing abroad anytime soon:
“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded. Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA”. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.
Rachel Kyte, a Tufts University climate adviser to the UN secretary general, sees Manchin as a feature of a wider problem (a Senate that favors rural-state Republicans?):
Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.
“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”
“Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us” by Brian Klaas examines that issue. Does power corrupt? Or are corrupt people attracted to power? Or do corrupt systems corrupt good people? Yes, yes, and yes, answers Klaas. Plus, and our still-stone-age brains attract us to leadership characteristics that no longer provide the evolutionary advantage they did 10,000 years ago. Klaas suggests tweaks to how organizations might better attract and select less-corruptible police officers, executives, and politicians, but few plans for how to build a constituency for implementing those changes.
Making us our worst enemies, choosing the Manchins of the world over those better-suited to governance in an age in which our choices in this hemisphere affect not just constituents in West Virginia but across the planet.