Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021407
JOE MANCHIN
Key Stats on West Virginia ... low ratings on almost everything
Key Stats on West Virginia
Burgess COMMENTARY
Joe Manchin is very much in the mode of 'the tail wagging the dog'! My parents were from the 'industrial north' in the UK ... Lancashire and Yorkshire ... where mining and coal fired industry dominated everything. Over time, the economy changed but the Lancashire textile industry and the Yorkshire mines have all closed and slowly replaced by industry that is more suited to the modern world. I can remember the dirt and grime ... but not younger folk. I travelled to the Ruhr Gebiet in Germany in the early 1960s. It was the industrisl heartland of Germany and also going through a transformation ... and I also travelled through the industrial areas of Canada and the United States around the same time. In Europe there was active clean-up of industry and the environment in the 1960s but nothing like it in the United States, and more than 50 years later the USA remains comfortable with environmental exploitation in places like Wyoming and West Virginia, not to mention low standards of living for the working (or unemployed) population. Sadly, many parts of the USA seems to have more in common with the Feudal world than the modern world!
Peter Burgess