Alaska's Senior Statesmen Shame State: Governor's Group Golden

June 4, 2007

By Terry Haines - If the USA was a high school and the students were the states, graduating senior Alvin Alaska might blush a little as he walks across the stage for his diploma. Everyone in the audience is whispering about his parents.

His stepfather, "Uncle" Ted, has been seen staggering around the Senate at midday, drunk on power, barking out angry half sentences or banging the table to demand a fresh round of earmarks for all his friends. Up at the House the staff is whispering about Big Momma Young and a steady procession of truckers and paving contractors who eagerly add to the campaign cookie jar as they slip out the kitchen door.

But no matter. Stand tall at the podium, Alaska. Other members of the family have been cause for pride. Aunt Lisa is not as fond of torture as her brother senator. And big sister Sarah Palin has been diligently cleaning up the piles of whiskey bottles, cigar ashtrays and tax breaks left at the Governor's house after the wild four year party put on there by Cousin Frank for every cowboy in town with an oil derrick and a lease contract.

And you have to admire the way governor Palin cleans house. She could have swiffered up a couple of especially sleazy officials and sat down with the press and a bowl of salty snippets, seasoned with slams on her predecessor. Instead she has politely shown the lobbyists the door and invited dedicated public servants back inside the house of government, where they started looking under the furniture for the dust bunnies of past misdeeds. One of the especially heavy hide-a-beds they peered under was the new law that determines the rate of tax paid by oil companies as they suck out the Alaska's irreplaceable reserve of petroleum. They found a very smelly dead cat under it.

They weren't alone in noticing the stench. Federal investigators have had remarkably little trouble spotting shoes sticking out from behind the curtains as they tracked down how it came to be that the industry had the good luck to have its tax structure switched from one based on the value of the oil to one based on the amount of profit shown on the company's books. This new system was shoved through the legislature by Cousin Frank the Bank at the end of his term, just as it was revealed that British Petroleum had been failing to maintain the pipeline. Crude was soaking into the tundra from leaks in the heavily corroded line while the state of Alaska passed the new tax law, one that would allow BP to stick the state with the bill for its negligence by taking the cost of the deferred maintenance off its "profits" to avoid paying the tax.

Governor Palin has pointed out that key figures in the formation and passage of this law are now being fitted for new suits with very wide pinstripes. She concludes, rightly, that a law cooked up in a dirty Juneau crockpot, rancid with the e-coli of corruption, is bad for Alaska. We never should have swallowed it, and now the only thing to do now is up-chuck and cook up a new law, in a cleaner kitchen. Right on, Sarah. You continue to make us proud.

The next sofa to check under has a dead fish under it. From Adak to Crab Ratz, big multinational corporations and well-placed individuals have been awarded exclusive ownership of Alaska's fish and the market to buy and sell them. Despite overwhelming public outcry against "rationalization" and protests from the U.S. Justice Department, the General Accountability Office, Food and Water Watch and innumerable other public and private watchdog groups, a very few highly placed public officials have made a very few individuals and companies very rich by giving them ownership of this nation's ocean resources.

This fish chowder is just as rotten as the oil tax soup. It is making our coastal communities sick. Many of the same cooks prepared it. It needs to be thrown out. And the new chowder must be prepared with clean hands.

I'm kind of hopeful.

Go, Denby, go.

A short (and incomplete) list of reasons to hope for the future:

1. Sarah Palin
2. Denby Lloyd
3. Michelle Ridgeway
4. Charlie Davidson
5. Shawn Dochtermann
6. Konrad Fisher
7. Beth Stewart
8. Bill Mahrer
9. Theresa Peterson, Dorothy Childers and Alan Parks
10. Steve Branson
11. Paul Parker
12. Gordon Blue
13. Oliver Holm
14. Alexus Kwatchka
15. Lisa Maher
16. Tim Henkel
17. Andrew Halcro
18. Arne Fluglvog
19. Frank Bailey
20. Joe and Seth Macinko

Clean cooks. More power to you all.

© AlaskaReport News