MOO

[Joanne98]

NYTimes
September 17, 2008, 9:06 pm

People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.

What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.
Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!

Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.

Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.

Let’s start with those cows. A few years ago, I met Harvey Baskin, one of the last of Alaska’s taxpayer-subsidized dairy farmers, at his farm outside Anchorage. The state had spent more than $120 million to create farms where none existed before. The epic project was a miserable failure.

“You want to know how to lose money in a hurry?” Harvey told me, while kicking rock-hard clumps of frozen manure. “Become a farmer with the state of Alaska as your partner. This is what you call negative farming.”

That lesson was lost on Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.

This is Heckuva-Job-Brownie government, Far North version.

On a larger scale, consider the proposal to build a 1,715-mile natural gas pipeline, which Palin touts as one of her most significant achievements. Private companies complained they couldn’t build it without government help. That’s where Palin came to the rescue, ensuring that the state would back the project to the tune of $500 million.

And let’s not talk about voodoo infrastructure without one more mention of the bridge that Palin has yet to tell the truth about. The plan was to get American taxpayers to pay for a span that would be 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, and about 20 feet short of the Golden Gate — all to serve a tiny airport with a half-dozen or so flights a day and a perfectly good five-minute ferry. Until it was laughed out of Congress, Palin backed it — big time, as the current vice president would say.

Why build it? Because it’s Alaska, where people are used to paying no state taxes and getting the rest of us to buck up for things they can’t afford. Alaska, where the first thing a visitor sees upon landing in Anchorage is the sign welcoming you to Ted Stevens International Airport. Stevens, of course, is the 84-year-old Republican senator indicted on multiple felony charges. He may still win re-election thanks to Palin’s popularity at the top of the ballot.

Alaskans will get $231 per person in federal earmarks — 10 times more than people in Barack Obama’s home state. That’s this year, with Palin as governor.
If Palin were a true reformer, she would tell Congress thanks, but no thanks to that other bridge to nowhere.

Yes, there is another one — a proposal to connect Anchorage to an empty peninsula, speeding the commute to Palin’s hometown by a few minutes. It could cost up to $2 billion. The official name is Don Young’s Way, after the congressman who got the federal bridge earmarks. Of late, he’s spent more $1 million in legal fees fending off corruption investigations. Oh, and Young’s son-in-law has a stake in the property at one end of the bridge.

Some of these projects might be fully explained should Palin ever open herself up to questions. This week she sat down for her second interview — with Sean Hannity of Fox, who has shown sufficient “deference” to Palin, as the campaign requested.
One question: When Palin says “government has got to get out of the way” of the private sector, as she proclaimed this week, does that apply to dairy farms, bridges and gas pipelines in her state? I didn’t think so.


http://www.testpattern.org/2008/09/moo.html

[Joanne98]

1. kick

[lonestarnot]

2. K & R

[cabbage08]

3. K&R

[scarletwoman]

4. This is all so interesting to me. I used to live in Willow Alaska. Wasilla was the nearest

"big town". I used to meticulously plan my bimonthly shopping trips to Wasilla, for groceries and various clothing needs -- like polypropylene socks and long underwear.

A few times a year, we'd go all the way down to Anchorage -- for nice gifts to send to family members Outside, and to shop at the health food store for herbal supplements and some organic staples like basmati rice.

Going to Anchorage was a trip of about 85 miles, though it would been under 50 miles as the crow flies. What made it such a long trip was the fact that you had to drive up and around the upper reaches of Cook Inlet - think of a huge inverted "U". Had there been a way straight across the Inlet, the mileage would have been considerably reduced. As it was, it was such a time- and fuel-consuming trip, that it was only undertaken after a careful cost/benefit analysis which generally ruled it out.

Anyway, the proposal to connect Anchorage to "an empty peninsula" is not quite so ridiculous as the article seems to imply. I would have loved a less time-consuming and less mileage-heavy way into Anchorage. I would have gone there more often.

As it is, there are many hundreds of daily commuters from the Mat-Su Borough for whom a shorter way in to Anchorage would mean less fuel and time consumed on their commute. I'm sure Anchorage businesses would benefit, and so would the earth in general from burning less fuel to get from one place to another.

I have no argument against the other points raised by the article in your OP, I just want to caution against a rush to judgement about the "empty peninsula" bit.

sw

[Terran]

5. A $2 billion bridge to benefit how many people, though?

I certainly sympathize with your desire to avoid a long drive, and I don't know how such big public works projects are normally decided on as to cost-benefit, but it sounds like the ratio of cost to benefit was certainly huge for this project. I can't say it would never happen in my state, but, well, sorry, it just doesn't sound like good public policy to me.

[scarletwoman]

6. I honestly don't know. But keep in mind, the TOTAL population of Alaska is less than some big cities

in the Lower 48. Therefore, I think that any cost/benefit analysis has to take into account the PERCENTAGE of the Alaska population, not raw numbers measuring quantity.

I no longer live in Alaska, but I can tell you that it's completely different from any other state. You simply cannot apply the same criteria to Alaska as you would apply to any other state. Alaska could just as well be another planet -- at least that's what it felt like to me when I first moved there.

A shorter way into Anchorage would definitely be a net benefit for a significant percentage of the Alaska population -- bearing in mind that the population of Anchorage is almost 50% of the total population of the whole state.

sw

[CampDem]

8. It would benefit all of those in both Anchorage and the Matsu valley

Over a third of Alaska's population live in Anchorage and the valley. Basically Anchorage (pop 260,000) has no more land because it is surrounded by mountains on the east and south and ocean on the west. North is the only way to grow Anchorage, which is where the Matsu valley lies. The Matsu valley as defined by wikipedia:

link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matanuska-Susitna_Valley

snip~

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough (the equivalent of a county, encompassing more than 24,000 square miles is about the size of the state of West Virginia) governs the Mat-Su region and the sparsely-populated southwest portion of the Copper River Basin northeast of the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains. Borough officials estimate rapid growth since 2000 drove the population to 80,000 in 2007.

snip~

Many of those 80,000 folks that live in the valley commute to Anchorage for work (1-2 hour drive each way depending on how far North). I believe that the bridge would cut the commute time in half, maybe more. Additionally, if the bridge were in place people in Anchorage might actually move to the valley (where there is plenty of cheap land).

[bvar22]

7. a "state-run dairy"....heavily taxing Energy/Extraction Corporations...

...to pay for Infrastructure and "dividends" to citizens?


Sounds like Socialism (gasp!) to me.

Didn't Chavez of Venezuela do the exact same thing?
...except he didn't give checks directly to citizens.
He used the dividends to:
Feed the hungry,
Heal the sick,
Build FREE schools,