September 12, 2016
Monday PM

So now you know, too, that “Oil Company” Walker is not merely a follower of this messianic insanity northerners call “The Beginnning,” he is a leader of this insipid lunacy. He suddenly has a constitutional mandate to build a liquid natural gas pipeline for the benefit of all Alaskans that will spew forth its joy sometime between 2025 and 2040. Indeed, a constitutional mandate to blow Alaska’s whole cash wad for the next several decades because what he wants you to support is your poverty and hardship while he monumentalizes himself with a project that costs somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion before the first dollar is earned. Why does he not have a similar ‘constitutional mandate’ to collect reasonable royalties and taxes from the jerks who are stealing Alaska’s oil for nothing in return to the State or to its people?

The world is so awash in liquid natural gas right now that the coal industry has tanked, and still there is so much natural gas on hand that the industry is inventing new ways to use the stuff in somewhat desperate fashion. What these recent analyses have clearly pointed out is that this development is not currently economically viable, so why is this man even wasting our time talking about this nonsense? In the first instance it is intended to serve as a distraction and a smokescreen to his continued complete unwillingness to collect reasonable compensation for our oil, and his colossal failure as consequence to deal with the realities of Alaska’s economy.

Second, it serves to hide the fact that this man and his lieutenant governor lack both the wit and the will to deal with this financial crisis because they are living in and living a looney tune. We are all supposed to put our lives on hold and live in abject poverty and squalor for the next 10 to 20 years so a bunch of braindead carpetbagging bastards in the Anchorage-Fairbanks corridor can blow $50+ billion on a new pipeline that might commence sometime in the next decade, and for which you and everyone else in the State is bonded to death on a project that the private sector does not consider economically viable, but there just might be a little window we can sneak through around 2025 or so where we can make a really bad deal just to get the crap moving down the pipeline, and on which we lose billions month by month as our production costs persist in being 40% higher than the sales price of the gas.

The hypocrisy of this man is appalling. He is willing to sacrifice and forfeit a generation of Alaskans’ time and money on a project whose benefits cannot accrue for what is in fact a generation from now. Yet somehow proposing to tax us to death while stealing our Permanent Fund Dividend and then the Permanent Fund itself to finance his oil company buddies’ destruction of this State is just fine.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

Received September 10, 2016 - Published September 12, 2016

About: David G. Hanger is a West Point graduate, a veteran, and a Ketchikan business owner.

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