I notice people across the blogosphere trying to make simple sense out of the political scandals now trickling from Alaska politics into the public view.
Simple it ain't.
Writing as someone who worked for years in the Alaska political scene, and as a professional in the oil industry, maybe I can shed some light.
It's a long story, complicated by the addition of my personal history, but being my first Diary here, I think that history is in on-topic.
In the Summer of 1989, when I drove my 1973 AMC Javelin from Houston, Texas, all the way up the Al-Can highway to Anchorage to work as an indentured servant, Alaska was a very different place than it is today.
Alaska was friendly. Alaska had Democratic leanings. It supported the arts and human rights. It legislated the highest minimum-wage law in the nation. It funded education and paid its teachers well. It sat aside special endowments for the elderly. It protected the people's assets by setting aside the Alaska Permanent Fund -- making sure the oil industry paid the people for the oil, and not just the government. And it had the best damned Constitution I had ever seen -- we even had a Constitutional right to privacy from government intrusion.
It's coincidence that I arrived right after the oil spill. I was actually running away from Texas, where after a lifetime of poverty in the Rust Belt, I had won a scholarship and was attending Rice U. But Texas culture was not kind to me, most notably when I was beaten at gunpoint by two deputies one evening -- one from Harris County, one from Fort Bend -- for being a white man with black friends. I of course reported the incident, resulting in the two deputies paying me another call at my part-time minimum-wage job the next evening just to make a point -- "We are above the law." Being impoverished, I felt I had no legal recourse. I wasn't going to fit into the culture there, so I decided to run away, to anywhere.
I was just about ready to return to the still-depressed Rust Belt when I got the offer from a friend's dad to move to Alaska to paint a house in exchange for room & board. At the end of the summer, if I wanted to stay, he'd make sure I didn't flounder and die, and if I wanted to continue back to Ohio, he'd pay my way back. I jumped at it.
1989 was the turning point for Alaska politics, indirectly due to the oil spill. Before the spill, Veco had been a somewhat profitable business with ups and downs -- they'd been in Chapter 11 just a few years prior -- but it wasn't until after the spill they became such a driving force in Alaska politics.
When our favorite Drunken Sailor hit Bligh Reef, Exxon was forced into pretending to clean up the oil. They had to quickly hire thousands of people to gather dead wildlife and stand on beaches to spray rocks with hoses in front of ever-present media. So they turned to Veco.
Veco hired some 2,500 workers and sent them down to spray rocks in Prince William Sound, and as a result, Veco got big.
Just as the termination dust was hitting the tops of the Chugach Mountains, I finished the house and found myself very much in love with Alaska, so I took an entry-level job with a prominent engineering company, Fluor Daniel.
I still remember the laughter there when a package hit the desk from one of the oil producers, soliciting bids for some very complicated production upgrades, and the bidders list included Veco -- the rock-scrubbers. "HA! Veco?!" Within a few months, that laughter started turning a bit nervous, as Veco actually started winning those contracts. And more. And more. And more, eventually driving out several long-standing professional firms. Nobody could figure out how they were doing it.
Fast-forward to 1994. By this time, Fluor had left Alaska and I had taken a job as a technical writer for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. And it was about this time that I started getting nervous about the national and local influence of the Christian Coalition and decided to get involved by attending a Democratic caucus for the first time.
The next thing I knew, I was a member of an important committee and had been drafted as a candidate for State House, running against an incumbent Republican, one of Veco's chosen.
As a matter of process, we candidates procured the donation records of our opponents, and started to see a trend. At each fund-raiser, the donation list showed the name and the employer of the donor. And each list was the same -- a few stray donors here and there for $20 or $100, and then a swarm of Veco employees all donating the maximum allowed by law.
The Democratic party called, "foul," and Veco denied reimbursing or coercing its executives to give so generously to these candidates, but the pattern was there. The bluish state grew purple, then glowing red. The candidates used the money to tap into the growing neo-con/Christian Coalition anger and swept the state far, far to the right. So far, in fact, that the Democrats followed them.
Even our Democrat Governor, Tony Knowles, started giving away sweetheart deals to the oil producers. Another former candidate and good friend, Clyde Baxley, and I decided that we would fight the corruption from the outside, and we both severed our ties to the Alaskan Democratic Party.
Shortly thereafter, Clyde and I started picking fights and pointing fingers at the corruption, bringing ethics charges against legislators, pointing out activities of the prominent Republican Baptist Temple, anything we could do to keep corruption in the news. And it was around this time that Clyde introduced me to Ray Metcalfe.
Ray was a former republican legislator -- pro-business, pro-United-States, pro-Alaska. He was a Republican because he honestly felt their policies would lead to a better quality of life for people. In the mid-eighties, however, Ray saw the Big Industy/Pat Robertson trend beginning to affect his party and protested by forming the Republican Moderate Party of Alaska.
In 1997, I was told that the Pipeline's main offices were being moved to Fairbanks, and was given the choice of paying for my own relocation or leaving my contract. Fairbanks is not Anchorage. Fairbanks is colder, hotter, has more mosquitos, and is too small and too isolated for my tastes. I was not going to move to Fairbanks, so I resigned, thinking, "Jeez, with my skills and experience, I should be able to get a job just about anywhere."
But by that time, I'd been in the news a little too much, and Veco held almost all the jobs in my industry. I found myself blacklisted and was forced to drop out of the public scene for survival's sake, although I still helped out with background research.
Clyde and Ray, however, pushed on publicly, filing suit against the North Star oilfield give-away, pushing for investigations into the Republican Baptist Temple's investment property taxes, and especially pointing fingers at the trend of our Republican Party's new crop of "Private Consultants" for various lobbyist industries, like oil and seafood. Clyde joined Ray's party and they ran together for Gov./Lt. Gov just to be part of the debate and keep the issues in the news.
Ray took his allegations to the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC), the state agency in charge of policing the political activities in the state. Just when they were starting to listen, but before they could investigate, however, their funding was cut, and they lost their investigator. They became little more than a public information outlet, where you could get copies of donor forms and the like, but with no power of enforcement. And there it stagnated.
All of the public advocacy options -- APOC, the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics, etc. -- were being controlled one way or another by the self-protecting Republicans. So Ray took it to the FBI, who finally listened.
This is why you see Veco in the news. And this is why you're going to be seeing more Alaskan politicians in the news over the next few months.
As for Veco, one great looming question remains. What, exactly, was in it for them? For years, Veco had been the dark shadow in the corner, doing its dirty work just beyond the public eye, carefully, craftfully getting the job done without ever taking the big risk.
So why take such a big risk over the oil tax? After all, Veco isn't directly affected by the tax -- they are a service agency, not producers. They get paid the same for a contract whether the tax is 20% or 70%.
I personally believe what we'll learn is that Veco has been a shill for the producers since 1989. It would explain how they got all those contracts that used to go to those world-renowned engineering companies like Fluor and CH2M Hill, and it would explain why they were willing to take the risks that eventually ended in indictments.
Speaking of CH2M Hill, they're now considering purchasing the now-for-sale Veco, and it looks like they're thinking the same way as I do -- they want a full audit of Veco's current and past contracts to learn which were actually valid, so they can determine the true value before purchase.
Something tells me that, before this is over, we'll be seeing BP tied into it somewhere.
Folks here on Kos are more interested in Ted, I know, but in reality, Ted is just a side benefit -- by-catch, as we say. What Ray should be most proud of is the timing -- these indictments prevented our legislators selling out Alaska's future by radically altering the oil taxation in favor of the producers.
And to me personally, it means I can go home soon, which I miss more than anything I've ever missed before in my life, and be able to find work based on my skills, without regard to what letter appears after my name on the voter registration.
But since you're such friends of Ted, I'll tell you another pretty story about him next time -- a story of a Friend, some land, a $40MM building, a $2.5MM rider to a military budget, and hopefully another investigation.
Enjoy.