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Stones & Bones / volume 9 number 10, October 2007 Red Alert: Uncle Ted Up the Block One rainy fall evening, I decided to walk from my Girdwood rentalup a narrow gravel road, to see the ill-famed home of Senator Ted Stevens. Among homes bigger, more modern, Stevens’ A-frame is far from illustrious. Its green roof is coated with sticks and dark brown paint is peeling from beams. A gutter hangs loose. The lower floor, apparently the work of VECO personnel, is undecorated T-111. Outmoded, seventies in style, the Stevens home is not the flashy mansion you’d expect of one of the top-ranked senators in Congress. Stevens’ Girdwood home, at least one target of federal investigations, is a mostly inadequate symbol in the story of our state’s history of political greed, corruption, and scandal. Yet, in the sad way that the gutter, a broken branch stuck in it, falls limp from the roof’s edge, the house perhaps represents an apt metaphor. When I served as road supervisor for Girdwood’s five-member council years ago, the local contractor and I made up a list of more than 100 repairs for our road service area. Someone had told us Ted was interesting in helping Girdwood fix its pot-holed, unpaved streets. The process to get approval for a grant request took several months, involved public discussion over priorities, and required agreement of the Board of Supervisors. With the board’s eventual blessing, I wrote a report that began with reference to Steven’s home. “As you know,” I said in the letter, “the street outside your home becomes a bobsled run in the winter.” Our small maintenance budget was eaten up with snow removal, sanding, and grading. I attached a page of prioritized projects to the letter. To our surprise, Stevens took notice. We soon found out that he had added an earmark to apportion money to the state for Girdwood road repair. The amount fell in the millions. I left Girdwood for Southeast knowing we had accomplished something for the community through an open, honest, engaging civic process. When I returned three years later, I found little has changed. The roads resemble those you’d find in Fallujah. Ted had secured an appropriation, all right. Unfortunately, the lion’s share of the money was directed to paving Crow Creek Road, a gravel road that passes by the restaurant of his close, longtime friend Bob Parsons. Parsons testified before a grand jury regarding the FBI’s investigation into Steven’s home. Parsons was apparently implicated because he helped oversee the home’s remodeling. Girdwood’s road story, an example of the subversion of democracy by some other political force (oligarchy?) is, granted, of little significance. But for how long has Stevens been pushing projects for his favored Alaska good old boys? Bridges, mines, oil fields, the Denali Commission, ANCSA—where do the back-room deals—the riches flowing to real estate developers, construction company owners, corporate Natives—where do they end? Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, details corruption and good-old-boy politics on an even grander level. Of the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq, much has been doled out to private contractors, companies and people with ties to the Republican Party of George W. Bush. “There isn’t a brazen, two-bit, purse-snatching money caper you can think of that didn’t happen at least 10,000 times with your tax dollars in Iraq,” Taibbi writes. Jacked-up prices, phony bids, half-finished utilities, dummy vendors, the disappearance of $8.8 billion in cash—Iraq’s “reconstruction” is Alaska good-old-boy politics, capitalist pigs squealing to get at the money trough, on a global scale. “How is it done?” Taibbi asks. “How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini?” Just ask any informed Alaskan. Like the plush card-playing suites inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, Ted Stevens’ Girdwood home likely hosted more than a few games of Texas Hold’em. I’m sure they were all there—Bill Allen, Bill Sheffield, Parsons, and so on and so forth. The participants are never good, but they are old. And, in their ethical judgment, they are still boys—boys with dirt-smudged noses, boys with firecrackers in their pockets.
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