Business as usual won't work anymore. Re-electing "Incumbent Party" candidates like Lisa Murkowski will continue our nation down a path leading to utter financial ruin.
Murkowski proclaims, you must re-elect me, my seniority will bring home the bacon. Alaskans need me she tells us. Mark Begich will say the same thing three years from now. But we are running out of bacon. No, we have already run out of bacon.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released estimates showing that from 2009 to 2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That's more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history.
That's right, we will borrow more money in the first three years of Obama's presidency than in all of U.S. history.
And yet Murkowski recently said the American people are not upset with how much the government is spending, but what we are spending it on. Wrong!
Did you know by 2019, the interest payments on the U.S. debt will be larger than the budget for education, roads, and all other nondefense, discretionary spending.
Big government Democrats and RINO's like Lisa Murkowski must be defeated on election day. It's time for a revolution.
A perfect example of why the Murkowski's of the world must go is the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program.
At its core this is a program that discriminates against business people based on their race. But the program is especially egregious when it comes to the special treatment government gives Alaska Native corporations based solely on race.
The 8(a) program is designed to help so-called small, disadvantaged businesses get a leg up. Of course this is done by discriminating against businesses run by people of certain races the government thinks don't need a leg up.
Any female or minority owned business can qualify for no compete government contracts under 8(a) but there is a cap to the size of the contract. Not so for Native corporations.
Alaska Native corporations are allowed around caps by hiring more subsidiaries. It doesn't matter how many companies they hire and do the actual work, the big fat government contracts keep rolling in. In other words the government funnels billions of contracts through Alaska Native corporations despite the fact that they are nothing more than a conduit or middlemen for Lower 48 companies.
This set-up obviously leads to a big waste of taxpayer dollars. But it is the lack of accountability and openness when it comes to what the Native corporations do with billions in government money that's the real shocker.
Last week Kristina Woolston, spokesperson for the Chenega Native Corp. admitted on my show that her company received a billion dollars in government contracts last year alone.
Keep in mind, Chenega is a village corporation with only 170 shareholders. I guess the government figures these 170 people are so disadvantaged that unless $1 billion in government contracts aren't funneled through their Native corporation, these folks just can't make it in life. It's madness.
I asked Woolston how much Chenega made from the billion dollars. Her first answer was about 4 percent. That would be $40 million for a corporation helping 170 so-called disadvantaged Alaskans.
Later Woolston said Chenega made about $20 million or $25 million last year from the billion dollar contracts.
But Woolston then called back and denied Chenega made $25 million last year. When I asked how much Chenega made last year she said it was not of my business. She said, and I quote, "I am not accountable."
Woolston did admit the corporation paid out last year a dividend to its 170 shareholders of approximately $30,000, which would total around $5 million.
The big question is what happened to the rest of the money. Chenega could have made anywhere from $20 million to $40 million or even more last year. Chenega won't say what the Native corporation did with all the money left over after paying 170 shareholders $5 million. And apparently they don't have to.
A program that allows $1 billion in government contracts to be funneled through a corporation based on race allows that corporation to operate in secrecy. This is taxpayer money we are talking about!
But it gets worse. If the government funneled $1 billion Chenega's way last year as Woolston claims, the year before it got almost $894 million in government contracts. I couldn't determine how much Chenega got in 2007. In 2006, $782 million of taxpayer money found its way to Chenega in way of government contracts. In 2005, Chenega got $643 million.
You are getting the big picture here and it is obscene. Not counting 2007, the federal government funneled $3.3 billion in taxpayer funded contracts to a Native corporation set up to help 170 people.
If Woolston is correct and the average profit from these contracts is 4 percent, it is reasonable to assume Chenega made over the past five years $132 million in profits. $132 million for 170 shareholders that the government has deemed unable to make it on their own.
If Chenega had actually divvied up the $132 million to its 170 shareholders they would have each received $776,470 over the past five years alone. That should give them a fighting chance to make their way in life don't you think?
But really what have the millions in profits done for regular Alaska Natives? In rural Alaska poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence is rampant. So just who is benefiting from the Alaska Native corporations 8(a) program?
And how does this insanity tie back to Murkowski? You won't find a bigger advocate and cheerleader for the 8(a) program than Lisa Murkowski.
Washington, D.C., has been taken over by special interests in ways our founding fathers could have never dreamed of. It's time for a change. A big change. It's time for liberal Lisa to go. It's time to clean up the madness of Washington, D.C.
Dan Fagan is a talk show host on KFQD and the publisher of The Alaska Standard, where this article first appeared.
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