Salon on Monday profiled the problems plaguing Alaska’s graft, corruption and nepotism tainted congressional delegation and state government:

What’s wrong with Alaska? The state’s politics can seem an accident of its own isolation, and dependence. There are few states that seem as ripe for scandal as this one, with its history of single-party rule and an economy, based on the extraction of wealth from public lands. But there may also be another, deeper truth: Alaska’s strange, enticing political culture may equally be a legacy of the state’s senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens.

…

[The] relationship between pork and prosperity in Alaska has been long-lasting. The original deal that politicians cut in the ’70s to permit oil companies to drill on public land in the state requires the companies to pay into a state-run fund, which in turn cuts each Alaskan an annual check that has ranged as high as $1,963. By the time Stevens stepped down as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2005, Alaska was snaring federal pork at a rate 30 times the per capita national average. The New Republic’s Franklin Foer, in a 2002 essay, called Alaska the archetypal conservative welfare state. “Stevens and his fellow Alaskans like to think of themselves as embodying a kind of rugged, frontier libertarianism,” Foer noted. “If only it were all true.”

This is actually the case across most of the West, which is hooked on federal welfare in the form of vast water projects, national defense (sic), highway construction and other kinds of federal aid all the while it pretends to pull itself by its bootstraps. The biggest single culprit is the federal government, which owns much of the land in the Mountain West (and Alaska) and refuses to part with that land. However, that has given rise to a culture of graft and cronyism (and entitlement), now well-situated within the Republican Party, to preserve government ownership so long as mineral rights, grazing rights, timber rights, and hydrocarbon rights are doled out on preferential terms to loved ones, friends, associates and golfing buddies.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone