Alaska, DC and Oil

Via Andrew Sullivan, there’s a great piece in the New Republic about the fall of a political dynasty.

The events of the past two years in Alaskan politics read like the last days of a venal institutional party somewhere in Latin America. Indeed, Alaska's history often resembles that of a kind of frozen banana republic: an idealistic political experiment projected onto an unsettled territory with a troubled colonial past, stagnating in the hands of a single ruling party bolstered by a monolithic resource extraction economy. Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, the state's iconic strongmen, have collectively spent 75 years in Congress, in part by encouraging Alaska's resentfully transactional view of the federal government, which still owns most of the land within the state's borders and supports it with generous subsidies. In lieu of the United Fruit Company, Alaska has the North Slope oil fields, upon which the state has been economically dependent since the 1970s.

It’s worth a read. Ted Stevens, already a TPBP favorite, and Don Young are on the way out. I can’t say there’s much to mourn, although some of my favorite political moments of the last few years have come from Senator Stevens. For that, at least, he will be missed. But check out the article. It’s fascinating reading about a dirt poor state dominated by one powerful industry.