Senator Ted Stevens' Empire of Corruption - (Revealing)

[Wind Dancer]

King of the Hill

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Ted Stevens doesn't exploit loopholes, he drills them.

From his aerie in the US senate, the Alaska Republican exerts his power over vast terrains of legislation and budgeting, from the logging of the Tongass National Forest to the development of the Star Wars missile defense scheme.

Since Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Congress, became the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1997, his power has magnified. Through his machinations, federal spending in Alaska has nearly doubled in the past eight years. On a per capita basis, Alaska now leads the nation in the receipt of federal money, at nearly $12,000 for each resident and twice the national average. Alaska also now occupies the top spot for so-called earmarked appropriations, special pet-projects in home states of senators and representatives on the appropriations committees. Under Stevens' sway, Alaska now gets more than $611 in federal funds for each Alaskan for these special earmarks. The national average for earmarked pork projects is $19 per capita.

Of course, this money doesn't go directly into the pockets of all Alaskans, but is channeled into projects benefiting the senator's political patrons and in some cases into projects in which the senator and his family own a financial stake.

Among the special earmarks engineered by Stevens: a $2 million project to monitor Alaska's skies for volcanic ash, a provision that ended up as a segment on the TV show "West Wing"; $1 million for an airport on remote St. Georges Island; $2.5 million to train Russian workers for jobs in Alaska's offshore and Arctic oil fields; $15 million to the University of Alaska to study the aurora borealis.

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In 2000, Stevens engineered and pushed through a measure that amended the Defense Appropriations Act to allow tiny Alaskan Native Corporations to receive no-bid contracts from the Pentagon (and, later, the Department of Homeland Security) worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The tribal entities were under no obligation to actually perform the work. Instead, they could simply subcontract it out to big defense contractors, such as SAIC and Bechtel, at a handsome profit. In essence, the tribal corporations act as cutouts for big companies that don't enjoy the same loopholes in federal contracting provisions.

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