Palin's Pipeline -Climate Crisis Acceleration Machine

by dengre at Daily Kos
The Palin Pipeline is a deal conceived and nurtured in the corrupt intersection of Alaskan politics, Republican politics and the Oil & Gas Industry.
President Carter’s Administration approved the concept of a natural gas pipeline to bring Alaskan natural gas to market. Since then, it has been a constant fight between competing groups of grifters to get a pipeline built that maximizes profits while passing on the risks to others. In 2006 Palin became Governor during the that year’s battle over the pipeline.
The Palin Pipeline finally hits the sweet spot—it will maximize profits and dump the risks. Under the Palin Pipeline plan, American taxpayers are the "easy marks" of the scam. At the heart of the Palin Pipeline is the concept that the US Federal Government should shoulder all the financial risks—in fact, without massive Federal aid and loan guarantees, the pipeline will never be built. Perhaps, this is why Palin is on the ticket.
Not surprisingly, the law firm that Palin hired to put the deal together, review the applications and defend the TransCanada proposal is Greenberg Traurig (GT). Not only were they Jack Abramoff’s employer at the height of his corruption, they are also tied to many, many other scandals and questionable deals. While Jack was a lobbyist for GT he hired an Alaskan lobbyist, Steven Silver, to work on "Issues Relating to Indian/Native American Policy" and "Exploration for Oil and Gas". It turns out that Silver was also Palin’s lobbyist and that Jack hired him at the same time that GT moved into the "Oil & Gas" business by opening offices in Texas. Another aspect of the corrupt nature of this deal is that the Palin Pipeline will continue the long tradition of stealing resources from the indigenous peoples of North America while destroying their land and cultures.
Greenberg Traurig’s entry into the international Oil & Gas business began after they hired Jack Abramoff and his scandal became a major problem for the firm. The firm’s involvement with Abramoff’s work for his clients and the Republican Party threatened Greenberg Traurig with a corporate death sentence similar to the one that Authur Andersen got in the wake of Enron. The firm was saved from this fate when they hired McCain’s advisor Randy Scheunermann to "advise" GT on how to "work" with John McCain. It was a good investment. McCain’s investigation cover-up of the Abramoff scandal gave Greenberg Traurig a "clean" bill of health and placed 750,000 pages of Abramoff documents that might prove otherwise into cold storage for 50 years. Since then the firm has given McCain over $160,000 and now John McCain has chosen their pipeline deal employer, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.