This week the Dunleavy administration is going to officially abandon the effort to give AIDEA—which has plenty of cash reserves—the $50 million, Randy Ruaro, the head of AIDEA, told the Senate Finance Committee Monday.

The reality of this situation is that there was no chance the Legislature was ever going to approve the $50 million request from Dunleavy because AIDEA has hundreds of millions it can draw upon. AIDEA is led by a former Dunleavy employee and a board of Dunleavy supporters.

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While the $250,000 has already been spent, AIDEA is now promising to pay for additional “time and expenses” to revise the “independent” study by Northern Economics in ways to suit AIDEA.

This is no longer an “independent” analysis, based on the latest amendment. AIDEA is deciding what “areas to highlight.”

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Sen. Dan Sullivan, chairman of the International Republican Institute, should have a lot to say about Elon Musk shutting down most of the institute’s operations, but he doesn’t.

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The Permanent Fund claimed at first that all information about the investments made by McKinley and Barings were secret, including the names of the companies. The state claimed that it would be entirely up to the two financial management companies to decide what Alaskans would be allowed to know.

As I wrote here on December 6., 2021: “The real danger is that secrecy can be a tool to hide public investments from the public to avoid controversy and public discussion. It can also be a tool that allows political influence to decide who gets the benefit of state money.”

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Questioned on CNBC if he was trying to dream up ways to defend outlandish schemes from Trump, economic adviser Kevin Hassett claimed that making Canada the 51st state is not outlandish at all.

Hassett didn’t sound like a guy with a doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He sounded like a dropout from Trump University.

No one believes that Canada is going to become the 51st state, but the price that supplicants pay to pacify and please the playground bully is to tell him he is always right about everything and call him “Sir.”

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The job of saying no to $50 million for the Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority has gotten a lot easier than anyone expected.

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The state secretly ordered the contractor—after its report was finished last summer—to revise the work it had done and set salaries at the 50 percentile for many employees. Lowering the benchmark would lower the cost and widen the gap between state workers and other employees..
This deception, for that is what it is, goes against the letter and spirit of the state law requiring government transparency.

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Rep. Nick Begich the Third didn’t tell Alaskans the full story when he praised himself for getting the House of Representatives to pass two bills on February 4.

The Begich bills were copied word for word from bills introduced by former Rep. Mary Peltola.

The hearings on both took place in November, before Begich took office, and they won unanimous backing from the Republican-controlled resources committee.

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It is a safe bet that the contractor discovered that the state is not paying enough to remain competitive, which is the real reason why Dunleavy is sitting on the study.

Had the contractor’s research shown that state pay rates are more than competitive, copies of the state salary study would have been in every mailbox of every politician in Alaska last summer.

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The Anchorage Daily News had the best coverage about Trump’s emissions about the Alaska gas pipeline. Read it here.

Elsewhere the news was not so good.

“President Donald Trump today announced a joint venture with Japan for the Alaska LNG project,” Alaska Public Media reported.

There are no signed documents about a joint venture. That’s because there is no joint venture.

This truth was completely missing from the Alaska news coverage.

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