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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=palast@gregpalast.net href="mailto:palast@gregpalast.net">Greg Palast</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=unionyes@ameritech.net
href="mailto:unionyes@ameritech.net">unionyes@ameritech.net</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, May 10, 2010 2:26 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> The Man Who Invented Alaska and Sarah Palin</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><B><FONT size=4>Emperor Hickel: The Man Who Invented
Alaska<BR>... and Sarah Palin </FONT></B><BR><BR><BR><I>by Greg
Palast<BR>Monday, May 10 2010</I> <BR><BR>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 7px; WIDTH: 250px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 7px"
align=center><IMG src="http://www.gregpalast.com/images/alaska/WalterHickle.jpg"
width=250 border=0><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12px; COLOR: #555555"><EM>Gov.
Wally Hickel ©1997 James Macalpine PIF</EM></SPAN></DIV>Wally Hickel invented
Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was
hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted
that second creation. <BR>Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well,
that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That
required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he
accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.
<BR>"That was a mistake," he said, referring to US Statehood. "We should have
been our own nation," which, I pointed out, would have made him President
instead of Governor. <BR><BR>Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he
massaged and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to
create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar
Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the Bering
Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the North, an
Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently ruled, he made
clear, by Emperor Wally. <BR><BR>Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts,
and usually successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the
Governor of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to
declare its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.) <BR><BR>Walter Hickel,
elected Governor of Alaska twice over twenty-five years, was one strange
Republican. Nixon expelled him from the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing
the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel was a Huey Long-style populist socialist.
"Private property," he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just
won't work for most of the planet." <BR><BR>But for a man averse to private
property, he owned lots of it and hungered for more. He was undoubtedly Alaska's
richest man and how he got it, and how he maneuvered to get more, with Nixon's
help, and later, Palin's, was the reason I have been investigating him.
<BR><BR><BR><BR><B>Indian Giver</B> <BR><BR>I first met Hickel in his office at
Hickel Investments atop his Captain Cook Hotel, the tallest building in
Anchorage (by a regulation crafted by Hickel). <BR><BR>Thirty years ago, Hickel
realized that his arctic dreams lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal
and lumber. But extracting and shipping those resources required removing a
large obstacle: the land's ownership by Indians and Natives. <BR><BR>The US
Congress recognized Native land rights in the original agreement to purchase
Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged those rights, albeit
reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state. <BR><BR>
<DIV style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 7px; MARGIN-LEFT: 7px; WIDTH: 300px"
align=center><IMG
src="http://www.gregpalast.com/images/alaska/Agnes_Nichols.jpg" width=300
border=0><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12px; COLOR: #555555"><EM>Eyak
Chief-for-Life Agnes Nichols, one of the Natives who negotiated the land deal
with Hickel. Photo©1997 James Macalpine PIF</EM></SPAN></DIV>Hickel, elected
Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of
the land. He told me, "You can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase.
Just because your granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean
you own it." <BR><BR>However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served
both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil
companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave Hickel
Udall's job. <BR><BR>Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions
of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through a
pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior
partner, Exxon. <BR><BR>From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel
successfully lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon
pipe required getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of
the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. <BR><BR>ANCSA contained a clause unique
in US history: Rather than create <I>reservations</I> in which there would be a
sovereign territory held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be
given shares of stock in a dozen or so <I>corporations</I>. The corporations,
not the Natives, would own the land. <BR><BR>Most important, Because the land
was corporate real estate, not reservation property it could be sold. And guess
who was ready to buy it? <BR><BR>I met with Hickel the day Chenega Corporation
of the Prince William Sound sold 90% of its land to Exxon and its Oil Spill
Trust. I asked Hickel, seeing the Natives give up their land, if he had regrets
about the Settlement Act and Chenega's sale. <BR><BR>"Yes," he said, "<I>I made
them an offer for that property myself</I>; but I wouldn't pay them anything
like what they are getting from the Exxon money." <BR><BR>Today, most of the
Native Alaskan corporate land of the Prince William Sound is owned by people who
don't live in Alaska. The remaining Natives are now tenants of the land their
ancestors have lived on for 3,000 years. <BR><BR>Native leader Gail Evanoff told
me, that was the plan from Day One. "They set it up for us to fail. They put it
in a form they could take away." <BR><BR><BR><BR><B>Palin's Pipe</B> <BR><BR>In
1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska Pipeline by a single
vote. <BR><BR>To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen, Chairman of
ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified under oath that North
Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively to the US market, not Japan.
<BR><BR>He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would not be followed by
a gas pipeline on the same route. <BR><BR>Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation
has begun work on that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan.
For Sarah Palin, whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her
greatest accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to
participate in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project. <BR><BR>Yukon Pacific's
founding investors were R.O. Andersen ...and Walter Hickel. <BR><BR><I>On
Saturday, Governor Walter Hickel passed away. He was 90.</I>
<BR><BR><BR><BR>******* <BR><BR><I>Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez
grounding for the Natives' Chugach Alaska Corporation. Palast is author of the
New York Times bestsellers,</I> The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed
Madhouse. <BR><BR><BR>The not-for-profit <A
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