Let’s get some priorities straight. Alaska cannot squander this moment. It is going to take leadership and courage to turn things around. Amazingly, it might — it should — be a bi-partisan effort.
Before reading further, first go to YouTube and watch what Gov. Walter Hickel produced in 1993, when he initiated a $29 billion lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to give Alaska what was promised at statehood. Here is the link. It isn’t long.
Incredibly, most Alaskans and many legislators, have never heard of the phrase “90/10.” It has been buried, thanks to our own congressional delegation, under the fig-leaf phrase, coined by Sen. Ted Stevens and echoed by Rep.Don Young, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Dan Sullivan and others, which says, “Fifty percent of something is better than 90 percent of nothing.”
A better phrase would be, “Our politicians have sold out our birthright for a mess of pottage.”
From Wikipedia: A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value, taken foolishly and carelessly, in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable.