Palin and Gifts: The Mining Connection

[tekisui]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/_when_james_v_grimaldi.html

About a quarter of the 41 gifts that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has received since taking office in December 2006 have a link to one of the state's most influential mining lobbyists. That's one of the findings in a report today by The Post's James V. Grimaldi and Robert O'Harrow Jr.

Among the items on the list are:

* A $2,200 ivory puffin mask from an Alaska Native Corporation called Calista, which has mining interests in southwestern part of the state.

* A $1,200 gold-nugget pin from the city of Nome and which Palin said she would keep for "personal use."

* More than $1,000 in gifts from the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

* A note apparently hand-written by Palin on an ethics form saying that the mining lobbyist, Wendy Chamberlain, had taken one of Palin's daughters on a trip.

Chamberlain has been hired by Calista and Nome as a lobbyist; several representatives of Chamberlain's clients are on the heritage center's board, including Calista, which promoted a ceremony with the governor in its newsletter.

(snip)

In all, Palin's 41 gifts from mining industry executives, visiting dignitaries, municipalities and the nonprofit cultural center were worth $25,000, records show.


Environmentalists brought to the ballot Proposition 4 to limit pollution from mines going into salmon waters. The initiative was seen as a direct attack on the Pebble Mine, a massive gold-mining enterprise proposed for the lands adjacent to Bristol Bay, the world's largest spawning ground of sockeye salmon.

Chamberlain and her firm, Legislative Consultants, were given credit by lawmakers in 2006 for successfully killing legislation that would have done what Proposition 4 proposed, impose new restrictions on mines that discharge tailings and pollution into Alaska waters.

In August, the governor took sides on the initiative.

"Let me take my governor's hat off just for a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop 4 -- I vote no on that," Palin said, when asked about the measure at a press conference in August. Palin said the initiative was unnecessary because state regulators kept watch over the mines. "We're going to make sure that mines operate only safely, soundly."

After Palin spoke, her statements were used in political ads and Prop. 4 went down to defeat.

more...

[Blue_In_AK]

1. Palin's involvement with the mining industry

became very clearly apparent when she publicly opposed the passage of prop. 4 in our August 26 election, a clean water initiative intended to stsll further work on the Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay headwaters region. Here's a quick overview I found.

http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/09/05/the-pepple-mine-project-and-alaska-initiative-4-how-palin-rolls-over-the-environment-and-the-law/comment-page-1/

The Pebble Mine is an environmental disaster of epic proportions waiting to happen. I wish that people in the Lower 48 would get as incensed about this proposed project as they are about drilling in ANWR. This is far, far more serious. For more, go here http://www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/pebble_mine.htm