Cripes. My Google spreadsheet project was moving all just fine. I entered the 2009 budget line items and they tied out to the one on the Alaska Office of Management & Budget site.

But when I opened the 2008 budget, the out-of-state contractors line item amount is different than when I first looked at it to the tune of $8 million or so.

Fortunately, I downloaded the 2008 budget when I first looked at it late this afternoon:

File: SB50_Operating.all.df.pdf
Title: Microsoft Word SB50 Operating Language.doc
Created by: SPRETER
Creation date: 1/17/07 9:49:03 AM
Modified: 1/17/07 9:52:57 AM
Application: PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2

Page #1 - Marked "25GS1013\A"

If anyone wants a copy, let me know.

I might have overlooked it but I can't find SB50_Operating_all.df.pdf on the OMB website now.

I'm beginning to wonder about the Alaska OMB. I downloaded SB_53_bill.pdf without opening it. I took a look just now and it is marked up to strike out the Federal Welfare Queen's now famous vetos.

Palin is one tough cookie, let me tell you. Cutting funding for the National Guard before a presidential campaign is risky under the best of circumstances.

I don't think I was too far wrong on the prison issue. I suspect it was put on the back burner during the campaign.

Here is what I mean:

20 Mat-Su Prison
Original dollar amount: $30,000,000
Revised dollar amount: $2,000,000

Hmm...I just now googled Mat-Su Prison.

From the Matatanuska-Susitna Borough website (undated):

Goose Creek Correctional Center

Groundbreaking is expected in spring of 2009 for what is likely the largest building project in recent state history. Trees are being cleared now. A design/builder team will be picked in the fall of 2008 for the Goose Creek Correctional Center. When the 1,536-bed prison goes in, the region will be charged with the influx of 600 to 700 construction jobs and 350 prison jobs. Occupancy: 2012.

The prison will be located at the corner of Alsop Road and Point MacKenzie Road, some nine miles from the Port MacKenzie dock. The anticipated cost to design and build the prison is more than $200 million. Borough Purchasing Officer Russ Krafft is managing the contract solicitation process.

“This is one of the largest vertical construction projects that's ever taken place in Alaska. It's like building an entire university campus at once,” Krafft said.

RISE Alaska will be the Borough Project Manager and will manage the Design Build contract and other activities required to deliver the Facility. The prison will be financed by the sale of revenue bonds and repaid by the state through 25 annual lease payments. Borough taxpayers are not paying for the project.

The prison is a joint project between the Borough and the State of Alaska.

The Goose Creek Correctional Center will be approximately 450,000 square feet. The medium security correctional center will have1,536 beds for male prisoners. The site is about 330 acres with 150 acres to be cleared. The new facility will be designed and constructed as a prison for long-term sentenced prisoners. In the near term, it will also provide overflow capacity for un-sentenced prisoners from local pre-trial facilities until additional jail beds have been constructed.

Other info about the Mat-Su prison project:

Project Budget

The detailed master budget is under development and will be presented in an upcoming monthly report. The largest budget component will be the Design-Build Correctional Center Contract. The maximum contract award is $219,600,000.

I can't post the Mat-Su Prison Project schedule but interestingly enough, the RFP process is scheduled to end in November 2008. At that point, the bonds will be issued, presumably after Election Day.

There are some photos on the Mat-Su site but they are labeled as being part of a "story".

E.g:

ww1.matsugov.us/prison/images/prisonaerialsm.jpg

ww1.matsugov.us/prison/images/stories/site/prisonaerial2smsm.jpg

ww1.matsugov.us/prison/images/stories/site/prisonaerial2smsm.jpg

The preliminary plat drawing is in PDF format:

P:\Projects\D60002\PLATTING\PRELIMINARY\PLATP-PRISON sht 1 (1)

I signed up for Mat-Su prison email news alerts.

I'm only interested in the Mat-Su Prison Project to the extent that it involves US taxpayer dollars. The Alaskans may very well be funding it themselves but given their track record, that is highly unlikely.

The Alaskans should take a look at upstate New York if they want to get an idea about what happens when you go into the prison business in a big way.

The NYS economic development czar, Charles A. Gargano, came from the construction business and all he knew had to do was hand out money for construction projects. He didn't develop any legitimate new business for NYS in the eight years he was in office but he sure did increase NYS's prison capacity.

Charlie is a pip. One year, he built a giant nanotechnology center. The next year, he widened the Erie Canal. I used to joke that someone should tell Charlie that aren't shipped on barges but now that Wall Street is going sour, my joke isn't at all funny.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to take away anyone's prison job in upstate New York. I just think we, as a society, are putting the wrong people in them.

Take Rudy, for example. A lot of people think he was the scourge of Wall Street in the late '80s because he went after Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

Wrong. The crooks on Wall Street were so delighted with Rudy, they made him mayor.

I don't think Rudy Giuliani is a crook, by any means. My theory is that Rudy thought he had really nailed Milliken and Boesky by giving them stiff fines and a couple of years in the Allenwood Country Club.

Rudy didn't come from money so maybe a hundred million seemed like a lot at the time. I found out much later that Ivan Boesky had another $800 million stashed. After I heard about the $800 million, I've wondered what Boesky told Rudy he had in the bank.

Believe you me, I'd do two years at Allenwood in a heartbeat if I had $800 million waiting for me and so would the crooks on Wall Street.

The way I see it, Rudy Giuliani is responsible for starting a twenty-year crime spree on Wall Street that is still going on to this day. Once they realized that Rudy's wrath was the worst they had to fear, it was Party Time.

But they didn't get away with the biggest ripoff in world history. Not yet anyway.

Don't believe me? Ask Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulsen for the confidential Goldman Sachs memoranda re the impact of Social Security privatization on the stock market.

My guess is that Paulsen will claim that only GS clients are entitled to that information.

If I were a Democratic politician when Bush spent six months pushing SS privatization during a war, I would have gone on Meet the Press and told everyone in this country who would listen, that, as the biggest class of investors in the world, American citizens were entitled to the best financial advice that money could buy before making one of the most, if not the most, important financial decision of their lives.

What would President Bush have said? We couldn't afford Goldman Sachs? (We probably couldn't but that's a different story.)

But I'm not a politican and I don't have any influence. What I don't understand is why perfectly intelligent people who opposed privatizing social security didn't demand a prospectus from the president.

They may not read them but everyone who is in a 401(k) plan gets a propectus in the mail when he or she invests in a mutual fund (or at least they used to - I haven't been in a 401(k) in awhile.)

A prospectus lays out the purpose of the fund, the names of the fund managers, how the fund will generally invest your money, fees, etc. The prosectus provides historical data, if applicable, as to the fund's performance.

I can't remember off the top of my head if a mutual fund propectus is required to disclose risk. I know a corporation has to when it goes public and evey year thereafter.

I was shocked at how casually the president explained why we should invest all our hard earned money in Wall Street and how little reaction it provoked from the press and the public.

I knew I wasn't the only one who was depending on social security for a big chunk of my retirement income and I thought a whole lot of people should have been paying a whole more attention to what he was telling us.

Bush clained that our retirement money would be safe because we would only be allowed to invest in mutual funds made up of blue chip stock. There is no such thing as a blue chip stock anymore. A Russian billionaire owns 5% of General Motors and IBM factors its receivables.

Me, I wanted to put Bill Clinton to work. One, he had the influence to get the venture capital rules relaxed so middle class Americans could bundle $5k or so investments into a meaningful amount of money.

Two, people around the world seemed to like Clinton so if the American Middle Class Group went head to head on a deal with the Carlyle Group, I thought the AMCG would have a better shot at winning. I thought most world leaders would prefer to be schmoozed by Bill than bullied by James A. Baker III.

And just who the hell would tell me that I'm not allowed to organize the middle class into a world class financial force?

We all know (or at least some of us do) that George Bush has one vote, I have one vote. James A. Baker has one vote, I have one vote.

I support our system of government but I don't know who else does. Around 1996 or so, I started to think something was terribly wrong with the government and I have Alphonse D'Amato to thank for that.

The last I heard, I have the same rights as every other American citizen under the Constitution of the United States of America. On paper, anyway.

Getting back to AMCG, going after the Carlyle Group would be worth the risk because then I'd know for sure if the big shot Republicans and Democrats tied to Carlyle support our form of government or they just pay lip service to the notion of love of country and freedom so they can line their pockets.

If I don't have the same financial rights as, say, a Frank Carlucci or a Frank Gaffney, the constitution doesn't mean much in practical terms.

I'm not a Ted Kennedy fan but I greatly resent how his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Senior, is portrayed in the media. Maybe President Franklin d. Roosevelt did pick a Wall Street hipster to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission but he sure picked the right one, didn't he?

Joe Kennedy probably didn't write Rule 34-B himself but I bet he had to pound some people into the ground to stop them from watering it down into another meaningless government regulation.

I think of the 1933 and 1934 Security Acts as being the Financial Constitution of the United States of America. The '33 and '34 acts protected a generation of Americans from the vultures on Wall Street stealing their eyeteeth but no more.

Pets.com did it for me. When it went public, there wasn't a doubt in my mind about what was really going on. It was Reagenomics at work and all of the people I knew were experiencing the benefit of Reagan's famous trickle down effect.

Why hardworking and honest Americans didn't throw Ronald Reagan's miserable ass out out of the oval office when he promised to let them feel a trickle down effect when the rich got richer is beyond me.

I'll give it to Reagan in that he made no bones about the fact that he was going to rob the joint. Unlike some other presidents, Regan played fair and square. He sent Arthur Laffer out to make sure every voter heard about the trickle down plan. No one can say they weren't warned.

That's why Ronald A. Reagan is hailed as the country's greatest president by a lot of rich people. Reagan showed them what you could get away with as long as you were honest with the American public.

And trickle down it did. The Wall Street crowd was putting more money up their noses in the '80s than many Americans earned in a year. Every day, the New York Post told eveyone in nYC about the mountains of coke piled up at Studio 54 and who was doing what to whom.

At the time, there was a crack epidemic in certain NYC neighborhoods and people were getting sent upstate by the truckload on drug charges. But I don't remember the New York City Police Department ever staging a raid at Studio 54 or working undercover at Nell's or any other hotspot where the Wall Street crowd hung out.

What burns me up is that it would have been nothing for those fucking assholes on Wall Street to get the Rockefeller laws changed. Those selfish pigs never gave one fucking minute of their "valuable" time to even think about the monumental social injustice going on right under their inflamed nostrils.

I think some people have me all wrong. I'm all for law and order. When you screw around with wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people by making the New York Stock Exchange a world class joke, you should be sent to prison for a long, long time.

If I was in charge of cleaning up Wall Street, Allenwood would be closed tomorow. Anyone on Wall Street who gets caught illegally manipulating the market gets a minimum of twenty years, no parole, in an upstate prison.

Everyone on Wall Street knows how much money Charlie Gargano spent on those prisons and they thought increasing the prison capacity was a swell idea. Not one of them, as far as I know, ever warned their fellow New Yorkers about the alarming increase in state debt.

I'm pretty sure that no one on Wall Street went out their way either to to publicize the fact that bond issues are now secured by the state tax revenue stream. Bondholders get paid before schools and hospitals are funded.

I only knew about the bonds because I kept my eye on Charlie. I wasn't quite sure what was going on but I knew that Charlie didn't have an honest bone in his body. I worked off the theory that everyone who had business with him was crooked. You are known by the company you keep, as the saying goes.

Send them upstate and the lowlife scum on Wall Street will find out exactly how much their loves ones love them when said loved ones have to spend every weekend jackassing back and forth upstate for eight hours at a clip.

But the first thing I'd do if I were in charge of cleaning up Wall Street would be to hire an army of lawyers who would spend all of their time legally busting trust funds. No such thing as an unbreakable trust despite what those snots on the Upper East Side were told by their parents.

Then I'd "negotiate" with the defense attorneys. If their Wall Street bigshot client pleads guilty, his or her family will be permitted to keep enough assets to generate an annual income equal to the median annual income of a family of four in New York State.

If New Yorkers only knew what was going on. I did everything I could to get them to pay attention to the crooks on Wall Street. I wrote to politicians, newspapers, government agencies etc etc and the few replies I did get were enough to keep me going.

I didn't know what else to do so I kept talking. I've been talking for more than seven years almost non-stop and I'm getting a little worn down but I don't have anything else as important to do so I'll just keep rattling on.

Our system of government isn't perfect but as it goes, so goes the world. Warren Buffet thinks the United States is still a rich country but I'm not sure if he is right. Its most valuable asset in the eyes of many people around the world is our educated middle class.

As the American middle class goes, so goes the world.

Fuck you and your stupid little book about being a patriotic American, Lynn Cheney. If you had half a brain, you would have thought of something a lot more useful to do after 9/11 other than hawking a boring children's book that no one in a hundred years would ever want to read.

"Home, home on the range.." is where you're going, Toots, if you're lucky.