Peeling the onion from Abramoff we get to Norquist then the "non-profit" think tanks and front groups, the cloud of 501(c)(3) and 527 entities he helped create, to Exxon/Mobil, BP, Edision Electric Institute, National Petrolium Association, National Mining Association, Dow Chemical, and my personal favorite, Koch Industries [owns GP mill].

[Cross posted at wampum, which has been covering the Abramoff associated interests Abramoff and the Injuns for 2005 and 2006.]

Two months ago, when the Bangor GP mill was shut down and everyone in Maine's political classes (elected and media employed) suddenly had a hot issue -- the spin on the mill closure was the cost of energy, could the new furnace burn construction debris to lower the cost of energy? A small matter of mercury, hydrocarbons, lead paint, asbestos, dioxen and so on as ash and stack gas from a subsidized "clean" wood furnace. But was the spin the right place to start with? Was the Bangor GP mill, of all the GP mills, the one with the highest energy cost? And who is GP really?

I wrote to Chris Miller, who is so far, (a) the only candidate for Governor of any state in the Union who wants to get his state's Guard out of the Iraqmire. and (b) the only candidate for office in any state in the Union who is running on Jimmy Carter's hydrocarbon conservation platform.

Charles and David zoomed up the Forbes annual list of the world's richest people, to tie for 33rd place with an estimated net worth at $12 billion each. The previous year Forbes ranked them at 138th and 139th place, at a mere $4 billion each. They'd a wicked good year, with Koch Industries becoming the largest privately-held company in the US in 2005, when it spent $21 billion to acquire Georgia Pacific.

It wasn't the cost of energy at the Bangor GP mill vs any other GP mill with an equivalent stream of pulp in and paper out, due to the exotic new shape of the New England energy market and Maine-specific regs for "clean" or "dirty" wood-fired industrial steam. it was, it is, the game of the Reagan years. The conversion of a public company into a highly leveraged private one, followed by the breakup and sell-off.

John Baldacci and the rest of Maine's political hipsters could talk about gutting the "clean" part of the tax break that GP's Bangor mill got the last time around, to save 300 jobs, or running a spur off the Nova Scotia - to - Boston (and possibly through one of the nicer bits of Long Island Sound to the New York metro market) gas pipeline and burning tax dollars that way, again, to save 300 jobs, but the real deal was between the banks in New York that hold Koch paper, to whom unrest among the elected "leaders" of the Paper Colony is as unimportant as unrest among the befeathered and painted chiefs of New Guinea when Freeport McMoRan struck gold at the Grasberg mine. To be resolved by the Commerce Clause and State bonds ratings, and the military of the current it-starts-with-S dictator of Indonesia, repectively.

So where is the missing third? What is Bill Koch up to these days? Racing 12 meter boats, one of the more expensive of past-times, and killing a project to put 130 wind turbines (420 megawatts) in Nantucket Sound, the first offshore wind farm in US territorial waters. Oh. And moving a lot of coal around.

All three men are billionaires on paper in combustible carbon. They are wicked sensitive to marginal issues like extraction cost (fun and games at the Minerals Management Service for carbon extracted from leases of Federal and Indian land) and stack gas scrubber cost (fun and games at the EPA for allowable levels of mercury and fly ash at coal-fired electrical utilities, something of passing concern to Mainiacs and Mainers alike). These guys see the whole picture, which is why they're setting up the PR hit on Al Gore's film, An Inconvienent Truth with all the cute CO₂ is natural goodness ads, and pulling John McCain's strings, both sets, his don't investigate past Abramoff (no drill-down to concealed extraction fraud) strings at the Select Committee on Indian Affairs, and his don't message on Global Warming strings on the Commerce Committee, about which he hasn't uttered a peep since he and Joe Lieberman were shown the "climate change" door, at the end of 2004.

Meanwhile, Le Soir reports that Belwind, a Dutch company, has applied for permission to build a 130 turbine (330 megawatts) wind farm on the Bligh Bank, in Belgian territorial waters about 40 km offshore, in waters about 6 to 10 meters deep. The company behind Belwind is Econcern, which did another off-shore wind farm on Sheringham Shoal, in the UK's territorial waters. Behind Econcern is SHV Holdings, the worlds largest LPG distribution company.

Maine's tried "high tech", the pop of the speculative Internet tulip bulb ended that flight into fantesy. Maine's also flirted with "genetics", generalizing from the Mt. Desert mouse farm to ... some fiction of value. One thing we have a lot of is air-born pollutants, being down-winders of every stack from West Virginia to Michigan. The West Germans figured out how to clean up East Germany and make abatement a profitable industry. Maine has wind too. But investment in renewable energy, and investment in cleaning up the carbon energy extraction to combustion byproducts pollutant streams, and disenvestment in carbon energy, which includes nuclear when the total energy cost is included, is safer in Europe than in the United States.

The control over government by organized crime is much lower.