Lisa Murkowski and Her SuperPAC’s PFD Grab Election Scam

Long before Alaska’s current fiscal crisis, Lisa Murkowski was an advocate of raiding the Permanent Fund for State expenditures. Even after 83% of Alaskans voted to stop the PFD Grab, Murkowski either sponsored or voted for three separate raids on the PFD.

When Lisa Murkowski decided to mount a 2010 general election challenge to the Republican nominee she promised to support, a SuperPAC called Alaskans Standing Together was formed.

The group was led by numerous Alaska-based corporations, including GCI, Unicom, Jim Jansen (owner of Lynden Transport), and other Alaska corporations. These corporations poured more than $1.8 million into the six-week effort to stop Republican nominee Joe Miller and assassinate his character.

No less than $575,000 of those funds came directly from leadership and corporate sponsors of the Alaska’s Future campaign that spent millions to convince State leaders to steal $666 million of your Permanent Fund earnings, costing every Alaskan more than $1,000 of their 2016 PFD.

Also playing along with the scam was the entire leadership structure of the Republican-controlled Alaska State Legislature, including Senate President Gary Stevens and Speaker of the House Mike Chenault.

Here’s one of the lying ads from 2010:

In retrospect, that effort was even more extraordinary than it appeared at the time. The case made by Murkowski and her supporters in 2010 was that Joe Miller’s economic plan would collapse Alaska’s economy and precipitate a state financial crisis that would end in the imposition of a State income tax and a PFD Grab. This was done with exactly zero evidence for such a claim. It was a lie, flat-out.

What made the campaign scam even more incredible was Speaker Chenault’s top staffer, Tom Wright, appearing in a Lisa Murkowski campaign ad claiming that Joe Miller was “so off the wall that the direction he wants to take us will bankrupt Alaska.”

Here’s that lying ad:

Yet Speaker Mike Chenault and Tom Wright, with a direct hand in every State budget since 2005, have actually presided over the bankrupting of Alaska, resulting in the theft of half of every Alaskan’s PFD and proposals for a whole array of new taxes and tax increases, including the imposition of a State income tax. It could rightly be said that Mike Chenault, with more influence over the state fiscal situation than any other Alaskan, is the architect of the State’s fiscal crisis.

Make no mistake about it, the Murkowski’s Alaskans Standing Together effort to discredit Joe Miller was no accident. It was a scam. It was executed with willful intent to cover Lisa Murkowski’s long history of support for stealing the PFD to fund big government.

Earlier this year, when Lisa Murkowski affirmed her support for the current PFD grab, the scam had come full circle. Like her father before her, who appointed her to the United States Senate, Murkowski has always been supportive of stealing your PFD to fund big government and special interests.

But she’s not alone. Many of the same players who supported her election scam in 2010 are now both funding Alaska’s Future campaign to steal the PFD, and Senator Murkowski’s current campaign for re-election.

It’s time to send this den of thieves packing, and it starts on November the 8th with rejecting Lisa Murkowski.