Canadian owned Jordan Cove Energy Project, LP, the company behind a proposed LNG import/export terminal, contributed another $2,000 to CCAP making its total contributions to $3,000. Just like the Australian owned CCAP contributor, ORC, Jordan Cove’s interest in influencing local politics is solely for the benefit of their shareholders.

Neither the strip miner, ORC, nor the natural gas energy developer, Jordan Cove, represent industries with a history of success in uplifting depressed rural economies. Nevertheless, local proponents have attempted to cast these resource extraction industries as saviors, corporate white knights, job creating deities who will enrich our schools and pave our streets with gold. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence indicates these companies and others like them are more predator than savior and the only enrichment will be to the same “tiny band” of local regulatory critics who have always prospered while everyone else suffers.

Cameron Parish. Louisiana, the home of Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass LNG import/export terminal is a case in point. Just like Jordan Cove, Cheniere road into town promising jobs and an increased tax base and a supporting pipeline used eminent domain rights to acquire property rights from landowners. Sabine Pass went into service in 2008 and unemployment in Sabine Pass as well as Cameron Parish are at 12% increasing steadily since 2008 while the population has dwindled and the poverty rate sits at almost 12%. This is consistent with the economic conditions in other regions with LNG terminals around the world and attempts to claim otherwise are spurious, contrived and designed to defraud a desperate populous. (Same argument is true of coal export facilities).

Back here on earth, the same characters that have sold the policies of unregulated resource extraction that have left the county broke and begging for more federal timber are attempting to repackage an old theme that somehow hiring a monarch, czar, god, AdminMan or PAC tool also to be known as an administrator is somehow new and shiny and modern. It isn’t.