The Bigger Indian Tribe Scandal

by Duckman GR

Wampum Blog has a series of posts, starting here, then here, here, and here, detailing the even bigger crimes underlaying the Abramoff Indian Tribe scandal. Now that there's documentary support that not only didn't he give any money to Democrats, but that he reduced the amounts that his clients traditionally gave to Democrats while vastly increasing what his clients gave to goppers, we can fully realize his duplicity and shameless cunning.

This Mother Jones article gives the background in the shameful treatment of the American Natives that continues today. And guess who gets to pay for it?

The public. We subsidize the trust fund, we subsidize the oil, gas, mineral corporations, then, best of all, we pay again to buy back those products we've already paid twice for, in a manner of speaking.

I've snipped a bit from the Mother Jones article on the flip side, but read MB's articles. Because she brings in Abramoff and Gale Norton (I told those Senators that her and Ashcroft were the ones to stop on day one, did they listen?) and ties it in with, as Josh Marshall describes Abramoffs public looting of the tribes, the slush fund. Only this slush fund is $176 billion dollars. You can buy all sorts of elections and politicians and reporters with that amount of cash, and big oil & co have certainly done it.

And I guess the NYT even covered the lawsuit at the heart of this matter. Maybe Sen. Conrad, who hasn't quite seen his way clear on Alito, can make up for some of it on the Indian Affairs Committee?

[thanks anon-fixed]

[T]he Dawes Act -- a 19th-century legislative attempt to solve what President Chester A. Arthur called "the Indian problem." Simply put, Western pioneers wanted Indian lands, while liberal Easterners (mostly out of sight of any Indians) wanted the Indians to be happy.

snip

Dawes mandated that most reservation lands be broken into individual parcels in the hope that dissolving communal ownership would dissolve the power of the tribes -- considered counterproductive to Indian assimilation.

snip

From the Indians' point of view, Senator Dawes' experiment in social engineering was a mockery. Not only did the government fail to furnish the Indian with a plow when it gave him his allotment, it typically splintered those allotments into unmanageable islands (30 acres of timberland here, 50 acres of farmland 100 miles away), more or less guaranteeing that no Indian could work the disjointed parcels. Consequently, the government took legal title of the allotments and began to lease the land to settlers and, later, corporations. It pledged to collect the revenues and disburse them to the Indian landowners.

But that hasn't happened, and now some of those "Indians" want their money. Can you blame them, giving the shit they've endured from the Europeans, from people JUST LIKE JACK ABRAMOFF?