If one really wants to see government healthcare in action, go to a reservation.
Reparations precedent.
Under the settlement, the government agreed to pay 1.4 billion dollars of taxpayers money to the 300,000 Native Americans tribal members. Another 2 billion dollars was set aside for the government to buy some of the land from its owners......fixed it.
Next step:
Reparations to descendants of former slaves... including Michelle.
Just another good reason to
STOP GOING TO THEIR CASINOS!!!!!!!!!
$3.4 billion divided by 300,000 tribal members equals $11,333 per person. But since “only” $1.4 billion is being “paid directly” to the tribal members, that means each person will get $4,667 (and that’s assuming the attorney’s cut is paid separately instead of taken out of the proceeds).
Wow, 3.4 billion will buy a LOT of fire water...
payment for shutting down their mail order cigarette business
I don’t know the particulars but I’m sure the 0bama administration caved in completely. Gave the Indians 100% where 60% would have been fair and acceptable
It’s only taxpayer money so give it way tgo buy votes
This is reparations
Heapum shakedown, ug
***The dispute stems from an 1887 agreement that divided up much of the Indian tribal lands into small parcels that were individually owned and held in “trust” by the US government.
Native Americans claim the mismanagement of those trust accounts robbed them of billions of dollars in revenue that the government collected from leasing the parcels of land. ****
THIS IS NONSENSE! When did the Government EVER mismanage anything!
Ok, Sarc/off!
Do the Indians realize they have just lost one of their best hammers to beat the modern white man into a guilt trip?
Now when Indians start whining we can point to this ruling and say...”So, sue me! We are NOT going away!”(And the buffalo ain’t coming back!)
Phase II - Reparations for anyone with a drop of black blood in them.
There are no Native Americans - just an argument over which group got here first.
Of course the true first folks didn’t stay here, they moved on.
Enough is enough! They keep coming back to the trough time and time again! it’s time to no longer recognize reservations, stop funding the Indian Health Care and education schemes. It is time to cut the “native” Americans off at the knees because the tribes have enough money to cover their the needs of their people if they use it wisely.
ObaMao is desperate for votes...he just took your tax dollars to buy those votes. Nice tidy round sum $1.4 BILLION...done in a back room deal.
Some other back room deal creating some BS formula will do them out of it.
How much is that in beaver pelts?
The government will pay them in the form of tax deductions on the billions they are making at the casinos.
I am an enrolled member of a tribe that has been involved in this litigation for 13 years, so I’d to correct a lot of disinformation out there.
1. Each “Account” will receive a cash settlement of $1,000.
2. An account is a plot of land, which was given to each family over 100 years ago. There are about 9-10 members of my family who are all owners of the same plot or “account” so that means we get to all split the $1,000.
This settlement is outrageous since we’ve calculated that the federal government has shorted us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past 100 years in oil and mineral rights and land lease payments that we should have received on a monthly basis but never did due to the crooked bureaucrats in Washington.
I've lived in or near Indian country my whole life, and the business of "tribal sovereignty" has always bothered me. It's a double standard joke. And I absolutely do not believe we should be paying reparations now, for events from centuries past.
All that being said, I think the tribes have a legitimate gripe about this trust fund fiasco. That was pretty much a straight business deal. Oil, gas, and coal companies would sign contracts to run their operations on Indian owned land and to pay royalties in return. The BIA agreed to administer the contracts and manage distributing the money. No federal money went to the tribes in this deal, although the BIA did agree to eat the cost of managing the system.
The BIA was so inept that not only did they not distribute the money properly, they didn't collect it properly either. Instead of managing the contracts and making sure they were paid the correct amounts of royalty money, the BIA evidently just took whatever the mining and drilling companies sent and assumed it was correct. If I'm the owner of an oil company and I owe say 20 million a year in royalties, and then I find out that if I just send in 2 million a year nobody ever says a word about it, you can imagine what happens. I believe that the vast bulk of the missing money was due to this problem of the BIA not auditing payments made against payments due.
This Indian royalty money was tracked for years at the BIA national data processing center in Albuquerque, NM. I think maybe it got yanked back to Washington DC at some point in the 90's, but in was in Albuquerque for a long time. In the early to mid 80's I worked at that data center as part of a contract technical services team. We assisted the BIA technical staff with just about everything they worked with, except one thing: we were never allowed to touch or even see the royalty tracking system.
We never understood why we couldn't see that system, because from what we learned talking to our BIA co-workers, that was the one system we should be looking at. Even back then then it was a disaster, and everyone seemed to know it. I don't remember most of the details, but I remember a couple of the problems. The main job of this system was to account for mineral-extraction royalties paid on Indian owned land, and to distribute that money to the owners. Sometimes the tribe would own all the land, but other times the tribe would own some and individuals would own some.
One thing they had trouble tracking was who owned the land. Ownership would change as the years rolled by and land was passed from one generation to the next, often being chopped up into different size parcels in the process. Different parcels received royalty money based on different contracts, and this got all mixed up.
The one problem that seemed most unique to me had to do with the way they prorated the money based on what percentage Indian blood each person had, and of what tribe. If you were blood-related to more than one tribe, then this system attempted to track your percentage ancestry in each tribe and prorate the royalty money accordingly. And it didn't keep this percentage as a single number for each tribe, that totaled up to 100%. Instead they stored the numerator and denominator for each person for each tribe in separate arrays, and tried to keep up with each new birth by using the numerators and denominators of the parents to generate the data for the child. No one seemed to know where this Rube Goldberg approach originated, but everyone seemed to agree that it was broken beyond repair.
The head of the Dept of Interior and the head of the BIA are both political appointees of course, and I think everyone knew about the problem but nobody wanted it taken care of on their watch - much too ugly. To me, this is not an Indian versus evil white man issue, nor is it a Republican versus Democrat issue. This is an example of government bureaucracy at its very worst, and both parties are at fault.
Will pay them with Obama bucks.. Worth about 2 cents on the dollar.