More hurty brain
Feb. 5th, 2006 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecunium"Let me e'splain. No. That will take too long, le' me sum up."
There has been a long lawsuit, where a lot of Indians have ben trying to find out what happened to billions of dollars of leasing rights they were supposed to have been paid (IIRC the number of billions is in the neighborhood of 200, not exactly chump change). Forget for the momement that oil companies made record profits last year (to the tune of a couple of dozen of those aforementioned billions, for one company, which name escapes me at the moment), because they paid the Feds for the rights to the oil they mined.
The Feds seem to have mislaid those fees, as well as a lot of other money.
So, the tribes sued. The cause is mismanagement of thngs since 1887, when the Gov't decided the Indians couldn't be trusted to manage their own finances and so set up, "individual accounts," and then assigned them to the Gov't, standing in loco parentis for the Indians.
In the course of almost ten years pursuing the lawsuit, they've racked up some serious legal bills.
Now the feds, as one might expect, have been coming off rather poorly in this. The judge has repeatedly taken them to task for present mismanagemnt, and other wrongs, in the course of the suit. Most recently he has awarded the Indians $7 million to cover legal costs.
The feds are willing to pony up. They are doing it by cutting money already budgeted to the tribes. The sheer gall of that is hard to encompass in a simple post.
1: I have agreed to pay you some money; completely unrelated to the lawsuit you are pressing.
2: I lose the lawsuit.
3: I pay you out of the money I was promising to pay you.
4: I have other sources from which I could pay you, but I won't use them.
Sweet, no?
My favorite part of this is this, Jim Cason, associate deputy interior secretary, said the cuts will include $2 million from a fund for lawyers performing tribal work.
Since they have to pay court costs, they will take it out of money the tribes were supposed to get for legal work. Sweet. This isn't borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, it's Paul stealing from Peter to punish him; for Paul's misdeeds.
It isn't as if the Gov't is happy with the judge. They've been trying to get him removed from the case (it seems they took it amiss when he said the problems were the result of evil, apathy, cowardice, or, as he put it the far more likely reason of "crushing beauraucratic incompetance.").
The Indians got lucky when they drew Judge Lambeth. The suit was brought in 1996, and both the Clinton and Bush administrations resisted it (the cost of doing an actual audit; to say nothing of what such an audit might reveal, is no small part of the reason), but Lambeth doesn't care. He, it seems, hates bad governnance.
Colleagues say Lamberth's strong prose is motivated by his government service and belief that it is a high calling. "He believes every person -- whether it's the president of the United States or an administrative clerk -- has a duty to serve the American people and do their duty as required under the law," said Mark Nagle, who worked under Lamberth when he ran the civil division of the U.S. attorney's office.
"I remember him calling up some senior-level presidential appointees and telling them: 'We can't defend this one. And we're not going to,' " Nagle said.
Lamberth's directness continued when he joined the bench. In presiding over several controversial cases involving the Clinton administration, Lamberth repeatedly accused government officials of trying to dupe the court.
In the November trial of Murder Inc. gang members, Lamberth spotted one defendant mouthing words to an ex-girlfriend as she reluctantly testified. Lamberth excused the jury, then let loose. "You sit down and shut up," the judge growled. "If you want to be bound and gagged for the rest of this trial, you just keep it up."
Lamberth has never spared the government in Cobell , and government lawyers say they cringe at his sometimes mocking tone. "You know any banker would be in jail for handling funds like this, don't you?" he told one Interior witness.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, now retired, who was removed from a criminal case by the appeals court after not following sentencing guidelines, said Lamberth's motives are undoubtedly pure in Cobell , and the appeals court needs to acknowledge this litigation is "no tea party."
"Here you have a judge who is terribly frustrated," Sporkin said. "Every time he tells the government to get something done, they don't. It seems to me you have a bunch of crybabies that aren't willing to do what has to be done." (Carol D. Leonnig WaPo. date unk)
For more details you can go to Indian Trust.com.
There has been a long lawsuit, where a lot of Indians have ben trying to find out what happened to billions of dollars of leasing rights they were supposed to have been paid (IIRC the number of billions is in the neighborhood of 200, not exactly chump change). Forget for the momement that oil companies made record profits last year (to the tune of a couple of dozen of those aforementioned billions, for one company, which name escapes me at the moment), because they paid the Feds for the rights to the oil they mined.
The Feds seem to have mislaid those fees, as well as a lot of other money.
So, the tribes sued. The cause is mismanagement of thngs since 1887, when the Gov't decided the Indians couldn't be trusted to manage their own finances and so set up, "individual accounts," and then assigned them to the Gov't, standing in loco parentis for the Indians.
In the course of almost ten years pursuing the lawsuit, they've racked up some serious legal bills.
Now the feds, as one might expect, have been coming off rather poorly in this. The judge has repeatedly taken them to task for present mismanagemnt, and other wrongs, in the course of the suit. Most recently he has awarded the Indians $7 million to cover legal costs.
The feds are willing to pony up. They are doing it by cutting money already budgeted to the tribes. The sheer gall of that is hard to encompass in a simple post.
1: I have agreed to pay you some money; completely unrelated to the lawsuit you are pressing.
2: I lose the lawsuit.
3: I pay you out of the money I was promising to pay you.
4: I have other sources from which I could pay you, but I won't use them.
Sweet, no?
My favorite part of this is this, Jim Cason, associate deputy interior secretary, said the cuts will include $2 million from a fund for lawyers performing tribal work.
Since they have to pay court costs, they will take it out of money the tribes were supposed to get for legal work. Sweet. This isn't borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, it's Paul stealing from Peter to punish him; for Paul's misdeeds.
It isn't as if the Gov't is happy with the judge. They've been trying to get him removed from the case (it seems they took it amiss when he said the problems were the result of evil, apathy, cowardice, or, as he put it the far more likely reason of "crushing beauraucratic incompetance.").
The Indians got lucky when they drew Judge Lambeth. The suit was brought in 1996, and both the Clinton and Bush administrations resisted it (the cost of doing an actual audit; to say nothing of what such an audit might reveal, is no small part of the reason), but Lambeth doesn't care. He, it seems, hates bad governnance.
Colleagues say Lamberth's strong prose is motivated by his government service and belief that it is a high calling. "He believes every person -- whether it's the president of the United States or an administrative clerk -- has a duty to serve the American people and do their duty as required under the law," said Mark Nagle, who worked under Lamberth when he ran the civil division of the U.S. attorney's office.
"I remember him calling up some senior-level presidential appointees and telling them: 'We can't defend this one. And we're not going to,' " Nagle said.
Lamberth's directness continued when he joined the bench. In presiding over several controversial cases involving the Clinton administration, Lamberth repeatedly accused government officials of trying to dupe the court.
In the November trial of Murder Inc. gang members, Lamberth spotted one defendant mouthing words to an ex-girlfriend as she reluctantly testified. Lamberth excused the jury, then let loose. "You sit down and shut up," the judge growled. "If you want to be bound and gagged for the rest of this trial, you just keep it up."
Lamberth has never spared the government in Cobell , and government lawyers say they cringe at his sometimes mocking tone. "You know any banker would be in jail for handling funds like this, don't you?" he told one Interior witness.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, now retired, who was removed from a criminal case by the appeals court after not following sentencing guidelines, said Lamberth's motives are undoubtedly pure in Cobell , and the appeals court needs to acknowledge this litigation is "no tea party."
"Here you have a judge who is terribly frustrated," Sporkin said. "Every time he tells the government to get something done, they don't. It seems to me you have a bunch of crybabies that aren't willing to do what has to be done." (Carol D. Leonnig WaPo. date unk)
For more details you can go to Indian Trust.com.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 08:33 pm (UTC)Given the level of corruption in the US Government such a system would not work for employees. It's not like they have true independence to give frank and fearless advice in the idealised Westminster tradition. If one was an employee, sure it would be preferable to quit rather than find oneself working on a such an illegal and nasty piece of policy, but a Government employee often doesn't get to make any more a significant independent decision than that if they're part of the machine.
Basically I think it gets down to voting their bosses out and insisting that elected officials insist on decent levels of probity in the machinery of Govenrment. Not that it's easy mind.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 09:40 pm (UTC)Certainly for civil actions.
TK
no subject
Date: 2006-02-05 08:01 pm (UTC)Of course punishment of tribes is a continuing trend in Bush's White House. Just ask the Duwamish who are no longer an officially recognized tribe (http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=2951) since Bush came into office. Or look into the various land grabs that have ensued (mostly for mining & oil interests).
Sheesh, I have to go walk or something--this case just burns me up. And the worst thing? It's happening here in the USA and few people have heard anything about it.
Anon
P.S.
Date: 2006-02-05 08:02 pm (UTC)And yet you will find even liberal bloggers insisting
Date: 2006-02-06 01:38 am (UTC)Amazing how willfuly blind even the "good guys" can be. But the numbers don't lie. Only people do.
Unfortunately, no amount of truth has ever brought about justice, or recompense. And a great deal of those supposedly-decent liberal white Middle Americans feel just as the likes of John Derbyshire at NRO/VDARE and Christopher Hitchens, just a little less honest in invoking a grand Social Darwinism, Inevitability and Destiny and the Sweep of History, to justify conquest and genocide and slavery and the destruction of other societies: if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here in my nice life, so I'm not going to complain or regret it.
Which is of course why they are so blase about the possibility of this current iteration coming to an end - oh wait, no, they're not, because that would require some actual other principle than "Look out for number One" and "No skin off my nose"--
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 04:11 pm (UTC)This is, I suppose, just another example of The Government (and the men in it) showing "them" -- the Indians, and the Judiciary -- who's Boss. Unlike so many things, it can't be blamed specifically on the Current Administration, either -- the government's handling of Indian affairs has been packed with corruption. ineptitude, and lack of any sense of Honor since the very beginning (with a brief hiatus while Collier was in charge of the BIA, perhaps) -- regardless of which party was in power.
I think it was John Burbee (son of LArea fan Charles Burbee) who put it, 20-some years ago, as : "The 'Indian Trust Fund' is just the Government saying 'trust me'". He didn't elaborate on that, and didn't need to.
Yup, the sheer gall (as you put it) of what they're doing causes me to splutter, but I think even worse is the _blandness_ with which they're doing it. Perhaps what we need is a President/Administration that insists on Accountability -- and actually practices it.
Meanwhile (as one of your other readers indicated) the Indian Affairs people shuffle shells and peas around by simply refusing to do even the minorly-good things Congress has instructed them to do, and recognizing or un-recognizing tribes according to whim and convenience, while refusing to make public their criteria for Recognition. (Mind you, I'm quite aware that bribery, corruption, and similar dishonesty are at least as rampant in most Tribal Governments as in the Federal one -- I think this comes under the term "assimilation" -- but I do feel that it's the responsibility of our nation's Government to set a good example, and they are clearly and brazenly not doing so.)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-09 07:41 pm (UTC)