Native Americans Win Justice, at LastBy JIM MCTAGUE
____In this culture of caricature, President Barack Obama is sketched by his opponents as an enemy of free markets, fanner of the flames of class warfare and a hollow speechifyer. There is some truth to this, as are there truths in the left's barbed criticisms of the right. But in this season of joy, why not forgo being so blinded by ideology that you fail to see his positives? Most important among these, in my opinion, is Obama's unfeigned empathy for the poor.
The evidence for this not only is his doomed effort to provide almost everyone with "affordable" medical coverage (the bill's cost-savings are delusional, so it hardly will be affordable), but also his $3.4 billion settlement with 300,000 American Indians west of the Mississippi who, for 13 years, had been suing the Department of Interior in federal court for mismanaging their trust funds. They alleged losses of $10 billion to $40 billion over 75 years.
THEIRS IS AN OUTRAGEOUS TALE of the weak versus a callous, arrogant federal bureaucracy;
the native Americans wouldn't have gotten satisfaction if President Obama hadn't interposed himself.The Indians, whose communities are the most impoverished in the U.S., had been trying to obtain an administrative fix to the trust-fund problem for two decades. Money owed them for oil, mineral, timber and grazing rights on their lands was missing, and the accounting by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was so inadequate that no one could say if the funds had been lost, stolen or used as a slush fund by Interior Department officials.
The plaintiffs claimed all of the above.
Officials in President George Herbert Walker Bush's administration appreciated the grave injustice when Indian representatives brought it to their attention during that president's final year in office, but the clock ran out before they could act. Ironically, the Indians believed that President Bill "I Feel Your Pain" Clinton would pick up where the first Bush administration had left off. Instead, Clinton handed off the problem to bureaucrats at the departments of the Interior, Treasury and Justice, who scoffed at the claims and instinctively dug in their heels . . .
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