Sunday, July 17, 2016

Real Pocahontas says vote for Hillary Clinton

An Astroturf group supposedly consisting of 12,000 "pro-family" donors but actually just ratfuckers Roger Stone and Donald Trump spent a million dollars running dishonest anti-Indian ads like this in local Upstate New York papers in 2000. Full story by Joseph Tanfani in the Los Angeles Times, June 30.



Thin-skinned Donald Trump is terrorized by the accurate remarks of Senator Elizabeth Warren, brilliant law professor and crafter of the legislation that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Donald Trump hopes to eliminate.

I imagine he doesn't think much of consumer financial protection. The CFPB has been working to provide banks with tools that will enable them to help their older customers avoid the kind of financial elder abuse that the late and unlamented Trump University used to practice, speaking of litigating fraud, for which Donald Trump will be facing trial in a few months (unfortunately after November 8, and not on criminal charges, but that could and should still come). In this way Senator Warren represents everything Donald Trump hates and fears. No wonder he has a meltdown every time she mentions him!

The story of Elizabeth Warren's supposed Cherokee and Delaware ancestry, which became a public matter in 1984, when she contributed recipes for savory crab omelet and spicy baked beans to a Pow Wow Chow cookbook produced for the gift shop of the Five Civilized Nations Museum of Muskogee ($19.95), has never been an actual issue. It's true that she listed herself as a "minority" in the American Association of Law Schools law teachers directory from 1986, the year before she got a job at the University of Pennsylvania (she had been working as a law professor for ten years already, at Rutgers, University of Houston, and University of Texas at Austin) until 1995, the year she accepted Harvard's second offer of a tenured post, and it seems to be true that somebody in the Harvard administration saw the listing and was inspired to boast that Harvard Law had hired its first woman of color.

But there is no evidence she made any use of the claim in her academic career. She didn't mention it in a job application—she didn't apply for the jobs at Penn and Harvard at all but was recruited—and unquestionably the most important factor was the major research she did on bankruptcy law while she was in Austin, putting her at the forefront of a new and very significant trend in legal studies, of looking at how legislation affects the ordinary citizen; and for the Harvard job her 1989 book, As We Forgive Our Debtors, awarded the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.

As Donald Trump continues to insult American Indians with the insinuation that none of them are smart enough to score a teaching gig and that affirmative action is used to boost them into positions they aren't qualified for, the only policy discussion he has ever engaged in on the subject has been complaining, with lots of false and blatantly racist allegations, about tribally-owned casinos, his business rivals, in 1993
in testimony given that year to the House Natural Resources subcommittee on Native American Affairs, Trump "devoted much of his testimony to bad-mouthing Indians and their casinos," asserted that "organized crime is rampant on Indian reservations" and that "if it continues it will be the biggest scandal ever." Trump offered no evidence in support of his claim, and testimony from the FBI's organized crime division, the Justice Department's criminal division, and the IRS's criminal investigation division did not support Trump's assertion.[352] Representative George Miller, a Democrat who was the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee at the time, stated: "In my 19 years in Congress, I've never heard more irresponsible testimony."[352]
and in 2000
Trump bankrolled in 2000 a set of anti-Indian gaming ads in upstate New York that featured "a dark photograph showing hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia," a warning that "violent criminals were coming to town," and an accusation that the St. Regis Mohawks had a "record of criminal activity."[353] The ad—aimed at stopping the construction of a casino in the Catskills that might hurt Trump's own Atlantic City casinos[354]—was viewed as "incendiary" and racially charged, and at the time local tribal leaders, in response, bought a newspaper ad of their own to denounce the "smear" and "racist and inflammatory rhetoric" of the earlier ad.[353] 
And of course he opposes any change in the name of the Washington, D.C. NFL franchise. Bet you didn't see that coming!

Meanwhile the Hillary Clinton campaign offers a remarkable range of policy proposals on issues of concern to Native Americans to build on President Obama's legacy (which has been very considerable, some tribal leaders have said more than all his predecessors combined), and not just the stuff you'd assume from any Democrat—money for improved education and health care, including drug and alcohol treatment, and youth jobs—but a commitment to making sure that Native peoples have a voice and a vote in the development of the policy, the recognition of tribal sovereignty in the protection of tribal assets and resources and in the resolution of ancient disputes, the jurisdiction of Tribal courts and the involvement of Tribal authorities in law enforcement. And attention to veterans' problems.

Anybody who cares about these issues would be crazy not to vote for her.

Matoaka aka Rebecca aka Pochahontas, daughter of the Emperor of the Powhatans, ca. 1596-1617. In his 1630 True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America, Captain Smith told a remarkable number of stories about being rescued from certain death by high-born young ladies, and I've been convinced, ever since reading the great Lost Tribes and Promised Lands of Ronald Sanders (1978), that the story of how Pocahontas saved him from execution in December 1607 was one of his lies (in his account written in 1608, he didn't mention it, or mention meeting her at all until several months later). But I don't care for the modern trend of seeing her as all victim either; as a little girl of 11 or 12 and later as an adult she really did some masterful diplomatic work negotiating between the two tribes, the nervous Powhatans and the crazed gun-carrying English, and I like to think of her as having been fully in control and conscious of what she was doing, bold and curious, when she got baptized and married the white man and visited England, though the filthy country did kill her with its microbe-heavy air.
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