The funniest thing about the appeals of various Republicans to the xenophobia of "real", White Americans isn't even that Obama is outperforming among white voters compared to all Democratic candidates since Carter, demonstrating that Republican politicians don't get white people, either. Certainly not all of us, and getting it wrong to the point where their overtly divisive behavior is turning off members of their own party. The funniest thing is that their definitions of what makes a real American (I know I'm not the first person to notice this) excludes the Americans who were here first.

I found a YouTube clip of a video address of Obama's to a Native gathering while searching for something unrelated last week, and in it, he covered in more detail the points he makes in the clip embedded here, saying "We're going to end nearly a century of mismanagement of Indian Trusts. We're going to work together to settle unresolved cases." Hmm. And, "I believe treaty commitments are paramount law." Hmmm.

You may have been aware of the class action lawsuits, the Cobell trials (Cobell v Kempthorne, prev. Cobell v Norton), brought by Native Americans against the Department of the Interior for mismanagement of resource royalties. I knew about them mainly through the good offices of the Wampum bloggers who've been writing about DOI corruption and other Indian issues for years.

So I went looking for recent news stories related to the Trust, and found a doozy. While the finance industry was beginning to unravel, a report was released on the Minerals Management Service's oversight practices:

... On Sept.10, Earl Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, released a report to Congress that documented - in lurid and embarrassing detail - the widespread use of sex, bribes and drugs by MMS employees to lubricate their professional relationships with officials of the oil and mineral industries.

...This is the office responsible for collecting royalties from energy companies that drill for oil and gas on public land owned by you and me. Last year alone, more than $14 billion in royalties was collected by MMS and deposited in our account. We cannot be sure of the real total, however, since MMS accounts are so bungled that no one can be sure if the reckoning is close to correct.

Coincidentally, the MMS is also responsible for collecting royalties for resources taken from more than 11 million acres of Indian land. ...

The accounts for the Indian Trusts alone had been so poorly kept that the judge who ruled on the Cobell case found it impossible to determine how much the plaintiffs were even owed, and levelling part of the blame for the sorry state of affairs at Congress for failing to properly fund an internal investigation and full accounting. That the whole oversight arm was managed the same way should hardly have been surprising.

And it happened that I had a real all-in-this-together moment, because it was clear that, just as Jack Abramoff had perfected his corruption by playing tribes off of one another, the DOI disregard of Indian treaty obligations seem long ago to have spilled over and become standard practice. This is more than just an Indian issue, but perhaps fittingly, the persistent marginalization of Indian concerns means we've all been taking a bath on this.

The oil and gas industries have a history of fraud and underpayment of all federal and local royalty obligations. Since Bush took office, even MMS' efforts to collect what was owed without expensive court cases have dropped off considerably, and they weren't great to begin with. Is the government missing millions? Billions? No one in government even knows.  

You could think of this lack of enforcement as a back door tax cut for ExxonMobil. At a time when the country is in a financial crisis and Americans' standards of living have been dropping, the government has been letting our wealthiest corporate citizens out of their financial responsibilities on the sly.

Or put another way, the coal, oil and gas companies have been stealing from the rest of us, from the First Americans to the vast majority of taxpayers, to pad their profits. Unless they do business in Alaska.

They've been getting to cut their costs of doing business below what they ought to be, in addition to all the other tax breaks they get. This not only helps them push healthy alternative energy technologies out of the market, but undercuts government attempts to transition to sustainable energy. That's costing us at the pump, costing us in utility bills, and costing us at the doctor's office. Privatizing profit and socializing risk, as usual.

Anyway, I hope Obama's as good as his word, and makes the treaty obligations right. While he's at it though, might as well clean up the Interior Department and get a full accounting to the public of what's been going on there and in Congress.

Might turn up some extra money to pay off Paulson's ransom demands. Let's hear the corporatists scream about spreading the wealth, then.