If you want to see how socialism works under the American Government, the best place to begin is an Indian reservation. Start with one that doesn’t have a massive casino or oil wells. The medical care is on par with what you could expect in almost any clinic in Africa and the lifestyle as people wait for their ‘free’ government allotment is legendary.
Bob O’Rorque, AOC and the rest of the fringe players who are demanding socialism should go there, live among the people, and see for themselves how things really work in an American Socialist system.
Yes, I know that Indians can leave the rez. But it’s not an easy thing when you’re a product of Indian schools and a culture that doesn’t want to release you.
Here at my new home in the Arizona Highlands, I live on the curtilage of reservation land. I’m not part Indian, like the illustrious presidential candidate Elizabeth (Poke) Warren, who brags about her 1/100,000th heritage. But I’ve seen graphically how things work under the government-sponsored socialism of Indian affairs. On reservations there are a few elite Indians who manage to siphon off as much as they are able as they lap at the government trough. They live quite well on a blend of low level graft and influence peddling. Cinderblock house, enough heat, 2 4×4’s in the driveway. And then there are the politically forgotten folk.
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Living conditions on many Indian reservations are so poor that they are comparable to conditions in Third World countries. Many families don’t have adequate food, clothing, or access to modern health care. Many homes lack indoor plumbing, heating systems, and electricity.For the best part of the last two decades Shannon County, South Dakota, which lies entirely inside the Pine Ridge reservation, was the poorest county in the United States. When it finally moved down on the poverty list, it was only because conditions worsened on another Indian reservation.The new poorest county in the United States is Buffalo County, northeast of Pine Ridge in central South Dakota and home to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.
Sure, we can point to the VA as being the penultimate in government healthcare (good in some places, horrid in others), but the real experiment in socialism is found on the rez. Only there is the real face of socialism and government failure evident.
That is true! And all the casinos do is enrich those 'leaders', very little of that trickles down to the average Indian on the res.
A lot of reservation Indians don't have a casino. The skim still goes to the leadership. The casino is an exercise in capitalism.
Socialism is the dependence on the government allotment, the quality of healthcare and the school system that prepares all of those Indian kids for the university. It's a train wreck, Old NFO
And I suppose those reservations with oil & gas production suffer the same fate as those with casinos…..
2005 my employer was offered a Kia point (franchise) in the Rapid City area. I was dispatched to find a location and do a market survey. When looking at incomes by county, I was astounded that the Pine Ridge county has the 2nd highest average income in Western South Dakota. Given the abysmal incomes of most resident weighing down the average, a few in that county must have been making seven figures.
That is socialism in action.
I don't know for sure DRJIM. I'm not an expert. But I can see trends just the same as you can.
Nobody said that the apparatchik class don't prosper under socialism and totalitarianism. The finest food, the finest things, the finest home, the prettiest women, etc.
I've never been on a rez but know the story well enough. Seems even worse in Canada?
But for sure, yet another triumph for socialism.
yeah- I lived on a rez for a few years, on and off.
LL speaks truth.
Socialism Kills.
I can't speak to the Canadian system in detail. I was approached by a former RCMP officer to work on the kidnapping and abduction problem of Indian women in Canada about two years ago. I said that I would, but funding from the government and the tribal authorities never materialized for the project. Based on what I learned then, that particular problem was huge primarily because the government didn't care… and because the women who went missing, presumably abducted – fate unknown – were not anyone important.
Literally kills. It's profoundly sad.
The other perfect example is the Public Housing Project.
The residents are completely under the control of the State, they arguably don't even have privacy rights in their own homes as they are public property, yet these establishments are usually (there are some model developments, of course) dens of crime, despair, and hopelessness. Even with total control, the Government can't bother to disarm and/or arrest / expel the obvious criminals and criminal organizations that infest these places, because nobody who lives there is anyone the Government could possibly care about and lower numbers of residents = smaller budget.
The perfect example of both the earthly hell that always results from Socialism, and the empty lie of gun control.
-Kle.
Wifmann lived on a Rez for awhile as a kid. She has no love for 'lo.
The skinny red headed white girl in braids was a target until she channeled her inner Pict and 'splained things to the indigenous population one at a time.
As a teenager I spent a week camping through the Navajo Rez. My uncle's mother was Navajo, so he knew where to take us. It was an eye opening trip. It may have not been Paris or London, but it was a time spent in a foreign country and affects my way of thinking to this day.
I had back surgery in Flagstaff in about 1980. I was recuperating at my BILs house in Winslow. After a few weeks a got well enough that I drove into Bathsheba's Market to get some steaks for dinner. The meat department was stripped. The local tribe had got their Indian Money that day. Their shopping carts were filled with nothing but meat and beer. Priorities were will established.
Canada set the eastern tribes up with a hydroelectric generating business. I wager they are doing well.
Due to the debacle with the tribes in the lower 48 the Feds set it up with the Alaskan tribes so that they had a twenty year moratorium on selling tribal land. This, in theory, would give them time to plan, train up tribal attorneys, and make wise decisions with their land and resources.
The Alaskan tribes circumvented the laws by doing lease to sell options IIRC, so they got their money up front, but the land belonged to the leesee in twenty years.
My BIL was involved in a logging operation in Ketchikan during the last year of the sales moratorium. The tribes logged all of the prime timber and buried the rest. He said it was a rape of the land and he is no tree hugger.
The prime Old Growth Douglas Fir were bought by Japanese buyers and winched down into the mud of Tokyo bay to be raised in the future and sold at a premium.
I read a few years ago that when they raised the logs (millions of board feet of lumber) they had all been infested with a marine borer and were worthless.
Native Americans are scored differently on Probation matrices. For the males, family ties and employment are not counted in as important factors when calculating the probability of recidivism. They are a different folk as are we all.
And, yeah, I got a little ya-ta-hay back in the woodpile.
I once applied for a job with a tribe. I was better qualified for the position, but was beat out by a candidate who had experience in writing grant proposals. When the interview panel found out he could write grants it was a done deal. It did not mater that he had no qualifications for the job itself.
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