Political corruption is nothing new. Once upon a time, the Romans called it “patronage,” and not looking out for your friends once you got into power was a shameful lack of loyalty. That’s supposed to be one of the defining differences between “ancient” and “modern” states, but neither one was as pure as all that. In the Roman Empire, with dedication and a lot of luck, you could succeed on merit. And in the United States, you can still buy power for your friends. Just ask Jack Abramoff. The Abramoff scandal has caused a lot of turmoil in the Republican government, from the replacement of Tom DeLay by John Boehner as Speaker of the House, to today’s accusations that he met Bush “almost a dozen” times. The Abramoff scandal’s all about loopholes and fundraising and all kinds of sordid practices that legions of lawyers have spent their lives trying to obfuscate and confuse, so try to stay with me here–this is about to get incredibly complicated.

Abramoff got his start at Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP, the lobbying arm of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP law firm based in Seattle, and founded by Bill Gates. No, not that Bill Gates; that’s Bill Gates III. This is Bill Gates, Sr., Bill Gates II, who was called Bill Gates, Jr., until his father Bill Gates, Sr., died. Then Bill Gates, Jr. became Bill Gates, Sr. … got that?

In the mid-1990’s, Abramoff started representing various Native American groups with casino interests. He started with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and helping them defeat a tax that was under consideration. In 2001, Abramoff left the employ of the Gates’ firm, to join Greenberg Traurig and assemble a “dream team” of lobbyists dubbed “Team Abramoff.” Jack Abramoff was a member of the Bush Administration’s 2001 Transition Advisory Team assigned to the Department of the Interior. In addition to all manner of complicated charges of bribery, illegal gifts, and campaign contributions, Abramoff is also accused of double-dealing with his Native clients. While collecting $80 million in lobbying fees from Native groups, he also orchestrated lobbying against his clients, so that they would continue to need his services. Such is the nature of empire, and while this whole scandal was certainly repugnant, a white man in the government exploiting the Native population is just the same song, different day.

I don’t normally read the Daily Kos, but I do read Savage Minds, and Dustin Wax’s article, “DC Scandal in Indian Country,” pointed me to “Is the story even viable in the Lefty blogosphere?” from a blog called Wampum, and finally, to the same author’s diary entry at Kos, “Abramoff and gaming Indians: Just the tip of the iceberg.” It seems the story here is much bigger than just that.

Remember I mentioned above that Abramoff was part of Bush’s transition team for the Department of the Interior? Bush’s secretary was the first woman to ever hold the position, Gale Norton, who as a lawyer had argued for industry’s “right to pollute.” The Kos adds:

Colorado native Norton is of the James Watt school of pillage the environment (she entered the Reagan Administration to work for him) and her entire career has been to forward the interests of oil and gas, mining and forestry industries.

Steven Griles was undersecretary. He’d been part of a consulting firm, National Environmental Strategies, that helped industries get around government regulations. The Office of Government Ethics and the Senate allowed him to continue collecting more than $1 million from NES, in addition to his $150,000/year government paycheck, on the condition that he would recuse himself from “any particular matter involving specific parties in which any of [his] former clients is or represents a party.” More recently, it’s been revealed that Griles met with many of his former clients in the oil and gas industries, leading to Griles’ resignation.

So, let’s talk for a moment about Cobell v. Norton. Yes, that Norton, the aforementioned Gale Norton, now Secretary of the Interior. To understand this, we need to backtrack all the way back to the 19th century, and the cascades of broken treaties used by the United States government to rob the Native Americans of their land and herd them onto the reservations that would later serve as Hitler’s model for his concentration camps.¹ Part of that effort included the Dawes act of 1887, which took the “Noble Savage” and its implication of an innocent, “child-like people” in need of parental guidance by more mature European powers, to its natural conclusion. Indian land was siezed, “to be held in trust,” but in fact simply opened to white settlers. Yet the excuse for this siezure meant that, legally, the land was still held in trust for Native Americans. Not that anybody really cared to keep proper track of that, since they never really intended to treat the Natives fairly in the first place.

So, when banker Elouise Cobell added up all the Indian Trust money that had been lost, it came out to $176 billion. And so began the largest class-action suit in U.S. history–fitting, since it addresses the key fact of U.S. history, that our entire country is built on a barely-acknowledged genocide. Clinton’s Secretary of the Interor, Bruce Babbitt, was found in contempt for his stalling tactics, trying to draw the case out long enough to make the next administration deal with it. It worked, but since then, Norton hasn’t dealt with it, either, landing her in contempt of court, as well. The aforementioned Kos article sums up the situation nicely:

The front-burner issue in the Interior Department during this Administration has been the foot-dragging, subverting and outright sabotaging of the largest class action case in US history, Cobell v. Norton. Norton was even slapped with a contempt charge by Judge Royce Lamberth for her part in the matter. …

A large chunk of those federal lands are Indian Trust Fund lands, taken into trust in the late 1800s via the Dawes Act, and leased out to industries, ranchers and farmers at cut-rate prices. The money was then to be managed by Interior and paid out to native landowners. Of course, that didn’t happen - hence Cobell v. Norton.

The courts have ordered a full accounting of the Trust. Problem is, many of the documents were destroyed, including a slew of them under Norton. So the plaintiffs decided a few years back that the only way to get a real accounting is to audit the industries’ books. That’s what makes everyone so nervous, as plaintiff experts, having done some sampling, estimate we’re talking over $150 billion in underpayments and fraud, along with interest, of course. Yes, $150 BILLION. And the pressure would be huge for Congress to force a repayment by the guilty. If not, then it comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets, as the courts have already ordered the accounts be properly audited and brought up to date. Hence, the concern of the oil/gas, mining, ranching, forestry and agriculture interests which use/abuse the land lease process.

To protect the industry from auditing, Norton began pushing Republicans in Congress to force a settlement–a settlement for a fraction of the amount, that wouldn’t require an audit of the industries involved. Richard Pombo led the effort (he’s been helped by John McCain), but it was struck down by DeLay–not for any love of Native Americans, mind you, but simply because it still offered a slight chance of an audit. As the Kos article puts it:

This is where Abramoff comes in. He was the slush fund operator. Indians thought they were paying Pombo and others on House Resources and Senate Indian Affairs, et al., for help with gaming issues, and Abramoff was in fact padding coffers necessary to protect the industry from auditing. …

In the Savage Minds article, Dustin Wax links the Abramoff scandal to his own experience with the breakdown of the Meskwaki Settlement. Their recall elections and the reports of armed take-overs between rival factions hinged on the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ inability to respond to their recall elections, because of their mismanagement. When faced with the closure of the casino their economy relied on, they turned to Jack Abramoff. Wax goes on:

Between 2003 and mid-year 2005, when Abramoff’s firm came under fire, they paid well over a million dollars to Abramoff’s firm. During this time, they also made donations to the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), a group founded by Gail Norton and Grover Norquist, at the instruction of Abramoff’s firm.

This is where things get complicated, and where Wampum’s work becomes relevant. CREA is one of the major players in Norton’s efforts to hold off and ultimately avoid entirely the auditing of corporations that have profited from the use of Indian lands. As with all Righty advocate groups, CREA’s mission has nothing to do with environmental advocacy; it is dedicated to the deregulation of environmental affairs and is backed primarily by oil, and to a lesser degree timber and mining, interests. Which are, of course, the same companies that stand to lose from an audit of Indian land use profits.

The Meskwaki weren’t alone among Indians asked to give to CREA; donations from the Saginaw Chippewa, Tigua, and Coushatta were also solicited, bringing the total to $300,000. $300,000 given by Indians to a group that lobbies Congress to pass a law exempting corporations from an audit intended to reimburse Indians for funds stolen from them by CREA’s other backers. And their lobbying has paid off: in 2003 Congress inserted riders into the “untouchable� Iraq appropriations bill to delay the court-ordered investigation, and have also cut investigators’ salaries and allowed Norton to control the payments to outside investigators and lawyers hired to process the case.

Abramoff’s contempt for his Indian clients is well-documented—in emails he referred to them as “monkeys�, “troglodytes�, and “morons�—but more and more it looks like the cause he was advancing was not just to line his pockets, nor even just to help protect Republican backers in the oil, mining, and timber industries, but rather an all-out attack on Indian sovereignty. Wampum has tracked down several ties linking oil interests to attacks on sovereignty, such as the petroleum associations backing Oklahoma-based One Nation United. Big business in general supports the attack, though it is often couched in moral arguments about the “right� of Indians to become “full� Americans, as in this editorial from the Wall Street Journal. Ironically, the few tribes that have profited from gaming—gaming made legal by their exemption from many regulations due to their sovereign status—have helped fuel this attack, making it appear to those unfamiliar with Indian affairs that a) sovereignty only serves to promote the morally questionable and seemingly “un-Indian� operation of casinos , and b) that anyone who can run a profitable casino is suitably assimilated and no longer needs or deserves the “special privileges� that sovereignty provides. But these are just the way the issue gets covered in the media; behind the scenes, the real reason for opposing Indian sovereignty is that it restricts access to Indian lands—and the oil, mineral, and timber on and under them. Abramoff’s contempt was not restricted to a little name-calling, or even to his misrepresentation to Indians who had hired him assuming he was going to help them advance their causes; in essence, Abramoff and his peers both in Congress and the business world are working to undermine the last vestige of autonomy Indian peoples possess.

American history doesn’t leave us with much to be proud of. We’ve always been the rear-guard of freedom: one of the last countries in the West to abolish slavery, one of the last to grant women the right to vote, one of the last to protect civil rights for our minorities. Worst of all, even that is built on a long history of genocide–herding the Native Americans onto reservations, betrayng treaty after treaty, and driving them into the most forsaken lands we have. When those lands proved of interest to ranchers, oil or gas, we took those, too.

The Jack Abramoff scandal is more than just dirty politics as usual. We’re seeing the completion of the continual, genocidal process our ancestors started some four centuries ago. We may not bear the blame for our ancestors, but we have a responsibility for what we do now, and if we don’t do all that we can to stop this, then we have to share in the guilt of our ancestors, and of the government that claims to rule over us in one of the most terrible atrocities in the history of our species.

¹John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Anchor, 1991. On p. 202, Toland writes: