Monday 7 December 2009

Obama's True Colours?

In a move not made under any previous US administration, the Internal Revenue Service has seized and sold 7,000 acres of the reservation assigned under Treaty to the Crow Creek Sioux people.
The Tribes exist on their reservations as residually-sovereign independent nations, denied normal human rights by successive decisions of the Supreme Court of an alien country - the USA.
Tribes are not normally taxed by the US [most Americans do have vague memories of 'no taxation without representation'] because the Tribal Territories are not part of the USA. Tribes are taxed on their dealings with the US economy and its citizens; but this taxation had not previously been applied to the Crow Creek Sioux.
President Obama recently applied his usual rhetoric to a gathering of the 'Native American' peoples.
This subsequent incident shows the operational irrelevance of his verbosity: as the Palestinians have found in his acceptance of ongoing Israeli settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem after his Cairo speech and accompanying verbiage about an absolute stop on settlements.
Words are cheap.

No comments:

Post a Comment