Plain-Spoken Politics with a Long Island accent
Few New Yorkers will shed tears for our indigenous brethren who will once again find themselves on the losing end of a political battle. After all, breaking treaties with Indians is a time-honored tradition in the United States. We’re awesome at that.
Brad Bonaparte was one of those storied Mohawk ironworkers who shimmied up skeletal high-rise beams building skyscrapers in New York City like his father before him. When the twin towers crashed to the ground he was just leaving “the Hall” waiting to be called out on a job.
The greased wheels of democracy behind the PACT Act carry a clown car of strange bedfellows like Peter King and Anthony Weiner down roads that all lead back to billionaire John Catsimatidis, the ringmaster of this bizarre circus of influence.
It amuses me to no end that we can build a refuse-burning facility with a Garden City address down the road, but a casino with a hotel, sports arena and convention center threaded by a coordinated transit hub that connects local retail and commerce is a non-starter.
Stossel’s report is packaged as an investigative news feature and passed off as real journalism despite the complete absence of veracity. Stossel prevaricates so often in attempting to prove that every Indian in America is poor, stupid and lazy that this piece almost feels like satire. Only it’s not.
In 2011 we have new legislators, a new Cuomo, and the same old fight. Alas, the brief recurring respite Indian Country has between Election Day and Inauguration Day every few years is over, and the fight begins again.
It takes great discipline and courage to continue writing about something you know very few people care about. OK, maybe courage is the wrong word. Too self-important. Let me start over. One must be either extremely disciplined or extraordinarily stupid to continue writing about something no one gives a shit about. There, that’s better. Such [...]
In short, this isn’t the first time the British and Americans have fucked the Iroquois Nation and it certainly won’t be the last.
On the surface it didn’t appear to be such a big deal. But in Indian country, everything comes at a price. If the team had capitulated and agreed to accept U.S. passports to travel abroad they would have established yet another dangerous precedent in U.S./Indian relations. Acquiescing to this solution would essentially have ceded the issue of sovereign recognition on a very significant level.
While New York State is hamstrung by infighting and ineptitude and barely staving off a historic shutdown, this committee issues a report so rife with inconsistencies and backward logic that it could have taken minutes, not months, to produce.
Jed Morey is the publisher of the Long Island Press, an alternative weekly newspaper with a circulation of 85,000, and www.longislandpress.com, which welcomes more than 750,000 unique visitors every month.
