Word: choctaw
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...Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds law firm and who notes that the trip came at a critical moment. Congress was considering legislation (which died a month after the trip) that might have shut down Internet gambling--and jeopardized the livelihoods of some of Abramoff's biggest clients. Two of them--a Choctaw Indian tribe and the Internet gambling company eLottery Inc.--each wrote a check for $25,000 on May 25, 2000, the day DeLay departed, to the sponsor of the trip, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit foundation on whose board Abramoff sat. Those checks would cover...
...tribe spends more--or more effectively--than Mississippi's Choctaw. Since 1997 the 8,800-member tribe has distributed some $11 million to Washington lobbying firms. Most of the money has gone to one of the capital's premier lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, a top Republican Party fund raiser. It was money well spent. In the 1997 legislative caper, Thad Cochran, Mississippi's five-term Republican Senator, slipped into a 40,000-word appropriations bill a 19-word sentence that exempts the tribe from oversight by the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), the regulatory body created by Congress to oversee Indian...
Meanwhile, government audit reports show that over the past five years, federal agencies have lavished $245 million in aid on the Choctaw. In 2001 alone--the same year the tribe bought a $4.5 million corporate plane--the Choctaw collected $50.4 million from nearly 70 government programs, including $14.9 million to run their tribal government, $1.3 million for law enforcement and almost $371,000 for food distribution. It adds up to an average of $5,700 for each member. In contrast, federal aid for the Navajo Nation, the poorest tribe in America, averaged $900 for each of its 260,000 members...
None of this is to begrudge the Mississippi Choctaw their newfound gaming wealth. Unlike tribes that are content to rely on a casino to support themselves without looking to the future, the Choctaw have plowed their profits into new businesses, from a car dealership to an electronics plant. Nor is this to begrudge the Choctaw their ability to extract aid from Washington. What is awry is a political system that consigns the majority of Native Americans to a life of poverty while rewarding the few who have casino riches with full membership in the system...
...tribes with casinos often pull in more HUD money per capita than casino-less, poor tribes. Over the past four years, while HUD has handed the Florida Seminoles housing funds averaging $2,800 per member, the tribe's five casinos have generated nearly $1 billion in revenue. The Mississippi Choctaw tribe, with its lucrative Silver Star Resort & Casino, pocketed an average of $5,900 in HUD funds per person. By contrast, the Navajo, the country's largest tribe, has a 52% unemployment rate but has received only $1,500 per member...