Susan Bradford on Ietan Consulting: A connection to Fake Indians and Tribal Councils?

Our friend Susan Bradford continues to explore the relationship with Ietan Consulting, lobbyist for many Indian Tribes including the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.  A principal for Ietan is Holly Cook Macarro, who just happens to be married to Pechanga chairman Mark Macarro, who led the tribal council that destroyed the citizenship of hundreds of longtime tribal members.   Ietan has links to Jack Abramoff.

One of the nation’s leading tribal lobbyists, Larry Rosenthal of Ietan Consulting, which enjoys a “strategic alliance” with the McCain-affiliated Akin Gump, became the inspiration behind both the Congressional Automotive Caucus and the Native American Caucus, which coordinate legislative action on behalf of both special interest groups and which his mentor, Congressman Dale Kildee Chairs.
The future lobbyist would acquire influence within Indian Country such that by 2006, Rosenthal had visited over 100 reservations in over 28 states. As Chief of Staff for the NIGC, Rosenthal became liaison to the White House, Department of Interior, and Congress. As lobbyist, he represented the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), which lobbies the federal government and Congress on gaming-related matters.

Tribes have essentially become conduits for money laundering, fund raising, single source contracts for the industrialists, which they can justify by claiming minority preference. The stimulus funds President Barack Obama directed to tribes for development, infrastructure, skating parks, among other things essentially allowed the recipients of tax money to enjoy tax-advantaged and unsupervised use of the money. As Elaine Devary Willman writes in Going to Pieces: The Dismantling of the United States of America, only 19 percent of the hundreds of millions of dollars granted to federal tribal governments has been accounted to, reinforcing the perception among tribal members that “the money just disappears.”

Ietan Consulting’s tribal clients are rife with tribal memberships issues with its principals unerringly championing the interests of the non-Indian infiltrators. With federally recognized tribes bursting at the seams with hundreds of thousands of pseudo-Natives and many more seeking admission, it’s time to re-evaluate what it means to be Indian and to put a stop to the looting of the national treasury. Once the faux Indians gain entree into tribes, they acquire per capita payments, which are generated from businesses, built on capital reserved for Natives. They are provided subsidies and other benefits for housing, health care, education which are denied the taxpayers who support them. These individuals often acquired their membership through fraud, which is running up a significant tab at a time of looming deficits. While Natives and hardworking taxpayers are receiving the short end of the stick, General Motors, which received a federal bailout in 2008, has gone on to make record profits in China, which owns the U.S. debt. GM is rapidly acquiring a monopoly in this vast market, as the leader of automobile sales there. The nation’s industrialist elite and the bankers who finance them continue to realize a boon into their fortunes as the solidify their plutocracy at the expense of free enterprise and the honest, hardworking American taxpayer.