Trump advisors believe that privatizing Native American lands will make it easier for the oil and gas barons of America to excavate these lands for oil and gas. This is basically the 21st-century version of the manifest destiny doctrine. Per Reuters:
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership - a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.
I thought that I’d lost the ability to be shocked one month after the election of Donald Trump. But I almost fell over after coming across this recent revelation. After recovering from the initial paroxysm of emotions that nearly left me in a catatonic state, I began to think of the word "decency" and it’s application when trying to describe Trump’s behavior. There is a definition of the word that I prefer:
Behaviour that conforms to accepted standards of morality or respectability.
It is now apparent that Donald Trump and his people are incapable of exhibiting this trait. They do not respect anybody or anything. All they care about is making money. My hope is that they will abandon their plans for privatization after they experience the inevitable pushback. But given Trump’s propensity to double down in the face of objection to his behavior, I am not optimistic. Blood is going to be spilled.
www.democracynow.org/…
www.reuters.com/...