Whitebread Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who engineered her rise in the world by falsely claiming to be an American Indian and taking ivy-league affirmative action teaching slots at the expense of real American Indians, now says she wants to help Indians.

It's gagworthy.

But worse still, it's bad news for American Indians, given that her plan to "help" is just going to exacerbate problems on American Indian reservations. Her plan is the same-old, same-old, whitebready, guilty-liberal solution of shoveling money and expecting problems to go away. According to Axios:

The massive plan looks to address issues ranging from economic development to restoring tribal sovereignty.

• Warren says, if elected, she would revoke the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline permits approved by President Trump.

On health care, Warren says her CARE Act would allot $800 million over the next 10 years to tribal governments and organizations along with Urban Indian Health Programs and improved Medicaid services.

• Warren also plans to expand tele-mental health services to help combat substance abuse disorders, resolve the suicide crisis and address childhood trauma.

For broadband access, Warren is proposing an $85 billion federal grant program that will help "build the missing 8,000 miles of middle mile fiber on tribal lands."

On housing, she wants to expand a grant program that provides affordable housing activities on Indian reservations and Indian areas to $2.5 billion. The funds would go toward building or rehabilitating nearly 200,000 homes. Tribes would be able to manage their own Section 8 federal housing vouchers as well.

• The National American Indian Housing Council says there is a need for 68,000 new homes "across Indian Country to address high rates of substandard homes and overcrowded conditions."

On education, Warren wants to invest $50 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Minority Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities.

On public safety, Warren wants to restore tribal sovereignty over crimes on native land so there is flexibility to provide justice fully and fairly.

• Warren also has plans to include protections for Native victims of abuse with the reauthorization of the 2013 Violence Against Women's Act. 84.3% of Native women report experiencing some type of violence in their lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice.

 Boy, where do we start?

Item one is to cut off those gas and oil pipelines, what a winner. That move, far from being all nature-oriented and green as the lefties say, would leave the affected place underdeveloped and Indian reservations dependent on other revenue streams. White lefties from the Sierra Club will pat themselves on the back for it, but the consequences for Indian tribes will be to yank a huge revenue stream which would otherwise benefit from rents and jobs in the energy industry. Sounds like a winner.

Now upon leaving those places economic wastelands, Warren has plans to shovel government money instead.

 Take a look at that $2.5 billion tribal housing promise.

That would be on top of the last pile of billions shoveled out by the last do-gooder governments, which as it happened, ended up bringing no significant housing to Indian tribes. Get a load of this investigation from the Arizona Republic in 2016:

Despite that, an Arizona Republic investigation found the Navajo Housing Authority, the agency responsible for that money, has failed in ways almost too numerous to count.

Among them:

 

• More than $100 million has been squandered on projects that never housed anyone. Some housing developments sit empty years after they were built. In the northern Arizona community of Tolani Lake, nearly $7 million was wasted on igloo-shaped fourplexes that still sit empty. 
• Much of the money received for Navajo housing simply sat unspent, collecting until the surplus was so large federal officials began pushing to take it back. Currently, there’s close to a quarter-billion dollars sitting in the tribe’s federal account.
• Federal pressure to lower the surplus caused the housing authority to go on a spending binge the past several years, yet few homes were built. In 2016, for example, the NHA spent $152 million, but built just 26 new houses. The majority of the funds was spent on modernizing existing residences.
• Among projects that actually were completed and occupied, many allegedly are plagued with construction problems. In Aneth, Utah, for example, $3.3 million was spent to build 23 homes that residents claim are beset by construction defects.
• The NHA spent much of its federal money on things that don’t directly house anyone. In Fort Defiance, Ariz.,about $6.7 million was spent to open a 17,000-square-foot youth center with a gym and computer room last year.

 

A low point arguably came in 2007 when HUD investigators determined that the NHA repeatedly allowed misappropriations, price-gouging and excessive delays.

Auditors for the Office of Inspector General found that $53 million went to 14 housing projects that were either unfinished or never started. Contractors were hired without competitive bids. Procurement codes were ignored. Building inspections were not done. Homes were built without access to roads. Workmanship was so flawed, and building materials so shoddy, some homes were ruled unsafe to inhabit.

Mismanagement led to corruption and chaos, followed by lawsuits and bankruptcies.

Nasty stuff. It sounds like Hugo Chavez's plans for building new housing from the country's oil revenues, he too had the same kinds of results. Bottom line: Shoveling more money in these conditions is going to create more corruption.

Same with her education and broadband Internet money-shoveling schemes.

Why are conditions are the way they are on Indian reservations? Why are they among the poorest parts of the country, and why are they so immune to improvement? It's not the people. It's the outdated systems of government which discourage the formation of capital and chase out investment. This 2011 analysis from Forbes tells us everything we need to know:

The vast majority of land on reservations is held communally. That means residents can’t get clear title to the land where their home sits, one reason for the abundance of mobile homes on reservations. This makes it hard for Native Americans to establish credit and borrow money to improve their homes because they can’t use the land as collateral--and investing in something you don’t own makes little sense, anyway.

This leads to what economists call the tragedy of the commons: If everyone owns the land, no one does. So the result is substandard housing and the barren, rundown look that comes from a lack of investment, overuse and environmental degradation. It’s a look that’s common worldwide, wherever secure property rights are lacking—much of Africa and South America, inner city housing projects and rent-controlled apartment buildings in the U.S., Indian reservations.

More than a third of the Crow reservation’s 2.3 million acres is individually owned, and the contrast with the communal land—often just on the other side of a fence—is stark, as Google satellite maps show. Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, co-authored a study showing that private land is 30-90% more productive agriculturally than the adjacent trust land. And this isn’t because the land is better: A study of 13 reservations in the West put 49% of the land in the top four quality classes, while only 38% of the land in the surrounding counties was rated that highly. For the Crow reservation, 48% of the land made the top four classes; only 33% of the adjacent land did. “The raw quality of the land is not that much different, it’s the amount of investment in that land that’s different,” he says.

Warren's plan addresses none of that. It's just the same-old, same-old, designed to enable white liberals to feel better about themselves, and to virtue-signal to each other.

Warren's plan isn't going to help Indians. 

But it's about par for her: Fake Indian, fake Indian rescue plan.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter from public domain sources