Untamed and peaceful, the world of the Alaska Natives is unlike anything elsewhere in America. Consisting of at least 20 distinct language groups, Alaska Natives are both culturally diverse and bound by a common lifestyle and set of core values. Today, they are divided into five major groups: the Inupiat (or Northern Eskimos); the Yuit (or Southern Eskimos); the Athabascans, who inhabit the state’s interior; the Tlingit and Haida tribes along the Alaska-British Columbia border; and the Aleuts, who reside predominantly in the Aleutian Islands.

Having inhabited the region for at least 14,000 years before the arrival of the first Europeans, pre-contact Alaska Natives subsisted primarily on a hunting, fishing, and gathering economy, and maintained an extraordinarily rich tradition of music, art, storytelling, and genealogy. The Russian Empire’s expansion throughout the region in 1741, however, signaled the eradication of the natives’ way of life, beginning with abductions, slavery, forced conversions into the Russian Orthodox Church, and the introduction of Old World diseases like smallpox, measles, cholera, and typhoid.

Then, in 1867, the Russians sold the region to a new empire: The United States. What followed in the generations after proved to be another all-too-similar chapter in the tragic history of the state’s indigenous population. Echoing the painfully familiar patterns of the government’s treatment of minorities elsewhere, the U.S. kept tight restrictions on natives’ access to education, healthcare, voting rights, and religious freedom—ensuring a miserable quality of life that lasted long after the Territory of Alaska’s elevation to statehood in 1959.

Statehood did not ease the longstanding legal disputes over the ownership of Alaskan land, either. In December 1971, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), completely abolishing indigenous people’s claims to their ancestral lands. Instead of tribal leadership (as in the Lower 48 states), the state’s indigenous populations came to be represented by twelve state-chartered, for-profit, regional corporations and over 200 local village corporations. (Congress later added a thirteenth regional corporation for Alaska Natives living outside the state.)

Fast forward to 2020, and the troubles with COVID take hold. Per the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (“CARES”) Act, Congress approved $8 billion for the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes, to be dispensed by the end of April. But the government fell through on its promises to the Native Americans yet again. With no trace of federal aid coming as of mid-April, tribal leaders swiftly filed suit against the Treasury Department, igniting one of the most heated legal battles ever to befall the American Indian community.

The cause of the delay: questions surrounding whether, under the ANCSA, the Alaska Native corporations (ANCs) qualified for stimulus funds. As representatives of the tribes in the Lower 48 objected to the inclusion of ANCs, Alaskan Congressional delegates Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Rep. Don Young called their position “unfair,” encouraging officials to look past the “corporate” status of Alaska’s native representation.

Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Schumer, with the support of several tribal leaders, took to Twitter to attack Tara Sweeney, then-assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in the Interior Department, who happened to be a former vice president at the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. Schumer accused Sweeney of “diverting funds for tribal governments” for personal profit, to which Sweeney fired back, calling Schumer’s allegations “ignorant” and “despicably low.”

Yet this proved to be only the tip of the iceberg, especially as the incompetence of Sec. Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department continued to surface.

A May 2020 report from the University of Arizona exposed numerous flaws in how Mnuchin’s department administered tribal funds. Using data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Indian Housing Block Grant program, the Treasury Department attempted to allocate funding based not on each tribe’s census records, but on how many people within a geographic area identified as American Indian or Alaska Native.

This failure to calculate tribal populations led to the Treasury Department overrepresenting some tribes while underrepresenting others. For example, the populations for the Miccosukee, Belkofski, Tuscarora, Tonawanda Seneca Nation, and Delaware Tribe of Indians (Eastern) were all recorded as “zero,” entitling them only to the minimum federal payment of $100,000. Also among these tribes were the Shawnee, whose current population stands around 10,000. Meanwhile, the Spirit Lake Tribe, a nation in North Dakota with approximately 7,200 members, received over $12.1 million.

Even more absurd: As tribal leaders were preparing to sue the federal government, Treasury Department officials accidentally mishandled sensitive data from nearly 700 tribes, potentially allowing financial and personal information of countless people to fall into the wrong hands.

In June, the case went to the U.S. District Court, where Judge Amit Mehta issued a 36-page opinion ruling in favor of ANCs’ ability to receive CARES Act funding. But just when it seemed the conflict had been resolved, the Lower 48 tribal governments carried the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals, who, in September, overturned Mehta’s ruling on grounds that ANCs were not “tribal governments.”

The end result: Six months, dozens of lawsuits, untold scores of impassioned tweets, and two court cases after the passage of the CARES Act, the federal government finally decided that Native Americans of Alaskan origin did not qualify for stimulus funding. One of the three appeals court judges, after admitting that the case was “technically correct,” referred to the outcome as an “unintended consequence” of the legislative process. While such language may often be heard from plain-spoken critics of government, it is less common from a representative of a government itself.

While the bewildering state of affairs elicits a number of questions, one in particular might strike us as a particularly great starting point: what can  Americans—of all cultural backgrounds—learn from this?

The story of the state’s relationship with its aboriginal inhabitants is not a pleasant one. Perhaps there is a case to be made that indigenous people are the most marginalized people on Earth, living within the borders and under the supervision of a government they never asked for, but one that foisted itself upon them anyway.

To limit the following bit of circumlocution to the eighth decade of each century: whether it is the Spanish Empire’s spread across the New World through the 1570s, the British Empire’s expansion of African slavery in the West Indies through the 1670s, the Russian Empire’s forced labor campaigns against the natives of the Pacific Coast in the 1770s, the Dutch Empire’s confiscation of native land in Java in the 1870s, the Portuguese Empire’s forced relocation campaigns against the people of Mozambique in the 1970s, or the American Empire’s disdain for the Alaska Native people today, the indigenous peoples of the world have most commonly suffered all the grisliest defects of government—and least commonly enjoyed its sparse redeeming qualities. As C.S. Lewis might have put it, they suffer all of its sting and collect none of its honey.

In other words, could there be a more clear-cut account of government without consent than in the stories of those whose existence—like indigenous Americans—is most irrefutably defined by their fight against coercive government?

Reed Cooley is a writer from Laurel, Mississippi. He graduated from Baylor University in 2017 with a B.A. in Anthropology and History.

This article has been republished with permission from Catalyst, a project of the Independent Institute. You can read the original here, under the title “Regulatory Shadows Make Dark Winter for Alaska”.

Image: National Park Service

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This is no shock, considering most people were dissatisfied with public education before the COVID-19 pandemic. Understandably, parents are now worried whether their kids are learning and developing as they should be. This situation urgently needs to be resolved, and public education as it stands now cannot do that.

Of all parents, only 29% feel their child is progressing very well academically; 25% for emotional development, and 27% for social development under COVID-19 restrictions. It is a bleak reality that under a third of all parents feel schools are performing above mediocrity with their child’s development. 

Furthermore, the mental health of students has been considerably worse over the past few years, and school choice has a massive upside in curbing that loss in the long term. One article finds “that states that enacted charter school laws witnessed a 10% decrease in suicide rates among 15- to 19-year-olds. Private-school voucher laws were also associated with fewer suicides, though the change was not statistically significant.” Ten percent might seem small, but over time, that is hundreds of lives that can be saved.

Consider further that private schools  are rated the highest by parents on how they feel their children are progressing (all 45% and over for each type of development). The only other type of school to exceed the average of all parents in any development is charter schools and academic and social development. Unfortunately, these two types of schools are the least accessible either via economic means or state regulation of charter schools.

These sentiments are confirmed by the support for school choice policies, such as education savings accounts (81%), school vouchers (73%), tax-credit scholarships (74%), and public charter schools (72%). These are massively popular programs that people believe can make a difference.

Not only do we need that difference, but we need it fast. The United Nations Children’s Fund warns that “when schools close, children risk losing their learning, support system, food and safety, with the most marginalized children – who are the most likely to drop out altogether – paying the heaviest price.” That is not just in the United States, but worldwide.

Our current system is not working as it should and too many are suffering for it. The United States needs to be an example for supporting children and their families. It is the duty of any public education system to do so. So why not consider the prospects of widely popular programs that aim to help these families? Let us open education alternatives for families and make it work for those who need it most.

The post Pandemic Public Education is Leaving Children Behind appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

But this “beating a dead horse” is not unique to just my father and his joke-telling. Just as my father does not learn from his not-so-witty mistakes, the state of Missouri does not learn from theirs as well.

Repeatedly, the state meddles in what should be decided by the private sector, not learning that this intrusion brings more harm than good. The most recent occurrence of this was just announced a few days ago, with the state releasing the names of the businesses that received licenses to sell medical marijuana in Missouri. 

Over 900 applicants sought a license to sell medical marijuana in Missouri. To obtain a license, they were tasked with filling out a lengthy application that included writing responses to numerous questions regarding how they would impact the community and their plans for marketing among other valuable questions. These answers were then judged and scored by a third-party company that the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services delegated the process to.  

This is the first of many problems in the process. According to the Kansas City Star, to find a third party to judge the applications, Missouri “put out a call for bids for companies to score the medical marijuana applications, [but] it got no responses.” This should have been the first red flag that this process was a horrible idea.  Nonetheless, the state was undeterred and on its second call, received interest.

To judge the third party, Missouri instituted a scoring system that would rate the prospects. The highest possible score of this system was 218, but the highest scorer and ultimate winner of the job to judge the medical marijuana applications, a company called Wise Health Solutions, received a whopping 106! This is red flag number two because Missouri handed out the task of judging the applications to a company that received less than 50% on its scoring test.

This does not exactly inspire confidence in this third-party scorer and whatever confidence that the state of Missouri had in Wise Health Solutions should be erased after the licenses were released. Since those who qualified for medical marijuana licenses became public, numerous applicants and lawyers who were associated with the process have cited irregularities and inconsistencies within the scoring process. 

One notable instance of this was applicants provided the same answer to a question and received wildly different scores. Some applicants who applied for multiple licenses “copy and pasted their answers on basic questions. But those identical answers received wildly different scores”. This happened even though the Missouri scoring guide stated that the same answer should receive the exact same score. This is red flag number three, with Missouri blatantly disrespecting the rules that it set out for applicants to follow. 

But the abuses don’t end there. In addition to indiscriminately giving the same answer different scores, applicants also received zeros for lengthy responses to application questions. One applicant stated that she received zero points on a question even though she provided exactly what the questions asked. The Missouri Medical Cannabis Trade Association ascertained that about 67 percent of the application pool received a score of zero on a question about marketing plans. The Association that this was so egregiously bad that it had to have been an error in the process.

Another applicant had support from the Mayor and 297 out of the 300 people in the small town that he planned to build his dispensary. In addition to this support, he planned to use revenue from the dispensary to aid the local police force. But this got him nowhere on the question on the application about the economic impact on the local community as he scored poorly on it. This apparent lack of attention to the application process earns Missouri a fourth red flag.

Apparently, though, Missouri is blind to the faults of this process. State officials still claim that the process was “secure and legitimate”, even though it was obviously not. Disgruntled applicants and their lawyers have started to file lawsuits against the state, causing an unnecessary headache for the Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS). The DHSS has already begun soliciting bids from attorneys who can defend the state in these lawsuits, which will be a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

But the underlying point remains: all of this could have been avoided if Missouri had left the task to the private sector. Hopefully, Missouri voters and legislators will learn their lesson so they will not repeat the same mistakes when recreational marijuana becomes legal.  I am not optimistic though. Missouri loves to beat a dead horse.

Image: Paul Sableman

The post Don’t Give Missouri License to Beat a Dead Horse appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Any parent can relate to Walden Ford’s story, so get ready to feel her anger and sorrow followed by joy and triumph. It is a powerful new film that everyone should watch.

The DC Voucher Program

Walden Ford was instrumental in helping to launch the Washington, DC, voucher program, giving low-income children access to funding to exit unsafe and low-quality public schools in favor of private options. The film is rooted in her experience of craving choice and encountering bureaucratic obstacles.

When she removes her teenage son from a failing public school and enrolls him in a nearby private school, Walden Ford feels hope and optimism despite needing to clean toilets and scrub floors to try to pay the tuition. Her hard work isn’t enough to pay the bill, though, and she is forced to leave the private school and re-enroll her son in the district school, where his potential is squandered.

When Walden Ford learns that the DC schools spend twice the amount of money per pupil than the cost of her son’s private school, she refuses to believe the prevailing rhetoric that public schools are chronically underfunded, and she seeks to establish a local school voucher program that gives disadvantaged families the opportunity to opt-out of mandatory school assignments in favor of private options.

Indeed, these are the options that more well-off families, including the legislator who opposes Walden Ford’s initiative, exercise all the time. Education choice programs extend these options to all families regardless of zip code and socioeconomic status.

Cost-Effective Programs

The DC voucher program came under attack in recent years as previous assessments showed that achievement scores for voucher students were lower on average than district school students. But the most recent evaluation of the program, released last spring, showed no difference in achievement scores between voucher and public school students in DC while costing taxpayers about one-third the money.

Moreover, Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation, has discovered that participants in the DC voucher program reported much safer learning environments. He writes:

Students that won the voucher lottery and attended a private school were over 35 percent more likely to report that their schools were very safe. And parents of voucher-using students were about 36 percent more likely to report that their children were in very safe schools.

Students in the DC voucher program also had higher overall satisfaction levels with their schools and significantly lower absenteeism.

Choosing safe and satisfying schools for their children is a key priority for many parents. Affluent families exercise this choice all the time, selecting private schools that focus on their children’s well-being or moving to communities with safer, better schools. Lower-income parents, like Walden Ford, want the same opportunity to choose safer, better schools. The DC voucher program and others like it across the country offer more parents greater choice and peace of mind.

Miss Virginia is a must-watch film. Click here for more information and viewing options. Be forewarned that I needed some tissues while watching, but it was well worth a few tears, and a few dollars, to learn more about this incredible woman, her remarkable story, and the promise of education choice for all families.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post “Miss Virginia” Shows the Dilemma Many Lower-Income Families Face on Schooling appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The description of “shockingly” was incredibly tongue-in-cheek considering Epstein’s alleged clients in his sex-trafficking ring were extremely high-profile and would have many reasons to want him dead.

It does seem plausible and reasonable that Epstein would commit suicide. However, it does seem the authorities did not take the correct precautions to stop this from happening.

Epstein was wealthy with a fortune of over a half-billion dollars, despite never graduating from college or having any real area of professional expertise.

Epstein’s wealth has been a question for many on Wall Street for years. It appears that he befriended wealthy, elite, well-connected people and convinced them that he was qualified to manage their money.

For example, Leslie Wexner, the billionaire behind the store Victoria’s Secret, gave Epstein sweeping control over his financial and legal matters in 1991. This relationship/career opportunity proved to be a successful one for Epstein; he gained much of his wealth during the nearly two decades he worked for Wexner.

In 2007, amid Epstein’s investigation by federal authorities in Florida, he was fired by Wexner. He accused Epstein of misappropriating more than 46 million dollars of Wexner’s fortune.

The misappropriation of money is why Wexner severed business ties with Epstein. He has said “This was, frankly, a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now.”

The renewed interest in Epstein’s finances could be reason enough for him to commit suicide. If this kind of shady financial “misplacement” was common for Epstein, it would be extremely possible for his “self-made” golden façade to come crashing down. Not only could he lose his money, he could be facing even more time in prison. Epstein was already charged with sex-trafficking which carried a 45-year sentence.

On top of all his financial woes, weeks ago Epstein was found injured in his jail cell from either a suicide attempt or an attack. After that, he was put on suicide watch in the jail, which involves almost constant monitoring and few personal items (even clothes are kept to a minimum).

Inexplicably, shortly before his death, Epstein was taken off of suicide watch.

Questions regarding Epstein’s death gained more bipartisan support than almost anything in the last few years.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted, “We need answers.”

Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) was outraged and said, “Every single person in the Justice Department—from your Main Justice headquarters staff all the way to the night-shift jailer—knew that this man was a suicide risk, and that his dark secrets couldn’t be allowed to die with him.” He continued with his final call to action “Obviously, heads must roll.”

Attorney General Bill Barr said he was “appalled” by Epstein’s death and directed the DOJ to investigate circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide.

It is reasonable and probable that Epstein felt desperate about the dismal situation he was in and wanted to commit suicide.

Anyone with common sense, and especially those with experience and expertise in law enforcement, should have put Epstein under close surveillance. Yet they didn’t.

This leaves us with a glaringly obvious, non-conspiratorial reasoning for this blunder: The government is so incapable of successfully completing a task that it couldn’t even keep a suicidal man from killing himself while in a secured jail cell.

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