The Bad Audit

Right now, I also know that you can read about it at Dr. Dawg's, Montreal Simon's and the Sixth Estate.

An audit by Deloitte & Touche done last summer shows that the First Nation of Attawapiskat does not have all its paperwork for spending on federal housing from 2005-2011. (Also, according to Simon, it seems they often didn't evict people for non-payment of rent in a timely fashion.) Chief Spence was elected in 2010, and was a co-Chief a couple of years before that. So this audit covers fully one year of her term. I also understand she's known about the audit since September.

I'm not even going to read the audit. Back in the day I used to do a LOT of reading about the sanctions against Iraq and the WMDs and the politics of Afghanistan so that I could come armed to the battle against the right-wing trolls. It turned out that 9 times out of 10, the right-wingers were insane, deluded or lying. I see no reason to do similar unpaid work to refute these imbeciles on this issue. (As well, Sixth Estate clearly seems to have a head for that sort of thing and can read those things quickly. I don't.)

It simply doesn't make sense that the leadership of a small First Nations community, under a co-management regime with the federal government, who are somehow guilty of fiscal malfeasance, would draw attention to the sufferings of their own people (that they themselves caused) by declaring a State of Emergency on the matter. It doesn't make sense that a crooked First Nations Chief would launch a public hunger-strike close to Parliament Hill so that she could be humiliated when her obvious criminality gets exposed.

Who am I going to believe?

The harperscum Canadians who claim they're not racist and that racism is not a problem in Canadian society except in so far as Aboriginal Canadians and non-white Canadians use it as an excuse for their own failings and as a club to beat libtards with?

They're not racist. Oh no, no, no! When they heard about the First Nations people at Ipperwash re-claiming their lands after 50 years [FIFTY YEARS!] of peaceful petitioning went nowhere, their first instinct was to side with the government that stole the lands and to cheer the premier who forced the OPP to go in and beat a man almost to death and to shoot and kill another man. One fuckhead even commented about how his family lost land to the Communists back in 1917. If I was so onside with the First Nations at Ipperwash, perhaps I could help him get his family's land back? In other words, he was so full of racist contempt for First Nations people that when he saw them fighting back against the same injustice his own family suffered he was inspired to side with the state against them! (At the time I'm sure he didn't realize that he sounded like a complete asshole.)

So, if they respond to direct action against an injustice so glaring as occurred at Ipperwash by siding against the First Nations people, it's going to be pretty obvious that they'd naturally side against the First Nations at Attawapiskat. Because they're racist fools.

Only slightly less disgusting than their racism is the devotion to the harperscum government. It's comical, but in a sick way, to engage with these idiots and here them say shit like "stephen harper is the greatest PM we've had in a generation" or "the grown-ups are in charge" when speaking about their harperscum government. It's too much! It's all I can do to not swoon when confronted with such insanity.

These are people who don't bat an eye at throwing $10 billion down a rat-hole in Afghanistan. These are people who don't care that harper spent over $1 billion to prevent a small number of protesters from breaking some windows at the G20 in Toronto, even though the windows got broken anyway. We still don't know where the money went and they don't care. They don't care about the $40 billion that's going to be wasted on the F-35's.

Sixth Estate also points out the relative treatment of Attawapiskat record-keeping and that of Tony Clement:

The reason I make this point is that when similar fiscal shenanigans are documented on the part of the federal government that is answerable to the rest of us, the people who are so angry about Spence are mysteriously and notably muted in their criticism. As just one example, take the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund. This $50 million grant pool actually started in the budget as a border security improvement project. Under Industry Minister Tony Clement, it was recast as an infrastructure subsidy fund, and all of the money then vanished, almost without a trace, into his own riding, in exchange for gazebos and other trinkets. The Auditor-General attempted to investigate, but could not fully complete her investigation because no paperwork on the grants process survived and the departments she contacted all denied that they had been involved in that process altogether.
You might think that evidence of such scandalous misuse of public funds — burning up on a two-day Toronto conference in an unrelated cottage-country riding half of what the Attapiskat Cree received over five years in the lead-up to the recently leaked audit — would put a dent in the good minister’s career prospects. After all, people rightly seem to think the audit raises questions about Theresa Spence’s leadership credibility.
If you thought that, though, you would be wrong. Tony Clement didn’t get fired, or even demoted, for the gazebo slush fund. Instead, he got promoted to President of the Treasury Board, a position which now puts him in nominal charge of all government accounts. This promotion passed with hardly more than a sleepy yawn from the press. The gazebo slush fund got a few days of commentary, but reporters let it go quickly enough. Nobody really seemed to care, then or since.

Notice that Sixth Estate is not doing a respectable person's version of the harperscum "B-b-but the Librullls!!!" routine. Neither am I. If it turns out that there has been embezzlement of band money at Attawapiskat, the guilty parties should be punished. I'm just saying, Sixth Estate is saying and, in a masterful post that went online after I began this screed, Dr. Dawg gets down to brass tacks:

The Crommunist Manifesto raises other matters: Parliasmentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, having to sue the government to get details of expenditures. Inflating the salaries of Conservative staffers and cronies while public employees are being laid off in the name of austerity.
None of these stories had the same prominence in the media as tiny Attawapiskat. There was no torrent of paternalistic BS from editors and op-ed authors about the obvious inability of white people to govern themselves properly or keep a clean set of books. There was no advocacy for abolishing traditional Conservative ways and moving into the twenty-first century.
When it comes to Attawapiskat, however, old racist stereotypes still die hard. Never mind the clear racism oozing from media stories and online comments threads. The overall media atmosphere is toxic, and the message, drummed into us day after day, is simple: Indians can’t handle money, they are incompetent, they fear transparency, they are living in the past.

Indeed. The Crommunist Manifesto link ends with sentiments that pretty much reflect my own thinking about Chief Spence:

*It should probably go without saying that I don’t buy the popular conclusions from the audit. It’s entirely possible that Theresa Spence misappropriated some money, but the idea that she would defraud her community and then launch herself into the national spotlight seems a bit far-fetched.

And, remember, not having receipts doesn't mean you stole the money. It's also unclear why the federal government doesn't have the receipts given the band's co-management status.

But I'd like to conclude with my own contribution to the list of scum an villainy that supposedly doesn't reflect badly on white people and our ability to govern ourselves, Paul Carson. Remember him? The sleaze-ball harper confidant who lost his legal practice as a result of robbing his clients? The dweeb who married a woman half-a-century younger than himself? When stephen harper ripped up the Kelowna Accord, he then mandated tough regulations on drinking water on First Nations reserves. But he didn't give them the revenues needed to implement the regulations. Along comes Carson, telling them that the government endorses his H20PRO water filtration system and, more importantly, that he's tight with harper and everyone else. If they buy H20PRO (and add a 20% tip for his lovely wife) they'll be able to access the funding needed to actually use his product. Otherwise, they're SOL and their people will still have unsafe drinking water.

Yep. The grown-ups are in charge. For fuck's sake.