It’s time of the year to issue my first
”
Clueless
”
Award, based upon, well, someone being absolutely clueless to a
particular issue boiling in the local South Valley teapot. The
first winner of this award goes to Gary Ramos, California Valley
Miwok project manager, who said that the anti-casino group Casinos
Represent A Poor Solution’s
– which has collected a number of citizen signature against the
development and is growing in strength – stance against the
proposed casino is premature.
It’s time of the year to issue my first “Clueless” Award, based upon, well, someone being absolutely clueless to a particular issue boiling in the local South Valley teapot. The first winner of this award goes to Gary Ramos, California Valley Miwok project manager, who said that the anti-casino group Casinos Represent A Poor Solution’s – which has collected a number of citizen signature against the development and is growing in strength – stance against the proposed casino is premature.
Premature? You’re clueless.
But Ramos’ fog of clueless verbiage goes even further when he says “It is disappointing that this group is opposed to a project that would bring 1,000 or more jobs and economic benefits to the community as a whole. It is even more disappointing that they are mounting this effort without any facts and before the public has had an opportunity to assess the benefits this project has to offer.”
Now Gary, do you really think that people who are opposed to a local casino live in such a vacuum that they have not already weighed the options, examined the facts, and conducted research for themselves, finding the negative factors for a local casino outweighing the supposed pluses? Do you think that these people are so stupid that they have no discernment to recognize that the “thousands of jobs” argument is a straw man issue that the casino backers are always apt to pull from their bag of tricks to get their foot into the local scene?
It’s been pointed out in previous letters to the editor that while dangling the local jobs as a big carrot on a stick to swap public opinion into a favorable mode, there is no ethical restraint on the part of a casino to pull a bait-and-switch tactic and farm-out the “local jobs” to foreign students or other non-skilled out-of-local-area labor for minimum wages. Come on Gary, the investors are in this business for the money, and you really don’t give a rip about the moral issue of gambling, because moral issues for you are too Victorian, and too subjective anyway – right? Nor do you really care about the environmental problems that such a casino resort will bring upon the local area.
Like Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’ famous novel “A Christmas Carol”, your money bags of profit are chained around you and the investors in back of this casino, link by link, box-by-box, dollar-by-dollar, and in your minds the fools who waste away their earnings, destroy their families, impede their mental health, and wind-up becoming the problems of county social services can all be damned because reaping profits are more important to you than anything else.
And now round two of the casino games comes in a Free Lance article indicating that the Miwok tribe (all five of them) have hired a private company to perform an economic impact report, which “will detail the financial effects a proposed casino would have on the area.” Well guess what folks, I can tell you already what the results of this report will be, because first of all, I have some idea of the games lawyers play when it comes to presenting “evidence” to ensure that such evidence is in favor of their clients.
As a “reasonable person” do you really think that the tribal PR handlers are going to let something negative come out of this report? Of course not. Can you imagine the Miwok spokesperson standing up in a public community meeting in January and saying, “well folks, the results of the report are in, and it shows that there is questionable positive economic impact on the area, in fact there might be negative impact including loss of jobs in surrounding businesses, bad environmental effects, and an increase in crime?”
Yet, we get the full pomp of public relations fluff that “this economic study will provide a lot of the meat from tax impacts, employment, and crime” according to Miwok attorney Phillip Thompson.
So continued kudos to local crusaders like CRAPS Chairman Steve Merrell, and folks like Laura Lee Foote who are waging the fight against these pro-casino special interest groups. Power to you to keep a casino out of our area, no matter what their report will say.
