Thursday, January 24, 2008

San Jose Mercury News Says STOP GAMBLING EXPANSION

As the awareness of the gambling expansion propositions, that give entirely too much of California's money away to four tribes grows to 70%, more newpapers come to the side of NO on Pechanga and NO to expanded gambling.

Here is part of the San Jose Mercury's editorial:

It's real money, but a small percentage of the state's current $14.5 billion budget shortfall. Overall, income from the compacts would be no more than half of 1 percent of the budget.
For the state to get $200 million, Californians will have to lose more than $800 million at the slots. Some might have been lost in Las Vegas anyway. But much of it will come out of other entertainment spending in local communities, and some will come out of mortgage payments, college savings or productive business investments.
Gambling addiction splits families and ruins lives, and a spike in the amount of gambling will take a toll. San Jose saw this during its last major expansion of cardroom gambling in the 1990s. After Bay 101 opened, specializing in Asian games, local human service agencies saw waves of Asian domestic violence victims - a rarity before - and families in financial distress.
Casinos have made some tribes, like these four, extremely rich.

A fund spreads some of the profits to non-gaming tribes, but many Native Americans still languish in poverty, and these new compacts will not be much help. They're definitely not what Californians signed up for when they approved Indian gaming in 1998 to help struggling tribes.

At the governor's request, the federal Department of the Interior has published the new gaming compacts in the Federal Register, which makes them part of federal law. That could supersede California law, which is the subject of the referendum.
An unusual - some would say suspicious - chain of events led to this, including a mysterious disappearance of the compacts for a period. The Interior Department's inspector general is investigating, and the governor's role deserves close scrutiny as well - particularly if it ends up thwarting the voters' will. It's hard to believe he didn't know what he was doing.
This is the kind of shady dealing that dogs large-scale gambling wherever it takes place. It's all the more reason to say no to Propositions 94 through 97, and hope it's not too late


OP: Pechanga members currently are making $400,000 a year (Corrected). Good for them. HOWEVER, to get this much, they targeted TWO large families, that represented voting blocs, and terminated their membership, even though the tribe's OWN HIRED EXPERT PROVED that they were Pechanga people. See this LINK In the news report, the Pechanga Chairman Mark Macarro is caught in a lie the first 15 seconds of the spot and more lies further in the article. But take a look, who looks more comfortable in presenting it's case; the tribal leader who has spoken before THOUSANDS, or the educator, who has the most experience tracing ancestry and who was PAID to prove that Paulina Hunter was NOT Pechanga, but found that wasn't true, she was? See it for yourself. Macarro is a liar, thus his motives are suspect, AND SINCE PECHANGA will CHEAT it's own people, why should you trust that they won't CHEAT the people of California? Please check out the links.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe you mean Pechanga members are receiving $400,000 per year. THERE ARE MANY MORE CORRUPT PEOPLE IN THE TRIBE BESIDES MACARRO, BUT HE IS THE LEADER AND SHOULD HAVE AND COULD HAVE STOPPED THE ILLEGAL ACTS DONE TO TRIBAL (NOW EX) MEMBERS.

OPechanga said...

Thank you, it has been corrected