Newspaper logo  
 
 
Bookmark and Share
Local News & Opinion

Ref.: Civic Events

Ref.: Arts & Education Events

Ref.: Public Service Notices

Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education

05.19 How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking -- and What That Means For Our Kids' Future

05.19 As Schools Crumble: Quiet Call for Revolution in Philly

Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Health Care & Environment

05.22 A Fine Brine: New Desalination Technique Yields More Drinkable Water

05.22 Only renewables - not nuclear - could be too cheap to meter

05.21 Health Bargain Hunters Use Websites To Cut Doctor Bills

05.21 Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard

05.20 Collateral Damage in the Marcellus Shale

05.18 Apple to Use Only Green Power for Main Data Center

05.18 New law makes Vermont the first state to ban fracking

05.18 Department of Energy Pretends that Low Levels of Radiation Are Safe

05.17 Only biofuels will cut plane emissions

05.17 Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find

05.15 Horrific Injuries Linked to BP Dispersant Corexit

05.15 'Last Call at the Oasis': Why Time Is Running Out to Save Our Drinking Water

05.14 German Government to Oppose Fracking

05.11 Petition calls on Brazilian president to veto 'catastrophic' forest code

05.11 Bans on School Junk Food Pay Off in California

05.11 When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed

05.10 Game Over for the Climate

05.10 Pollution: the great leveller

05.10 New study: Amish prove raw milk promotes health in children

05.10 Big Agriculture's Big Secrets: 9 Things You Need to Know About the Food You Eat

Ref. High health-care costs: It’s all in the pricing - graphic

Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians

Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics

Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators

Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here)

Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries

“News” Media

05.22 It’s Official: Watching Fox Makes You Stupider

05.20 Corporate Media: Dan Rather on Real Time with Bill Maher [video]

Daily The Daily Howler

Justice Matters

05.22 How America's death penalty murders innocents

05.20 "The Whole System Relies on These Arrests": The NYPD's Racist Marijuana Arrest Crusade And Its National Implications

05.17 Federal court enjoins NDAA

05.16 Is the filibuster unconstitutional?

05.15 MONEY UNLIMITED

05.11 How the Corporate Right Hijacked America's Courts to Enrich the Top 1 Percent

US Politics, Policy & Culture

05.22 Krugman: Romney ‘really does not understand the economy at all’ [video]

05.22 Is Texas Waging War on History?

05.22 Today's GOP: Worst Political Party Since the Civil War

05.21 The Rise of the New Economy Movement

05.21 Psychiatrist who championed 'gay cure' admits he was wrong

05.16 5 Ways Conservatives are Destroying the Institution of Marriage

05.16 Congress: The TSA Is Wasting Hundreds Of Millions In Taxpayer Dollars

05.16 The Economic Case for Same-Sex Marriage

05.16 If Information Is Power, What Is Lack Of Information? [video]

05.15 IMAGE: It doesn't have to be true, just credible...

05.15 WEDDING BELLS

05.15 Memo to Mitt: Time to Fess Up on Bullying

05.14 “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.”

05.14 Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane

05.11 Why Atheists Have Become a Kick-Ass Movement You Want on Your Side

05.11 Fixable Error, New Insight, and Social Security

05.10 Ballot Access

05.10 Christian Conservatives vs. Sex: The Long War Over Reproductive Freedom

05.10 Patriotism! Super Rich Renounce US Citizenship to Make Tax Evasion Easier (And Other Ways the Wealthy Cut Ties to Country)

High Crimes?
Economics, Crony Capitalism

05.22 Today Germany Is the Big Loser, Not Greece

05.22 Europe is driving full-tilt, foot on the pedal, into a brick wall

05.21 Heist of the century: Wall Street's role in the financial crisis

05.21 MANIPULATIONS: FACEBOOK is a fiat stock, its valuation is no different than fiat money...

05.21 Obama pledges tough enforcement of Wall Street reforms

05.18 Barack Obama tells EU: boost growth now or face a global crisis

05.18 Bank runs intensifying in the Euro zone

05.18 The Dog That Didn’t Bark: Obama on JPMorgan

05.17 Inside Job, Narrated by Matt Damon (Full Length HD Documentary)

05.17 Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders

05.17 Paul Krugman’s Economic Blinders

05.16 “What Scares Me Isn’t $2 Billion Loss JP Morgan Made, What Scares Me is the Record $19 Billion in Profits” [video]

05.16 Accidentally Released - and Incredibly Embarrassing - Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in 'Naked Short Selling'

05.16 Republican Party suckles at the breast of Big Business

05.16 Weisbrot and Krugman are Wrong: Greece cannot pull off an Argentina

05.15 Greek deadlock heightens fears of full European economic crisis

05.14 Why We Regulate

05.11 Indentured Servitude for Seniors: Social Security Garnished for Student Debts

05.11 Breaking Up Four Big Banks

05.11 Wall Street’s immunity

05.11 How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

05.11 Michael Hudson: From the Democratic Party to European "Socialists", they manage crisis in the interests of finance [video]

05.10 Real Estate 4 Ransom -- locking up the Great American Dream

05.10 Quelle Surprise! Fed Defends Incompetent Bank Management Against Investors

05.10 Europe’s Problems Multiply

05.10 Michael Hastings & Glenn Greenwald on how media hype about ‘melodramatic’ terrorist plots helps sustain the [profitable] U.S. ‘War on Terror’ [video]

Ref. Nurses vs. High-Speed Traders

Ref. Inside Job, Narrated by Matt Damon (Full Length HD Documentary)

Ref. We’re More Unequal Than You ThinkGraphic: Unequal rise in income

International

05.22 The Soviets showed the way to leave Afghanistan

05.21 US war veterans tossing medals back at Nato was a heroic act

05.21 Israeli settlers filmed firing guns at [unarmed] Palestinians

05.17 South Sudan slides towards destitution amid border conflict with Sudan

05.15 IDF closes Palestinian school to make way for West Bank training zone

05.14 Noam Chomsky on:
WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break From the U.S. [video]
Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity [video]
Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights" [video]

05.14 INFOGRAPHIC: Gas Spending Around The World

05.14 Graphic: Products of Slavery

05.14 Israel warned of volatile situation as Palestinian hunger strikers near death

05.14 How Right-Wing Extremists and Islamists Are the Same

05.14 Guatemala's land grab and massacre

05.11 U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

05.11 Thousands of British police join anti-austerity protest

05.10 China Investment Corp. Stops Buying Europe Government Debt on Crisis Concern

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.

You can also mail a check to:
Baltimore News Network, Inc.
P.O. Box 42581
Baltimore, MD 21284-2581
Google
This site Web
  Vote NO on Maryland Question 2--Unless You Love Being Fooled
Newspaper logo

SPEAKING OUT:

Vote NO on Maryland Question 2--Unless You Love Being Fooled

by Deborah Cunningham

Can anybody imagine the danger to our national security IF even one presently loyal employee of the National Security Agency "plays to extinction"?
Maryland voters will decide on November 4 whether to amend our State's Constitution to reward an outrageously pushy lobbying effort on behalf of the cartel-like gambling industry.

The National Security Agency is located 5 miles or so from Laurel Park, where Maryland's politicians have planned to open a casino with computerized slot machines which incorporate lots of Pavlovian conditioning to keep the players on the machines. The gambling industry speaks, among themselves, of getting players "to play to extinction." Can anybody imagine the danger to our national security IF even one presently loyal employee of the National Security Agency "plays to extinction"?

Such carefully-psychologist-designed machines should not be lined up in a casino within 100 miles of our National Security Agency—even as we have no doubt that 99.99% of the employees would not be tempted excessively. We do know that most people who will sell out their nation—our country or somebody else's—do it for money, not ideology. Frequently, they have done it for a combination of financial reasons, and gambling is among those recognized over time.

Every state which has introduced casinos, slot machines, etc., has been "informed" ahead of time by the highly organized gambling industry how much money the state will "earn".

Besides that, we know that every state which has introduced casinos, slot machines, etc., has been "informed" ahead of time by the highly organized gambling industry how much money the state will "earn". We recognize that the figures cited by the tightly-run gambling companies are always much higher than what's earned. Maybe a state will make 40% or 50% or 60% of what the gambling corporation "informs" the state ahead of time. If a state is uncharacteristically lucky, it might, in good financial times and with less "market saturation" of gambling machines, make two-thirds of what the industry tells its polticians ahead of time.

Meantime, localities discover traffic jams around new gambling centers, and heavy demands on old sewer systems (predicted in particular for the infastructure serving Laurel Park). There suddenly are discussions of expensive improvements to roads and newer, bigger water mains and other infastructure.

The Maryland General Assembly did not write any new funding for education into the proposal last year.

The Maryland General Assembly did not write any new funding for education into the proposal last year—since the politicans and gambling industry lobbyists were eager to pressure various groups into supporting the Referendum. "Promising" money to State-funded organizations if they supported the Referendum without any written guarantee was a way to push organizations of teachers and others to support this Amendment to the Maryland Constituton.

The money which is supposed to come, in a few years, from slot machines to the State Treasury has been informally, conversationally, "ear-marked" numerous times over.

Anybody who has even casually listened to advertisements and politicans knows that the money which is supposed to come, in a few years, from slot machines to the State Treasury has been informally, conversationally, "ear-marked" numerous times over. The gambling establishments could never bring in the exaggerated, many-times-over, claimed, advertised, and rumored benefits for the horse racing industry, for senior citizens, for police and fire protection, for public schools, for the Maryland Teachers Pension Fund, to underwrite health care for needy residents, and everything else.

Where's the owner of the big company that Maryland plans to let run gambling establishments here? Canada. This means one-third of the proceeds will go out of the country.

Meantime, we know that one-third of the money will go to the owners of the gambling corporations—those people who contend they will be performing such a public service for the State. And, where's the owner of the big company that Maryland plans to let run gambling establishments here? Canada. That's what these proponents of Question 2 call "bringing money into Maryland." That is what these endorsers of the Amendment to our State Constitution call "keeping the money in Maryland."


Deborah Cunningham is president of the board of Baltimore News Network, Inc., publisher of the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel.


Copyright © 2008 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own.

This story was published on November 3, 2008.

 


Public Service Ads:
Verifiable Voting in Maryland