Miami deserves slot machines and anything else that could serve to remind us that Miami is defined by addiction and speculation and couldn't care less whether our children learn that gambling is an unsustainable model of human behavior.
After all, Citigroup just announced it is taking another $14.5 billion from investors, including Saudi Arabia-- the nation that not only has a lot of our nation's net worth in return for supplying our addiction to oil but is also the homeland for nearly half of the foreign fighters we know about, in Iraq and Afghanistan. (That's in addition to $7.5 billion invested by Abu Dhabi in November. And who knows where that money came from.)
According to Bloomberg, "Wall Street banks have now received $59 billion, mostly from investors in the Middle East and Asia, to shore up balance sheets battered by more than $100 billion of writedowns from the declining value of mortgage-related assets."
So I'll connect the dots: your city and county commissioners approve zoning and permitting decisions for growth that is bankrupting the state of Florida, that invested pension funds of teachers and municipalities in the same toxic junk that Wall Street created for the "free market", enriching bankers, lawyers, engineers and the commodity brokers, the cement manufacturers, the lobbyists and so, since the drunken sailors were running the ship of state and Congress, now we are forking over equity in the nation's financial institutions to the global masters, who simply supplied us oil or low cost labor in order for us to buy SUV's, suburban sprawl, and the kitchen sink made in China.
So under that set of facts, what possible virtue is violated by slot machines in Miami Dade?
2 comments:
uh...none? we are all virtuous clods?
I think that if my Hummer was on BIG tires I would jump off it and kill myself. But, this being Dade, there is so much trash, that I would probably bounce when I hit the ground and land on my feet. (For the record, I would not do that at the Indian Casinos, the parking lots are too clean... and my family couldn't sue them for damages.)
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