Today’s Boston Globe editorial section posted this article.
http://www.boston.com/bostongl…
For the 12 year run of the big Dig, due to the requirements of Public Procurement Laws the big construction labor unions had a seemingly unlimited trough to fill high paying, high benefit jobs for their members. But as the work load finished and this work dropped off the impact was that other construction subcontractors (non union but still decent paying employers who had no access to Big Dig project sub contracts) found them selves being strong armed or intimidated into using union workers or being forced out of potential projects by the union reps hard nosing the general contractors.
As a side note wonder why your local school building project costs so much? Public Procurement laws.
So to hear that this union muscle has now been enlisted to push this ill conceived casino gambling plan is disturbing if the motivation is Construction Jobs. The editorial notes
DiMasi prefers to concentrate on the economic development possibilities of Patrick’s $1 billion life sciences initiative.
For instance the New Bristol Myers Squib plant being constructed out at Devens is around a $900,000,000 project. Clearly the Life Sciences initiative can create significant construction jobs for Big Union.
But further the editorial notes:
His plan includes sound protections for those at risk of compulsive gambling.
That this justification somehow makes it Okay is further proof of how ludicrous the casino argument is in the first place.
For the Patrick administration to include revenues in his budget for a yet to be approved plan to license gambling and to hold out the carrot of education funding support to small towns from those revenues is to play some shell game of why this is good for the Commonwealth and is not what many of us expected as we held street signs, manned phone banks and knocked on doors to get him elected. For him to garner support from big unions to push it is more a sign of desperation than a Governor with a real plan to fulfill the “Sound bites of Hope” he campaigned on.
value of casinos however is immense.
It lowers the constructive societal norms.
It enables mafia type thinking and behavior.
It takes potentially concerned citizens and diverts their attention from the obvious cesspool of politics and sets them Zombified in front of a slot machine.