Oregon Indian wars to be continued? You can bet on it!

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Some sell snake oil, some sling the venom….

The two shiny-suited Lake Oswego hucksters fronting the recent attempt to build a foreign-owned private megacasino at the former greyhound track in Wood Village have announced that they—like the clap—will be back.

A 2-to-1 defeat at the polls would usually kill off most expensive, grandiose political schemes, particularly one as poorly thought out as the Measure 75 campaign was, but the Wood Village Casino zombie lives.

The promoters smell the sweet scent of hundreds of millions of dollars in the distance, even if nearly all of that fortune is money siphoned off from existing businesses and that comes at onerous social cost.

They are counting on a single element to work eventually in their favor: Indians. To be precise, they are counting on attitudes towards Indians and the threat of more Indians to motivate voters to choose to make the promoters rich.

The key lesson learned in the recent Measure 75 campaign was that no privately owned casino can possibly be built in Oregon without mustering up the votes to pass multiple constitutional amendments and to force other substantive changes in state law, although many voters probably misunderstood these prohibitive legal realities.

Since the Wood Village Casino complex creates nothing of new value to Oregon beyond the short-term construction jobs needed to build it, the promoters realize that they can make no compelling argument to persuade Oregon voters to grant them an exclusive license to enrich themselves on fiscal grounds alone.

As the M75 campaign demonstrated, their strategy in the future will be to mount an organized effort to dredge up anti-Indian resentments and to leverage that hostility into votes.

There is no other path to the place they want to lead Oregon.

The core of their business plan will continue to depend upon instigating and increasing hostile attitudes among the general public towards Oregon’s indigenous populations in general, against its nine Confederated Tribes in particular, and by conjuring up the threat that other Indians might build a casino north of the Columbia River in Southwest Washington.

This strategy is shamefully consistent with the history of the state.

The Oregon Territory was founded as a whites-only paradise. The Oregon Provisional Government authorized land claims to white settlers of 640 acres apiece for free, while early law and actual practice barred non-whites from land ownership and even from residing in the Territory.

The pioneers swarmed into Oregon and took all of the best, most productive land, destroying food sources that had sustained Native people for thousands of years in the process, introducing lethal new diseases and murdering any Indians who stood in the way.

Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act in 1850, offering free 160- and 320-acre tracts of land to white settlers only, years before the tribes were forced at gunpoint into treaties ceding the land. By the time the Act expired in 1855, white settlers had laid claim to 7,437 patents covering two and a half million acres of free land in Oregon.

These patents formed the foundation of many Oregon family fortunes, and the state’s founding fathers enshrined those racially discriminatory practices and attitudes in the Constitution itself.

Later generations passed the Dawes Allotment Act in 1887, the Surplus Land Act of 1901, and the Termination Act of 1954, all for the purpose of transferring Indian land and resources into white ownership. During this entire period, the federal government subjected Native American children to forced removal from their families and sent them to boarding schools en masse.

Extermination of the race was seen as a side benefit to these policies.

But reciting these facts merely annoys many people, nearly one third of the electorate in the last election cycle, as the M75 vote illustrates.

We can expect to see a lot of money spent on snake oil, on misinformation and on the usual mudslinging when the Wood Village Casino promoters ramp up their next campaign, but what will characterize their efforts more than any other single aspect will be the venom.

Oregon Measure 75 is Dead on Arrival, its public expense has just begun

by Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon--

Proponents of Measure 75 and the Wood Village Casino have placed their bets on the “Pass” line, but they will come up craps regardless of how the November vote turns out.

Measure 75 is fatally flawed with several violations of the Oregon Constitution.

The first issue lies in this line: "The Legislative Assembly has no power to authorize, and shall prohibit, casinos from operation in the State of Oregon."

The Constitution clearly requires the Legislative Assembly to take action to prohibit this or any other non-Tribal proposed casino from operation in the State of Oregon.

Should M75 pass, the legislature "shall prohibit" its operation.

The second issue lies in Article I, Section 20 of the Oregon Constitution, which states: "No law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges, or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens."

Rossman and Studer's casino measure stomps all over Section 20:

Under M 75, the only permissible casino location in the state would be at the former Multnomah County Kennel Club, specifically, at 944 NE 223rd Avenue, Wood Village, which just happens to be under the control of Rossman and Studer, for their exclusive benefit, a clear violation of the Oregon Constitution.

M 75 defines “gaming operator” as “The owner of the property identified in Section 14 of this 2010 Act”.

In addition, Section 17, Paragraph (5) of M 75 amends ORS 320.011, creating a special immunity from taxation for the Wood Village casino operators, specifically, from the $125 per-device excise tax.

If those aren’t flaws enough, M 75 would grant these exclusive privileges and immunities to Rossman and Studer for 15 years, renewable for another 15 exclusive years.

A better, more accurate ballot title would have been

"The Rossman-Studer Full Employment Act."

Both the coming court battle and the action of the legislature are going to cost a great deal of public money, and we can thank Rossman and Studer for sticking us with the bill. Remember that when they come back for another go in 2012.

You can eliminate much of that expense by voting "NO" on Measure 75.

Talk about problem gamblers….