Sodom and Gomorrah in Pennsylvania

April 27 (EIRNS)--Preparation for the June demolition of the 130-year-old Bethlehem, Pennsylvania steelworks to make way for a $600 million casino complex run by Las Vegas Sands Corp., began this week. This giant steelworks once included the world's longest machine shop, but by 2008, 3,000 slot machines, hotels, and entertainment centers are to fill the area, with 2,000 more slots to follow soon thereafter. The blast furnaces will be left standing, as a tourist curiosity.

Giant casinos are now going up across Pennsylvania, as the 2004 law legalizing slot machines is being implemented, turning this historic state, once one of the industrial and agricultural powerhouses of the nation, into the second-largest gambling state after Nevada, in terms of slot machines.

This is a bipartisan atrocity, pushed through under Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, under the slogan of "slots for tax relief." (Or was that really 'sluts'?) Thus is the industry of the United States being literally blown up in the name of a "budget crisis," by politicians who fail the most basic of test of physical economics: Are you so nuts as to believe the investment of $10 million in steel and $10 million in casinos is equal?