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Choice of Seneca Gaming as 'Admired Company' Is Puzzling Given Predatory Nature of Casinos

By Frank Parlato

The Niagara Falls Reporter does not advocate making cigarettes illegal. We believe that people have the natural right to be free to choose that which helps or hurts them.
We do not buy into the flawed argument that smoking costs society more money, since the flawed studies that suggest do not take into consideration the savings reaped from people dying younger, saving society old age pension and nursing care money plus trading one smoking related illness for another long term care illness later in life.

Buffalo Business First, a weekly publication in Western New York, has chosen Seneca Gaming Corp. as one of the region's "Most Admired Companies" for 2013.

The publication selected 21 companies based on factors such as growth, success, diversity and contributions to the local community.

The Seneca Gaming Corporation has an advantage over the others: They don't pay property, sales or state income tax and do not have to conform to New York State building or health codes.

The Business First report recognizes the Seneca Gaming Corp. as one of the largest private sector employers in Western New York.

Factually they are not in Western New York. They are a sovereign nation, technically outside the state of New York.

In 1784, the Six Nations and the United States government signed the Fort Stanwix Treaty, recognizing the sovereignty of each nation.

In 1842, the Seneca Nation, the U.S. government, the State of New York, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts signed the Buffalo Creek Compromise Treaty, which prohibits the taxation of business activities on Indian reservations, because they are not in any US state.

The Business First report suggests that the mostly low-paying, mostly part-time casino jobs are "good-paying" and the Senecas themselves boast of "generous benefits, such as access to a free team dining room and fitness center, both open 24 hours a day," without mentioning that Senecas regularly make their employees work less than 40 hours, to avoid paying benefits standard with most large companies.

Most instructive however is: "The progressive (Seneca Gaming Corp.) company has many additional healthy initiatives, such as diabetes prevention and smoking cessation programs, as well as a health office with services offered free-of-charge and no need for co-payments or insurance."

This is written about a company that regularly requires 3,000 workers to be subjected to secondhand cigarette smoke every day of their working lives in their casinos and restaurants.

By the way, subjecting workers to secondhand smoke is absolutely illegal in New York State since secondhand smoke is considered to be nearly as dangerous as firsthand smoking.

The so-called "health conscious," "progressive" Senecas also sell cancer -- in a variety of flavors, such as regular, menthol, menthol smooth, lights, ultra lights, non-filters, and a variety of options, from kings to 100s, and a 120-size line.

Their regular flavor cigarette box features a distinctive red color, with a logo of a mountain range and a Seneca man with a headdress to help foster the lie that the cigarette is virile and manly, instead of the weakening, health-shattering death stick that it is.

The Senecas, true to ideals of equality, sell their cigarettes cheap, to help poor people who can't afford to get lung cancer from more expensive brands.

Seneca cigarettes can be purchased for around $3.50 a pack, which means you can get three times the carcinogens for the same price as one pack of Marlboro (cost $10) in the U. S. marketplace.

There is someone today who will buy a pack of Seneca cigarettes, who cannot afford a premium brand, who will later develop lung cancer directly from smoking cigarettes.

How anyone can call a nation, a man, a company, or a store who sells the death-inducing product known as cigarettes "health conscious" and someone or something to be "admired" is a puzzle..

Only a true "savage," whether white, black, red or yellow by birth, would sell his fellow human beings cigarettes or be willing to make money off of selling poison- legal or not.

Manly to sell cigarettes? It is the height of cowardice. Who else is so weak that they cannot earn without selling an addictive and fatal product to their fellows?

This publication calls all sellers and manufacturers of cigarettes cowards, even Native Americans like the Senecas, who are normally exempt from criticism on the grounds of political correctness.

The Senecas get rich off of selling cancer and getting people to lose money in their predatory casinos.

Most admired indeed.

But not here.

 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter - Publisher Frank Parlato Jr. www.niagarafallsreporter.com

Jan 28, 2014