As we’ve been taught, if you’re going to tell a lie then make it a whopper. Enter Republican Advocates President Jim Clark. Having called completion of CityCenter “throwing good money after bad”, Clark unloads this doozy: “The project is now a $13 billion (with a “b”) bankruptcy employing some 22,000 lawyers, most from out of state.”
Excuse me? Mr. Clark is, at best, grossly misinformed. CityCenter is not in bankruptcy and did not cost $13 billion. As for the 22,000 lawyers, I’d like to know from which orifice that grandiose claim was pulled. So long as Clark is playing god, let’s take the wayback machine to late-March 2009, when CityCenter was on the verge of Chapter 11, with 8,500 construction j0bs up for grabs. What would Clark have had then-MGM Mirage and Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign do? Let the thing shut down, even as it neared completion? Implode it? (The question of how the economic impact would be absorbed simply goes begging.)
The Jim Clarks of the world should shut their traps and leave discussion of CityCenter to people who actually know something about it. Incidentally … scuttlebutt has it that MGM has laid out a contingency plan for demolition of the stalled Harmon Hotel tower. If MGM tears it apart, maybe they’ll invite Clark so he can get his rocks off seeing what’s left of Sir Norman Foster‘s concept come tumbling down.
“… if you’re going to tell a lie then make it a whopper.”
{Republican Advocates President Jim Clark]
The operative word is “Republican.”
As for getting his rocks off, doesn’t he already do that watching YouTube clips of Sharron Angle?
Harmon implosion? I’d hang out late for that.
CC wouldn’t have been imploded, it would have sat there, and probably MGM Mirage would have sank, and hopefully more companies and Ruffin-esque entrepreneurs would step in to pick up the bargains.
At the time of the MGM bailout I wasn’t very happy with it, because it screamed special interests and I figured MGM would feel compelled to even more deeply buy into the incumbents’ re-election campaigns, which it kind of has when you consider how much MGM talks up about how you couldn’t walk into Aria today without Reid’s assistance.
The real CC question is whether MGM Mirage should have basically gone kaput, hoist by it’s own petard of excessive dreams and unrealistic expectations of the Las Vegas market. The answer, in my mind, was yes; but mostly because I was never a fan of the duopoly of the Strip to begin with, and also because Harry Reid is not going to cold-call banks on my behalf if I’m in trouble. The arguments for are legitimate but I’ve never been totally convinced.
It generally boils down to “it’d be really bad for the city for it’s largest employer to sink under the waves,” but I like to think that should have been considered before the powers that be in the regulatory departments allowed MGM to hang it’s hat so heavily on Las Vegas (and vice versa as result.)
Perhaps I have an unrealistically optimistic view of the world, but I just like to think that big donator interests shouldn’t have more access to the Senator than I do.
How does Jim Clark come up with “22,000 lawyers”? Maybe he reached the number 22,000 by adding the total amount of construction workers who helped build City Center and the number of employees City Center had when they opened in December of 2009. Adding those two together might come close to 22,000. But 22,00 lawyers? That might be the number of lawyers who wanted to sue Donald Trump after he tried to trademark the phrase “You’re Fired”.
Truth be darned! City Center has become a political football since Harry Reid made his famous phone calls. Now the right wing wants to portray it as a drain on the public because that fits the narrative they are pushing. I would reluctantly take twenty two thousand lawyers over one Sharron any day. At least lawyers party!
What a clown!
Mike_ch:
It wasn’t a bailout.
Interesting argument Mike Ch. While I also feel Darwinism is the ultimate arbiter, I am happily free of any thought or idea that I personally deserve the same access to Harry Reid that MGM Mirage enjoys. I doubt you truly feel that way. More likely that you are just using the bash-Harry meme and expanding the right wings talking point about City Center to a new height.