Bleeding Neon

Oh hey you guys, good news: The economic crisis is over. Back to work, everyone!

(More Moments of Zen here.)

Just. Wow.

On the plus side, it looks like a beautiful Las Vegas sunset!

Getting your week kicked off with a little bit of harsh (but funny) reality courtesy of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show (via Mark Evanier):

I’ll have an awesome, senses-shattering post about stuff that doesn’t matter later.

I guess they've been short-Circuited, huh? Ha, I know, I am genius.

By now, you should be well aware of Circuit City’s pending complete and total shutdown in these fine United States of America (for some reason, the company’s Canadian operations are staying open, for now). That’s 30,000 people about to lose their jobs in 567 U.S. branches of the 60-year-old electronics retailer. Almost immediately after officially announcing the closures, the stores began running liquidation sales. And not surprisingly, the allegedly struggling American consumers flocked to Circuit City to get their grubby hands on what had to be fire sale deals.

But the deals suck. I went on the Saturday after the liquidation announcement to the location at Sahara Avenue and Decatur Boulevard. Sure enough, the store was probably busier than it had been in years. However, after perusing the aisles for things I really didn’t need (I came looking for a Wacom Intuos graphic tablet, y’know, just in case), it occurred to me Circuit City’s prices weren’t very competitive. Even with 10 percent overall and slightly varying discounts in different departments, it seems as though all these shoppers would have been better off going to Wal-Mart or Target or even Best Buy. When you couple high prices with what I’ve read about increasingly bad/sparse customer service over the years, well, it’s no wonder that the venerable retailer found itself in big financial trouble. I mean, you don’t see Best Buy on the bankruptcy block, do you?

I went to a different location this week, figuring it’s been another week, maybe the liquidation prices are dropping. Nope. There were some killer deals on open box items, but there are always open box bargains in electronics stores. Maybe it’s good that the company’s liquidators aren’t shoving items out the door too quickly. After all, the sooner the stores sell out their inventory, the sooner they shutter the doors and Circuit City employees find themselves out on the street. Is it any surprise that Circuit City employees wear red shirts?

Well, don’t look at me. I sure as hell didn’t vote for him. I voted for his opponent in 2006, an educator unlikely to say “fuck you” to education.

"Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen."

But I digress. Yes, Gov. Gibbons’ proposed budget for Nevada cuts an already-struggling state to the bone. His short-sightedness most strikingly pulls the rug out from under public education, a proposal that Clark County School District Superintendent Walt Rulffes calls “painfully regressive and destructive to the system we have been struggling to improve for years.”

The budget hasn’t even passed muster with the state legislature yet and already schools are on the verge of closing. This further punctuates Nevada’s bottom-of-the-list standing in the national education rankings as well as regional assessments.

However, the blame cannot be entirely laid at Gibbons’ feet. Or even at the feet of the people who voted him into office, likely the same schmucks who thought re-electing Dubya was a good idea. No, this is just the latest painful evidence of a state whose elected officials, citizens and business leaders still think is a maverick frontier state in which the best policy is “every man for himself.”

This is a state that has said “no” to a state lottery to  support education even as it continues to mine the pockets of a struggling gaming industry, which lawmakers “protect” by maintaining the lottery ban.

This is a state that entices businesses to move to Nevada by offering unreasonably low taxes, thereby increasing the number of people our state has to support without increasing funds into the state, allowing these businesses to send their profits back to wherever they come from. And that lack of a diversified tax base, that dependence on gaming revenues, has brought us here, to a crippling state budget deficit.

Listen up, backwards-thinking Nevadans who snub every movement to increase our state’s revenue and possibly secure our long-term future: It’s time to grow up. It’s time stop short-sighted thinking and selfishness. If you call 911, you expect an answer. If your home is on fire, you expect the fire department to show up. You want your children to have a school to go to every morning, maybe even one that doesn’t shove them into an overcrowded classroom with an underpaid teacher who is dead tired from her second job slinging cocktails. You want clean streets, green parks and free parking. Guess what? Someone has to pay for it. You. Me. Your boss. The guy who owns the 7-Eleven down the street. Gary Loveman. Everyone. We take care of each other, we make sure we have working schools, hospitals and roads — maybe even better than “working,” perhaps one day “excellent.”

If you live in Nevada and give a damn about its future, its children or, hell, even yourself, tell the governor and, more importantly, your state senate and assembly representatives that you will not stand for budget cuts and outmoded tax structures that will inevitably make your home unlivable. Here’s how:

• Contact Gov. Gibbons
• Find your state legislator
• Write a letter to the editor of Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Sun or Reno Gazette-Journal

It doesn’t matter where you claim political allegiances. It’s time to follow the example of the national political climate: Partisanship is dead. We need to work together for what’s best for our cities, state, country and future. We need to make sure we’re heard, and yes, I’m sorry to report, put our money where our mouths are. Let’s prove that Nevadans will not go quietly into the night.