Being against casinos is not being against people in the service industry, or unions, nor job creation. Wherever casinos are built, the way they operate sucks tourism that was widely spread among local businesses to feed the mega-corporation. Very different from building other entertainment venues that attract people who will also shop at other neighborhood businesses.
“But what about jobs, the drum-beat casino proponents tout as their best argument? Casino workers’ unions across the country are embroiled in labor fights with casino owners, fighting for fair pay and even to keep what little they receive in tips. Last year, hundreds of employees quit just days after the opening of Cleveland’s new Horseshoe Casino, outraged at their excessive hours and low pay.” from article by Steve Holt in Universal Hub 3/06/2013 Here’s the Cleveland article :http://www.clevescene.com/…/lots-of-people-already-quitting
More info on negative effects for everyone in a community: http://imshttp.rapv.com/documents/CasinoResearch-NAR.pdf
…that they are very much FOR people. They are concerned about the potentially exploitative nature for people who can least afford to be exploited.
I’d never been to a casino. A group of friends planned a trip to one in Connecticut and I figured, why not? I’d seen plenty of ads on the television and thought I knew what to expect: shiny happy people having fun. Instead, I watched as tired and frowning elderly people pushed little buttons on slot machines as their social security money was sucked in. I saw young couples pushing baby strollers in line for a cheap buffet and just image after image of people who bore no resemblance to the care free happy go lucky “hip” people that were in the ads.
All I could think of was that most of these people have lost hope, or at least have come to a point in life where their only hope was a roll of the dice.
The best way to protect our economy and our local jobs is to stop the casino from devastating them by redirecting all the money currently being spent. This si the story around the country, and being anti-casino is truly being pro-jobs and pro-community.
As referenced above and in multiple lawsuits across the country, casinos are also bad for the long term health of the union and worker movement. Once they are built, casinos are just another anti-union corporation with close friends in the Legislature, trying to roll back worker protections.
They are the antithesis of growing communities with responsible, forward-thinking economic development. What other form of entertainment is owned by out of state corporations and relies on our residents losing their money by the billions?
If you want to support jobs, support local jobs and strong Massachusetts industries by voting YES on 3 for the repeal!
I started out neutral on the repeal. My dad worked more than 30 years at the thoroughbred race tracks in New Jersey and Maryland (including Atlantic City) and earned a decent living, managing to send both his daughters to college. He was a waiter, headwaiter, captain, and finally Maitre D’ in the dining rooms. (I was always a bit confused by the term “blue-collar” because my dad was the nicest-dressed man I knew.) But that was back in the days of relative income equality and employment stability, before the hollowing out of the middle class. I started out thinking perhaps the jobs would be good. But the facts presented on casinos’ history have convinced me to vote for repeal. It’s not that I’m dogmatically opposed to gambling — live and let live. This is about HOW we choose to regulate gambling establishments in our Commonwealth — and whether we create a structure that encourages big bets and big risks (and probably big money courting officials) or find another route.
At the end of the day some of us have moral aversions to gambling, whether it’s the religious traditionalism of my brother or the progressive aversion to making money off the working poor and their collective cognitive dissonance, but you’re perspective is the one that is needed to win the folks in the middle. Those that don’t gamble or play the numbers only occasionally but also know people who work at the tracks (like my ma) or have an aversion to government telling people how they can entertain themselves. For that group focusing on the fact that the job numbers and expected revenue are not based in reality, that former gambling Meccas like Atlantic City are falling on such hard times they are requesting government bailouts, and that even Reno is trying to diversify and is frankly trying to copy the economy we already have in Massachusetts. Or focus on the obvious pay to play conflicts of interest that have messed up this process before it even hit the ground, Steve Wynn’s union busting ways, or the fact that we can create alternative jobs and economic bases from fixing our crumbling infrastructure and investing in our gateway communities.
This is a job killer, not a job creator. This will end with a government bailout, not increased revenue. Our licensing process is easily prone to corruption and influence peddling. And the state shouldn’t subsidize an industry with this track record of failure at a time when it’s revenues and expansion is at an all time low.
I figure the regulation of these casinos, if approved, will provide another opportunity for setting up an O’Brien-style patronage mill. After all, there’s a good chance the jury will find the defendants innocent, so what’s the harm?
I would think that Bob DeLeo would be an early and frequent customer for the new patronage jobs service. After all, it’s only regulating a few casinos — what could go wrong?
is occupied by people regulating NJ casinos. That’s hundreds and hundreds of employees — and god knows at what cost to that state.
Casinos fail all four metrics of determining whether a tax is good and fair — it targets the poor, it’s inconsistent year to year, it cannibalizes other state revenue (state lotto, food and meal tax) —– and because of its regulatory framework and associated costs, it’s very expensive to collect.
All the more reason to expect that the standard of hiring these regulators in Massachusetts be higher than the “knows-somebody” that so many seem to be defending regarding the Probation Department.
We can’t regulate anything if we can’t figure out how to rein in our patronage culture.
I didn’t have the personal view you had of it, but first thought of the issue years and years (and years) ago when New Bedford was debating the issue and I was going to school nearby at UMASS Dartmouth.
My basic feeling back then was “well, with all the struggling going on in the South Coast, things really couldn’t get worse.”
Then someone challenged me to look into the issue and down the rabbit whole I went.
Things could, indeed, get worse — and they would, especially in a gateway community. That would be true whether you’re looking at it from the perspective of the damage it would do to families or the local economy, since casinos are vampires that suck communities (and their populace) dry.
So I started to oppose casinos.
I am not and have never been anti-gambling. I have no problem with people having a poker night and am not opposed to the state lottery (though I think it could be reformed). I just think it’s incredibly important that the industry is strictly regulated — up to and including banning slots in Massachusetts, since they are by far the most addictive and dangerous form of gambling, and suck by far the most out of the local economy.
It’s interesting to read this from you. Maybe your transition mostly happened before I knew you, but you’ve always struck me as someone always adamant in opposition to the point where our exchanges have gotten a bit tense when I have not shared your view.
don’t oppose gambling. I oppose the economics that shift wealth away from regional economies – specifically small businesses and the regional impacts. I became engaged as a local official looking out for the town’s interests. As I educated myself, conferred with other local unpaid officials and those without a financial or political stake in the proposals, I found irrefutable evidence that the net impact is negative. This topic is new to some, others like myself and those on this blog have been on top of the issue for 7+ years.
It is interesting to learn that those who are in the parsing truth from power phase or process can perceive opponents as ,”stuck.” “Convinced” would probably be a closer descriptive word. Thank you for your skepticism and willingness to evaluate evidence.
many of these conclusions in the early days of my old blog, which predates when I was active on BMG.
Great blog…..thank you Ryan for contributing to so many great discussions online, on-radio and in-person over the years.
I couldn’t have cared less before I started to look into it. Once you realize what these things do in an economy and who they make their money from, there’s really no going back.
The best and most compelling argument in favor of casinos is the job-creation/economic development one and it also happens to have more holes in it than the Red Sox starting lineup. I think this is the issue the Repeal The Deal folks need to go after with everything they have, with solid research on what has actually happened elsewhere and an emphasis on the fact that the state is undeniably getting into the casino industry when it is not just on its way down, but dropping like a bomb.