Anyone who has read the facts leading up to where the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is now on issuing a casino license cannot reasonably believe it’s on the level. There is absolutely no difference between the NFL’s intentional avoidance of what happened in the elevator with our state’s politicians and media avoidance of the Gaming Commission’s conflicts and criminal involvement with the Everett site.
The media is reporting the Mayor’s letter to the Commission as nothing more than a bitch and moan on esoteric issues while ignoring the meat of the correspondence in which Walsh tells them he was born at night but not last night and it’s impossible to believe the Everett deal isn’t dirty on up to the highest level.
So here we have the top law enforcement person in the state, a person who also appointed a member t the Commission, ignoring it. Not only ignoring it but bending over backwards to help them by wrongfully trying to stop the initiative petition from going forward.
And we have a governor telling the press yesterday he doesn’t see a problem over there. WTF. Hey dude, you just made it so easy to paint you as a corrupt big city politician.
Do you know why Martha? Do you know why Deval? Because these facts are very easy to understand and your actions ignoring them are easy to follow too. So easy they can be turned into useful 10 second soundbites and 15 and 30 second radio and TV ads that will make people puke.
Hey Deval, rather than running around playing the role of the milquetoast potted plant governor yearning to be President only sticking your head out of the bunker to protect the likes of Steve Wynn and Everett mobsters you should be working on clemencies etc for as many people as possible serving drug related mandatory sentences.
Now to you Charlie. First things first. Stop starring in your TV ads. Stop it! Now! You suck. You’re not likable. Your whiney voice is irritable. People are thinking they don’t want to listen tot hat for four years. Think Steve Tolman.
We don’t care about your family, Swampscott, Bill Weld, or Tufts Health. We don’t care who says you’re a nice guy. Big Deal. There’s hell of a nice guys all over the place.
No, you and the Republican party have to hit Martha and the Dems on the corruption going on under hers and theirs watch and their willingness to allow it. Martha had a hand in creating this commission plus appointed a member. And now she’s not investigating it. Martha should own this issue and it should dominate the race.
Charley, at most there should only be a photo of you in your ads. No talking. No moving. It’s not about you. It’s about your opponnent. Remind people why they dislike Martha because trust me the Dems are going to be selling the soap differently.
And as for you casino foes your ads should be one person after another telling their fellow Ma residents that they were in favor of casinos but watching the corruption taking place in front of our eyes makes them not in favor of casinos in Massachusetts. If we can’t do it right we can’t do it.
…that Baker is also in favor of casinos AND has expressed a willingness to find away around a repeal vote if that were to come to pass?
He’s only mentioned Springfield.
the argument is the Dems have created a corrupt system
I’m saying that he can still attack despite his support for a Springfield casino.
…unless he comes out with a plan to decorrupt the casino process, which I have not heard yet.
1.) If repeal passes and they allow a casino in Springfield anyhow, they would be denying the clear will of the voters.
2.) A casino in Springfield would open the doors to an Indian casino, or 2, or 3.
1) The will of the voters has been denied before. Maybe there will be some initial resentment from voters, but time heals all wounds.
2) Would it open the door to more? Doesn’t it just mean that Coakley and Baker don’t seem to have a good reason to deny more casinos? Being well reasoned and consistent is a nice thing, but it’s not necessary.
The federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) gives federally-recognized tribes the right to set up casinos in states that allow casino gambling. So the state can pass a law authorizing only one commercial casino in Springfield, but once it does so, it cannot prevent additional casinos from springing up under IGRA. There are additional complications such as getting the land taken into trust – the system is anything but straightforward. But, basically, once slot machines are allowed anywhere in Massachusetts, we can look forward to years of litigation relating to the building of tribal casinos.
The tribes should not have any special privileges on this. The states should have plenary authority to decide on the number of licenses and reservations should have to compete for those licenses in the same way other communities do.
…was a form of reparations for broken treaties. Otherwise we have to do things like pay the market value of the gold from the Black Hills, etc. A gambling franchise seemed cheaper to Congress. Repeal puts the value of the legal signed contracts back on the table with 100 years compound interest.
I’m sorry that history stinks for this population, but the reservation system frankly hasn’t worked out very well. Some of the highest poverty rates can be found in such places. They should just be treated as full citizens with equal protections of the law and the same rights to local governance as anybody else – nothing more or less.
Germ warfare, genocide, concentration camps, wholesale theft, cultural erasing, and you’re sorry, because “history stinks for this population.” Your comment takes “mistakes were made” to a whole new level. Have you forgotten who did all those things to “this population”? Or that we made endless promises to these people, which we then proceeded to ignore? We owe them more than we can ever repay. Treating them as the Romans did to conquered peoples is not a morally-advanced position to take.
But I do think Christopher has a bit of a point. We can never really fix the situation of Native Americans, but reservations haven’t worked out very well, and the casino bribery is even worse.
So at some point, we should take the discussion to its next step. Either the reservations become truly independent (unlikely), or they become integrated as citizens. Many of them have already left the reservations.
…though I’m not aware of concentration camps for Native Americans; that sounds a bit Godwinesque. Other than that I know they were treated horribly, had treaties broken, etc. We should not keep up the pretense that they have or should have some sort of sovereignty. By that logic there are all sorts of places throughout history that current occupants need to accommodate previous occupants, and it often just leads to strife. Romans pushed out all sorts of people and their influence continues to be felt in the former empire. Anglo-Saxons pushed out the Celts in Britain. Phoenicians and Greeks colonized much of the Mediterranian. Eventually Germanic tribes knocked off Rome. We are responsible for how we treat people NOW, but not in the past. Like I say, our system is such that we offer equal protection and local control anyway. That should be enough and I stand by my previous comment.
This is from Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust. Before you start up with your Godwin nonsense, please click on that link and take note of who wrote it.
When you have time, I also suggest you do some reading on the Iroquois Confederation, which was a major inspiration for the Constitution you keep mentioning. Sadly, our Founding Fathers did not see fit to adopt the egalitarian principles of the Iroquois toward women and defeated enemies.
I’m certainly willing to file this under you learn something new everyday, but it doesn’t change my thinking about present day policy and I guess when I hear concentration camps I automatically think gas chambers and ovens.
where casinos mean we don’t have to do the right thing by someone.
N:t
If you are in the neighborhood, stop into the casino in Niagara Falls NY for a preview of what to expect in Springfield. Casinos go after one of two markets.
One market is the “Premium Player”. This is the well dressed, gets a comped room, has dinner in the restaurant and blows a few grand or more with each visit. This is the image that many think of when they hear “Casino: Robert DiNiro, Susan Stone, you get the picture.
The other market is the grind player, most typically the 45 year old woman in sweat pants and sweater who has her lucky stuffed animals and charms arranged on her favorite slot machines. Most often she arrives with $20 or $50 and plays the 25 cent slots until that $20 or $50 is gone. Then she gets into her car (where she is behind in payments), drives home, and tries to figure out how to put a meal together for her family with what’s left in grocery money. Oh well, next time, she’ll hit is big at the slots and this misery will be over.
Welcome to the future of Springfield.
The nearest Keno outlet offers a sneak preview of who this industry is targeting. Sit down, watch the “players” for awhile, and think about whether this demographic is a suitable revenue foundation for ANY government that claims to be “progressive”.
and online gambling, and the general expansion of the lottery?
I couldn’t find anything on their websites during the primary.
it has the absolute worse rate of return of anything a casino may offer.
The ones in Gary, Milwaukee, and Hammond target the Grind players. During my two years at a foreclosure/bankruptcy hotline I had a CPD cop who blew her entire six figure pension at Horseshoe in Hammond, and had to plead with a Milwaukee woman to stop “going to the boat” to
“Pay for her husband medication”. When you’re losing 10k you don’t have it ain’t paying for anything.
The luxury ones are just as bad. The ones in downtown Aurora (where I’m currently living) and Joliet didn’t develop those downtowns and are now in danger of becoming white elephants.
The human brain does not find probability natural or intuitive. We incline toward thinking of luck as some kind of divine emanation susceptible to our influence.
While I was standing outside my polling place on primary day, we got into a heated discussion between the pro and anti casino groups. One thing I noticed is that the pro folks were filled with anecdotes about “George who lives on the South Shore and spends a ton at the Connecticut casinos” or “My in-laws who hit Mohegan Sun once a month” and all these stories have the same message: People are doing it anyway so we might as well have them do it here. I guess they have narrow point. Yes, at the moment are just dealing with the related social costs of these individuals (bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, embezzlement, child abuse) with none of the tax revenue. So why not grab that revenue? Here’s why. Now we’ll have George and your in-laws at a factor of ten because the added convenience of state sponsored addiction is just down the road, not in another state. Anecdotes pro and con are moving, but as Don Berwick said over and over, look at the data (Hell, look at the headlines). Casinos are a bad bet.
If I have other financial obligations it makes no sense to blow precious cash on the better-chance-that-I-get-struck-by-lightening odds that I hit it big. This is why the exploitation arguments have always been the weakest ones for me.
If you listen to how grind players talk, though, you’ll find that they indeed have an elaborate system of reasons for why their behavior is perfectly sensible.
There is also a sunk costs effect. If I’ve lost $400 at the slot machine and I walk away, I’ll have lost $400 permanently as a result of my visit. If I stick more money into the machine, there’s the prospect that I won’t have lost $400. That’s very attractive — even if it is foolish.
Consider the F-35 II Lightning :
There you’ve got yourself some serious sunk costs!
doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do yet
May explain why we are fighting our fourth air war in Iraq in as many presidencies.
It’s addictive.
Both Connecticut Indian casinos are deeply in debt. So is the state:
Foxwoods has defaulted on a half-billion dollars of loans. Allowing casinos is not a viable plan for funding state government.
From what I’ve read, the tribes that run these casinos are so far in the red that in order to service the debt, they are selling off tribal lands.
And yet BOTH viable candidates for governor in the commonwealth are tripping over each other in an effort to be the “I Want Casinos” governor.
It’s madness.
In the end, guys like Wynn will still walk off with a wad of cash, just as Trump still has his millions after his NJ casinos close.
That’s the model for American Capitalism, privatize the profits and socialize the loss.
If you believe everyone has Personal Responsibility and if you believe that recreation which doesn’t cause harm to others should be allowable because you’ve been bitten by the libertarian bug, then it makes perfect sense. Once you add to that knowing people who use casinos elsewhere whose lives maybe aren’t a disaster as a result, you can easily arrive at the view that they should be allowed in Massachusetts.
Coakley’s position seems to be that this takes a fair bit of watching and curating to get right but, gosh darn it, that’s what she’s good at and so we watch and curate all the evil out of it.
I’m guessing Baker is riding the jobs line plus a bit of no-nanny-state-for-me. There are a lot of people who oppose the Nanny State. Think Half-Term Governor Palin and her Big Gulp.
The facts you point to, kirth, and the recent experience in Atlantic City and elsewhere would seem to undermine all this, but, as a recent rather trollish visitor to BMG made clear, there’s a lot of literature (litter-ature?) on the other side just waiting for a casino advocate to cite.
You deny the reality of gambling addiction/disorder. A person who is addicted to heroin or oxycodone “blows precious cash” on it as well. For the sufferer of an addiction disorder, the rational process you assume is replaced by the irrational demand of the addiction. This is why arranging for the state to benefit by encouraging those who exploit this disorder is analogous to suggesting that the state partner with heroin or oxycodone dealers.
The primary “weakness” of the “exploitation arguments” for you is circular — they seem “weak” to you because you deny the reality of gambling addiction. All you need to do is WATCH Keno players to see how mistaken your denial is.
Not everybody who gambles is an addict. If we banned things on addiction alone alcohol and nicotine go out the window too, though the former have plenty who aren’t addicted and the latter I also have a problem understanding why anyone starts, especially if they are under 40.
Not everybody who gambles is an addict. You and I and Wynn and Adelson know that. The key to success for any casino is to identify those addicts, hit them with an aggressive marketing campaign for maximum exploitation and see to it that they play to extinction. Without these “grinders” the casinos go broke.
And the two biggest locations that do successfully target these players — Macau and Monaco — do so by making it very difficult for local people to even play in the casinos at all.
Both Monaco and Macau let foreigners play at their casinos as much as they want, but locals get hit with a very high ‘use tax’ that serves to prevent them from going at all because they don’t want casino addicts and all the problems that come with them.
Some other casinos may market themselves as ‘premium’ casinos, such as those in Connecticut and NJ, but in reality that’s not their player base. But they’ll market things with their casino cards with offers to suck anyone in who hasn’t been there lately with free rooms or free dinners, etc. Basically, anything to get them back in the door.
Hurrah’s — America’s largest casino company — has openly admitted that 90% of its profits come off the backs of 10% of its players… and those are the 45 year old women in sweats playing slots 3-4 days a week, until they “play to extinction” (their term, not mine). The “premium” casino market in the United States is almost non existent.
while he’s tried to pooh-pooh them and talk about how he would want to do them differently (yeah, yeah, yeah… sure, Charlie), at the end of the day he supports the casino legislation and the process because he said he’s voting yes.
So he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Any person who agreed with you and I on this issue, EB3 — that this “Commission” has been a farce and there’s loads of corruption in it going on — would have to vote for repeal. Charlie’s not doing that.
Go over to RMG, his base seems to be against casinos and it’s the rare issue he could run to Coakley’s left on economics/taxation and to her right on social issues (lot of Lively/Fisher voters are anti-casino).
Sort of like McCain who should’ve opposed the bailouts.
it’s the social conservative crowd. It’s one of their issues.
The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. (got this from Noam)
The billionaires behind the gambling syndicates are skilled in this sort of thing. It’s “step one” of getting into communities. Step two is to attract the “grinders” (a syndicate term) who are most typically middle aged women who will “play to extinction” (another syndicate term) meaning they will play and play until they are broke. Step Three is externalizing the costs of these broken citizens by turning over the bankruptcies, foreclosures, embezzlement, divorce and other problems to the state to mop up. Step Four is to leave (declare bankruptcy as so many are now doing in New Jersey) once the “grinders” are all ground up, leaving with the profits but also leaving unpaid taxes, empty buildings, and hundreds of unemployed people,