Stop Predatory Gambling

The new story line about the predatory gambling trade in America

by spgadmin

The Massachusetts Legislature held a public hearing on casinos last week and not one of the gambling operators who testified denied that their business model, their product or their marketing was predatory.

1) They did not deny that casinos earn 90% of their gambling profits from 10% of the players, making 9 out of 10 casino visitors – the casual player- irrelevant to their business model. In a telling exchange, Senate Chair Karen Spilka pointedly asked a Mohegan Sun executive to respond to the 90%/10% fact and he deceptively provided her Mohegan’s “property revenues” which includes revenues from non-predatory gambling sources.

2) They did not refute the powerful testimony by MIT’s Dr. Natasha Schull that “electronic gambling machines are designed to treat every player as a potential addict” so the person will “play to extinction” – until their all their money is gone.  Nor did they deny Schull’s research that modern electronic gambling machines are “a high tech version of loaded dice.”  Can you imagine representatives from any other business testifying before a legislative committee right after a researcher from one of the world’s most prestigious universities has just torn apart their core product and they don’t offer even one response? 

3)     No one denied the testimony of Harvard Medical’s Dr. Hans Breiter that the buzz or high people get from electronic gambling machines is “indistinguishable” from taking a hit of cocaine which is why when you put these machines in accessible locations where people can play them more than once a month, almost half the users have problem gambling behavior.

4)     No one rebutted the charge that casino marketing practices are more extreme than those used by subprime mortgage lenders leading up to America’s foreclosure crisis. 

5)     They did not deny the testimony of other presenters that the casino business model is dependent upon getting people into debt. 

6)     And they did not deny the testimony that this is the only product or service where the people who own it and promote it, don’t use it.

Predatory gambling is another kind of something for nothing scheme and the only people who benefit are the ones who own it.