Stop Predatory Gambling

What we own is broken and it’s up to us to fix it

by spgadmin

News about another massive public corruption scandal spread across America yesterday. This time in New Jersey. It comes on the heels of other recent corruption scandals, extreme examples of mismanagement and inept leadership from around the country including Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Michigan and Nevada.

It’s no coincidence that all of these states have developed active partnerships with the predatory gambling trade. State-sponsored predatory gambling corrupts America’s core democratic principles in at least a couple of very profound ways.

The first is the notion of self-government. The state-sponsored predatory gambling business model cannot exist without addicted or heavily-indebted citizens. They attempt to elude charges of exploitation by pleading it is a “voluntary” act, hiding under the cloak of “freedom.” But any addiction is a potential threat to good government because by definition, someone who is an addict is not self-governing. Someone who is in deep financial debt is not free.

The core democratic principle that binds us the strongest is equal citizenship. In America, we do not have kings or queens because here; all blood is considered royal. State-sponsored predatory gambling, the practice of using gambling to prey on human weakness for profit, blatantly violates the principle of equal citizenship. We are creating addicted and heavily indebted citizens in order to provide a small number of schemers an obscene level of unearned power and wealth, all in the name of getting someone else to pay our taxes. We also are saying clearly that some people in America are expendable. Doesn’t our Constitution prohibit anyone from denying another American equal protection under the law?

A healthy democracy cannot exist anywhere without the principles of self-government and equal citizenship firmly in place. To improve American government, we must stop state-sponsored predatory gambling first.