This is a video featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch at Stop Predatory Gambling’s 2008 National Convention in Washington, D.C. He begins to specifically address the issue of government-sanctioned predatory gambling after the 6:00 mark. Daniel Hunter of Casino Free Philadelphia was invited to introduce Branch.
Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil Rights Movement and biographer of Martin Luther King, lays out why the government policy of predatory gambling undermines the core democratic principles our nation was founded on: “State-sponsored predatory gambling is essentially a corruption of democracy because it violates the most basic premises that make democracy unique: that you can be self-governing, you can be honest and open about your disagreements as well as your agreements, and that you trust other people that you are in this together. That’s what a compact of citizens is. And the first-step away from it is to play each other for suckers. We’re going to trick them into thinking they are going to get rich but they are really going to be paying my taxes.”
The first document below is a opinion piece written by Branch for the Baltimore Sun in 2004. The second item is a feature story on Branch’s activism that appeared in the Sun in 2008.
The massive expansion of predatory gambling over the last twenty years came as the result of gambling interests spending hundreds of millions of dollars under the guise of “Let the People Vote.” What they really meant was “Let Us Buy the Vote!” In 2008, nine states considered whether to replace declining revenues with money from predatory gambling. “Never a Sure Bet,” a report from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, examines the money behind these ballot measures. Gambling proponents significantly outraised opponents in each of the states they were successful in, ranging from about 2 to 1 in California to 1,734 to 1 in Colorado. An examination of the business sectors behind the measures shows that Indian casino tribes gave $157.4 million, more than half (57 percent) of all the money. Non-tribal gambling interests were the next-largest donors, giving $104.5 million (38 percent). Combined, these interests gave 96 percent of all money raised around the measures.
Never A Sure Bet Report from National Institute on Money in State Politics
Six out of ten of the top funders of political causes nationwide are casino interests, according to analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics (2007 and 2008 cycle.) For more information about how much money gambling interests spend to influence our political process, please visit the Center for Responsive Politics at OpenSecrets.org and see their Influence and Lobbying section as well as their National Donor Profiles section.