For more than 25 years, the casino lobby has told the American people that casinos are the engine to help Native American tribes prosper. Now The Economist, the world’s leading international magazine, spotlights how casinos have actually made tribal members poorer, pointing to a new study in the American Indian Law Journal showing that growing tribal gambling revenues can make poverty worse. The study looks at two dozen tribes in the Pacific Northwest between 2000 and 2010. During that time, casinos owned by those tribes doubled their total annual take in real terms, to $2.7 billion. Yet the tribes’ mean poverty rate rose from 25% to 29%. Some tribes did worse: among the Siletz poverty jumped from 21.1% to 37.8%. Below is both the story from The Economist and the study from the American Indian Law Journal.
Native American Casinos
Casinos Failed to Bring Prosperity to Connecticut
Despite developing two of the largest casinos on the planet in the 1990s, the state of Connecticut is in dire fiscal shape. The New York Times piece below states that “Connecticut’s finances are among the most troubled in the nation: it is last or close to last in financing pension obligations and retaining reserves for emergencies, and near the top in per-capita debt…Moody’s lowered its outlook for the state’s bond rating to negative from stable.” This is just another example that casinos fail to provide the revenue promised by lobbyists of the predatory gambling trade. And what about jobs? The state has “an abysmal level of job creation and economic growth that has left the state with fewer workers employed now than in 1987.”
Government’s Predatory Gambling Program Surpasses the Predatory Subprime Lending Business
Prior to the massive crash of the highly-predatory subprime lending business which nearly every state Attorney General sued for their predatory practices, former Harrah’s top executive Rich Mirman boasted to Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley: “I worked in the subprime lending industry. At least casinos are open about what they do.”
The infamous subprime lender Countrywide Mortgage made a lot of money and employed a lot of people by selling bad loans to citizens who could never afford to pay them back. Countrywide’s “success” was phony prosperity and it caused major damage to our economy which all of us are still paying for today. Presently, our state governments across the U.S. are full partners with corporate gambling operators whose business practices go far beyond failed subprime lenders like Countrywide.
The Inevitability of Tribal Casinos Not Being Inevitable
Attorney Stephanie A. Levin spotlights a common tactic used by predatory gambling promoters: they misrepresent Indian gambling law to sway a skeptical public about the need for the state to act quickly to legalize casinos before Native American tribes build their own.
Hundreds of millions in casino dollars haven’t lifted Oregon’s Native Americans out of poverty
This news story from Willamette Week explores how hundreds of millions in casino dollars haven’t lifted Oregon’s Native Americans out of poverty.
Tribes Not Winning Out Under Casinos
This blog post from TruthOut.org points out the devastating economic conditions that still exist on Native American reservations and how casinos will not solve the problem.
Olbermann’s Support for South Dakota Tribe Points to Way More Inclusive Indian County Coverage
Class II casino gambling hurts low-income tribal members
An article in the Valley Journal explains why the gambling revenues expected with the introduction of Class II are not evenly distributed over all tribal casinos and the benefits expected are often not realized.
2015 Class II gambling hurts low-income tribal members
Cash from Casinos Make Native Americans Poorer
For more than 25 years, the casino lobby has told the American people that casinos are the engine to help Native American tribes prosper. Now The Economist, the world’s leading international magazine, spotlights how casinos have actually made tribal members poorer.
2015 How cash from casinos makes Native Americans poorer
Tribal leader who led fight for casinos said it was intended to be short-term solution
This story from the Washington Post serves as an obituary for Richard Milanovich, chairman of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who led the fight for tribal casinos. However, he never intended them to last. “It’s not our end goal,” Mr. Milanovich told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “We know gaming won’t last. The laws will change at some point. But it’s a means to an end. It has brought us sorely needed revenue which has allowed us to diversify even more, so the future of the tribe is secure.” Thirty years after IGRA, most tribes are still promoting predatory gambling as aggressively as ever.
Key tribal leader who led effort for casinos conceeded their inevitable failure
All play and no work leads to millions for one Native American tribe
Every day, millions of Americans get out of bed, get ready, and go to work, spending their whole day working to provide their family with necessary income. The American economy is built on hard work on the part of individuals. However, members of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Native American tribe live a very different lifestyle. “We have 99.2 percent unemployment,” Stanley R. Crooks, the tribe’s president, said as he smiled during a rare interview. “It’s entirely voluntary.” Members of this tribe receive just over $1 million annually from the tribe’s casino profits, without ever having to work to provide a good or service. Their economy is built on the profits of gamblers, and little more. There is no economy in the entire world that functions like this- where no one has to produce anything of value to reap millions. That is because it is an unsustainable economic plan, as can be seen in this article from The New York Times which documents the group’s fear of recent attempts to restrict casino gambling, which would leave the tribe with essentially no source of income.
2012 One Million Each Year for All as Long as Tribe Luck Holds