1) The challenge encourages participants to be filmed doing whatever they did instead of not gambling for one day (whether it’s gambling online, buying state lottery tickets, using electronic gambling machines, or gambling at regional casinos.) Then participants nominate others to do the same. Nominated participants have one week to comply or forfeit by way of a charitable financial donation to Stop Predatory Gambling.
2) The challenge also encourages every online gambling app, convenience store, gas station, or regional casino operator that offers either online gambling, lottery tickets, electronic gambling machines, or any other form of commercialized gambling, to stop offering commercialized gambling for one day.
1) To spotlight the 40 million Americans who have been harmed by the greed of big gambling operators. This growing campaign first began in Oregon more than 25 years ago out of the work of Ronda Hatefi, a member of Stop Predatory Gambling. Ronda’s brother Bobby Hafemann committed suicide because he became addicted to the Oregon Lottery’s electronic gambling machines. Every year on September 29th, her late brother’s birthday, Ronda has organized a day to spotlight the serious harm the state’s gambling machines were inflicting on citizens and their families.
2) To awaken the public consciousness about how the widespread promotion and availability of extreme forms of commercialized gambling is a major factor behind the financial hardship and unfairness of opportunity facing millions of American families today.
3) To educate Americans on the truth that financial peace occurs most often from the act of regularly saving small sums of money over the long-term.
4) To give families and friends a way to start a conversation about the problem of commercialized gambling with the people they love.
5) To offer an opportunity for commercialized gambling operators to acknowledge they have a duty of care for citizens.
— Americans are on course to lose more than $1 trillion of their personal wealth to commercialized gambling over the next five years. Many of these citizens are suffering life-changing financial losses.
— Commercialized gambling is now recognized as an addiction on the same level as heroin, cocaine, and opioids in the American Psychological Association’s DSM V, used by health care providers and insurers as the principal source for mental health diagnoses.
— Citizens who are financially desperate look to commercialized gambling as a way to improve their lives and help them escape their financial condition. It’s become a Hail Mary investment strategy, one that dooms them to inevitable failure and personal debt.
— More than 40 million Americans have been harmed because of predatory gambling.
— All taxpayers, regardless whether they ever gamble, end up paying higher taxes for less services, and the state ends up with worse budget problems over the long term because of commercialized gambling. It’s the ultimate budget gimmick.You pay even if you don’t play
— Commercialized gambling is an antiquated, outdated public policy and a relic of past failures of leadership. Each year state governments spend more than $1 billion of public money marketing gambling to the most financially-disadvantaged citizens. The state’s gambling monopolies are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws, allowing them to grossly exaggerate the chances of winning and lure citizens into losing their money on gambling games that they are mathematically guaranteed to get fleeced.
