Mississippi gambles: the carpetbaggers are back

National Review, April 7, 1997 by Ben C. Toledano

In fact, Satre's industry is alarmingly attentive to the characteristics of particular racial, religious, and ethnic groups. The first vote to approve dockside gambling in Harrison County (Gulfport and Biloxi) took place in December 1990. The plan was narrowly rejected. Another vote could be held a year later, and the casino interests geared up to win the second go-round. They engaged the services of Nancy Todd, the president of a political consulting firm specializing in gambling referenda, and Washington pollster Bill Hamilton, who, in Campaigns and Elections, described the campaign in these terms: "We were targeting lower incomes, Catholics, and black men. Those groups didn't have a moral problem with gambling and were the most in need of new jobs." Strong and effective efforts were made by Miss Todd to get out the vote. Those programs resulted in the largest turnout in the county's history, in which 57 per cent voted in favor of dockside gambling. "The mood was right," says Hamilton, "the moral issue wasn't about to sway the moderates while they felt their standard of living slipping away." In the lingo of casino proponents, a "moderate" is someone in favor of legalized gambling; an "extremist" is one who's against.

This is just one example of the racial, ethnic, and religious targeting used by the gambling industry. The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City is so devoted to ethnic groups that it presents "themed events" on such occasions as Chinese New Year, Martin Luther King's birthday, St. Patrick's Day, and Columbus Day. Boyd Gaming Corporation's California Hotel in Las Vegas offers what its executive vice president and general manager, John Repetti, calls "the aloha spirit -- a feeling of the way people are treated in the islands." Eighty-five per cent of its customers are Hawaiians. Funny about that "aloha spirit": Hawaii is one of the two states, the other being Utah, that haven't legalized gambling.

LEGALIZED gambling leads to political control over individuals, communities, and local and state governments. In Mississippi, small-town career politicians with limited formal education are no match for the casino Carpetbaggers, who give the locals two words to recite to their constituents: jobs and revenue. The average politician in this state or in any other legalized-gambling state doesn't start out a pawn to the gamblers, but it doesn't take a high-school education to know the sources of campaign contributions.

If the casino industry is just another business, then why is it taxed differently from, say, General Motors or Home Depot? Why is it shaken down by every level of state and local government? Why does it pay annual fees, local option fees, and city and county fees on each gaming device along with monthly gross-revenue fees, state annual device fees, and even background investigation costs? One problem surely is eliminated by legalizing casino gambling: the irregular, haphazard method by which government got paid when gambling was illegal, with kickbacks having to masquerade as "fines." Under the new arrangement, you can supposedly prepare budgets, reallocate other revenue sources, and generally run things in a businesslike manner.