Local View: ‘Bingo’ machines offer no salvation

By Pat Loontier Journal Star

The Journal Star editorial on tribal casinos missed some key considerations.

First, gambling has not shown itself to be a boon for tribes. Dr. Rudi Mitchell of the Omaha tribe notes Natives suffer among the highest rates of gambling addiction of any ethnic group. The American Indian Culture and Research Journal identifies 42 percent of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and 59 percent of Devil’s Lake Sioux in North Dakota as compulsive or probable pathological gamblers.

“[W]e have enough problems in our lives as it is without adding another,” testified Santee Tribal Member Randy Thomas to the Legislature’s General Affairs Committee in 2002. “I’ll see mothers get their welfare check and drop their whole welfare check in that machine at one time. And I’ll walk outside the door and they’re selling their food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar.” No wonder only 61 of more than 900 Santee tribal members voted in favor of a casino in 1999.

As the Journal Star notes, the Winnebago have done well. They are a rare exception. Tribal unemployment and welfare rates increased by 20 percent seven years after the San Carlos Apache Tribe opened a casino in Arizona. In a state with 18 tribal casinos “over 90 percent of Indians living in Minnesota do not presently benefit from Indian gambling operations in Minnesota,” estimates Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Native American Press/Ojibwe News. Time magazine’s “Wheel of Misfortune” at the end of 2002 detailed the litany of broken promises of tribal casinos nationwide.

In short, tribal slots do not offer tribal salvation.

Second, where is the Journal Star’s outrage that slot machines are operating in Nebraska with no apparent government opposition — less than a year after Nebraska voters rejected their legalization?

Federal law allows tribes to have bingo. On Sept. 23, 2003, in a bizarre ruling, Penny Coleman, acting general counsel for the National Indian Gaming Commission, declared that a video slot machine with a postage stamp size bingo card in the corner of the screen is  … BINGO!

Ask any of “the elderly from the area” (as Santee Chairman Butch Denny has identified the Santee casino target market). They are not there listening to the slow call of “B-3,” “I-10,” “O-54”; they are betting as fast as they can hit a button. And the speed of the bet makes all the difference in the addictiveness of the gambling activity.

Instead, the Journal Star downplays Nebraska’s tribal casinos as “limited,” with no “roulette wheels and dice tables.” That is akin to calling “limited” a smoking ban that allows methamphetamine but not cigars. Slots, because of the speed of their bets, are gambling’s most addictive tool. Today, slots account for more than 70 percent of casino revenues nationwide — and problem gamblers, though a small percent of all gamblers, provide 46.8 percent of video slot revenues, according to research reported in 2001 in the journal Managerial Decision Economics.

Highly addictive video slots are operating on tribal ground today in defiance of Nebraska’s constitution and with little government action to stop them — and not a peep from the Journal Star.

Third, where is the recognition by the Journal Star of the slippery slope? Does the Journal Star know that the Nebraska Veterans Council has already had a debate on pursuing veteran “bingo” slot machines across the state? Or that a “pickle card” slot machine bill is alive in the Legislature?

Bottom line in the debate is that gambling is not a value-adding business activity, that dollars dropped in a slot machine are at the expense of dollars drained from surrounding areas — and that those dollars are only attracted with significant, locally experienced, socially expensive, family-breaking addiction, bankruptcy, crime, corruption and other unavoidable negative side effects: the kinds of things we will continue to hope that our capital city newspaper will remain vigilant against in the interest of Nebraska’s tribes, Nebraska’s residents and the good life we share.

Pat Loontjer is director of Gambling with the Good Life.