Spinning The Wheel: America And Its Native American Casinos
Short piece on Native American Casino Politics in the US
Spinning The Wheel: America And Its Native American Casinos
We are in the process of building an incredible Vice in America... No, not that hip media station, you guys. It’s the growing vice of unregulated Native American Casino gambling; where the associated evils of greed are hidden and nurtured by the American Congress, who trade political favors for $10,000 dinner plate specials at campaign fundraising parties in Washington DC, all put on by a few new billionaire chiefs.
Meanwhile it goes unrecognized during dinner, that human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, meth deals, and Mexican standoff’s are happening at the casinos on the reservations, and will soon be finding their way into American neighborhoods, on the shoulders of America’s need to engage the same cerebral nerve endings triggered by railing a line of blow - this fascination with spinning the wheel.
How did we get here? Did we leave our First American neighbors out of John Locke’s mantra: 'take only what you need and as much to not cause harm to others'? Did we really leave them so desperate that the only way they could survive was through a coerced agreement to build million dollar pits of despair? Pits of despair for Americans to indulge in regret, and perhaps see if these gold coins would give back in the form of forgiveness?
What is this America? It’s not the place we've wanted to build, but its the one we’re building.
Where to start? How about John McCain? He was the first to recognize a loophole in the Federal Election Committee’s (FEC) 1978 administrative ruling, which allowed for "soft donations", or undisclosed, unregulated contributions to federal and state elections, to be made "by individuals or corporations at unlimited amounts for party building activities”. Said party building activities, as loosely defined as they are, can never explicitly mention a candidate for office, but always do us the grand nudging favor of lampooning the opposing party via the mass media machine, making it easier for television producers to help us choose between democrats or republicans. For example: that Presidential promo of Ronald Regan driving the tank? That was paid for by Native American Casino profits.
Ten years later, The Indian Gaming Regulation Act (IGRA) of 1988, penned by McCain and his staffers, allowed for the further expansion of Native American casinos, and horse and dog track race-inos, even the creation of brand new tribes for the explicit purpose of building more casinos to take more money from. Some new tribes consisted of 1-35 people in membership. One tribe consisted of two people.
McCain suggested to the public that the bill, "represents America’s political interests in growing the self determination of Native Americans". But what it really represented to McCain and others was the potential to grow the $100 million a year net profit of Indian Gaming at the time, so he could later tap into it through his newly found loopholes from the FEC ruling 10 years earlier.
McCain is a hard worker, diligent, fearless old “maverick”, with the foresight that this would all pay off in undisclosed amounts, eventually helping fund his own presidential bid in 20 years. And from 1988 to 2008, after McCain coupled his Indian Gaming Regulation Act with the FEC’s 1978 ruling on “soft donations”, American political campaign funding skyrocketed steadily in private donations. Since then, Indian casino profits in America have risen from $100 million to $58 billion a year in nontaxable American dollars.
It was set out in the IGRA that a stipend of these immense profits would be given to the members of the communities on the reservations, reaching closer to the goal of Native American self-determination for individuals and communities. However, Native Americans are still living in horrible poverty, experiencing staggering alcoholism and unemployment rates, in some cases above 50%. Native Americans are even being "dis-enrolled" from their communities and their shares of the casino cash for speaking freely or holding political beliefs that might be opposed to the only thing these communities have going for them at the moment: American vice, the spinning wheel.
But we'll keep spinning it, gambling, pulling the levers, and ignoring the dysfunction of spending money to build establishments that take your money back at a guaranteed 8 cents on the dollar, thus creating societal addiction and drug problems that will soak up your tax dollars to correct the very problems they're causing.
While the benefits of Indian gaming were shown to be overwhelming on paper checks to American politicians, but to the rest of us, in our communities and neighborhoods, the truth will be ringing out like shots fired in due time.
On Oct. 9th, 2014, the aforementioned associated evils of American greed began trickling out of the Chuckchansi Casino close to Fresno, as rival factions of the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians engaged in an armed conflict on the casino floor, while trying to retrieve late audit documents on revenue owed to the California State government, the fines for which are adding up to $16 million in CA taxpayer dollars.
As state and federal officials rushed to evacuate everyone from the Casino, and as some of the residents of Fresno and Merced California were being stripped from spinning their wheels, and as the greater evil of this whole mistake was being thrown like dice in their faces, reports from the Fresno Bee say the patrons evacuated disgruntled, and were "milling about the parking lot, angry about the abrupt closure and the inability to retrieve their money.”
And so it seems, this is the America we’re building.
Video of the Chukchansi conflict.
