Some Reservations

When I wrote a post on the issue of Indian reservation gambling in Rhode Island, I was essentially thinking out loud. Marc Comtois rightly called me on some of the content of that post, and although I still thought the risk of a casino to be far below other problems in the state of Rhode Island, I did reevaluate my position.

The reassessment found a foundation, today, in a piece by Gary Bauer. I hadn't realized how extensive and culturally significant the trend of Indian casinos has become:

The petition to the high court was filed by four card clubs and two charities in the San Francisco Bay area — operations that stand to be driven out of business by a nine-acre urban "reservation" conveniently created for an Indian tribe and its investors just off a major interstate near San Francisco.

Many people, including the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court who helped effectuate IGRA in 1988, might be shocked to see that the financial "winners" from Indian gambling include very few Indians. Rather, the "winners" are oftentimes savvy, non-Indian investors, large public casino-operating companies that manage operations for the tribes, and a handful of very wealthy Indians who are aggressively working to exclude other tribes from the action.

Matters of questionable ethics are like that, though: the door can't be cracked open, even for reasonable license. In the case of mega-casinos, it hardly even represents a gamble to predict that any allowance will be pushed and wedged to open the way for, as Bauer calls it, "casino culture."