Category Archives: Missouri legislature

Do we really want to let casinos become loan sharks?

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Ever since casinos became legal in Missouri, we’ve seen one broken promise after another, and now the gambling-industrial complex is doing it again. They’ve convinced at least one Missouri legislator [I wonder how they did that?] to sponsor a bill that would let them loan money to tapped-out gamblers.

How did we get to this particularly unhealthy and unhelpful idea? Let’s see: We went from gambling only on cruising riverboats, to boats in pretend moats; from a $500 one-time gambling-loss limit to lose whatever you lose; from a lifetime ban on compulsive gamblers to an open-door policy. One after another, restrictions on casinos have been lobbied and legislated into oblivion.

And now, under the pretense of helping hapless, high-roller professional athletes, we’re on the verge of turning casinos into loan sharks. Gambling [I refuse to use the term “gaming”] industry lobbyists and their paid employees—Missouri legislators—want us to believe that millionaire professional athletes who roll into town need loans for their high-stakes gambling entertainment. [Some of these people, apparently, gamble with as much as $30,000 in an evening.] We can’t expect them to carry that much cash around, argue the lobbyists, so we need to allow casinos to loan them the money to piss away at the craps tables.

That’s a very clever cover story, but it doesn’t hold enough water to float a toy boat in a fake moat. Do they want us to believe that athletes with huge salaries and financial advisors to manage them don’t have high-limit credit cards to tap into? Really?

No, loans to gamblers are not really for already-well-staked athletes. They’re a great way for casinos to rake in even more money—through a new revenue stream of interest payments–from everybody, particularly the average person who gets in over his or her head and needs just a little more to win it all back. What a great strategy for the casinos—keep customers gambling longer, losing more money, and then paying it back with interest.

They’d like us to believe gambling loans will be innocuous and that applicants will be carefully screened. If you want an instant casino loan, you’ll have to show that you qualify for a $5,000 line of credit. That sounds reasonable enough, until you find out that the casinos will be using criteria similar to those employed by furniture stores and used-car dealers—and they’re widely known as some of America’s most discriminating bankers, right?

And, by the way, does anyone know what the interest rates on gambling loans will be? Missouri already permits exorbitant interest rates on payday loans. Will borrowers do any better with a loan from a casino? Isn’t this what used to be called, in the old-time gangster days, “vig?”

Instant loans to gamblers is a lousy idea with no redeeming value, except for the added value it provides to casino operators.  Even casino operators themselves know this. A recent Post-Dispatch editorial notes that some of the operators’ own websites offer links to tool kits that help people identify their own problem gambling.

The kit opens with 10 questions, a “yes” answer to any of which indicates a gambling problem. Question 7: “Have you ever borrowed money to pay for your gambling?”

[Another website] lists 10 statements under “How do you know if you have a gambling problem? One says, “You have borrowed money to finance your gambling.”

None of this subterfuge and cynical exploitation should come as a surprise. This history of the gambling industry in Missouri and elsewhere is a story of backroom deals and deliberate, patient, incremental erosion of the limitations initially promised by casinos and legislators to protect customers from themselves.

State-sanctioned gambling—under the pretext of helping to fund education—is already a giveaway to corporations whose product is designed to do nothing except empty its customers’ pockets. Do we really need to give the gambling industry another way to skim money from Missouri’s citizens?

Missouri contemplates doomsday

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I chuckled when I read about a Doomsday Bill making its way through the Wyoming legislature. Ha, ha, ha! Those yahoos in Wyoming are spending legislative time worried about the collapse of the federal government, and what Wyoming should do in that scenario? They want to…what? Print their own money and buy an aircraft carrier? Really, I thought, that’s what happens when you live out in the middle of nowhere and have nothing better to do with your time, right?

Silly, condescending, wrongheaded me. It turns out that Missouri legislators—specifically State Sen. Chuck Purgason [R-Caulfield] are contemplating doomsday, too. Purgason want to form a task force on government continuity, which would study the possibility of Missouri creating its own currency as an emergency substitute for a decimated U.S. dollar.

Under such a bill, the possibilities are endless: If Wyoming can have an aircraft carrier, why can’t Missouri have one, too? Or maybe a submarine? Maybe Missouri should simply secede from the United States now, rather than face the chaos of federal collapse.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Purgason is jumping on the apocalypse bandwagon. I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar moves even more states. It seems quite possible that the not-so-invisible hand of ALEC is at work here. Not to mention some hard-core, hard-right religious mythology. ["The end is near!"]

This whole doomsday-preparation kick seems to me to be another component of the much larger Tenther surge, in which states assert their sovereignty and reduce the centrality of the federal government. That theme seems to underlie the doomsday bills we’re beginning to hear about. They may even be a way of planting the idea of the decline and fall of the federal government. And I wonder if some of these legislators are actually secretly hoping for that collapse, so that they can swoop in and declare the supremacy of states.

If that’s the case, and if people begin to support these  bills, I’m afraid that doomsday for America is closer than we think.

Missouri’s omnibus education bill: Nightmare for schools

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At yesterday’s meeting of the Missouri Progressive Action Group [MOPAG], Democratic State Rep. Margo McNeil presented a rundown on the omnibus education bill now making its way–or not–through the Missouri legislature. It’s really about 7 bills smashed together into one, and even McNeil–who’s on the legislature’s Education Committee and who’s well-versed in the intricacies of the legislation–had a tough time explaining what all the various bills are about. Upshot? These bills should be considered–up or down–individually, not as the messy, incoherent and sometimes internally contradictory package that they’re being crammed into.

A few impressions:

-There’s too much energy going into “alternatives” to public schools, and not enough attention to making the system work as it is. When savvy parents figure out how to opt out of failing public schools –a path that’s being incentivized big-time in some of the bills under consideration–we’re going to have a lot of kids left behind. What about them?

-The corporatists, who see privatization of education as a way of creating a whole new revenue stream for themselves and their friends, are exerting a lot of pressure. We just can’t let them win. Public education is what differentiated this country from others. Do we really want to turn it over to for-profit entities?

-The idea of “Passport Scholarships” is nothing more than a veiled voucher system. By the way, it’s horrifying to hear that McNeil was gaveled down and not allowed to speak when she had the audacity to use the word “voucher” when attempting to address the issue!

-It’s crazy to lump revamping of the foundation formula [the Kafka-esque system by which Missouri public schools are funded] in with other bills on completely different subjects. Funding the schools is too complicated and urgent for this approach.

-The “Turner fix” is also too important to be lumped in with other bills. Under proposed “Turner fixes,” students from unaccredited public districts would be allowed–at the district’s cost–to attend schools in adjacent counties–without the assent of the receiving district! Whoa! That could both bankrupt the district that’s unaccredited and swamp the receiving district. This issue needs to be addressed separately.

Kudos to McNeil for diligently staying on top of these bills and fighting for what’s right for Missouri schools.