Title: Temples of chance
Description: In just over a decade, revenues from gambling have grown from $2 billion a year to $10 billion. The immense profit potential of the gambling business has sucked in corporate giants like the Holiday Corporation and Ramada, Inc., both of which sold off their namesake hotel chains at the end of the 1980s and sank their resources into megacasinos. But as award-winning journalist David Johnston argues, no matter who deals the cards, the game is always the same. Business school graduates and skilled managers have replaced mob muscle, but casinos now rely on new forms of loaded dice - computer geniuses who carefully stack the odds, government officials who support corporate deal makers at the expense of the little guy, and subtle psychological techniques that invite addictive behavior. In fact, as Temples of Chance reveals, any wager placed on legal gambling in America is a sucker's bet - unless you are one of the power brokers on the inside. Mitzi Briggs, once worth $44 million, lost everything she had when Ramada bought out her casino and then refused to pay her for it. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission stood by as bondholders were financially raped by the junk-bond borrowing sprees of Trump, Griffin and Bally Manufacturing. Government regulators even gave one casino written permission to cheat novice roulette players. The mentality of greed that is driving corporate investors to sponsor casinos on Mississippi riverboats, Indian reservations and Main Street U.S.A. has also led casino managers to encourage sixteen-year-olds to drink and gamble indiscriminately. Most frightening of all, the logic underlying government support of the expansion of legalized gambling is as shifty as the sands upon which this country's most notorious casinos were built. As Johnston vividly demonstrates, while legal gambling can offer short-term economic relief, it creates no new wealth, and it cannot permanently revive struggling economies.
Subjects: Casinos, Economic aspects of Casinos, Economic aspects
Places: United States