Skip to main content

Connecticut's casinos

SealIndian tribes have a monopoly on running casinos in the State of Connecticut.


The following comes from memory: I'm way too lazy to look it up.


Anyway, the monopoly came about several years ago [;ate 1980s?], and almost accidentally. The state legislature passed a bill that was designed to give non-profit organizations the opportunity to use "Vegas nights" as a fund-raising ploy. The bill was universally understood as referring to transitory activities, not a permanent year-round activity.


But after that bill became law, a federal judge interpreted it -- apparently in conjunction with a federal statute -- as giving the tribes a right to open year-round casinos, so long as the casinos didn't include slot machines (the one game of chance that hadn't been included in the original state law).


The Mashantucket Pequots (whose tribal symbol is shown above) created their no-slots casino at once. It was Foxwoods, a reference to said tribal iconology: and a big hit: big enough a hit that the revenue of the state's own daily numbers operation was apparently suffering as Connecticut residents used their throw-it-away money elsewhere.  The state was soon faced with a choice: rework the law to close the loophole and close down the casinos, or rework it to cut itself in for some of the revenue.


The charities who were benefitting from their Vegas nights lobbied hard against any change that might hurt them.


The state went the other way. It used its one lever: the absence of slot machines in the Pequot casino. Connecticut promised to legalize slots, putting the Pequots into the gaming-world big time at a stroke, IF the state got a percentage of the slots revenue. The percentage eased the state's pain about the loss of money on the daily numbers.


Anyway, the Pequots and since then another tribe as well, have enjoyed their slot machine and casino privileges. I recall getting into some fun exchanges in the letters section of local newspapers back when all this was novel and controversial. I would defend them against idiots who would decry the awfulness of gambling and suggest the rest of the state should boycott them.


I'm not going anywhere with this: I just enjoy a trip down memory lane now and then.






 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more