Sunday, November 01, 2009

Videos from the Casino Hearing

Cross-posted at BMG.

As promised in Thursday's rundown of the casino hearing, I put together a video diary of the event, featuring a lot of the videos I took throughout the day. Take a look at the videos, pick a few and get a sense of what's going on.

Fair weather warning: the acoustics in the Gardner are lousy, not all the microphones worked and my camera was set up behind the people speaking. Keep the volume up. Also, this was an incredible amount of work -- I did not add all the videos and, if there's any mistakes, let me know.

I was thinking of one video to post above the fold, summing up all my thoughts, showing the kind of dangerous greed -- and blindness -- the slot industry leads states into and it was Senator Tucker speaking with the Mohegan Sun rep about just how hard Mohegan tries to "help" problem gamblers, with their "exclusionary lists" and "trained employees."

She got Mohegan Sun to admit the lists to ban people from gambling were self exclusionary and that there was no recourse for family or friends who had fallen pray to addicts, save getting them to come in and sign the exclusionary forms after the fact.

Mohegan Sun would take the initiative to ban problem gamblers -- if they were rowdy or violent. In other words, the company policy is to exclude others when they start to become a problem to the bottom line. So long as they keep bringing in the dough, whoever's dough that is, those addicts are given all the free booze and extra perks to keep them there as long as possible. Mohegan sings a nice song and a dance, but it's all a farce. So long as people ruin their lives and the lives of others quietly, Mohegan has no problem with it.

As Senator Tucker says, if casinos had to pay for all their costs, including social costs, they wouldn't be profitable. There would be no business model.

Click here and go below the fold to watch all my videos from the hearing (or just the one's you're interested in).

1 comment:

Ryan said...

Eh, maybe. Deb's a great person and a compelling debater, but I think she's wrong on this. I wrote my own diary on Coakley here:

http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/17534/my-two-concerns-with-martha-coakley

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