Commentary –

More Casinos Mean Less Democracy

By Chris Powell

Nobody ever asked the people of Connecticut if they wanted to turn the southeastern corner of the state into Las Vegas.

The closest thing to a democratic decision was a vote in the General Assembly in 1991 against repealing a law that allowed small-stakes gambling for charity, a law that had been construed by a federal court as allowing the same games of chance to be held for unlimited stake for profit on Indian reservations. Even legislators who voted against repealing the charity gambling law out of sympathy for the struggling Mashantucket Pequot tribe in Ledyard, which had operated a bingo hall, never anticipated the transformation to come: of southeastern Connecticut’s economy; of state tax policy, which, relying more on gambling, became more exploitive of the weak; and, most important, of political power, away from individuals and toward another special interest.

Having installed itself by less than democratic means, what is now the Indian casino power maintains itself the same way: as a private monopoly based on ethnic privilege and wealthy enough to buy most politicians.

The Mohegan tribe quickly followed the Mashantuckets in gaining federal recognition and, with it, the privilege of opening a casino in Montville. And now the Eastern Pequots and the Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, who share a 224-acre reservation in North Stonington, have won a preliminary decision for federal recognition from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Paucatucks already have a deal with the developer Donald Trump to build a casino for them.

And that’s what the Indian business in Connecticut is about: not culture or heritage but privilege and monopoly. Two more casinos in southeastern Connecticut may cut into the Mashantuckets’ and Mohegans’ business more than they cause more gambling in the area, but even so they will show the false and offensive premises on which the business is based.

Of course no Indian tribe needs government recognition to be a tribe any more than, say, an Italian-American club needs government recognition to be an Italian-American club. Like everyone else Indian tribes had the right of free association long before the federal Indian Gaming Act was enacted. But the government that calls it Mafia gangsterism when people of Italian descent run gambling enterprises calls it social justice when gambling enterprises are run by people whose ancestry includes one great-great-grandparent who was an Indian.

Of course the Indians are not bad people; they are just exploiting their opportunities under mistaken public policy as any other group might. But what is happening is an ever-more grotesque mockery of democracy, no more sensible than it would be to give people of color, by virtue of the oppression their ancestors suffered, the privilege of selling otherwise illegal drugs. That mockery of democracy – that ethnic entitlement – should be even more offensive than the government’s encouraging an often destructive activity in the guise of helping people who, in fact, in Connecticut needed no help at all.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)