Projects and Campaigns

Become a National Victims Advocate

National Victim Advocates are ordinary citizens who have been harmed by commercialized gambling, whether it be regional casinos, online gambling, commercialized sports betting, or state lotteries. Their life stories and lived experience provide them a powerful moral authority to speak out.

Predatory gambling is America’s most-neglected major problem. There is an urgent need for Victim Advocates to come forward to publicly demand no more taxation by exploitation and call for immediate and sweeping gambling reform.

The powerful stories of our Victim Advocates continue to persuade many people who heard their stories to take meaningful action for change.

Victim Advocates also give a powerful and compelling voice to all of those who have been severely harmed by the greed of gambling operators and considered expendable by their own state government officials.

Where we see the pain and agony of citizens who have been turned into addicted gamblers, and the immense suffering it causes loved ones and friends, many state officials merely see these individuals as nothing more than a “profit center” for “tax revenues.”

 

The Message of Victim Advocates

In delivering their message, our National Victim Advocates aim to focus on at least three specific points:

  • How the business practices of commercialized gambling cheats and exploits citizens;
  • How commercialized gambling extracts enormous personal wealth from ordinary Americans, leaving many in life-changing levels of personal debt, and how this financial devastation affects their future.
  • Issue a public call for commercialized gambling to be dramatically reformed in America, especially because we believe the life of every person has intrinsic value and no one is expendable.

Spreading the Message

Victim Advocates deliver this message to the public by:

  • Speaking at local civic and faith group meetings
  • Interviewing with media
  • Testifying before legislative and other governmental bodies
  • Appearing before college and high school audiences
  • Communicating through social media
  • Helping to recruit and mentor other citizens who have been harmed by this policy to go out and speak on behalf of this cause.

If you want to reveal the truth behind gambling operators to prevent more victims, become a Victim Advocate in your local region. Please contact us by email at mail[at]stoppredatorygambling.org or phone (202) 567-6996.

CkirbyBecome a National Victims Advocate
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Predatory Gambling Liability Project

Major lasting reform to improve the lives of the American people will require successful litigation against the major harms caused by commercialized gambling operators.

While changing the legal environment for most businesses can be accomplished through legislative and regulatory approaches, our government fails to protect citizens from the excesses of commercialized gambling. Why? Because both government and their corporate gambling partners profit so greatly at the expense of those being harmed. Much of the harm is inflicted by industry design. Government, with its primary focus on maximizing profits, is complicit.

Litigation offers the most promising means to change the legal environment. For this reason, we’ve been building a national network of talented attorneys from across the nation as part of our Predatory Gambling Liability Project. 

Litigation helps to denormalize harmful conduct and change the social and legal environment. Over time, denormalization of gambling industry practices will facilitate success in court. Even where cases are not immediately successful, social progress emerges through litigation, literally, by trial and error. Media attention about the issue and its predatory practices serves an important purpose in its own right.  Litigation also will help to encourage current or former industry insiders to come forward to share what they know in subsequent cases.

A variety of approaches are considered in developing successful lawsuits to change industry and government practices, to compensate victims for health and financial losses incurred due to the commercial gambling industry’s purposefully harmful and negligent conduct, and, where appropriate, to punish particularly egregious behaviors. Facts and theories supporting products liability, consumer protection, unjust enrichment, breach of implied warranty of merchantability, quo warranto, defective design, failure to warn, negligence, class actions, and other legal approaches to litigation must be researched, developed, and considered in a variety of jurisdictions.

For a national legal movement to stop predatory gambling to continue to grow, we need to add more financial resources and enlist additional attorneys.

Please make a generous gift today to sustain this legal work.

To participate in our legal network, please email us at mail[at]stoppredatorygambling.org

CkirbyPredatory Gambling Liability Project
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An American Declaration on Government and Gambling

After reading An American Declaration on Government and Gambling below, please add your name by signing here.

After four decades of unfulfilled promises, it is time for our government to end its partnership with organized gambling interests and to embrace a fundamentally different and higher vision of the path to American prosperity.

In short, after four decades of consistent failure, it is time for our government to get out of gambling and for gambling to get out of our government. We come together now to work for this change.

We will not be satisfied with small concessions, nor with measures that merely slow down the pace of government’s gambling expansion.

We hereby dedicate ourselves to a fundamental national reform –an America where no taxpayer dollar is used by government to lure citizens into gambling away their money and becoming slaves to debt; where no agency or entity of government depends on gambling to fund its activities; and where no legislature, whether in the name of economic development or raising revenue, passes laws to promote, sponsor, or enable gambling.

We realize that many of our current political leaders will oppose this reform. They will say that they can no longer resist the power of the gambling forces, that the spread of gambling is inevitable, and that the debate is over.

We also realize that some of our fellow citizens, worn down by the relentless encroachments of the government-gambling partnership, will say that our cause is hopeless.

It is anything but hopeless. We are a free people who can reform our government and change our ways.

This is a critical moment. How our generation responds to the reach and arrogance of the government-gambling power structure will largely determine the quality of our social life in the coming decades.

Politically, economically, ethically, and spiritually, the stakes are extraordinarily high.

POLITICALLY: Government’s partnership with gambling fundamentally changes the compact between government and the governed. It pits government’s interests against the best interests of its people. For government to win, its citizens must lose.

ECONOMICALLY: No great nation has ever built prosperity on the foundations of personal debt, addiction, and the steady expansion of “businesses” that produce no new wealth. Relying on gambling as an economic development strategy is a sign of surrender and defeat on the part of leaders who have failed to lead.

ETHICALLY: A decent government does not finance its activities by playing its most vulnerable citizens for suckers, thus rendering the lives of millions expendable, exploitable, and unworthy of protection.

SPIRITUALLY: We mock the higher values that any good society depends on–honesty, mutual trust, self-discipline, sacrifice, concern for others, and a belief in a work ethic that connects effort and reward –when government tells its citizens every day that it is committed to providing “fun” instead of opportunity; that a rigged bet is the way to achieve the American dream; and that spending one’s hard-earned dollars on scratch tickets is a form of good citizenship.

This is America. Surely we can do better than this. Surely we must.  The choice is not – it has never been – between tying our future to gambling and accepting economic decline. Government-sponsored gambling is itself a form of economic decline. The alternative is to muster the courage to chart a path to true prosperity. An America freed from the yoke of government-sponsored gambling would be an America once again on the move–an America with broader and more sustainable economic growth, more honesty in government, more social trust, and the rekindling of the optimism that has long been our defining national strength.

Therefore, with this Declaration, we set forth our reasons for seeking this reform and appeal to a candid nation to judge the truth of our argument.

Over the past four decades, how has government’s partnership with gambling failed?

  • It has transformed gambling from a private and local activity into the public voice of American government, such that ever increasing appeals to gamble, and ever-expanding opportunities to gamble, now constitute the main ways that our government communicates with us on a daily basis.
  • It has broken its promise to remain a small component of our government and a small part of our society. In the brave new world envisioned by this power structure–where every cell phone is a “casino in your pocket” and every bar, gas station, convenience store, computer, and home in the nation is a place to place a bet–the essential driving message from the American government to the American people is “All gambling, all good, all the time.”
  • It has fueled irresponsibility and non-accountability in government by imposing a giant excise tax on the citizenry that politicians never have to call a “tax.”
  • It has failed to deliver on its over-hyped promises to fund education, lower taxes, or pay for needed public services.
  • It has taken political power away from the people and handed it over to gambling lobbyists.
  • It has perpetrated a phony model of economic development–a model with a jobs multiplier effect of approximately zero, since, in this model, nothing of value is produced.
  • It has promulgated the very economic attitudes and practices– short-term is more important than sustainable, wealth can come from ever-growing debt, something can come from nothing, slickness trumps honesty–that led us into the debt bubble and the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond.
  • It has caused neighboring states to compete against each other in a race to the bottom.
  • It has taken dollars from the poor to fund programs for the better-off.
  • It has spread addiction into our population, using the new science of machine design to produce out-of-control behavior that, according to scientists, closely resembles addictive behavior from cocaine.
  • It has spread debt and bankruptcy into our population.
  • It has led to serious gambling-related problems among young people.
  • It has extracted 80 percent or more of its profits from 10 percent of its “players,” with those high-volume “players” among our poorest and most vulnerable citizens.
  • It has contributed to broken families and child neglect and other social messes everywhere it goes, and has taken little or no responsibility to clean them up. 
  • It has turned many law-abiding citizens into criminals who cheat, steal, and embezzle in order to continue to gamble. 
  • It has arrogantly exempted itself from truth-in-advertising laws so that it can use taxpayer money to create and spread deceptive advertising.
  • It has corrupted our sense of community and undermined our faith that we’re all in this together.
  • It has deliberately changed the word “gambling” to “gaming” in order to make this often destructive activity sound as innocent as child’s play. 
  • It has fueled cynicism about the motives of our government. 
  • It has repudiated the value of thrift by creating mass incentives to turn potential savers into habitual bettors.
  • It has repudiated the virtue of “love your neighbor” and replaced it with a government endorsement of predatory practices, or preying on human weakness for gain. 
  • It has withered our capacity as a people to confront forthrightly our reluctance to pay taxes for the public services we desire.
  • It has trampled on the ideal of “confirm thy soul in self-control.” 
  • It has trampled on the ideal of “justice for all.” 
  • It has broken faith with the wisdom and leaders of earlier generations who, seeing the failure of gambling in the past, amended state constitutions to ban gambling activities. 
  • It has lied to us about how the government actually uses the money it gets from gambling. 
  • It has lied to us by repeating again and again that luck–rather than work–is the key to the American dream.

WE therefore come together as American citizens, from diverse backgrounds, religious faiths, political convictions, and life circumstances, to declare our intention of making these United States free and independent of government-sponsored gambling, and once again able to resume their place as protectors of our security, leaders in building a shared prosperity, and examples to the world.

Please add your name to An American Declaration on Government and Gambling by signing here.

Les BernalAn American Declaration on Government and Gambling
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The Freedom Players

Why Participate as a Freedom Player?

You need to become a Freedom Player if you want to help the 40 million Americans suffering harm because of the greed of big gambling operators. 

People like you are the reason why Freedom Players always win.

What is a Freedom Player?

Our action is simple but powerful. We enter a local casino (or local gambling venue), sit down at an electronic gambling machine, put in our money and then we begin Freedom Playing.

Freedom Playing means you play the machine any way you want except you don’t press the Play button. While we Freedom Play, some of us talk with a friend, some read a book and some even knit. The ideas are almost limitless.

While you are Freedom Playing, you are encouraged to ask casino staff some essential questions such as: how do electronic gambling machines work? Why does the casino give away “free slots play” to citizens? Will I ultimately lose all of my money if I play these machines for a length of time? The DSM V labeled gambling an addiction like heroin, cocaine, and opioids so should this slot machine be considered a dangerous and addictive product, and if so, does this casino have a legal duty of care to ensure that I’m not harmed by this product? And so on. You get the idea.

Once you are done Freedom Playing, you will hit the cash out button on the machine and receive a paper voucher that you will present to the Cashier’s Window to receive your “winnings.”

Here are the few steps it takes to be a Freedom Player along with some sample questions you can ask.

What The Freedom Players Aim to Achieve

We use our freedom to play these machines in such a way that:

  • Spotlights the 40 million Americans suffering harm because of the greed of big gambling operators;
  • Demonstrates commercialized gambling extracts enormous personal wealth from ordinary Americans, leaving many in life-changing levels of personal debt, and how this financial devastation affects their future.
  • Highlights the urgency for commercialized gambling to be dramatically reformed in America, especially because we believe the life of every person has intrinsic value and no one is expendable.

All Freedom Players Need to Bring the Following:

  • A $5.00 bill or larger (not surprisingly, many slot machines require that you insert at least a $5 bill even though you may be playing a penny slot machine)
  • Bring a Valid Photo I.D. (All participants need to be 21 years old or older to enter the casino.)
  • Something to do while “Freedom Playing” (i.e. a book, knitting, drawing, etc.)
  • Please bring at least one other person with you, a family member, friend or co-worker.

If you need more info, contact us at mail[at]stoppredatorygambling.org

Below is a brief video of the first Freedom Players action from back in January 2008. We were rookies then.

 

 

 

Les BernalThe Freedom Players
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The Take a Gambling Break Challenge

Gambling Operators Are Called On to Turn Off Their Lottery Terminals and Gambling Machines for a Day; Citizens Urged to Stop Gambling for One Day and Deposit the Money They Would Have Gambled in a Bank or Credit Union

#TakeaGamblingBreak

 

WHAT:

1) If you buy state lottery tickets, use electronic gambling machines, gamble online or at regional casinos, just stop for one day. Take the money you would have risked and deposit it into a bank or credit union account. If you don’t have an account, open one.

2) Any store, restaurant or regional casino operator that offers lottery tickets, electronic gambling machines, or any other form of gambling, is asked to stop for one day..

3) If you have a loved one or a good friend who is an active gambler, be a sponsor for the one day. As a sponsor, your role is to help your loved one or friend stay away from gambling for the day, encourage them to put the money they would have risked into a bank or credit union (if they don’t have an account, show them how to create one,) and help them participate in other activities to substitute for gambling.

WHY:

1) To spotlight the 40 million Americans who have been harmed by the greed of big gambling operators. This growing campaign first began in Oregon more than 25 years ago out of the work of Ronda Hatefi, a member of Stop Predatory Gambling. Ronda’s brother Bobby Hafemann committed suicide because he became addicted to the Oregon Lottery’s electronic gambling machines. Every year on September 29th, her late brother’s birthday, Ronda has organized a day to spotlight the serious harm the state’s gambling machines were inflicting on citizens and their families.

2) To awaken the public consciousness about how the widespread promotion and availability of extreme forms of commercialized gambling is a major factor behind the financial hardship and unfairness of opportunity facing millions of American families today.

3) To educate Americans on the truth that financial peace occurs most often from the act of regularly saving small sums of money over the long-term.

4) To give families and friends a way to start a conversation about the problem of commercialized gambling with the people they love.

5) To offer an opportunity for commercialized gambling operators to acknowledge they have a duty of care for citizens.

 

KEY FACTS: 

Americans are on course to lose more than $1 trillion of their personal wealth to commercialized gambling over the next eight years.[1] Many of these citizens are suffering life-changing financial losses.

– Commercialized gambling is a dangerous and addictive product, now recognized as an addiction on the same level as heroin, cocaine, and opioids in the American Psychological Association’s DSM V, used by health care providers and insurers as the principal source for mental health diagnoses.

– Citizens who are financially desperate look to commercialized gambling as a way to improve their lives and help them escape their financial condition.[2] It’s become a Hail Mary investment strategy, one that dooms them to inevitable failure and personal debt. This is a critical issue because asset-building, the opposite of commercialized gambling, is almost non-existent for nearly half of the nation’s population.

– More than 40 million Americans have been harmed by the greed of big gambling operators. 

– All taxpayers, regardless whether they ever gamble, end up paying higher taxes for less services, and the state ends up with worse budget problems over the long term because of commercialized gambling. It’s the ultimate budget gimmick.[4] You pay even if you don’t play!

Commercialized gambling is an antiquated, outdated public policy and a relic of past failures of leadership. Each year state governments spend more than $1 billion of public money marketing gambling to the most financially-disadvantaged citizens. The state’s gambling monopolies are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws, allowing them to grossly exaggerate the chances of winning and lure citizens into losing their money on gambling games that they are mathematically guaranteed to get fleeced.[5]

The nation’s political elite – from both political parties- have transformed gambling from a private and local activity into the daily public voice of state government, such that ever-increasing appeals to gamble, and ever-expanding opportunities to gamble, now constitute the main ways that our state governments communicate with us on a daily basis. Nothing else comes even close.

Stop Predatory Gambling: Who We Are

A 501c3 non-profit based in Washington, DC, Stop Predatory Gambling is a national advocacy network of individuals and organizations working to reveal the truth behind gambling operators to prevent more victims.

SOURCES:

[1] “This is how much Americans lost on state-sanctioned gambling last year,” Quentin Fottrell of MarketWatch, published by Dow Jones Media, May 15, 2018. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-americans-lost-on-state-sanctioned-gambling-last-year-2018-05-15

[2] Cornell Univ. Professor David Just, “The big swindle: In lotteries, the poor are the biggest losers,” CNN, Dec. 18, 2013https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/18/opinion/lottery-poor-just-opinion/index.html

[3] National Institute for Health, May 2011 http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/May2011/Feature1

[4] Lucy Dadayan, State Revenues from Gambling: Short-Term Relief, Long-Term Disappointment, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government (2016), http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/government_finance/2016-04-12-Blinken_Report_Three.pdf

[5] “This is how much Americans lost on state-sanctioned gambling last year,” The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch, May 15, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-americans-lost-on-state-sanctioned-gambling-last-year-2018-05-15[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

CkirbyThe Take a Gambling Break Challenge
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Week of Action to Stop Predatory Gambling, Sept. 24-Sept. 30, 2023

To spotlight the 40 million Americans harmed by the greed of big gambling operators and to prevent more victims, we are organizing the National Week of Action to Stop Predatory Gambling, Sept. 24- Sept. 30, 2023.

At least 100 actions will be happening across America and the world during the week. 

We are calling for 100% participation from you and everyone who wants a future better than the one predatory gambling offers us. It’s an opportunity for thousands of citizens across the US and the world to act together to confront the unjust and dishonest policy of predatory gambling.

Do your part. Please commit two hours to participate locally in some way during the week of 9/24-9/30. If you can’t commit the time, then please participate by making a gift of $25 or more tax-deductible to support our work locally.

Possible Actions Include: The “action” can be anything you (or your group) want it to be. It could be a prayer vigil, a sign-holding visibility with homemade signs, participating in a “Freedom Players” event at a regional casino (or at a local restaurant/tavern with video gambling machines)…the ideas are limitless.

Also, here is a brief, effective guide that we put together with the Alabama group about how to organize a prayer vigil in your place of worship that weekend.

If you want to stop the harm that predatory gambling inflicts upon your community, then you personally need to act. Don’t think it will happen without your sacrifice because it won’t.

Les BernalWeek of Action to Stop Predatory Gambling, Sept. 24-Sept. 30, 2023
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