Category: Casinos

A Terry Maddona tweet says: Reliable sources in Harrisburg suggest that table games will be approved for Pa casinos as part of eventual budget deal. I’ve argued for a long time that, if we are going to have gambling, we made a mistake by starting with slots. Table games have an appeal to members of the the professional–mangerial calss who can better afford to blow their money. I’d prefer not to finance our government with gambling. But the residents of the city live with a high end casino–preferably one where you had to wear a Tux and drink your martinis shaken not stirred—much more easily than a slots parlor. I would think that a high end casino in the Strawbridge building would have relatively more appeal to tourists and well-off suburbanite than a slots parlor, which would appeal as well to the poor and working class in the city. Continue reading

For long enough we’ve been told the casinos are coming.  We have heard this long enough that it should have taken hold.  It hasn’t, despite the politics of fear in our city that encourage us to acquiesce to our continually the broken politics. Now, however, anti-casino advocates have picked up an idea I suggested a few weeks ago, to put a legally-binding question on the ballot: do you believe slots casinos should be in Philly’s neighborhoods? Getting the 20,000 valid signatures we need to get this proposition on the May ballot can block the casinos and help us keep building a politics of hope. So what’s the deal? Continue reading

For the last few months, I’ve been running around the city, giving a speech to any group of three or more people who will listen that begins with the following words: “Politics in Philadelphia is Broken.” I have another five and a half months to go giving that speech…and maybe it won’t stop then because fixing politics in Philadelphia is probably going to take the progressive movement the better part of the next ten or fifteen years. It is, of course, an easy case to make. Sometimes, people shout out examples of our broken politics before I get three minutes into my speech. And no example comes up more than the ridiculous path by which our political system has taken us to the verge of bringing casinos to Philadelphia. How does this process exemplify the broken character of our politics? Let us count the ways. Continue reading