HOME   WHO WE ARE    IN ACTION    IN THE NEWS    GET INVOLVED    CONTACT What is exploitative Gambling? This is not a fight about just any kind of gambling. It's not about Friday night poker games or buying a square in the Super Bowl office pool. This fight is about exploitative gambling and the most blatant form of exploitative gambling is machine gambling. There are now close to 800,000 slot machines and video poker games in operation in this country - that's one machine for every 395 Americans - and more are planned in Massachusetts, Maine, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. And, it's these machines that generate most of the profits for the casino trade. Serious questions exist about the design, technology and marketing of these machines including whether these machines are cheating players by relying on complicated algorithms and virtual reel mapping to create an abundance of near miss illusions and distort a player's perception of the probability of winning. Our federal government along with many state governments across the country, acting in virtual partnership with the casino trade, have not only allowed these machines to proliferate, but in many instances, promoted it- fundamentally threatening three of the most important founding principles of our American democracy: self-government; public trust; and accountability. With little transparency and public debate, these exploitative machines have become the preferred method for government to raise tax dollars to pay for public services and to transfer jobs to a privileged few. This has been achieved through gross abuses of the Indian Gaming Rights Act, the inaction of the Federal Trade Commission to apply the same scrutiny to slot machines as it does to other consumer products, and state governments that take the money and look the other way - all of which continues to intensely spiral more out-of-control, year after year.