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Annotation on Corporate Victimization Rudiger Appel's Kandinsky Figurine

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Changing Patterns of Corporate Victimization

Sources: Jeffrey Klein's article on casino culture on the Mojo Wire.
And The Net as Ponzi Scheme, by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman.
And Corporate Predators, by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman.
And The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 90s

From the Klein Article on casino culture:

"Many Americans enjoy gambling for a similar reason. The gambling explosion happening on riverboats and Indian reservations, in obscure suburbs and rural towns (in addition, of course, to Atlantic City and Las Vegas) isn't being fueled by a sudden surge in national masochism. Ours is a risk-taking culture -- that's why a prohibition of gambling won't work. Besides, we already learned in the '30s that prohibition leads to more corruption. Since people will gamble anyway, it's better to regulate this industry than to cede control of it to organized crime.

"Regulating the gambling industry, however, raises tricky political and moral questions. Although the gambling boom may not pose obvious problems today, it signals the spread of a corrosive social disease - one that goes beyond lotteries, casinos, and horse racing. It is a bitter irony that the people likely to lose the most as the industry expands are the very people who can least afford defeat, people who are already losing their slots in the winner-takes-all global economy.

"Already those in low-income brackets spend four times as large a percentage of their income on lottery tickets as those in the highest income group, according to Robert Goodman, author of The Luck Business. A study done by Harrah's in its own casinos showed that the yearly income of the most frequent casino visitors is $39,000 and that slightly less than half of those players have no college education. No longer confident that steady effort in the workplace guarantees success, people seek economic advancement in temples of pleasure that hold out the promise of the redemptive jackpot. Before our eyes, Calvinism is transforming into casinoism."



From the Net as Ponzi scheme article: