Who are these No Casinos people and where have they been living all these years? They need to gallop across the castle moat, get as far away from Fantasyland as they can and spend a little time in Florida reality.
Florida isn't seedy, but neither is it a giant clam shell where only wholesome mermaids and Mouseketeers live. Opportunists live here, too. And a lot of them -- in fact, an inordinate number -- are employed by the government, find some way to betray the public trust, and sooner or later wind up in the slammer.
Sadly, Public Corruption 'R' Us.
Florida leads the nation with public officials and employees who have been accused, charged and convicted of breaking the law. We're No. 1 -- coming in ahead of California, Texas, Illinois, even New York.
So, imagine my surprise earlier in the week to see a press release from No Casinos Inc., warning that public corruption is coming! Casinos will bring it to Florida! "One of the many nasty side effects of legalizing casinos is a significant increase in public corruption,"the statement sneered.
As an example, No Casinos President John Sowinski included in the release the story of Bo Johnson, a sitting speaker of the Florida House in the 1990s, who landed in federal prison after a casino company gave him $250,000 to help bring in casino gambling. Unfortunately, this "example" is no example at all. Johnson went to prison all right, but it was for income tax evasion. He wasn't arrested for, nor was he ever charged with public corruption.
It's been widely reported, it's fact: Florida electoral politics have always been imbued with a scent of corruption, from the statehouse on up. Remember Integrity Florida's study last year that found 781 federal corruption convictions from 2000 to 2010? As Tampa Bay news station WTSP put it, thats an average of one conviction every five days.
Just yesterday Gov. Rick Scott signed an order to remove Liberty County School Superintendent Gloria Uzzell from office after she was arrested and charged with grand theft. And, no, neither gambling nor casino money was involved.
Florida has had an ethics commission for some time now, but until the 2013 session, when the Legislature put some teeth into the law, the commission would impose fines, offenders wouldn't pay, end of story. Good for the leadership in both chambers finally -- but ethics reform will be only as good as its enforcement, and looking at history, that's not a cheerful thought.
In fairness to Sowinski, in his press release he was only parroting a study -- "Casinos and political corruption in the United States: a Granger causality analysis" -- performed by a pair of economists,Douglas M. Walker and Peter T. Calcagno, and reported in the latest issue of the journal Applied Economics, then reported again by the Pew Research Center. You might want to have a look at it to see if you can find meaning there. I certainly can't.
Are the corrupt public officials responsible for regulating the gambling industry? Nope, the study doesn't say that. Do they have anything at all to do with gambling? No again. Are the corrupt politicians receiving contributions from gambling moguls? Sorry, no. The bottom line here is that one thing has nothing to do with the other. It's like me showing a correlation between macaroni and cheese and poverty and trying to convince you that one leads to the other.
Almost as meaningless, the study compares four gambling states for their public corruption convictions a year per 10,000 state employees. Mississippi, they said, led the list with almost four, followed by Louisiana, Illinois and South Dakota. Do the math: nongambling states, according to the study, have a 2.49 per 1,000 corruption rate; the states mentioned with gambling have a 3.30 per 1,000 rate. Some scary trend, huh?
This isn't just me. Perplexed commenters point these statistics out at the end of the study, too.
I know Sowinski & Co. have to make a strong showing. They know what's coming in the study the state commissioned, they know how much money the casino industry is going to throw around in the next year. But up and down Florida, county commissioners, judges, legislators, officeholders of every stripe are still facing charges and going to jail and virtually none of it -- with all the gaming options Florida now offers -- has anything to do with gambling.
The public corruption argument may work to keep the converted in the fold, but that's about it.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423.
