Gotta Whole Lotto Love

I really don’t believe that I have ever addressed the lottery before, especially in the light of what can be called a conspiracy. However, now that we are seeing the totals of the lottery winnings rising to at last count 1.4 billion, it seems that there is a reason to explore the possibility.

I never really was exposed to any kind of lottery growing up. Lotteries were illegal in Utah and any gambling that you could do was in a place called Wendover, Nevada where in order to get lucky you had to drive hundreds of miles over the desolate salt flats to find on the border a white trash Vegas-style strip with a huge neon cowboy welcoming weary Utahan’s ready to spend what they didn’t put in their gas tank.

The smart ones paid 20 bucks and took the bus. You would then ride to a chosen casino and as you left the bus you were handed 11 dollars in quarters for the slots and a number of coupons for the loser lunch if you didn’t get lucky.

Most would return taking what was called the bus ride of shame. That was the bus where the woman would get on the loudspeaker and ask if there were any winners and the response would be a unanimous growl from drunk and broke passengers.

Here in Oregon, we seem to be allowing for more gambling. I know a place where I sometimes eat that I call, Little Reno. The reason is that besides serving great food, there are slots, Keno and Lottery, and embarrassingly enough an occasional hooker walking up and down a busy highway taking her Johns to a seedy hotel just across the parking lot.

When I lived in Utah, I was fighting to loosen gambling laws and allow some gambling. I was warned that it was a slippery slope and that if we loosened the laws, we would be nothing more than a state owned by a money hungry mob that wouldn’t put the money to good use.

Now that I live in a city where there seems to be a enough gambling to satiate you, and keep you from wanting to go see Celine Dion in Vegas – I am kind of growing tired of what appears to a be a scheme to take advantage of the poor.

In fact, I often find that I sometime play Keno or even the slots when I am bored and low on cash.

Now, I no longer care.

I think the conspiracy is, the gambling industry can be proven simply by stating the obvious, that when you play, the house always seems to find a way to win and if and when you win, the government finds a way to win as well.

The hard sell by the government to all who play the state lottery is that it funds education and public parks. Yet, we always hear how teachers are under-funded and that land set aside for parks and even farmers are now being taken over by the Bureau of Land Management.

In all honesty, the lottery is pretty much a test to see how desperate the public can be in economically hard times.

It illustrates the inherent evil of how a $70 billion dollar tax can be levied under the radar to the poor and the desperate.

This is the conspiracy of the lottery.

It is a conspiracy that has the estimated price tag of $300 dollars spent per adult annually. Unfortunately though, the bottom third of households buy more than half of all tickets. So that means households making less than $28,000 a year are dishing out $450 a year on lotteries.

Sure, you can say that people have a choice, and that the lotteries help under-fund schools, and that it is all a voluntary tax for the stupid – the lottery is for all people and if $1.4 billion is up for grabs now then majority of Americans are stupid.

Statistically, that can’t be the case.

If you were to ask the average American if they could come up with $2,000 in 30 days if they had to, you would find out that nearly half of Americans couldn’t. This means that the average American is only one emergency away from financially dire circumstances.

Facts are, Americans have a low savings rate; and Americans love to play the lottery. Once again, it is a conspiracy against the good nature of most Americans.

The lotteries warn people that they are for entertainment purposes and not for investment. It is merely a hollow covering of one’s ass when you realize that people aren’t entertained by spending their money for a game of chance — they are doing it to see if they can get cut a break.

The reality is that people making less than $30,000 are 25 percent more likely to say that they buy lottery tickets for money than for fun, while it’s the opposite for everyone else.

In other words, lotteries don’t just prey on poor people’s dreams — they do that for everyone, but rather on dreams that are desperate or that are living disparaging nightmares.

Our $1.4 billion dollar lottery Jackpot should be seen as an omen of what is coming and that is an economic bottoming out and more desperate people fighting over resources in order to avoid scarcity.

The lottery is a dreamer’s tax for people who don’t have much more than dreams.

If you want proof of all this all you have to do is understand that at the moment the lottery is in the middle of a scandal and yet it is still chugging along like the little engine that could.

The Iowa-based Multi-State Lottery Association — which runs the drawing, has weathered a jackpot-fixing investigation involving its former security director, Eddie Tipton, and led the group’s board to strip its executive director, Charles Strutt, of his duties.

It began with a winning ticket worth $16.5 million being drawn in Texas in December 2010. Later that year, a man from Canada came forward to claim the prize, as did a lawyer from New York who claimed to be representing a trust in Belize.

That kind of raised suspicions and, long story short, resulted in the security director for the Powerball’s governing body, a man named Edward Tipton, being charged with fraud. Tipton, prosecutors alleged, used self-destructing software he installed on Powerball computers to create the winning ticket.

Tipton was convicted on two counts of fraud in July and sentenced to a decade in prison, the Washington Post reported.

More than 440 million tickets were sold for last Saturday’s drawing, which featured a jackpot of $949.8 million, according to the Texas-based lottery watchdog, Lotto Report.

According to the report, the sales volume suggests that a winning ticket should have emerged Saturday, as 292 million combinations of numbers can be created using the five white balls and the red Powerball.

Most players, instead of choosing their own numbers, buy “Quick Pick” tickets that feature randomly generated numbers.

Those tickets are often duplicated, meaning lottery players are receiving the same losing numbers as players in other states – this is generating conspiracy theories over whether or not this lottery drawing is a scam.

Not to mention there have been a few weird coincidences that a lot of people have been crying foul over – and with reason.

Lotteries are hosted around the world and are subject to just as many discrepancies mysteries, urban legends and theories of cheating as any other form of gambling.

The interesting thing about the lottery is that there are actually amazing tales of coincidence that will make you wonder if everything is as random as we like to think.

The odds of any of the following events actually occurring are so low as to be virtually impossible. However, you have to remember the law of big numbers. Hundreds of lottery drawings take place every single day around the world and have been taking place for decades. When this many people participate in something, there are bound to be weird coincidences.

In fact, it would be truly strange if nothing weird ever happened. The world is a big place and with so many lotteries running every day, year after year, weird things will happen. Keep that in mind when you ask yourself, “Are these coincidences or conspiracies?”

For example on November 5th, 2008, on the day that Barrack Obama was elected President, the Illinois state winning Pick 3 lottery Numbers were 666. It can be written off as mere coincidence however 666 was also drawn on three other dates 1/16/2007, 3/22/2008 and 10/23/ 2008.

On 1/16/2007, Barack Obama first announced plans to be President. On 3/22/2008, Bill Richardson put the final nail in Hillary’s Clinton’s candidacy by backing Obama while in Portland, Oregon and on 10/23/2008, the New York Times endorsed Obama for the presidency.

The day before the draw for $1.5 billion, Obama will give the State of the Union Address.

In 2005, a single Powerball drawing resulted in 110 second-place winners. All 110 players got five of the six numbers correct and ended up winning a total of $19 million. Each winner took home $100,000 or $500,000 depending on whether or not each player had chosen the Power Play option.

Lottery officials suspected fraud because they expected 4 or 5 winners at most. How could 110 people from around the country have picked the same exact winning numbers? Lottery officials stayed up late trying to figure out if there was fraud or if some popular television series had included a lottery ticket as a part of its plot.

The roughly one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39 had been selected by so many hopeful lotto players because it had been the “lucky numbers” given to them in fortune cookies given to them in various Chinese restaurants.

By some incredible coincidence, the Wonton Food Company had picked the winning Powerball numbers and printed those numbers on thousands of fortune cookies. The lucky players chose those numbers and won.

The fortune read:

“All the preparation you’ve done will finally pay off.”

Here in the Northwest where I live, The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver Washington, just a few miles north of Portland Oregon almost got into a lot of trouble when it printed the winning numbers for the Oregon Lottery a day in advance of the drawing. A Vancouver resident noticed the eerie prediction after the lottery and gave Oregon lottery officials a call.

Officials checked and double-checked the man’s story and found he was right. The Columbian had printed the winning numbers of the Oregon lottery (6-8-5-5) a few hours before the lottery was actually hosted. Lottery officials couldn’t figure out what happened, so they got help from a detective with the Oregon State Police.

The detective visited the newspaper, asked questions and found out what really happened. The computers used by the Columbian had crashed at the last minute before being printed, so a copy editor was assigned to redo certain pages. Crunched for time on the lottery predictions page, the copy editor simply grabbed Virginia’s previous Pick-4 numbers and used those for the next day’s prediction.

It was reported to be a coincidence that Oregon went on to pick those numbers. Officials reasoned that with only four numbers in the sequence and a police detective checking things out, this was probably just a long shot lucky guess.

Or was it?

Lottery officials have previously acknowledged that it’s possible for multiple buyers to receive the same “Quick Pick” numbers, but that they also tell us that no central computer is controlling the tickets being generated.

You may recall that Powerball was re-tooled in October to include more white balls but fewer red Powerballs — meaning improved odds to win any prize, but longer odds at netting a jackpot.

While no one matched all of Saturday’s winning numbers which were 16-19-32-34-57 and Powerball number of 13, some peopled did win a little: 25 tickets won $1 million by matching five numbers, and three other tickets won $2 million because they paid extra to multiply smaller prizes.

Powerball is played in 44 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The lotteries are revenue generators for the states that participate and obviously with $1.5 billion being generated it will be a banner year for the government as they have no trouble sucking the money away from the poor and the middle class.

And the winner of course will have a lot of the total jackpot stripped away for taxes and other processing fees, so that means more money for the government.

Which brings up yet another lottery conspiracy and that is how the lottery has been a very successful lobby in keeping banks from offering “Prize Linked Savings.”

Prize Linked Savings is a banking raffle system where instead of each person earning interest on their savings, all the interest is pooled together nationally and then raffled off.

So what you are doing is saving money which you should be doing anyway and with what little extra you would have spent on lottery tickets – in this case the interest — you would see that money go into a general fund.

So the worst case scenario is that you have forfeited interest on saved money for a chance at a cash prize through pooled interest funds.

It encourages saving money at least and you could get a nice cash prize when that money is nationally given out.

Prize Linked Savings accounts have been successful in other parts of the world for years. However once they start they immediately get shut down by the state run lottery.

The truth is even though Congress has gotten rid of all the federal hurdles for Prize Linked Savings — you are up against a conspiracy of greedy state government officials that depend on lottery revenues, and, why would they allow something to compete with that?

Keep in mind that the Powerball now is tougher to win. When the odds are lower, it means there will be more jackpots that aren’t won, thus, jacking the prize payout higher. As the pot gets bigger and bigger, more and more people will want to participate.

The more people participate, the more revenue that the government makes – this is certainly a way to get the poor to pay for a new government stimulus plan.

It most certainly smells like a conspiracy against those who got a whole lotto love.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org