Though it’s not as calamitous as the War on Drugs, Washington’s War on Poker* is even dumber than that long-running fiasco. What they have in common, of course, is the criminalisation of consensual behaviour. As of today it seems that if you try and play poker online at Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker or Absolute Poker you’ll be greeted by this charming message:
The founders of these sites and a number of their colleagues have been indicted on charges of bank fraud, money-laundering and offenses against the (ridiculous) 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. That bill made it an offence for American banks to process payments to poker sites no matter where the poker companies may be based. Conveniently it did not place similar restrictions on online gambling on US horseracing, casinos on Indian reservations or state lotteries. Even Congress, stuffed with fools though it is, can’t claim there’s any great principle at stake here other than vindictiveness. These exceptions have ensured that the US has violated numerous trade agreements and broken WTO rules. Plucky Antigua has been at the forefront of the fight against Washington’s bullying.
Now the Feds are suing for $3bn in damages and will want to extradite the charged executives. The US alleges that the companies
[T]ried to sidestep U.S. laws prohibiting banks and credit-card issuers from processing gambling payments by disguising billions of dollars from U.S. gamblers as payments to nonexistent online merchants for golf balls, jewelry, flowers and other merchandise.
Prosecutors also allege the sites conducted unlawful Internet gambling that flouted laws in several states, such as New York.
After U.S. banks and financial institutions began detecting and shutting down bank accounts used by the poker companies in late 2009, prosecutors allege, a new strategy was developed in which two poker sites allegedly persuaded a few small, local banks facing financial difficulties to process their payments in return for multimillion-dollar investments in those banks.
If true then the Feds may have a case. Nevertheless it’s a moronic law – backed, of course, by Nevadan politicians such as Senator Harry Reid – that criminalises perfectly ordinary behaviour for no good reason of any sort. And for no half-good reason either. (The bank fraud charges are a means of side-stepping the poker companies’ previous, perfectly reasonable, defence that poker is a game of skill, not of chance.)
As the Sage of Baltimore, HL Mencken, observed puritanism is The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. If there were an afterlife the old boy would be roaring I told you so today. As Radley Balko says: Obama – Worse Than Bush On Bullshit Gambling Moralization Too.
*This Forbes article published last year is an excellent primer on the long-running battle between the Justice Department and orindary Americans who just want to be able to play cards online. This piece by Reason’s Jacob Sullum, published in 2008, has lots more detail too. The War on Poker isn’t just about online play either: police are happy ro raid home games too.
UPDATE: ESPN’s Andrew Feldman tweets that there is talk that the sites will be taken down even in countries – such as the UK – where their activities are clearly legal and where, one would have thought, the US has no obvious right to interfere.
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