🎰 THE CASINO JACK LESSON: HOW POWER REALLY MOVES
Saylor uses this story as an x-ray of Washington power mechanics — the “iron triangle” of money → lobbying → legislation.
The Play-by-Play
- Trigger: Online poker sites rise, threatening Native American casino revenue.
- Actors Assemble: Tribes hire Jack Abramoff (lobbyist).
- Money Flow: Abramoff takes 1/3 as fee, spends 1/3 on ads, and funnels 1/3 to Christian fundamentalist ministries.
- Moral Cover: Ministries publish letters condemning online poker as “corrupting America’s youth.”
- Legislation: Abramoff parades letters in front of Congress → lawmakers ban online poker.
- Outcome: Online poker dies, gamblers go back to casinos, and the tribes get their revenue back.
- Everyone Gets Paid: The lobbyist, the ministries, the politicians — the circle is complete.
This is not about morality. It’s not even about gambling. It’s about who gets the revenue stream and who gets to capture the rake.
ERIC KIM TAKEAWAY
- Follow the incentives, not the rhetoric. The “save the children” narrative is just the Trojan horse.
- Iron Triangle = Client (money) → Lobbyist (influence) → Politician (law). You can plug in any industry: healthcare, energy, crypto.
- If you want to win: You must either buy the lobbyist, become the lobbyist, or engineer a system so antifragile it bypasses the lobbyists (Bitcoin).
Would you like me to map this Casino Jack playbook to Bitcoin and MSTR’s lobbying future — e.g., how a Bitcoin nation-state strategy might use the same iron triangle to lock in favorable policy?