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The house always wins

 

LAS VEGAS - No wonder Ocean's Eleven, the remake of the Brat Pack classic with George Clooney and Brad Pitt was a smash hit: which red-blooded Americans in their right minds would not dream of breaking into the vault at three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously and leaving with the loot through the front door?

Vegas bills itself officially as "The City of Entertainment" - and unofficially as America's most fabulous city. A carefully constructed public relations myth rules that while the rest of the United States is devoted to "family life and economic liberty", Vegas concentrates on the "pursuit of happiness". In Vegas, more than anywhere else in America, perception is indeed reality. But even if Vegas is the national capital of the pursuit of happiness, "a little less conversation"(Elvis) and some investigation reveals that some dudes are definitely getting happier than others.

Charge my life to my room
The whole Vegas strip can be experienced as an ultra-tacky competition over who rakes in more bucks in the sport of converting Europe (or "Yrup", in mid-America speak) into a shopping mall.

The Paris-Las Vegas casino, with its fake Eiffel Tower and opera house, almost takes the cherry in the showgirl cake ("a taste of France without leaving the States"). The fake cobblestone street, Le Boulevard, "lined with store facades designed to resemble charming country-style cottages and houses", would enrage many a Washington neo-con: the food is predictably lousy, but why aren't there any "freedom fries" on sale?

In the average Vegas casino mogul's Italian obsession stakes, the only one that delivers a decent "luxury experience" is the relatively discreet (for Vegas standards) Bellagio - the imitation of a deluxe belle epoque hotel on Lake Como in northern Italy. The Venetian, with its fake frescoes in the grand lobby and fake Vegas gondolas under a mini-replica of the Rialto bridge, is just plain tacky. More to the point would be to shop like a gladiator in the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace, which, in the imperial words of Wallace Barr, Caesar's entertainment chief executive officer, "gives Las Vegas visitors even more reasons to make Rome their home". For those on a Russell Crowe swords-and-sandals trip and a Bush family budget, it's even possible to buy a "timeless Tuscan setting" in the desert: the Chateau Bella villa sells for a cool US$6 million.

The MGM Grand - the largest hotel in the world, with almost 6,000 rooms - is still afflicted with a serious identity problem: it strives to be hip while its customers tend to the trailer-park variety. Gastronomically at least, the parts of Vegas that consider themselves hip seem to have solved the all-you-can-eat buffet syndrome: enough of it. Vegas is now importing great chefs such as world number two Alain Ducasse, as well as Thomas Keller, Mario Batali, Julian Serrano - the chef at Bellagio's Picasso, Vegas' best restaurant - and even world number one Joel Robuchon, who will be hosting his own atelier at the MGM Grand next year.

Still, some things never change. Tom Jones will be singing Delilah till he's a century old. The old guard - from the perennial Wayne Newton to the Eagles - performs never-ending comebacks, while the new guard slugs it out in the MGM Grand boxing ring. Blunt forms of Chinese torture like Celine Dion keep attracting masochistic hordes. There's even some fine art on display - although the hordes may not distinguish a Monet at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts from a Manet.

For those who charge their life to their room and plan of escaping to a desert island before the credit card company collects, there's always that dreamy "whoooosh" of the Bellagio dancing fountains - synchronized to Frank Sinatra or Andrea Bocelli's Con te Partiro. It takes a planeload of high-tech equipment to make water dance in the Nevada desert, the whole thing housed in the Bellagio's "Bat Cave". Curtis Hunton directs a team of 36 engineers through the daily shows - one every half hour until 7 pm and then one every 15 minutes until midnight. Nine main compressors supply water, taken through high-pressure air to "dizzying heights". The air creates the "whoooosh", while supershooter jets create the "boom"; everything operated from a show control room stuffed with computers and fiber-optic cables.

One can't stop imagining a similar franchise in Baghdad's Green Zone: that would seal the end of the insurgency. The Bellagio even collects buckets of money from the lake around the dancing fountains (people dream they may be at the Trevi Fountain in Rome). "But we donate everything to the local Red Cross," adds a politically-correct Hunton.

Vegas recently discovered the ultra-lounge - such as Tabu in the MGM Grand, self-billed as "one step ahead of the seven deadly sins". In the 1990s, Vegas was heavily sold as a family destination. Not anymore - not in the age of Survivor and Big Brother sleaze. Room service now reaches new heights in Vegas for those who prefer to order two choice blondes, private, in person and totally nude ("direct to your room in 20 minutes or less"), 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and with all major credit cards accepted.

So much fun elicits paranoia. Take, for instance, the security agent on a bike, probably on minimum wage, intercepting a heavily suspicious operation: the taking of a photograph in a Vegas parking lot. "Is this a political statement?", he asks. Echoes of Fallujah come to mind - or just another sample of the private militarization of American life.

Kirk's house always wins
The MGM Mirage group owns the Bellagio, the MGM Grand and the Mirage - whose common vault, housed at the Bellagio, was broken in Ocean's Eleven. The group also owns Treasure Island, the New York-New York and other minor additions such as the MGM Grand in Detroit and the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi. Now MGM Mirage has offered nearly $8 billion to buy the Mandalay Resort group - which owns, among others, Mandalay Bay (of caged tigers fame) and the fake-pyramid Luxor.

Billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, 87, MGM Mirage's boss, is bound to control more than 30 casinos and at least 36,000 hotel rooms - including more than half of all the hotel rooms in Vegas. Kerkorian, already instrumental in positioning Vegas as the world's gambling capital, now is the undisputed king of the strip. The buck stops with Kirk. Or should that be the bucks stop with Kirk?

Vegas and war
After severe exposition to the Vegas lifestyle, it's irresistible to examine the possible correlations between this land-of-make-believe, the charge-my-life-to-my-room syndrome, exploding cholesterol, the Western life of privilege, and the situation in Iraq. Vegas is the American apotheosis of distortion of perception, a phenomenon closely linked to distortion of information. A case can be made of a naturally good and decent American population eager to buy distorted perception and information.

Vegas became the fastest-growing major city in the US not because it is Disneyland on steroids, but because it has exploited the "sunk cost" fallacy (the more one's invested the less likely one is to leave) with extreme success. Wily casino managers of course always fix the odds in favor of the house. This means that Vegas gamblers consistently lose to the house, and they will keep on losing forever while charging their life to their rooms.

At the "Mesopotamian casino", things are not very different. The sunk cost argument holds in the form of "we have to stay the course". After all, previous arguments failed (liberators greeted with flowers, weapons of mass destruction, a self-financing occupation, peace and democracy expanding to the Middle East, etc). American taxpayers will soon have committed $200 billion to Iraq, plus the sunk cost in casualties - even though Washington has not met a single pre-war target, save deposing an already defanged Saddam Hussein.

Pill-popping nation
And then there are all those hugely expanding waistlines. Vegas, more than America's capital of entertainment, seems to be America's capital of obesity.

Impeccably sipping a martini at the Tabu ultra-lounge in the MGM Grand, surrounded by a brash mob, Paris-based Dr Jean-Philippe Minart, a doctor-communicator and a fixture at every major international medical congress in different domains, has granted a few minutes between meetings to talk to Asia Times Online about America's number one problem.

"According to the World Health Organization [WHO], in a report last March, obesity is fast becoming the number one cause of mortality, before cancer. The WHO talks of a global epidemic; at first, we thought it was a purely American problem. The main causes of obesity are the uniformization of eating habits and a sedentary way of life. This is extremely serious in the US: the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta [Georgia] has announced that in 2005 obesity will be the number one cause of mortality in the US, even worse than smoking."

Minart frames the problem in simple formulas: "The more you eat fat, the more you get obese. Just a minority of the American population exercises. Sixty-five percent of the American population is overweight." At least now there's deep concern among medical associations. "The first to move was the American Diabetes Association, because obesity is a major factor in the risk of diabetes and hypertension, coronary artery disease and strokes," Dr Minart says.

He explains that there are "multiple metabolism factors which are altered by obesity, like cholesterol. Ten years ago, the first statin appeared on the market. Statin lowers cholesterol and saves lives. Cardiologists started to be interested in cholesterol and soon discovered the real problem - obesity." The statin drug business is a business of billions. The leading statin medicine is Lipitor - a billion-dollar drug produced by Pfeizer, the world's number one pharmaceutical giant.

So obesity, according to Minart, is "both a real threat and a real business. The pharmaceutical business is the second-largest investor in volume behind the automobile industry in this country, where more than half of the population has no health insurance." He says "this may be the land of the hamburger - but hamburger is not good for your health. Junk food plus TV equals short life."

Now there's something even juicier in the horizon. The first results of a new medicine that acts directly on the causes of obesity were revealed at the latest congress of the American College of Cardiology. "It has a revolutionary potential," says Minart. This latest frontier is a smart drug - a weight-loss pill. "It acts directly on the rewarding centers in the brain, so you have less stimulation. The same receptors are found in the adipocytes [fat cells]. The drug has a central action over the centers of pleasure and the adipocytes. The result: you eat less, you stop smoking and your waistline is reduced."

The whole, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry is involved in this breakthrough. "The first smart drug was Prozac. Another great example is Viagra. Prozac, Viagra and the weight-loss pill are lifestyle drugs." Sipping the last of his martini, paying no attention to the chill-out lounge music on offer, but always pointing out potential stroke victims crowding at the bar, Minart enunciates his formula for the future: "Be positive, take Prozac. Have good sex, take Viagra. Look smart, take the weight-loss pill." Cynics would argue about the side effects on the libido. The answer would be circular: take more Viagra.

America is already a pill-popping nation - and there's many a place in Vegas, including the Tabu ultra-lounge, where patrons happily imbibe their "secstasy cocktails", Viagra included. But if a combination of Prozac, Viagra and the weight-loss pill may represent the ultimate bright future of the American consuming hordes, there's always that nagging question of money, and where will it come from to finance so much fun?

Bring on the dancing fountains
Answering this question requires a tortuous pilgrimage through the interconnected bowels of casino-land as we look for a specialist in casino economics. We're ultimately lucky: we find a character who is happy to talk but requires anonymity. Let's call him Dan the Fat Cat.

Dan the Fat Cat, a very successful ad executive from Colorado via California, is a would-be candidate for the weight-loss pill. He is also a high roller. He's in Vegas practically every other weekend and enjoys the customary perks at the Mirage. Donna Harris, director of Texas Holdem poker operations at the Mirage, says that to play "you have to give your name at the door, get on waiting lists, know where to go for the limit you want to play". None of this for Dan the Fat Cat - he only plays high stakes in the high-roller room. He's the quintessential Texas Holdem poker man: familiar with nuts (an unbeatable hand), trips (three-of-a-kind), holes (the first two cards one is dealt, face down, in the game Texas HoldEm) and flop (the first three cards on the table in Texas HoldEm). He's a Republican who will vote Democrat next November (John Kerry is carrying a five-point lead over Bush in Vegas at the moment).

Texas Holdem Poker players better take Dan the Fat Cat's message seriously: America will have to stop consuming like crazy because its economy is in trouble. "Politicians always promise the free market is our salvation and the key to our prosperity. That's wrong, because we cannot live with an everlasting trade deficit. Last year it was almost half a trillion dollars," he says.

How does America manage? According to Dan the Fat Cat, "China, Japan and Europe lend us a fortune, so we can keep on buying more and more imports. And the trade deficit keeps growing. Imagine when they decide to stop lending. When that happens, we will have huge interest rates, a collapse in the stock market, a collapse in home prices. That'll be the end of easy credit. I don't need to tell you that when you have these everlasting trade deficits getting bigger and bigger, this is always interpreted as a sign of weakness."

Dan the Fat Cat, never a man to spurn a first-growth Bordeaux at a four-digit price at the Renoir restaurant in the Mirage, is nevertheless worried: "Last year we had to borrow something like $540 billion from Europe, Japan and China. We became a debtor nation in the late 1980s. Now our debt abroad is something like $3 trillion. It will be double before 2010. Some people say that when the dollar hits new lows, Americans will buy less and less imports. That's bull. The way I see it, we are indebted to the house. And the house one day will come to collect. The house is now a bunch of countries. They hold our debt paper, they collect interest on our Treasury bonds and private bank loans. We may be a very wealthy nation, but we can't keep spending what we don't have and borrowing money forever. One of these days America will lose control of its destiny."

So when does the Texas Holdem poker game end? "It ends when one of the major players decides it's time to collect and go home. Suppose China has a banking crisis. They would have no choice except selling off their US bonds and use the proceeds to correct their financial system, and also to politically appease their masses."

Dan the Fat Cat would be branded a dangerous communist in many Texas Holdem poker circles when he says that the American labor force is paying the price for the casino economy. "US multinationals would never allow themselves to be on the losing side, nor would the US government be able to resist them. These huge trade deficits are in large part a 'gift' from the multinationals. They export and import within themselves, between US-based factories and their subsidiaries abroad. Half of US foreign trade - excluding oil - is intra-trade. That's why trade deficits equal job losses in the US. Suppose an American multinational switches production to China: they still produce the same thing, but the labor costs are much lower and the products become imports - and that makes the trade deficit rise. But of course you know that in America the government puts the interests of multinationals way ahead of its own citizens."

After all his talk, Dan the Fat Cat sips his cappuccino and leaves - he has a Texas Holdem game to play. He's a moderate consumer, for American standards. He never charges his whole life to his room, and he makes sure he has kept enough collateral. He knows the house always wins, so as a rule of thumb he always collects when he's still flush - after all, he refuses to further enrich Kerkorian, the king of the strip. As for the legions of losers, there's always the sight of the dancing fountains of the Bellagio erupting to the sound of Sinatra.

 

 

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