Lifeline Lottery
Creating Lifeline Lottery, a global lottery dedicated to raising funds for Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Aid to communities around the world in desperate need.
Since the times of the ancient Romans lotteries have been used for raising funds to finance large-scale community, regional or national projects that benefit society such as schools.
London Bridge and the British Museum were both financed through British national lotteries. In America, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth universities were financed by lotteries. Well-run lotteries raise billions of dollars per year for various good causes requiring massive funding amounts such as our California state school system.Having worked for years on the Heartlands Project with its central core lottery funding mechanism I've grown to see lotteries in a new light, as a way of paying taxes for good causes without feeling the sting. Actually, I'd like to see governments add lotteries to state and federal taxes so that paying your taxes becomes more appealing and again, taking the sting out of paying taxes.
But what about the downside of people playing lotteries? you say. What about low-income people spending their precious few dollars on lottery tickets instead of food or rent? What about the winners blowing their money in short order and ending up worse off than before they'd won? Well, our lottery system would have a clause on every ticket stating that winners must enroll in a money management firm of their choice in order to receive any substantial prize money. The low-income people, that's harder to deal with because they've become real addicts and need professional care like all addicts need. Part of the lottery system finances must include professional treatment plans especially geared for lottery gambling as part and parcel of social responsibility. But I think the small minority of low-income with real gambling addiction problems are far outweighed by the beneficial aspects that lotteries have historically provided to prove their worth to the community.
History:
In 1995, I read about the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in Idaho starting a national lottery using Indian gaming rights to do so. I was an environmental activist at that time who's girlfriend happened to be both Native American and a former California Lottery set-up person. Realizing how much money the Coeur d'Alene Tribe expected their National Lottery to generate, I thought that perhaps a local Native American tribe here in Humboldt County could also run a lottery, one that would only need to be in California because, unlike Idaho, we have a large population that a lottery needs as a customer base to succeed.
I contacted the Bear River Band of Rohnerville Rancheria and pitched the lottery project as a means for the Bear River tribe to regain a large portion of their former ancestral lands. Their Tribal Council agreed to sponsor the project which became known as the Heartlands Project after my partner Bear River tribal member Donald Brenard joined in 1996. We worked for about 13 years on and off with a few other members of the Tribe unable to ever get a solid backing for our Heartlands Project because the Tribe also had a Casino Commission going which did not appreciate our lottery project seeing it as unwanted competition. Our Heartlands Project was handicapped throughout its entire 13 year existence with this internal tribal political battle that pitted our Project against the tribe’s Casino project with the Casino group eventually winning the upper hand and closing down our Heartlands Project twice in the 13 year period, the most recent shelving happening last March. The final Heartlands Project act was to submit a Heartlands Trust Company reorganization plan to the Palco Bankruptcy court case in Corpus Christi, Texas which was ignored by the judge there because Bear River did not have any legal representation in court in Texas. The Heartlands Reorganization Plan is valuable for its Palco diversification plans that included Communikit mfg. (as "Palco-kits") and "Down Homes"--emergency disaster relief tents made like sleeping bags to withstand cold weather.While researching lottery systems I’ve developed a new global lottery system that I believe will be the most advanced lottery system in the world and one that will provide the model for the next generation of state and national lotteries. The Coeur d'Alene's National Lottery was stopped by what is called the Wire Act which prohibits any type of gambling over any telephone lines that cross state lines within the U.S.A.
This new cell phone/satellite phone lottery system needs no land lines to operate and so far, there are no laws prohibiting Tribes using such a system to run a national or international lottery. And at this point in time with many tribes with casinos able to lobby for Indian gaming expansion with major money behind, it would be very hard for the U.S. to try to stop such a Native American run international lottery. With the tribe no longer interested in recovering their ancestral lands using the lottery mechanism, I am free to use this new lottery system for what I believe will be the next level of lottery systems which is global and includes a much more relevant Good Cause--Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Aid to communities in desperate need. Emergency Shelters, Food, Medicine, and state-of-the-art eco-friendly sustainable community self-sufficiency systems--the Lifeline Lottery can provide funding for all of this.In 2005, International Lottery and Totalizer Systems, Europe's counterpart to G-Tech, wanted me to keep them up to date and notify them when our Heartlands Project again received Bear River Tribal Council backing. That did finally happen however briefly for three days in March of this year before once again being shelved by the Tribal Council–such is tribal politics in Indian Country.
The Lifeline Lottery's new cell-phone/satellite phone lottery system
Since 2005 I been developing plans for a new state-of-the-art lottery system that is ahead of the competition in every way. Ahead in cost of setting the system up, ahead in cost of system operation, and ahead in marketing coverage by using new smart phone and global satellite phone technologies that have been developed in recent years.
Instead of a vast outlay needed to set up lottery ticket outlets in thousands of stores, gas stations, etc,, with reliance on billboard and expensive TV advertising to sell lottery tickets, our lottery system is built right into the new, cheaper, but just as well built cell phones and later on, satellite phones that will eventually replace cell-phones. Briefly flashing on the hour and half-hour across the screens of our inexpensive smart "Lotto Phones" will be the current lottery prize amount. The prize amount is what sells the tickets and that's all lottery customers really are interested in. This system doesn't require any billboard or TV advertising or even tickets for that matter. It's all done electronically on the screens of our new smart Lotto Phones or whatever we decide to call them.
Why will lottery customers buy Lotto Phones over other cell-phones? One big reason? Lotto Phones will be just as cheap as cell-phones, if not cheaper, but still built to last and with satellite phones these phones will have a great advantage over cell phones--satellite phones don't run out of range. Seeing the current lottery amount for a few seconds twice an hour will be a small inconvenience to pay for better technology and global coverage.
Satellite phones are the direction phone technology is inevitably going because cell phones need cell towers and cell towers are increasingly unwelcome environmental risks and eyesores in any community but cell phone technology is available now while our satellite phone system is still in the developmental stage.
Other possible universal phone systems
Smart phones/smaller but more powerful laptops, and worldwide web phone connection possibilities are out there too to investigate for our Lifeline Lottery system. I'm hardly a computer or telecommunications expert so there's room for further research on our lottery system. The satellite phone system seems a winner if we can make satellite phones competitive in manufacturing and distribution costs with current cell phone systems.
But our new cell phone/satellite phone lottery system is only potential now. It needs a business plan to present to investors for start-up capitalization. This is where the Lifeline Lottery Organization needs bodies and brains, members who can create the world’s biggest and best cause lottery–-the Lifeline Lottery.
But organizing the Lifeline Lottery system isn't the final goal of the LLO. Using Lifeline Lottery Organization's lottery management income, LLO will finance the start up of its emergency aid and community self-sufficiency systems research and development and production arm, Communikits Inc. For those interested in using in disaster relief and humanitarian aid many of the skills being creatively developed in Humboldt County by students and homesteaders, Communikits and Communikit R&D may be of special interest.