Скачать или смотреть The Dark Story of America's FAILED Casino Empire: Atlantic City

November 1976: New Jersey voters approved casino gambling by the narrowest margin — fifty-six percent. They promised it would save a dying resort town. Jobs. Prosperity. A future. Forty-eight years later, Atlantic City stands as a monument to American delusion.
Behind the glitter came the cost: Donald Trump's billion-dollar Taj Mahal, financed with junk bonds, filing for bankruptcy within a year. Contractors who built it never fully paid — some lost their entire businesses. Workers promised good jobs watched five casinos close in two years between 2014 and 2016. Nine thousand nine hundred jobs lost in twelve months — the worst in the nation.
May 1978: Resorts International opened the first legal casino east of Nevada. Crowds lined the boardwalk for hours. Money poured in. By 2006, Atlantic City's twelve casinos generated five point two billion dollars annually.
Then the monopoly ended. Pennsylvania. Delaware. Maryland. New York. Every neighboring state legalized gambling. By 2014, revenue had collapsed to half the peak. Four casinos closed in eight months. Trump Plaza sat vacant for seven years before implosion in 2021. The Taj Mahal shuttered in 2016 after a labor dispute over health benefits stripped in bankruptcy court.
2024: Nine casinos remain. Profits fell nine point three percent. Only two properties saw increases. Atlantic City has the nation's highest foreclosure rate. Eighteen million visitors generate shrinking returns. Workers who cleaned rooms at Showboat, dealt cards at Revel, built the Taj — retrained for pharmacy jobs, office work, anything but casinos.
Who paid? Construction workers who built monuments to greed that would destroy their livelihoods. Dealers who breathed secondhand smoke for eight-hour shifts for thirty years. Contractors Trump stiffed in bankruptcy court. The city itself — still poor, still struggling, still trapped by an industry that promised salvation and delivered wreckage.
The casinos extracted billions. The wealth flowed to distant corporate accounts. The neighborhoods beyond the boardwalk remained blighted. The workers were cast aside. The promise was a lie from the beginning.
If you inherited a struggling Atlantic City casino tomorrow — would you fight to save it, convert it to another use, or walk away like Trump did? Is Atlantic City's collapse a cautionary tale about gambling economics, or proof that corporate capitalism always sacrifices workers for profit?
Which failed American empire should we investigate next?

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