The sad truth of the gambling capital of eastern America.

It’s raining bodies in Atlantic City.
You know the problem. You are walking along the Boardwalk and suddenly a body comes hurtling down. You need some kind of human-protecting umbrella for this odd phenomenon. No one knows why this is going on. It is a completely mysterious wave of gravity propelled bodies.
This, at least, seems to be the view of the newspapers and media of Atlantic City. Their articles, in this gambling dominated city, about the poor beleaguered souls who have chosen to jump off the top of parking garages only mention in passing that the buildings are right next to casinos. According to the home town media, there is no possible connection between the suicides and the betting centers.
When I read these articles, it makes me think that this is so redolent of what is going on in this great nation – a media that speaks about anything except the important, while much of the population is caught in a hopeless, declining spiral of debt – that I decide to go down to Atlantic City for an early morning walk-about to see this city.
Atlantic City is a small city two hours from New York. It has always played the role of the mini-Las Vegas or Tijuana for the Big Apple. American puritanism is an under-rated but still very powerful force in the society. Listen to foreign media and you would imagine that Americans are indulging in a constant orgy of drug-fuelled bacchanalias. Sadly, your correspondent is no expert in drug filled orgies, but what I can say is that everyday life here is far more restrained than in much of Europe. There are few American promenades, as in Spain or Italy, where families sit and drink red wine in public while young people flirt and children play safely. Nor are there the interminable alcoholic-feeding pubs of Britain that are the base of almost every social occasion and the bedrock of UK communities. Life here is fairly sedate. The tale of the man marrying his high-school sweetheart is still honoured – in public. In private, of course, it is another tale. Which is why places like Atlantic City get created.
Atlantic City is New York’s sin city. Its hey day was the 1920s when New Yorkers could escape a dreary life of grinding poverty or just the grind, by hopping on a train and spending the day gambling, drinking (both illegal in the 1920s) and various other delights. Its allure has faded slightly, but Atlantic City still has dozens of casinos, run by multinational corporations, and millions of visitors every year who bet billions of dollars.

Simply the Best

There are no happy gamblers at 5.30 in the morning.
Tina Turner’s song Simply the Best is blasting over the loud speakers at the Resorts Casino where I am staying. The casino floor is a downmarket place full of dingy carpets and, now in the early morning, two dozen obsessed, unhappy bettors. There are two card tables open with bettors who turn their cards over in disgust and a few other people sitting hopelessly in front of slot machines. Its pre-dawn, but no daylight ever gets into these areas of the casinos. Few people smile, certainly not the gamblers. They look like they are having the most miserable time of their lives. The security guards are out in full force – both uniformed and suit wearing. They patrol the floor while the morning cleaning crew are coming in to vacuum the much stained carpets.
The staff are stony friendly. They smile in that kind of “Have-a-nice-day, sir. We are going to dispossess your home, fuck your wife and piss in the face of your children, but do have a nice day, sir” attitude beloved of Corporate America’s staff training sessions.
As I search for a good coffee, I wonder about where the reputation of glamorous casinos comes from. This particular casino looks like an all-night bus station without the exciting culture. Speaking of bus stations – there is bus terminal built into the casino. A lonely looking older woman sits alone in the area. She is clutching her bags with an anxious expression and does not answer when I wish her a good morning. It is no surprise that the woman is elderly. Many casinos in America charter buses that go, specifically, to old age and retirement homes to pick up the lonely and get as much money as they can from them.
Outside, however, is a complete and joyous contrast to the early morning fugue of the casino and the depressing sight of watching people lose their money so unhappily. The walk along the wooden Boardwalk – sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean – is glorious. It gets forgotten under the glare of the gambling, but Atlantic City’s beach is beautiful. It is a great comparison to Las Vegas – a dusty hell-hole in the middle of a squalid desert. The Vegas marketing types try hard to bolster the image of that city with its plus one-hundred degree heat and utter lack of picturesque landscape. The locals vainly say things like, “It is a dry heat. It doesn’t bother you as much.” To which any sane visitor replies, “It is 100 degrees in the shade. Of course, it bothers you! You wouldn’t walk outside unless someone paid you!”
Atlantic City, on the other hand, has somf of the most beautiful scenery that a nature lover could wish for: rolling ocean waves crashing on a gorgeous sandy beach. Across the bay is one of the largest bird sanctuaries on America’s East Coast – a site for millions of migrating birds.
The wooden Boardwalk running along the beach is, if you play Monopoly, the original rich man’s playground. The board game was invented here, so the street names are very familiar. It is no longer the site for the super-rich, but it is very much the working family’s holiday – an American Ibiza. In the evening, the Boardwalk is a steaming mixture of hot dog vendors, cotton candy shops, shawarma places, t-shirt sellers, psychics, and tattoo parlours, while thousands of people in clothing from dental floss bikinis to full burkas stroll past.
I walk to the new, and spectacularly designed, Revel Casino. It is dominated by vast, multi-floor, sail shaped windows. The inside has the charm of a clean, well-lit airport lobby but the outside view is spectacular.
On the beach, washed by the golden early morning sun, three young Asian women are posing for their unprepared, totally unrehearsed, natural selfies. It seems hard work. It takes twenty minutes of adjusting make up, hair styles, posing – checking the results in the phones – repeating – before they get the natural, spontaneous look they want. After getting the photos of themselves enjoying the beach, the women turn around and make their way back into the hotel – without actually enjoying the beach. It is as if the photos of the pretended activity make up for the complete absence of the actual activity. That image sums up much of the Atlantic City experience. The beauty is a back drop for an unnatural, superficial and barely enjoyed show.

The Betrayal of the Poor

I cycle on the creakiest machine from the thinly used public bike rental system down Pacific Avenue. This street runs behind and parallel to the Boardwalk and is lined with the brick-walled backs of the casinos. The other side is lined with 24 hour pawn stores and fast loan places to profit from desperate midnight gamblers looking for more cash to lose.
It is 6.30 a.m. and off one of the side streets, beside a closed strip bar, the professional ladies are out looking for early morning trade. There may be a lower rung of prostitution than the sex dawn patrol of Atlantic City but I do not want to see it. These ladies, with their badly knocked in teeth and poo-stained tights look desperate for their next fix. But they are kind to the obviously out of place chap. I ask for directions and one soul is determined to make sure that I have the right way.
“You be careful,” she screams after giving a precise route. “They are crazy up there! Crazy people.”
It is the same with the tall, dignified, gentle chap in his fifties – he, too, treats me kindly. He is waking up from a night sleeping on cardboard boxes at the door of a church. It is too early for life stories, but we speak about the weather and he tells me he is happy that summer is here and the cold is gone for a little while.
The next main street running parallel to the Boardwalk is Atlantic Avenue. It is a pot-holed ruin worthy of Havana. In Cuba, they at least have the excuse of extreme poverty from American government sanctions. Here, it is just that we are now off the Boardwalk. We have gone past the pawn shops and strip bars. Past the places that most of the gambling tourists will ever see. We are in the city proper where the poor, who work in the casinos, live.
Along with its pot-holed infrastructure, Atlantic City has the highest foreclosure rate in the country – people lose their homes here faster than anywhere else in America. The downtown is known as a “food desert” – there is only one functioning supermarket within three miles. When I visit the dirty, greying library, it is like many libraries in the western world, jammed with the homeless desperate for a few hours of comfort and clean bathrooms.
This is the betrayal of the public by the gambling industry. It was never supposed to be like this. Gambling is supposed to produce taxes. Yes, there will be people hurling themselves off buildings or lining up for food handouts after their money has gone. But some of that money was supposed to return to the public in large taxes so that schools are well-funded, hospitals are free and roads are well paved.

The Pissed on War Memorials

There are beautiful buildings in Atlantic City. It is not all airport lobby shaped casinos, knocked down pawn shops, or the rotting tooth church buildings. At the end of Pacific Avenue is an extraordinary monument to the veterans of the First World War. Chiselled above the grey, somber stone pillars of a classic Greek temple are the names of the battles – Somme, Champagne-Marne, Oise-Aisne – that the Americans fought and, mostly, won in that long ago war.
The actual memorial temple is locked up. You have to cross a high traffic road and peer through the chained gates to see a broken stone of memory and puddles contrasting with the splendour of the once mighty memorial. There is a faint smell of urine over all of it.
The homeless, in cardboard boxes, squat around it. Their shopping carts full of possessions close by. They are waking up. One of them wears a baseball cap that proclaims him a veteran of one of America’s hopeless current-day wars. One of those conflicts where the military-industrial complex makes their profit by sending America’s poor to die in lost battles.

The Vision of America

I cycle back up the Boardwalk. Past the Atlantic City cat feeders; they are a group of kind hearted types who spiritually adopt, name and feed the hundreds of cats who live under the Boardwalk.
I find one of the parking garages from which one of the poor souls flung herself. I walk up. There are no security guards. No fences or gates to stop me. Nor even a poster urging the desperate not to take their own lives.
The view from up here over Atlantic City is an educational one. The Casinos rise, like vast space stations across the old town. The big corporations – the effective government of the country – are all here – some have their logos blaring out from the side of their casinos. The beautiful old churches, built in the golden times of prohibition, are decaying now, like yellowed, rotting teeth. Great swathes of the old brick buildings, where people actually live, have been knocked down and empty lots surrounded by wire fences wait for the next corporate developer to build a cash drain for gamblers.
This is the secret, unarticulated blueprint of corporate America spread out at the back of this suicide haven of a parking garage. It is a vision, in present day America, of what used to be called the third world. The corporations want to turn this country into a cold weather version of Mexico or the Philippines. A place full of desperate, indebted people. They have succeeded here in Atlantic City and now, with the legalization of gambling, they want to spread it across the rest of the country.
It is a vision worth fighting to prevent. If we value our people and our communities, it is worth speaking about. The problem is that at the moment, there are no parties and very few individual politicians not in the pockets of those large corporations whose goal is to plunge us all into debt.
God help America.
God help us all.
For Atlantic City is the plan that the globalist corporations have for everyone in the western world.