Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Bill Gates: Wouldn't have predicted US would do so poorly handling pandemic" video.
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"COVID-19 is certainly revealing some uncomfortable truths about America. For example, everyday brings a new reminder that we are a country of extreme-haves, and extreme have-nots. And I'm not talking about money - we all knew that. I'm talking about people having accurate information. In this pandemic, "accurate" information has made toilet paper seem plentiful.
America, the country that has the most Nobel Prizes in science, also has the most willfully ignorant people per capita when it comes to understanding science.
How else can we explain electing a low-information bu.ffoon, who wheezes medical tips on our TVs about poisoning ourselves with disinfectants.
And maybe the most clueless aspect of that supposedly "sarcastic" advice is that Trump thinks we can still find disinfectants at stores. I guess we're finding that a pandemic isn't the ideal thing to happen to a country that believes science is just an opinion. Just something you roll the dice and decide whether you believe, instead of something you actually try to understand. And whether it's evolution, vaccines, or viruses, Americans are far busier dismissing inconvenient science as politically motivated, than they are learning about how it will effect their lives. Because NOT believing in Darwinism, IS Darwinism.
Because America is a country that cares more about the financial health of its corporations, than the actual health of its citizens. After all, who got most of the bailout cash? Corporations!!
And who is behind the "grassroots" push to prematurely reopen America? Corporations, and the (republican) politicians corporations pay. But science doesn't watch foxnews, so it doesn't know that it's just a DNC "hoax" or some other childish QAnon conspiracy.
Republican Governors believe that sacrifices have to be made for corporate profits. And that your grandmother, may just be one of them. And because Donald " I don't take responsibility at all" Trump, is passing the buck to Governors to make decisions, so Donald won't be blamed.
America's approach to this pandemic is ad-hoc, conflicting, and piecemeal. Exactly the type of uncoordinated response that helps spread a pandemic. South Korea's response was like a well conducted symphony. America's is like an open mic night at improv.
We have states with policies founded on epidemiological research, surrounded by states with policies founded on Twitter hashtags. Oddly enough, viruses don't respect state lines. Or your beliefs in how deadly they are. The worst states spread the virus, and prolong the pandemic for the rest of us.
This pandemic has proven two things: You're only as healthy as the most stupid person in America; and his name, is Donald J Trump.
Trump: "And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body."
--Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian
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Trump is running the country the exact same way he ran his failed businesses, including his failed casinos. It's all just a game to him, and the objective of the game is for him to extract as much personal wealth as he can before everyone finally catches on to his con, and realizes that he has no clue what he's doing. He has done the exact same thing with his fake charity foundation, and his fake university.
Even as his casinos did poorly, Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen. And that is Trump in a nutshell. A narcissistic sociopathic con-man who only cares about himself, and will use others to achieve his own self-serving desires.
In interviews with The Times, Trump acknowledged that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.
Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed.
His casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders.
After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Trump avoided a second potential crisis by taking his casinos public and shifting the risk to stockholders.
And he never was able to draw in enough gamblers to support all of the borrowing. During a decade when other casinos there thrived, Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.
Trump now says that he left Atlantic City at the perfect time. Well no sh't. He left after he had ruined everything, and there was no more money for him to grift. The record shows that he struggled to hang on to his casinos years after the city had peaked, and failed only because his investors no longer wanted him in a management role..
He just did not put the equity into the projects he should have to keep them solvent,” said H. Steven Norton, a casino consultant. “When he went bankrupt, he not only cost bondholders money, but he hurt a lot of small businesses that helped him construct the Taj Mahal.”
In an interview with the Times, Trump said “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.” Like a true sociopath, Trump boasts about how he ravaged Atlantic City, without any regard for all the people and businesses he hurt along the way.
Beth Rosser of West Chester, Pa., is still bitter over what happened to her father, whose company Triad Building Specialties nearly collapsed when Trump took the Taj into bankruptcy. It took three years to recover any money owed for his work on Trump's casino" she said, and her father received only 30 cents on the dollar.
“Trump crawled his way to the top on the back of little guys, one of them being my father,” said Ms. Rosser, who runs Triad today. “He had no regard for the thousands of men and women who worked on those projects."
“He put a number of local contractors and suppliers out of business when he didn’t pay them,” said Steven P. Perskie, who was New Jersey’s top casino regulator in the early 1990s. “So when he left Atlantic City, it wasn’t, ‘Sorry to see you go.’ It was, ‘How fast can you get the he// out of here?’”
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