#and then donald trump comes along and looks at the square peg

[lady-raziel]

hilarious that with each new day that passes a new bit of dirt from JD Vance's past gets discovered and plastered over the internet...it's almost as if this is why presidential campaigns have always announced their running mates well before the convention...so that if glaring issues with a candidate came to light quickly there would be time to replace them on the ticket before they were officially locked in...it's almost as if certain things in political campaigns were done for a reason, donald...because the very same critical failures had happened before...but no i'm sure you and your guys attempt to recreate a fantasy version of history while ignoring all the reasons that history was a disaster will work this time...because you are built different and the 10000th time trying fascism will work like a charm...

[opedguy]

Conflict on Jan. 6 House Select Committee

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Nov. 27, 2022.--Responding to a report from the Washington Post, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), pushed backed that Jan. 6 House Committee Co-Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) pushed committee members to focus the report primarily on 76-year-old former President Donald Trump.  Cheney destroyed her political career in Wyoming with her fixation on Trump.  Cheney lost her reelection bid to Liz Hageman by nearly 20%, largely because she turned her focus on getting rid of Trump.  Whatever the final Jan. 6 House Select Committee says, it won’t satisfy Cheney who wants it all about Trump.  Cheney has been telling the press for months, without proof, that Trump planned and orchestrated the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, even though the evidence says otherwise.  To Cheney, shoving a square peg into a round hole has always been her fixation when it comes to eventually charging Trump with a crime.

Speaking to Democrat-friendly CNN, Schiff told Dana Bash she hoped the final report would be broad enough to cover more than whatever role Trump played in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.  “No, I mean at least I certainly hope not,” Schiff told Bash on CNN’s State of the Union.  Bash reported that the Post’s article said the Committee wanted to focus on security measures and intel leading up to the Jan. 6 riots.  Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), impeached Trump on a single high crime and misdemeanor on “incitement of insurrection.”  Trump was acquitted in the U.S. Senate Feb. 13, 2021, largely because House Impeachment Mangers, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) couldn’t prove their case.  Democrats insisted at the time that Trump’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse the morning before the Capitol riots incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol

FBI investigations into the Jan. 6 Capitol riots showed that they were planned for months, not a spontaneous event, as House impeachment managers insisted from Trump’s early morning speech.  All transcripts of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech indicated that he asked the crowd to protest peacefully at the Capitol, not encouraging any violence.  House Jan. 6 Select Committee members concentrated interviews on Trump’s attempts to plan and orchestrate the Jan. 6 riots.  “I would like to see a report be as broad and inclusive as possible,” Schiff told Bash.  “We are discussing as a committee among the members, what belongs in the body of the report, what belongs in the appendices of the report, what is beyond the scope of our investigation.  And we’ll reach those decisions in a collaborative manner,” Schiff said.  Schiff knows the committee takes no exculpatory information about Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riots.

Cheney has her own ax to grind with Trump, looking at the end of her House Republican career.  Cheney has hinted she may want to make a presidential run in 2024, even though she’d play largely an spoiler role either as an independent or Republican. Hard to imagine after losing her House race by 20% she has any prayer of running as a Republican.  Her constituents in Wyoming say her betraying the GOP for her obsession with Trump, eventually wrecking her career.  When Cheney joined the House Select Committee as Co-Chair, she thought she showed a profile in courage but instead showed a profile in betrayal.  Schiff defends Cheney because he knows that the highly biased Democrat panel needed a fig leaf of bipartisanship.  With Cheney, the Committee got not bipartisanship but a woman with a personal vendetta, using the committee to retaliate against Trump.

Schiff’s incapable of honesty, one of Trump’s fiercest detractors in the House of Representatives along with Pelosi.  Pelosi and Schiff, like two tag-team wrestlers, like to pounce on Trump at every opportunity.  Years before the Pelosi’s impeachments of Trump, she was all in with Schiff on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million investigation into Trump’s alleged contacts with the Kremlin.  Pelosi and Schiff embraced former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s paid opposition research AKA the Steele dossier, accusing Trump of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign.  Mueller and everyone on Democrat House knew that the Steele dossier was a fabricated set of allegations designed to help Hillary get elected in 2016.  Yet even after Mueller finished his final report March 23, 2019 clearing Trump, Pelosi and Schiff insisted Trump colluded with Russia.

Schiff did everything to dismiss the Washington Post report because he’s all about showing consensus on the committee.  “I’ve never viewed it that way, and I think her [Cheney] role on the committee has been indispensable,” Schiff told Bash.  Schiff wants to use Cheney as a GOP smokescreen to prove the committee was bipartisan.  “We’re going to get a lot of consensus on the report, we’re very close to that now, “ Schiff said.  Schiff is the same person after Mueller finished his final report saying he had proof that Trump colluded with Russia. Nothing Schiff says can be trusted for anything other than advancing the Democrat narrative, advanced by Cheney, that Trump planned and orchestrated the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.  Democrats can’t admit that after months of leftist rioting after George Floyd’s May 25, 2020 murder, right wing militia groups wanted to make a statement Jan. 6.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-trump-tower-tax-records-reveal-new-inconsistencies/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Trump made Trump Tower look more valuable to lenders (when he wanted $) and less valuable to the government (when he wanted to keep his tax bill low) - a shell game he’s played for years with lots of his properties. Via ⁦@propublica⁩

Trump Tax Records Reveal New Inconsistencies — This Time for Trump Tower

Documents show the president’s company reported different numbers — higher ones to lenders, lower ones to tax officials — for Trump’s signature building. Last month, ProPublica revealed a similar pattern in two other Trump buildings.

by Heather Vogell | Published Nov. 27, 2019 4:00 a.m. EST | ProPublica | Posted November 27, 2019 |

Donald Trump’s business reported conflicting information about a key metric to New York City property tax officials and a lender who arranged financing for his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to tax and loan documents obtained by ProPublica. The findings add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month.

In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show.

For example, as of December 2011 and June 2012, respectively, Trump’s business told the lender that 99% and 98.7% of the tower’s commercial space was occupied, according to a prospectus for the loan. The figures were taken from “borrower financials,” the prospectus stated.

In tax filings, however, Trump’s business said the building’s occupancy was 83% in January 2012 and the same a year later. The 16 percentage point gap between the loan and tax filings is a “very significant difference,” said Susan Mancuso, an attorney who specializes in New York property tax.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization said that “comparing the various reports is comparing apples to oranges” because reporting requirements differ.

Trump had much to gain by showing a high occupancy rate to lenders in 2012: He refinanced his share of Trump Tower that year and obtained a $100 million loan on favorable terms.

The vast majority of the gap between occupancy figures could be explained by diverging reports on how much space the Trump Organization used in Trump Tower. In loan documents, the company said it and its affiliates occupied 74,900 square feet in mid-2012, or 31% of the building. But tax reports from the January before and after listed the company and related parties as occupying 41,600 square feet — or about 18% of the tower.

“I cannot give you an explanation,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert, former accountant and real estate professor at Montclair State University who reviewed the tax and loan records for Trump Tower at ProPublica’s request.

More than a dozen tax and finance experts, presented with ProPublica’s earlier findings, also said they could not decipher a reason for the differences. As with Trump Tower, the discrepancies made the two properties — a skyscraper located at 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower near Columbus Circle — appear more profitable to the lender and less so to property tax officials.

Those discrepancies were “versions of fraud,” according to Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. The penalties for false filings can include fines or criminal charges.

The diverging numbers match a pattern described by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in congressional testimony this year. Cohen said Trump at times inflated assets’ value in documents submitted to lenders in an effort to secure loans. In reports to tax officials, Cohen testified, Trump would lower the value to reduce what he owed.

The focus on Trump’s business and personal financial records has been particularly intense of late. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has subpoenaed a wide array of Trump financial records to investigate claims that the Trump Organization falsified records of hush-money payments to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who said she and Trump had a sexual encounter. (He has denied the affair.)

Congressional lawmakers are seeking Trump’s personal tax returns, as well as other financial information, as part of their investigation into potential foreign influence on the presidency. Two federal courts have affirmed lawmakers’ right to enforce the subpoenas, and Trump has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

ProPublica used New York’s Freedom of Information Law to obtain property tax filings for four of Trump’s Manhattan buildings, including Trump Tower. The income and expense statements Trump filed when repeatedly appealing the city’s valuation of his property are public under the law. We then compared information in the tax reports to loan data made public when Trump’s debt became part of pools of loans sold publicly as bonds known as commercial mortgage-backed securities.

Information in tax and loan filings can differ for legitimate reasons, experts said. A small portion of the occupancy gap at Trump Tower did appear to have an explanation: About 2.5 percentage points of the discrepancy in 2012 consisted of an instance where the Trump Organization treated newly leased, but still empty, space as full in its loan documents (which Trump’s lender disclosed) but not in tax documents.

The Trump Organization refinanced Trump Tower in 2012, replacing its existing $27 million in debt with a loan for $100 million. That allowed Trump to extract about $68 million in cash. The same institution that handled the refinancing, Ladder Capital, refinanced 40 Wall Street and the Columbus Circle property a few years later.

Occupancy, along with cash flow, is a factor used by lenders and ratings agencies to assess the riskiness of a loan. Trump secured relatively favorable terms: an interest-only loan that allowed him to avoid paying monthly principal. The Trump Tower loan received coveted AAA and Aaa ratings, respectively, from credit agencies Fitch and Moody’s. (The company has continued making payments.)

When it comes to reporting property taxes in New York City, there’s a potential incentive for owners to minimize how much space they’re renting to themselves. The city’s Tax Commission, which handles property tax appeals, tends to treat owner-occupied space as if it’s being rented at full market price, which increases the value the tax commission assigns to the building, and thus increases the tax bill. But the commission often won’t assign such income to vacant space, said Mancuso, the New York property tax expert.

The Trump Tower filings showed smaller discrepancies when it came to income. (New York City assessors consider income when calculating the taxable value of commercial properties, making New York property tax filings resemble those of income taxes more than property tax filings typically do in other parts of the country.)

Trump Tower, however, fell shy of expectations for profit set out by underwriters working for Ladder Capital during the refinancing, tax and loan records show. They had pegged net operating income at roughly $20.4 million a year. In the years after the loan was made, the building hasn’t come close.

New York City real estate observers have suggested that the tight security needed at the tower because of the presidency has cut into Trump’s ability to make money from the building. This year, China’s biggest bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, made plans to reduce its space in Trump Tower when its lease ran out, according to Bloomberg News.

The financial institution that arranged the Trump Tower refinancing, Ladder Capital, is a publicly traded real estate investment trust that reports more than $6 billion in assets. It has a close Trump connection: Jack Weisselberg, an executive in loan origination, is the son of the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. Allen Weisselberg is under investigation by the Manhattan DA for his role in the Daniels payments.

Ladder Capital declined to comment.

Doris Burke contributed reporting.

[opticien2-0]

2017 RETAIL PREDICTIONS From the global to the individual

Now that 2017 has dawned, we bring you the final in our three-part series of predictions for what the New Year will bring for ecommerce and multichannel retailers. Here, we hear from contributors across the industry about the trends and technologies they believe will be important in the year ahead.

Rupal Karia, managing director of Retail and Hospitality, UK and Ireland at Fujitsu, puts the emphasis on personalisation and on working together.

Continued focus on personalisation 2017 will be the year where the shopping experience comes full circle to the days where retailers knew their customers on a personal basis. The online experience has mastered this already, and now it is the physical stores turn. With loyalty amongst customers being so poor in today’s retail landscape, retailers need to be thinking about the personalised experience they bring in store and the value that face to face adds to a customer journey. What needs to happen is a true integration between instore and online to create a truly personalised experience. An example of a company that is providing this new heightened level of personalisation is McDonalds as they now through their in-store devices permit customers to customise their orders to the last detail transforming the way people purchase fast-food.

Co-creation for a collaborative nation In 2016 collaboration between retailers grew as we saw the likes of the Post Office and WH Smith team up, Tesco and Arcadia do more together, as well as the major acquisition of Argos by Sainsbury’s. In the next year this collaboration will continue, as retailers find ways to maximise the in-store footprint, and see consolidation as an effective way of doing this. Collaboration also works in reverse, with physical retailers teaming up with online only players to widen their reach as we saw with Ocado and Morrison’s. Through collaboration, whichever way retailers choose to do it, it allows them to maximise their offering to customers and ensure that they are making themselves available at every channel. By teaming up with retailers that already do in-store or online well, they are able to provide a better service offering and focus on delivering that customer experience, rather than starting from scratch.

The days of tilling are numbered Tilling as we know it needs to have a change. In most cases, shop processes have been the same for decades; and with the recent launch of Amazon Go, we have seen how retailers can again push and innovate a physical store. The instore model where customers load their shopping baskets to then unload, scan, repack, and pay all of their items as they would have done fifty years ago are limited. Amazon Go is an example of how retailers can harness technology and embrace innovation in their physical stores to create that invaluable seamless customer journey. Now that the level of customers’ expectations is at an all-time high, retailers need to find ways to match it and ensure they are differentiating themselves from their competitors. Shopping instore is now very much experiential. By bringing innovative new ways to shop, retailers can enhance the shopping experience to make it more interactive, and digitally enabled. Those that do will be the retailers that stand out in a noisy retail landscape.

Lucie Greene, director of JWT Innovation, puts the emphasis on Brexit and new retail concepts.

Brexterity First it was the Marmite scare. A price dispute between Tesco and Unilever over the polarizing breakfast spread grabbed viral headlines in October 2016, worrying devoted fans that it might disappear from British supermarket shelves. Ultimately, Marmite remained in stock, but in the long term, consumer prices in a Britain with a weakened pound suggest future declines in buying power. Unilever’s chief financial officer Graeme Pitkethly told investors on an earnings call that “prices should start to increase to cover the cost of imported goods due to weaker sterling.” In November 2016, Toblerone began shrinking the size of its famous triangular chocolate bars in the UK to cover lost revenue caused by higher prices of imported chocolate. The cost to print books jumped from £1.50 ($1.86) per unit to over £3 ($3.72) per unit between June and November, Sam Jordison, codirector of Norwich-based publishing company Galley Beggar Press, told CNBC, adding that the company had been in danger of folding as a result. Apple raised UK retail prices 20% at the end of October 2016, making MacBooks in the United Kingdom about $275 more expensive than in the United States. Microsoft has announced a similar plan to “harmonize prices” with the EU. The likely implication is that, absent salary increases, British consumers’ buying power will decline next year and onwards, especially as talk of a “hard Brexit” continues to spook traders.

Why it’s interesting: Globalisation has delivered small but incremental increases in buying power to consumers across the board in recent decades. Watch to see whether this trend is fully reversed along with the rising tide of economic nationalism. And double down on delivering more value for less.

Retail naturalism Technology brands are evolving retail concepts away from cold and minimal shops toward something friendlier and more natural. Apple’s store on central London’s Regent Street received a major facelift in fall 2016 that features the company’s new “town square” layout, with a central space, the Forum, that hosts daily entertainment. The store showcases the brand’s new design philosophy, which is interactive and community-oriented. A central hall lined with trees, an open layout flooded with daylight, and other natural touches like wooden fixtures and plant walls mark a departure from Apple’s classic, bordering on clinical, aesthetic. Google’s Manhattan pop-up store, which also opened in October, features similar touches. A massive wooden “fountain of light” takes center stage in the store, anchoring it in a unique architectural feature. There’s also a whimsical play area to experiment with Google’s Daydream View virtual reality headset, and a homey kitchen setup to try Google’s Home line in action. Increasingly, Apple is working to preserve the architecture of historical buildings, rather than impose contemporary layouts. In February 2016, the New York Landmarks Conservancy gave the company an award for its work protecting New York’s rich architectural history at its locations, including Grand Central Terminal and a Beaux Arts bank on the Upper East Side, where architects preserved the vault.

Why it’s interesting: Consumers expect more out of bricks-and-mortar retail—whether it’s an experience, or a space worth visiting even when they’re not in the market for a specific product. Apple and Google are admitting that varying their well-honed aesthetic can keep retail spaces fresh.

Jon Copestake, retail and consumer goods analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, says many emerging markets will rebound after a poor 2016, but uncertainty in Western Europe and slower growth in China will peg back sales.

China Fears of a debt bubble in China are unlikely to result in an economic crisis but the economy is expected to experience a slowdown in growth which will sharpen in 2018. As a result 2017 will see Chinese consumers becoming increasingly bearish with luxury goods firms continuing to bear the brunt. Despite slowing growth, China will still be among the five fastest-growing retail markets in the world, with e-commerce continuing to thrive.

Brexit and Western Europe A greater worry for retailers will come from Western Europe. Fallout from the Brexit vote, and potential for further political upheaval in European elections will weigh on consumer confidence in 2017 leading to virtual stagnation in regional sales volumes. The UK could be hit particularly hard as the decision to leave the EU sinks in and a weak pound pushes up prices. An expected decline in sales volumes will put the UK among the five worst performing retail markets in the world in 2017.

Emerging markets There will be bright spots however. India and Iran will be the world’s fastest growing retail markets, with India liberalising its retail sector further and with the Iranian economy finally beginning to open up to foreign investment. Innovations like AR, VR and AI are also set to be hot topics in the coming year and will drive product innovation. Meanwhile, retailers will experiment more with cross-channel investment with the likes of WalMart betting heavily on e-commerce even as Alibaba and Amazon look more towards bricks and mortar investment.

One unknown will remain: the election of Donald Trump as US President could bolster domestic demand through lower tax rates and infrastructure spending, but also weigh on various international trade agreements, causing considerable uncertainty beyond US borders.

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