Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: December 2018

Sears plans 50 to 80 more store closures as challenges mount


Mr. Lampert has touted his desire to maintain the Sears/Kmart system and associated brands but from the beginning he began to dig the current pit the company is in. With no experience in retail , he made the mistakes that many before him has and that is to make moves that work in the finance sector but not in retail. First move is determine who the long time existing retail managers are and embrace and learn from them. Second: reassure the front liners (the people who face the consumers daily),Third: maintain credit lines so that merchandise continues to flow into the stores. These few things never materialized as Mr. Lampert had no clue how retail works and apparently was not eager or willing to learn. I have always felt that no one can successfully run a business that they know nothing about, so the key is to learn the business while allowing those who do know it run it. Unfortunately this seems to mirror our country at this time.MA

msn money

Lauren Hirsch 14 hrs ago

Even as Eddie Lampert is trying to keep Sears alive, the company is preparing for its potential doom.

Sears’ chairman, Eddie Lampert earlier this month unveiled his $4.6 billion proposal to save Sears by buying the company out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund, ESL Investments. Such a deal is likely its last chance at survival. If Lampert can’t buy the company, it will likely need to liquidate and sell itself in parts. But as the deal faces increasing legal and financing challenges, the company is bracing for the reality it may not come together at all.
Sears’ advisers told the bankruptcy court judge this week the company is already planning to close a number of stores and solicit liquidation bids as a protection, should Lampert’s effort fall apart. The retailer is weighing closing to 50 to 80 more stores at the end of the year, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC. That could bring Sears’ footprint closer to 400. Lampert has said he wants to buy roughly 500 stores.
The company filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 15 with a little under 700 stores. At that time it said it would close 142 unprofitable stores, then in November it announced the closure of 40 additional stores.
The plans are a precaution. It is possible that Sears averts further store closures should Lampert seal a deal to buy the company and its 500-store footprint. But they are an implicit acknowledgement of the potential bleak reality that may lie soon in Sears’ future.
Lampert has yet to formalize and submit financing to support his offer for Sears, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC. Advisers spent much of Monday in active negotiations discussing the asset-backed loan that would support Lampert’s offer. Lending to Sears provides bank underwriting fees, but it also would require confidence in the business strategy of a company that hasn’t turned a profit since 2010.
Without formal financing, Sears last weekend missed its chance to be named a so-called stalking horse bidder in an auction for Sears. It still has until Dec. 28 to submit a formal offer for the company. Being named the stalking horse in a bankruptcy sale typically affords a number of perks, like a role in setting bidding procedures and a break-up fee should that bid be topped.
Meantime, Lampert is financing $1.8 billion of his bid by rolling over debt he already holds in the company. But that too carries uncertainty — and, now, formal pushback.
Some of Sears’ creditors have taken aim at some Sears’ transactions under Lampert’s leadership, including his spinoff of Lands’ End and transactions with Seritage Growth Properties, the real estate investment trust Lampert created through select Sears properties. Those creditors told the bankruptcy court judge this week they plan to contest a credit bid.
It remains unclear whether Lampert would be willing to backstop the credit portion of the bid with cash, should he not be able to use debt to fund it. It therefore remains unclear how else he would finance the bid.
Meantime, ESL is asking as part of its bid that the creditors agree to another stipulation: a release from lawsuits over his past transactions. With the threat of litigation looming large, that too is far from sure.
A spokesperson for Sears declined to comment.
In statement provided to CNBC, a spokesperson for ESL Investments said, “ESL Investments is working around the clock to try to keep Sears in business with a going concern proposal that would save tens of thousands of jobs and provide severance protections for eligible workers.”

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

And What Can You Say About Paul Ryan?How Much Time Do You Have?


By Matt Fuller and Arthur Delaney

WASHINGTON ― Paul Ryan was furious.
He’d been caught in a trap ― lured into an auditorium by the promise of a speech about fiscal responsibility. Instead, President Barack Obama was lecturing the crowd about why it would be wrong to balance the budget by impoverishing old people. Obama didn’t mention Ryan’s name, but in Ryan’s mind, the president might as well have addressed the speech to him.
Everybody could see Ryan, just sitting there in the front row of an auditorium at George Washington University. One of his colleagues leaned over and asked if they should leave. No, Ryan said. They should stay; they were being watched. He had noticed a photographer with a camera mounted on a unipod, its long lens pointed straight at him. He sat rigidly in his chair.
It had all been a setup.
To Ryan, Obama’s breach of decorum in April 2011 ― in which he lightly criticized Ryan’s budget while calling for entitlement reform himself ― was Exhibit A in the case against Obama. According to Ryan, it meant Obama was unwilling to work across party lines to solve policy problems. It was an affront to fiscal responsibility and the Beltway Norms. A stunning contrast between the two men ― one a partisan politician and the other a serious policy wonk.
“His false attacks were offensive, even by the low standards for discourse and civility in Washington, D.C.,” Ryan recalled in his 2014 book, in which he devoted eight pages to the incident.
The story has been retold in at least three books, with Ryan denouncing Obama’s “demagoguery” each time.
In retrospect, of course, in light of the current president’s constant depredations ― against civility, against the discourse, even against Ryan himself ― Obama’s speech was the political equivalent of using the wrong fork at a dinner party. The idea that the speech amounted to some great offense, by the standard Ryan has set not even six years later, is patently absurd.
Whereas Obama didn’t even mention Ryan by name in the infamous speech, President Donald Trump has repeatedly insulted Ryan directly, calling the House speaker “weak and ineffective” and a “Boy Scout” and saying he “knows nothing,” though Trump has more recently said he has come to appreciate Ryan “like a fine wine.”
(Reminder: Trump doesn’t drink.)
While Ryan made a habit of bashing Obama ― his reaction to Obama’s last State of the Union address was to say Obama “degrades the presidency” because Obama warned against then-candidate Trump’s divisive rhetoric ― he has famously stood by Trump, greeting the president’s near-daily embarrassments with cheery unawareness. Even when Ryan couldn’t avoid Trump’s scandals, he continued to praise Trump as “thoughtful,” “refreshing” and “exquisite.”
It’s all part of the fiction that Ryan chooses to live in ― a fiction in which Trump is restoring honor to the presidency and his behavior is to be downplayed, dismissed or outright ignored. And it’s that blithe fiction, contrasted with our graphic, Trump-y reality, for which Ryan should be remembered.
When Ryan leaves office in January, he will not have balanced the budget or fixed Congress or solved poverty or left our politics smarter or less divided. Instead, during his three-year tenure as speaker, the deficit has nearly doubled. The procedural problems in Congress are more daunting. Poverty isn’t much different. And our politics are more partisan, less ideological, than maybe ever before.
The version of Paul Ryan that he and his staff tried to project for years ― the image of a squeaky-clean numbers guy, rolling up his sleeves, solving tough policy problems ― is a sham. According to a number of polls, many people now recognize him as a monumental partisan, a politician who won a reputation as a wonk because he was able to memorize a few lines from an actuarial table and then promptly ignore his own pledges to balance the budget when he had the chance. Ryan is the man who, perhaps more than anybody else, normalized Trump, who led reluctant Republicans back to Trump, who went along with the president even when he knew he shouldn’t and traded his dignity for a tax cut.
Tax Cuts!
This week, Ryan and his office released a six-part video series on his decades-long quest to reform the tax code. But he didn’t reform our tax code. When all the new guidance is issued, the 40,000-page tax code is likely to be even longer. He simply cut taxes ― or, at least, he didn’t stand in the way.
It turned out that cutting taxes by $1.5 trillion wasn’t all that hard, as long as “conservatives” were on board with not paying for tax cuts. The grand irony of “tax reform” is that, for all the credit Ryan and his staff try to give him for the bill, the final legislation was closer to the principles that Freedom Caucus leaders like Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) laid out: a corporate rate at 20 percent, a bigger standard deduction and cuts that weren’t paid for.
Ryan wanted a bill that was at least mostly revenue-neutral (it ended up costing more than a trillion dollars over 10 years), that would allow individuals to fill out their tax returns on a postcard (that didn’t happen) and that had a corporate rate closer to 25 percent (it ended up at 21 percent).
He almost blew up the tax bill by insisting on a border adjustment tax to offset some of the cuts. It wasn’t until he gave up on the BAT ― a tarifflike tax that would have increased prices on imports and also, theoretically, increased the value of the dollar ― that tax reform became a reality.
And it was the Senate that played the biggest role in shaping the tax bill, with Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) deciding how much debt was acceptable to rack up. In conference, when differences between the two chambers’ versions are resolved, legislators took the Senate version on a number of important provisions ― pass-through income, international regulations, the child tax credit ― and ditched a bunch of politically perilous, revenue-raising ideas from the House, like ending deductions on medical expenses and student loans.
Ryan’s signature achievement of tax reform is neither actually his nor actually an achievement. Yes, the economy is doing well. But there was low unemployment and economic growth before the tax cuts. A year after it was enacted, the bill remains unpopular. The stock market has basically run sideways since the GOP’s tax bill was enacted ― the S&P 500 is down on the year ― and wages for workers have barely grown.
The tax cuts were supposed to spur investment and put more money in everyone’s pocket. Instead, they prompted a small round of one-time bonuses, a huge number of stock buybacks and deficits that will persist for decades.
And yet, in true Ryan form, he seeks out another round of feting, when most politicians would have the self-awareness to quietly exit out the back.
It’s possible that he will hand over the speaker’s gavel to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a partial government shutdown, because he and other Republicans refuse to level with Trump and tell him he’s not getting his border wall. A short-term funding bill, looking more likely by the hour, would be more of the same avoidance. It would be stage one in the grieving process.
But denial has been one of Ryan’s favorite strategies with Trump. Ryan has been satisfied to try to influence government and the president at the periphery. When Ryan became aware recently that there were more than 10,000 unused work visas, he pushed through legislation making sure Irish nationals would have access to those visas.
When Trump said he might try to end birthright citizenship, Ryan suggested such a move would have to come from Congress, which prompted Trump to say that Ryan “knows nothing” about the issue and should be focused on holding the GOP majority ― something Ryan wasn’t able to do. The speaker oversaw the largest Republican losses in 44 years.
Ryan never responded to Trump’s diss. The direct insults from Trump never seemed to rankle Ryan the same way Obama’s indirect slights appeared to bother him.
A simple truth of Ryan’s career is that he spent every day fighting to help people who didn’t need help. It was always about cutting taxes, and as big of a game as he talked on the debt, when he had the chance to do something about entitlements or spending, he cowered from the challenge.
As part of his farewell tour, he said in November that his two biggest regrets were failing to tackle immigration reform and not addressing the growing national debt. He also theorized that history would be kind to his speakership and the GOP Congress he ruled over, partly because of the tax cuts that passed under his watch.
But there’s no evidence that the tax cuts are getting more popular or becoming more effective, and there’s no indication that Republicans are getting more serious about debt.
The Debt
To take the issue of debt seriously for a moment ― something Republicans (and Democrats) don’t do ― we’ve incurred enough debt at this point that the interest payments on our $21 trillion hole will ensure that we never see a balanced budget again without massive spending cuts and tax increases.
For Ryan, this might not be much of a contradiction. Cutting taxes is core to the Republican mission, while the debt is a political tool used to bash Democrats and to justify welfare cuts. The media and the public just fell for the GOP ruse.
“History will not be kind to a president who, when it came time to confront our generation’s defining challenge, chose to duck and run,” Ryan said of Obama after the president once again criticized the House GOP budget in 2012.

How will Trump’s administration impact you?

But when it was his party controlling Congress and the White House, during a time of economic prosperity, when Washington has traditionally looked to realign the federal budget, Ryan didn’t shrink the deficit; he nearly doubled it, through a combination of spending increases and tax cuts. Legislation enacted since Trump took office will add $2.7 trillion to the national debt. The tax cuts and spending bills enacted in fiscal 2018 alone will widen 2019’s deficit by $445 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And the yearly deficit, which was $585 billion in fiscal 2016 ― the year Ryan took the speakership ― will be roughly $1 trillion when he leaves office.
War
When Ryan announced his retirement from Congress in April, he cheered the spending increases for the military that Republicans locked into spending agreements. Those Pentagon plus-ups, paired with domestic spending increases to appease Democrats, have ballooned the deficit.
In 2011, conservatives in Congress refused to go along with increases to spending or the debt ceiling without a plan to restrain the deficit. What they came up with was the Budget Control Act, which set caps for defense and nondefense spending for the next 10 years. Except lawmakers have refused to live by those caps. Congress has honored the spending limits exactly zero times. The Pentagon particularly seems unwilling to abide by the limits. And Republicans like Ryan cheer on the military budget increases, even as the Pentagon has never completed an audit.
Ryan entered the speakership by saying he wanted to pass a new Authorization for Use of Military Force. We’ve justified more than three dozen military operations in more than a dozen countries using the overly broad authorization from 2001.
“It would be a good sign for American foreign policy to have a new one updating our AUMF,” Ryan said in December 2015.
But he spent the next three years blocking a new AUMF, saying he wouldn’t allow debate on any bill that would restrict the ability of the military to fight.
Just last week, Ryan attached special instructions to a rule for the farm bill that would waive provisions in the War Powers Resolution so he could block debate on a resolution about U.S. support for a war in Yemen ― a war that has created what the United Nations called “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time.” An estimated 85,000 Yemeni children have died from starvation associated with the war, and an additional 17 million Yemenis are at risk of malnutrition.
Regular Order!
Ryan’s efforts to block debate on war are entirely consistent with his actions as speaker but totally inconsistent with his message as he took the gavel. He said he wanted to return to regular order, that he wanted to allow debate on bills and amendments on the House floor.
Instead, there was one open rule during the entirety of his speakership, meaning there was only one bill to which members could offer any amendment they wanted, as long as it pertained to the bill and wasn’t written on the fly. He oversaw what may go down as the most closed Congress of all time. And rather than address immigration or entitlement reform or war or guns or children being separated from their parents at the border or a bill protecting Robert Mueller’s investigation, Ryan was satisfied to use the House to pass uncontroversial bills renaming post offices or selling federal land to pump up the number of bills the House passed and Trump signed.
The Republican calls to read the bill ― calls that helped propel them to the majority in 2010 ― have been replaced with Ryan ramming through a 2,232-page bill funding the government 17 hours after leaders released the text. Amazingly, on the same day the House passed that bill, he said he had done “a phenomenal job” restoring regular order.
On Wednesday, Ryan took to the Great Hall in the Library of Congress for yet another goodbye speech. It was almost exactly three years since Ryan delivered a speech in that room at the beginning of his speakership. But what was supposed to be a farewell was really more of the same calls he made in the past for reform ― on debt, on immigration and on poverty.
As Vox recently remarked in a headline, “Paul Ryan really wishes the House speaker would fix immigration and the debt.” Ryan is the speaker who didn’t seem to realize that he had the power to do things, that he could do more than cut taxes and that achieving results would take more than grandiose speeches echoing hollowly through the Great Hall in the Library of Congress.
Poverty
One particular issue that Ryan simply seemed to give up on was poverty.
After the 2012 presidential election, when he was mocked for a soup kitchen photo op in which he seemed to be washing pots and pans that were already clean, Ryan launched himself into what he called a “poverty tour.” He traveled the country visiting nonprofit organizations that sought to rehabilitate poor people with criminal histories or drug problems.
He came up with a bunch of proposals that were basically a rebranding of welfare cuts, and he built his case for cutting assistance to the poor on a false claim: that the War on Poverty had failed.
That is all consistent with the Ryan we’ve all come to know. But one of the reasons he was able to con so many people for so long was that he wasn’t incapable of coming up with an interesting idea from time to time. He had elements of self-reflection and regret, like when he said in early 2016 that it was wrong of him to have used the frame “makers and takers.”
In 2014, instead of simply claiming that government programs that help poor people actually make them worse off ― and that therefore antipoverty spending should be cut ― Ryan did something different. He said the government should hire case managers who could work with poor people to create a “customized life plan to provide a structured roadmap out of poverty.”
Case management was the centerpiece of his proposal to reform the federal government’s antipoverty programs into an “opportunity grant.” The proposal and the poverty tour figured prominently in his 2014 book, “The Way Forward,” which is the type of book politicians write when they’re thinking about running for president. He portrayed poverty policy as a consistent area of concern during his career, ever since his days working as an aide to Jack Kemp, a former congressman who called himself a “bleeding-heart conservative.”
But commentators from both sides thought the idea of a “customized life plan” was weird. And so Ryan backed away. “We’re saying this is one of the things we recommend, but give the states the ability to try other ideas,” he told HuffPost in 2014.
After he became speaker and Trump became president, Ryan had a chance to make his poverty agenda a reality. Instead, he used his time and political capital trying to take health care from millions of poor people ― remember, the House GOP health care plan included $834 billion in cuts to Medicaid ― and then passing a tax cut. He gave up on poverty.
He said Wednesday that solving poverty will require “a great rethinking of how we help the most vulnerable among us.” And without a shred of self-awareness or irony, he urged his Republican colleagues to not “let this issue drift from your consciousness.”
The Myth Of Paul Ryan
The sincerity with which Paul Ryan believed in the myth of Paul Ryan was perhaps why it was so effective. During his speech Wednesday, he decried how outrage had become a “brand,” how we all needed to disregard “the noise.”
But what Ryan deems noise and what he thinks warrants outrage have a distinctly partisan slant. When Trump tweeted that he was considering revoking the security clearances of his political enemies, Ryan said Trump was “just trolling.” When Trump attacks fellow Republicans or when he lies outright or suggests breaking into the Democratic National Committee, that’s just to be ignored.
“All this stuff you see on a daily basis on Twitter this and Twitter that — forget about it,” Ryan said in October 2017.
Except that was not how Ryan treated Obama. Ryan said Obama was the nation’s worst president. Ryan relentlessly attacked Obama and took horrible offense during the 2011 speech in which Obama agreed that the nation needed to tackle entitlements.
In Bob Woodward’s telling, “Ryan felt betrayed. He’d expected an olive branch. What he got was the finger.”
What was the appalling criticism that Obama had made?
One of the most egregious insults was that Obama noted Ryan’s budget would transfer Medicare to a voucher system. “And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck — you’re on your own,” Obama said.
And how did the Congressional Budget Office describe Ryan’s budget? “Under the proposal, most elderly people who would be entitled to premium support payments would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.”
Obama wasn’t wrong, though he would later tell Woodward he thought he made a mistake by embarrassing Ryan. Obama had accurately described what Ryan’s proposal would do. Ryan was just upset that the reality of his budget didn’t measure up to his inflated self-image, of a man whose ideas transcend politics, of a should-be president delivering speeches at a prestigious university or in the marbled Great Hall of the Library of Congress.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

SURVEYS


Surveys are the current way that companies assess their products and services. This is not new device, it is just being done electronically. I have never been a big fan as the questions are parsed to get a specific answer rather than your opinion. I now use a method that I think gets to the heart of the questions. After you go through each of the  selections (usually a graphics shown as a row of boxes or circles numbered from 1 to 10) and have made your selection, a pop up will ask why you made that choice and there is a space to elaborate. I never elaborate, I just write in the following: “It what is deserved” , that is what’s appropriate for the question or that’s what is deserved”. I see no need to feed into questions that are skewed towards a certain outcome. Feel free to use these answers for your self.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

In Search Of A win


The loud and non factual utterances of this administration is beginning to be more like a rant from a know nothing leader. Billions for a great wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for was shot down as a budget item. The offer from Congress was money for more security not a wall that may not even cost 5 billion. Given that TOTUS is prone to “exaggeration” aka lies when will we reach the tipping point where his tweets are more entertainment than taken as fact? Taking troops out of Syria via tweet without consulting with allies and our military is another attempt to deliver on a campaign promise. This Resident has spent a ton of capital and trust in attempting to fulfill campaign promises that were unattainable even with full agreement from Congress and allies. TOTUS is gearing up for the 2020 election year which will see him out of office in spite of the stream of lies that will surely lead up to that election. TOTUS is looking for a big win to try to stay in office but many of his Congressional allies will no longer be around and will not jump into the boat with him. With the Mueller investigation moving closer to him and his family TOTUS is looking for any win that he believes will keep his base intact however the base is thinning due to activities which have created more economic hardships than they expected, according to  promises he has made. TOTUS’s track record as the Titular head of a major nation will possibly be recorded as one the worst in American history if observed through sensible eyes, this all follows his track record as a business man who operated in the same win at all costs way.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias


No Surprise here.MA
By Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder
Aug. 27, 2016
She seemed like the model tenant. A 33-year-old nurse who was living at the Y.W.C.A. in Harlem, she had come to rent a one-bedroom at the still-unfinished Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. She filled out what the rental agent remembers as a “beautiful application.” She did not even want to look at the unit.
There was just one hitch: Maxine Brown was black.
Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump.
“I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,’” Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.
It was late 1963 — just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act — and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his middle-class housing empire: seven 23-story towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island.
He was also grooming his heir. His son Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents’ home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur.
“His father was his idol,” Mr. Leibowitz recalled. “Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side.”
Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle.
The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants. It was front-page news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying of the government’s allegations.
In a 1973 court filing, Donald Trump denied allegations by the government that Trump Management had engaged in racial bias in its renting of apartments. The document was contained in the National Archives.
Aug. 27, 2016
Looking back, Mr. Trump’s response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle — as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier — he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients” and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.
When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt.
But an investigation by The New York Times — drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors — uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.
That history has taken on fresh relevance with Mr. Trump arguing that black voters should support him over Hillary Clinton, whom he has called a bigot.
While there is no evidence that Mr. Trump personally set the rental policies at his father’s properties, he was on hand while they were in place, working out of a cubicle in Trump Management’s Brooklyn offices as early as the summer of 1968.
Then and now, Mr. Trump has steadfastly denied any awareness of any discrimination at Trump properties. While Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, his general counsel, Alan Garten, said in a statement that there was “no merit to the allegations.” And there has been no suggestion of racial bias toward prospective residents in the luxury housing that Mr. Trump focused on as his career took off in Manhattan in the 1980s.
In the past, Mr. Trump has treated the case as a footnote in the narrative of his career. In his memoir “The Art of the Deal,” he dispensed with it in five paragraphs. And while stumping in Ohio, he even singled out his work at one of his father’s properties in Cincinnati, omitting that, at the time, the development was the subject of a separate discrimination lawsuit — one that included claims of racial slurs uttered by a manager whom Mr. Trump had personally praised.
As eager as he was to leave behind the working-class precincts of New York City where Fred Trump had made his fortune, Donald Trump often speaks admiringly of him, recalling what he learned at his father’s side when the Trump name was synonymous with utilitarian housing, not yet with luxury, celebrity, or a polarizing brand of politics.
“My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,” he said last year.
Coming Under Scrutiny
Fred Trump got into the housing business when he was in his early 20s, building a single-family home for a neighbor in Queens. During World War II, he constructed housing for shipyard workers and Navy personnel in Norfolk, Va. After the war, he returned to New York, setting his sights on bigger, more ambitious projects, realized with the help of federal government loans.
His establishment as one of the city’s biggest developers was hardly free of controversy: The Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed him in 1954 during an investigation into profiteering off federal housing loans. Under oath, he acknowledged that he had wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government.
In 1966, as the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett detailed in “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth,” a New York legislative committee accused Fred Trump of using state money earmarked for middle-income housing to build a shopping center instead. One lawmaker called Mr. Trump “greedy and grasping.”
By this point, the Trump organization’s business practices were beginning to come under scrutiny from civil rights groups that had received complaints from prospective African-American tenants.
People like Maxine Brown.
Mr. Leibowitz, the rental agent at the Wilshire, remembered Ms. Brown repeatedly inquiring about the apartment. “Finally, she realized what it was all about,” he said.
Ms. Brown’s first instinct was to let the matter go; she was happy enough at the Y.W.C.A. “I had a big room and two meals a day for five dollars a week,” she said in an interview.
But a friend, Mae Wiggins, who had also been denied an apartment at the Wilshire, told her that she ought to have her own place, with a private bathroom and a kitchen. She encouraged Ms. Brown to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, as she was doing.
“We knew there was prejudice in renting,” Ms. Wiggins recalled. “It was rampant in New York. It made me feel really bad, and I wanted to do something to right the wrong.”
Applying for Housing at a Trump Property in the ’60s
In the 1960s, Mae Wiggins and her friend Maxine Brown applied for housing at the Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. Ms. Wiggins recalled her experience.
Published On
Aug. 27, 2016
Mr. Leibowitz was called to testify at the commission’s hearing on Ms. Brown’s case. Asked to estimate how many blacks lived in Mr. Trump’s various properties, he remembered replying: “To the best of my knowledge, none.”
After the hearing, Ms. Brown was offered an apartment in the Wilshire, and in the spring of 1964, she moved in. For 10 years, she said, she was the only African-American in the building.
Complaints about the Trump organization’s rental policies continued to mount: By 1967, state investigators found that out of some 3,700 apartments in Trump Village, seven were occupied by African-American families.
Like Ms. Brown, the few minorities who did live in Trump-owned buildings often had to force their way in.
A black woman named Agnes Bunn recalled hearing in early 1970 about a vacant Trump apartment in another part of Queens, from a white friend who lived in the building. But when she went by, she was told there were no vacancies.
“The super came out and stood there until I left the property,” Ms. Bunn said.
Ms. Bunn testified about the experience at a meeting with the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1970. According to a summary, recovered from the New York City Municipal Archives, she told a Trump lawyer that it was known that no “colored” people were wanted as tenants in the building.
The lawyer concluded that the episode was “all a misunderstanding.” Ms. Bunn and her husband, a Manhattan accountant, soon became the building’s first black tenants.
Unlike the public schools, the housing market could not be desegregated simply by court order. Even after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, developments in white neighborhoods continued to rebuff blacks.
For years, it fell largely to local civil rights groups to highlight the problem by sending white “testers” into apartment complexes after blacks had been turned away.
“Everything was sort of whispers and innuendo and you wanted to try to bring it out into the open,” recalled Phyllis Kirschenbaum, who volunteered for Operation Open City, a housing rights advocacy organization. “I’d walk in with my freckles and red hair and Jewish name and get an apartment immediately.”
The complaints of discrimination were not limited to New York.
In 1969, a young black couple, Haywood and Rennell Cash, sued after being denied a home in Cincinnati at one of the first projects in which Donald Trump, fresh out of college, played an active role.
Mr. Cash was repeatedly rejected by the Trumps’ rental agent, according to court records and notes kept by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Cincinnati, which sent in white testers posing as a young couple while Mr. Cash waited in the car.
After the agent, Irving Wolper, offered the testers an apartment, they brought in Mr. Cash. Mr. Wolper grew furious, shoving them out of the office and calling the young female tester, Maggie Durham, a “nigger-lover,” according to court records.
“To this day I have not forgotten the fury in his voice and in his face,” Ms. Durham recalled recently, adding that she also remembered him calling her a “traitor to the race.”
The Cashes were ultimately offered an apartment.
At a campaign stop in Ohio recently, Mr. Trump shared warm memories of his time in Cincinnati, calling it one of the early successes of his career. And in “The Art of the Deal,” he praised Mr. Wolper, without using his surname, calling him a “fabulous man” and “an amazing manager.”
“Irving was a classic,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The young Mr. Trump also spent time in Norfolk, helping manage the housing complexes his father built there in the 1940s. Similar complaints of discrimination surfaced at those properties beginning in the mid-1960s, and were documented by Ellis James, an equal housing activist.
“The managers on site were usually not very sophisticated,” Mr. James, now 78, recalled. “Some were dedicated segregationists, but most of them were more concerned with following the policies they were directed to keep.”
Battling the Government
Donald Trump said he had first heard about the lawsuit, which was filed in the fall of 1973, on his car radio.
The government had charged him, his father and their company, Trump Management Inc., with violating the Fair Housing Act.
Another major New York developer, the LeFrak Organization, had been hit with a similar suit a few years earlier. Its founder, Samuel LeFrak, had appeared at a news conference alongside the United States attorney, trumpeting a consent agreement to prohibit discrimination in his buildings by saying it would “make open housing in our cities a reality.” The LeFrak company even offered the equivalent of one month’s rent to help 50 black families move into predominantly white buildings.
Donald Trump took a different approach. He retained Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting counsel, Roy Cohn, to defend him. Mr. Trump soon called his own news conference — to announce his countersuit against the government.
The government’s lawyers took as their starting point the years of research conducted by civil rights groups at Trump properties.
“We did our own investigation and enlarged the case,” said Elyse Goldweber, who as a young assistant United States attorney worked on the lawsuit, U.S.A. v. Trump.
A former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” on it — for “colored” — to any application filed by a black apartment-seeker.
The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a contempt-of-court charge against one of the prosecutors, accusing her of turning the investigation into a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The Trumps derided the lawsuit as a pressure tactic to get them to sign a consent decree like the one agreed to by Mr. LeFrak.
The judge dismissed both the countersuit and the contempt-of-court charge. After nearly two years of legal wrangling, the Trumps gave up and signed a consent decree.
As is customary, it did not include an admission of guilt. But it did include pages of stipulations intended to ensure the desegregation of Trump properties.
Equal housing activists celebrated the agreement as more robust than the one signed by Mr. LeFrak. It required that Trump Management provide the New York Urban League with a weekly list of all its vacancies.
This did not stop Mr. Trump from declaring victory. “In the end the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.”
Only this was not quite the end.
A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978.
Once again, the government marshaled numerous examples of blacks being denied Trump apartments. But this time, it also identified a pattern of racial steering.
While more black families were now renting in Trump-owned buildings, the government said, many had been confined to a small number of complexes. And tenants in some of these buildings had complained about the conditions, from falling plaster to rusty light fixtures to bloodstained floors.
The Trumps effectively wore the government down. The original consent decree expired before the Justice Department had accumulated enough evidence to press its new case.
The issue was becoming academic, anyway. New York’s white working-class population was shrinking. Shifting demographics would soon make it impractical to turn away black tenants.
By the spring of 1982, when the case was officially closed, Donald Trump’s prized project, Trump Tower, was just months from completion. The rebranding of the Trump name was well underway.
As for Ms. Brown, she still lives in the same apartment in the Wilshire.
Over the years, she has watched the building’s complexion begin to change — along with some of her neighbors’ attitudes toward her. During the 1990s, one man who used to step off the elevator whenever she stepped on suddenly started greeting her warmly.
On a recent afternoon, she reminisced about the unlikely role she played in breaking the color barrier of the Trump real estate empire.
“I just wanted a decent place to live,” she said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 27, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Trumpism


TOTUS is insisting on 5 billion dollars for a border wall when studies have shown that a physical wall is impractical as well as improbable. The Southern border is broken up by many terrain features that make a wall impossible, impractical and possibly illegal. All that being said the cost is a number that TOTUS possibly pulled out his butt as he has done on many of his building projects. TOTUS appears to believe that a huge number is a rational reason to invest in this wall (as he has done in his naming rights deals). Somehow the primitive brain sees bigger as a serious argument for an action no matter that facts dictate the opposite. If the “real Donald Trump” is as smart as he wants us to believe he is then why are we dealing with the raft of truth floating on a sea of lies? The fault lies with our 500 plus neer do wells who have politicized our government to the point of inaction and made a joke of the office. These seat fillers have made sure that their health care benefits continued while the ACA (Obamacare) languished under undue scrutiny leaving most Americans in  limbo for healthcare  coverage. Unknown to many Americans is the cost of living adjustment that Congress awards themselves by a law they enacted years ago while many of us get zip. This is the backstop that TOTUS enjoys in the name of “serving the people”. The 2 party system has left a void that allowed a ” Trump Presidency” to be in place much to the detriment of us all now and for some time to come. We should remember that government retirees in Washington will enjoy a better retirement than most voters due to their own self service and the “go along” attitude many adopted after being elected.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Slave Bible From The 1800s Omitted Key Passages That Could Incite Rebellion


This is excerpted from a NPR article. Full story can be found on the NPR website.MA

 

December 9, 20185:26 PM ET

Michel Martin

On display at Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves.
Museum of the Bible
On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves.
What’s notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation.
Anthony Schmidt, associate curator of Bible and Religion in America at the museum, says the first instance of this abridged version titled, Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands, was published in 1807.
“About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing,” Schmidt says. “Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232.”
Schmidt says passages that could have prompted rebellion were removed, for example:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28
And verses that reinforced the institution of slavery, including “the most famous pro-slavery verse that many pro-slavery people would have cited,” says Schmidt, were kept.
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” Ephesians 6:5
Anthony Schmidt, associate curator of Bible and Religion in America at the museum, says the first instance of the abridged version of the Bible titled, Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands, was published in 1807.
Museum of the Bible
National New Museum Invites Visitors To ‘Engage’ With The Bible
“It was intended for use among enslaved Africans in the British West Indies, which is modern day Caribbeans, so Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua,” he says.
Schmidt says there are several theories behind the editing and omitting of so much of the standard Bible, but the main thought stems from the fact that farmers in the West Indies were opposed to missionaries worked with the enslaved Africans on their land.
“This can be seen as an attempt to appease the planter class saying, ‘Look, we’re coming here. We want to help uplift materially these Africans here but we’re not going to be teaching them anything that could incite rebellion.’ ” Schmidt says. “Coming in and being able to educate African slaves would prepare them one day for freedom, but at the same time would not cause them to seek it more aggressively.”

Visitors are encouraged to write down and share their reactions, with prompts such as “What questions does the Slave Bible raise about how the Bible is used today?”
The Bible is on loan from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and has been in the museum since it opened in November 2017. The university says only three copies of this Bible are known to exist, and that the one on display in Washington is the only copy in the U.S.
Schmidt says the museum decided to create the exhibit, “The Slave Bible: Let the Story Be Told,” because of the attention visitors were already giving it the artifact.
“From the very beginning people have been shocked to see it,” Schmidt says. “It’s drawn a lot of interest. In fact, of all the items we have on display here it’s probably been the most talked about among our guests.”
While the exhibit tells the story of what’s inside the Bible, it also gives people a chance to reflect and respond to the material.
“One of the points of the exhibit is that time and place really shape how people encounter the Bible,” Schmidt says. “What I mean by that is people don’t look at the Bible or approach the Bible or read the Bible in a vacuum. They’re shaped by their social and economic context.”
‘Manuscripts’ Encourages Readers To Approach The Bible Like A Novel
As people come from a multitude of backgrounds, Schmidt says how they encounter the Bible can vary greatly from person to person and, as such, the exhibit will affect them all differently.
“I hope people take away a greater appreciation for that and maybe even a self-reflection to be more cognizant of why you read something a certain way,” he says. “If people can better appreciate that then maybe they can better empathize with others.”
NPR’s Robert Baldwin III and Elizabeth Baker produced and edited the audio for this story. Wynne Davis adapted it for digital.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Speed Of Rotation-Squared


Fastest revolving door in Washington. The current administration is in dire straits when it comes to keeping Chiefs of Staff. Newest “interim” Chief will be Mick Mulvaney who already has two (2) other jobs. Mulvaney’s accomplishments have been unremarkable to date so an additional job will be no promotion. I am curious as to  what Mick will be able to do in the new job as the TOTUS listens to no one (except FAUX news). With the hovering problems of immigration, healthcare, tax reform and the Mueller investigation, what is it that TOTUS thinks a new Chief will do for him again since he listens to no one (except his gut, which is suspect). There is no reason to believe there will be any changes in TOTUS’ actions or mindset of being the boss and dictating rather than leading. As we wind down the year we see out going Governors hobbling incoming Governors with new laws that restrict their ability to do the job and I wonder what TOTUS will try to do before he leaves office (one way or another).

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

The Madman Syndrome


It becomes clearer that TOTUS is as inept in the office as he has been rumored to be in business despite dubious superficial successes. The color of money and the flow of cash gives the impression of business acuity much like a failed rocket launch, it looks great on paper and lift off but unsustainable for the long run. The value of Trump enterprises is in naming rights and access. Essentially TOTUS is a facilitator rather than a builder. This could explain his erratic behavior in the office. In private life he can wave money around and get things done with no regard to end results but in Government it does not shake out the same. You should not drop or dump programs that affect millions for years to come and you really should not do it in business but greenbacks tend to mask the bad practices of the unscrupulous. This bowing to cash is a type of madness which inure the kowtower to the effects of their actions. This the path we have been set upon by this administration and by extension the neer do well Congress.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Circle The Wagons?


Nick Anderson Comic Strip for December 14, 2018

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate