Donald Trump’s history and record are filled with failed business ventures — from casinos to Trump University, and now, his presidency.
Want to stop the chaos? The solution is to vote.
Make your plan to vote at makeaplan.com
CDA, City, Development, Government Spending, Local Government, Poverty, WEDC
Whitewater Common Council Meeting, 10.20.20: Basics and Buildings
by JOHN ADAMS •
The Whitewater Common Council met briefly last night, 10.20.20. The agenda for the meeting is available, and a recording of the session appears above.
Two different topics are worth noting (for different reasons): autumn leaf collection and a building rehabilitation project.
A few remarks —
1. Leaf collection. The city has many homes & apartments, the homes & apartments have yards, the yards have trees, and as most trees shed their leaves in the fall, the city collects bagged leaves from residents’ yards. (Video, 08:55.) It’s a government service, but a small, innocuous, helpful one. In a time of walls and cages and paramilitary federal agents, leaf collection is more than a service – its a kind of balm.
If all government were so small and simple – and it is not – one would have far fewer concerns.
2. A Community Development Investment Grant from the WEDC. Council unanimously approved a grant application for the rehabilitation of a commercial building at 183 W. Main Street (the storefront shop at that location sells antiques). (Video, 12:00.) The grant covers a portion of the rehabilitation cost.
In the video embedded above, slides show the expected difference between the current building and an architect’s rendering of a rehabilitated one – if the finished work looks as illustrated, it will be a significant improvement.
If there men and women outside the city who wish to rehabilitate properties, they should be encouraged to do so. If there are people who outside the city who have rehabilitated nearly a dozen properties, they should be encouraged to look at a dozen more. (Whitewater does not lack for properties in need.)
It is a measure of our unfortunate local condition that we’ve not a market strong enough to encourage private investment without government grants.
It is a measure of our unfortunate local own condition that we’ve not more local developers doing something like this.
It is a measure of decades-long failure that since its founding in 1983 the Whitewater Community Development Authority has not ‘developed’ this market so that individual and household incomes would be closer to the national average (rather than low-income across many demographics), allowing – among many things – that Whitewater’s own residents would be able to undertake more projects of rehabilitation in their own city.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 10.21.20
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 6:01 PM, for 10h 44m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 28.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1897, Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay is dedicated.
Recommended for reading in full —
Mike McIntire, Russ Buettner, and Susanne Craig report Trump Records Shed New Light on Chinese Business Pursuits (‘As he raises questions about his opponent’s standing with China, President Trump’s taxes reveal details about his own activities there, including a previously unknown bank account’):
But Mr. Trump’s own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company.
And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.
The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.
(Trump has paid far more in taxes to China than on many years of his United States federal income tax return.)
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Craig Timberg report Threatening emails reportedly sent to Democratic voters in three swing states, sparking investigations:
Authorities in Florida and Alaska on Tuesday were investigating threatening emails sent to Democratic voters that claimed to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group supportive of President Trump, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making use of a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.
The emails, which appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as “voter files,” told recipients the group was “in possession of all your information” and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.
“You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,” warned the emails, which by Tuesday night were said to have reached voters in four states, three of them hotly contested swing states in the coming presidential election.
The emails were reported in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida and Alaska. Only Alaska is not a major focus of the presidential campaign, but it does have a closely watched race for the U.S. Senate.
How Amazon Prime Day drove record numbers for third-party sellers:
more >>Biden-Harris
Better Future
by JOHN ADAMS •
Bad Ideas, Boosterism, Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Foxconn, Gov. Walker, Government Spending, Speaker Vos, State Capitalism, Taxes/Taxation, Technology, Trump, WEDC, Wisconsin, WISGOP
Highlight’s from The Verge’s Foxconn Assessment
by JOHN ADAMS •
No failure better reveals the bankruptcy of corporate welfare in the Walker and Trump years than the Foxconn project in Wisconsin: exaggeration upon exaggeration, but nothing productive. This was a failure of judgment so obvious and significant that everyone involved should retire from policymaking. Walker Administration, Trump Administration, the WISGOP, the WEDC, down to Whitewater’s Community Development Authority, and her business lobby the Greater Whitewater Committee: a brimming basket of buffoonery.
National reporting on Foxconn at The Verge has been excellent, and Josh Dzieza’s exhaustive Inside the empty promises and empty buildings of Wisconn Valley is worth reading in full. Below, I’ve republished their Twitter summary of the story. The nine-tweet Twitter thread begins on 10.19.20 @ 9:09 AM:
President Trump struck a deal with Foxconn that promised to turn Wisconsin into a tech manufacturing powerhouse in exchange for billions in tax subsidies. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will
….
Foxconn had said it would build a 20-million-square-foot LCD complex in Wisconsin. Instead, it constructed an empty building 1/20th that size
….
The company said it would aim to employ 5,200 people at the end of this year, a number that was to grow to 13,000. At the end of 2019, Wisconsin found it employed only 281 people eligible under the terms of the contract
….
Foxconn attempted to exploit a loophole in its contract with the state by hiring a sufficient number of employees to receive subsidies just before the end of the year. Employees were hired with no actual work to do. Many were laid off after the deadline passed
….
Employees describe a toxic workplace, where supervisors often berated and publicly humiliated employees. Many of the original Wisconsin hires have quit or been laid off
….
Despite publicly insisting it was building an LCD factory, as early as 2018 Foxconn employees had been asked to figure out a business plan for the company in Wisconsin. Records show Foxconn recently changed the intended use of its factory from manufacturing to storage
….
Foxconn’s search for a viable business led it to consider everything from fish farming to exporting dairy to renting storage space. Almost every idea collapsed in corporate infighting and a reluctance to spend money
….
Very little manufacturing ever occurred with the Foxconn project. The company has started a small manufacturing line making servers, and now says it is making ventilators, but no employees or state officials could say whether any have been produced
….
In the end, the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is the physical manifestation of the alternate reality that has defined the Trump administration
Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers, Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition, Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, Foxconn Confirm Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation Discussion, America’s Best Know Better, Despite Denials, Foxconn’s Empty Buildings Are Still Empty, Right on Schedule – A Foxconn Delay, Foxconn: Reality as a (Predictable) Disappointment, Town Residents Claim Trump’s Foxconn Factory Deal Failed Them, Foxconn: Independent Study Confirms Project is Beyond Repair, It Shouldn’t, Foxconn: Wrecking Ordinary Lives for Nothing, Hey, Wisconsin, How About an Airport-Coffee Robot?, Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!, Foxconn: First In, Now Out, Foxconn on the Same Day: Yes…um, just kidding, we mean no, Foxconn: ‘Innovation Centers’ Gone in a Puff of Smoke, Foxconn: Worse Than Nothing, Foxconn: State of Wisconsin Demands Accountability, Foreign Corporation Stalls, Foxconn Notices the Noticeable, Journal Sentinel’s Rick Romell Reports the Obvious about Foxconn Project, Foxconn’s ‘Innovation’ Centers: Still Empty a Year Later, Foxconn & UW-Madison: Two Years and Less Than One Percent Later…, andAccountability Comes Calling at Foxconn.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 10.20.20
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will mostly cloudy a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 6:02 PM, for 10h 47m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1856, Frederick Douglass speaks in Beaver Dam on the brutality and immorality of slavery.
Recommended for reading in full —
Timothy O’Brien writes Trump’s Taxes Show He’s a National Security Threat:
Amy Qin reports In China, the Formidable Prosecutor Turned Lonely Rights Defender (‘After sheltering a prominent dissident, Yang Bin, a former prosecutor, is now under the scrutiny of the police. But she has no regrets’):
Yang Bin was at home when two dozen Chinese police surrounded her house and entered, searching for the man she had recently taken in as a houseguest. Filing in quickly, the officers found their suspect upstairs and arrested him, ending a weekslong manhunt.
The police also detained Ms. Yang for questioning. They wanted to know how Xu Zhiyong, one of China’s most outspoken government critics, had come to find refuge with her, a Communist Party member and former government prosecutor.
For Ms. Yang, the turn of events came with no small irony. In her old job, she had escorted death row prisoners to a police station near the one in which she was being interrogated, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. This time she was regarded as a suspect, and the police had also taken her husband and 20-year-old son.
“Even though I was being questioned like a criminal, I knew in my heart I hadn’t done anything wrong,” Ms. Yang, 50, who was later released with her family, said in a recent telephone interview from her home on Seagull Island, a rural area on the outskirts of Guangzhou. “When many people look at the system, they see its strength. When I look at it, I see only its fragility.”
France’s famous monument, Mont-Saint-Michel is cut off from the world:
more >>Authoritarianism, Bigotry, Conflicts of Interest, Gluttony, Grifters, Never Trump, Seven Deadly, Trump, Unfit
Transfer
by JOHN ADAMS •
Music
Monday Music: Dave Brubeck Quartet Performs The Trolley Song
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 10.19.20
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will partly cloudy a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:08 PM, for 10h 49m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1781, America and France are victorious at the Battle of Yorktown.
Recommended for reading in full —
Heather Long, Andrew Van Dam, Alyssa Fowers, and Leslie Shapiro report The covid-19 recession is the most unequal in modern U.S. history:
The economic collapse sparked by the pandemic is triggering the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history, delivering a mild setback for those at or near the top and a depression-like blow for those at the bottom, according to a Washington Post analysis of job losses across the income spectrum.
Recessions often hit poorer households harder, but this one is doing so at a scale that is the worst in generations, the analysis shows.
While the nation overall has regained nearly half of the lost jobs, several key demographic groups have recovered more slowly, including mothers of school-age children, Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, Asian Americans, younger Americans (ages 25 to 34) and people without college degrees.
….
The recession’s inequality is a reflection of the coronavirus itself, which has caused more deaths in low-income communities and severely affected jobs in restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues as Americans try to avoid crowded places to protect their own health and slow the spread of the virus. Jobs in these places typically pay, on average, $17 an hour and were overwhelmingly held by women and people of color.
No other recession in modern history has so pummeled society’s most vulnerable. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 caused similar job losses across the income spectrum, as Wall Street bankers and other white-collar workers were handed pink slips alongside factory and restaurant workers. The 2001 recession was more unequal than the Great Recession: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, travel and tourism jobs vanished and low-wage employment fell 7 percent below the previous year’s level, while high earners remained largely unscathed. Yet, even that inequality is a blip compared with what the coronavirus inflicted on low-wage workers this year.
Megan Garber writes How Fox News Became a Language:
The leader and the news network speak, and enforce, the same language. Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox’s banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances—in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. “People think he’s calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show tells Stelter. “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”
But the manipulation flows in both directions. At Fox, Stelter reports, executives live in fear of angering the opinion hosts, who in turn live in fear of angering viewers—who of course have been made angrier by the hosts themselves. A former producer tells Stelter: “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.” Stelter’s sources describe “a TV network that has gone off the rails,” he writes. “Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had become dangerous to democracy.” A well-known commentator on the network tells Stelter: “They are lying about things we are seeing with our own eyes.”
Science under Trump: Four key moments:
more >>Joe Biden, Never Trump, Trump
Promise?
by JOHN ADAMS •
Donald Trump says he’ll never come back to states like Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina— even America itself if he loses. We can think of worse things.
Make sure you have your plan to vote Biden-Harris this election by visiting http://www.makeaplan.com
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 10.18.20
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 6:05 PM, for 10h 52m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.
Recommended for reading in full —
The New York Times editorial board writes End Our National Crisis (‘The Case Against Donald Trump’):
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.
Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.
The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.
Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.
The resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first term. Four more years would be worse.
But even as Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the courts or even on the streets.
The enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.
It is the purpose of this special section of the Sunday Review to remind readers why Mr. Trump is unfit to lead the nation. It includes a series of essays focused on the Trump administration’s rampant corruption, celebrations of violence, gross negligence with the public’s health and incompetent statecraft. A selection of iconic images highlights the president’s record on issues like climate, immigration, women’s rights and race.
The urgency of these essays speaks for itself. The repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first step in repairing the damage he has done. But even as we write these words, Mr. Trump is salting the field — and even if he loses, reconstruction will require many years and tears.
Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history.
Coronavirus: what has changed about what we know?:
more >>Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 10.17.20
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:07 PM, for 10h 55m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1931, Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion.
Recommended for reading in full —
Matt Wilstein reports Obama [and Reagan] Photographer Pete Souza Exposes Trump’s ‘Obviously’ Staged Pics (‘Pete Souza breaks down what working for Reagan and Obama taught him about Trump’s “disastrous” presidency’):
As soon as Pete Souza saw the photos of President Donald Trump “working” from Walter Reed hospital earlier this month, he knew something was off.
“They were obviously posed pictures,” Souza, who worked as chief White House photographer under both President Barack Obama and President Ronald Reagan, tells me by email a couple of weeks after our longer conversation below about his new documentary The Way I See It, which will premiere commercial-free on MSNBC this Friday night at 10 p.m. ET.
Aside from the seemingly blank sheet of paper Trump can be seen signing in one of the photos, released by the White House in an attempt to prove the president was hard at work, one intrepid reporter determined that another photo, in which Trump is wearing a different outfit, was taken just 10 minutes later.
Comparing them to photos he personally took of Reagan in the hospital after he was shot by a would-be assassin in 1981, Souza says, “The pictures I made of President Reagan in the hospital were authentic and unposed, unstaged photographs.”
Asked why Americans should be outraged about all of the obfuscation by the White House over the reality of Trump’s illness, Souza replies, “I’d pose that question to any of the 215,000 families that have lost a loved one from COVID.”
Dan Alexander reports Donald Trump Has At Least $1 Billion In Debt, More Than Twice The Amount He Suggested:
No aspect of Donald Trump’s business has been the subject of more speculation than his debt load. Lots of people believe the president owes $400 million, especially after Trump seemed to agree with that figure on national televisionThursday night. In reality, however, he owes more than $1 billion.
The loans are spread out over more than a dozen different assets—hotels, buildings, mansions and golf courses. Most are listed on the financial disclosure report Trump files annually with the federal government. Two, which add up to an estimated $447 million, are not.
….
One reason for all the confusion: Trump’s loans are not fully transparent. It’s still unclear to whom he owes an estimated $162 million against his skyscraper in San Francisco, for example. The loan against 1290 Avenue of the Americas is also something of a mystery. And it’s difficult to pin down the amount the president owes on a loan tied to his Bedford, New York, mansion. When asked about all of this, the Trump Organization did not respond.
Video from Space – Highlights for the Week of Oct.11, 2020:
more >>Federal Government, Housing, Poverty
Frontline: Poverty, Politics and Profit (Full Film)
by JOHN ADAMS •
FRONTLINE and NPR investigate the billions spent on affordable housing, and why so few get the help they need.
In a nine-month investigation that takes FRONTLINE and NPR from Dallas to Miami, NPR’s Laura Sullivan and FRONTLINE’s Rick Young find that just one in four households eligible for Section 8 assistance are getting it, and the nation’s signature low-income housing construction program is costing more and producing less. The team investigates the inseparability of race and housing programs in America, tracing a legacy of segregation and discrimination that began more than 80 years ago.
Cats, Nature
Friday Catblogging: A Cougar in Utah
by JOHN ADAMS •
Anastasia Tsioulcas reports Man Escapes Cougar: ‘Dude, I Don’t Feel Like Dying Today’:
Twenty-six-year-old Kyle Burgess was on a 10-mile run on Saturday up Slate Canyon in Provo, Utah. He told the Deseret News that when he saw four cougar cubs on the trail, he took out his phone and started filming.
But when Burgess saw the young animals’ mother come along, he knew he was in trouble. For the next six minutes, he recorded their encounter.
The mother cougar followed him — hissing, growling and threatening — as Burgess backed away, keeping his eyes locked on her. Mostly, he alternated between yelling a stream of profanities at the mother mountain lion and calling the animal “dude.”
“Dude, you’re scary!” Burgess tells the animal at one point, adding: “You’re a (bleep) scary kitty cat.” A few minutes later, after she repeatedly lunges in Burgess’ direction, he says, “Come on, dude, I don’t feel like dying today.”
But see The cougar in that viral video looked scary, but experts say the runner was safe:
Burgess didn’t get close to the young, but his presence probably set mom off. “Mothers of any animal species become aggressive when protecting their young,” San Bernardino National Forest wildlife biologist Angelica Mendoza wrote in an email. “The lioness in the video was just trying to get the hiker (whom she considered a threat) as far away from her cubs as possible.”
The mountain lion immediately put herself between her young and Burgess and, early in the encounter, more than once looked back in the direction of the kittens because she was concerned about their safety, Riley said.
Beth Schaefer, director of animal programs at the L.A. Zoo, called the mountain lion’s actions typical “escorting behavior” aimed at scaring Burgess. The pounces and jumps the lion made when Burgess bent over to grab a rock, called mock or bluff charges, are something big cats don’t do when they’re going in for a kill.