Sunday, October 11, 2020

Coronavirus News (267)

Top Companies 2019: Where the U.S. wants to work now  

चीनसँगको आपूर्ति खल्बलियो, व्यापार सिद्धान्तविपरीत आयातमा कोटा व्यापारमा चीनको सन्देश– कोरोना देखिए तुरुन्तै नाका सिल

The Swamp That Trump Built A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration. .......... But Mr. Trump did not merely fail to end Washington’s insider culture of lobbying and favor-seeking. He reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign. ...................  As president-elect, he had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he built a system of direct presidential influence-peddling unrivaled in modern American politics. ............ large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades. ........... But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. ...............  avowed small-government activists and contractors seeking billions from ever-fattening federal budgets ......... Sometimes, he lined up his donors to ask what they needed from the government. ........ The president has visited his resorts and hotels on nearly 400 days since his inauguration .......... At Mar-a-Lago, he told longtime members that he ought to raise prices on the new crowd angling to join. Then he did — at least twice — bringing the initiation fee to a quarter-million dollars, according to a membership application. ...............  and put his eldest sons at the helm of the Trump Organization, promising they would not discuss business with him. Those promises were quickly broken. ............  “Are we full on the outside patio?” he would ask ...............  During meals, people would line up at his table. Guests, even paying members, had a habit of thanking Mr. Trump for having them over. ...................   “I give to everybody,” he explained at a Republican primary debate in 2015. “When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them — they are there for me.”   

HOW REALITY-TV FAME HANDED TRUMP A $427 MILLION LIFELINE  Tax records show that “The Apprentice” rescued Donald J. Trump, bringing him new sources of cash and a myth that would propel him to the White House. ...............   “I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills and I worked it all out,” he told viewers. “Now, my company is bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.” It was all a hoax. Months after that inaugural episode in January 2004, Mr. Trump filed his individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year. The red ink spilled from everywhere, even as American television audiences saw him as a savvy business mogul with the Midas touch. ....................  Mr. Trump’s genius, it turned out, wasn’t running a company. It was making himself famous — Trump-scale famous — and monetizing that fame. .............  he earned some $197 million directly from “The Apprentice” over 16 years — roughly in line with what he has claimed — they also reveal that an additional $230 million flowed from the fame associated with it. ............. And there were schemes that exploited misplaced trust in the TV version of Mr. Trump, who, off camera, peddled worthless get-rich-quick nostrums like “Donald Trump Way to Wealth” seminars that promised initiation into “the secrets and strategies that have made Donald Trump a billionaire.” ................  Just as, years before, the money Mr. Trump secretly received from his father allowed him to assemble a wobbly collection of Atlantic City casinos and other disparate enterprises that then collapsed around him, the new influx of cash helped finance a buying spree that saw him snap up golf resorts, a business not known for easy profits. Indeed, the tax records show that his golf properties have been hemorrhaging millions of dollars for years. ...............  Unlocking the mysteries of Mr. Trump’s wealth has been attempted many times with varying degrees of success — an exercise made difficult by the opaque nature of his businesses, his penchant for exaggerations and lies, and his willingness to threaten or sue those who question his rosy narratives. He has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain secrecy, most notably his refusal to honor 40 years of presidential tradition and release his tax returns. ...............  and $15,286,244 from licensing his name to a line of mattresses. ...............  his personality-based and fact-bending presidency. ............. On his income tax returns, he reported annual net losses throughout the 1990s, some of it carried forward year to year, a tide that would swell to $352.8 million at the end of 2002. ..................  Some of Mr. Burnett’s staff members wondered how a wealthy businessman supposedly running a real estate empire could spare the time, but they soon discovered that not everything in Mr. Trump’s world was as it appeared. ............ “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture,” Bill Pruitt, one of the producers, told The New Yorker in 2018. “We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.” ............ But the ratings success of “The Apprentice,” and the advertising dollars it generated, quickly pushed him into the unfamiliar position of declaring positive adjusted gross income on his I.R.S. Form 1040. After netting $11.9 million from the show in its first year, he really hit the jackpot in 2005 with $47.8 million, the tax records show. He made so much that over three years he paid a total of $70.1 million in income taxes (later refunded, with interest, via an aggressive accounting maneuver now under audit). ...................... an unusual arrangement that entitled him, as the show’s star, to half its profits .......... money from product placements on each episode that sometimes numbered more than 100 a month, with household names like Pepsi paying millions of dollars ............... Mr. Trump was not terribly discriminating in his choice of endorsements. He slapped his name on everything from steaks and vodka to a board game and cologne. For the benefit of “consumers interested in experiencing the Trump lifestyle at an affordable price,” as a news release put it, he signed a licensing deal with the Serta mattress company that eventually netted him more than $15 million. Another $15 million would pour in from Trump neckties, shirts and underwear by clothiers like Phillips-Van Heusen. .............. With his penchant for using what he called “truthful hyperbole” to play on people’s desires, Mr. Trump had always skated close to the edge of fraud. Soon, he would be accused of crossing the line completely. ................   The first year of “The Apprentice” was barely over when Mr. Trump pocketed $300,000 to speak at an event in Dayton, Ohio, where attendees paid $2,995 to learn the secrets of instant wealth from a company that was later accused in a lawsuit of running a Ponzi scheme. ...............  In his monologues, he made a virtue of his first round of casino failures, portraying himself as a victim whose grit and intelligence saved the day. People ate it up. “His presence gives me reassurance,” Lillie Moss, who raided her retirement fund to buy an investment kit at the Dayton event, said of Mr. Trump. ............ By the time Mr. Trump featured ACN’s video phone on “The Apprentice” in 2011, the technology was close to obsolete, and yet he played it up, saying, “I think the ACN video phone is amazing.” ............. In 2016, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle litigation over Trump University, an unaccredited seminar that persuaded people to pay as much as $35,000 to learn the real estate trade. ............. the company, right from the start, went looking for financing from Russia to pay for its Trump-branded hotels. ............ he could find easy profits from licensing his name not only to neckties and bedding but to entire buildings — and use the TV show to market them. ............ between licensing and management fees, Trump companies involved in the project ultimately netted as much as $9 million, even though they did not build or finance it. ............ Because of how the licensing agreements were drafted, with sizable fees up front, Mr. Trump stood to gain even if a project failed. Of the 10 “future properties” initially listed on the hotel collection’s website, three never got off the ground, and five others either were not completed or later severed ties with Mr. Trump. Yet he still managed to collect a total of $46 million from them. ................   And buyers of units in a planned Trump condo-hotel in Mexico were burned after putting up some $32 million in deposits, only to see the project canceled with no refunds. In a lawsuit that was eventually settled, some of the buyers claimed they had been duped into believing Mr. Trump was an active participant in the project. .............. “We’re like a hotel company, Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons or Waldorf Astoria,” Mr. Trump said. “We are a name.” .............  golf — a pastime that he “spent an inordinate amount of time on” ....... always seemed destined to become his next financial sand trap ............ “I have the best buildings in Manhattan. I have the best casinos in New Jersey. I build a great product,” Mr. Trump boasted to a reporter in 2002. “I actually have more fun building courses than I do playing.” ............. During a three-year period starting in 2014, he pumped $144.5 million into his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, his tax returns show, even as the property has continued booking losses year after year. He has put $213 million into his Doral resort in Florida, with similar results. ......... In 2012, he borrowed $100 million against his equity in Trump Tower in Manhattan, one of his more valuable properties. A year later, he withdrew $95.8 million from his share of a real estate partnership that owns buildings in New York and California. And in 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds. .............  he has huge balances on loans, soon to come due, from Deutsche Bank, including $160 million on his Washington hotel in the Old Post Office building and $148 million on the Doral golf resort. Neither of those businesses is turning a profit. ............ he is a man politically and financially challenged. ..........  After he announced his candidacy in 2015 with racist comments about Mexicans, NBC, which carried “The Apprentice,” cut ties with him and he sold his interest in the Miss Universe pageant, another reliable moneymaker. Hotel licensing deals have mostly dried up. 





Saturday, October 10, 2020

Coronavirus News (266)

NYC positive rate highest since June

Top Companies 2019: Where the U.S. wants to work now

LinkedIn Top Startups 2020: The 10 Indian companies on the rise

How Oregonians Survived the Fires  


‘It’s Not in My Head’: They Survived the Coronavirus, but They Never Got Well With seven million known cases of the coronavirus across the country, more people are suffering from symptoms that go on and on.

The Rise of Remote Work Can Be Unexpectedly Liberating What if you are better off without the office? ........  What if a more disconnected work force leads to changes that could make employees happier and companies more compassionate? .......... We’re now seeing the cracks, as employers and employees start to voice their concerns about the long-term, isolating impact of remote work. ........... “It’s hard to reproduce the magic,” he told me. “People don’t want to spend any more time connecting over video chat than they have to.”  ......... an unexpected liberation, encouraging workers to look beyond the workplace to build friendships and identity. ........... Why not try something entirely new, like going for a walk in the middle of the day, or participating in social activism or a protest during typical work hours, as millions of Americans have done this summer? ......... I know I split my day differently now, sometimes having lunch with my husband and kids at noon, or starting work much earlier or later depending on what I need to get done that day. 

IRS: Claim Your $1,200 Stimulus Check By November 21

Vladimir Putin Thinks He Can Get Away With Anything Why has the poisoning of Alexei Navalny been met with Western silence?

At Climate Week, America’s Cascading Disasters Dominate This year’s events come amid a climate reckoning in the world’s richest country. Here are the takeaways. ..... When asked recently about the links between global warming and the fires racing across California, President Trump said, “I don’t think science knows,” even though scientists say the connection is inextricable.  The Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., responded by calling him a “climate arsonist.”  ..... around half of all the planet-warming gases produced between 1990 (when the first United Nations climate report was published) and 2015 (when the Paris climate accord was reached) came from the world’s richest 10 percent. ......... Mr. Trump rejects climate science, has pulled the United States out of the Paris accord, an international agreement designed to slow down temperature rise and avert the worst climate impacts, and rolled back a series of environmental regulations. His challenger, Mr. Biden, has promised to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement and proposed to invest $2 trillion to address climate change by, among other things, spurring the development of clean energy infrastructure.  


What We Know About Coronavirus Cases on Campus