In Search of the Perfect Investment

I’m sticking my neck out. I believe our president Donald Trump is in hock to Russian oligarchs and possibly Putin for many billions of dollars. I believe Russia also has compromising material on him.

I believe that mention of Ukraine was removed from the Republican platform by the Trump team because of the loans and the compromising material.

I believe that in coming weeks, Mr. Trump will remove the sanctions we put on Russia because of their invasion of Eastern Ukraine and their theft of Crimea from Ukraine. The sanctions have been hurting the fine citizens of Russia, but the oligarchs and Putin have been hurting far more.

I believe Putin’s goal is to strengthen Russia by weakening both the U.S. and NATO, and occupying those parts of Estonia, Latvia and Belarus, which adjoin Russia.

I believe Putin is the richest person in the world, possibly worth as much as $100 billion, and would like more. Putin would also like to run Russia for another 18 years — key to which is his success at foreign occupying ventures (like stealing Crimea) — which are perceived well by the Russian people.

As a dictator, his fear is a popular uprising, topped by a coup and his assassination. Hence, he needs to launder much of his money — so in exile (if he gets out alive) he can be comfortable. Donald Trump’s many business ventures are helpful in laundering his money.

What happens next? That’s the difficult part. If he succeeds in busting NATO apart and getting Britain and France to leave the EU, are we likely to have a Third World War? No. Are we likely to put the world into recession and our stockmarket down the toilet? Yes. Is this likely to happen soon? No.

Putin is  a master spymaster. That’s his training. He can hack. He can fund political parties he likes. He can curry favors with billions of dollars. And, so long as he deals decisively with political opponents (exiling, jailing or killing them), he can hang around for a long, long time, making mischief. He’s only 64. And he’s clearly having fun.

I don’t want to leave you with a big reading or viewing list. Turn on any TV channel. Every day we find out a little more. This is long ongoing saga.

Meantime, here’s a fascinating piece from the March 13, 2017 issue of the New Yorker. Please read it before you dismiss it as dishonest left-wing media. (The media Trump is vilifying.) The reporter did a lot of research, including a 9-day visit to Baku.

Donald Trump’s worst deal

The Trump Tower Baku never opened. Trump partnered with an Azerbaijani family that U.S. officials called notoriously unethical.

Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork.

As you approach the city center, a tower at the end of the avenue looms in front of you. Thirty-three stories high and curved to resemble a sail, the building was clearly inspired by the Burj Al Arab Hotel, in Dubai, but it is boxier and less elegant. When I visited Baku, in December, five enormous white letters glowed at the top of the tower: T-R-U-M-P.

The building, a five-star hotel and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, has never opened, though from the road it looks ready to welcome the public. Reaching the property is surprisingly difficult; the tower stands amid a welter of on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses. During the nine days I was in town, I went to the site half a dozen times, and on each occasion I had a comical exchange with a taxi-driver who had no idea which combination of turns would lead to the building’s entrance.

The more time I spent in the neighborhood, the more I wondered how the hotel could have been imagined as a viable business. The development was conceived, in 2008, as a high-end apartment building. In 2012, after Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project, plans were made to transform the tower into an “ultra-luxury property.” According to a Trump Organization press release, a hotel with “expansive guest rooms” would occupy the first thirteen floors; higher stories would feature residences with “spectacular views of the city and Caspian Sea.” For an expensive hotel, the Trump Tower Baku is in an oddly unglamorous location: the underdeveloped eastern end of downtown, which is dominated by train tracks and is miles from the main business district, on the west side of the city. Across the street from the hotel is a discount shopping center; the area is filled with narrow, dingy shops and hookah bars. Other hotels nearby are low-budget options: at the AYF Palace, most rooms are forty-two dollars a night. There are no upscale restaurants or shops. Any guests of the Trump Tower Baku would likely feel marooned.

The timing of the project was also curious. By 2014, when the Trump Organization publicly announced that it was helping to turn the tower into a hotel, a construction boom in Baku had ended, and the occupancy rate for luxury hotels in the city hovered around thirty-five per cent. Jan deRoos, of Cornell University, who is an expert in hotel finance, told me that the developer of a five-star hotel typically must demonstrate that the project will maintain an average occupancy rate of at least sixty per cent for ten years. There is a long-term master plan to develop the area around the Trump Tower Baku, but if it is implemented the hotel will be surrounded for years by noisy construction projects, making it even less appealing to travellers desiring a luxurious experience-especially considering that there are many established hotels on the city’s seaside promenade. There, an executive from ExxonMobil or the Israeli cell-phone industry can stay at the Four Seasons, which occupies a limestone building that evokes a French colonial palace, or at the J. W. Marriott Abershon Baku, which has an outdoor terrace overlooking the water. Tiffany, Ralph Lauren, and Armani are among the dozens of companies that have boutiques along the promenade.

A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”

The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

The Trump Tower Baku originally had a construction budget of a hundred and ninety-five million dollars, but it went through multiple revisions, and the cost ended up being much higher. The tower was designed by a local architect, and in its original incarnation it had an ungainly roof that suggested the spikes of a crown. A London-based architecture firm, Mixity, redesigned the building, softening its edges and eliminating the ornamental roof. By the time the Trump team officially joined the project, in May, 2012, many condominium residences had already been completed; at the insistence of Trump Organization staffers, most of the building’s interior was gutted and rebuilt, and several elevators were added. …

To read the rest of this fascinating article, click here.

Watch Stephen Colbert explain our new budget:

You’ll die laughing. Click here.

Watch Alec Baldwin play Donald Trump:

Click here.

My favorite music video has been seen two billion times. Taylor Swift in Shake It Off

Taylor Swift targets 15 to 30-year old girls who have bad experiences with boys (i.e. all of them).

In this song, she counsels girls to shake off hurt feelings. My tennis coach also tells me to “shake it off” when I miss a ball.

Play the video by clicking here. Follow the words here:

Shake It Off by Taylor Swift

I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain
That’s what people say, that’s what people say
I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay
At least that’s what people say, that’s what people say

But I keep cruising
Can’t stop, won’t stop moving
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Saying it’s gonna be alright

Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

I never miss a beat, I’m lightning on my feet
And that’s what they don’t see, that’s what they don’t see
I’m dancing on my own, I make the moves up as I go
And that’s what they don’t know, that’s what they don’t know

But I keep cruising
Can’t stop, won’t stop grooving
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Saying it’s gonna be alright
Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off

Hey, hey, hey!
Just think while you’ve been getting down and out about the liars
And dirty, dirty cheats of the world you could’ve been getting down to this sick beat

My ex-man brought his new girlfriend
She’s like, “oh my God”, but I’m just gonna shake
And to the fella over there with the hella good hair
Won’t you come on over, baby, we can shake, shake, shake

Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I shake it off, I shake it off

According to Forbes, Taylor Swift earned $170 million in 2016.

Shake off your disappointment that you didn’t.

Favorite tweet

This week’s Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-The middle-school student who wrote the Republican health-care bill that was unveiled earlier in the week complained on Friday that he still has not been paid for his work.

Kevin Tenco, a seventh grader from House Speaker Paul Ryan’s congressional district, in Wisconsin, said that Ryan hired him two weeks ago to write the American Health Care Act with the promise that it “wouldn’t be too much work” and that he would be paid handsomely for his effort.

“He said I would get paid, like, five hundred dollars, and I could buy a Nintendo Switch,” Tenco said.

Taking Ryan at his word, the thirteen-year-old, from Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, “pulled several all-nighters” to complete the health-care bill in time for its Monday unveiling.

“I basically went to the Wikipedia page for Obamacare, cut and pasted a bunch of stuff and then threw in some tax cuts and whatnot,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but I was super tired by the end of it.”

According to Tenco, Ryan’s failure to pay him in a timely fashion for writing the American Health Care Act has left him “feeling really bad about our government.”

“I was all set to write an immigration reform bill for Congressman Ryan, but now there’s no way,” he said.

Harry Newton, who apologizes for the long blog today. I started mulling what Russia meant days ago and, with yesterday’s developments, I couldn’t sleep last night. I was mulling and mulling.

And by this morning…. well you have my thoughts above. I encourage everyone to leave comments below. Be polite, if you can. Enjoy the weekend.