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gogobootz1 · 1 year

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Dream A Little Dream Of Me

Eddie Roundtree x Reader

Summary: Stress is starting to interfere with your sleep schedule. But a late-night encounter with a fellow member of The Six might just help you out.

A/N: It really bothers me that the show changed his last name, but I love this man so here you go

Word Count: 1k

The one thing you really couldn’t find yourself getting used to in LA was the heat. Dry, stifling, and never-ending, it made you miserable. After spending nearly your whole life in cold, dreary Pittsburgh, you were more than struggling to make the adjustment.

The cheap ass house Billy had rented didn’t help things, either. Among its flaws, the lack of air conditioning is at the top of your list. And it’s why you can’t seem to stop tossing and turning. No matter which limbs you stick out from under your blankets, it’s not enough to cool you down. The windows you opened two hours ago aren’t helping either. Growing tired of trying to sleep, you throw the covers off of yourself and sit up.

At the very least, some water should be able to help.

You huff and make your way downstairs, paying no mind to the time. Grabbing a glass from the kitchen cabinet, you let the door swing shut. Once you’ve sipped on your tap water for a bit, you decide a snack might help too.

Still holding your cup in one hand, you start rummaging through the fridge with the other.

Leftovers were clearly out. As delicious as Camila’s lasagna was two nights ago, you didn’t want to bother heating anything up. Not to mention that Warren would probably want it for breakfast. Billy specifically said that the apples he bought were off-limits, but you aren’t necessarily opposed to pissing him off. You are, however, concerned about his taste. He probably got red delicious or Jonathan or something equally as gross, so you can't have that. Finally, you strike gold. The deli drawer. At least one Dunne brother has your back. Graham made a B-line for the deli counter on your grocery trip the other day.

You snag two slices of cheese out of the packet and start eating them while looking to see if the fridge has anything else to offer.

"Are you eating deli meat straight from the fridge at 2 AM?"

You whip around to find Eddie staring at you expectantly. For a second, you're like a deer in headlights. Caught red-handed, standing by the evidence. You swallow the final bite of cheese you were working on.

"No."

He makes a face that tells you he is not at all buying it.

"It was cheese," you mumble. Quietly, you continue, "why are you in here anyway, Edward?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe to see who was making all that noise?" He shrugs angrily. For the first time, you take note of his pajamas. The blue and green plaid really compliments the white Rolling Stones shirt he's got on. His hair's all tussled, probably because he was just sleeping.

"Shit, I woke you up, didn't I?" You whisper, internally kicking yourself. The fridge closes behind you as you take a seat at the kitchen table. You rest your head in your hands. "I'm really sorry, Eddie."

The sincerity in your voice takes him off guard. Typically your relationship is characterized by bickering and teasing and sticking your tongues out at each other like when you were little. This is a rare moment of vulnerability for you.

Eddie takes the seat across from you at the table. "What are you doing up in the first place?" He asks gently.

"I'm too hot," you complain.

"Sure are," he nods, and you kick him. "OW! Jesus, I was joking."

You sigh again, guiltily, "sorry."

"Cranky much," he rubs at his knee, "did you get any sleep at all?"

"No," you say miserably.

"Wait, are you serious?" Eddie asks, and you nod. "We were in the studio all day, and you stayed late to record the extra trombone part. Aren't you exhausted?" You nod once again. He lets out a sigh, "what's keeping you up then?"

"I already told you, Billy needs to fix the damn air conditioning," you grumble.

"And that's all?" Eddie sounds skeptical.

You sigh, "I don't know. It's just- a lot." He gives an encouraging nod, and you continue, "we're not in Pittsburgh anymore, and everything's new and different, and this is our shot, and if I blow it-"

"Woah there," Eddie stops you. "First of all, if anyone blows it, it'll be Graham for spilling something on someone important." That pulls a laugh out of you, and he smiles. "And I know things are different, but it's exciting too. If you ever feel homesick, though, we'll just drive around until we find someplace that reminds us of Eat'n Park. Okay?"

You nod softly at his words, and he stands up. You send him a questioning look.

"Come on," he says, "you've gotta get some sleep."

"Eddie, I've tried," you insist. He rolls his eyes at you.

"Then at least come sit on the couch," he pleads. You reluctantly follow him into the living room and plop yourself down on the sofa. "Close your eyes too. If they get any more bloodshot, people will think we're high all the time."

"Aren't we?" You ask, throwing your arm over your face. You don't see him shake his head at you while he grabs his guitar.

"Since you woke me up, you get to hear what I've been working on," Eddie says. He pushes your legs over so that he has room to sit.

"Lucky me," your voice drips with sarcasm. Eddie flicks your leg, and you flinch away. "Hey!"

"Watch it, sleeping beauty," he says.

"Or what?" You taunt.

"I'll tell Billy you broke the garbage disposal," he smirks. You bolt upright at his words.

"You wouldn't!"

"Wouldn't I?"

"How was I supposed to know I had to turn the water to use it?!"

Eddie stares at you, unimpressed.

"Never mind, Mozart, play on," you nod at him. Eddie starts strumming the guitar, and you sigh, laying back down.

The melody is slow and sweet, mesmerizing too. Your intentions of listening closely to offer feedback quickly slip out the window. Especially when he starts humming along. You don't even feel yourself starting to drift off. Your acute awareness of the temperature in the house, your dry mouth, or any residual hunger that haunted you earlier slips away.

Eddie goes on playing for a bit before he looks to you for your thoughts on it. When he finds you fast asleep, he sighs, "that good, huh?" He shakes his head with a smile on his face. Eddie stands and hangs the guitar back on the wall, retiring to his own room. He'll make you listen to it again in the morning.

#eddie roundtree x reader #daisy jones fanfic #daisy jones and the six #eddie loving #eddie loving x reader

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anzimbu55 · 1 year

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5 Quickest Ways to Save Money

You are reading this because you know how challenging it is to save money. Saving requires serious discipline and superior budgeting skills. That's why I am determined to take a different approach to help you save and ultimately achieve financial freedom. Saving is a habitual skill that demands consistent nurturing and development.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear notes that small repetitive actions can yield remarkable results over time. He further adds that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, moods, and emotions have a significant impact on our behavior. Overspending and Impulsive buying are a few enemies of saving that fall into this category.

Luckily, it's not too late. Read on as I discuss 5 simple actionable ideas that will lead you to financial success.

1. Make small adjustments.

Everyone is looking for that earth-breaking improvement that the world will notice and talk about. You will be shocked at how small improvements in certain areas of your life can make all the changes you desire.

Small adjustments to your spending habits can really pay off in the long run. Habits like buying a breakfast sandwich to bring to work every day, shopping emotionally, and shopping for status are a few of many you should get rid of today. These bad habits vary from person to person. Do an internal audit of your daily life and cut out all the loopholes that waste money.

2. Repetition and patience

In life, we must standardize our habits before we think of optimizing them. By this I mean, any tiny change you make today might not show results tomorrow. Saving a few dollars now will not instantly turn you into a millionaire. It takes time. Congratulations on taking the first step by putting some money into your savings account. Now it's time to be patient and repeat the same process over and over again. You can do it! Don’t mind what the hood thinks. You can forgo that expensive purse with a celebrity handle. If your friend's party slices your dollars, you can pass. Hang in there. It's just a matter of time. Financial success is right around the corner! Can you see it?

3. Track your progress.

We feel rewarded as humans whenever we are rewarded for doing something worthwhile. Buying your wife or kid a gift makes you feel proud of yourself especially when they jump up and down in joy. So you do it again and again to get that fulfilling feeling. It is in our nature.

Therefore get a calendar or a tracking app. Mark all the days you saved a dollar. Don't forget the days you ignored that bad spending habit. Once you see the calendar after a month or two, you will be motivated to continue saving. Everybody loves seeing progress. Remember to buy yourself a gift for making it this far!

4. Make automation.

Having the bank automatically deduct cash from your savings account is a convenient way of saving especially if your income is regular. Automation of expenses such as house bills, electricity, and phone bills is wise as it evades penalties for late payments. I know there will always be time to do this. So you tell yourself that you can do it later. You need to set up automation now. Today! We said small adjustments make huge improvements. The vice versa also works!

5. Use budgeting apps.

Budgeting apps can really reinforce the art of saving through controlling and maintaining your budget. They have a way around the human weakness of forgetting as they conveniently remind you of any late financial transactions.

Most apps track overspending while recommending ways to reduce variable expenses like entertainment and travel. Monify is a free mobile app to start with. There are many others available on the market.

Knowledge builds up like compound interest, as Warren Buffett said. Now you have some ideas to add to your learning hub. Thanks for reading this far. Remember, the more you think of yourself as unworthy, stupid, poor, and ugly, the more your mind will be conditioned to this thought loop.

Always remember every day is a new day to save!

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robertreich · 4 years

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Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers Lose

Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t. Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out. At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap. These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures -- under intense corporate lobbying -- have enacted laws making it harder to form unions. Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages. Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels. To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time.

In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages.

As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act.

In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry. Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance. Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors. -- The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay. -- The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions. -- High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market. If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition. This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile -- and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight. And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy. Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power. These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped.

They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story. The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high. Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!

And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company's safety issues. While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.

In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are. Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.

Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions. As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives.

Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.” Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize. All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage. All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.

That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment. The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains. So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages? For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment. Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent. Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system. Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies. Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing. This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.

#monopoly #antitrust #unions #wages #jobs and wages #video #videos

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tswiftdaily · 4 years

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In the 2010s, she went from country superstar to pop titan and broke records with chart-topping albums and blockbuster tours. Now Swift is using her industry clout to fight for artists’ rights and foster the musical community she wished she had coming up.

One evening in late-October, before she performed at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift’s dressing room became -- as it often does -- an impromptu summit of music’s biggest names. Swift was there to take part in the American Cancer Society’s annual We Can Survive concert alongside Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Camila Cabello and others, and a few of the artists on the lineup came by to visit.

Eilish, along with her mother and her brother/collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, popped in to say hello -- the first time she and Swift had met. Later, Swift joined the exclusive club of people who have seen Marshmello without his signature helmet when the EDM star and his manager stopped by.

“Two dudes walked in -- I didn’t know which one was him,” recalls Swift a few weeks later, sitting on a lounge chair in the backyard of a private Beverly Hills residence following a photo shoot. Her momentary confusion turned into a pang of envy. “It’s really smart! Because he’s got a life, and he can get a house that doesn’t have to have a paparazzi-proof entrance.” She stops to adjust her gray sweatshirt dress and lets out a clipped laugh.

Swift, who will celebrate her 30th birthday on Dec. 13, has been impossibly famous for nearly half of her lifetime. She was 16 when she released her self-titled debut album in 2006, and 20 when her second album, Fearless, won the Grammy Award for album of the year in 2010, making her the youngest artist to ever receive the honor. As the decade comes to a close, Swift is one of the most accomplished musical acts of all time: 37.3 million albums sold, according to Nielsen Music; 95 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 (including five No. 1s); 23 Billboard Music Awards; 12 Country Music Association Awards; 10 Grammys; and five world tours.

She also finishes the decade in a totally different realm of the music world from where she started. Swift’s crossover from country to pop -- hinted at on 2012’s Red and fully embraced on 2014’s 1989 -- reflected a mainstream era in which genres were blended with little abandon, where artists with roots in country, folk and trap music could join forces without anyone raising eyebrows. (See: Swift’s top 20 hit “End Game,” from 2017’s reputation, which featured Ed Sheeran and Future.)

Swift’s new album, Lover, released in August, is both a warm break from the darkness of reputation -- which was created during a wave of negative press generated by Swift’s public clash with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West -- as well as an amalgam of all her stylistic explorations through the years, from dreamy synth-pop to hushed country. “The skies were opening up in my life,” says Swift of the album, which garnered three Grammy nominations, including song of the year for the title track.

She recorded Lover after the Reputation Stadium Tour broke the record for the highest-grossing U.S. tour late last year. In 2020, Swift will embark on Lover Fest, a run of stadium dates that will feature a hand-picked lineup of artists (as yet unannounced) and allow Swift more time off from the road. “This is a year where I have to be there for my family -- there’s a lot of question marks throughout the next year, so I wanted to make sure that I could go home,” says Swift, likely referencing her mother’s cancer diagnosis, which inspired the Lover heart-wrencher “Soon You’ll Get Better.”

Now, however, Swift finds herself in a different highly publicized dispute. This time it’s with Scott Borchetta, the head of her former label, Big Machine Records, and Scooter Braun, the manager-mogul whose Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group and its master recordings, which include Swift’s six pre-Lover albums, in June. Upon news of the sale, Swift wrote in a Tumblr post that it was her “worst case scenario,” accusing Braun of “bullying” her throughout her career due to his connections with West. She maintains today that she was never given the opportunity to buy her masters outright. (On Tumblr, she wrote that she was offered the chance to “earn” back the masters to one of her albums for each new album she turned in if she re-signed with Big Machine; Borchetta disputed this characterization, saying she had the opportunity to acquire her masters in exchange for re-signing with the label for a “length of time” -- 10 more years, according to screenshots of legal documents posted on the Big Machine website.)

Swift has said that she intends to rerecord her first six albums next year -- starting next November, when she says she’s contractually able to -- in order to regain control of her recordings. But the back-and-forth appears to be nowhere near over: Last month, Swift alleged that Borchetta and Braun were blocking her from performing her past hits at the American Music Awards or using them in an upcoming Netflix documentary -- claims Big Machine characterized as “false information” in a response that did not get into specifics. (Swift ultimately performed the medley she had planned.) In the weeks following this interview, Braun said he was open to “all possibilities” in finding a “resolution,” and Billboard sources say that includes negotiating a sale. Swift remains interested in buying her masters, though the price could be a sticking point, given her rerecording plans, the control she has over the licensing of her music for film and TV, and the market growth since Braun’s acquisition.

However it plays out, the battle over her masters is the latest in a series of moves that has turned Swift into something of an advocate for artists’ rights -- and made her a cause that everyone from Halsey to Elizabeth Warren has rallied behind. From 2014 to 2017, Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify to protest the streaming company’s compensation rates, saying in a 2014 interview, “There should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify.” In 2015, ahead of the launch of Apple Music, Swift wrote an open letter criticizing Apple for its plan to not pay royalties during the three-month free trial it was set to offer listeners; the company announced a new policy within 24 hours. Most recently, when she signed a new global deal with Universal Music Group in 2018, Swift (who is now on Republic Records) said one of the conditions of her contract was that UMG share proceeds from any sale of its Spotify equity with its roster of artists -- and make them nonrecoupable against those artists’ earnings.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade expresses hope that she can help make the lives of creators a little easier in the years to come -- and a belief that her behind-the-scenes strides will be as integral to her legacy as her biggest singles. “New artists and producers and writers need work, and they need to be likable and get booked in sessions, and they can’t make noise -- but if I can, then I’m going to,” promises Swift. This is where being impossibly famous can be a very good thing. “I know that it seems like I’m very loud about this,” she says, “but it’s because someone has to be.”

While watching some of your performances this year -- like Saturday Night Live and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert -- I was struck by how focused you seemed, like there were no distractions getting in the way of what you were trying to say.

That’s a really wonderful way of looking at this phase of my life and my music. I’ve spent a lot of time recalibrating my life to make it feel manageable. Because there were some years there where I felt like I didn’t quite know what exactly to give people and what to hold back, what to share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade. I broke through pre-social media, and then there was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music. I’m not really here to influence their fashion or their social lives. That has bled through into the live part of what I do.

Meanwhile, you’ve found a way to interact with your fans in this very pure way -- on your Tumblr page.

Tumblr is the last place on the internet where I feel like I can still make a joke because it feels small, like a neighborhood rather than an entire continent. We can kid around -- they literally drag me. It’s fun. That’s a real comfort zone for me. And just like anything else, I need breaks from it sometimes. But when I do participate in that space, it’s always in a very inside-joke, friend vibe. Sometimes, when I open Twitter, I get so overwhelmed that I just immediately close it. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don’t like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that’s it. But I don’t like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There’s only so much bandwidth my brain can really have.

It’s sort of an amalgamation of all of it. People who aren’t active fans of your music, who like one song but love to hear who has been canceled on Twitter. I’ve had several upheavals of somehow not being what I should be. And this happens to women in music way more than men. That’s why I get so many phone calls from new artists out of the blue -- like, “Hey, I’m getting my first wave of bad press, I’m freaking out, can I talk to you?” And the answer is always yes! I’m talking about more than 20 people who have randomly reached out to me. I take it as a compliment because it means that they see what has happened over the course of my career, over and over again.

Did you have someone like that to reach out to?

Not really, because my career has existed in lots of different neighborhoods of music. I had so many mentors in country music. Faith Hill was wonderful. She would reach out to me and invite me over and take me on tour, and I knew that I could talk to her. Crossing over to pop is a completely different world. Country music is a real community, and in pop I didn’t see that community as much. Now there is a bit of one between the girls in pop -- we all have each other’s numbers and text each other -- but when I first started out in pop it was very much you versus you versus you. We didn’t have a network, which is weird because we can help each other through these moments when you just feel completely isolated.

Do you feel like those barriers are actively being broken down now?

God, I hope so. I also hope people can call it out, [like] if you see a Grammy prediction article, and it’s just two women’s faces next to each other and feels a bit gratuitous. No one’s going to start out being perfectly educated on the intricacies of gender politics. The key is that people are trying to learn, and that’s great. No one’s going to get it perfect, but, God, please try.

At this point, who is your sounding board, creatively and professionally?

From a creative standpoint, I’ve been writing alone a lot more. I’m good with being alone, with thinking alone. When I come up with a marketing idea for the Lover tour, the album launch, the merch, I’ll go right to my management company that I’ve put together. I think a team is the best way to be managed. Just from my experience, I don’t think that this overarching, one-person-handles-my-career thing was ever going to work for me. Because that person ends up kind of being me who comes up with most of the ideas, and then I have an amazing team that facilitates those ideas.

The behind-the-scenes work is different for every phase of my career that I’m in. Putting together the festival shows that we’re doing for Lover is completely different than putting together the Reputation Stadium Tour. Putting together the reputation launch was so different than putting together the 1989 launch. So we really do attack things case by case, where the creative first informs everything else.

You’ve spoken before about how meaningful the reputation tour’s success was. What did it represent?

That tour was something that I wanted to immortalize in the Netflix special that we did because the album was a story, but it almost was like a story that wasn’t fully realized until you saw it live. It was so cool to hear people leaving the show being like, “I understand it now. I fully get it now.” There are a lot of red herrings and bait-and-switches in the choices that I’ll make with albums, because I want people to go and explore the body of work. You can never express how you feel over the course of an album in a single, so why try?

That seems especially true of your last three albums or so.

“Shake It Off” is nothing like the rest of 1989. It’s almost like I feel so much pressure with a first single that I don’t want the first single to be something that makes you feel like you’ve figured out what I’ve made on the rest of the project. I still truly believe in albums, whatever form you consume them in -- if you want to stream them or buy them or listen to them on vinyl. And I don’t think that makes me a staunch purist. I think that that is a strong feeling throughout the music industry. We’re running really fast toward a singles industry, but you got to believe in something. I still believe that albums are important.

The music industry has become increasingly global during the past decade. Is reaching new markets something you think about?

Yeah, and I’m always trying to learn. I’m learning from everyone. I’m learning when I go see Bruce Springsteen or Madonna do a theater show. And I’m learning from new artists who are coming out right now, just seeing what they’re doing and thinking, “That’s really cool.” You need to keep your influences broad and wide-ranging, and my favorite people who make music have always done that. I got to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Cats movie, and Andrew will walk through the door and be like, “I’ve just seen this amazing thing on TikTok!” And I’m like, “You are it! You are it!” Because you cannot look at what quote-unquote “the kids are doing” and roll your eyes. You have to learn.

Have you explored TikTok at all?

I only see them when they’re posted to Tumblr, but I love them! I think that they’re hilarious and amazing. Andrew says that they’ve made musicals cool again, because there’s a huge musical facet to TikTok. [He’s] like, “Any way we can do that is good.”

How do you see your involvement in the business side of your career progressing in the next decade? You seem like someone who could eventually start a label or be more hands-on with signing artists.

I do think about it every once in a while, but if I was going to do it, I would need to do it with all of my energy. I know how important that is, when you’ve got someone else’s career in your hands, and I know how it feels when someone isn’t generous.

You’ve served as an ambassador of sorts for artists, especially recently -- staring down streaming services over payouts, increasing public awareness about the terms of record deals.

We have a long way to go. I think that we’re working off of an antiquated contractual system. We’re galloping toward a new industry but not thinking about recalibrating financial structures and compensation rates, taking care of producers and writers.

We need to think about how we handle master recordings, because this isn’t it. When I stood up and talked about this, I saw a lot of fans saying, “Wait, the creators of this work do not own their work, ever?” I spent 10 years of my life trying rigorously to purchase my masters outright and was then denied that opportunity, and I just don’t want that to happen to another artist if I can help it. I want to at least raise my hand and say, “This is something that an artist should be able to earn back over the course of their deal -- not as a renegotiation ploy -- and something that artists should maybe have the first right of refusal to buy.” God, I would have paid so much for them! Anything to own my work that was an actual sale option, but it wasn’t given to me.

Thankfully, there’s power in writing your music. Every week, we get a dozen synch requests to use “Shake It Off” in some advertisement or “Blank Space” in some movie trailer, and we say no to every single one of them. And the reason I’m rerecording my music next year is because I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.

Do you know how long that rerecording process will take?

I don’t know! But it’s going to be fun, because it’ll feel like regaining a freedom and taking back what’s mine. When I created [these songs], I didn’t know what they would grow up to be. Going back in and knowing that it meant something to people is actually a really beautiful way to celebrate what the fans have done for my music.

Ten years ago, on the brink of the 2010s, you were about to turn 20. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time?

Oh, God -- I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I would have done everything exactly the same way. Because even the really tough things I’ve gone through taught me things that I never would have learned any other way. I really appreciate my experience, the ups and downs. And maybe that seems ridiculously Zen, but … I’ve got my friends, who like me for the right reasons. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my boyfriend. I’ve got my fans. I’ve got my cats.

#taylor swift #interview #billboard #women in music #woman of the decade

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path-of-my-childhood · 4 years

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Billboard Woman of the Decade Taylor Swift: 'I Do Want My Music to Live On'

By: Jason Lipshutz for Billboard Magazine Date: December 14th issue

One evening in late October, before she performed at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Taylor Swift’s dressing room became - as it often does - an impromptu summit of music’s biggest names. Swift was there to take part in the American Cancer Society’s annual We Can Survive concert alongside Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Camila Cabello and others, and a few of the artists on the lineup came by to visit.

Eilish, along with her mother and her brother/collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, popped in to say hello - the first time she and Swift had met. Later, Swift joined the exclusive club of people who have seen Marshmello without his signature helmet when the EDM star and his manager stopped by.

“Two dudes walked in - I didn’t know which one was him,” recalls Swift a few weeks later, sitting on a lounge chair in the backyard of a private Beverly Hills residence following a photo shoot. Her momentary confusion turned into a pang of envy. “It’s really smart! Because he’s got a life, and he can get a house that doesn’t have to have a paparazzi-proof entrance.” She stops to adjust her gray sweatshirt dress and lets out a clipped laugh.

She also finishes the decade in a totally different realm of the music world from where she started. Swift’s crossover from country to pop - hinted at on 2012’s Red and fully embraced on 2014’s 1989 - reflected a mainstream era in which genres were blended with little abandon, where artists with roots in country, folk and trap music could join forces without anyone raising eyebrows. (See: Swift’s top 20 hit “End Game,” from 2017’s reputation, which featured Ed Sheeran and Future.)

Swift’s new album, Lover, released in August, is both a warm break from the darkness of reputation - which was created during a wave of negative press generated by Swift’s public clash with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West - as well as an amalgam of all her stylistic explorations through the years, from dreamy synth-pop to hushed country. “The skies were opening up in my life,” says Swift of the album, which garnered three Grammy nominations, including song of the year for the title track.

She recorded Lover after the Reputation Stadium Tour broke the record for the highest-grossing U.S. tour late last year. In 2020, Swift will embark on Lover Fest, a run of stadium dates that will feature a hand-picked lineup of artists (as yet unannounced) and allow Swift more time off from the road. “This is a year where I have to be there for my family - there’s a lot of question marks throughout the next year, so I wanted to make sure that I could go home,” says Swift, likely referencing her mother’s cancer diagnosis, which inspired the Lover heart-wrencher “Soon You’ll Get Better.”

Now, however, Swift finds herself in a different highly publicized dispute. This time it’s with Scott Borchetta, the head of her former label, Big Machine Records, and Scooter Braun, the manager-mogul whose Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group and its master recordings, which include Swift’s six pre-Lover albums, in June. Upon news of the sale, Swift wrote in a Tumblr post that it was her “worst case scenario,” accusing Braun of “bullying” her throughout her career due to his connections with West. She maintains today that she was never given the opportunity to buy her masters outright. (On Tumblr, she wrote that she was offered the chance to “earn” back the masters to one of her albums for each new album she turned in if she re-signed with Big Machine; Borchetta disputed this characterization, saying she had the opportunity to acquire her masters in exchange for re-signing with the label for a “length of time” - 10 more years, according to screenshots of legal documents posted on the Big Machine website.)

Swift has said that she intends to rerecord her first six albums next year, starting next November, when she says she’s contractually able to - in order to regain control of her recordings. But the back-and-forth appears to be nowhere near over: Last month, Swift alleged that Borchetta and Braun were blocking her from performing her past hits at the American Music Awards or using them in an upcoming Netflix documentary - claims Big Machine characterized as “false information” in a response that did not get into specifics. (Swift ultimately performed the medley she had planned.) In the weeks following this interview, Braun said he was open to “all possibilities” in finding a “resolution,” and Billboard sources say that includes negotiating a sale. Swift remains interested in buying her masters, though the price could be a sticking point, given her rerecording plans, the control she has over the licensing of her music for film and TV, and the market growth since Braun’s acquisition.

However it plays out, the battle over her masters is the latest in a series of moves that has turned Swift into something of an advocate for artists’ rights, and made her a cause that everyone from Halsey to Elizabeth Warren has rallied behind. From 2014 to 2017, Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify to protest the streaming company’s compensation rates, saying in a 2014 interview, “There should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify.” In 2015, ahead of the launch of Apple Music, Swift wrote an open letter criticizing Apple for its plan to not pay royalties during the three-month free trial it was set to offer listeners; the company announced a new policy within 24 hours. Most recently, when she signed a new global deal with Universal Music Group in 2018, Swift (who is now on Republic Records) said one of the conditions of her contract was that UMG share proceeds from any sale of its Spotify equity with its roster of artists - and make them non-recoupable against those artists’ earnings.

During a wide-ranging conversation, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade expresses hope that she can help make the lives of creators a little easier in the years to come - and a belief that her behind-the-scenes strides will be as integral to her legacy as her biggest singles. “New artists and producers and writers need work, and they need to be likable and get booked in sessions, and they can’t make noise - but if I can, then I’m going to,” promises Swift. This is where being impossibly famous can be a very good thing. “I know that it seems like I’m very loud about this,” she says, “but it’s because someone has to be.”

While watching some of your performances this year - like SNL and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert - I was struck by how focused you seemed, like there were no distractions getting in the way of what you were trying to say. That’s a really wonderful way of looking at this phase of my life and my music. I’ve spent a lot of time re-calibrating my life to make it feel manageable. Because there were some years there where I felt like I didn’t quite know what exactly to give people and what to hold back, what to share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade. I broke through pre-social media, and then there was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music. I’m not really here to influence their fashion or their social lives. That has bled through into the live part of what I do.

Meanwhile, you’ve found a way to interact with your fans in this very pure way - on your Tumblr page. Tumblr is the last place on the internet where I feel like I can still make a joke because it feels small, like a neighborhood rather than an entire continent. We can kid around - they literally drag me. It’s fun. That’s a real comfort zone for me. And just like anything else, I need breaks from it sometimes. But when I do participate in that space, it’s always in a very inside-joke, friend vibe. Sometimes, when I open Twitter, I get so overwhelmed that I just immediately close it. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don’t like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that’s it. But I don’t like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There’s only so much bandwidth my brain can really have.

You’ve spoken in recent interviews about the general expectations you’ve faced, using phrases like “They’ve wanted to see this” and “They hated me for this.” Who is “they”? Is it social media or disparaging think pieces or... It’s sort of an amalgamation of all of it. People who aren’t active fans of your music, who like one song but love to hear who has been canceled on Twitter. I’ve had several upheavals of somehow not being what I should be. And this happens to women in music way more than men. That’s why I get so many phone calls from new artists out of the blue - like, “Hey, I’m getting my first wave of bad press, I’m freaking out, can I talk to you?” And the answer is always yes! I’m talking about more than 20 people who have randomly reached out to me. I take it as a compliment because it means that they see what has happened over the course of my career, over and over again.

Did you have someone like that to reach out to? Not really, because my career has existed in lots of different neighborhoods of music. I had so many mentors in country music. Faith Hill was wonderful. She would reach out to me and invite me over and take me on tour, and I knew that I could talk to her. Crossing over to pop is a completely different world. Country music is a real community, and in pop I didn’t see that community as much. Now there is a bit of one between the girls in pop - we all have each other’s numbers and text each other - but when I first started out in pop it was very much you versus you versus you. We didn’t have a network, which is weird because we can help each other through these moments when you just feel completely isolated.

Do you feel like those barriers are actively being broken down now? God, I hope so. I also hope people can call it out, [like] if you see a Grammy prediction article, and it’s just two women’s faces next to each other and feels a bit gratuitous. No one’s going to start out being perfectly educated on the intricacies of gender politics. The key is that people are trying to learn, and that’s great. No one’s going to get it perfect, but, God, please try.

At this point, who is your sounding board, creatively and professionally From a creative standpoint, I’ve been writing alone a lot more. I’m good with being alone, with thinking alone. When I come up with a marketing idea for the Lover tour, the album launch, the merch, I’ll go right to my management company that I’ve put together. I think a team is the best way to be managed. Just from my experience, I don’t think that this overarching, one-person-handles-my-career thing was ever going to work for me. Because that person ends up kind of being me who comes up with most of the ideas, and then I have an amazing team that facilitates those ideas. The behind-the-scenes work is different for every phase of my career that I’m in. Putting together the festival shows that we’re doing for Lover is completely different than putting together the Reputation Stadium Tour. Putting together the reputation launch was so different than putting together the 1989 launch. So we really do attack things case by case, where the creative first informs everything else.

You’ve spoken before about how meaningful the reputation tour’s success was. What did it represent? That tour was something that I wanted to immortalize in the Netflix special that we did because the album was a story, but it almost was like a story that wasn’t fully realized until you saw it live. It was so cool to hear people leaving the show being like, “I understand it now. I fully get it now.” There are a lot of red herrings and bait-and-switches in the choices that I’ll make with albums, because I want people to go and explore the body of work. You can never express how you feel over the course of an album in a single, so why try?

That seems especially true of your last three albums or so. “Shake It Off” is nothing like the rest of 1989. It’s almost like I feel so much pressure with a first single that I don’t want the first single to be something that makes you feel like you’ve figured out what I’ve made on the rest of the project. I still truly believe in albums, whatever form you consume them in - if you want to stream them or buy them or listen to them on vinyl. And I don’t think that makes me a staunch purist. I think that that is a strong feeling throughout the music industry. We’re running really fast toward a singles industry, but you got to believe in something. I still believe that albums are important.

The music industry has become increasingly global during the past decade. Is reaching new markets something you think about? Yeah, and I’m always trying to learn. I’m learning from everyone. I’m learning when I go see Bruce Springsteen or Madonna do a theater show. And I’m learning from new artists who are coming out right now, just seeing what they’re doing and thinking, “That’s really cool.” You need to keep your influences broad and wide-ranging, and my favorite people who make music have always done that. I got to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Cats movie, and Andrew will walk through the door and be like, “I’ve just seen this amazing thing on TikTok!” And I’m like, “You are it! You are it!” Because you cannot look at what quote-unquote “the kids are doing” and roll your eyes. You have to learn.

Have you explored TikTok at all? I only see them when they’re posted to Tumblr, but I love them! I think that they’re hilarious and amazing. Andrew says that they’ve made musicals cool again, because there’s a huge musical facet to TikTok. [He’s] like, “Any way we can do that is good.”

How do you see your involvement in the business side of your career progressing in the next decade? You seem like someone who could eventually start a label or be more hands-on with signing artists. I do think about it every once in a while, but if I was going to do it, I would need to do it with all of my energy. I know how important that is, when you’ve got someone else’s career in your hands, and I know how it feels when someone isn’t generous.

You’ve served as an ambassador of sorts for artists, especially recently - staring down streaming services over payouts, increasing public awareness about the terms of record deals. We have a long way to go. I think that we’re working off of an antiquated contractual system. We’re galloping toward a new industry but not thinking about re-calibrating financial structures and compensation rates, taking care of producers and writers. We need to think about how we handle master recordings, because this isn’t it. When I stood up and talked about this, I saw a lot of fans saying, “Wait, the creators of this work do not own their work, ever?” I spent 10 years of my life trying rigorously to purchase my masters outright and was then denied that opportunity, and I just don’t want that to happen to another artist if I can help it. I want to at least raise my hand and say, “This is something that an artist should be able to earn back over the course of their deal - not as a renegotiation ploy - and something that artists should maybe have the first right of refusal to buy.” God, I would have paid so much for them! Anything to own my work that was an actual sale option, but it wasn’t given to me. Thankfully, there’s power in writing your music. Every week, we get a dozen synch requests to use “Shake It Off” in some advertisement or “Blank Space” in some movie trailer, and we say no to every single one of them. And the reason I’m rerecording my music next year is because I do want my music to live on. I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.

Do you know how long that rerecording process will take? I don’t know! But it’s going to be fun, because it’ll feel like regaining a freedom and taking back what’s mine. When I created [these songs], I didn’t know what they would grow up to be. Going back in and knowing that it meant something to people is actually a really beautiful way to celebrate what the fans have done for my music.

Ten years ago, on the brink of the 2010s, you were about to turn 20. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time? Oh, God - I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I would have done everything exactly the same way. Because even the really tough things I’ve gone through taught me things that I never would have learned any other way. I really appreciate my experience, the ups and downs. And maybe that seems ridiculously Zen, but... I’ve got my friends, who like me for the right reasons. I’ve got my family. I’ve got my boyfriend. I’ve got my fans. I’ve got my cats.

Taylor Swift Discusses 'The Man' & 'It's Nice To Have a Friend' In Cover Story Outtakes

Billboard // by Jason Lipshutz // December 12th 2019

During her cover story interview for Billboard’s Women In Music issue, Taylor Swift discussed several aspects of her mega-selling seventh studio album Lover, including its creation after a personal “recalibrating” period, her stripped-down performances of its songs and her plans to showcase the full-length live with her Lover Fest shows next year. In two moments from the extended conversation that did not make the print story, Billboard’s Woman of the Decade also touched upon two of the album’s highlights, which double as a pair of the more interesting songs in her discography: “The Man” and “It’s Nice To Have A Friend.”

“The Man” imagines how Swift’s experience as a person, artist and figure within the music industry would have been different had she been a man, highlighting how much harder women have to work in order to succeed (“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can / Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man,” she sings in the chorus). The song has become a fan favorite since the release of Lover, and Swift recently opened a career-spanning medley with the song at the 2019 American Music Awards.

When asked about “The Man,” Swift pointed out specific double standards that exist in everyday life and explained why she wanted to turn that frustration into a pop single. Read Swift’s full thoughts on “The Man” below:

“It was a song that I wrote from my personal experience, but also from a general experience that I’ve heard from women in all parts of our industry. And I think that, the more we can talk about it in a song like that, the better off we’ll be in a place to call it out when it’s happening. So many of these things are ingrained in even women, these perceptions, and it’s really about re-training your own brain to be less critical of women when we are not criticizing men for the same things. So many things that men do, you know, can be phoned-in that cannot be phoned-in for us. We have to really — God, we have to curate and cater everything, but we have to make it look like an accident. Because if we make a mistake, that’s our fault, but if we strategize so that we won’t make a mistake, we’re calculating.

“There is a bit of a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t thing happening in music, and that’s why when I can, like, sit and talk and be like ‘Yeah, this sucks for me too,’ that feels good. When I go online and hear the stories of my fans talking about their experience in the working world, or even at school — the more we talk about it, the better off we’ll be. And I wanted to make it catchy for a reason — so that it would get stuck in people’s heads, [so] they would end up with a song about gender inequality stuck in their heads. And for me, that’s a good day.”

Meanwhile, the penultimate song on Lover, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend,” sounds unlike anything in Swift’s catalog thanks to its elliptical structure, lullaby-like tone and incorporation of steel drums and brass. When asked about the song, Swift talked about experimenting with her songwriting, as well as capturing a different angle of the emotional themes at the heart of Lover. Read Swift’s full thoughts on “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” below:

“It was fun to write a song that was just verses, because my whole body and soul wants to make a chorus — every time I sit down to write a song, I’m like, ‘Okay, chorus time, let’s get the chorus done.’ But with that song, it was more of like a poem, and a story and a vibe and a feeling of... I love metaphors that kind of have more than one meaning, and I think I loved the idea that, on an album called Lover, we all want love, we all want to find somebody to see our sights with and hear things with and experience things with.

“But at the end of the day we’ve been searching for that since we were kids! When you had a friend when you were nine years old, and that friend was all you talked about, and you wanted to have sleepovers and you wanted to walk down the street together and sit there drawing pictures together or be silent together, or be talking all night. We’re just looking for that, but endless sparks, as adults.”

Read the full Taylor Swift cover story here, and click here for more info on Billboard’s 2019 Women In Music event, during which Swift will be presented with the first-ever Woman of the Decade award.

[link to this tweet]

Was there ever a part of you that was like, “Oh shit, I like this darker vibe, let’s go even further down that path?” I really Loved Reputation because it felt like a rock opera, or a musical, doing it live. Doing that stadium show was so fun because it was so theatrical and so exciting to perform that, because it’s really cathartic! But I have to follow whatever direction my life is going in emotionally... The skies were opening up in my life. That’s what happened. But in a way that felt like a pink sky, a pink and purple sky, after a storm, and now it looks even more beautiful because it looked so stormy before. And that’s just like, I couldn't stop writing. I’ve never had an album with 18 songs on it before, and a lot of what I do is based on intuition. So, you know, I try not to overthink it. Who knows, there may be another dark album. I plan on doing lots of experimentation over the course of my career. Who knows? But it was a blast, I really loved it.

I mean, look, a Taylor Swift screamo album? I’ll be first in line. I’m so happy to hear that, because I think you might be the only one. Ha! I have a terrible scream. It’s obnoxious.

Why Taylor Swift's Lover Fest Will Be Her Next Big Step

Billboard // by Jason Lipshutz // December 11th 2019 - [Excerpt]

On why she chose to put together Lover fest: “I haven’t really done festivals in years - not since I was a teenager. That’s something that [the fans] don’t expect from me, so that’s why I wanted to do it. I want to challenge myself with new things and at the same time keep giving my fans something to connect to.”

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mgares · 3 years

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HOW TO BUY A HOUSE - IN 3 EASY STEPS

There is a lot of confusion out there about how to become a Homeowner so I thought I would take a moment and put it into Average Joe speak. That, and in my experience, some people go about it totally backwards which is counter productive to the end goal.

STEP 1. - ASSESS YOUR FINANCES

This is fairly simple. Eliminate non-essentials from your spending budget and stick it in the piggy bank. Modify spending habits to generate savings. Make short-term lifestyle changes.

It's just temporary and if canceling monthly memberships (Netflix, Gyms, Any Subscriptions), adjusting your shopping habits [I got some great tips for this], or eliminating other non-essential spending allows you to keep more money in your pocket to get a home versus flushing rent dollars down the proverbial toilet? Bit of a no-brainer if you ask me.

Bottom line is you have to have money ready-to-hand for the transaction. Even with the "zero down" options like VA and some USDA loans; just to name a couple.

There are inspections, appraisals, escrow funds, repairs, home warranty policies, property taxes, closing costs, and other such considerations that must be paid in order to get a home of your own.

"Do Not Save What Is Left After Spending; Instead Spend What is Left After Saving" - Warren Buffett

Figure out what kind of a down payment your financial situation will allow for. The more, the better, but very few people I know got 20% of the purchase price [a.k.a. - conventional/bank loan] sitting around collecting dust. Good news is you don't necessarily have to have that much.

One of the most common loans is a FHA that only asks for 3-5% down AND there are down payment assistance programs out there if you are really Stuck Like Chuck when it comes to finances. NOTE: This does NOT mean they are going to give you ALL of your down payment; you gotta have some chips in that poker game too.

I like to recommend that people shoot for at least 6-8% of the purchase price of the "kind of home they want" just to make sure all the bases are covered - down payment AND cost(s) of the transaction. Folks, that's a lesser down payment than Owner Finance options for the same "kind of home" as Owners generally ask for 10-15% down.

This total can be a combination of self-savings, down payment assistance, assets that can be used as collateral against the loan, monetary or tangible gifts from friends/family members in some few cases, and more.

Each person is unique and different in how that 6-8% manifests and lenders can vary in what form(s) of down payment they will accept.

EXAMPLE:

Purchase Price: $150k

FHA Down Pymt (3-5%): $4,500 - $7,500

Other Cost(s): (3% +/-): $4,500

Total Savings Needed: $9,000 - $12,000

Kill some bills, sell your "junk" - we all got crap laying around the house we don't use worth money in various amounts - and modify spending habits in a positive manner.

If you are a two car family... can you get by with just one vehicle on a temporary basis [turn that car, and its bills, "into" a house]? Perhaps you have a skill set or piece of equipment that can earn you extra cash here and there on your terms? What changes to your lifestyle can you make that will put another dime or dollar into that kitty bucket?

Finally, do whatever it is you need to do to put those greenbacks into a savings method you can stick with. Whether that is a traditional banking institution or an old shoe box under the bed; you do you. If this means you have to ask someone in a position of trust to hold it so you don't spend it? Guess what you should consider doing?

STEP 2. - TALK TO LENDERS

Let's talk about the "When" of contacting a lender. The only true answer to "When" is... When You Are Ready and only you know how Ready you feel.

I've had clients express the sheer dread they felt about reaching out to a lender and it's an understandable fear. One of my people even said that they felt applying to lenders and having them see their credit condition was akin to stripping naked in front of a total stranger.

But, and as I told my client... think of it like going to the doctor for a full physical exam. Hospital gown over your birthday suit and all. Lenders are professionals there to do a job. They do NOT judge or speculate just because they have intimate knowledge of or about you.

If you suspect you may have some homework to do, credit wise, then it's better to contact a lender sooner rather than later. This allows you to get a game plan together and knock out credit related targets while you are saving funds for your down payment goal. Once completed, you are able to resume your application with confidence moving forward.

"Everything You Want Is On The Other Side of Fear" - Jack Canefield

However, if you are one of the few who feel their credit profile will be a "non-issue" then my suggestion becomes waiting to speak to lenders until you have most, if not all, of your down payment goal met.

When applying to a lender always ask if they perform a Soft or Hard inquiry against your credit report. Most of the lenders I know [and I will list two of my favorites for you here in a second] will execute a Soft Credit Inquiry to determine credit worthiness. This Soft Inquiry does not impact or affect your credit score - should such be a matter of concern to you.

Something else I've noticed is that people don't seem to understand shopping for lender is very much like shopping for an automobile. The overall requirements of any one particular lender (or dealership) can be totally different from a fellow lender's (or dealership's).

Just because one says "No" does not mean they will all will say "No". And even if the first lender tells you "Yes"... I would still encourage you to apply to more than one who does Soft Inquiries. Compare apples to oranges to find the best fit for your home purchasing needs by reviewing interest rates, terms of repayment, mutual rights and remedies, and so on and so forth.

Only after you have secured lender approval (which may be conditional based on various factors) and they have given you the green light to shop up to the amount of $X.00 do you move on to Step 3.

STEP 3 - FIND YOUR REALTOR

The vast majority of the population feels the path to homeownership is "finding the home and then buying it" - through a Real Estate agent. This is NOT the case.

Selecting an agent to help navigate you through the complexities of The Offer and Purchase process is the absolute LAST step to be taken.

What Happens When You Do It Backwards:

You shop for, and find, that PERFECT place and then reach out to an an agent or contact the website that is listing that property. The agent involved determines you haven't spoken with a lender and may now recommend one to get the process started.

Just to let you know... most of us agents are unable to do much of anything at this point without your having secured a lender first. There are some agents out there who are also qualified mortgage consultants but I, personally, haven't met one yet so I don't know how they work.

At this point the agent may also put you on an e-mailer list that scouts the MLS's and regularly sends you properties "matching" the ideal home that you originally asked about.

Why?

Because "that home may not still be there when you are in a position to buy". That's agent speak for... this is gonna take a bit of second and that property will most likely have sold by the time we get you lender approved.

I can't emphasize enough the fact that we agents don't "GET" you that house - the lender does that by providing the loan to pay for it. Us agents help you shop for a home and protect your best interests when buying it.

We deal with the butt-ton of technical paperwork coming/going from every which-a-way at all hours of the day, manage the contract negotiations, handle scheduling and execution of services by professional providers involved in the transaction, are your personal defacto counselor/moral support during the stress mess of buying, and more. None of which can be done until a lender gives us the green light to begin.

Well, most folks aren't mentally or emotionally prepared to reach out to said lender on the fly like this. Fears of "what that lender will see" or personal misgivings about "not qualifying" due to credit condition can halt the whole process at this point. Perhaps leaving you with negative emotions about the whole experience thus far.

But, for the sake of argument let's say you muster up the courage to reach out to a lender anyway. You'll discover that they are people too - most with a generous heart and helpful personality.

You might even discover that your credit was nowhere near as bad as you had built it up in your mind to be. Or, the lender may come back with a little homework for you. Take care of This and That and we'll be able to get you into a home.

The "whammy" of doing it in reverse order like this is that the lender will also share that you will need X thousands of dollars as a down payment to make that happen. Talk about a case of sticker shock!

Obviously, this can be discouraging and disheartening. To overcome one obstacle only run smack dab into another you weren't prepared to tackle? It may start to feel like you are looking up the side of a mountain, the goal of owning a home clearly in your line of sight, but you lack the climbing equipment (not to mention the funds to acquire such) to reach the summit.

It may feel like "that's it, game over" at this point. I know because I, too, approached home ownership azz-backwards like this before I became a Realtor. Felt like someone had ripped a bit of my soul away and left me frustrated and crying inside my heart and mind.

DON'T give up on yourself or your dream of home ownership. Back up, regroup, and attack that goal again. This time, in the correct sequence of events.

"You May Have To Fight A Battle More Than Once To Win It" - Margaret Thatcher

Do this and I promise you that there will be no better feeling in the world than those you experience at the closing table when you are finally handed the keys to your very own home.

Disclaimer: Opinion Editorial for educational and/or informational purposes. Content presented is deemed accurate and/or reliable at the time of authorship. Any errors or omissions present in material(s) are unintentional. You are encouraged to execute your own research.

#MGARES #VirtualPropertyRealty.com #homegoals #househunting #homebuying #realestate #realestateagent

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grootpoepjeplasjehoofd · 4 years

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Here's how the stock market is holding up so well. This is what real looting looks like

Soon after the Federal Reserve’s March 23 assurance that it would make borrowing easier for American corporations, Sysco Corp. sold $4 billion of debt.

Not long after that, the food-service giant announced plans to cut one-third of its workforce, more than 20,000 employees. Dividends to shareholders would continue, executives said.

That process repeated itself in April and May as the coronavirus spread. The Fed’s promise juiced the corporate-bond market. Borrowing by top-rated companies shot to a record $1.1 trillion for the year, nearly twice the pace of 2019. Companies as diverse as Sysco, Toyota Motor Corp., international marketing firm Omnicom Group Inc. and movie-theater chain Cinemark Holdings Inc. borrowed billions of dollars -- and then fired workers.

The companies were under no obligation to behave any differently, but their actions call into question the degree to which the U.S. central bank’s promise to purchase corporate debt will help preserve American jobs.

While the Fed has yet to buy a single bond, its pledge threw a lifeline to the market that undoubtedly kept some people working. Retail chains such as Dollar General Corp., CVS Health Corp., Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., Lowe’s Cos. and Costco Wholesale Corp. said they’re adding personnel after tapping the bond market.

But unlike the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which has incentives for employers to keep workers on the job, the taxpayer-backed facilities that the Fed and Treasury Department created for bigger companies have no such requirements. To make sure the emergency programs help fulfill one of the Fed’s mandates -- maximum employment -- the central bank is essentially crossing its fingers that restoring order to markets will translate to saving jobs.

“They could set conditions, say to companies, hire back your workers, maintain your payroll to at least a certain percentage of prior payroll, and we will help,” said Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton who now teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s hardly clear that if you keep companies afloat they’ll hire employees.”

Unanimous Senate

The lending programs -- credit for big companies and the so-called Main Street facilities for midsize firms -- are supported by the CARES Act, a law that passed the House with more than 96% of the chamber’s votes and cleared the Senate unanimously. For many supporters, putting conditions on the assistance was a step too far. If Congress had intended any, it would have made it explicit in the legislation, they say.

“Really it’s all about creating a context, a climate, in which employees will have the best chance to either keep their job, or go back to their old job, or ultimately find a new job,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a May 29 webinar hosted by Princeton University. “That’s the point of this exercise.” A spokesman for the U.S. central bank declined further comment.

Even as businesses around the country began reopening in May after months of stay-at-home orders, helping a battered U.S. economy add 2.5 million jobs in May, prospects remained grim for millions of Americans who’ve been let go since February. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March is slated to stop on July 31. The prohibition against firing workers in the $25 billion government rescue of U.S. airlines expires Sept. 30, and the biggest recipients have said they intend to shed employees after that date.

Protecting Workers

Reich’s view is echoed mostly by progressive Democrats and supporters of stricter regulatory oversight of the financial system.

“The Fed’s primary motivator in creating these lending facilities is not protecting workers,” U.S. Representative Katie Porter, a California Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said in an email interview. “The American people should not be asked or expected to loan $500 billion with no strings attached.”

A letter, circulated by the Wall Street watchdog group Americans for Financial Reform and published May 27, urged Congress to attach conditions favorable to workers to any Covid-19-related rescue programs. It was signed by 45 organizations, including labor unions and religious and environmental groups.

Without provisions for employees, “the credit assistance will tend to boost financial markets, but not the broad economic well-being of the great majority of the population,” Marcus Stanley, Americans for Financial Reform’s policy director, said in an interview.

Stanley said the corporate-lending programs don’t have to require companies to keep or rehire workers, but they could give priority to those that do.

In its legislation, Congress did express an intent that workers benefit from taxpayer-funded assistance, but it left a lot of the details to Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

“Our No. 1 objective is keeping people employed,” Mnuchin said during a May 19 Senate Banking Committee hearing after Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of “boosting your Wall Street buddies” at the expense of ordinary Americans. “What we put in the Main Street facility is that we expect people to use their best efforts to support jobs,” Mnuchin said.

The phrase “best efforts” echoes the original terms for the Main Street program, which required companies to attest they’ll make “reasonable efforts” to keep employees. The wording was subsequently changed to “commercially reasonable efforts,” which Jeremy C. Stein, chairman of the Harvard University economics department and a former Fed governor, called a welcome watering-down of expectations that the central bank would dictate employment policies to borrowers.

Emergency Help

“It was smart of them to weaken that,” Stein said. “You can’t expect companies to borrow to pay employees.”

Companies might not seek emergency help if too many strings are attached to the aid, Stein said. Others question the practicality of tying workers to their companies as economic realities shift.

“To go to great lengths to make companies keep employees that they don’t need, in light of new expectations that economic activity will remain below pre-Covid levels for a long while, doesn’t make sense,” said Mark Carey, a former Fed staff member and now co-president of the Risk Institute of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.

The Fed approached this crisis with the intent of keeping credit flowing everywhere, from municipalities to small businesses to big corporations to households. Powell said the programs are about lending, not spending -- in other words, they aim to ease a financing pinch rather than stimulate the demand companies need to keep workers on the payroll.

Weird Hybrid

“For the Fed to second-guess a corporate survival strategy would be a step too far for them,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and author of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” Putting explicit conditions on program beneficiaries would make the central bank “a weird hybrid of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, BlackRock and an activist stockholder.” BlackRock Inc. is the world’s biggest money manager and was hired by the central bank to assist with bond programs.

Through the Main Street facilities, which are scheduled to begin operations any day, the Fed will buy as much as $600 billion in four-year loans made to companies by commercial banks with principal and interest deferred for one year. The program is aimed at midsize businesses, with 15,000 or fewer employees or annual revenue of $5 billion or less in 2019.

The central bank’s credit backstop for larger companies is split in two. The $500 billion primary program is designed to buy slices of syndicated loans or new bonds from companies with investment-grade credit scores or one notch below. It’s available to corporations that can prove they can’t borrow elsewhere. The $250 billion secondary facility buys individual corporate bonds already on the market and exchange-traded funds that include investment-grade and junk bonds. The Fed kicked off the program last month; its balance sheet as of June 2 listed ETF holdings valued at $4.3 billion.

European Differences

European countries are charting a different policy course by paying workers directly. The U.K., for example, is offering 80% of salaries up to 2,600 pounds ($3,207) a month. The Netherlands and Denmark have effectively nationalized private payrolls.

The U.S. government paid adults who make less than $75,000 a year a one-time sum of $1,200, with $500 for every dependent child. The cost was $239 billion.

The S&P 500 has jumped 38% since March 23, the day the Fed intervened. Observers of the stock market wonder how it could be so bullish at the same time as the country faces an avalanche of joblessness unsurpassed in its history. The choices companies are making provide an answer.

Since selling $4 billion in debt on March 30, Sysco has amassed $6 billion of cash and available liquidity, enabling it to gobble up market share, while cutting $500 million of expenses, according to Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hourican. Sysco, which is based in Houston, will continue to pay dividends to shareholders, Chief Financial Officer Joel Grade said on a May 5 earnings call.

Junk Bond

Movie theaters were one of the first businesses to close during the pandemic. Cinemark, which owns 554 of them, shut its U.S. locations on March 17. Three days later, the company paid a previously announced dividend. It has since said it will discontinue such distributions. Cinemark borrowed $250 million from the junk-bond market on April 13, the same day it announced the firing of 17,500 hourly workers. Managerial staff were kept on at reduced pay, according to company filings. Cinemark, which is based in Plano, Texas, said it plans to open its theaters in phases starting June 19.

The theater chain opted to go to the bond market over seeking funding from the government because “it didn’t come with any of the strings attached that government-backed facilities can include,” CEO Mark Zoradi said on the April 15 earnings call. It “was really no more complicated than that.”

Sysco and Cinemark declined to comment for this story, and referred to their executives’ previous remarks.

Omnicom issued $600 million in bonds on March 27. In an April 28 conference call to discuss quarterly earnings, CEO John Wren said the company was letting employees go but didn’t say how many. He said the company was extending medical benefits to July 31 for employees furloughed or fired.

Wren added: “Our liquidity, balance sheet and credit ratings remain very strong and we have no plans to change our dividend policy.” Omnicom didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Toyota borrowed $4 billion from investors on March 27. Three days later, the Japan-based car company said it would continue paying dividends to shareholders. Eight days after that it said it would drop roughly 5,000 contract workers who helped staff its plants in North America. Scott Vazin, a Toyota spokesperson, declined to comment.

In a March 24 letter, 200 academics, led by Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jonathan Berk, called lending programs aimed at corporations “a huge mistake.” Better to focus help directly on people living paycheck to paycheck who lost their jobs, it said.

“Bailing out investors who chose to take high-risk investments because they wanted the high returns undermines capitalism and makes it an unfair game,” Berk said in an interview. “If you don’t have a level playing field in capitalism, it doesn’t work.”

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anhed-nia · 4 years

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BLOGTOBER 10/27/2020: THE CURSE OF CATTOBER pt 3 - THE CORPSE GRINDERS

Ted V. Mikel's notorious sickie THE CORPSE GRINDERS is one of a few movies that has become symbolic of my whole journey with psychotronic cinema. Today, I would understand exactly what kind of movie this is, even if I had not seen this exact item: An exploitation movie in the truest sense, just as infamous for its grossout premise as it is for its extraordinary cheapness, delivering all of the moral turpitude and almost none of the over the top effects promised by its attention-grabbing key art--or its dumbfounding title. But when I was a kid, I seriously wondered about these films; worried about them, even.

I wasn't allowed to watch anything that smacked of bad taste, but I still managed to build up a vivid awareness that there were movies out there about forms of perversion and evil that I could never imagine, made by freaks of the highest order. I would hunch nervously over the horror rack at our local mom & pop video mart, earning me the nickname Igor from the amused heshers behind the register, while my parents went through the motions of renting me LABYRINTH for a eight zillionth time. I was allowed to buy exactly one copy of Fangoria (the December 1990 issue featuring LEATHERFACE) before my mother reneged on this gesture of tolerance, but I was allowed to read most anything I wanted--my intellectual hippie folks wouldn't dream of censuring the written word--and I spent many hours, nay years, poring over the Re/Search book of Incredibly Strange Films. This helped create a kind of cinema of the mind for me, in which I tried my best to realize what the movies discussed in the book could possibly be like in real life. The book's detailed descriptions of pictures like SPIDER BABY, THE WIZARD OF GORE, SHE-FREAK, THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS, etc were stimulating in some ways, and only added to my confusion in others. Without seeing them up close, it was hard to make sense of their combination of laughable cheapness, unfunny comedy, and genuinely sickening crimes against human dignity. What these movies are like, is something you can only find out for yourself.

Having said all that, I'm still going to try to tell you what THE CORPSE GRINDERS is like. We open on the rainswept grounds of the Farewell Acres cemetery, where a jerky-addicted ogre called Caleb (Warren Ball) is extracting freshly interred bodies from the earth, as a gaggle of geese honk savagely from being a wire fence. Caleb's dotty wife Cleo (Ann Noble) argues with Caleb for not-the-last time about how his jerky habit is going to ruin his appetite for the dinner she slops out for her filthy baby doll instead, while Caleb bitches about not being paid by a Mr. Landau for his latest job. What's the job, you ask? Selling corpses to the Lotus Cat Food company, where Landau (Sanford Mitchell) has discovered that human flesh is the secret to his success, having kinda-accidentally fed a difficult shareholder into his cat food grinder. It's hard to say exactly how this has led to such a windfall for Landau, especially since he has to produce the illicit pet food one corpse at a time with his neurotic assistant Maltby (J. Byron Foster, my favorite guy in the movie). I guess I've just never dealt with a cat whose specific addiction is so obvious, so oppressive, even, that it forces me to buy the most expensive cat food on the market. This is what is happening to customers whose cats have fallen under the spell of Lotus, and they pay for it with their very lives because Lotus has given their pets a taste for long pig. Landau struggles to find more sources for his secret ingredient, including a mob hitman, giggly morticians who load the bodies up with "pork-flavored fluid (instead of) formaldehyde", and his own employees--"The world is full of ingredients!" he declares, hopefully. Meanwhile, Doctors Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) decide to investigate the recent rash of cat attacks; it's hard to imagine how they're going to get to the bottom of anything, amid many makeout breaks and random changes of clothes, but somebody has to stop all these house cats from devouring the rest of Los Angeles, and it might as well be them.

So that's the plot, but THE CORPSE GRINDERS is still a lot weirder than what I've described. You could be forgiven for wondering whether the movie is supposed to take place in Andy Milligan's version of 19th century London, with Cleo's bizarre insistence on a cockney accent, and Caleb's grumbling about finances involving "pounds" (actually pounds of flesh) in their ramshackle dwelling on the edge of a cardboard-and-styrofoam cemetery. A further Dickensian touch is provided by Landau's one-legged deaf-mute assistant Tessie (Drucilla Hoy), who limps around glumly in a sailor dress and Little Orphan Annie fright wig. If she could talk, she would probably sound like the widow Babcock (Zena Foster), whose husband was the first to go into the grinder, and who speaks in a twittering falsetto that would sound more natural coming out of a sock puppet. All of these community theater touches contrast jarringly with the movie's exploitation nature, which revels in scenes of hardboiled scumbags shaking each other down, of women taking their clothes off for literally no reason at all, and in the suggestion that the gloopy pink paste extruding out of the cat food grinder was once a beautiful girl or a rotting cadaver. The grinder itself is a sight to behold, reminding me at once of something from SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, and the Wish Squisher invention from the MST3K episode of SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. The metallic gizmos whirring along its façade glint in the fabulous gelled lights over the production line, optimistically evoking the rich purples and greens of a Mario Bava picture; in a movie that's explicitly about money woes, in a subgenre that's specifically known for its cheapness, it's nice that director Mikels shelled out to add a little extra style to the grinding scenes.

And on that note, I would like to propose, without having much to say about it yet, that some exploitation films are allegories for exploitation filmmaking itself. I don't include all genre movies about money in this category: it's easy to identify many thrillers as being about more general economic conditions that affect us all, including a lot of noir entries. But then there are movies like THE CORPSE GRINDERS, or LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, or COLOR ME BLOOD RED (or its predecessor A BUCKET OF BLOOD), in which the main character tries to solve his financial woes by committing an utterly dehumanizing crime. In these three examples, there is the revelation that honest work doesn't pay, and that money is only gained through the individual's willingness to exploit sensational imagery and/or decadent sensations to tease, titillate, and even addict the customer. It's hard not to see Landau, Seymour, and Adam Sorg as avatars for Ted Mikels, Roger Corman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, in their similar quests to prey on the craven appetites of the public, at a minimum cost for a maximum payout. If you have other movies you'd like to add to my list, please feel free to reach out.

All told, it's hard not to like THE CORPSE GRINDERS for its sheer audacity--first, in selling something so meager as a "real movie", and second, for making the movie be about THIS. Also, all of this is significantly enriched when you know a little something about Mikels, a polyamorous eccentric who lived in a castle, whose grounds--and guard geese!--were used for the scenes in Farewell Acres. I'm not even going to try to discuss his prolific exploitation career and personal exploits, because that would be better handled by a longform piece on him specifically. It seems like a few documentaries have attempted the subject, but I don't know whether they're any good. It would be nice if Frank Hennenlotter would give it a try, or someone similarly capable, if there even is such a person. In the meantime, I will contribute the sole piece of information that my own scant research has turned up in preparing for this Blogtober entry: That THE CORPSE GRINDERS was co-written by Arch Hall Sr, and Joe Cranston--father of the now-iconic Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. I don't know if I'd call that a reason to see the movie, but luckily there are plenty of other reasons to check out THE CORPSE GRINDERS this Halloween. If you don't, then you can never really know what the hell I'm talking about.

#blogtober #2020 #the corpse grinders #ted v mikels #horror #exploitation #cattober #arch hall sr #joe cranston #sean kenney #monika kelly #sanford mitchell #j byron foster #warren ball #ann noble

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detroitcashforhomes · 11 months

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northwarrenrealestate · 3 years

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Good Morning Northwestern New Jersey. Me & Mr. Levi Wil be out driving, searching for New Inventory this weekend, in Warren & Sussex counties NJ.

Our region has very low Inventory... That means Home values in our area are going up. If you ever thought about possibly, selling your home or know somebody that’s is ready........Right now! December 2020, is the best time in 8 years to start that conversation, I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, about my family’s services, We can sell your home traditionally on market for Top Dollar or sell your home Fast for Cash to a private investor, who buys houses in any condition, & pays All the sellers closing costs and commissions. The best part is, you can take what you want and leave anything you don’t want behind, No need to worry about cleaning the house out before closing. And I mean Any condition, Bad Well, Failed septic or cesspool, Underground oil tank, Let’s put it this way, there could be a tree growing, in what used to be the living room straight through the roof and we will still make you a cash offer.

The process is simple, a Quick Phone call, text or email, a walkthrough of your home, We will then be able to determine an accurate current value of your home, You will Receive 3 Reports about your evaluation, at no cost to you. We are a family business and don’t believe in pushy sales tactics. if you decide now is not the time for you to sell your home, there are no obligations, at the very least, you will receive an accurate value of your home in today’s Hot market at No cost to you. If your too busy to meet with the holidays, don’t worry, you can still receive a Computer generated instant evaluation. Visit Blanchard-Team.com, type your address in the seller's search bar to receive your Free instant evaluation on your home

You can Call or text 908-869-8331 ,E-mail me at [email protected] or visit us at Blanchad-Team.com

I hope you all have a great Weekend & I look forward to speaking with you. ~Carl-

#njrealestate #warrencountynj #sussexcountynj #fsbo #WeBuyNJ #njrealtor #we buy houses #webuyhomes #we buy ugly houses #nw #btown #Nwr

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years

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Never in U.S. history has there been a moment like this: Trillion-dollar proposals are pouring forth from Capitol Hill in a mad bid to save the economy from the ravages of a pandemic.

On the other hand, 2008, when toxic mortgage assets made “bailout” a political buzzword, wasn’t so long ago.

Back then, Congress, to revive a financial system paralyzed by devastating mortgage losses, opened the nation’s wallet wide, passing a $700 billion bailout. The following year, as unemployment rose, credit froze and public coffers dried up, it kicked in $840 billion more in a stimulus bill designed to save and create jobs and jump-start consumer spending. Of course, these helicopter drops of taxpayer cash seemed ripe for waste and fraud, so we decided to track where the money went.

What we learned from dogging those massive efforts provides some important lessons for today’s crisis. Many of the proposals lawmakers put forth this week — a grab bag of rescues for affected industries, broad loan programs and cash payments — the U.S. tried not too long ago.

Here’s a key takeaway: The reason we can easily update you on the pitfalls of the 2008-09 bailout is … it never actually ended. (And guess who keeps updating ProPublica’s Bailout Tracker?) Massive interventions have a way of leaving a mark. The government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage finance entities, in 2008, and they remain in conservatorship. Tens of millions each month are still going out under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bailout’s misleading moniker, through next year. (We’ll get back to what TARP ended up doing in a bit.)

So, while a crisis provoked by a rampaging global virus certainly looks a lot different from one caused by toxic mortgage assets, the proposed solutions already on the table really aren’t.

President Donald Trump’s marquee proposal, also embraced by some Democrats, is a $500 billion plan to send stimulus money to American taxpayers as soon as early April. But history shows that the much-anticipated cash relief might not come as fast, or end up as well targeted, as the Trump administration is promising.

The Bush administration tried a similar stimulus measure in February 2008 when it sent $600 tax rebate checks to middle-class workers, with additional money for parents with children. But workers didn’t get them for three to five months — much longer than the two to three weeks Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is currently promising.

When the checks did arrive, people didn’t run out and buy things. Most of the money was saved or used to pay down debt.

When President Barack Obama took over, he pitched a much larger, but ultimately insufficient stimulus package, designed around “shovel-ready” projects, safety net spending and investments in clean energy. Many people forget that the biggest item was a middle-class tax cut. But instead of sending checks, the administration chose to dribble the money out in paychecks at about $10 a week over two years, hoping that this way consumers would spend more of it. They didn’t.

There’s even more reason to believe that the proposed stimulus checks will be saved this time.

By definition, stimulus programs aim to get people to go out and spend, creating demand that creates jobs. But to slow the spread of the coronavirus, government officials are telling, and in some places ordering, people to stay home. Extra money would certainly help workers who’ve lost their jobs or seen their hours cut. It might even encourage people stuck at home to buy new laptops and TVs, helping foreign manufacturers and domestic warehouse workers and truckers. But as popular as tossing cash from helicopters might be, lack of money is not the reason people with jobs aren’t spending right now.

Economic studies have shown there may be more efficient ways to spend $500 billion to aid those in need, such as expanding food assistance, unemployment benefits and other safety net programs as well as incentives to stem the tide of layoffs.

One of the most effective programs from Obama’s stimulus package was a $50 billion fund to shore up state and local budgets, which has been credited with saving the jobs of more than 300,000 teachers and support staff. Sending money to local governments could help down the line as tax revenues plummet along with the economy.

The Trump administration and Congress could do something similar with private businesses now, encouraging them to pay their workers during shutdowns, as Honda has pledged to do.

One proposal floated in a recent Treasury Department memo obtained by The Washington Post is a program that would guarantee $300 billion in loans to help small businesses meet payroll for eight weeks.

But policymakers should also consider the success that Germany had during the last recession with a program known as “work sharing.”

The idea is that businesses will eventually need to ramp up again whenever this especially unpredictable crisis is over. Under work sharing, instead of laying workers off, employers reduce hours, and the government pays partial unemployment benefits to make up for lost wages. For some workplaces, such a program could also achieve the goal of social distancing or allow people a way to balance the new child care and teaching demands caused by school closures.

But according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than 20 states don’t offer work sharing programs.

There’s also a lesson from the bailout about what happens when Congress hands an administration broad authority without clear direction or restrictions.

One clear lasting legacy of the 2008-09 bailout is a chronically flawed mortgage modification program, one launched with the promise of saving millions of people from foreclosure, but characterized by ongoing chaos, lax enforcement of its rules and failure. The program was rolled out months after the Treasury Department had quickly pumped hundreds of billions into banks with few strings attached.

This happened because, with pressure to act quickly in 2008, Congress gave the Treasury Department broad discretion to essentially make things up as it went. That’s how — and why — even though the TARP was conceived as a giant program to buy up toxic mortgage assets, the government almost immediately abandoned that idea. Instead, the Treasury Departments of both Bush and Obama spun out an array of programs, successfully bailing out AIG, large banks and the auto industry — and only later launched a notably unsuccessful program for homeowners. (For a rundown of who paid the money back, see here.)

It’s the kind of freedom Trump’s Treasury Department appears to covet: Its recent proposal suggests giving it the authority to send $50 billion to the airlines and $150 billion to “other severely distressed sectors,” with the Treasury determining the “appropriate interest rate and other terms and conditions.”

The TARP had relatively robust oversight built in, and it’s an aspect that should be repeated, said Neil Barofsky, who served as the special inspector general for the TARP from 2008 to 2011.

“You cannot push out $1 trillion without scandal. There’s going to be crime, there’s going to be fraud,” he said. “But with strong and effective oversight, you can limit it.”

Not only did the TARP have Barofsky’s office, but there was also the Congressional Oversight Panel, which was headed by a Harvard professor named Elizabeth Warren. The SIGTARP, as Barofsky’s office was known, released scathing reports and brought criminal cases against bankers who’d lied on their bailout applications, while Warren’s panel publicly raked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the coals for being too generous to banks while doing far too little for ordinary people.

Whatever proposals are ultimately adopted, taxpayers should be able to see how the government is spending their money. In 2009, Obama’s stimulus package created an accountability and transparency board, requiring any entity that received contracts, grants or loans to file quarterly reports that were posted publicly on a government website.

Extending the idea to all federal spending was supported by people as far apart politically as then-Vice President Joe Biden and former Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chaired the House oversight committee. Some provisions made it into law, but the larger effort failed to get traction, and the board and its website shut down in 2015. Perhaps it’s time to resurrect the idea. Without adequate testing, we may not know the full reach of COVID-19; but at least should be able to track the money spent to respond to the crisis it’s leaving behind.

#economy #trump #tarp #obama #coronavirus #capitalism in decay #capitalism #late stage capitalism #history

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contactpoint12-blog · 4 years

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4 Proven Ways to Inspire Your Employees to Care About Your Customers

Customer service is a paradoxical business function. Although the nature of customer requests are repetitive by nature, your customer service is supposed to deliver a personalized experience to each customer.

This uncertain nature of customer support can sometimes open a can of worms for both the customer service professionals and the customers. While the service professionals get their jobs done to the bitter end, it often leads them to burnout, mental health issues, and a host of other problems.

That’s probably the reason why the call center industry in the U.S. has an average turnover rate of 45%, one of the highest across industries. The business impact of this problem can be huge.

The stress that your customer service employees go through can find their way to your customers. For example, when your call center staff lack motivation at work, it shows in their everyday interactions with customers. These things can lead to a general apathy towards customers, a hostile team environment, and a colossal fall in customer loyalty.

But there is hope. You can train your customer support teams to care genuinely about customers if you take specific steps towards improving their workplace conditions. Below, we have listed four steps you can take to start inspiring your employees to be more caring towards your customers.

#1 – Treat them like customers

Most businesses don’t treat their employees the way they deserve.

The relationship between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) is highly proportional. In many ways, your employees are your first customers. To quote author Steven Covey:

“Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. You can buy a person’s hand, but you can’t buy his heart; his heart is where his enthusiasm is. You can buy his back, but you can’t buy his brain…Treat employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that’s what they are. They volunteer the best parts – their hearts and minds.”

Your call center employees are like therapists. They have to handle raw human emotions day in and day out. It can be a stressful job to carry out every day. Just like you offer your customers deals and discounts to buy from your brand, you’ve to provide some excellent perks to your employees to keep them motivated.

Here’s a real-world example from Wegmans, an American supermarket chain, on how you can do that.

Business magazines like Forbes and Fortune consistently rank Wegmans in their list of best places to work. The family-run Wegmans’ employee turnover rate is half than the industry average because they invest generously on their staff. They pay their staff to upskill themselves, spend more than $50 million a year on workforce training and development, and award college scholarships without any catch.

And look at what happens when a business takes this kind of employee-first approach. A stellar employee experience eventually leads to equally superior customer experience. The chain store was awarded the title of America’s #1 supermarket in 2016 by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Customers love Wegmans as much as their employees do. For instance, Wegmans collected an average annual sales of $9.7 billion in 2019.

#2 – Give praise & recognition for good work

It’s important to recognize good customer-centric habits in your call center employees. When you praise an outstanding performance, it sets the right kind of standards among your call center employees. It also motivates others in your support team to follow suit.

Conversely, you should tread carefully when you want to reprimand poor performance. Criticizing someone in public often leads to a feeling of shame and antagonism. Legendary investor Warren Buffets put it best when he said, “praise by name, criticize by category.”

When you want to highlight good behavior, call out the person and give them a deserving grandstanding

Long-time former CEO of Home Depot Frank Blake did this; he spent most of his Sundays’ hand-signing hundreds of thank you cards for staff who went out of their ways to delight customers. On top of the personalized appreciation cards, the employees were interviewed as part of an excellent customer service story video series and made to retell the story of what they did for deserving the recognition. The videos aired in break rooms across all the Home Depot franchises for everyone to celebrate the small wins.

Public praise is the best incentive to motivate people to do what they are supposed to do. Therefore, call out good behaviors in public to establish a norm of great customer service.

#3 – Set them up face-to-face with customers

Your call center agents are hardwired to perceive customers in abstract, stereotypical ways, such as—a support ticket, the refund guy, the can-I-talk-to-your-manager lady, and so on.

The best way to break this mold and inspire empathy in your customer service teams is to make them meet your customers in flesh and blood. A handful of companies that we work with do this already, and they rave about how powerful this exercise is.

For instance, one of our B2B client companies organize a quarterly customer open house day and invite a random set of customers to join them over a couple of rounds of beer and pizza. But the food is just an alibi. The company’s primary aim is to interact with the customers, understand their pain points, and collect direct feedback on critical issues.

This ritual of meeting and greeting customers in an interpersonal setting has also led their support staff to develop genuine care towards the customers. When a customer shakes the hand of a customer support agent who helped them get through a technical problem, for example, it means a world to that agent. That kind of appreciation helps your staff understand the magnitude of their everyday job and inspires them to care personally about their customers.

Find ways to make your customer service teams mingle personally with your customers. It breaks down the fourth wall that stands between them and the customers and crushes the cognitive biases they might have about their customers.

#4 – Encourage them to do charity work

Inspiration can come from any direction. In the case of honing the empathy skills of your customer service teams, you can take an unlikely inspiration from Dr. Rick Goodman, an American motivational speaker, and author.

Dr. Goodman has a very simple—and somewhat unconventional—idea to create empathy in your employees. In his book, The Solutions Oriented Leader, Dr. Goodman writes:

“Align your company with a cause. Allow your employees to feel like they are adding value to the world; that they—and your company—are part of something bigger, and something good.”

There are many ways you can go about organizing charity work for your employees to take part in. Give them the necessary support to distribute food and clothes to homeless people in the downtown, sponsor your team to run for a 10K marathon to raise funds for the hurricane victims in Costa Rica, and give them the freedom to come up with their philanthropy ideas as part of your company’s CSR activities.

Charity instills a sense of giving and empathy in everyone, and it’s more effective when a team is brought together for the same mission. It’s hard to directly measure the impact social philanthropy has on your employees’ empathy, but there’s no doubt that such collective missions lead them to become more caring about the customers and makes them happier.

#customer service

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robertreich · 5 years

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America Has Already Fired Trump

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-delivered report will trigger months of congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests, media revelations and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the House? Will he be convicted by the Senate? Will he pull a Richard Nixon and resign?

In other words, will America fire Trump?

I have news for you. America has already fired him.

When the public fires a president before election day -- as it did with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover -- they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired. They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone, but he might as well be.

It’s happened to Trump. The courts and House Democrats are moving against him. Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown.

The Fed is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing the day-to-day work of the agencies. States are taking up the slack: California, for example, is now running environmental policy.

Isolated in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies, distant from his Cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.

His tweets don’t create headlines as before. His rallies are ignored. His lies have become old hat.

Action and excitement have shifted elsewhere, to Democratic challengers, even to a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman too young to run for president.

Don’t get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old land mine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war.

Yet even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American public, then do whatever they want.

Why did America fire Trump? If the nation were to write him a letter informing him he’s no longer president, then it would go like this:

Dear Mr. President,

While many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like obeying the Constitution and not letting big corporations and the wealthy run everything.

Your 35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your “national emergency” to build your wall with money Congress refused to appropriate.

When you passed your tax bill, you promised our paychecks would increase by an average of $4,000, but we never got the raise. Our employers used the tax savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.

Then you fooled us into thinking we were getting a tax cut by lowering the amounts withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know that now because we’re getting smaller tax refunds.

At the same time, many big corporations aren’t paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet, they’re getting refunds.

For example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104 million refund on $11.8 billion of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming a $129 million refund on profits of $11.2 billion. (This is after New York offered it $3 billion to put its second headquarters there.)

They aren’t breaking any tax laws or regulations. That’s because they made the tax laws and regulations. You gave them a free hand.

You’re supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they’re doing better than ever, as are their top executives and biggest investors. Yet nothing has trickled down. We’re getting shafted.

Which is why more than half of us support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent tax on dollars earned in excess of $10 million a year, and more than 60 percent of us support Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2 percent tax on households with a net worth of $50 million or more.

You’ve also shown you don’t have a clue about health care. You promised us something better than the Affordable Care Act, but all you’ve done is whittle it back.

A big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat to eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions. Are you even aware that 70 percent of us now favor Medicare for All?

Most of us don’t pay much attention to national policy, but we pay a lot of attention to home economics. You’ve made our own home economics worse.

We’ll give you official notice you’re fired on Nov. 3, 2020, if not before. Until then, you can keep the house and perks, but you’re toast.

Respectfully,

America

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Rather suddenly, we are on a trajectory toward the potential impeachment of President Trump.

Both close allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and vulnerable Democrats in swing districts have signaled their desire this week to pursue impeachment proceedings over President Trump’s alleged efforts to induce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden, whose son Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukranian gas producer during Biden’s tenure as vice president. A majority of House Democrats had already expressed a desire to impeach Trump over his conduct toward Russia in the 2016 campaign and his handling of the Russia investigation, but the list of pro-impeachment Democrats then included relatively few from competitive districts, and Pelosi had largely held the reins against impeachment.

This time is different. Although the story is still unfolding as I write this, impeachment is, at a minimum, highly plausible. And if Pelosi wants impeachment — as she reportedly does — she can probably get it. Democrats have a fairly comfortable majority in the House and they have been relatively unified under Pelosi. Betting markets, which had been bearish on impeachment, now assign around a 50 percent chance that Trump will be impeached (but not necessarily removed from office) during his first term.

But Democrats had better hope that something else is different this time too: public opinion. Despite Trump being quite unpopular, and despite the public largely buying Democrats’ interpretation of the fact pattern on Russia — most polls find that a majority of the public thinks that Trump sought to obstruct the investigation into Russia, for instance — impeachment was a soundly unpopular proposition.

In the table below, I’ve compiled data on all polls from PollingReport.com, a compendium of high-quality telephone surveys, on whether the public thinks Trump should be impeached or at least that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings.1 And despite the slightly different question wordings — you could favor holding hearings on impeaching Trump but not actually favor his impeachment per se2 — these polls have tended to produce similar results: Impeachment was an unpopular option through the entirely of the Russia investigation process.

On average, in all polls since the start of 2017, 38.5 percent of the public favored impeachment and 55.7 percent opposed it, which is fairly close to a mirror image of Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings. And there had been absolutely no sign that the public was moving toward impeachment. If anything, the opposite was true and impeachment had become slightly less popular. Polls conducted after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the public on April 183 showed an average of 37.3 percent of the public favoring impeachment, and 57.3 percent opposed. The two polls in the database conducted since Mueller’s testimony to Congress on July 24 showed even worse numbers: 33.5 percent in favor of impeachment and 59.5 percent against.

This article is meant to be forward-looking, rather than a comprehensive analysis of all facets of public opinion related to the Russia investigation. But numbers like these ought to at least give Democrats pause. Heretofore, quite a lot of voters have both disapproved of Trump’s conduct and disapproved of impeaching him.

Why this gap has persisted isn’t entirely clear. Pelosi’s reluctance on impeachment undoubtedly dissuaded some Democratic voters from getting on board; the most recent Quinnipiac poll found only 61 percent of Democrats in favor of impeachment and 29 percent opposed. Those numbers may increase now that House leadership is coming around to impeachment.

The same poll, however, found independent voters mostly against impeachment — 62 percent opposed it to 28 percent in favor. That’s despite Trump having only a 35 percent approval rating among independents in the poll. So impeachment has given Democrats problems among swing voters as well.

Another explanation may simply be that the public has a high threshold for impeachment, especially for an elected president and especially especially when that president will be on the ballot again soon. By contrast, Andrew Johnson was an unelected president when he was impeached — he had taken over the presidency after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton took place in their second terms. Voters may not think Russia met that threshold; in fact, the Russia investigation itself was the lowest priority for midterm election voters among 12 issues that Gallup asked about last year.

One explanation that doesn’t make any sense — but which seems to come up from pro-impeachment partisans every time I’ve pointed out impeachment’s lack of popularity — is the notion that the Democrats simply weren’t focused enough on the Russia investigation or that the public didn’t know enough about it. In fact, the Russia investigation has been one of the most focused-upon news stories of our lifetime; it was the most-covered story of 2017 on the network news and the second most-covered of 2018 after Brett Kavanagh’s confirmation hearings. And the public has not moved toward impeachment as more and more facts have been revealed about Russia, including Mueller’s exhaustive report. This is despite the fact that, as I mentioned — feel free to browse the polling results yourself — the public mostly agrees with the Democrats’ interpretation of Muller’s findings; they do not think the report cleared Trump of wrongdoing, for instance.

Other Democrats like to cite the fact that impeachment against Nixon was initially fairly unpopular. But this comparison doesn’t entirely work either. Rather dramatic facts were being revealed throughout the Watergate investigation and impeachment process, which tended to sway public opinion. By contrast, the outlines of Mueller’s eventual findings were largely laid out for the public a long time ago, through Mueller’s various indictments and through reporting at places such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Whereas for the past year or so at least, Democrats have had relatively little new material to work with on Russia. The increasing numbers of House Democrats who called for impeachment over the past few months didn’t seem to move public sentiment in Democrats’ favor either.

Again, none of this is meant to provide for an absolutely definitive analysis of how public opinion might have evolved if Democrats had proceeded on impeachment as a result of the Russia investigation. The sample size of impeachments is small, which make any conclusions tentative. But that uncertainty doesn’t necessarily work to Democrats’ benefit, given that the status quo is fairly promising for them electorally: Trump is quite unpopular and, although these polls don’t mean much at this stage, he currently trails all his major Democratic rivals (especially Biden, but also Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) in head-to-head matchups. Democrats are also coming off a strong midterm.

The politics of impeachment on Ukraine may be different than on Russia. But Democrats should take public opinion seriously. That doesn’t mean you always have to do the poll-driven thing. But don’t wish the numbers away because you don’t like them, or presume that they’ll change in your favor, or assume there won’t be consequences for taking an unpopular action.

More specifically for Democrats, their failure to persuade the public that Russia warranted impeachment offers several potential lessons if they are to proceed on Ukraine:

Lesson No. 1: Be narrow and specific, perhaps with a near-exclusive focus on Ukraine. For some Democrats in Congress who were nearly ready to impeach Trump over Russia, Ukraine may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. But Democrats probably shouldn’t portray it to the public that way.

The public was largely not persuaded about the wisdom of impeaching Trump on Russia. And Ukraine provides a much clearer story, in some ways: Trump allegedly pressured a foreign leader to undermine one of his chief rivals in the 2020 election. It’s not a case of the cover-up being worse than the crime, or of Trump attempting to obstruct the investigation, or of actions that took place before Trump took office. It’s a direct, recent and relatively simple throughline. The more focused Democrats are on Ukraine specifically, the better chance that public opinion will turn out better for them than it did on Russia.

Even worse for Democrats than combining Ukraine and Russia would be to offer a laundry list of impeachment charges, involving the emoluments clause or Trump’s general conduct in office or what not. The public has a high threshold for what constitutes impeachable conduct, so reasons that are below that threshold might weaken the overall case for impeachment rather than being additive.

Furthermore, such a strategy would tend to play into the White House’s strengths. The White House is fairly skilled at muddying the news cycle and navigating its way through the swampy thicket of a story in ways that can fatigue the public. It isn’t a perfect analogy, but in the Kavanaugh hearings, the sheer volume of accusations against Kavanaugh eventually helped him; the less credible allegations allowed Kavanaugh and the White House to cast doubt on the more credible ones, such as Christine Blasey Ford’s. Throwing more accusations or alleged reasons for impeachment at Trump could likewise allow the White House to focus on the weakest ones.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post op-ed by seven first-term Democrats calling for impeachment solely referred to Ukraine as a potential cause for impeachment. So Democratic leadership may agree with this strategy.

Lesson No. 2: Don’t overpromise on details unless you can deliver. You’ll sometimes hear the sentiment that the entire Mueller Report might have been more politically damaging to Trump if it had dropped all at once instead of slowly being teased out through indictments and news accounts and investigative reports over the course of two years. That seems reasonable enough, although there’s no way to test the hypothetical. It’s also true, though, that the public’s reaction to news events — and the media’s reaction to news events, which conditions the public’s response — is often calibrated relative to “expectations.” If the expectations get too far ahead of themselves, even a relatively damaging story may land with a thud.

Without relitigating the Mueller Report more than we have to, it’s safe to say that it provided neither the total exoneration that the president claimed, nor the direct evidence of collusion with Russia that Democrats might have been hoping for. That’s to say nothing of the breathless speculation about what the Mueller Report would say on cable news, or the too-frequent reporting missteps on important Russia-related stories (even if, in my view anyway, the press largely got the big picture right on Russia).

The fact that Ukraine is a much simpler story than Russia again works to Democrats’ benefit here: There are fewer details to screw up. But if Democrats promise caught-red-handed evidence above and beyond what’s been made public already (the White House has not exactly been steadfast in its denials) and doesn’t deliver on it, it’s obviously going to injure their case. And it should go without saying that the more damaging the information, the harder it could be for Democrats to obtain. That Trump has pledged to release a “fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of his phone conversation with Zelensky might make Democrats a little nervous since Trump presumably wouldn’t release it so soon if it contained many bombshells.

Lesson No. 3: Emphasize the threats to election integrity. As I mentioned, I suspect (though I certainly can’t prove) that some of the public’s reluctance on impeachment over Russia stemmed from the fact that Trump was still in his first term and is running for re-election. We want to decide this one for ourselves, the public may have been saying.

In some ways, that’s a bigger problem for Democrats on Ukraine, since the election is even closer now. But, of course, the Ukraine scandal involves the 2020 election: Trump’s efforts to impair Biden’s candidacy. My point is simply that Democrats should emphasize that angle since any impeachment hearings would take place directly against the backdrop of the election, a prospect that voters might otherwise find strange.

Lesson No. 4: Stay unified. As I said above, I don’t think Democratic infighting over impeachment on Russia explains all, or necessarily most, of its unpopularity with the general public. But it probably explains some of it. This tends to be one of Pelosi’s strengths, but the more Democrats are willing to sink or swim together on Ukraine impeachment, the more compelling their message is liable to be to the general public.

Lesson No. 5: Work quickly and urgently. Now that they’ve seemingly decided to move forward on Ukraine, there are lots of reasons for Democrats to move fast. It will reduce the potential for public fatigue over the story, which can set in quickly for all news stories in the Trump era. And a sense of urgency could underscore some of the other themes here, e.g. that there’s an immediate threat to the integrity of the 2020 election, to national security, or both.

Obviously, Democrats will need to weigh moving rapidly against Lesson No. 2 (the risk of getting too far ahead of themselves). Nobody said impeachment would be easy for anyone involved!

But the other benefit to moving fast is that, if impeachment backfires on Democrats and makes Trump more popular, Democrats will have more time to recover from that. Impeachment isn’t necessarily an all-in bet for Democrats, but it’s an awfully big one.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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fatcashmoney · 6 years

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