James Risen exposed warrantless wiretapping by Bush and Cheney, faced imprisonment under Obama’s Justice Department, and is preparing to do battle with Donald Trump. Link >> Intercepted 22 Feb 2017
This week on Intercepted, the New York Times investigative journalist breaks down Trump’s declaration that journalists are the enemy and analyzes Trump’s royal court. Transgender Americans are being targeted in record numbers as Attorney General Jeff Sessions moves to quash LGBTQ rights. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and former New England Patriots star Donté Stallworth talk about the war on the transgender community and the rising resistance of pro athletes. Sam Biddle exposes the Trump-connected firm set up by the CIA that helped the NSA spy on the world, and actor Wallace Shawn stars as an NSA operative who is worried about adversaries spying on his luncheons. Plus music from Anohni.
Transcript coming soon.
Top photo: Donte Stallworth (L), Chase Strangio (C), and James Risen (R).
Attempts for years to revive the dead mall - where Mesa Mayor John Giles says "Location, location, location is everything" as if this practicing personal injury-accident law attorney knows anything about real estate - have floundered to say the least like most of the highlights of his NextMesa campaign that propelled into office: figments of his imagination,if he ever had one like comparing the City of Mesa to Mayberry, the fictional television show from years gone by.
An article from Bloomberg News today might give the mayor and the bright minds in the Office of Economic Development inside City Hall some clues:
How to Save a Dying Mall
A small group of investors is buying struggling shopping centers on the cheap and trying to turn them around.
Some malls struggle because they simply can’t access credit, said George Good, executive vice president in CBRE Group's National Retail Investment Group. As department stores close and large mall operators retrench around their best assets, many lenders have decided to stop financing lower-quality properties. In many cases, owners that can’t get a new loan will look to sell at a discount, or let the mall go into foreclosure.
Not every struggling mall is a good candidate for a refresh.
In bigger markets with stiffer retail competition, developers have considered more radical strategies for failed malls, such as turning them into office buildings, medical centers, and hotels with mixed results.
Still, the vicious nature of the retail business makes plenty of opportunities for investors.“We think there are somewhere between 100 and 200 malls out there that fit the general criteria” for a rehab, said Chris Maguire, chief executive officer at Cypress Equities, a Dallas-based investor that bought a 40-year-old regional mall in Flagstaff, Ariz., earlier this year. “They need capital, but there’s cash flowing, so you just sit and wait.”
Having had a 1st-Generation American-born father, the last child of 14 from a fertile couple who emigrated here from The Azores in the early 1900's who became a two-time All-American football player at Notre Dame, your MesaZona blogger got curious reading this article from Yale News about a 1st-generation high school student from here in Mesa with different circumstances ....and what he said about his high school education here in Mesa different from all the hype.
Rayan Alsemeiry
Rayan Alsemeiry ’19 arrived at Yale last year from Mesa, Arizona. His family had emigrated to the United States from Saudi Arabia when he was 3 years old, and is in the first generation of his family to attend college. In addition to the usual adjustments to campus life that most freshman face, Alsemeiry struggled to get his bearings in an unfamiliar culture. “Everyone here [at Yale] seemed to have a sense of direction — to know where they’re going and what they want to get out of college,” says Alsemeiry. “I came from a large public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigor.”
According to the article- in addition to attending a public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigors - he was both high-achieving from a low-income family - who gained entry to one of the most highly-respected universities in the world, Yale. It wasn’t until the first semester of his sophomore year before he felt truly at home, he says. Nearly 400 first-generation students like Alsemeiry are coming to Yale Friday-Sunday, Feb. 24-26 to discuss their common challenges and ways to overcome them at the third annual 1vyG Conference. Alsemeiry and Laura Plata ’19 are co-chairing the event, which will bring together first-generation, high-achieving, low-income students from the 19 top U.S. colleges and universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and MIT — including 25 delegates from Yale.
The annual conference is presented by the Inter-Ivy, First-Generation College Student Network (1vyG), a network of students and administrators aimed at building best practices and advocating for institutional change to increase first-generation students’ chances at success in both their academic and professional careers. The first conference was held at Brown; the second at Harvard . . . “One of the biggest hurdles as a first-generation student is that you don’t have a lot of knowledge about the professional world,” says Alsemeiry, who is also co-chairing the conference’s finance committee, which raised over $155,000 and received sponsorship from companies like Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, DE Shaw, Teach for America, and more. The ultimate goal of the 1vyG conference is to raise awareness of the challenges faced by first-generation students and “to provide people with the information and tools to organize and push for more acceptance of this community at top colleges,” says Alsemeiry. The Yale sophomore — who is now a campus tour guide and economics tutor and helps run a peer liaison group for low-income students in Yale College — is majoring in Economics and Global Affairs, and a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Program in Human Rights. In the future, he says, he wants to continue to work to improve access to education on a global scale, thereby breaking a cycle that “perpetuates poverty and inequality.”
The global network has become dangerously unstable By Niall Ferguson The world today is like a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage. Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hate, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on.
The president of the United States tweets that his own intelligence agencies are illegally leaking classified information to The New York Times about his campaign’s communications with the Russian government, but he insists that it’s all “fake news.” (Read that again, slowly.)
You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of new information technology. This has become a truism. The question is, how has it changed? The answer is that technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures. The reality is that the global network has become a dangerously unstable structure. Far from promoting equality, the network does the opposite, by allowing hyperconnected “superhubs” to emerge.
Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hate, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on. If Zuckerberg seriously intends to turn Facebook into the vanguard of liberal world government, then he is on a fast track to joining George Soros at the top of Steve Bannon’s Most Hated list.
Niall Ferguson’s new book, “The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks,’’ will be published early next year.
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The lying, hating hi‑tech webs of Zuck and Trump are the new superpowers
Extracts from The Times UK [over 100 comments published with article]
*Please see blogger's note after reading extracts
"Laugh out loud if you dare. Globalisation is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. How on earth do we make sense of all this? In pursuit of answers, many bewildered commentators resort to crude historical analogies. To some, Donald Trump is Hitler, about to proclaim an American dictatorship. To others, he is Richard Nixon, on the verge of being impeached."
You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of information technology. This has enormously empowered networks of all kinds over traditional power structures.
Networks were the key to what happened in politics last year. Above all, there was the grassroots network of support that Trump built using the power of Facebook, Twitter and the Breitbart news website.
It was this that defeated the “global special interests” that — according to the final ad of campaign chief executive Steve Bannon — stood behind the “failed and corrupt political establishment” personified by Trump’s opponent. Note here how one network attacks another. It all goes to show networks are transforming not only the economy — through viral advertising, targeted marketing and “sharing” of cars and apartments — but also the public sphere and democracy itself. Yes, it’s awesome: we’re all connected. But the notion that taking the whole world online would create a utopia of “netizens”, all equal in cyberspace, was always a fantasy.
On Thursday Facebook’s co-founder, chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a long defence of that ideal of an interconnected “global community”, arguing that his company’s role should be to promote “meaningful” local communities, to enhance “safety” (by monitoring content with artificial intelligence), to promote diversity of ideas, and to foster civic engagement — even at the global level. “As the largest global community,” Zuckerberg wrote, “Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.” The example he cited was last month’s anti-Trump Women’s March. The reality is that the global network has become a dangerously unstable structure. Far from promoting equality, it does the opposite, by allowing hyper-connected “superhubs” to emerge. Surprise, surprise, from Trump to PewDiePie, these turn out to be rather the reverse of saintly role models.
Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hatred, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on. Zuckerberg’s letter has been “liked” more than 66,000 times on Facebook and 2,400 times on Twitter.
The following tweet was liked by twice as many people on Facebook and 35 times as many on Twitter: “Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism — even before tax plan rollout!” That tweet came from Trump.
If, 20 years from now, someone asks you what finally crashed the global network, you’ll want to mention the @realDonaldTrump virus.
But remember: the flawed design of the network made the outage inevitable. And for that, Chairman “Zuck” is much more to blame.
Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks, will be published in the autumn by Penguin
Blogger's Note: None of the images used in this post appeared in Niall Ferguson's original article.
2 days ago - Op-ed: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto is a political trainwreck. He says that Facebook is developing AI to create a global democracy—kind of.
Source: Field of Schemes [Also see previous post on this site from 16 Feb 2017] The SB1492 bill would allow creation of “community engagement” districts of up to 30 acres. Within them, up to half of the state’s share of sales taxes generated from retail sales and hotel stays would be dedicated to paying the bond debt for new sports or entertainment facilities. It also would allow an additional 2 percent district sales tax to be applied to all purchases within the district, with those revenues also dedicated to defraying the cost of facility construction. This is a bit of a hybrid bill, combining super-TIFs (where half of existing sales and hotel taxes would be kicked back to pay teams’ construction costs) with a new sales tax surcharge in the area around the new venue. This arrangement would also work for the arts and music theater Worsley and his wife are proposing in Mesa. No conflict of interest in this, is there?”
Now, the bill has so far only passed one committee in one branch of the Arizona legislature — Sen. Bob Worsley of Mesa used one of those “gut an unrelated bill and insert your own language” tricks to get it on the agenda of his own transportation and technology committee.
John Washington on said:
Good work, as always, Neil! I agree with KT, there are a lot of morons (or sellouts) in the AZ State Legislature…as elsewhere, I’m sure. So, it’s important that we call them out by name. In this case, Bob Worsley, so called “Republican” senator from Mesa, AZ, is leading the charge to give away our tax money to a millionaire . . . Bob Worsley is a moron, along with 4 of the 5 other people on his AZ Senate “Transportation and Technology” committee. More analysis: http://wp.me/p7hU3T-qH
Piggy Wilf on said:
‘Course I should have added that such a “crisis” only works when you have a whole buncha pols who are either idiots or bought and paid for. And fortunately that pretty much covers 98% of them.
Jerry McKenzie on said:
Fits perfectly with Worsley’s bleed the beast mentality: no tax increases for education, roads, bridges, etc.; but it is OK to give away tax dollars to the filthy rich in order to decrease government.
John Bladen on said:
True Jerry. But why do voters simply accept this? I’ve heard far too often that “you can’t do anything”… well, that’s certainly true if you don’t try. But if the people who are ultimately paying for these facilities/subsidies were more active in their opposition, I wonder if they would go through? Politicians don’t listen to a few angry voices.
Jerry McKenzie on said:
The one’s who vote, agree with him. Voter turnout among the young and Mexican-Americans is low and it is reflected in the makeup of Mesa politicians — white Mormon men with a fetish for rich folk. This is a problem in other parts of AZ too. It is all about registering and then going to vote. I suspect this proposal will die as the state is getting hungry for funds and any carve-out will make it worse. Sales taxes are a big part of the AZ budget, so there is no way to avoid that, and property taxes are low, but if you don’t pay, an investor can swoop in and buy up your tax lien and slap a debt with interest on your property and then, after a time, turn you out.
Listen & Subscribe to the Intercepted podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and other platforms. 
This week on Intercepted, the New York Times investigative journalist breaks down Trump’s declaration that journalists are the enemy and analyzes Trump’s royal court. Transgender Americans are being targeted in record numbers as Attorney General Jeff Sessions moves to quash LGBTQ rights. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio and former New England Patriots star Donté Stallworth talk about the war on the transgender community and the rising resistance of pro athletes. Sam Biddle exposes the Trump-connected firm set up by the CIA that helped the NSA spy on the world, and actor Wallace Shawn stars as an NSA operative who is worried about adversaries spying on his luncheons. Plus music from Anohni.
I agree with KT, there are a lot of morons (or sellouts) in the AZ State Legislature…as elsewhere, I’m sure. So, it’s important that we call them out by name.
In this case, Bob Worsley, so called “Republican” senator from Mesa, AZ, is leading the charge to give away our tax money to a millionaire . . . Bob Worsley is a moron, along with 4 of the 5 other people on his AZ Senate “Transportation and Technology” committee.
More analysis: http://wp.me/p7hU3T-qH
Piggy Wilf on said:
Jerry McKenzie on said:
John Bladen on said:
Politicians don’t listen to a few angry voices.
Jerry McKenzie on said:
I suspect this proposal will die as the state is getting hungry for funds and any carve-out will make it worse. Sales taxes are a big part of the AZ budget, so there is no way to avoid that, and property taxes are low, but if you don’t pay, an investor can swoop in and buy up your tax lien and slap a debt with interest on your property and then, after a time, turn you out.
NotMyGlendale on said:
http://www.scottsdalecitizen.com/2017/02/15/roberts-a-225-million-subsidy-for-coyotes-really/
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/mesa/state-senator-wife-raising-funds-for-concert-hall-next-to/article_8ed73d5e-d558-11e2-b86d-0019bb2963f4.html
Also, this article by Representative Anthony Kern on the procedural trick to move the bill between committees:
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2017/02/14/kern-warns-of-procedural-tricks-regarding-taxpayer-funded-arena/
Worsley is a founder of SkyMall.