Monday, November 16, 2020

TRUMP TV ???

First the disclaimer - then the fun begins! "The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT."

Trump’s planned TV network would take broadcasting to new depths. Here’s an idea of the horrors it might have in store…

RT International | 13:02 GMT, Nov 16, 2020

Michael McCaffrey

Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo

15 Nov, 2020 13:12

". . . Rumors persist that once out of the White House, Donald Trump will launch a new TV station that promises to be as deplorably biased as its MSM rivals. A quick look into a crystal ball reveals some of the madness that could await. . .

Much like Trump set his sights on winning the presidency after he was publicly humiliated by searing jokes told at his expense by President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, rumors now swirl he will focus his fury at Rupert Murdoch and Fox for their seditious election betrayal by starting his own TV network, Trump TV.

Trump looks like he’s toast, so who’s going to take the reins and lead the Republican fightback for 2024?

Many will scoff at this idea, but under-estimating Trump is how he won the White House in the first place. The truth is that Trump TV is bursting with ratings potential

> Ivanka Trump and her empty-suit husband Jared Kushner would surely be put in charge of the day-to-day operations of Trump TV and fill the network’s lineup with Trumpian news, entertainment and reality shows that would be the most electrifying line-up in cable television history.

> HERE'S THE ZINGER:

First-born son Donald Trump Jr. and his gal pal Kimberly Guilfoyle could host The Screaming Hour - Brought to You by Meth Amphetamine, where the odd-couple incoherently shout Trumpian platitudes until they pass out.

Guilfoyle, the taut-faced temptress who is the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsome and a one-time Fox News firebrand who was sacked for sexual harassment, could also have her own game show titled Shameless, where she chooses moderately famous men to sleep with in order to desperately hold on to any sort of relevancy.

> Venturing out of the Trump family to his administration also opens up some ratings possibilities.

There could be the Kellyanne and George Conway Variety Hour, where, like Sonny and Cher on crack, America’s least favorite couple and their attention seeking teen daughter, Claudia, could bicker and have breakdowns between musical numbers and comedy sketches.

> Anthony Scaramucci could host 10 Minutes with the Mooch, which would last 10 minutes - one minute for every day he worked as Trump’s Director of Communications. Scaramucci would spend the 10 minutes trying to figure out which way the political winds were blowing and then licking the proper boots.

. . . Unlike Fox, CNN and MSNBC, which once upon a time gladly milked Trump’s bizarre star power to enhance their own ratings but now actually refuse to cover his speeches or cut away from them mid-sentence, Trump TV will proudly cover all of The Donald’s rabid rallies and rants in their entirety.

And the funniest thing about my imagined version of Trump TV? If this inane network ever actually comes to air it will have just as much journalistic integrity as the phony, flag-waving fools at Fox and the insidious, mendacious, sanctimonious clowns on CNN and MSNBC.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

https://on.rt.com/auwh

Spreading The Word > 2 New Live Virtual Public Meetings

Pressers from the City of Mesa Newsroom:

(1) North Center Sports Fields

Live virtual public meeting to discuss North Center Sports Fields

November 9, 2020 at 1:21 pm
Please join us for the live online Virtual Public Meeting to learn about the North Center Sports Fields Project. There will be a presentation showing revisions to the site layout, sports fields, lighting, etc. based on the site and neighborhood...

(2) Broadway Road Construction Project

Live virtual public meeting for Broadway Road reconstruction project

November 10, 2020 at 9:12 am
The City of Mesa invites to you an online virtual meeting to learn more about the Broadway Road Phase 1 project. The City is in the design phase, which involves a full reconstruction along Broadway Road from Lesueur to Spur (Mesa Drive to Stapley...

East Valley Tribune Front-Page News: City Officials Ponder A Trolley Loop

Hard-to-Believe but that was the chosen Sunday Edition cover-story by Staff Writer Jim Walsh. It was only one of more than 30 items that the Mesa City Council had on its agenda for a Study Session last Thursday at 07:30 in the morning that went on for more than an hour-and-a-half.

SPOILER ALERT: Because a new source of revenue must be secured, the potential Mesa streetcar could be as long as 10 years into the future, when Mesa Mayor John Giles said that west Mesa likely will be very different than it is today

Tempe Streetcar top story

City officials ponder trolley route for west Mesa

By Jim Walsh, Tribune Staff Writer
Nov 16, 2020
3 hrs ago

14 November 2020

REMOTE ZOOM FOR 1:33:24 Mesa City Council Study Session Thu 11.12.2020

There a helluva lot on-the-table for this Study Session - and you better have done your homework ahead of time!

Hizzoner Mayor John Giles is more than just a wee bit "fuzzy" in the Mayor's Welcome . . . stay with watching this Study Session as long as you can + see if all the council members are asking the right specific questions.

First Came "Zombie Malls"...and Now The "Office Apocalypse"

What if they reopened the office and nobody came?

That's the opening question on 11.09.2020 from Joel Kotkin - the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute — formerly the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin

CORONAVIRUS & THE OFFICE APOCALYPSE

newgeography.com

"This scenario is not as far-fetched as many believe. The office may not be dead, but its post-COVID future, particularly in big cities, may look more like a medieval-style arrangement than the buzzing, super dense science fiction vision from The Jetsons.

In the coming months, particularly after Trump likely loses the White House, there will be a massive campaign—already starting from office owners like Related—to force people back into their cubicles. Billions in real estate are at stake for the creator of New York’s Hudson Yards, which received $6 billion in city subsidies and tax breaks. Besides being a hideous monstrosity, the development now could prove itself a giant white elephant. Wall Street financiers, many of whom have invested in ultra-expensive city residential and office properties, also are desperate to get the peasants back tilling the postindustrial fields. With even the iconic Empire State Building losing money hand over fist, some landlords are so panicked that they are offering tenants free rent to lure them back. Meanwhile, in San Francisco some tech firms are canceling their leases.

COVID has been especially severe in cities due to what the demographer Wendell Cox labels “exposure density” brought on by insufficiently ventilated places like crowded housing, subways, elevators, and the office environment. The virus’s fatality rate has been between three and six times higher in dense urban areas than in the suburbs or the countryside. No surprise then that among current remote workers—who tend to be clustered in cities where a higher percentage of occupations can be done remotely—roughly 60%, notes Gallup, want to stay at home or close to home. Even fewer still are likely to want to take public transit, which has been widely linked to high infection and fatality rates in the pandemic.

Going back to pre-COVID work arrangements seems all but impossible. As the Gallup poll shows, most people now working from home want to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. . . Many companies, including banks and leading tech firms such as Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter, are expecting a large portion of their workforce to continue to work remotely after the pandemic. The transition has been less jarring for tech companies since dispersed work is now the norm for the vast majority of startups, as a recent survey of venture capitalists shows. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom projects that ultimately, we will see telecommuting increase from 5% of the workforce before the pandemic to something closer to 20%. . .

These current trends toward remote work and greater concern about “density exposure” and related risks of urban living contradict many of the bold predictions made over the last quarter century. We are a far cry from a decade ago when developers like Sam Zell were boldly predicting rapid densification, with many people choosing to crowd into micro-units in a process tied to widespread claims about “the end of suburbia.” This was always a gross exaggeration: Throughout the last few decades the suburbs have retained their demographic and economic predominance. As a Harvard study recently confirmed, suburbia has actually been gaining ground over the past 40 years.

Read the rest at Tablet Magazine.

Now....About that 42"-Inch Water STUB

A pipeline to where - was that ever an unpublished mystery?

DUH? Hard to believe city officials are using that same old play-book

"This is just an illustration.

We have no idea where the alignment is,’’

----- Jake West, Mesa’s water resources director, said

“We’re just in the beginning of an alignment study to make it as successful and economically done as possible.’’

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The West Is Trading Water for Cash. The Water Is Running Out

Desert farmers along the Colorado River are striking lucrative deals with big cities. But not everyone comes out a winner.

By Luke McGrath Bloomberg.com ‎August‎ ‎15‎, ‎2019‎ ‎1‎:‎00‎ ‎AM

"The 1,450-mile-long Colorado River serves as a source of water for seven states, but climate change and overuse have caused its levels to drop precipitously. . . climate change is responsible for aridification—the progression from cyclical drought to a permanent decrease in water. . .

With big western cities clamoring for a share of the river’s diminishing supply, desert farmers with valuable claims are making multimillion dollar deals in a bid to delay the inevitable. It’s an echo of the historic manipulation that long ago subdued this waterway, . . .

When you combine institutionalized overuse with an accelerating climate crisis, . . that’s when you get “the problem.” . . .

And for rural communities further down the list of water rights, the growing shortage of Colorado River water has become an existential threat.
Arizona’s Pinal County, an agricultural community wedged between Phoenix and Tucson, ranks near the bottom when it comes to claims.
Here, farms lay fallow not for money, but simply because
there’s not enough water.

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BLOGGER NOTE:

Water is the most precious commodity here in the Desert

It can be bought and sold or traded on the private equity market - all with higher prices all the time the hotter and drier our so-called 'stable environment' gets.

The Most Precious Commodity

Here in The Desert

More than 5 years ago, this LAND DEAL was one of the largest in Mesa's history.

We didn't know more about it then.

Mesa Seals $135 Million Land Deal

Posted on January 7, 2014

by Kristian Seemeyer

When people talk, listen completely.

Most people never listen.

- Ernest Hemingway

The "land deal" land sale proceeds will boost the City’s Economic Investment Fund, financing in part projects such as: Sloan Park, The Cubs new Spring Training facility and the so-called then "Higher Education Initiative". We're talking 11,400 acres, folks!

The vast tracts of land were know back then as The Mesa Water Farm.

Read more ....this is where you find it > Click or Tap Here

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The Saints Have A Plan:

THIS IS WHAT THAT $135M LAND DEAL - OR LAND SWINDLE OR STEAL?? - FOR THEIR VISION ON THE 11,447 ACRES THAT WERE ONCE THE MESA WATER FARM ...

Nice buy: $135M 11,400+ ACRES

Watch where this story goes and note that the buyer in 2012, a company in Scottsdale, is now called Saints Holdings Company. They agreed to buy the land in three 5-year phases.

Let's do some numbers first: a recent city auction for 132 acres, without water rights, went for $21.1M (that's $5M above the appraised price) . . .or $159,848 per acre.

"According to Natalie Lewis, assistant to city manager Chris Brady, and also lead negotiator on the deal, Mesa purchased the land in 1985 for more than $29 million for its water rights to create a water farm.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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City envisions a $66M pipe as a lifeline to SE Mesa

By Jim Walsh, Tribune Staff Writer

"A deal with the Gila River Indian Community could deliver billions of gallons of drinking water to southeast Mesa, fueling the area’s development in exchange for billions of gallons in effluent. . .

While the deal would help both parties – with the Native American community receiving water for irrigating crops and Mesa receiving drinking water at a cut-rate price – there is a catch

29 January 2020

Saint Holdings LLC. No Longer A Low-Profile

Jackob Andersen, Saint’s president and CEO, personally involved in bringing big economic development projects to the State of Arizona and Pinal County, by arranging land deals and acquiring rights-to-water, apparently likes the spotlight. All those BIG LAND DEALS have not gone un-noticed - or publicized - including getting put into the spotlight by your MesaZona blogger.
"We are one of the largest land owners and developers in the state of Arizona,”
---- Rose Law Group Reporter 17 May 2019

That's the outcome for the power-wielding influence from the Saints' control in the established intersection of Finance, Religion and Politics
Its holdings include:

Heritage Arizona: an 11,438-acre development in Coolidge slated for many land uses including commercial, residential and renewable energy developments.
Saint has also developed the 2,700 acre Inland Port Arizona. The Inland Port has direct railroad access and is modeled after Union Pacific’s hub in Salt Lake City. The Inland port is home to the planned Nikola plant which landed there after originally looking to locate in Buckeye.
Central Arizona Commerce Park: a nearly 700-acre industrial park with shovel-ready parcels. The Casa Grande development is in an Opportunity Zone offering tax breaks for real estate and business investments. The project Is directly served by Union Pacific railroad. Lucid Motors and Tractor Supply Co. have located at the Casa Grande park.
The latter involves 360 job at a regional center.
Andersen said that deal was born in Nashville when he was at their headquarters to finalize contracts or agricultural products and ended up meeting with TSC executives about a western expansion

Here's a post farther down on September 5, 2019 from Saints Holdings on Twitter if readers of this blog are curious what the Saint's holding companies are planning to create between Phoenix and Tucson around Casa Grande and Coolidge and Florence > a new "inland port", much similar to the same thing in-the-works in Utah. . . it certainly looks likes they are tending to now privatize water-rights just when a federal Drought Emergency Contingency Plan has been activated, When big deals like the sale of 'obsolete water-rights' on thousands of acres that would be just dirt without it, there's always scandals that surface somehow taking a cue from an earlier extract:

Arizona Corporation Commission’s desire for consolidation of the highly-fragmented water utility industry in Arizona and their new policy guidelines that support and incent such consolidation, the stage is well set for additional acquisitions,”

SAINTS HOLDINGS LLC

Website: Saint Holdings
Twitter: @SaintHoldings
Saint Holdings is a multi-faceted real estate investment and development company with holdings in industrial, land, multifamily residential, and agriculture.

Scottsdale, AZ

"Global Water Resources has signed agreements with Saint Holdings that will result in providing water services to Saint Holding’s Inland Port Arizona, where @nikolamotor is constructing their new facility."

MesaZona > Table of Contents : Here's The Menu. Enjoy