Paying Big Bucks to be Racist

If I was this business owner, think I’d be considering a blanket baseball bat party at these clowns homes…$800,000 in lost business because of some racist assholes!

Company loses two Milwaukee contracts after its employees displayed guns, KKK sticker

A company where several employees displayed gunsand another brought a Ku Klux Klan sticker to a worksite will effectively lose two contracts worth $800,000 with the City of Milwaukee under a deal approved Wednesday by the Milwaukee Common Council.

Under the resolution, which passed unanimously, the city will terminate one American Sewer Services contract and reject another bid on an un-awarded contract where the company was the lowest bidder. The agreement also prohibits American Sewer Services from rebidding on either of the contracts, and says the company won’t contest any part of the deal.

The Milwaukee Common Council may also push for harsher penalties for American Sewer Services. Those punishments could include compelling its owner, Dennis Biondich, to testify before aldermen.

Debate over the issue grew heated during a previous Public Works Committee meeting at City Hall — especially after two south side aldermen voiced concern that city officials were punishing the company too severely for the actions of a few employees — but the resolution passed without discussion Wednesday.

Alds. Mark Borkowski and Bob Donovan previously insisted Biondich felt terribly that his employees had brought weapons and a cooler with a KKK sticker to worksites.

Donovan added that Biondich had apologized and fired the worker who brought the KKK sticker as well as another who displayed his weapon. He also said American Sewer Services had an otherwise stellar record from its 30 years.

 

The Chumph’s Ownership By the Russian Mob Starts to Become Public

The Chumph is owned by the Mob. More specifically Putin’s Russian Mob. The FBI, the MSM, and a few others are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Mob has used the Trump organization to launder hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in ill gotten gains. The Chumph was bought and paid for, way before he began his run for office.

As a guy who sometimes does what’s called “due diligence” for corporations to sniff out just these sorts of financial ties, I stated here over a year ago that the Chumph has ties to organized crime, largely because of the fact crime bosses utilize investment in real estate deals of the type the Chumph does to both gain political power, and to launder money. Lets not even talk about the Chumph Casino in Atlantic City.

Ergo, without even opening the books, there was evidence of “funny money”.

Putin, besides being President of Russia, is the most powerful Mob boss in the world. His known holdings are somewhere in the $55-80 billion range, and that just covers the relatively “legal” stuff on which there are at least some financial reports. The common misconception about these criminals is they are all the tattooed freaks you see in the movies. That is a long way from the truth anymore.

New Style Russian Mafia

Donald Trump’s businesses appear to have ties with alleged Russian mobsters: report

There’s a long history between Trump’s business interests and Russian interests

President Donald Trump, his company and partners have worked with wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics, according to a USA Today review of court cases, government and legal documents, in order to grow real estate developments. There are several of whom are allegedly connected to organized crime, according to USA Today.

At least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen — who are allegedly tied to criminal organizations — have been linked to Trump and his companies. Some of them include: a member of the the firm that developed Trump SoHo Hotel in New York — a twice convicted felon; an investor in the SoHo project who was accused of being involved with a $55 million money laundering scheme by Belgian authorities in 2011; and three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan who were indicted on their belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss in Russia.

At a time when Trump’s connections with Russia are under massive scrutiny, including an ongoing investigation by the FBI, the president’s decades-long history of business dealings with Russia are only creating more smoke. Trump has denied having any dealings in Russia as recently as February.

“I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all,” Trump previously told reporters.

However, back in 2013, Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow. Later touting to Real Estate Weekly,  “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors, according to USA Today.

USA Today reports:

Dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many of those super-wealthy people are generally suspected of corrupt practices as a result of interconnected relationships among Russia’s business elite, government security services and criminal gangs, according to former U.S. prosecutor Ken McCallion, as well as Steven Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations.

“Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview. “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”

Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to any of the individuals mentioned in this article.

However, the deals, and the large number of Russians who have bought condos in Trump buildings, raise questions about the secrecy he has maintained around his real estate empire. Trump is the first president in 40 years to refuse to turn over his tax returns, which could shed light on his business dealings.

Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, had money laundering problems when it was fined $10 million in 2015 for not reporting suspicious transactions. “The Trump Organization admitted that it failed to implement and maintain an effective (anti-money laundering) program; failed to report suspicious transactions; failed to properly file required currency transaction reports; and failed to keep appropriate records as required by (the Bank Secrecy Act),” U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in a statement, according to USA Today.

While the statement said warnings of multiple violations go as far back as 2003, no Russians were mentioned. However, former mayor Viktor Khrapunov was accused by lawyers for the Kazakh city of Almaty, lawsuits were filed in 2014, according to USA Today, of owning three Trump SoHo units through shell companies used to hide hundreds of millions of dollars. The money was allegedly looted by selling state-owned assets. The nation of Kazakhstan is a former member of the Soviet Union.

According to USA Today:

The Trump SoHo project “was largely financed by illegally obtained cash from Russia and Eastern European sources, including money provided by known international financial criminals and organized crime racketeers,” former prosecutor McCallion wrote on his blog in October. McCallion was an assistant U.S. attorney in New York from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s under presidents Carter and Reagan.

Old Style Russian Mafia

 

The Chumph Tries to Kill the Chesapeake Bay and Kill More Jobs

One of my favorite memories as a young boy was when visiting country relatives who lived along one of Virginia’s rivers emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. In the summer, we’d go fishing a few miles down river for the plentiful Sea Trout, Spot, Croaker, and Bluefish. And yes, “Croaker” is a type pf fish prevalent along the mid-Atlantic seaboard considered a delicacy by some, and a trash fish by others because it has lots of bones.

Atlantic Croaker. So named because it makes a sound when caught. They breed in a 6 year cycle, and disappear for a year. Depending on year, they can range from 3-4″ to over 18″ in length.

In the fall Hunting season, the men in the Hunt Club would sometimes go out to the Oyster Grounds along the river, and collect bushels of the delicious bivalves. We would usually all ride on one of the flatbed Lumber Trucks, and wade out at low tide to chip Oysters off what is called Oyster rock, filling bushel baskets. Then on the way back home, “shuck” a few to eat raw, flavoring them with Vinegar, splitting up the catch so everyone had some to take home.

By the late 60’s – there just wen’t any Oysters.

The bay (and ocean side) has made a big comeback from the devastation of the Oyster stock by over-fishing and pollution. And a number of small aquaculture companies have had success in farming Oysters and Clams for the commercial market. I started “planting” my own clams, and raising Oysters in baskets which are designed to float, suspending the Oysters in a cage under water.

While people both farm clams and use the floats for Oysters for commercial purposes, many people here who live along the water, or have access to a dock will raise Oysters or Clams for their own personal consumption. Originally the floats were designed to raise the Oysters above the bottom to avoid the deadly MX Virus, as well as pollution. Now, they are the basis of a sustainable aquaculture system.

Now, Putin’s Bitch wants to take us back to the “bad old days” by destroying the very Chesapeake Bay clean up efforts which allowed the Oyster and Clam businesses on the bay to come back. POS needs to keep his freaking small paws off the Bay!

This is why the Farmers in my part of the world…

Weren’t stupid enough to vote for Trump

Chesapeake Bay’s Booming Oyster Industry Is Alarmed By Trump’s EPA Budget Cuts

Ryan Coxton resurrected his family’s oyster business in 2001 from the same muddy swath of Virginia river bottom his great-grandfather leased 102 years earlier. The slippery, jagged-shelled bivalves became so popular in the decades after the Civil War that a gold rush ensued in the Chesapeake Bay and its teeming estuaries, at times spurring violent rivalries that became known as “the oyster wars.”

But the Rappahannock Oyster Co. ― the first iteration of it, at least ― died in 1991 with Coxton’s grandfather. By the time Coxton and his paternal cousin, Travis, started growing oysters as a hobby on the family’s old property, the oyster industry in the region had all but collapsed.

Overfishing over the last century badly hurt wild oyster populations. Diseases ravaged the remaining creatures in the 1950s. Runoff pollution from farms and sewage treatment plants tainted the waters with phosphorus and nitrogen. Bacteria and algae fed by the pollution blossomed into massive, toxic plumes that sucked up oxygen and blocked sunlight, stymying fish populations and thinning the marsh grasses that oysters cling to to keep from slipping into the soft, silty mud and dying.

Things started changing in the last several years as the effects of an Environmental Protection Agency cleanup that began in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan took effect. (President Barack Obama imposed even stricter targets in 2009). Levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, a third of which settled on the water from being wheezed by power plants into the air, fell. The water cleared. Grasses grew back in dense thickets, tightening the river bed with roots.

By 2004, Coxton quit his day job and started cultivating oysters full time. At first, restaurants in the area, knowing how dirty the water had been, wouldn’t buy his product, even though it was safe to eat. He shipped them to upscale eateries in New York. But as water quality improved over the past decade, local demand came roaring back. Coxton opened his fifth restaurant Thursday evening and plans to cut the ribbon on a sixth in September.

Now the program that saved the Chesapeake Bay oyster industry is in jeopardy. The budget President Donald Trump proposed Thursday would eliminate funding for the $73 million initiative, along with more than 50 other programs and 31 percent of the EPA’s overall budget. Funding isn’t the only thing on the chopping block. Trump vowed to boost economic growth by axing regulations, particularly environmental rules he blames for holding businesses back. Already, his administration has scrapped a rule protecting streams from coal mine pollution, tossed out a directive ordering oil and gas drillers to report methane emissions and overturned a regulation giving the EPA power to police fertilizer and manure runoff from farms, the chief contaminants in the Chesapeake Bay.

“Oysters are filter feeders,” Coxton, 47, told The Huffington Post in a recent interview. “We can’t operate without clean water and a good environment.”

It wasn’t long ago that another Republican eager to placate his party’s populist wing took aim at cleanup efforts pursued by his Democratic predecessor. Weeks after taking office in January 2015, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan blocked regulations aimed at limiting Eastern Shore poultry farmers’ use of chicken manure on their fields. The phosphorus-rich fertilizer is a leading source of runoff in the Chesapeake Bay.

A month later, the Hogan administration received a letter from the EPA warning that, if the state dropped new manure rules, it would need another policy to meet the agency’s pollution limits. Maryland Democrats scrambled to pass bills that would have done just that. In response, Hogan made an about-face. He ordered an immediate ban that targeted fields oversaturated with manure, even though he gave other farmers more time to comply, local NPR station WYPR reported.

“We have listened to the agricultural and environmental communities to find a fair and balanced plan for limiting phosphorus,” Hogan said in a statement at the time. “The enhanced Phosphorus Management Tool regulations … will protect water quality in the Chesapeake Bay while still supporting a vibrant agriculture industry in Maryland.”

In a statement to The Huffington Post, the governor vowed he would “always fight to protect our state’s most important natural asset.”

“If any of these budget proposals ever become law, we will take a serious look at how to address them during our budget process next year,” Amelia Chasse, the governor’s spokeswoman, said. “Since taking office, Governor Hogan has invested more than $3 billion in efforts to protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay and will remain a fierce advocate going forward.”

Conservationists, clean water advocates and oyster farmers hope Trump will have a similar change of heart. Or, at least, that Congress will withhold approval for any budget that doesn’t include funding for the project. Republican lawmakers, some of whom already joined Democrats in opposing Trump’s cuts to a similar cleanup effort in the Great Lakes, are expected to oppose the reductions.

“This just makes no sense. We are in disbelief,” said William C. Baker, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “The EPA’s role in this cleanup is nothing less than fundamental. It’s not just important; it is critical.”

Oyster farmers emerged over the past decade as a force in Virginia and Maryland. In the Old Dominion State, farmers sold $16 million in oysters in 2015 alone, besting all other states on the East Coast, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s 10th annual report on the state’s aquaculture industry. Though smaller in Maryland, the industry has ballooned in the last eight years, said Jeffrey Brainard, a spokesman for the EPA-funded Maryland Sea Grant, which is also earmarked for disposal.

In just the last five years, farmers in the Chesapeake Bay region helped double oyster production on the East Coast to 155 million bivalves per year, said Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association.

“We’re literally an engine of job growth, especially in Chesapeake and especially for the watermen of that region who are up for the challenge,” Rheault said. “These proposed cuts are just job killers.”

“It’s like, my God,” he added, sighing loudly, “if we don’t have clean water, we don’t have customer confidence.”

Uncertainty over the future of the EPA cleanup program has spooked some who left other jobs in recent years to join the booming industry. Johnny Shockley, 54, quit commercial fishing to build a sustainable oyster hatchery on Hooper’s Island, the bayside archipelago where he grew, a third-generation waterman. Now the man The Washingtonian once called “the Chesapeake Bay’s hope on the half shell” worries his small empire of sustainable oyster hatcheries could be imperiled.

“One of the reasons why folks were getting in and willing to change their lives and commit their livelihoods to these efforts is the support we’ve seen from the federal government in the last 25 to 30 years,” Shockley said. “All of a sudden we’ve been threatened to see that all taken away.”

 

 

Miller Lite – “Tap the Future”​ Competition – Daymon John, No Equity Angel Investment

Daymond gives some good advice here…

Miller Lite’s “Tap the Future” Contest is underway accepting applications through April 14th. The Contest participants (rules in link above) get $20,000 for being selected in the first round, and can get $100,000 if their idea is selected as an overall winner. As Daymon John points out above, the huge advantage in participation in the competition, is the money does not require giving up equity in the winning companies, giving the a massive leg up should their business move to the point of seeking secondary of tertiary investment. If you can get to the product prototype stage (or are already there) with $100,000, this is far better financially than pursuing “Angel” investors who will want 30-50% ownership. One of the most critical factors to success of a startup is keeping the investor/ownership group as small as possible. Winning this could mean the entrepreneur retaining majority ownership through at least the Venture Capital round.

Go for it!

 

Immigrants as Entreprenuers

A few year back a study for Forbes showed that nearly 30% of new incorporation of companies in America were by black folks. Black folks, faced with persistent job discrimination, created businesses in reaction to discrimination.

It seems we have some competition… Immigrants.

What do Immigrants do for America? They follow the American Dream, no matter how difficult the path.

Outperforming the lazy, dumb-ass white Trumpazoids every step of the way despite their endemic racism.

 

 

Study Shows Immigrants Are Twice as Likely to Become Entrepreneurs

Research shows that the economy benefits, in a big way, from immigration.

If you’re searching for examples of big, revolutionary businesses that were started by immigrants, you don’t have to look very far. Andy Gove, one of the founders of Intel (and one of Steve Jobs’ biggest influences) fled Hungary and taught himself English while working in a restaurant and attending college.

Jobs himself was the son of a Syrian immigrant.

In fact, 40% of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. But the examples of immigrant entrepreneurs aren’t just restricted to huge, household name companies. According to research conducted by The Kauffman Foundation:

• Immigrants started 28.5% of all new businesses in 2014.
• Between 2006-2012 immigrants founded one quarter of the engineering and technology companies in the United States.
• In 2012 immigrant founded engineering and technology firms employed approximately 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales.
• Immigrants have seen their rate of business generation rise by more than 50% since the start of the new millennium, while native-born citizens have seen their rate of new-business generation decline by 10%.
• Immigrants are now more than twice as likely to start a business than native-born citizens.

So why are immigrants starting more businesses?

Economists theorize that many immigrants are prevented from accessing other paths to upward mobility. In other words, all those studies that show applicants are less likely to get hired with an ethnic sounding name might force new immigrants into creating their own business, rather than trying (and often failing) to find a decent paying job working for someone else.

Additionally, immigrants often live in underserved communities. If you live in an underserved market, you can spot the goods and services community members don’t have access to and fulfill that need.

Like my new friend, Ajay.

Ajay immigrated to America from India about 15 years ago, where he began working as a computer engineer for Enterprise Rental Car.

But he also saw an unserved need in his immigrant network: cricket.

His friends who grew up playing cricket had nowhere for their sons and daughters to play, so Ajay founded the American Cricket Academy and Club–which has grown from six to more than 150 members in about a year.

Ajay’s cricket academy might not be the next Intel, but that’s growth a lot of new entrepreneurs would love to experience.

Of course, immigration has many facets.

But most economists–including the ones at the Wharton School, alma mater of Donald Trump–conclude that immigration (both legal and illegal) is a net positive to the economy.

Economic studies are one way to measure the impact of immigration.

Personally, I like to measure it another way. I like to look at my son–the great-grandson of a Mexican immigrant–while he plays cricket with his friends, nearly all of whom are second-generation Indian immigrants.

When I watch my son play cricket with his friends, I come to the same conclusion the economists at Wharton do:

Our new immigrant friends are enriching our lives and making our economy better–and I’ll be really thankful when my son gets that cricket scholarship.

The Welfare State

 

Hubris Leads to Black Restaurateur’s Spectacular Failure

Washington, DC., New York, Chicago, San Fran, LA, and Dallas All host great restaurants – of which a half dozen or so compete on the World Stage of greats.You want to open a restaurant and claim it belongs you better be on the very, very, very top of your game. Legendary locations for exquisite cuisine include The French Laundry, Per Se, Alinea, or  Le Bernadin are world famous. The top 5, 10, or 50 list is hotly contested and changes from year to year. Per person seatings generally run from $80 to $300 before the wine tab.

In the Washington, DC area that list include perennial favorite, The Inn at Little Washington, as well as relative newcomers Minibar, Rasika, Komi, Fiola, and French traditional stalwart L’Auberge Chez Francois.

So when an upstart opens a new place with a price tag of $1,000 a seating, at 4 times the price of 2 of the highest Michelin rated restaurants in the US, you better be able to  produce something so spectacular, people faint at first tasting.

Alas… This foolish brother couldn’t “walk the walk”.

Just from a single guy standpoint, if I’m picking up a $2,000 tab – everything from the decor, ambiance, food, service, wine better be so good – my date hands me the room key to the Presidential Suite she paid for at the hotel…With the bottle of champagne!

I’m not paying 4 times the going rate for some of the very best restaurants in the world…For a place whose decor looks like “Early Howard Johnson’s”

Shaw Bijou Dining Room @ $2,000 for 2

The competition — The Inn at Little Washington Veranda Dining Room @ $300-$500 for 2

Shaw Bijou, one of D.C.’s most expensive restaurants, has closed after less than three months

Fail! Chef Kwame Onwuachi lost his debut restaurant after less than three months of business.

The Shaw Bijou closed today, and the owner says the blame for the restaurant’s two-and-a-half-month existence is shared among all the principals.

Kelly Gorsuch, the principal owner of Shaw Bijou, says he saw himself as a silent investor, providing the capital for first-timers chef Kwame Onwuachi and general manager Greg Vakiner to build and run the high-concept restaurant they had been planning for years. But in retrospect, Gorsuch says he should have pushed the duo more from the start.

He says that the restaurant’s pricey tasting-menu dinner wasn’t filling seats or covering costs. So on Sunday, Gorsuch called Onwuachi and Vakiner into a meeting and told them he was closing Shaw Bijou, effective immediately. Gorsuch and the other principal investor Glenn Paik could no longer afford to keep the place running.

Neither Onwuachi nor Vakiner could be reached for comment.

“[The restaurant] bled too much, at too much of a clip, to be able to salvage it,” says Gorsuch, the president of Gorsuch Holdings, a company that operates upscale salons and other luxury brands. “It just cost a lot of money. It was a very expensive business. I’ve never quite seen that in business at all. That was new for me. The numbers were staggering.”

The closing of Shaw Bijou, first reported by Washingtonian, brings an abrupt end to a restaurant that endured wild mood swings before it served a single meal. Even before appearing on “Top Chef,” where he finished sixth out of 17 contestants last year, Onwuachi was a hot commodity. He not only had a compelling back story, but he also had an impressive run with Dinner Lab, a series of pop-up dinners in which the chef consistently impressed diners. Onwuachi’s appearances on “Top Chef” only contributed to the buzz around the young cook, even though he had never run his own restaurant or managed a kitchen.

The hype took a turn in August when Onwuachi and his team announced the price tag of their 13-course tasting menu, which would take diners on a journey through a converted townhouse. It wasn’t long before Washingtonians realized that dinner for two at Shaw Bijou could top out at $1,000, immediately making it one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Diners couldn’t understand how someone with such a thin resume could compete with the likes of José Andrés, Eric Ziebold and Aaron Silverman.

When Shaw Bijou opened on Nov. 1, the early reviews were mixed. In his First Bite review, The Post’s Tom Sietsema enjoyed several of his savory courses but found the desserts fell flat. More dispiriting, the critic realized that after dropping $500 per person on the meal, he was still hungry. Washingtonian gave the place two stars in a review that couldn’t make sense of the story that Onwuachi was trying to weave.

Two months into its existence, Shaw Bijou slashed its prices and its offerings: Onwuachi rolled out a seven-course, $95 tasting menu on Jan. 3. The chef also offered up a little humble pie. “Humility creeps up on you when least expected,” Onwuachi noted in a letter. “The opening of this restaurant has taught us just that.”

But Gorsuch says it was too little, too late.

“I think all business is difficult. You have to be able to move and change and adapt quickly, especially when you’re starting out,” Gorsuch says. “It wasn’t happening. It wasn’t where it needed to be.”

The owner says he had been trying for weeks to convince Onwuachi and Vakiner to change the concept, but he says he couldn’t convince them.

“I think the biggest problem here, from the get, was that we were not listening to the guests,” Gorsuch says. “We spent two years working on this thing . . . I don’t care what the industry is, you put your people first and you care about the guests and you care about the details. . . I mean, numbers can be tweaked. You can cut things, but you have to have those elements.”

Gorsuch says he had spent most of Sunday trying to find jobs for the servers, cooks and bartenders at Shaw Bijou. The owner wasn’t as concerned about the chef and general manager. The longtime friends, who first met while attending the Culinary Institute of America, will probably find a new home soon, Gorsuch says.

“They’ll be fine,” the owner says. Onwuachi “had tons of offers before us.”

Gorsuch says this experience has shaken him. He’s never closed a business before. “This is probably the roughest week I’ve ever had,” he says.

But more than that, Gorsuch is upset by the lost opportunity. He says he believed in the team behind Shaw Bijou. He thought they could have pulled off the concept with proper oversight.

“The game plan was always to be super innovative,” Gorsuch says. “For all the things we did wrong, the talent that was in that building was special.”

 

From Rags to Riches…To Rags

Met Rodney the first time at a high-end luxury car dealership, where I was having the venerable sports car I owned at the time serviced. There are a group of guys living in the Va suburbs who love exotic sports cars, antique cars, and cars they have fixed up themselves from not so glorious names as Ferrari or McLaren, who uhhhh…kinda illegally race along some of the rural roads about 30 miles out from the City. On any Sunday morning you can find guys with anything from a new or aged Mustang up to a $3 million Bugatti raring to go down the curvy foothill roads.

I was looking at an Aston Martin DB9 (and looking is the operative word here,, as I couldn’t afford it, and two if I could I couldn’t see throwing that type of money on the floor for a car.) He was looking at a Mercedes McLaren – which got up in the million dollar range with markup. I knew of him from a cousin who raced a race prepped Lotus in that group. Rodney had made a lot of money on the Iraq War, supplying security personnel to guard Americans in the country. The most successful and infamous of the groups who did that was Blackhawk. Rodney’s company wasn’t too far behind.

He was there to buy a Mercedes McLaren SLS, which at that time was one of the 3 or 4 fastest cars  in the world at that time. In talking, it was fairly obvious he had no experience in that sort of car. He wanted to buy it basically to impress people. I suggested that driving that beast at anywhere near its capabilities took a driver with Formula One racing skills. At his request I went out on a test drive (the Dealership guy drove it, as I knew it was beyond my skills on any public street). The gearing in the car is set up for the track – not daily commuting. Coming out of second at 80 Mph with a top end over 200 Mph or better, with a 0-60 time in 3 seconds ain’t your mamma’s Honda. Suggested he buy the Mercedes SLS AMG, which is set up to operate on the streets and you could dial down the power. A  third to half of the price. About this time they brought out my aged toy from the early 70’s from service, and I left. No idea which he bought.

The neighborhood he built his house is in has several extremely wealthy luminaries. On is Steve Case, AOL founder. I grew up in the town the property is located in (a much, much poorer part). The property some years ago was part of the Bouvier estate (As in Jackie Kennedy).

Hunt is not in position anymore to pay either the mortgage (around $100,000 a month), or even the electric bill to keep this place lit.

Man who built a $24 million mansion along Potomac River loses battle to keep it

Rodney P. Hunt, a once-rich-but-now-bankrupt government contracting titan, is losing his beloved $24 million mansion turned party house on the banks of the Potomac River.

On Tuesday, an Arlington County judge granted possession of the home to a firm managed by Jeong Kim, a former president of Bell Labs and a co-owner of Verizon Center, the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals.

Kim’s company, 201 Chain Bridge LLC, bought the 20,000-square-foot property earlier this summer after it had been sold at a foreclosure auction. But Hunt, still in bankruptcy proceedings, resisted relinquishing his trophy home, claiming the foreclosure auction was illegitimate.

In a bizarre hearing at Arlington County General District Court, the former multimillionaire served as his own attorney. Hunt, 56, told Judge R. Frances O’Brien that another entity, Crown Properties LLC, was the real owner and agreed to lease the home back to him in May, a month before the house was auctioned. He said he was providing technology consulting to another firm, Legal Investment Group, which was paying his rent to Crown Properties.

Hunt’s sudden claims — he never discussed these companies in his pretrial defense filings or pretrial hearings — prompted Kim’s attorney, Leon Koutsouftikis, to question the authenticity of those firms.

“I think he’s committing a fraud in this court. It’s ridiculous,” Koutsouftikis told O’Brien.

“I have not committed a fraud in this court,” Hunt countered.

The judge was skeptical. “I think there are issues of credibility,” she said, before ruling in favor of Kim.

For years, Hunt has been beset by legal and financial problems. He founded RS Information Systems in 2003 and built it into one of the country’s most prominent black-owned government contracting firms. By 2006, he finished building his Mediterranean-style home, which boasts a basketball court, a 15-space underground parking garage and five bedrooms. It was once featured on “MTV Cribs” and was known on social media as #RHPmansion.

The home’s size and location — around the corner from tech entrepreneur Steve Case and down the street from the CIA — symbolized Hunt’s perch atop Washington’s hierarchy.

In 2007, the year he sold his IT contracting company to a California aerospace firm, Northern Virginia Magazine estimated his net worth at $265 million.

But soon, Hunt began piling up astronomical debts. By 2012, Bank of America said Hunt had defaulted on a $9.4 million loan on the mansion. Court records also showed that he racked up more than $10 million on unpaid loans and shoddy business deals.

Last year Hunt filed for bankruptcy, citing debts between $10 million and $50 million. One creditor, a Texas woman, alleges in his bankruptcy court documents that Hunt raped her in July 2009 at a Houston hotel and owes her more than $600,000 in court-ordered judgments stemming from a settlement in a civil suit she had filed against him. Hunt has denied the assault accusations in court, saying the woman was trying to extort money from him so that eventually he would settle to avoid tainting his reputation.

On June 16, Hunt’s mansion was sold in one of the largest foreclosure sales in the region’s history, for $7.3 million to an entity called GREI LLC, whose managing member is Alasgar Farhadov, a Realtor in Northern Virginia. Then, in July, Farhadov transferred his company’s interest in the house to 201 Chain Bridge LLC, the firm managed by Kim.

Hunt has been living on the property “on and off” since July, according to his close friend and business associate Danny Jones.

 

Thanks, Dad! Trump Name Becomes Toxic Even for His Kids

The Chumph has not only killed his Hotel business…He’s killing his daughter’s business too!

Fewer than 1 in 4 women would buy clothes from Ivanka Trump after her father’s toxic campaign

Donald Trump’s name is so toxic that it has harmed his own businesses or hotelsfor whom he has leased his name. But now that Trump name is beginning to have a huge impact on the rest of the family.

Just last month, the social media app FourSquare revealed data showing the decrease in foot traffic at Trump-named properties. The numbers were even lower for women, who are avoiding Trump brands in larger numbers.

This weekend, Raw Story explained how one woman’s boycott of Ivanka Trump’s fashion line and accessories has promoted other woman to respond in kind.

But that boycott has been turned into actual numbers. According to a Fortune report, fewer than one in four women would buy anything from Ivanka Trump’s brand. It’s unclear whether the boycott was the culprit or the bad press over the last year, but women don’t want Trump, whether for president or to wear on their bodies.

The national survey asked 1,983 voters if they would consider purchasing clothing from a Trump line and 57 percent said they would not. Only 23 percent said that they would with the remainder saying they weren’t sure. Those numbers are even worse when looking at a partisan breakdown. An overwhelming 75 percent of Democratic women refuse to buy the GOP candidate’s daughter’s products. Only 11 percent said they would.

 

 

Gasp! “A Taco Truck on Every Corner!”

Last I checked, one of the things folks brag about in this country is entrepreneurship. The country was built on people’s desire and pure moxie to start businesses in good times and bad, and while the majority of those businesses failed – some didn’t. Whether that business was a Mom and Pop store on the corner – or became a multi-billion dollar enterprise the point is that folks worked and scraped and saved and sometimes overcame tremendous challenges. They employ 6 out of every 10 people in this country as small businesses.

Now we have a Trumpazoid who wants to claim that starting a business is bad…Simply because the person starting it s brown.

Last time I checked, it takes quite an investment to start a Food Truck business. The low end on starting that business is about $50,000. Fancy, high end trucks with refrigeration and generators can reach over $200,000. To claim that someone is willing to come over our border illegally, invest $50 or $100,000 in an American Made Truck (likely used), American made stoves, refrigeration, and generator…Pay the business taxes and license fees to an American city or town, submit to health inspections (all generating American jobs)…And then risk it all on business in a roadside location doesn’t sound to me like a losing proposition for America.

Indeed we would be better off encouraging these folks to come here…

And deport the welfare sucking, meth/heroin addicted, white trash trump scum who do nothing for this country….and their jinete de césped.

 

 

Businesses Voting With Their Feet to Leave Republican States

The only thing worse than Republican Stone Age fundamentalist social hate…Is the failed Republican economic beliefs trashing their states and forever leaving them on the tail end of economic development.

Unable to locally hire educated and qualified staff, unable to get qualified people who want to move there, and burdened by hateful conservative social laws and tax cuts for the rich destroying everything from the quality of life through the ability for children to get an education companies are increasingly fleeing the red states.

‘Resign in shame’: Fed-up Kansas CEO flees GOP governor’s disastrous reign

A Tech CEO blamed Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and his ultra-conservative policies for his decision to move his company — and its jobs — to another state.

“It’s not so much that I’m moving the company to Missouri as I’m moving it away from Kansas,” said Jeff Blackwood, CEO of Pathfinder Health Innovations.

Blackwood, whose privately held company provides software to autism therapy centers, wrote a blistering attack of Brownback and the Republican-dominated legislature — which he said had destroyed the state’s economy with failed conservative policies.

“Kansas has become a test center of ‘trickle down’ economics, espoused by economist Arthur Laffer during the Reagan years,” Blackwood wrote in a personal post on the company’s blog. “Nowhere has there been as thorough an implementation of Laffer’s policy recommendations — and nowhere has there been as dramatic a failure of government.”

The CEO blasted an unprecedented tax cut enacted in 2012, which Brownback promised would be a “shot of adrenaline” to the state’s economy, but instead has cost Kansas jobs, revenue and its bond rating.

Kansas has faced budget shortfalls in 11 of the past 12 months, and its economy shrank in three of four quarters last year.

Blackwood ripped the governor for placing the burden for his mistakes on children and the developmentally disabled with cuts to education and social services.

“You’ll hear claims from Kansas officials that funding to education is at an all time high, but it’s just an accounting trick – they chose to shuffle money for special education and retirement funds through the schools so it could appear as an increase on the books,” Blackwood said.

The Republican legislature had instead focused on freezing teacher salaries, pursuing funding cuts later ruled unconstitutional and laws calling for teachers to be imprisoned for introducing “offensive” content, Blackwood said.

He accused Brownback and his GOP “cronies” of intentionally undermining public education and diverting taxpayer funds — and students — to private and religious schools.

“In the end, I believe the goals of the Brownback administration are going exactly to plan — starve the state of resources to the point where it just makes sense to turn over critical government functions to for-profit entities,” Blackwood said.

The CEO accused Brownback of turning the state’s Medicaid program, KanCare, into a cash cow for three insurance companies — which he said forced pregnant women to wait months for care and kept health care providers from being paid for their service.

Blackwood blamed the governor’s policies for the murder of a 61-year-old man by a patient improperly released from an underfunded mental health care facility and the rape of a worker at another hospital.

“I can’t, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they’re simply a tax burden that should be ignored,” Blackwood said.

Blackwood said his decision to move Pathfinder Health Innovations, which is adding new jobs, to Kansas City, Missouri, was a matter of conscience — and a decision he hoped other business leaders would emulate.

“I believe that it is the responsibility of business owners and people with some voice in society should speak up against these destructive policies,” Blackwood said. “And I believe it is far past the time that Sam Brownback and his cronies admit the damage they’ve caused to the people of Kansas and resign in the shame they deserve.”

 

How Republicans Have Derailed the New South’s Emergence

North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the Charlotte/Cary area are hotspots for tech an other development. The US Government supplies over $1.5 billion a year in research grants to the state’s public universities, money that has helped drive the growth of the Universities in the state from decidedly mediocre to competitive powerhouses. This has spurred massive growth, as the combination of a realistic cost of living, easy access to recreational activities in the mountains and shore, as well a good school systems have individualized both corporations and employees to flock to the state.

Unfortunately, like Virginia, the back woods redneck religious bigots haven’t quite dissipated yet, and with the election of a Republican majority in the state house – pushing extremist social conservatism which is an anathema to the high-tech and banking industries.That growth roll may be in for a screeching halt.

You want to keep that growing Gov McCrory, you need to cut the “Culture War” bullshit fast.

The fact is, major corporations don’t give a shit about Republican tax breaks, they do about being able to attract the best and brightest as employees, and having a stable government  which isn’t going to do something stupid to hurt their business. They need good schools, which are producing students in the fields that relate to their businesses, who are willing to stay in-state after they graduate. (As an example, the collapse of what was once referred to as “Silicon Valley East” here in northern Virginia, was in good part due to the major University in the area being taken over by conservative donors. The school produces Economists and right wing Federalist Lawyers – but not STEM Graduates needed by the local industries to grow, or to establish the sort of incubators which create the next Google. Instead we have the Antonin Scalia Law School, which is fornicating useless, both as the symbol of higher education in the fields in demand, as well as in attracting students that want to be in a top program in the Sciences, Engineering, or technology.)

They want to be able to attract experienced workers and executives. To get those people, the potential employees need to feel comfortable moving their families into the State. The sort of “Culture Wars” and racism being promulgated by the right, destroys that.

This isn’t just an issue about Transgender people, it is an issue about the future viability of the State as a business center.

Back during the South Carolina confederate flag imbroglio, one of my clients was a foreign auto company looking to put a plant there. Took one of the Senior Staff folks down there behind the proverbial woodshed, and explained to him that foreign companies, unlike their US counterparts are not willing to go into an environment where discrimination and harassment lawsuits chew up 10-15% of their profits. And as such, were looking for a place which supported a harmonious workforce, over cheap rent. The differential between labor costs between Detroit and Charleston disappears really fast paying lawyers at $500/hr over racial bullshit. They got that message apparently from more than one prospective company. American companies have finally started to get a clue about this as well.

Too bad the white winger Tea Baggers haven’t.

This isn’t just an issue about Transgender people, it is an issue about the future viability of the State as a business center.

TRANSGENDER RIGHTS AND THE END OF THE NEW SOUTH

Monday, two North Carolinians squared off over the state’s controversial House Bill 2, which requires transgender people to use the bathroom matching their “biological sex” in public schools and government buildings and invalidates local laws protecting transgender people from discrimination. Both Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, grew up partly in Greensboro, a site of anti-segregation sit-ins in 1960, and Lynch recalled that history by comparing H.B. 2 to Jim Crow laws. “Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight,” she said, as she announced that the Department of Justice is suing North Carolina, claiming that H.B. 2 violates federal laws forbidding sex discrimination.

Earlier that day, McCrory’s office had filed its own federal lawsuit, which attempted to protect the state from federal anti-discrimination action against H.B. 2. “North Carolina does not treat transgender employees differently,” according to the lawsuit. “All state employees are required to use the bathroom and changing facilities assigned to persons of their same biological sex, regardless of gender identity, or transgendered status.” Such bland assertions of neutrality have an infamous place in the law. Before the Supreme Court established a right to same-sex marriage, in 2015, North Carolina forbade gay and straight alike to wed members of the same sex. Before the Court invalidated laws against racial intermarriage, in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, the state forbade both black and white people to marry someone of the other race. All these laws were defended on the grounds that they treated everyone alike. So, for that matter, were the original Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1896, upholding separate-but-equal accommodations, the Supreme Court held that, if “the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” this was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.”

McCrory’s suit looks more like political theatre than a serious attempt to preserve H.B. 2. On April 19th, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes North Carolina, adopted the Obama Administration’s interpretation of federal sex-discrimination law to invalidate a local school-board policy that assigned students to bathrooms by “biological genders.” The court accepted the federal government’s argument that the prohibition on sex discrimination in Titles VII and IX of the Civil Rights Act includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and that “biological” bathroom assignments are just this sort of discrimination. (The Fourth Circuit reported that, in public hearings on school-bathroom assignments, the plaintiff in the case, a transgender boy, had been called a “freak” and “compared to a person who thinks he is a ‘dog’ and wants to urinate on fire hydrants.”)

That McCrory would seek out this wrong-side-of-history position reveals a lot about the fractured and desperate state of the Republican Party. The governor took office in 2013 as the consummate country-club Republican. He had spent fourteen years as the mayor of Charlotte, a banking capital, where he presided over robust growth and—unusual in the South—the construction of a light-rail system. He was a candidate in the “New South” tradition, a political manner that is also a development strategy. In the sixties, as other parts of the white South dug in against desegregation, North Carolina’s politicians found a different formula: accept the national consensus on civil rights and attract employers with low wages, weak unions, and business-friendly laws. The state’s population more than doubled between 1960 and 2010, as a formerly rural, agricultural state developed national centers of technology and finance. The previous New South governors were Democrats, but many saw McCrory as their natural successor in a state that narrowly supported Barack Obama in 2008 but in 2010 handed control of the legislature to Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.

Since taking office, McCrory has mostly been back on his heels as a Tea Party legislature, installed with decisive support from the activist donor Art Pope (whom Jane Mayer wrote about in 2011), has set the state’s agenda. McCrory has signed laws restricting abortion access, cutting back on early voting and requiring voter identification, slashing unemployment benefits, and repealing the state’s Racial Justice Act, which commuted the death penalty for people sentenced in racially inequitable jurisdictions. North Carolina is one of nineteen states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (and the fourth-largest, after Texas, Florida, and Georgia). The advocacy group Families USA estimates that 593,000 North Carolina residents lack health insurance because of the state’s refusal.

The Tea Party has shared McCrory’s deregulatory, tax-cutting economic agenda, but it has led with culture-war issues. The year McCrory won the governorship, the legislature put forward a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, which passed with sixty per cent of the vote. This blend of tactics defined most state-level Republican parties in the Obama years, when the Republicans took power in statehouses across the country, and McCrory seems to have made his peace with it. Polls showed him lagging in a tight reëlection race when he called North Carolina’s part-time legislature into emergency session in late March. Both houses passed H.B. 2 on March 23rd, and McCrory signed it that night. The only local anti-discrimination statute that it overrode was one passed a month before in Charlotte, where McCrory had served seven terms as mayor.

Now the New South elements of McCrory’s governing style are falling to pieces. H.B. 2 may have seemed an ordinary measure of culture-war politics when the governor signed it, but the consensus position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights has changed so fast that it may secure his place as the Orval Faubus of public bathrooms. McCrory’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general, who has announced that his office will not defend H.B. 2 against legal challenge, has led McCrory in every poll since the law was passed. Since H.B. 2 became law, PayPal and Deutsche Bank have scrapped expansion plans for North Carolina, the N.B.A. and N.C.A.A. have suggested that they may not hold future events in the state, and a caravan of entertainers have cancelled shows, including Bruce Springsteen and Cirque du Soleil. New South governors measure themselves by the investments they attract. When the cultural divisiveness of Tea Party politics drives out business and entertainment, it becomes New South kryptonite….More Here…

 

With Trump…Even the Wine is Fake

At the Infomercial which passed for a victory speech Tuesday Night after winning in Michigan, Trump hawked his supposed “successes” in business.

A group of products which largely already failed, including “Trump Steaks” which went out of business, “Trump Magazine” which published only 8 issues before folding, Trump Vodka – which failed in 2007, and “Trump Water” which has never been sold commercially.

Lastly was Trump Wine – an overpriced mediocre vintage, which in terms of acreage is one of the larger Vineyards in Virginia…But in sales, doesn’t scratch the Top 5, although it does in volume produced. That means a lot of overpriced, bad wine siting on shelves. The wine has never scored above the low 80’s in any of the industry ratings like Wine Spectator, which puts it at $20-40 a bottle in the category of expensive cooking wine. To those unaware, Virginia has a long and storied history in wine production, and now, after some fits and false starts early on in re-establishing the industry in the state – now produces high quality wines competitive with those from California and Washington. Trump Vineyards best vintage, their bubbly Rose wines don’t carry Trumps name at all, but that of the founder, Patricia Kluge.

I mean…Can you imagine the President of the United States giving a speech to the United Nations…And hawking Trump Blenders in the middle of the speech to the collected world leaders?

Trump Swill…Turns out the Winery claims no relationship whatsoever to Donald Trump other than name.

Trump Wine Is Built on Acres of Lies

While Donald Trump may be famous for his litany of ridiculous boasts and exaggerations, his latest claim to be a top winery owner—made during his speech after the Detroit and Mississippi primaries—may be one of his most laughable.

It’s certainly a perfect example of how The Donald seamlessly mixes truth with fiction to form a narrative that manages to sound plausible when delivered in 30-second sound bites.

Despite begging the assembled media to fact check his statement about the financials of Trump Winery (what else would he call it?), Trump still made a few major mistakes in his description of the establishment.

For one, he claimed the vineyard was “close to 2,000 acres,” while in fact Trump Winery’s own website states that it’s a 1,300- acre estate. And, no, the establishment is not located next to the “Thomas Jefferson Memorial.”

We will assume Trump was talking about Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home (not the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.), which is actually several miles from his winery.

His most grandiose claim was that Trump Winery was the “largest winery on the East Coast.”

His 200 planted acres certainly make the winery sizable and the largest one in Virginia by property size. But when discussing the size of a wine or spirits brand, the yardstick is typically case sales, not acreage. (Would you measure an automaker’s size by the square footage of its plant or how many cars it sells?)

One reason for this is the size of the vineyard may not matter given that many wineries buy grapes instead of growing them. “The largest vineyard in Virginia? Maybe. The largest producer? No,” says Jerald O’Kennard the director of the Beverage Testing Institute, which reviews wines and runs wine competitions. “It’s just semantics.”

According to the Virginia Wine Board, Trump Winery is in fact not even the state’s top producer by volume—it falls in the top five. The state’s largest producers are Williamsburg Winery and Chateau Morrisette, which readily admits to buying grapes from a network of Virginia growers.

Trump also failed to give an accurate history of the vineyard. During the press conference he said that media mogul John Kluge, “built one of the great vineyards of all time.”

As it turns out, it was really Kluge’s ex-wife, Patricia, who started the vineyard. You might excuse the mistake except that Patricia stayed on to make the wine after Trump bought the property.

It’s also hard to imagine why Trump would bring up his winery as an example of his business acumen given how well his eponymous vodka worked out.

In 2006, to great fanfare, he introduced Trump Vodka (what else would he call it?) in a statuesque bottle with a garish gold label designed by famed graphic designed Milton Glaser.

The launch party, according to New York Magazine, was emceed by rapper Busta Rhymes and, as you can imagine, featured a mix of hired models and “a bunch of middle-aged, slightly overweight white guys.”

Trump was characteristically optimistic about the brand, forecasting that his version of the classic vodka tonic, the Trump & tonic would be a huge hit. The closure of the brand in 2011 was quite a bit less glamorous, with the vodka quietly disappearing from store and bar shelves.

 

Millionaire or Felon – The Cannabis Industry vs Carceral State

Interesting video on the ONLY Black legal Marijuana entrepreneur in Colorado…

 

The Story of Terri Upshaw, and a Family Who Would Not Accept

This one is getting some press in DC due to the imminent opening of a new Tadich Grill in Washington, DC. To be honest, I’ve never heard of the Tadich Grill in San Francisco – but have visited the city and area well enough to have frequented French Laundry (you may have to sell your firstborn for the price of a meal…But it is that good), Saison, and Quince…and have never seen the joint on any Michelin or Zagat lists. Got my eye on Restaurant at Meadowood for my next visit to the area. Perhaps it is the DC equivalent of “Old Ebbit Grill” est 1856, or the more plebian “Ben’s Chili Bowl” est 1958, which have fueled everybody from the Presidents to street sweepers in the city for generations – but are not highbrow enough to make the connoisseur lists…

Terri Upshaw was the wife of departed NFL great, and NFL Player Union head Gene Upshaw – who was probably on the top 10 list of the most respected people in sports. Her family owned the Tadich… And apparently disowned her after her marriage to Gene. The impact of that disownment, and refusal to even meet as a family with Terri and Gene’s kids is raising a few eyebrows in DC, and doesn’t bode well for their new venture. And the competition is tough.

 

Terri and husband, Gene Upshaw

Lonnae O’Neal: Terri Upshaw says she had to choose between family and love

Sometimes emotion gets the better of Terri Upshaw, and she appears softer, more vulnerable, younger than her 55 years. Then she regains her composure and continues, in spare, straightforward language, to tell the kind of story we think doesn’t happen anymore in modern America. A dark family story that syncs with a national racial history we like to tell ourselves we’re well beyond.

She talks about being raised in the upper-middle-class Buich family, who owned San Francisco’s famed Tadich Grill. She calls her upbringing strict, loving and marked by expressed disdain for people who weren’t white or Christian. A fellow might be “a great guy” if he came into the restaurant, but you knew never to bring one home, she says. “I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t question it,” Upshaw says. “I lived in a house where you didn’t question.”

As a young woman working as a hotel catering manager, she met an older football player. An African American. They hit it off and became friends. Then more. He retired, accepted a job in Washington and asked her to move with him. They’d dated for eight months without her family knowing, and she had to make a decision.

“I was scared,” Upshaw recalls on a recent afternoon near her home in Northern Virginia. She says she broke the news to her brother and sister first. “They said, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ They said our parents would be livid, upset, disappointed, embarrassed, ashamed.”

Tadich Grill in Washington, DC

Word got back to her father. She remembers how much she sobbed in that final family meeting with her parents and siblings. She was 23 and pleading for love — both theirs and her own. She thinks her mother and siblings were crying, but it has been so long. Only the final message was clear.

When she told her father that she had decided to follow the black man she loved to Washington, she says, “he told me that’s it — you’re out of the family. Change your last name, and don’t ever call us again.”

It was 1983. They married in 1986.

The black man was the legendary Gene Upshaw, whose 15-year career as a guard for the Oakland Raiders landed him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. During 25 years in his equally famous second act as the controversial head of the National Football League Players’ Association, he helped usher in free agency, which led to an explosion in player salaries. Upshaw died in 2008, days after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The union headquarters in Northwest Washington is named Upshaw Place in his honor.

Terri Upshaw says she has not heard from her family in decades, true to their final message. While visiting San Francisco a few years ago, she saw a news report that Tadich Grill would open a D.C. location, and last month it did, to great fanfare. Guests included prominent members of Congress and a Supreme Court justice.

Her parents, now in their early 80s, and siblings have never met Upshaw’s sons, 28 and 25. She says they didn’t reach out when her husband died. She says that she has tried over the years to make contact with her family — that they ignored her at her grandmother’s funeral. When her oldest son was 3 months old, she says, she took him to her parents’ house and was ordered to leave.

There is surely another side to this, because there are always sides and layers to all of our stories. There is perhaps a heartache, a wish for a daughter’s well-being that was not properly expressed, but it is difficult to know because numerous calls, voice mails, text messages and messages left for the Buich family and sent through Tadich Grill executives explaining Upshaw’s contention and requesting comment were not returned. Her sister, reached by phone, declined to comment.

Tadich Grill, DC

Upshaw, who had never spoken publicly about the rift, says she is telling this story now, in response to a reporter’s query, because with the new restaurant, she is talking more to friends and “it sounds archaic,” she says.

It sounds like the kind of extreme racial story we don’t want to think happens anymore, although what’s closer to the truth is that both extreme and casual racism are all around us, even in some of our most solid American success stories….Read the rest here…

 

Go Girl! Black Women Fastest Growing Entrepreneurial Segment

Don’t like not being recognized for your contribution at big company?

Start your own.

Black women increasingly are doing just that, despite obstacles in terms of venture or bank financing.

Black Women-Owned Businesses Skyrocket By 322 Percent In Less Than 20 Years

 

African-American women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in America, a new study reveals.

The 2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report released this week found that the number of women-owned businesses grew by 74 percent between 1997 and 2015. That’s 1.5 times the national average of business growth to be exact.

Meanwhile, the growth in the number of businesses specifically owned by black women is outpacing that of all women-owned firms, the report says. The number of black women-owned businesses has grown by a whopping 322 percent since 1997. Today, black women own roughly 14 percent of all businesses in the country owned by women, which tallies to around 1.3 million businesses, according to the report.

“While nationally African American women comprise 14% of all women-owned firms, African American women comprise a greater than average share of all women-owned firms in Georgia (35%), Maryland (33%), and Illinois (22%),” the report says.

Statistics show that throughout these 1.3 million companies, nearly 300,000 workers are employed and the businesses generate an estimated $52.6 billion in revenue. When digging into the number of black-owned businesses overall, 49 percent are owned by women.

Businesses owned by black women also top the charts in revenue growth when compared to other minority women-owned firms proving that their economic clout is ever-growing.