Hasta La Gadget!

For years, the GOP has been moving away from its identity as a traditional center-right party and morphing into something that more resembles the populist fringe parties of Europe.

Donald Trump’s candidacy has all but completed this transformation. If anyone still had doubts, Trump’s hiring of Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon was the clearest sign yet that the Republican Party has become a vehicle for what in the U.S. is known as the ‘alt-right’ movement.

The alt-right thinks the mainstream conservative movement has been compromised by feminism, racial tolerance and “globalism,” and that only a reactionary, populist movement that speaks to the plight of white men can save America from political correctness and multiculturalism. The alt-right is drenched in racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and misogyny. But that didn’t stop Bannon from calling his outlet “the platform for the alt-right.”

While avowed white nationalists have always had a place in the conservative movement–most recently, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa proudly detailed his white supremacist views to a cable TV audience–Trump has thrown such forces into the mainstream.

Trump’s view of America as a weak, crime-ridden and chaotic place would resonate with any regular reader of Breitbart’s news coverage.

Breitbart News depicts an America where white people are under attack from the Obama administration, anti-Christian feminists and LGBT rights activists, African Americans who seek to discriminate against white people, Latino immigrants obsessed with rape and violence, and Muslim refugees who support terrorism.

The U.S. isn’t the only country experiencing a surge in the alt-right’s ideology. Anti-immigrant ethnic nationalists are on the rise in Europe, and European far-right leaders from France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders have jumped aboard the Trump Train.

This is all good news to one of the European far-right’s most enthusiastic backers: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia under Putin’s leadership has been promoting ultraconservative political groups in Europe with the goal of weakening the EU and the liberalism, democracy and cultural pluralism that comes with it. The National Front, a French political party rooted in Holocaust denialism and anti-immigrant sentiment, is open about its financial links to Russian banks, and neo-fascist parties including Jobbik of Hungary, Vlaams Belang of Belgium and the Northern League of Italy likewise have Russian ties.

“As European far-right leaders openly voice their support for Moscow, it would be wise to remember that Putin’s Russia is not just another ‘meddling power’ lobbying for its interests,” writes Alina Polyakova. “It is a government hostile to the West and the value system–democracy, freedom of expression, political accountability–that it represents.”

The Syrian refugee crisis has presented a great opportunity for these far-right movements in Europe to spread their messages of xenophobia. Russia, whose bombing campaigns in Syria have ravaged the civilian population, has been happy to help promote the anti-refugee message. Russian state-sponsored media outlets have enthusiastically fanned the flames of anti-refugee suspicion, bolstering the far-right’s criticism of how the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have approached refugee resettlement.

The Russian government has also sponsored a global right-wing effort to portray the U.S. and Europe as victims of cultural rot due to homosexuality, abortion rights and secular government, and Russia as the protector and preserver of traditional Christian values. In 2014, major conservative groups from the U.S. and Europe convened at the Kremlin to praise the government’s crackdown on LGBT rights advocates while lamenting the social liberalism in their home countries.

Trump, who aspires to be the Russian president’s “new best friend,” has praised Putin as “a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” and has seemed to side with Putin’s position on the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and shared in fueling doubts about the future of the EU and NATO. Trump’s campaign is stacked with officials with Russian ties and, at least according to his eldest son, his businesses have seen “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Merkel, on the other hand, has been a frequent target of Trump’s attacks, and the GOP nominee has dubbed Clinton “America’s Angela Merkel.” (Just to show how far to the right the GOP has drifted, Merkel is the leader of Germany’s main center-right party).

Beyond his expressed support for Russian policies, Trump seeks to govern in the same illiberal, authoritarian manner that Putin has demonstrated, itching to dilute the freedom of the press and laws barring war crimes and human rights abuses and deport undocumented immigrants and refugees legally settled in the country. Like the Religious Right activists who have rallied behind Putin, Trump believes that Christians have been sidelined and marginalized in America, promising to return them to their rightful positions of power.

Such contempt for civil rights, diversity and democracy pervades the alt-right, which calls for a more “masculine,” racially chauvinist response to a society it sees as weak and rootless. One alt-right meme shows “President Trump” congratulating Putin, both decked out in military garb, “on retaking Constantinople.”

While Trump and the alt-right emerged without the help of the Russian government, Putin’s display of authoritarianism and aid to far-right movements have helped bring their ultraconservative designs into the political mainstream.

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Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) said Wednesday that for the past seven months he has been keeping a dossier of drug dealers arrested in his state to justify an earlier comment linking drugs and race. 

In a January conversation about Maine’s heroin problem, LePage said “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” bring drugs from New York and Connecticut and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave.” 

At a town hall in North Berwick on Wednesday, the Portland Press Herald reported, a man who identified himself as a businessman from New York asked the governor how the state could attract investment given the “toxic environment” created by LePage’s comments. 

“I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state. Now, ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state,” LePage said, adding the man would be welcome to see the binder. (You can hear the exchange on the Portland Press Herald’s website.)

“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come,” LePage said. “And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book ― and it’s a three-ringed binder ― are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

The New Yorker then asked LePage if Maine police might be racially profiling their arrestees. LePage responded by repeating the thing about white girls. 

“There are a whole lot of white girls, too, a whole lot of white girls,” LePage said. “In fact, in almost every single picture is a white Maine girl in the picture.”

It’s not clear how there’s a white girl in every photo if 90 percent of the pictures are of black and Hispanic people. A LePage spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the governor’s comments in a statement. 

“White people are statistically more likely to sell drugs than black people, yet according to the governor police in Maine are nine times more likely to arrest black people for doing so,” the Maine ACLU said on Twitter. “We don’t know what’s behind this disparity, but we look forward to working with the governor to end any unconstitutional racial profiling that may be occurring.” 

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Might as well start with the boring definition: “Absorption rate is the rate at which homes sell in a given area during a given time period. Absorption rate is calculated by dividing the number of sales in a given month by the number of available homes for sale. It is the inverse of months of supply.”

If we were talking about building them instead of selling them, it would be how fast they’re coming off the assembly line. But, we’re talking about how fast homes are selling, and the absorption rate can give you a jump on market changes. Like any calculation that helps to invest, it’s not a slam dunk, but it can help.

For our example to help you to understand absorption rate in home sales, we’ll use a three-month period to gather sold data. You can get this from a real estate agent or other source that gives the total number of closings for the period. We’ll say that our check finds that in the previous three months 1800 homes sold in our market.

We only have one other number to get to work this calculation, the number of homes currently listed. Again, if you can’t get it on your own, get the number from a real estate agent. In our example, we have 3600 homes currently listed. Now we do the simple calculation to get the current absorption rate.

Divide the number of sales over 3 months by 3 to get one month’s average sales.
1800 / 3 = 600 homes sold per month on average

Divide the current listing number by our average sold per month.
3600 / 600/month = 6 months

What we find is that at the current rate of 600 homes per month being sold, it would take 6 months to get rid of all of our inventory if no more homes were listed.

Is there a “normal” absorption rate? Real estate is local we know. So, each local market will tend to exhibit what is normal for that market. Higher priced homes generally sell slower, as well as vacation homes. So, in those type markets, we may see absorption taking 6 months to 10 months or longer.

In starter homes and lower priced markets, sales tend to be faster, so you may see average absorption in the 3-month to 6-month range. To get the value from using the local absorption rate in making decisions, you need to keep up with the rate over time. It is changes you’re looking for.

Back to our example, let’s say that we’ve been watching the absorption rate for a while, and it is normally running between 5 and 7 months, as it is in our calculation. It’s pretty much a normal market right now.

But, we do it again next month, of course our three months will change to the closest three, and suddenly we see that it has dropped to 4 months. In other words, we’re selling off inventory faster for one of two reasons:

• Our inventory dropped, meaning fewer homes being listed on the market, OR
• Buying pressure increased, more homes going under contract than normally.

If we’ve been running this 5-7 month number for a while, this could be a hint of price increases to come. When sales pick up, often prices follow. We just see the change earlier than many because we’re watching the absorption rate.

Going the other way, if we see a change this month to 8 months, it could mean the market is slowing down, either too many homes being listed or too few buyers. Either way, the slowing market may signal lower prices on the way.

If you’re thinking of listing your home for sale, you’d rather see the first situation, a change to a faster absorption rate, as you hopefully can expect to get a higher price. A buyer may want to adjust any offers they plan on making a little lower than they would have made them to see if they can grab a bargain.

Put absorption rate into your toolbox for more market knowledge and better decisions.

Have you found success in real estate investing by implementing different approaches? Have you struggled to take that first step? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below, or by finding me on social media:

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Cheryl, a business coaching client, ran a $1.5 million per year glass company. She worked hard, typically 70 hours a week, and she was scared to death to empower her team to “own” functions and responsibilities within the business.

“David,” she said, “I’ve tried that before. I delegated to my team and asked them to run their respective areas of the business, and after 6 months my business was a mess. Sure we had grown, but our margins had shrunk, customers weren’t happy, and I hated the stress of waiting to see what would go wrong next.”

In Cheryl’s world, the reason her experiment with “empowerment” didn’t work was because she gave up control and her team just wasn’t capable enough to do things as well as she could.

So her solution was to just grab back the reins and take charge of the company in a firm manner.

And it worked, to a degree. She improved her margins and grew her profits. But then she hit a plateau where she was stuck – for several years. What was worse, she was working harder than ever, stretched thin and unable to even think about growing any more for fear of things coming crashing down again.

What had she missed? Was it really a choice between “stay in tight control of everything but accept long hours, heavy stress, and a ceiling on your growth” or “delegate responsibility but know that something bad will happen“?

What Cheryl didn’t understand is that the problem wasn’t that she let go of control, but rather, the real problems her company suffered were a direct result of how she let go of control.

She merely handed control over a team member, with no way for the business to make sure that the staff member she delegated authority too was doing a great job. And when things went wrong, she reverted back to that traditional owner-reliant mode of running her business.

She had set up a false dilemma. You don’t need to be in control; you need your business to be in control.

What’s the difference? When you are in control, you need to be present daily to exercise that control. When your business is in control, it operates with a solid foundation of systems, processes, and procedures to address the business’s needs, not just your fears and limitations as the owner.

Controls are the intelligent processes, procedures, and safeguards that protect your company from uninformed or inappropriate decisions or actions by any team member.

When you build a business versus a job, you want your team to have the authority to get tasks done without running everything past you. You need them to exercise their judgment and use their discretion.

But you also need to empower them with the feedback, ground rules, and double checks they need to do their best work. This is where business controls come into play.

Building strong internal controls is not about you, the business owner, being in control, but rather enhancing and giving control to your business. The best controls make the default behavior the right behavior. And they empower your team to get better results with less effort by giving them immediate feedback and a more defined playing field.

Controls are not about you being a traffic cop hiding in the bushes to leap out and give an unwary team member a speeding ticket, rather, you want your controls to be more like a speedometer or cruise control system that helps individual team members autonomously do better work. Your controls, which are really just a specialized subset of your business systems, help your team members do better work.

Further, good controls also empower your managers and leaders with immediately clear and actionable information on how to coach and redirect your team, by letting them know what’s going on in an area at any given moment.

In fact, this was one of the biggest reason Cheryl got into such trouble when she simply handed authority over to her team. She didn’t realize that letting go of control wasn’t an on/off switch – let go completely; stay in control completely–rather it was a dimmer with which she needed to progressively ease ownership of functions to her staff, with each key function with a structure of system and controls to it.

She had no feedback process to let her business, including the individual performing the work, her managers supervising the work, and her as the C-suite leader supervising her managers, know if things were being done the right way, at the right time, getting the right result.

Had she had better controls and structured systems, and eased her delegation of authority and control over to her team in a more intentional and strategic way, she would have avoided most of the chaos and expensive mistakes that her business suffered when she ceded control.

If you want to learn more about how to systematize your company and introduce sound internal controls, I’m about to teach a new webinar that will focus in large part how you can do both so you build a scalable business.

If you’d like to join me on this special webinar training, please just click here to learn the details and to register. (It’s free.)

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Pandora is trying valiantly to stay afloat in a sea filled with competitors like Spotify and Apple Music, and now the company has tapped music legend Questlove to help rescue it from the murky depths of irrelevance.

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