Month: June 2016

Money in Politics

Ka-ching! McConnell’s wealth jumped as much as 23% last year — to $43.2 million, new disclosure shows
McConnell,Mitch-012309-18422-jf 0024
McConnell

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife saw the value of their stocks, cash and other investments climb last year, cementing his status as one of the wealthiest U.S. senators, his new financial disclosure report shows. But the source of his riches — via his wife Elaine Chao‘s immigrant father — also demonstrates the fine line the senate majority leader must walk in supporting the GOP’s presumptive White House nominee: Donald Trump.

Senators make the finance reports public each year, valuing investments according to a predetermined range. In 2015, his portfolio was worth $9.6 million to $43.2 million, according to a new Boulevard analysis. On the low side, that was a 2% increase from 2014. On the high side: a whopping 23%.

Mitch McConnell financial disclosures 2004-2015 final

The vast majority of McConnell’s wealth is held by his economist wife, Chao (photo with senator, top), whose father made a shipping trade fortune. Chao, 63, was U.S. labor secretary during the George W. Bush Administration.

Boulevard examined the senator’s latest report, filed May 16, to arrive at his 2015 estimates. The midpoint of their values would be $26.4 million vs. $22.2 million in 2014, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group in Washington that tracks political campaign finance. The center hasn’t published estimates for 2015 yet.

But in 2014, it ranked McConnell the 11th richest senator. No. 1: Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, with an average net worth of $243 million — a fortune he built investing in telecommunications. Here are the 25 richest.

Tripping over Trump

Chao’s parents fled to Taiwan from mainland China when the Chinese Communists seized power in 1949, according to Wikipedia. In 1961, when she was eight years old, Chao immigrated to the U.S. on a freighter with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship. He later went on to launch shipper Foremost Group.

McConnell has offered tepid support to Trump at best, citing his inflammatory anti-immigration postures. In an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric Tuesday, McConnell said the New York billionaire’s proposals could threaten the GOP’s standing with immigrant voters. “America is changing,” he told Couric, “the Republican Party clearly doesn’t need to write off either Asian or Latino Americans, and that is not a good place to be for long-term competitiveness.”

Related: Here’s McConnell’s  report from last year, plus his 2014 report for comparison. And here’s Sen. Rand Paul’s new report, plus his 2014 report.

Bottom Line

Add up all of Amazon’s data and distribution centers, and you’d get 229 Humana Towers
Humana building
It’s a downtown icon.

That’s one amazing measure of how big the retailer’s gotten since it was founded in Seattle 22 years ago.

And it’s still growing. Amazon just announced plans for two more giant distribution centers, both in Edwardsville, Ill. It already has two in the Louisville area employing a combined 6,000 workers, in Shepherdsville and Jeffersonville.

Worldwide, Amazon has 123 centers, including more than 50 in the U.S. alone. At the end of last year, it leased 118 million square feet of distribution and data centers, and owned another 6.8 million square feet. That’s equivalent to:

  • Football fields: 2,105
  • Humana Towers: 229
  • Empire State Buildings: 44
  • Apple headquarters “spaceships”: 43
  • Pentagons: 18 (it’s the world’s biggest office building)

The Jeffersonville center is one of only six in the U.S. open to tours. They last an hour; age restriction: 6 and up. How to schedule one.

Related: More Amazon company facts. Here’s the center in the U.K.’s Hemel Hempstead:
Embed from Getty Images

Latest Headlines

Haier in home fix-up show deal; and Taco Bell franchise owner gives Fla. ‘coma’ guy $2.5K
Tebow Home Free
Tebow (left) and Holmes host show where Haier is now a sponsor.

A news summary, focused on big employers; updated 10:32 a.m.

GE: Haier has signed on as a sponsor for the second season of the reality TV-game show Home Free, where contestants compete to win a home outfitted with Haier appliances. Co-hosts are Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy winner, and Mike Holmes, the series’s creator and professional contractor. On the Fox Network show, nine couples compete to renovate a dilapidated home each week, facing elimination until the winners are awarded their dream home. The series starts June 16 (press release). China-based Haier’s pending $5.4 billion purchase of the 6,000-employee Appliance Park in Louisville is expected to close this summer.

Michael Booth Taco Bell coma man
Booth in hospital with tacos.

TACO BELL: The Florida man who became an Internet sensation after waking from a 42-day coma in April and immediately asking for Taco Bell as his first meal is now closer to paying his medical bills, too: The franchise owner whose restaurant supplied the 8½ crunchy tacos last month presented Jake Booth with an oversized check for $2,500 at his Bonita Springs home, plus $250 in gift certificates for more tacos; Booth’s request led to untold millions of dollars in free publicity for Taco Bell. “We wanted to meet one of our greatest fans,” said Carlos Silva, chief operating officer of Prometheus Franchise Restaurant Holding; the Clearwater, Fla.-based company owns Taco Bell franchises throughout Southwest Florida. The money will go toward a Wake the Jake Go Fund Me campaign to raise $50,000 to help Booth pay medical bills (Naples Daily News). Watch the video. Booth’s story caught fire when someone posted a photo of him on Reddit. “Taco Bell’s marketing team have a slam dunk with this one,” said one poster.

AMAZON‘s latest round of distribution center openings is set for Edwardsville, Ill., where it plans two centers with more than 1,000 full-time jobs total. The company said today that one center will specialize in handling big-screen TVs, sports equipment or kayaks and the other will handle smaller items, including books, toys and electronics; no opening date was given for the centers (press release). Rumors had circulated last month that Amazon was headed for the area (Belleville News-Democrat). Edwardsville has 25,000 residents and is 27 miles northeast of St. Louis (Census facts). Today’s news follows Amazon’s announcement just a week ago that it would open a second distribution center in Joliet, Ill., with 2,000 jobs on top of the 1,500 already at the existing center; Joliet is an hour south of Chicago (press release).

In other news, University of Louisville has given baseball coach Dan McDonnell a $325,000 raise, to a base salary of $1 million a year, to discourage other schools from trying to poach him (Courier-Journal). U.S. stocks were modestly lower an hour into trading as Wall Street digested fresh ADP payroll data, watched an OPEC meeting, and waited for tomorrow’s May employment report from the Labor Department (Google Finance). The Boulevard Stock Portfolio of 11 big employers was mixed.

Just Tweets

Amazon and Domino’s were on the same promotional page for National Best Friend’s day.

Not so much at Pizza Hut . . .

. . . or Papa John’s:

Cops and Courts

Schneider feud erupts again: heiresses attack heiresses over ‘desperate grab at power’
Galt House
The Galt House is the jewel in the Schneider real estate crown.

Well, that ceasefire didn’t last long.

Reigniting a family fight, Schneider Co. CEO Mary Moseley and her sister Dawn Hitron have accused their other two sisters of a “desperate grab at power and control power play” to prevent the sale of their late father’s $280 million real estate empire, The Courier-Journal is now reporting. In a blistering claim filed in a long-running lawsuit, they’re demanding their siblings pay them damages for “derailing” the sale of the Galt House hotel downtown and other properties.

The battle had appeared over just two weeks ago, when Moseley, 66, and Hitron, 62, a homemaker, agreed in Jefferson Circuit Court to drop a plan to sell the real estate before the end of May, when a trust expired and control flowed to all 24 of Schneider’s beneficiaries, according to the newspaper.

Al Schneider
Schneider

But in the new 49-page claim filed Tuesday, the two sisters want to recover damages for the thwarted sale of the assets to Columbia Sussex for $135 million, which they said was far in excess of appraised value, the CJ says. The hotel is the marquee property their father, Al Schneider, bequeathed to his children when he died in 2001 at 86.

The fight has already dragged on through four courts and required 10 lawyers. It’s divided the four sisters — three of whom live in adjacent houses on the same block off Newburg Road; a fourth is just a mile away — in a business drama rivaling the 1980s Bingham family meltdown over their media business. The two sisters on the other side of Moseley and Hitron are Christy Coe, 64, a nurse practitioner, and Nancy O’Hearn, 70, who owns an event planning company.

Diversions

Once the nation’s glittering disco ball star, Omega’s now barely stayin’ alive
Disco ball
$25 at Amazon.

During the late 1970s, when the Bee Gees made Saturday Night Fever a box-office hit, Louisville’s Omega National Products factory on Baxter Avenue nearly cornered the market, churning out 90% of the spinning dance floor ornaments in the U.S.

“That was the heyday, I’m telling you,” said Yolanda Baker, now 69, and the last of dozens of women still making the mirrored globes by hand at Omega, according to The Wall Street Journal. These days, production is down to about 15 or 20 a month, nearly all Baker’s work. The culprit: overseas competition has cut prices; a 12-inch Omega ball retails for about $135 vs. one made in China that’s $25 on Amazon. (Of course, Boulevard notes, it doesn’t help that mirror balls are nowhere on Omega’s product list.)

As for the Bee Gees, the city’s still breakin’ and everybody’s shakin‘ — on video.