http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028326225

“The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing”

In an interview with The New York Times, the leaders of the GOP reveal a shift away from free-market capitalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/business/economy/trump-carrier-pence-jobs.html

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/02/mike-pence-abandons-reaganomics-the-free-market-has-been-sorting-it-out-and-americas-been-losing/

Langone to Trump: "the US is a free economy"

Republican billionaire businessman Ken Langone told CNBC on Friday that Donald Trump should not make a habit of pressuring companies to keep jobs in the United States.

"Trump has to understand, and he will no doubt about it, ... we don't have a managed economy. We don't say to companies you can't go and you won't go. That's scary,"

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/02/ken-langone-to-trump-the-us-is-not-a-managed-economy.html

An upstart group of Electoral College voters have formed a political non-profit organization to fund a campaign to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

But while a campaign organizer says the movement has secured one anonymous Republican, it remains an unlikely, last-ditch effort for opponents of the president-elect.

The paperwork filed Tuesday with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office creates a “527” group, which can raise unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and labor unions for political activities.

http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/30/anti-donald-trump-electors-fundraising-colorado/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028325033

He joins a growing list of designers including Marc Jacobs and Sophie Theallet, who wrote an open letter urging her peers to avoid working with the new first lady.

https://twitter.com/sophietheallet/status/799378444249399300/photo/1

Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh posted this message on LinkedIn:

The debate in the U.S. over gun safety and gun rights is as complex as it is divisive. As a former army officer, a father and business leader, I’ve heard the arguments from all sides. And, as CEO of a 163-year-old company whose products and presence rest at the intersection of culture and community in more than 110 countries around the world, I feel a tremendous responsibility to share our position on the issue, now, at a time when clarity is paramount.

Providing a safe environment to work and shop is a top priority for us at Levi Strauss & Co. That imperative is quickly challenged, however, when a weapon is carried into one of our stores. Recently, we had an incident in one of our stores where a gun inadvertently went off, injuring the customer who was carrying it.

So, while we understand the heartfelt and strongly-held opinions on both sides of the gun debate, it is with the safety and security of our employees and customers in mind that we respectfully ask people not to bring firearms into our stores, offices or facilities, even in states where it’s permitted by law. Of course, authorized members of law enforcement are an exception.

With stores in Paris, Nice and Orlando, and the company’s European headquarters in Brussels, I’ve thought more about safety in the past year than in the previous three decades of my career because of how ‘close to home’ so many incidents with guns have come to impacting people working for this company.

We operate in hundreds of stores across every state in the U.S., and laws are different in each one. We know that the presence of firearms in our stores creates an unsettling environment for many of our employees and customers. We also know that trying to enforce a ban could potentially undermine the purpose of the ban itself: safety. With that in mind we’ve made this decision as a business – a request not a mandate – and we sincerely hope responsible gun owners will respect our position.

It boils down to this: you shouldn’t have to be concerned about your safety while shopping for clothes or trying on a pair of jeans. Simply put, firearms don’t belong in either of those settings. In the end, I believe we have an obligation to our employees and customers to ensure a safe environment and keeping firearms out of our stores and offices will get us one step closer to achieving that reality.

Other brands, including Allstate and Warby Parker, have pulled back from Breitbart. BMW said on Wednesday that it too wouldn’t be running targeted ads on the site.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-01/breitbart-urges-boycott-of-kellogg-after-brand-leaves-news-site

Breitbart primarily uses Google AdSense, which mostly positions its clients’ ads based on the reader’s browsing history and by a site’s subject content. Pulling “targeted ads” from a site doesn’t necessarily mean that the brand will no longer appear at all. That requires a site-specific block by the advertiser.

n an appearance on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show on Wednesday, Trump spokesperson Scottie Nell Hughes asserted that in today’s information landscape, “There are no such things as facts.”

She was appearing alongside Atlantic editor James Fallows, Politico‘s Glenn Thrush and Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post in a discussion of the role of journalists in a prospective Donald Trump presidency.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/trump-booster-scottie-nell-hughes-gets-blasted-on-npr-after-saying-theres-no-such-thing-as-facts/

In His Enormous F'king Blind Spot

While Pres.-elect Dump is gearing up to junk Dodd-Frank, the one law most likely to save us from another global economic crash, it turns out risky auto loans are revving up to drive a new financial crisis right onto the driveway at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

http://www.businessinsider.com/auto-loan-delinquency-numbers-from-ny-fed-2016-11?ct=t%28TFN+12_1_16%29&mc_cid=87b421e680&mc_eid=%5BUNIQID%5D

http://www.businessinsider.com/chanos-auto-loan-2016-6?ct=t%28TFN+12_1_16%29&mc_cid=87b421e680&mc_eid=%5BUNIQID%5D

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-21/this-is-what-s-going-on-beneath-the-subprime-auto-loan-turmoil?ct=t%28TFN+12_1_16%29&mc_cid=87b421e680&mc_eid=%5BUNIQID%5D

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/01/as-auto-lending-rises-so-do-delinquencies.html

According to a blog post by the New York Federal Reserve, the default rate for repayment of subprime auto loans--the pre-owned Dodge Dart that smells like tears and Axe Body Spray of auto loans--is climbing. For background, the global economy crashed in 2008 because Wall Street had figured out how to make money selling investors bundles of shitty mortgages--which made shitty mortgages valuable enough, regardless of whether they'd ever be repaid, for banks to start pushing them on everyone, regardless of whether they could ever repay them..And then selling those bundles of mortgages to idiots. When mortgage defaults began piling up, everyone realized no one had a fucking clue how shitty all those mortgage bundles were. Screech. Crash. Boom. Soft Tinkling of Broken Glass.

But the 2008 crisis could have been set off by default rates for any fucking kind of loans for any kind of purchase. Auto. College. iPhone. Weed.

Since it happened to be mortgages, all the mortgage assholes started looking for other shit to fuck. And they found the auto-loan industry parked on an isolated street, far from the street lights, with the keys still inside, and a six-pack on the passenger seat.

In some ways, car loans are considered even safer than home loans. You don't have to own your home. But you need a fucking car to get to the fucking job you need to pay off your fucking car loan.

Not to worry, however, because who better to slam the brakes on this shit than Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a predatory banker who produced Avatar.

Trump has assembled a transition team and cabinet deeply tied to one of the most pernicious anti-gay groups around. The Family Research Council isn’t content to oppose homosexuality on religious grounds; instead, it uses pseudoscience to give its homophobia a flimsy veneer of objectivity. And it could wind up shaping the incoming president’s policies.

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/trumps-transition-team-tied-anti-gay-pseudoscience/?mbid=nl_113016_p4&CNDID=30772003