The NRA is losing business ties faster than Donald Trump switches positions on the issues.

Courtesy of CNN:

Before last week, membership in the National Rifle Association meant gaining access to a broad range of discounts. From special rates on auto insurance policies to cheaper flights when you booked through its website, the NRA's discount program offered a lot of perks. 

But in the wake of a massacre at a Florida high school on February 14, activists flooded social media with calls to end corporate partnerships with America's most powerful gun lobby. 

Since Thursday, more than a dozen brands severed ties with the organization. 

In a statement, the National Rifle Association called the decisions "a shameful display of political and civic cowardice."

"In time, these brands will be replaced by others who recognize that patriotism and determined commitment to Constitutional freedoms are characteristics of a marketplace they very much want to serve," the statement said.

Funny how cowardice is now defined as refusing to stand with an organization that helps to murder our children, rather than standing to defend them.

However their threats have not stopped business from fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.

Here is a list so far: 

• The First National 
• Bank of Omaha 
• Enterprise Rent-A-Car 
• Alamo Rent a Car 
• National Car Rental 
• Symantec 
• Hertz 
• MetLife 
• SimpliSafe 
• Avis 
• Budget Rent a Car 
• Allied 
• North American 
• TrueCar 
• Delta Air Lines 
• United Airlines 
• Paramount RX 
• Starkey

There actually may be more now.

Republican supporters of the NRA are not going down without a fight however. 

I will kill any tax legislation that benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA. Corporations cannot attack conservatives and expect us not to fight back.

— Casey Cagle (@CaseyCagle) February 26, 2018

Cagle is the current Georgia Lt. Governor, now running for the Governor's seat.

I wonder what his political chances would be if Delta suddenly decided to move their company headquarters to a more agreeable state?

Businesses are starting to turn on the NRA.

Courtesy of Vice: 

The National Rifle Association is getting burned by businesses after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last week. 

So far, two business partners have dropped the NRA from their roster. The First National Bank of Omaha said in a tweet on Thursday that because of “customer feedback,” the bank will cease issuing its NRA Visa card after its contract with the pro-gun lobbying group expires. And Enterprise Holdings — which operates the car rental companies Enterprise, Alamo, and National — told reporters on Thursday that it would no longer offer a discount to NRA members. 

For many years, the powerful lobbying group has struck partnerships with companies to offer NRA members discounts on a variety of services. Some of its existing partners include Hertz, FedEx, and the anti-virus software maker Norton.

Bloomberg found some others:

On Friday, LifeLock owner Symantec, Hertz, North American and Allied Van Lines, and insurer MetLife announced they would break off from the NRA. “Symantec has stopped its discount program with the National Rifle Association,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. A MetLife spokesman said “we value all our customers but have decided to end our discount program with the NRA.” Security systems maker Simplisafe Inc. also dropped the gun group today.

There are also some businesses that are not quite ready to bail on the NRA, but are putting them on notice.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

The world’s largest asset manager put U.S. gunmakers on notice on Thursday that it is no longer business as usual in the wake of a shooting that killed 17 at a Florida high school. 

BlackRock Inc said it will speak with weapons manufacturers and distributors “to understand their response” to the second-deadliest shooting at a public school in U.S. history, putting pressure on companies such as Sturm Ruger & Company Inc and American Outdoor Brands Corp. 

BlackRock is the largest shareholder in both gunmakers and has more than $6 trillion in assets under management. It stopped short of saying it would divest its funds of gun companies, however.

Well I think it's time to push for even more boycotts, don't you?

Not only should we refuse to do business with any companies that have advertising deals with the NRA, but we should also refuse to vote for any candidates that accept NRA money.

That would almost strip them of their influence overnight.

Well after the elections this year at least.

Vladimir Putin tells Russian businesses to prepare for war. Uh oh.

Courtesy of The Independent:  

Russian business should be prepared to switch to production to military needs at any time, said Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. The Russian president was speaking at a conference of military leaders in Sochi. 

“The ability of our economy to increase military production and services at a given time is one of the most important aspects of military security,” Mr Putin said. “To this end, all strategic, and simply large-scale enterprise should be ready, regardless of ownership.” 

A day earlier, the president had spoken of a need to catch up and overtake the West in military technology. “Our army and navy need to have the very best equipment — better than foreign equivalents,” he said. “If we want to win, we have to be better.”

When the clear outcome of a war between the US and Russia is mutual destruction, it is hard to understand what winning or being "better" might entail. 

Since it is obvious to everybody that Russia has nothing to fear from America as long as Putin's puppet Donald Trump is in office, it seems to me that this directive is the result of Putin thinking that he may not stay in office that much longer.

However the idea that we would remove Trump and then immediately start a war with Russia seems more than a little ridiculous, even though by interfering in our election Russia essentially launched a first strike.

So is Putin simply saber rattling here for the benefit of his constituents, or is he literally considering a military engagement with the US?

Christopher Steele leaves Robert Mueller a trail to follow that may be the key to the Russian investigation.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:  

As federal investigators pour over the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the work of ex-British spook Christopher Steele continues to loom large. At least part of Robert Mueller’s probe has been informed by Steele’s infamous dossier, which alleges substantive ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government. Though Trumpworld has cast doubt on the document’s legitimacy, with former Trump aide Carter Page dubbing it the “dodgy dossier,” Steele has stood by his research and, reportedly, has offered up another tip: zero in on the president’s foreign real-estate deals. 

In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said, according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.” 

According to his book, Steele did not elaborate on this point to Harding, but his implication was clear: it’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Remember now Trump warned Mueller not to investigate his business dealings?

This is definitely why. 

The article goes on to say that Mueller is already on the trail of Trump's business dealings with Russia (Remember he has already interviewed Steele.), so in the end it may really be the Russian dossier that leads to the end of Trump's presidency.  

How is that for some sweet karma?

Guess what? Your tax dollars are being used to protect Donald Trump's private businesses from lawsuits.

Courtesy of USA Today: 

Taxpayers are footing the legal bill for at least 10 Justice Department lawyers and paralegals to work on lawsuits related to President Trump's private businesses. 

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department will say how much it is costing taxpayers, but federal payroll records show the salaries of the government lawyers assigned to the cases range from about $133,000 to $185,000. 

The government legal team is defending President Trump in four lawsuits stemming from his unusual decision not to divest himself from hundreds of his companies that are entangled with customers that include foreign governments and officials. 

In the cases, Justice Department attorneys are not defending policy actions Trump took as president. Instead, the taxpayer-funded lawyers are making the case that it is not unconstitutional for the president's private companies to earn profits from foreign governments and officials while he's in office. 

The government lawyers and Trump's private attorneys are making the same arguments — that the Constitution's ban on a president taking gifts from foreign interests in exchange for official actions does not apply to foreign government customers buying things from Trump's companies. The plaintiffs, including ethics groups and competing businesses, argue the payments pose an unconstitutional conflict of interest.

Hey, remember when the Founding Fathers laid out all of those rules to protect this country from becoming an oligarchy or from being taken over by a dictator?

Boy those were the good old days, weren't they? 

The Democrats are demanding to know just how much the government is paying Trump owned businesses.

Courtesy of Madison.com: 

As President Donald Trump spends much of August at his New Jersey golf club, Democratic lawmakers are making a new push for information about how much money the federal government is spending at his for-profit properties. 

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday asked departments to hand over information about their Trump-related spending by Aug. 25. 

"The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are spent, including the amount of federal funds that are being provided to private businesses owned by the president and the purposes of these expenditures," reads the lawmakers' letter to Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The lawmakers sent similar requests to all Cabinet secretaries. 

Their request seeks documents about any payments the departments made to the Trump Organization or any business in which the Trump organization has an ownership stake. 

The Democratic Oversight letter cites reports about the State Department booking rooms at a new Trump hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, where his adult sons were on site for the grand opening, and the Defense Department and Homeland Security renting space at Trump Tower, where first lady Melania Trump and the couple's 11-year-old son lived until the end of the school year. 

"President Trump also makes frequent trips to properties he owns, and these trips may result in U.S. taxpayers' money flowing into President Trump's pockets," the letter to Duke reads. 

The new effort is one of many to understand how much money the Trump-led government is spending on businesses that he still owns. The Government Accountability Office is undertaking the most comprehensive study.

This is a good move.

I think that even many of Trump's supporters might be shocked once they see the millions of taxpayer dollars that have been flowing into the Trump family businesses since the inauguration.

It might even knock Trump's approval numbers down into the twenties.

After election Trump businesses required employees to sign draconian confidentiality agreements or risk losing their jobs.

Courtesy of CBS News:

CBS News has obtained a new confidentiality agreement rolled out after the election. The Trump Organization is requiring employees at all levels to sign it, or else they will lose their jobs. 

Employees must agree to keep secret any information they learn about anyone in the "Trump family" and extended family, including their "present, former and future spouses, children, parents, in-laws." 

"I have reviewed confidentiality agreements in international, family-run hospitality organizations and... I have never seen a loyalty code to a family like this," said Debra Soltis, who has specialized in employment law for more than 25 years.

"This confidentiality agreement looks more like what you would expect to sign if you were a nanny to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's children, where you were being brought into the home and exposed to private information," she said. 

Specifically off limits: "all political, legal, social, religious, health-related affairs, activities, views and/or opinions of any member of the Trump family... all photographs, movies, sketches, videos, sound or image recordings or likenesses of any member of the Trump family." 

The agreement lasts forever and is retroactive.

Not surprised by this at all, this family is terrified of having their private information leak out, because they know that some of their secrets could land them in prison.

I imagine that there is a similar agreement which members of Trump's cabinet and White House staff are also required to sign.

Really makes you wonder just how much dirt is out there, doesn't it?

Top crime watchdog quits because she felt holding businesses accountable for ethical violations while Donald Trump is in office was hypocritical.

Courtesy of  New York Magazine:

Until late last month, former federal prosecutor Hui Chen worked in the Justice Department’s fraud section, ensuring that corporations followed federal ethics laws. She started the job in the fall 2015, but in the last six months it became impossible to conduct her duties without feeling as if she was “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn. So she quit, and she blames the White House: 

First, trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it. 

As a compliance expert in DOJ’s fraud section, Chen essentially served as a corporate crime watchdog. She helped ensure that companies made changes to the policies that resulted in their prosecution and then monitored the effectiveness of those changes.

Totally get it. It's sort of like being a firefighter in a town where the fire chief is a pyromaniac.

Of course with Chen out that means that nobody is watching the candy store, and I think we all know that even IF Trump decides to replace her it will be with somebody who is completely blind to unethical behavior by corporations.  

If you ever before wondered just how much damage one president could do in only one term, sit back and watch, because you are about to have that question answered in spades.

Many American companies are bowing to pressure from Russia to give up their cyber security secrets. They do realize that Russia used stolen data to hack the election right?

Courtesy of Reuters:  

Western technology companies, including Cisco, IBM and SAP, are acceding to demands by Moscow for access to closely guarded product security secrets, at a time when Russia has been accused of a growing number of cyber attacks on the West, a Reuters investigation has found. 

Russian authorities are asking Western tech companies to allow them to review source code for security products such as firewalls, anti-virus applications and software containing encryption before permitting the products to be imported and sold in the country. The requests, which have increased since 2014, are ostensibly done to ensure foreign spy agencies have not hidden any "backdoors" that would allow them to burrow into Russian systems. 

But those inspections also provide the Russians an opportunity to find vulnerabilities in the products' source code - instructions that control the basic operations of computer equipment - current and former U.S. officials and security experts said.

U.S. officials say they have warned firms about the risks of allowing the Russians to review their products' source code, because of fears it could be used in cyber attacks. But they say they have no legal authority to stop the practice unless the technology has restricted military applications or violates U.S. sanctions.

Look I understand that businesses are concerned about their bottom line, and opening up new opportunities in new markets is very seductive, but based on what just happened in 2016 this seems incredibly naive.  

I'm sorry let me take that back because naive simply does not cover it.

Volunteering this information is FUCKING STUPID!

The Russians are clearly collecting information in order to find weaknesses in America's cyber security systems, and these companies are simply handing it over to them without a fight.

Draft of new executive order seems designed to protect religious people from progress.

Courtesy of The Nation: 

A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination. 

The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.” 

The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act.

Language in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”

In other words this order would repeal much of the progress made by the Obama administration, and once again allow Christian business owners to discriminate based on sexuality, gender, and lifestyle.

That would mean these fundamentalist Christians, Jews, and even Muslims, could use this order to deny adequate healthcare to women, kick gay students out of their private schools, and refuse to rent to any person, or persons, whose lifestyle they believed conflicted with their faith in some way.

It should be noted that this is still in a draft form, so it is by no means official. 

However based on everything that we have seen since Trump took office I have a high level of certainty that a lot of what is in this draft will find its way to the final executive order.

North Carolina just lost 400 jobs due to new anti-LGBT laws. And that is only the beginning.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

PayPal announced Tuesday morning that it has abandoned its plans for a massive global operations center, which would have brought 400 new jobs to Charlotte, North Carolina. The company was unequivocal that the decision was made because of the state’s passage of HB2, a sweeping law that blocks cities from enacting LGBT nondiscrimination protections and mandates that transgender people use the wrong bathrooms for their gender identities. 

CEO Dan Schulman explained in a statement that “the new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture.” 

Schulman asserted that the decision to not proceed with the Charlotte center “is a clear and unambigous one” that reflects the company’s “deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect.” Because PayPal’s employees would not have equal rights under North Carolina law, employing them there is “simply untenable.”

Pay Pal is not alone in rethinking plans to do business in the hostile environment of North Carolina.

Courtesy of USA News:   

New Jersey-based Braeburn Pharmaceuticals said it is "reevaluating our options based on the recent, unjust legislation" whether to build a $20 million manufacturing and research facility in Durham County. The 50 new jobs paying an average of nearly $76,000 a year were announced two weeks ago. 

Lionsgate, the California-based entertainment company, had been lining up hotel and equipment rentals and hiring more than 100 workers in North Carolina, but decided to shoot its pilot episode for a comedy series in Canada instead, said Jennifer Irvine, a Charlotte production coordinator. 

Charlotte convention officials and the organizers of one of the world's largest furniture markets say some customers have pulled out, also citing the new law.

One would think that this kind of potential economic impact would have other states thinking twice about passing their own laws discriminating against the LGBT community.

But thinking twice, or even once for that matter, has no place when your religion urges you to hate.

Courtesy of the LA Times:

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a controversial bill into law on Tuesday that could allow businesses and government workers to deny services to lesbian and gay couples. 

Bryant said in a statement that he was signing HB 1523 “to protect sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions of individuals, organizations and private associations from discriminatory action by state government or its political subdivisions.”

Somehow I think that this will inspire a whole lot of anti-discrimination cases which will eventually find their way to the Supreme Court.

Which means that we really need to get Antonin Scalia's replacement seated just as soon as possible.