YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders at Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was interviewed about issues important to Hispanic businesses and communities. He answered questions concerning the economy, immigration, race relations, and issues affecting the Latino community. He also discussed his chances of winning the Democratic nomination and vowed not to run as a third-party candidate in the 2016 presidential election.

This was a fabulous interview. The questions were great as well as the answers. It gave Bernie Sanders a chance to explain his positions, which surprisingly to many in the audience, were not anti-business and not anti-capitalism. In fact, Bernie explained how some of his “socialist” social programs like single payer health care would lift a tremendous burden off the backs of small-business owners. It would allow them to concentrate more on their own business, what they like and want to do, and what they do best. How you could call this anything but pro-business, I don’t know.

I think the moderator and many in the audience were surprised at how much of Bernie Sanders’ platform they agreed with once they heard it explained.

Robert Reich posted on his Facebook timeline a re-emphasis of the 2014 article Raising Taxes on Corporations that Pay Their CEOs Royally and Treat Their Workers Like Serfs.

Until the 1980s, corporate CEOs were paid, on average, 30 times what their typical worker was paid. Since then, CEO pay has skyrocketed to 280 times the pay of a typical worker; in big companies, to 354 times.
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The proposed legislation, SB 1372, sets corporate taxes according to the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the company’s typical worker. Corporations with low pay ratios get a tax break.Those with high ratios get a tax increase.
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For example, if the CEO makes 100 times the median worker in the company, the company’s tax rate drops from the current 8.8 percent down to 8 percent. If the CEO makes 25 times the pay of the typical worker, the tax rate goes down to 7 percent.

I don’t see why a company should get a tax break at over a 30:1 ratio. Certainly not at 100:1. Companies should not get rewarded for doing what they ought to do in an ordinary way. They need to be penalized for not doing what they ought to do. They should certainly not even be considered for some sort of reward unless they do something extraordinarily good.

Our politicians, including Hillary Clinton, immediately jump to the idea of some corporate tax break as the solution for every problem. The share of taxes paid by corporations is already far lower than it used to be. We need to think more about my principle of using tax penalties for bad behavior, ordinary taxes for good behavior, and then, if really need be, tax incentives for extraordinarily good behavior that needs to be encouraged.

Naked Capitalism has the post Meet the Hedge Funders and Billionaires Who Pillage Under the Shield of Philanthropy by Lynn Parramore.

America’s parasitical oligarchs are masters of public relations. One of their favorite tactics is to masquerade as defenders of the common folk while neatly arranging things behind the scenes so that they can continue to plunder unimpeded. Perhaps nowhere is this sleight of hand displayed so artfully as it is at a particular high-profile charity with the nerve to bill itself as itself as “New York’s largest poverty-fighting organization.”

Yves Smith who posted this on Naked Capitalism warns that the article is a little shrill. Most of the commenters and I think it is not shrill enough.

I have always felt, without any explicit evidence to back it up, that society would be better off if the billionaires didn’t take the money in the first place before they gave it back in philanthropy. I had no measure of the extent to which I was correct. Recently, I have seen estimates that if the non-rich had advanced in the past 40 years at historical rates, they would be almost $11 Trillion dollars ahead of where they are today. I guess that figure fits nicely with the contention of this article.