I received an email over Barack Obama’s “signature”. Note the warning below. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a mass epidemic of vomiting. So only contemplate doing this if you have a very strong stomach.

I almost forgot to mention that this will be hosted and broadcast by Faux Noise. I hate to suggest anything that will boost the ratings of that propaganda channel.

Ring of Fire Radio has the commentary Comcast Orders MSNBC To Remove Anti-TPP Hosts.

When it comes to coverage of the Trans Pacific Partnership, no one in the corporate media covered the issue more than Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. When it was announced last week that they were pulling the plug on his program, they effectively killed the only national voice that was talking about the disaster of a trade deal on cable news.

But what is the real reason for MSNBC dumping Ed? When you dig down, it’s dirtier than you would think.

I had no idea of the real reason why these changes have been made. I just thought that Progressives didn’t have the stomach for media aimed at them that was a mirror image of the stuff aimed at the regressives.

The mention of Bill Clinton’s support for media conglomeration was something that I had forgotten about. I thought it was all Reagan’s fault for doing away with the fairness doctrine.

Now you have a deeper understanding of the attack these companies have been making on net neutrality. The internet is the last bastion that has held out against the silencing of Progressive voices. I wonder when I will get shut down.

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.

Elizabeth Warren posted this video on her Facebook timeline.

The Republican plan to defund Planned Parenthood is a right-wing attack on women’s rights. Watch why I voted to stand with Planned Parenthood.

Imagine if we had a fighter like this as President. Elizabeth Warren is doing a great job in the Senate. Bernie Sanders would do an equally great job as President. Imagine if both of them had a platform from which to speak and rouse the public to action.

Imagine a President who would not be cowed into preventing this woman from heading a federal agency. That’s what drove her to become a Senator, and we in Massachusetts are actually glad this happened.

You don’t mess with Elizabeth Warren. We can elect Bernie Sanders as President to show that you don’t mess with Bernie Sanders either.

In case you didn’t see what Ted Cruz was responding to as shown in my previous post Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz, here is Rand Paul in all his glory.

Instead of a motto of “Unleash the American Dream”, maybe he should change it to “Unleash an oligarch’s wet dream”. 14% flat tax indeed. Would a one-page tax code allow for deductions?

If $15/hour is a barely livable wage – equivalent of $30,000 per year, let’s see what that flat tax rate is on various salaries above the barely livable wage.

Does it still sound fair to you?

Now think of the huge increases in wealth from unrealized capital gains that are not even counted as income and which people at the $50,000 level have hardly any of. This increase in wealth, not recognized as income, is many multiples of the amount of money counted as income for the billionaires. This is the way the wealthy arrange for their compensation, not income, to be paid. Is this still sounding fair?

Apparently there is a YouTube video of a Ted Cruz political commercial.

It’s almost as if he were saying, “Don’t take Steve Greenberg’s word that I am crazy. Let me give you a demonstration of what he means.”

Ironically, Ted Cruz is such a firearms expert apparently he wouldn’t know a machine gun when he didn’t fall over it. That’s no machine gun compared to what I got an expert’s badge firing while in US Army training. (Well, what Ted has is actually called an automatic rifle. And he purports to live in Texas? In case you missed my point, an automatic rifle is very distinctly different from a machine gun.)

In my recollections, I can still hear the firing range officer “Fire a burst of six.”

I wonder if the lame stream media will play this like they did Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, or Barack Obama bowling, or Howard Dean shouting over a noisy crowd with the crowd noise filtered out by the news media inventing faux news.

Robert Reich has posted his 2012 essay The Difference Between Private and Public Morality on his Facebook timeline. The introduction to the recent post is

The Republican attacks on a woman’s right to choose once again confuse private morality with public morality. The Republican concept of morality centers on bedrooms rather than boardrooms. They fixate on the most intimate decisions people make about their own personal lives, and ignore the abuses of power emanating from large corporations and Wall Street. Yet public morality is the crisis of our time, not private morality. Public morality is all of our business. Private morality is not.

The closing remark in the original essay is

It’s time once again to save capitalism from its own excesses – and to base a new era of reform on public morality and common sense.

One of these times when it may seem we need to come to the rescue of capitalism again, more people might start to wonder why we bother.

Bloomberg has the article Star Trek Economics: Life After the Dismal Science.

In other words, the rise of new technology means that all the economic questions will change. Instead of a world defined by scarcity, we will live in a world defined by self-expression. We will be able to decide the kind of people that we want to be, and the kind of lives we want to live, instead of having the world decide for us. The Star Trek utopia will free us from the fetters of the dismal science.

I have a thought experiment that I like to pose to people, and that is to imagine the day when everything we need can be produced without any human workers. How will wealth be distributed then?

Little did I realize that Star Trek provided the answers. Maybe if I had watched Star Trek after the original series had finished, I would have seen what this author describes.