Bloomberg has a new column by Michael Lewis making fun of the MBA Oath. He suggests "The Warren Buffett Oath": "I pledge to remain the go-to moral compass of the American money culture. To that end I pledge to learn less than I typically do about the Wall Street businesses in which I invest, so that, after they are discovered to have lied, cheated or stolen, I can plausibly claim to have known nothing about it." And the SEC Oath: "We pledge to figure out who on Wall Street the American people most hate, and to sue them, even if we are sure to lose."

The American Council on Science and Health highlights Apple's marketing pitch for the new iPhone: "arsenic-free, BFR-free, mercury-free, and PVC-free." The ACSH calls it "ridiculous."

But it taps into a trend that I have been noticing in consumer products. Companies used to advertise what was in the products. Think of "two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce cheese, pickles onions on a sesame seed bun." But now, especially with higher-end products, the key selling proposition seems to be what's not in the products. The hand-soap in my bathroom has a label boasting: "Paraben free, Disodium EDTA Free, Sodium Laureth/Laurel Sulfate Free." I've never heard of these things, but I suppose I should be glad they aren't in my soap. The meat I am about to cook for dinner? "No added antibiotics, No added hormones." The olive oil I will cook the vegetables in? "No chemicals, no preservatives."

We've gone from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous abstention.

Journalists and their children enjoy the "rides for kids, the face painting, and the moon bounce" with Vice President Biden, paid for by the Democratic National Committee.

The blog Little Green Footballs has found two blatant cases (here and here) of the Reuters wire service cropping knives out of photographs of the "peace" activists aboard the Gaza flotilla.

More evidence of the "newspaper war" in New York City: The Wall Street Journal Web site posts a video of Paris Hilton giving its reporter a tour of the Upper East Side; the New York Times counters with a video of a hunt for 13- and 16 year-olds in bikinis that runs under the headline "Finding Supermodels in Rural Brazil."

The comments string on the Journal Web site is particularly lively: "You can see Rupert Murdoch's fingerprints clearly on the WSJ! wsj is becoming more and more like the NYPost. Tabloid trash"..."I cannot believe the WSJ has sunk to such disgusting depths!"

The Financial Times has an article with some color on what's happening at General Motors. Highlights: The government hasn't forced GM to separate the CEO and chairman's jobs; before new manangement took over, GM ran nearly 3,000 Web sites, " two-thirds of which were internal and many of which were not updated regularly." The new team "has chopped the number of regular reports compiled by GM's research group from 94 to four. He may dispense with some of these too, after deliberately not e-mailing them to the usual 150 recipients and finding that only a handful missed them."

GM's design chief says "prior to the new regime, 'half of our people were spending all of their time preparing presentations, instead of designing great cars.'"

Turnaround narrative notwithstanding, the company is still looking for loan guarantees from the German government for its Opel division.

From Mike Allen's Politico playbook:

At the Smithsonian National Museum of American History last night, an array of Washingtonians (Lee Aitken, UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, Elena Allbritton, Susan Axelrod, Jeremy Bash and Robyn Cooke Bash, Wolf Blitzer and Lynn Greenfield, Margaret Carlson, Liz Cheney, Nina Easton, Michael Feldman, Juleanna Glover, Savannah Guthrie, David Israelite, Eileen McMenamin, Autumn and Jim VandeHei, Judy Woodruff, etc.) turned out for a dinner honoring the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative.... Among the speakers:

--Melanne Verveer, the State Department's Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, thanked the night's emcee and the 10,000 Women maestro, "my dear friend Dina Powell," a Goldman managing director and Global Head of the Office of Corporate Engagement, " … This afternoon at the State Department, [Goldman executive] John Rogers said, 'We hope the day will come when 10,000 women and all it represents will no longer be a program, but a movement.'"

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new Forbes column about the oil spill: "There is a real risk that BP will go bankrupt when the dust settles on this case."

President Obama, in January, said: "We have to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together...So just a tone of civility instead of slash-and-burn would be helpful."

Bloomberg News has an update on the state of the effort by President Obama and some in Congress to raise taxes on the "carried interest" of fund managers. The wire reports: "The Senate plan under discussion would tax fund managers' profit shares at about 33 percent for assets held less than seven years, and about 31 percent for assets held longer than that, the aide said late yesterday. The House adopted a tax rate of about 35 percent on May 28, with no special rates for long-term assets."

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"Much of the current popular literature on the neocons is unpersuasively hostile, overwrought, superficial, paranoid, and wrongheaded," write C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook in their new book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea.

Professor Thompson, executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, was the subject of an interview on this site last year. Mr. Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. Their book has back-cover blurbs from Glenn Beck and Richard Epstein.

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First Powerline and Little Green Footballs ran Dan Rather off of CBS, now some rabbi with a YouTube video has toppled Helen Thomas of the Hearst Newspapers.

Here's a scenario spun by a FutureofCapitalism.com reader-community member-watchdog-participant:

The "moratorium" on new offshore oil drilling will start to affect both gas prices and unemployment rates upward as existing wells are depleted and the cleanup work for people who otherwise would be working in oil services abates. President Obama is tempted to lift the moratorium, but he needs some political cover from Republicans to do so. Do they provide it? Or would they prefer to see Mr. Obama saddled with the high gas prices and high unemployment rates?