Here are some interviews on Democracy Now! that offer some assessment of Earth Day 2011:

• Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the rights of Mother Earth. “People are already joking: ‘Oh, you’re talking about rights for ticks and rights for rats.’ This is the right wing mocking what we’re doing. We’re talking about survival here. We’re talking about human and other species’ survival on this planet, if we don’t change the way we see the world, the way we see nature, the way we see water. It is not a big resource for us.It is the essential—these are the essential elements of a living ecosystem that gives us all life, and this is about survival…. For me, earth democracy means, first, recognizing the fundamental fact that we are part of nature, that human rights and nature’s rights are not separate, because we are just one strand in this amazing mystery and miracle that the earth has created in terms of life. But earth democracy also means democracy in the everyday life of people, exercised daily by ordinary people, not the once in a five-year or four-year election, because everywhere around the world, we are seeing, you can bring someone to power, and they don’t represent your will anymore. “So, democracy under corporate control has mutated from “of the people, by the people, for the people” into ‘of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.’ In this country, I watched how Wisconsin suddenly became a playground for destruction of democracy and destruction of the fundamental rights of collective bargaining and public services and public domain, only because there is this corporate pressure on privatizing everything and preventing people from exercising their democratic rights. So, it’s the democratic rights of the people and the earth versus the fictitious corporate rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, and now they’re costing the earth and people too much. They’re bringing nothing in return. It used to be the case that when General Motors put out a car, it gave employment. It even gave salaries so people could buy that car. Today, the corporations give nothing back to society. They just take from nature, take from society, and want to rubbish this planet and rubbish our lives. And I think people are getting fed up. The entire rising in the Arabic world is part of that fed-upness.”
• Hold both parties to high standards”: Van Jones, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar. “You have to make a decision not to wait your turn. Dr. King was 25 years old in Montgomery. The Freedom Riders were 19 and 20 years old. The founders themselves were in their twenties and in their thirties. You have to make a decision not to wait your turn. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re going to be the leaders of tomorrow. Tomorrow is not promised. You must be the leaders of today, Generation Power Shift.”
• Now is our time to take a stand”: Tim DeChristopher’s message to youth climate activists at Power Shift 2011. ‎”We could send 30 people onto a mountaintop removal site, shut it down temporarily, cost them a lot of money, start to clog up the court systems of West Virginia, and we could send 30 people the day after that and the day after that and the day after that, every day for a year. And I don’t think we would ever get to that year point, because mountaintop removal would end before that. Long before we got to the end of that year, Barack Obama would be forced into a choice between either ending the war against Appalachia or bringing in federal troops to continue it. And for all my disgust—for all my disgust and disappointment with Barack Obama, I don’t think he would bring in federal troops to defend a mountaintop removal site. I think he would end it before it got to that point. And it’s our job as a movement to force him into that position.”
• Bill McKibben of 350.org calls House vote on global warming “One of the most embarrassing votes Congress has ever taken. ‎”Last week, the House voted 248 to 174 to pass a resolution saying global warming wasn’t real. It was one of the most embarrassing votes that Congress has ever taken. They believe—they believe that because they can amend the tax laws, they can amend the laws of nature, too. But they can’t.”

See Democracy Now! for a revelatory interview about what the Koch brothers are doing, with the capabilities they get from last year’s Supreme Court Citizens United decision.

Last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision granted free speech rights to corporations and effectively removed regulations preventing employers from politically manipulating their workers. In practice, employers can also fire workers who refuse to attend political seminars or dare to voice their dissenting opinions too loudly.

“‎Lee Fang of ThinkProgress put a memo (see below) up on ThinkProgress yesterday from an operative who’s been tied to the Koch Industries, saying that, really, after Citizens United, corporations need to start using their employees more to push their politics. So they’re going to start using the three million supervisors that work in this country to directly push politics on the job before elections. And this is something we haven’t seen in American history since we passed the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s….

“I think that’s what Americans really have to realize, is that we don’t have any power, except the power of solidarity and the power to strike and the power to organize in unions. Street protests are great. Online petitions are great. But only when you can threaten to shut down the factories of the boss, only when you can have that type of leverage, are Americans ever going to be able to change the situation. And I don’t see the situation changing unless there’s more organizing. I think we’re going to see more corporate oligarchs taking on workers, unless workers themselves organize and take away the power, their power to work.”

Here is the memo on ThinkProgress and the right-wing huzzahs about what corporations can now do to control how workers vote and even think.

Do you have young children? Do you know what they are going to have to face in their lives? This is a crime, pure and simple. Boehner, Inhofe, and his climate-crank friends like to talk about the immorality of the debt, but what about the climate? This is a crime, and we need to hold the criminals responsible. “My daughter and the rest of her generation have been given a life sentence for a crime they did not committ, and it is time to go get the people who did commit it.”

Here comes some wisdom from investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, environmental correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of the new book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Mark has worked for more than 20 years on climate change:

• Interview on Democracy Now!: “[Senator Inhofe] knows his lines pretty well. And he’s going to stick with them. And that’s really the problem. They are climate cranks. They like to be called ‘climate skeptics.’ And the media, I’m very sorry to say—the mainstream media, at least—calls them climate skeptics. They are not skeptics. Genuine skeptics are invaluable to science. That’s how science progresses, is with skepticism. But a true skeptic can be persuaded by evidence. They cannot. They have made up their minds for economic reasons or ideological reasons that they’re not going to believe in this. And because our country has allowed them to dominate the debate for 20 years, we’re now stuck with 50 more years of rising temperatures. We’re not locked in. My daughter, the rest of Generation Hot, are locked in to living under the hottest, most volatile climate our civilization has ever known. And that is a crime.” (The interview also touches on problems with supposedly carbon-neutral nuclear power.)
• Article in The Nation, confronting the climate cranks. “It is outrageous that these climate cranks have the upper hand in Washington. The plain truth is that they have no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, and that should discredit them from exercising any influence over our climate policy, much less holding it hostage to their ideological and economic agendas. But someone has to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes.”
• Author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

So the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission extends Vermont Yankee’s nearly expired lease, trumping local Vermonters from closing the damn leaking Fukushima-modeled thing down. This from Democracy Now!.

Here is a response from a friend, a Vermont native, to my post of this on Facebook:

I’m not opposed to nuclear power in general, but I take exception to this leaky, out-of-date plant being allowed to stay open. It is of the same vintage as the plant in Japan, and it’s already leaking, so I don’t understand why anyone would think it’s okay to keep it open. It wasn’t intended to last beyond the original timeframe. Either shut it down or put up a more modern, safer version. This is an incredibly environmentally-conscious state, and we have every right to insist that it close down as promised. I think the VY owners should come here to live with the people who work at the plant, or live near it, and then see if they feel it should stay open.

Here’s Carl Safina:

The worst environmental disaster in history isn’t the oil that gets away. It’s the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the gas we burn. The real catastrophic spill is the carbon dioxide billowing from our tailpipes and smokestacks every second, year upon decade. That spill is destabilizing the planet’s life-supporting systems, killing polar wildlife, shrinking tropical reefs, dissolving shellfish, raising the sea level along densely populated coasts, jeopardizing agriculture, and threatening food security for hundreds of millions of people….

“The alternative is that eternal energy powers the whole planet: the energy of the sun, the strength of the wind, the power of the tides, the heat of the earth, all the algae that powers all of the life in the ocean. Petroleum, after all, is algae that’s been cooking at the bottom of the sea for millions of years. You can make jet fuel with genetically engineered algae. It’s been done. Jets have been flown on it. We have the ability to harness all of the eternal sources of energy that really power the planet. And instead, in this country, we’re stuck doing what we’ve done ever since we lived in caves: whenever we want some energy, we light fire to something. The United States is stuck in a debate that says that harnessing the eternal sources of energy that run the planet are too expensive and too impractical, but China is not under that delusion, neither is Germany or Denmark or Spain or Canada. All these countries are ahead of us in developing clean technologies, diversified energy sources, creating the jobs that go with it, and building the infrastructure that goes with it, as we pretend that it’s impractical, while our factories rust and we complain about high unemployment….”

See the entire interview on Democracy Now!

Also see the followup interviews:

• Voices from the Gulf: Here is from a typical victim: “I can barely even get up out of bed. I have trouble breathing. I can’t remember anything. I’ve lost half my eyesight. I cough up and spit up blood all the time. I shake and tremble all the time. I can’t even open a bottle of water or even hold a bottle of water in my hands. The chemical poisoning causes headaches so bad that it puts pressure on the nerves in my brain and causes my body to be paralyzed.”
• Deepwater drilling resumes: “Dispersants, in particular, have a very damaging effect on the small wildlife and the invertebrates. The oyster beds, for example, were hit really hard by this. And unfortunately, just as the sea turtles and dolphins are still dying today, if we go out and use this dispersant again, this disaster is going to just keep rolling and rolling and rolling. We still have not addressed the fundamental problems with offshore oil drilling. We still do not have a method of containing or cleaning up further oil spills, but yet we’re going forward with new drilling all the time.”
• Death toll from the blowout still rising: “This is the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history—the biggest petrochemical poisoning of humans in U.S. history, and also, of course, the marine life along the Gulf Coast. And we are poised now, as we’ve also heard, that because of the Obama administration’s unbridled support of the petrochemical industry and Big Oil, specifically, in this case, we are poised to repeat this disaster and have it dealt with the same way, whether it be in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic or somewhere in Alaska.”
• Father of one of the explosion victims

Here is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders discussing the scofflaw tax evaders.

Here is Sanders arguing on his own site:

While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.

With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep
spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.

Sanders renewed his call for shared sacrifice after it was reported that General Electric and other major corporations paid no U.S. taxes after posting huge profits. Sanders said it is grossly unfair for congressional Republicans to propose major cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the reality that some of the most profitable corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.
Sanders compiled a list of some of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.

(1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. (Source: Exxon Mobil’s 2009 shareholder report filed with the SEC here.)

(2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion. (Source: Forbes.com here, ProPublica here and Treasury here.)

(3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS. (Source: Citizens for Tax Justice here and The New York Times here. Note: despite rumors to the contrary, the Times has stood by its story.)

(4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009. (Source: See 2009 Chevron annual report here. Note 15 on page FS-46 of this report shows a U.S. federal income tax liability of $128 million, but that it was able to defer $147 million for a U.S. federal income tax liability of $-19 million)

(5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year. . (Source: Paul Buchheit, professor, DePaul University, here and Citizens for Tax Justice here.)

(6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction. (Source: the company’s 2009 annual report, pg. 112, here.)

(7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department. (Source: Bloomberg News here, ProPublica here, Treasury Department here.)

(8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury. (Source: Paul Buchheit, professor, DePaul University, here, ProPublica here, Treasury Department here.

(9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2006 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction. (Sources: Profits can be found here. The deduction can be found on the company’s 2010 SEC 10-K report to shareholders on 2009 finances, pg. 127, here)

(10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent. (Source: The New York Times here)

Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He also introduced legislation to impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion a year. The senator has said that spending cuts must be paired with new revenue so the federal budget is not balanced solely on the backs of working families.

“We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed,” Sanders said, “but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We’ve got to talk about shared sacrifice.”

It’s not just the corporations; there are also those individuals: Newly released tax data shows the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has been effectively cut in half since the mid-1990s. In 1995, the richest 400 Americans paid on average 30 percent of their income in federal taxes. In 2007, the richest Americans paid less than 17 percent. During that same period, the combined annual income of the richest 400 Americans soared from $6 billion to $23 billion. On Monday, Tax Day protests were held in some 300 cities, including the one I attended in Poughkeepsie, NY. Many protesters focused their attention on Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Google for avoiding to pay their full share of taxes by using tax code loopholes.

The right wing is on the attack: slashing public services, eliminating workers’ rights, and destroying jobs. Their excuse? “America is broke”—and yet big corporations and the wealthy are raking it in, and continue to get tax break after tax break. Something doesn’t add up.

America is not broke. The right-wing wants to convince us we’re broke so that they can push through their radical agenda. And well-connected corporations continue to use their political power to dodge their taxes. In 2009, after helping crash the American economy, Bank of America paid $0 in taxes. GE had a tax bill of $0 in 2010. Republicans want to give a $50 billion tax bailout to big oil companies—and at the same time take away food aid to hungry pregnant women and children. This is immoral and un-American.

Enough is enough! On Tax Day, April 18, as millions of Americans patriotically paid their taxes, we called on corporations and millionaires to pay their fair share. At hundreds of events from coast to coast, we presented tax bills to corporate tax dodgers for the billions of dollars their legions of lobbyists helped them avoid. We organized a peaceful, dignified, and powerful day of action to call on corporations to pay their fair share. And we demanded that our elected leaders make them pay.

It’s time to demand that everyone pays their fair share to rebuild the American Dream. We invite frustrated taxpayers, underwater homeowners, vilified public servants, job-hunting students, and unemployed veterans—everyone facing cuts or cutbacks, a pink slip or a shrinking paycheck—to join in protests. See US Uncut (www.usuncut.org) and It’s Our Economy (www.itsoureconomy.us).