The Week in Review

Gasoline prices are soaring. Corporations are dodging federal taxes.  When it comes to Medicare and taxes, a major new poll published Friday showed House Republicans are totally out of touch with Americans. Sen. Bernie Sanders discussed all that and more on Friday during his weekly nationwide radio show. To listen to an excerpt from Brunch with Bernie on The Thom Hartmann Program, click here.

Tax Day Protests There were protests against corporate tax dodgers across the United States on Monday, this year's deadline for filing tax returns with the IRS. In Chicago, demonstrators marched down Michigan Avenue dressed up as corporate tycoons.  In San Francisco, protesters gathered outside Chevron's headquarters demanding higher taxes for wealthy corporations. In South Burlington, Vt., demonstrators gathered outside a General Electric facility to question why GE paid no federal taxes. The demonstrators all citied Sanders' top-10 list of hugely profitable corporations that paid little or no federal income taxes and in some cases pocketed millions of dollars in refunds. To watch the senator's floor speech that sparked the protests, click here.

Congress vs. America The House one week ago, on a party-line vote, rammed through a budget that eliminates Medicare and Medicaid as we know them and, believe it or not, would give another $1 trillion in new tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations.  An overwhelming 84 percent of Americans oppose a House-passed budget plan to privatize Medicare and force seniors to pay twice as much for their health care, according to an ABC/Washington Post survey published on Wednesday.  Another finding was that 72 percent of Americans support raising taxes on incomes over $250,000. When pollsters for The New York Times and CBS News asked about raising federal taxes for households earning $250,000 a year or more, 72 percent of adults approved and 24 percent disapproved. The polls showed that Congress is "way out of touch with the American people" on how to reduce deficits.  "At a time when not a single Republican in Congress is prepared to ask the wealthiest people in this country to pay a little more to help bring down deficits, an overwhelming majority of Americans see things differently," Sanders said. To read more, click here. 

Barack and Bernie and Budgets As editors at the Times-Argus listened to President Obama talk about the House Republican budget, they heard a familiar ring. Obama declared in the speech earlier this month that "there's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires."  The newspaper was struck by the fact that "the rhetoric of Sen. Bernard Sanders had found its way into a major address by the president of the United States. Millionaires and billionaires - it rolls off Sanders' lips with the ease of a true blue populist. And now Obama was taking on the millionaires and billionaires, too." To read the editorial, click here.

Gulf Oil Spill On Wednesday, the first anniversary of the BP disaster, there had been little change in environmental policy since the worst environmental disaster in American history. Big oil companies continued to rake in huge profits inflated by tax breaks that Congress left intact. Even as oil polluted the Gulf of Mexico, the Senate last year defeated a Sanders amendment to rescind oil and gas tax credits.  In fact, Congress failed to pass a single piece of legislation in response to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Nor, for that matter, was anything done to address global warming and record temperatures that scientists attribute to burning oil and other greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels.  Nearly $44 billion in tax loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas companies would continue under a 2012 budget that the House passed a week ago Friday.  Never mind what the American public thinks. A February 2011 NBC / Wall Street Journal poll found that 74 percent of Americans support eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries in order to reduce the deficit.

Earth Day Addressing hundreds of students at the University of Vermont on Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders talked about the effects of climate change and how the economy could benefit from creating more green jobs.

Gas Prices Wall Street speculators drove up gas prices to more than $4 a gallon in some places.  At President Obama's request, the Justice Department announced on Thursday that it has created a task force to investigate the oil and gas markets. "The supply of gasoline in the United States today is at an 18-year high -- an 18-year high. And yet I think what Wall Street is doing is using the guise of the Middle East crisis to raise prices and force prices up through market speculation," Sanders told Ed Schultz on MSNBC. To watch, click here.