let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. one well. we never got the chance to further keep him safe get ready because their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story at the scene so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realize that everything you say. i'm sorry is a big. dog

and add to the big picture on tom hartman coming up in this half hour record high levels of radiation now being detected in japan nuclear specialist paul gunter will fill us in on the potential dangers of that situation plus just when you thought it was safe to come up for air the real estate waters deepen the details of the new housing crisis and is it mandatory for the commander in chief to declare war i'll show you why corporate control over everything in government up to and including our foreign policy has gone over the top and tonight's daily take. the international atomic energy agency issued their latest report on the situation that day each a nuclear plant today take

a look. the pressure is. in the reactor pressure vessel in drawing of units three is stable however pressure is in it's increased in both to react to pressure vessel on the dry well of unit one where she was rejected has been increased japan is still in a dire situation as we asian readings in some areas are now hitting their highest levels yet and in a town forty kilometers away from the day to plant radiation the soil is sixteen hundred higher than normal levels so despite somewhat good news that electricity may soon be restored to the plant is the situation in japan actually terrier here to shed some light on this issue once again paul gunter director of reactor oversight of nuclear power welcome back thank you tom we've been hearing the reports first of all just in general is the situation in japan getting better or worse while we're on a nuclear roller coaster that has these steep inclines and then goes into

a deep drop and it's apparent that unfortunately this is going to be the news for some time days weeks maybe even years at this point but clearly what we're seeing is that now all of the radiation levels are reaching proportions we're going to have exclusion zones that will go on for decades we're going to see food bans. like controllable the radioactive cesium one thirty seven fell two thousand miles away in northern scotland and there's still food bins on cheap and limb up there so i think this is going to be the situation for years decades to come no i have. this article from the kyoto news today and it said that tepco has announced that they have observed a neutron beam. and one half kilometers away from the plant

neutrons are a subatomic are you know neutrons protons electrons that mean. that fission is going on. you know what is the significance of a neutron of you know a significant number of neutrons being measured a mile and a half a mile away from the plant i think there is still opinion. circulating what we're concerned about is that these are plutonium particles that plutonium is normal exactly because active fuel particles are now working their way into the soil and you were seeing perhaps black smoke had is now carrying hot particles of plutonium away from a particular unit three fuel pool because you have to remember that four of these. reactors have had explosions and the third reactor is a plutonium fuel reactor put a essentially all these fuel pools have some a melt of plutonium in the waste and it's really through trying to better it is ok

so an engineer at the daiichi plant has come forward to say. he covered a personal covered up a flaw in reactor four and had it not been shut down at the time of the quake it probably would have melted down union of concerned scientists highlighted fourteen near misses and u.s. nuclear plants just last year many as a result of an approaching flaws how common is ignoring or covering up problems in nuclear power plants. it's the it's been the story from day one we were active in exposing a. history of around the dave especially a nuclear power station in just outside of toledo where operators and the u.s. nuclear regulatory commission allowed leaks from inside the reactor vessel of boric acid a cool it's the moderating coolant to eat through six and three quarter inches of carbon steel in through the vessel and they had three sixteenth's of an inch

between nuclear catastrophe. and you know basically an accident they would have been much much worse then the three mile island accident and that was in two thousand and two but the n.r.c. had pictures of roiling rust lava like formations coming off of the reactor in april of two thousand when they let the plant go back on him for two more years i was excluded michigan we almost lost detroit there was a book by that title absolutely plant near detroit nearly went critical and nobody covered it it was like it was invisible until the book came out and then it but it was a news story for a couple of weeks. does the fact that these cooling pumps are still not on line two days after we've been told that the electricity is attached we have just a minute left by the way. does that tell you that they're probably not functional or is there do we just not know yet we i don't think that we know yet but the fact

that it took them a loving days to get the lights on in the control room for unit three is of major concern when we're talking about actually gearing up a nuclear reactor six nuclear reactors for cooling so so we the bottom line we don't know we are in a wait and see mode unfortunately and the news is not good this is this is new territory for us and and. the last question just a quickie were seen ration levels of one hundred twenty hundred fifty two hundred millisieverts per hour my understanding is that that level of radiation over a twenty four hour period is enough to produce radiation sickness is that. well you know we're part of the information problem. that we're having is that there is this. stark difference between what's permitted and what's actually safe and we cannot trust the permitted releases clearly the first and foremost right now

risks are these workers and then the populations that are literally being quarantined within a twenty kilometer thirty kilometer zone around the plant but no the radiation cat is out of the bag yeah now we have iodine in the water in tokyo thanks or. no nukes to go situation in japan should be a huge cautionary tale for america let's hope our politicians learn the right lessons from. it's been nearly five years since the real estate bubble started to burst plunging our economy into a nosedive from which it has yet to recover in those five years homes across america have lost nearly a third of their value and three and a half million people have been foreclosed on today more than a quarter of all the mortgage homes in america are underwater mean people owe more

on their house than the house is worth five point seven million people could be foreclosed on in the near future and congress is estimated as willing as many as thirteen million people to be kicked out of their homes by the time time housing prices go back to normal so when will that be and with banks still already many of these bad mortgages on their balance sheets is our economy headed for another real estate induced collapse here's shed some light on this is alex i'm a journalist a reporter for the american banker alex welcome to the program thanks for having me thank you for joining us from our new york studio could a second real estate crash be worse than the first one but certainly for all those people that are going foreclosed it's going to be pretty terrible. well i mean for our economy is it is it conceivable yes there was that was i was concerned that the first crash was going to create a great depression and you know bush came along with tarp and then obama came along with the stimulus and the consensus is that that avoided the great depression if

a crash is again we're kind of out of safety nets aren't we it could this be what provokes a real great depression. but i think what's going to happen is they're going to. delay taking losses on the second lien loans they're going to just try to drag that out. and meanwhile lots of homeowners will lose their homes and in these banks will be able to stay in business but it does slowly writing off secondly in loans so it is difficult for housing prices to recover so is the essence of what you're saying that the first bubble burst crash was primary loans and now there's all these second mortgage loans that is another bubble that could burst and crash and i have that right. yes but i think it would eventually well it will crash but the problem is that banks the government is

allowing these banks to stay in business with with this sort of double. double standard of accounting we need these loans these securitized loans a lot of the securitized loans have to be marked to market but the these loans that are in these pay pal and sheets they can value them for what they want of value them at interesting one point one trillion dollars for first second lien loans is a lot different than it is on a securitised loan. i didn't realize that the banks toure's were given nine trillion dollars we discovered when we finally forced the fed open their books in addition i mean in aggregate along with all of the other money that they got in tarp we could have it my number i believe these numbers are accurate we could have paid off every subprime mortgage in the country with one point four trillion dollars was this even an option or considered as an option at the time that george

bush authorized what eventually became a nine trillion dollar bailout of the banking industry but it should have been considered enough i'm not sure about that but it's definitely should have been and the problem is somebody has got to eat this all this mortgage debt and it's the homeowners who are eating it and not the banks and yet the the all this mortgage debt in aggregate is about one seventh or one eighth of the total of the amount of money that was given to the banks. so i think one thing that's interesting about this secondly mones it's one of the dominant narratives of securitization was that paying scared all the toxic assets all through bank balance sheets through mortgage securitization in fact some of the most toxic assets are still on bank balance sheets in the form of second lien loans and the only reason that the banks aren't feeling more pain is because they're

allowed to. value them for close to pretty vocal prices. that's that's remarkable alex thanks so much for being with us tonight. looks you're welcome it looks like we've all got to hang on to our hats for this right five years three and a half million people kicked out of their homes in those six million in danger you put on the streets a quarter of all mortgage holders being screwed over by having to pay far more than their house is worth because banks theories were deregulated by phil graham at the request of enron's and les and then phil graham's wife of course wendy who work for can she was on the board of directors of enron so they could prey on working class families to make a quick buck and despite the fact that they're illegal exploits are fairly well known by now not a single person is in jail for any of this is a travesty but it's also the natural outcome of the kind of economy that ronald

reagan set up for us in the one nine hundred eighty s. this is this is not a surprise or this shouldn't come as as some quote sort of incredible horrible surprise for all of us this really started with richard nixon going to china on behalf of pepsi actually turned out a lot of soap and things of a known friedman in the libertarians came along with his crazy idea of free trade we don't need no stinking trade barriers we don't need to protect america the whole free trade idea went on steroids with nafta gatt in the w t o and you know we're you're you may be wondering now how do i bring this back to housing what that lead to is that we now have an economy that based on manufacturing which is what i mean go back to adam smith seven hundred seventy six wealth of nations the literally the wealth of nations is the ability to transform raw materials the stuff of the soil of the earth into finished goods but we've abandoned that so now and you know we've gone from thirty thirty five percent manufacturing down or eleven percent for as

a percentage of our g.d.p. and banking which used to be so instead we were living in a global economy banking which used to be this nice board. brain business and the should be frankly predictable safe profitable marginally even boring and thinking for the long term banking generated thirty five percent of the of our corporate profits year before last i don't know the numbers. and now the banks are saying that this year is going to be their best year in twenty years this is incredible so what we have now is an economy because driven by bubbles we have the tech bubble and it's been just think in the last just the last ten or twelve years we have the technology all we have the stock market bubble and all of them by the way followed by a crash the oil bubble the real estate bubble the food bubble the derivatives bottle and now quoting to alex our guest we've got a secondary housing bubble that's about to crash we need to you know brain banking back to the notion there's a couple of steps that we need to do really quickly that basically undo

a lot of the damage that was done by the reagan administration and several administrations since then following that same kind of milton freidman chicago school economics we need to reregulate the banks to stop the bubbles we need to return to a tax of over fifty percent on great income so that there's not an incentive to gamble like it's a it's a casino and it's cheap money and we need to return to manufacturing in the united states which means putting up barriers called tariffs it kept this country the place where we made things literally from seventy one when alexander hamilton pretty proposed and promoted them during the george washington administration until the time ronald reagan sort of dismantling them in the one nine hundred eighty s. protectionism they say it's a bad word i say it's the thing that can save this country.

it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question maine ohio and new jersey are giving tax cuts to rich to the rich and at the same time raising taxes on the middle class well is fly your options are a yes cuts to children's hospitals and a millionaire welfare that's just fine or no just say no to the new robin hood's for the super rich the reverse robin hood steal from the poor give to the rich so far the majority of you have said no he still have time to tell us what you think log on to turner and dot com to cast your vote the poll be open until tomorrow. coming up what's the real reason why every american president recent history has thrown us into a new war i'll explain in tonight's daily take. let's

not forget that we had an apartheid regime. i think. even one well. we never got that says the infamous safe haven graduate because their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so bleak you think you understand it and then you glimpse

something else you hear see some other part of it and realize everything you saw you don't know i'm sorry for the big picture. for. five. crazy alert just give her a kiss already ninety two year old woman from for

a quiet florida is in jail after she fired a semiautomatic pistol four times in your neighbor's house neighbor a fifty three year old man says the woman came over to manning he kissed her when he refused she went back to rouse grabbed a gun and unleashed the rodger bullets into his eye was one actually narrowly missing his head man he says the man says he'd done some homework pairs for her ever since she's been head over heels it's unclear what the woman's final goal was with the kids perhaps she just wanted a shotgun wedding. in the past six decades the only president who did not send the u.s. troops to fight and die in a war broad was jimmy carter. whether we like it or not our nation has become

addicted to war this is a problem for a variety of reasons it's bankrupting us it's a lousy way to run a country it's consistently something we see as empires or in their death throes but perhaps most importantly it's a problem because as james madison the father of our constitution and the fourth president united states said no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare and loose war is destroying our freedoms and ultimately our democracy and we can thank corporate personhood for these endless wars. as i discuss my book on equal protection other than a brief go at it around five hundred b.c.e. by the greeks democratic government is a relatively new phenomenon in the six thousand years of modern western human history before the rise of modern democracies governments were basically led by people who either claimed power by divine right like pope's or all those are by

people who claimed power by force like war lords and then declared themselves kings and a common theme among these rulers is that they took of themselves all the rights in their societies and then dribbled out a few privileges to the masses to the rest of the nation so the show you how this works you know that the religious groups in europe it was the catholic church for a long time would come out and say ok we're in charge or the king is the war lords they were the government who held the rights and they then gave privileges to the people and to corporations actually to the groups you want to start a school you want to have whatever but basically it was it was the warlord kings or the pope's of them all those or whatever this is the historic form of governance government had the rights people had privileges that our founding fathers borrowing from the greek bottle more than two thousand years earlier created democracy here in america and look this pyramid of rights and privileges upside down our phone

founders knew that the best defense against our government being seized by were wards who would then declare themselves kings or by religious fanatics and try to impose a theocracy is to put all of the rights and thus all the ultimate power in the hands of the people as abraham lincoln called government of the people by the people for the people. so our founding fathers weren't the least bit worried about the rise of corporate power at the time of the american revolution they had flipped this upside down so the power was with the people and the people then gave privileges to the government in part they weren't worried about this because the spark the revolutionary war the boston tea party with the tea party was a revolt against the world's largest corporation of the british east india corporation and by the way it was a revolt because the tax act exceeded the teac of seventeen ninety three or seven

hundred seventy three was a tax cut for this giant corporation which was going to put out of business all these small entrepreneurial businesses across america the american founders rose up and said no we're not going to let your wal-mart to us and madison and jefferson warned us about corporations why in large founders and framers thought they'd driven a stake through the heart of what you jefferson called money off of what little did they know that about one hundred years after the constitution was ratified the greatest threat to american democracy would come not from traditional here kratz kings or warlords but from corporations. this is this is where it has come to now the process if we have the american democracy tragically the corporations now by our supreme court have been given the rights privileges now are going to the people and their government and this is this is not

how the founders organized i mean look at the constitution originally it was the people it was the governor it was actually local and state governments that had that could have the power to control. corporations that because they represent the people and the people were at the bottom of the pile of shit we used to be up at the top and have their rights so the process of applying off supreme court justices and clerks senators and congressman really began after the civil war when the railroad corporations and their owners like gould in huntington are the richest men in the world that led to john d. rockefeller famous challenge to ohio when that state declared his standard oil trust to be illegal and lead to the changing of laws regulating corporations in state after state was called the charter mongering era elite eight hundred ninety s. until today it largely captured all the branches of our government in part they did

this by good old fashioned graft and bribes things like the revolving door between government industry but increasingly they're using a new strategy claiming that there are persons and therefore have rights under the constitution like you and me and since our form of government which the government itself but a lower persons knows originally organized we the people create a government which then controls corporations the in terms of rights and does power these new corporate persons particularly those in the very profitable defense industry have become fabulously rich and powerful. historian and author thomas frank did a report recently about the influence of defense contractors in washington d.c. take a look so here we are in crystal city. where a stone's throw from the pentagon and this is sort of the heart of the military contractor world on this and you see k.b.r.

which stands for kellogg brown and root formerly a subsidiary of halliburton and now they're sort of famous or infamous depending on how you want to put it. for managing or i suppose a mission managing the logistics of the occupation of iraq and over here you get general dynamics one of the biggest defense contractors of them all making fighter planes at all that's one thing and just down the road we passed lockheed martin boeing another giant sci c. complex and many many more they're all right here right next to the pentagon so that everyone can conveniently get together and sign contracts and. you know eat lunch and have fun together the bill so the day is defense and transnational corporations have steadily accumulated more and more rights they've risen to power in america as the new warlords in

a way the new theocrats promoted by the religion of the so-called free market and make no mistake it is a religion with a belief system that has no objective proof that it exists or works but these king ward theocrat corporations masquerading as persons are wrecking terrible damage terrible damage to our democracy since war is a profitable business for these corporate wards more and more of these military operations like libya for example are likely here to stay that is unless we strip corporations of their rights as first it's their personhood if we do that then we can put an end to needless wars let's take away. the rights from the corporate bomb throwers and give them back to the people and that's the big picture for more information on the stories we cover tonight visit our website at www dot com an r t dot com this entire show is available as a free podcast on i tunes also check out our youtube page or you tube dot com slash for the big picture and you tube dot com it's a.