well. whenever he says they feel safe get ready for freedom. in the. world. you know sometimes you see a story on the scene so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you say. i'm sorry is a big picture. going

to the big picture i'm samarra been 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 and 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 of the situation the daiichi nuclear plant today take a look. the pressure is. in the reactor pressure vessel and drawing of units three is stable however pressure is in is increased in both the reactor pressure vessel on the dry well of unit one where she water injection has been increased japan is still in a dire situation as radiation readings in some areas are now hitting their highest

levels yet and in a town forty kilometers away from the day plant radiation the soil is sixteen hundred times higher than normal levels so despite sunlight good news that electricity may soon be restored to the plant is the situation in japan actually tyria rating here to shed some light on this issue once again paul gunter director of reactor oversight at beyond 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 rollercoaster 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 mail the radiation levels are reaching proportions where 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 are still food bans on on cheap in lamb there and 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 now neutrons are a subsonic are you know neutrons protons electrons that mean. that fission is going on that. you know what is the significance of a neutron of you know a significant number of neutrons being measured a mile and a half or a mile away from the plant and i think there is still opinion. circulating what we're concerned about is that these are plutonium particles that plutonium.

normally they say if it's active fuel particles are now working their way into the soil and used we're seeing perhaps black smoke had was king 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 plateauing fuel reactor put a essentially all these fuel pools have some amount of plutonium in the waste and it's really truly trying to matter it is ok so an engineer at the daiichi plant has come forward to say that he covered up he personally 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 in u.s. nuclear plants just last year many as

a result of unreported flaws how common is ignoring or covering up problems and nuclear power plants. it's the it's been the story from day one we were active in exposing a. history of around the davis bessie 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 head and they had three sixteenth's of an inch between nuclear catastrophe. and you know basically an accident that 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 including michigan we almost lost detroit there was a book by that title absolutely detroit nearly went critical and nobody covered it it was like it was invisible until the book came out and then it and it was a news story for a couple of weeks. does the fact that these cooling pumps are still not online 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 they're probably not functional or is there do we just not know 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 a major concern when we're talking about actually gearing up a nuclear reactor six nuclear reactors for cooling so we know 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. just last question just to quickly we're seen radiation 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 now we have iodine in the water in tokyo thanks or. no nukes there you go the situation in japan should be

a huge cautionary tale for america let's hope our politicians run 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 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 that as millions as many as thirteen million people could be kicked out of their homes by the time time housing prices settle 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 a real estate induced collapse here is 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 the new york studio could a second real estate crash be worse than the first one but certainly for all those people that are getting foreclosed can be pretty terrible. well i mean for our economy is it is it conceivable yes there was always a concern 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 it crashes again we're kind of out a safety net certainly 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 is slowly writing off secondly in loans so is there a 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 you have that right. yes i think it. will crash but the problem is that banks the government is allowing these banks to stay in business with a with this sort of double. double standard of accounting and we need to look at these loans the securitized loans a lot of the securitized loans have to be marked for 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 four trillion dollars for the 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 to open their books in addition you know i mean in aggregate along with all of the other money that they got in tarp we could have my number i believe these numbers are accurate we could have paid off every subprime mortgage in a 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 which should have been considered an option i'm not sure about that but it's definitely should have been the problem is somebody is going to eat this all this mortgage debt and it's the homeowners who are eating it not the 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. abaft. so i think one thing that's interesting about this secondly mones is one of the town and narratives of securitization was that the banks got all the toxic assets 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 secondly 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 bubble prices. it's this remarkable alex thanks so much for being with us tonight 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 those six million in danger and put

on the streets a quarter of all mortgage holders beings were over by having a far more than their house is worth all because banks jurors were deregulated by phil graham at the request of enron's and lay and ten kilograms wife of course wendy who worked for ken lay will 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 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 loud so when things of unknown 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

spare oids with nafta gatt in the w t o and you know what you are you may be wondering now how do i bring this back to housing what that led 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 out so now and we've gone from thirty thirty five percent manufacturing or a level percent for a as a percentage of our g.d.p. and banking which used to be so instead we were living in a bubble economy banking which used to be this nice board. i mean business and it 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 for life cheerio 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 that's driven by bubbles we have the tech bubble age that just think in the last just the last ten or twelve years we have the tech bubble we have the stock market and all of them by the way followed by a crash the oil bubble the real estate bubble the food bubble the derivatives bubble and now according to alex our guest we've got a secondary housing bubble that's about to crash we need to bring 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 friedman 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 that kept this country the place where we made things literally from seven hundred ninety one when alexander hamilton. proposed and promoted them during the george washington administration until the time ronald reagan started dismantling them and then 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 for the rich and at the same time raising taxes on the middle class well let's fly your options are a yes cuts to children's hospitals and pay 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's

steal from the poor give to the rich so far the majority of you have said no he's still a time tell us what you think log on to time or not come cast your vote 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 right. i think. one well.

we never government says they're confused safe get ready because of their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else she hears sees some other part of it and realize that everything you saw you don't know i'm sorry is a big. fat . fuck.

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 home repairs for her ever since she's been head over heels it's unclear what the woman's final goal was with

her kids she just wanted a shotgun wedding. in the past six decades the only president who did not send 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 of united states said no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of

continual warfare endless war is destroying our freedoms and ultimately our democracy and we can thank corporate personhood for these endless wars. as i discussed 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 by pope's. or by people who claim power by force like world war 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 for the rest of the nation so just to 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 warlords they were the government who held the rights and they then gave privileges to the people and to corporations actually to the groups you know you want to start a school you want to have whatever but basically it was it was the warlord kings or the pope so them all those are what if this is the historic form of governance government had the rights people had privileges but our founding fathers garwin from the greek model 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 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 the american revolution they had flipped the sub side down so that 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 of the revolutionary war the boston tea party with the tea party was a revolt against the world's largest corporation at the time 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 to 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 us and madison and jefferson warned us about corporations by and large without hers 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 organize i mean look at the constitution originally it was the people it was the governor it was actually local and state governments that had the you had the power to control. we 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 the rights so the process of applying off supreme court justices and clerks senators and congressmen really began after the civil war when the railroad corporations and their owners like gould and huntington are the richest men in the world ed led to john d. rockefeller famous challenge to ohio when that state declared his standard oil trust to be illegal and should lead to the changing of laws regulating corporations in state after state was called the charter mongering era only eight hundred ninety s. until today it largely captured all of the branches of our government in part they did this by good old fashioned graft and bribes things like the revolving door between government and 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 puts the government itself below a person's. you know as originally organized we the people create

a government which then controls corporations. in terms of rights and thus 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 our i suppose mismanaging the logistics of the occupation of iraq and over here you've got 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 a 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 defensive transnational corporations have steadily accumulated more and more rights they've risen to power in america as the new warlords and away 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 wreaked terrible damage to our democracy. since war is

a profitable business for these corporate warlords 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 purse 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 bond 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 web site at thom hartmann dot com and. this entire show is available as a free podcast on i tunes also check out our youtube page youtube dot com slash the big picture and you tube dot com slash tom hartman and don't forget democracy begins with you when you show up and you get active tag your it will see the.