and flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations are today. hello i'm starvin to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture how rage against government cuts toward health care wages and education are not only being felt here but across the globe more on why a half million people took the streets of london over the weekend after making billions of profits and not paying taxes general electric is next going after the union workers can really get away with things and radiation continues to rise in

japan are we seeing a worst case scenario unfolding. you need to know this more than five hundred thousand people took to the streets of london over the weekend to protest the british government's proposed austerity program that would cut one hundred thirty billion dollars in spending and lay off nearly five hundred thousand public workers all walks of british life will be concise affected by the conservatives proposed cuts to child care services for retirees and public safety programs and because the nation's single payer health care system on the road to privatization london hasn't seen a protest this big since the two thousand and three demonstration against the iraq war one of the groups leading the protest was the trades union congress and polling

our head of organization and services said this about why people are demonstrating . the government needs to change economic cool cool because the creative nolan employments this life and all that recovery on the devastating public service is not why hundreds of thousands of people who joined the march today to send out loud and clear message to the government. front and center of the protests was the u.k. movement which targets corporate tax dodgers were a major reason why governments across the world are facing huge budget deficits so will this weekend's protests in london kill the spirit. not just in the u.k. but possibly worldwide for more on this drug was who was on hand in london for the protest freelance writer erica seder it's. great to be here great to have you with us first of all what was it like on the ground in london this weekend for you what was the major carry away for i think it was just a really powerful experience for me i join you know half

a million other folks there just you know such a diverse crowd there is you know nurses teachers parents and union member is firefighters i think it just was a really powerful show of strength and it was really sort of a showing that this is really affecting all walks of life and all types of different people in the u.k. and it's not just limited you know narrow and narrow group it's kind of a mass movement that's really emerging there the coverage that i saw on television here in the united states seemed to emphasize violence i know there were you know a few crazies in the crowd did you see any there's certainly some but i think for the most part i mean the vast vast majority of it was really peaceful protesters you know there's always going to be some violence but i think the media really chose to emphasize that over a lot of the peaceful actions in u.k. i'm kind of how the peaceful sit in and one of the stores there and i think that was really the judge of her this is the have a large department store really upscale apartment store and there. they targeted

for you know the tax cuts tax avoidance tax dodging so i think that that really wasn't the case you know and a large part of the process that was sort of a small minority definitely was a good purpose or as they were called to avoid paying forty sixty million dollars in taxes that you know. you would see you've spent the last. week's in the u.k. how would you describe the mood. at this point where i think it's really building i mean i think we saw this when jeremy starr lot of the student protests there were students out. protesting you know sort of different things that were related to education but this is really a broadening about a movement now it's kind of expanded and i think this is really kind of the start of that mass movement when you talk to people there they're saying this is just the beginning it's going to last through the summer it's going to you know keep on going they're going to do kind of what they feel you know is necessary to really push this forward the first big protests in the u.k. after the new cameron conservative government announced cuts the first cuts

a billion dollars for two student programs and raising university tuition which are . close to free in a lot of colleges. and that brought the students or what percentage of the group of course were seeing the baby roll here as the fire this is the this is the stuff that was actually few and far between yeah but what percentage of the group was. young people. and and is it true that there were large parts of the demonstrations where it was literally you know moms with kids and strollers and all poll showing up holding flowers and things and yeah i mean it there was a significant number of young people i mean i marched in one of a train with one of the feeder marches that sort of joined the main march that was mostly students but once i got to the main march i mean it was you know it was kids it was parents it was you know sending the firefighters all with their you know coworkers that you know union so i think it really was just quite

a mix and largely peaceful was there a social media so all over the middle east we're hearing about you know the twitter wars you have facebook you know was there a social media. element of this separately i mean the group that's you know it's very distributed group that's working to target these you know people avoiding these corporations avoiding paying taxes and a really really blossomed them kind of were established on twitter where they do a lot of their organizing it's just kind of people will decide to have these actions publicize them online and others will join in so definitely i mean i think that was the way that people were keeping posted and as things evolved and saturday i'm now you were in the u.k. for six weeks you're an american yeah and there's a u.s. for us and. what's your sense of the difference between the two. not so much necessarily organizationally or behaviorally. but in terms of public perception. i mean i know that in the u.k. and u.s. u.k.

and has been really well received i mean they're sort of seen as doing these more direct actions but in a way that's really sort of approachable and fun and playful and creative in a way this is us on the bank of america yeah so i think here i mean i think it's just in the beginning stages i mean there are definitely witnessed a lot of really strong anger at the banks with special operations yeah and greenpeace or the green i think here i mean it's still kind of evolving i think that you know what happened with cons then hopefully will you know we'll see how that sort of plays out with us and i was at an event in the u.k. that you know did a video skype conference call with people in wisconsin to kind of get that connection going that's one that's pretty erica thanks so much for having me here jim great to be here they are speaking with a. half million people protesting seems like a big news story doesn't especially since whenever the tea party sends a few thousand people washington d.c. dressed up like columnists that's all you hear about our cable news sometimes for weeks these protests were largely ignored by the mainstream media. well

just consider this possibility you've got millionaire commentators and in fact let me let me just set this up first of all who is on network television we have multimillionaire commentators people multi-million dollar rich people would rather not pay taxes the all the networks are owned by billionaires and transnationals none of them want to pay taxes and back in one thousand nine hundred three when ronald reagan was president if you're old enough to remember there was a period that was called the m. and a explosion stood for mergers and acquisitions and people like ivan boesky and all these good they were ebony artists and it was the hot new harmony. i can do mergers and acquisitions all these companies started combining so that we see this graphic this is you know bad been bad documented this is what we need even offered that when the reagans started stopped and. in the sherman antitrust and just allowed companies like crazy to start merging fifty companies controlled more than

ninety percent of everything american saw in newspapers magazines t.v. radio stations books music movies videos wire services and photo agencies and fifty companies owned ninety percent of our media now since reagan's deregulation and these are the various iterations of ben's rewriting his book we're down to five companies now five companies own ninety percent of our media and i just ask yourself why is there not so much media coverage of us uncut could it be because those five companies are a large giant transnationals that frankly would rather not pay taxes. so why should they give coverage to a bunch of protesters who are out there saying hey big corporations players taxes. it just kind of makes sense but it's not going to happen you know so the word frankly falls on us we've got to tell each other we've got to uses the web we've

got to use social media we've got to and to whatever extent you can help influence the media to cover these stories u.s. and cut is actually a big story you can have a big story it needs a lot more coverage if it was the tea party it be all all so it's good to get some coverage for this. and. it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question did you hear about this weekend's protests in london from the mainstream media possible answers a yes i heard it on the mainstream news five says reporting that the u.k. uncouple been is standing up to corporate tax dodgers or. no the mainstream news does not want us to know what the u.k. is that the reason the u.k.

is rejecting corporate tax that's paid for by spending cuts that screw workers so far you have overwhelmingly voted water on a time when i know you think it will be open. wonders stood up against budget cuts and corporate tax dodgers the us wasn't just sitting back u.k. uncut counterpart of the united states us on also held demonstrations across our country at more than forty bank of america branches on saturday as those that corporation bank of america used over one hundred ten offshore tax havens to avoid paying any u.s. profits on dollars taxes on billions of dollars and cry. it's and the timing couldn't have been more appropriate as the new york times reported last week general electric the largest corporation in america made more than fourteen billion

dollars in profits last year worldwide over five billion of that the us i wish taxes that they pay zero zero in fact they got a three point two billion dollars tax credit in other words we need a g.e. for making mind bogglingly high profits so it makes sense to you so it seems like g.e. should be just fine with their massive profits right. yes again mychael freelance labor journalist union organizer joins me now to tell us that g.e. is planning to screw their own workers with all their profits from not paying taxes mike welcome it's great to be on the show again tom thank you mike i appreciate it and thanks for being with us so what is g.e. up to so basically the new york times reported on friday that g didn't pay any taxes in fact they got three point two billion dollars worth of tax credits right now g.'s and contributions is this year and it's asking employees to do away with their health insurance they're going to give people these health savings accounts which only save corporations money and cost workers their lives because they will

provide savings out of is there like a limit of five thousand dollars a year or something like that high deductible any of taking your own money or putting in the account and then if you get sick you hope you have enough money to cover it because in their own work they save corporations money because workers their lives so now they want all employees to get that they've already implemented this for their nonunion salaried employees and on top of that they're going to limit they want to eliminate pensions for new hires general electric so no pensions anymore if you're a general on kayseri and not even that not even that well so we're talking about a corporation which is made massive profits that which has been subsidized heavily by the state that is well into the green a major defense catch a major defense a hundred more bucks from our tax dollars jeffrey immelt is the c.e.o. and the chairman of the board and he's also the president's chairman of his jobs commission now there's something wrong with this picture when the chairman of the president's jobs commission first off has closed twenty nine factories in the

united states since obama took office it doesn't pay any taxes and then cut his workers' wages we wonder why we have a jobs crisis in this country when people like the g. c.e.o. jeff immelt are advising the president on how to create jobs well i remember two or three years ago i was talking to bernie sant senator bernie sanders on the air about this on our radio show and he made this remark about how jeff immelt had just me. this comment about you know when i think of the future of general electric i see china china china and he was talking about moving factories after you said he's closed twenty nine factories since obama took the us just since obama yes any idea how many during bush i mean i know we've lost fifty four thousand factories since bush took took office i'm not but jobs back to raise i don't know how many of the g.'s g.'s close dozens of factories i mean the former c.e.o. of g.e. jack welch that he preferred to have factories on an island that he could just ship it off and anywhere in the world acknowledge bragged in his autobiography about being the guy who invented what's called pink collar outsourcing which is and white

collar outsourcing which is the call centers and the the back office operations the bookkeeping and things he talks in is his own autobiography about how he was over there trying to sell a power plant or something and he looked around and said wait a minute i'm struck by people who speak english and they're willing to work for twenty five cents an hour what am i doing paying these guys you know thirty bucks an hour in new york city to do bookkeeping in the back office and they answered and he literally claims credit for having predated white collar and this is general electric why would the president and states president obama the democratic president hire the head of this company that does this kind of stuff that does this kind of stuff as his jobs advice or what what my misson here the reason is that the general electric is one of the most powerful corporations in the world not our own america not only are they a large corporation they own several major media the own n.b.c. and i miss n.b.c. . they sold a good chunk of that to was surprised and hurt rise oddly still in forty nine

percent of the corporation. so there's still a huge chunk of n.b.c. doing the message universe yeah don't mess with g.e. but on top of that i think it shows which side to present is really on the president doesn't have to pass any legislation here he just doesn't need someone who's actively shipping jobs overseas including workers' wages being his advisor on jobs resident. truly on the side of workers he would fire him and bring in somebody try to think even if he was truly on the side of workers and frankly i think frankly i always thought he was that he'd look at this and go loops you know time for this guy to resign let's replace him with somebody from you know from the a.f.l. but you know i'm just i'm baffled by the side of the optics are so bad and this and this isn't a real job i mean jeff immelt is still torn down i don't know what the salary is but something he was at g.e. this is just a part time advisor what the president does all the time he did this for example with honeywell the honeywell workers have been knocked out at a uranium facility in southern illinois for almost

a year now while they were locked out because you know the company wanted to cut their health care entirely you know after they retired and when they were locked out the president was flying on air force one with the c.e.o. of honeywell around india making speeches with the c.e.o. of honeywell he was traveling over with about two hundred fifty three hundred other c.e.o.'s i'm not sure you can just can that but he was traveling with them in mt only that he was the president's choice to be on the deficit commission so this president time and time again chooses to bring in advisors like that and i talked to some g.e. workers today and they said well jeff immelt goes to the white house when we could go that way here i mean wouldn't that be fair i mean if they would have been will give some advice on jobs when i have some workers or actually if it were from talk what it's like to work for g.m. it would be you would think a good idea let's hope. it's something that if you are with yeah at the very least the president obama can change the optics if not the entire tune i'd like to see the whole thing changed night thanks so much for joining me on the show great to have you. on the massive protests in london and the actions over the weekend of

u.s. uncut as well as protests in greece ireland portugal france spain and even germany it looks like the entire world is rejecting corporate tax cuts paid for by spending cuts that screw working families and here in the u.s. well we may be getting a late start more and more people are standing up against this can see. servant of radical agenda to devastate the middle class and sell the remnants of our nation transnational corporations we need frankly to call out companies like g.e. to profit from the middle class in america and then dodge their taxes in ways that average person could never do without going to jail so let's get out there and get active. coming up japan's it's on the brink of a nuclear crisis that could be worse than sure a noble potential risk we could face to have to break.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. easy to understand it and then you glimpse something else and you're see some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry to see. in the best of the rest of the news the crippled nation of japan suffered another big earthquake over the weekend a six point five prompted

a tsunami alert fortunately there were no reports of damage however the situation of the broken daiichi nuclear facility appears to be worsening plant workers who are trying to dispose of huge amounts of nuclear waste water has reportedly been found in all four badly damaged reactors at the plant in reactor two the water contains radiation levels reported to be one hundred thousand times above normal and has already sent some workers to the hospital with radiation burns seawater outside the plant as registered radiation levels nearly two thousand times above normal which can trigger a sea food crisis in a nation that depends on seafood to feed its own enemy matters worse the sum of all fears has been realized as plutonium has been found in the soil near the daiichi plant which tony and by the way is by far the most toxic of radioactive elements in fact as those types of elements just one atom is able to kill

a human and it takes hundreds of thousands of years to lose its radiation so what are these extremely high levels of radiation. could this become worse than chernobyl paul gosar director of the reactor oversight project at beyond nuclear joins me again to shed some light on these troubling new developments all welcome back. today is the anniversary three mile island. absolutely i remember that well. in fact i think jane fonda's movie was out at that time or just a few weeks before about the trying to syndrome and so a lot of us when we saw three mile island had a pretty good idea of what could go wrong. what from that time that was swats seventy seventy nine seventy nine ok from seventy to today what have we failed to learn. well its lessons on learned. what's being demonstrated today i think that what the what we're seeing right now is. a lesson that should have

been learned about nuclear power at three mile island was and learned and then really learned. in one thousand nine hundred six and then and learned again with fukushima and now we're basically waiting for an aging nuclear industry to demonstrate yet another lesson that nuclear power will fail you it will always be more of a liability than an asset in time of national crisis or natural disaster well even even without that i understand quite clear to everybody that it is the most expensive way to generate electricity so i mean you know it's insane to do it the first place there are apparently hundreds of tons of waste water that have radiation levels one hundred thousand times above normal how. are they going to get rid of this i mean this is a liquid it's a whole different thing from trying to move solids well what we're concerned about now is that fukushima daiichi units two and three have demonstrated that all the

barrier systems are failing that this insidious toxic substance that is that knows no time for inflicting harm and danger is now out in the environment but the news this morning was that a trench that's just one hundred or so feet from the sea of japan. it is now filled with radioactive water that is on the same radiation readings as what's inside the reactor building so containment has failed for units two and three and we're now concerned that all the water that's been poured into these reactors the salt water the fresh water is now coming out like a sieve and getting into the environment so that water in radioactive water out that's that's the scenario and it's not just radioactive water it's water containing particles of radioactive material like cesium in uranium. and plutonium

is it not we're literally flushing the reactors and the reactor contents into the environment and mostly into the ocean. the ocean is a big. big concern but there are also the gas emissions that are not really being monitored there you know we're seeing the effects of tremendous amounts of radioactive releases into the air when you see tokyo water supplies being affected . because when i. first leaves it typically leaves the gas right true of cesium and some of the other there are all. these things are very heavy i mean we're seeing we're seeing the liquid effluent that's radioactive we're seeing air assault effluent it's radioactive and we're seeing gas releases that are radioactive so it's all three of these fronts right now we have rust them. just quickly mention backstage that france is as yes tepco right well actually the tokyo electric

power company you know they have basically played their deck right now in the they're running out of time they're running out of solutions and today's news was that they have now turned to the french government to see if their resources specialists from electricity defrosts and and the french nuclear safety agency. basically there now call it trying to call in reinforcements but really we're all off the chart right now there is no plane and i guess i wasn't surprised of the french for that anyhow it's all thanks again john associates. entire world is feeling the effects of this catastrophe as far away as massachusetts rainwater registered radiation from the day she planned and in new york two democratic representatives are pushing republicans to get money from the nuclear industry to go along with a reevaluation of the indian point nuclear facility which sits on an earthquake

fault line so how worried should we all be about what's happening in japan and it could happen here is the indian point plant a ticking time bomb congresswoman nita lowey one of the why makers trying to raise awareness of this issue joins me on the phone from new york congresswoman welcome hi there a pleasure to be with you tom and i want to say even before this catch catastrophe in japan i've always had concerns about the safety of operating a nuclear facility in the middle of our nation's most densely populated regions and now that we've seen the destruction from what's happened in japan and there is seismic data there on the areas around the indian point proves that all our concerns are legitimate the n.r.c. must be required to consider seismic risk population density evacuation plans

this paper operation of indian point. in its two thousand and thirteen and two thousand and fifteen lead licensing process. i have introduced legislation again requiring the n.r.c. to use the highest standards and determining whether a power plant will be relicensed. the new york times reported shortly after well i guess it was maybe five or six months after nine eleven when. they had the intelligence and i get paid captured. khalid shaikh mohammed the mohammad attah the guy who was flying one of the planes into the world trade center had a ridge and who organized who planned the thing here in the as it apparently had originally planned on flying it into that nuclear facility in point of syllabi but then rejected that idea assuming that there be a surface to air missiles and that besides that the reactor was so heavily guarded what we're seeing what we're learning now from japan is that is that it's not a nuclear plant that so dangerous as the waste right next door to it and he could

have flown a plane right into that and would have been a dirty bomb that would have covered new york city are is congress seriously considering saying to all the nuclear facilities around the united states you've got to put the same kind of protection around your nuclear waste facilities on site as you have around your reactors without a doubt but the key issue here in india employing is they evaluate them in an area within ten miles but in japan is you know the nuclear regulatory commission urged evacuation of a fifty mile radius and that would include twenty one million people who live and work in new york city and its separatist try and think of a vacuum waiting these people if something like this happens if you think new york has a traffic problem now his tribe that you're waiting on the most densely populated regions in an emergency so this is why i've been tough my colleagues have but doesn't ever has we don't think this plan belongs in an area

where you have it's a high twenty one million people such a high population area and right after the japanese disaster i called in the n.r.c. for a briefing spoke directly with director jasko i urged him and he committed to personally tour. point. we need to get them to clarify any inaccurate information about seismic risk i mean to come to a public meeting but i think you've nailed it congresswoman thanks so much for the great work out of durham i thank you thank you for coming on our program you know over the over the weekend on sunday they had elections in germany and german chancellor angela merkel basically lost her party which has held power for like fifty sixty years and lost to the green party why isn't germany eighty percent of the power.