well. whenever the government says they're into safe get ready because of the other freedoms. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else if you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok and you don't. charge welcome to the big picture. for.

fear. welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour could the business of selling medical marijuana become the next entrepreneurial boom house democrats are actually working to make that happen plus greenpeace has released a new report citing the latest radiation levels in the japan coast is the ravaged country out of the danger zone and free public education for our nation's children

is a right as it's a nice daily take i'll tell you why some republicans believe it should become a privilege. because democrats are crusading for medical marijuana rights rogerson pete stark jared polis and barney frank no shrinking violet introduced a series a bill of bills that protect medical marijuana entrepreneurs the legislation classifies medical marijuana dispensary as legitimate small businesses those able to take advantage of federal tax deductions just like any other small business it also gives immunity from federal prosecution to any person or business in the medical marijuana industry as long as they're operating in compliance with state and local laws in addition to these reforms other measures ensure that medical

marijuana dispensaries have full access to the american banking system and the marijuana is reclassified is a drug that is not highly addictive and does have medical value so what kind of impact of these commonsense reforms have on the medical marijuana industry and what are the chances that they can get asked joining me now to offer their takes from new york david selleck conservative commentator and federal tax expert advocate al . st pierre executive director of normal national organization for marijuana laws he's. glad to have you guys with us here allan how are medical marijuana dispensaries different from others or right now they're illegal under federal law but we have sixteen states in the district of columbia that have either by initiative or legislation made marijuana legal state of colorado and others hacks in control of the drug despite the federal prohibition so that the way that dispensaries if it's an illegal business that make can take x.

to governments for grants and things like that is the argument that was made in a case four years ago that's called champ and that the i.r.s. ruled against a dispensary for four hundred eighty thousand they litigated it brought it down to four thousand dollars and they got their legitimate expenses if that case prevails then these twenty three hundred dispensaries around the united states will continue to keep growing interest in very interesting david what's so scary about marijuana are you opposed to this one when these medical purposes have been defined by reasonably good or not reasonably good size of the published by the american to say ok out of here out of science. well i've just approach this from a tax perspective the real concern here is that. legalisation of marijuana will cost the taxpayer an awful lot more than the benefits we receive and i'll give you an actual case some point there's presently i believe twenty states

with the marijuana tax stamp and so far over the past twenty years not a single state or municipality has collected one thin dime of voluntary marijuana tax and the argument is people will say i never paid tax on this before why should i now it allows for a black marketeers to come in under cut the market additional. that was the argument leads me to say against that was the argument was made against not having taxes on things all over the internet i mean is the us very true and that's still a very contentious issue right now it is directionally but these people have not been doing taxes because they're illegal companies there's no provision in state law to get in taxes. well be that as it may you're still allowed to pay the taxes you do not have to but you got it right it will get worse if you have the money say your money i mean it's it's just it seems like it's not as true. that is absolutely

not true sir there is a provision within the i.r.c. that allows and as a matter of fact mandates that if you do make money is from selling marijuana legal or otherwise you are obligated to pay taxes on it and as i said so far nobody has voluntarily paid a dime additionally when you legal ice cubes excuse me let's meet you yes sir let's be clear the states of oregon colorado new mexico have taken already tens of millions of dollars in taxes from legally sold marijuana products currently they have already done to them have already violated federal law they have what got three hundred or so he that are against the expenses that also generates additionally by legalizing it again as i was saying you will open up the door to the free market the prices were lower goodies if you are going to tax the wait a minute if you are going to tax that now an individual who is selling it again on the black markets is going to be able to sell it less than the so-called lead sure

oh look he's a look at your minute and we're going to spend more with the states more you are residing in the do reside in the prime example right now in new york you have an illegal market for cigarettes because your state over taxes cigarettes in a united states that does not tax the product so therefore if we want to have a product controlled by the government taxation control is the only essence seventy five. years of prohibition doesn't actually put a dime in the tiller and the end to both of you are a lot of i always know works howie you know if marijuana is being sold as medicine right how is it any different going to a marijuana dispensary how is that any different than going to your local pharmacy and getting you know an anabolic or a painkiller the only difference right now is the drug is not controlled through a tax regulation of the f.d.a. but i mean what once all that's in place and you know this if this kind of legislation passes it's just going to a different kind of drugstore is that there's four hundred thousand pharmaceuticals in the united states that are sold this would just simply be another one yeah. but

there would be places that would specialize in it or maybe pharmacies would just start caring but why go to your local c.v.s. and say you know it's a made a fortune by selling alcohol legally during prohibition to those who need it hundreds of thousands of people got alcohol during world vision i think that it is themselves the mis leading possible analogy you could be making and by the way this was this argument was also made in proposition nineteen last year actually lost by . three percentage points you lost over the sea in two thousand and twelve c. in two thousand and twelve you know when this may be just thousand and eleven and you lost in two thousand and ten and tell them why they decided because of the money not because of the social implications be because the implications and the money fifty five percent of all federal prisoners are there for drug offenses and you know pot is legal going out of there i would say that in a lot of those were are we ways that all this is sunny why are we wasting money on

what should be a medical problem you know portugal decriminalised all drugs out there is pot and what happened to their crime when one bit rate went down their petty crime way rate went down and addiction to serious drugs is falling off a cliff because you don't have entrepreneurs out there hustlin. well that's just the thing tom you're going to give up one expense for another you're not. to get rid of the black market because one third of your drug addled audience does not want to pay taxes on the joke they regularly smoke for medical no reason no pianist is no reason she is here everybody can acknowledge there's no panaceas here for prohibition in a free market oriented society doesn't work for popular products does it not it did not work for alcoholism or drug we're talking basically about a recreational into this case if it was not about legalizing it go here were talking about that as you know and this stuff has been demonstrated to work for glaucoma for cancer for the way that when it's on the dog there's going to

a medicine well i think we're in fighting hard conversation is going to be to win because all you all acknowledge that and we've got to wrap it up but i want to thank you both for being here david thank you very much for joining us from new york allan banks you know i don't like your viewing audience they've been so nice to me thank you thank you dave it's about time for some common sense marijuana reforms in this country too much money has been wasted and too many lives have been ruined by richard nixon's so-called war on drugs. a new leak was discovered at the crippled fukushima nuclear plant in japan today spewing fifty seven months of radioactive waste into a nearby trench meanwhile according to a new report from greenpeace sea life off the coast of the meltdown fukushima nuclear plant contains high levels of radiation japanese officials assured the

world that the tons and tons of radioactive waste water that's been dumped into the ocean will dilute enough to not pose a health risk but this new report from greenpeace concluded otherwise has fish oysters and seaweed more than well miles off the coast contain levels of radiation fifty times that's that's five pounds. thousand percent above legal limits so what are these radiation levels mean for potential seafood eaters should we be worried and what can be done if anything to stop for the contamination here to offer some answers on this is kevin cancer radioactive waste specialist at beyond nuclear about or kevin welcome back so first of all how serious are the findings in this green peace report well it's very serious medical sea we had fifty times the permissable radiation dose even the permissible radiation goes carries a health risk so the times that a lot of people injured and the medical say we would get i will see would you get

sushi they get the little i forget what they call the salad with the green seaweed in it i mean there's no what's incredible is the u.s. the u.s. federal agencies that are supposed to protect the american public against radioactivity risks of largely dismantled any emergency systems for radiation monitoring that have been set up after fukushima we're back to a pretty. radiation monitoring system which means in some cases for milk for example it's once every three months that they're examining the milk we've still got a very serious nuclear catastrophe in full swing in japan so kevin has as this cut and what you said so it was finished it's incredible that the u.s. federal government would take that kind of action and what it applies to the seafood supply as well they've really not taken any special measures to examine the seafood supply. have it almost looks like our government has. we're going to actually back off on checking for radiation on these products that

are being imported in giant container ships i mean we're not talking about you know a basket full of seafood coming in here we're talking about thousands of tons of seafood coming into the united states from that part of the world every month or whatever every certainly every year. has this reached the absurd point now where if somebody wanted to smuggle radioactive material into the united states for example to make a. dirty bomb while it would have been more difficult before because we had all these radiation detectors and now all they have to do is stash it in with a bunch of shrimp well what's incredible is i just spent the whole day at the nuclear regulatory commission in a special post fukushima evaluation meeting where there's so many question marks they don't know what's going on although they seem to have a lot of radiation data from the earliest days of this thing that i hadn't been. shown before so you know the cover up is in full swing from the nuclear establishment not only in japan but here in the united states which raises the

question. are are we looking at regulatory capture here in the united states is this a classic example of where the regulators have been captured by the industry and you know either as a result of the revolving door problem or you know that after they leave the rig that the you know regularly get a job in industry for a lot more work or just being intimidated or i mean what's going on here and much so before fukushima began i called the nuclear regulatory commission a rogue agency captured by the industry it supposed to regulate well that was on full display today i mean sitting in this room of mostly government officials but a lot of industry people as well you hear a lot of gallows humor about what's going on in japan and one gentleman said to another who works for the nuclear energy institute why don't you guys get over there were some buckets and help control this radioactive water situation hahaha that's real funny you know it's it's an unprecedented global catastrophe in full swing and some of the academics at this advisory committee on reactor safeguards and n.r.c.

find it oh so interesting it's just oh so interesting it's almost like we're so glad this has happened because we're going to learn so much how much the public gets there from what we learned that's another question but so far there are two sets of data being kept one that's public and one that's not well there was a lot of information about how how much radioactivity was being detected in the earliest days that i had not heard before and i've been trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the situation and this was stated. accumulated by the us from the us detection devices replace us federal government whether you can military the department of energy there are a number of groups friends of the earth for example who filed a freedom of information act request to the federal agents and i don't think they've been not responded to yet but incredibly the information is being shared today in this meeting up at the headquarters of the n.r.c. but by the time we really know what's going on we'll have already eaten things will have cesium in our bodies if we don't already know where it was you know weeks ago this catastrophe and tokyo electric power company just

a few days ago admits well you know we probably have had three largely wholesale meltdowns it's taken them eleven weeks to admit what happened in the first days if not the first hours there's some indication that you know wind may have melted down before the tsunami hit while those are the indications that just as hour ago the right way for this is only so big in others before last the some of the numbers that i've seen indicate that for example chernobyl they have killed as many as a million people the american above ground nuclear testing back in the one nine hundred fifty s. may have killed well over a million people. that never got caught in either case. how does. compared to chernobyl words at the u.s. above ground testino the french test in the pacific in this last minute we have well harvey wasserman a new fried out or just put out an essay today comparing the oceanic contamination from chernobyl the fukushima granted turn nobilis inland it's not directly on the

ocean levels ten times turn knoebels radioactivity in the sea so his question was is this kind of times chernobyl radioactive poisoning of the ocean and those currents come right to the u.s. west coast that tuna migrate the salmon migrate from japan to the u.s. let alone imports from that part of the world here the fish swim here they're coming here they're contaminated very likely the food chain is contam. needed at this point in time to become vegetarian. through the well a lot of vegetables are contaminated there's that gallows humor i you know i guess this is so bad that for some people the only response is to try to figure out. that when there's like just very quickly question it we're out of time but a very quick question what can we as citizens to to to shake up our regulatory agency to get some real information but are we talking a direct route is for folks to call their two senators and their representatives of epicurus help so it's lord the congress has oversight on these agencies these agencies are out of control kevin thanks so much for being with us and thank you

for having great to see you again i have a bad feeling that this is just the first of a series of permanent consequences resulting from from the fukushima disaster and our world's dependence on the most expensive form of electricity generation that exists nuclear energy. it's time for a daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question vouchers versus public schools is education a right or a privilege is royce's are a free public schools a right or b. that's just fine that republicans turn public education over to profit making private schools for their millionaire buddies i'll give you my opinion on this very matter and i still take.

this number given that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. on the oil. we never got the shows the safe get ready because of the freedom.

you know sometimes you see the story and the scene so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you're seeing some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry there's a big. fight . for. crazy alert the human legal loon

a man in new zealand nearly died in the most unusual of ways steve mccormack was at a gas station when he slipped and fell on top of a broken air pressure a valve let's just say the valve entered mccormick's body through a most unlucky os theory or noise and immediately shot era hundred pounds per square inch right into him inflating his body to twice its normal size in just a matter of minutes it took three days from a corner to shrink back to normal size and he says it wasn't a pleasant experience for him or anyone else in that wing of the hospital. just then it seemed so clear aiden that you just got a right foot so i'm the guy d.m. can to take on and live without that scouts in your neck so for more. than one things that you don't need to be killer you will a bloody houses round up under the circumstances but either you knew what was. so you just have to find out if they have or. kind of took at surrey guy who are. no

more stars luckily there was no permanent damage and it looks like mccormick could have quite a future in conservative talk radio since he already meets one of the few requirements he has a history of being full of hot air. raise your hand if you're in violation of your state's constitution that's right the new jersey supreme court ruled yesterday that republican governor chris christie's enormous cuts to education cuts mostly targeting schools and low income districts are in violation of the state's constitution which requires the state to provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for these struction of all

the children in the state between the ages of five and eighteen years he words right there free public education for some reason chris christie as well as a slew of other republicans around the country think they can get around that requirement of free and public education but instead offering a free for profit private education or a free religious private education private education that's been proven over and over again do not yield any better results for students than public education but comes with a much higher price because the nice fat profit margin for education company c.e.o.'s the way this all works is the state launders the education money to big corporations in the state to get around the constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state and then parents end up with vouchers for a few thousand dollars each that they can use to send their kids to either for profit schools run by cronies of the govern. or religious schools associated with

churches that help the governor get stale like that everybody wins except the kids and the taxpayers kids get an education is no better than public schools and in some cases far worse for example do you want your tax payers being used to teach children the sciences evil in the world is only six thousand years old that's great generation future engineers right but the governor and the republicans get a lot a lot of mega churches fundamentalist religion groups and the for profit school honors and c.e.o.'s that they played golf with and get their campaign contributions from here's how the scam works in jersey republican governor chris christie cut eight hundred twenty million dollars out of his education budget last year then created eight hundred twenty five million dollars school voucher program this year in wisconsin governor scott walker is slashing nine hundred million dollars out of his education budget and adding seven hundred fifty million dollars to a school voucher program so forcing us to use our tax dollars to undermine our very

own public education systems what's worse some of the private schools that benefit from these vouchers are religious schools so not only are we committing tax dollars toward ruining public education but we're also committing tax dollars to tearing down that wall of separation between church and state thomas jefferson so eloquently wrote about so we have federal education dollars going to c.e.o.'s who only care about profits and federal education dollars going to churches that only care about getting the religious message across and these churches like the corporations have a whole new revenue stream to support their evangelism and a whole crop of young new converts your nickel. we as a nation you cited a long time ago to make education a part of the commons something that belongs to all of us all of us citizens and not for corporations to carve up watered down and sell back to us at

a profit for example this was the dream of thomas jefferson who founded the university of virginia as a beacon of public education a school that would serve both aristocrats and paupers university of virginia was one of jefferson's premier accomplishments and a life of endless a contractor got compliments in fact he wanted a grave on his tombstone not that he was the third present the united states will find that there on his tombstone but that he was the founder of the university of virginia that's how much he cared about it in seven hundred eighty six jefferson wrote about a system of public education he wrote i think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation and freedom of happiness of stablish and improve the law for educating the common people let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils of tyranny and oppression and

that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than a thousandth part of what would be paid to kings priests and nobles who will rise up again among us if we leave the people in ignorance in large part because of jefferson's fight every state in the union today has a provision in their constitution to provide free public education to all of its citizens just the way our founding fathers vision. and the system lasted for years and years from one thousand nine hundred eighty one when ronald reagan started the war of public education he immediately slashed the federal education budget in half he put bill bennett in charge of the federal the education department a guy who had campaign eliminating their partner he told for profit business it's doubt up and pick up the slack and now reagan worshippers like chris christie and scott walker find themselves in positions of power around the country and they want

to further expand private education until it completely replaces public education but we can't let them do it just like the new jersey supreme court stood up yesterday for the rights of students to have access to free public education we need to stand up and tell our lawmakers that we're tired of having our education of our kids outsourced to greedy c.e.o.'s are being forced to pay for other people's kids to go to church schools as jefferson warned the taxes we all pay to educate americans are far less than the consequences of not educating them at the cost of tyrants rising to power in an ignorant america let's keep the profiteers and the of banjul lists out of our schools. as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to thom hartmann dot com and r t dot com also check out our youtube page at youtube dot com slash the big picture artsy and youtube dot com slash tom parker and this entire show is

available for free video podcast on i tunes and don't forget the markers he begins with you when you show up when you participate tag you're it will save. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule today.