welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour of the fukushima disaster was a year ago next week what we learned from that our nuclear reactors survive similar trauma also incentives the science of the phrase you're such a pig is getting a new meaning and in tonight's daily take america swimming in oil why are gas pumps guzzling all your dollars. in the best of the rest of the news that a little over a week we'll hit the one year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear crisis by focus in japan and this week we're learning that nuclear crisis was even worse than was originally thought on wednesday japanese scientists

announced that twice as much radioactive cesium than estimated blew out of the plant after the earthquake and tsunami that's about forty thousand trillion backer rolls and it took just eighteen days for those radioactive particles to encircle the planet turning up in places as far away as not french scientists are now calling on japan to remain vigilant and its expect inspections of fruit milk and games for the radio a radioactive contamination these new numbers come on the heels of a greenpeace report on the fukushima disaster in which that organization places the blame for the crisis not on a natural disaster but instead on the japanese government report accuses the japanese government of ignoring the risks posed to push before the earthquake and quote cutting corners to protect profits over people. and goes on to argue that nuclear energy is inherently unsafe and governments are too quick to approve nuclear power plants at the same time unable. to deal with the consequences of

nuclear disasters that includes the united states currently there are twenty three general electric mark one reactors in operation around the united states mark one is the same reactor design used at fukushima and just last month the nuclear regulatory commission issued a warning to ninety six nuclear reactors around the nation the sit on fault lines urging operators before new stress tests to see if the reactor could hold up in an earthquake so what should we make of all this killing him joins me now is the radioactive waste. nuclear nuclear dot org kevin welcome back thank you for having me great to have you with us what do you make about this new information coming to light about fukushima fukushima just how and just how bad could it have gotten or might it still get incredible revelations are coming out on a daily basis at this point so for example the new york times on monday night reported that a private investigation thirty investigators brought together by a former editor of the asa he simbu in japan which is

a major newspaper incredible revelations so it donal who is the chief cabinet secretary the main spokesman at the time that the nuclear catastrophe began with saying things like no immediate health threat the radiation is blowing out to sea don't worry about it if you're within twenty kilometers yes it may affect you if you're not it it won't affect you incredibly what the new york times reveal is that dano admitted to this investigatory group that the worst case scenario that he and the prime minister knew about was what he called a demonic chain reaction of meltdowns so we had fukushima daichi three meltdowns they knew about that it was happening but fukushima daichi four more reactors just seven miles to the south they were worried the radioactivity releases from beachy would cause an evacuation of the workers from dany those four reactors with meltdown and then further south closer to tokyo there's another reactor and so they were looking at the worst case scenario all those reactors. melting down releasing

catastrophic amounts of radioactivity and long story short evacuating tokyo a city of more than thirty million people and abandoning it forever the way that donald put it was losing tokyo if we lost daiichi die any and we would lose tokyo that's incredible just what does forty thousand trillion vaca rolls mean. well seventy percent going into the into the ocean first of all what does that number mean what you know welcome back or all of the single radioactive disintegration ok so that to you know somebody getting an x. ray somebody getting you know too much radiation what people were supposed to run hiroshima or nagasaki. how does the average person understand what this number of means it's. catastrophic radioactivity release the powers that be in the nuclear stablished that would like people to think that it simply pollutes into the earth's atmosphere into the earth's oceans we know that any exposure to radioactivity

carries a health risk and so that means that you know that pollution gets reversed in nature and it moves its way up the food chain lots of great concentration by a magnification and so that food pathway is is where people are going to be the most exposed to internal radiation doses which conveniently the nuclear industry often neglects to the point of just ignoring completely that is a very serious out way of health damage and that's the stuff you can cause cancer it's inside your body it's just a whole current form of diseases they are they also like to focus just on cancer that happens all the time but if you look at turn over all for example a whole spectrum of diseases including genetic damage certainly a vast number of different kinds of cancers but things like normal heart which is radioactive cesium attacking the heart muscle in children die roid pathology and the list just keeps going now one of the things that they said is that twice as

much radio x. radioactive cesium was released as they had previously disclosed and previously they had said oh well there's twice as much as we had before this is the second. why should why should anybody care about radioactive cesium how does that enter the food chain what does it do in the food chain how does it affect humans it's actually the third building and each time you've had me on the show and it was. weeks into this catastrophe they double the months and they double the and now here we are a year later they're they're doubling it again so it's just incredible i mention the turn of the heart. it is radioactive cesium which seeks human muscle tissue that's where it ends up so the body thinks the cesium is potassium is that right yes your body mistakes this it ends up in places like the heart and the children in the turnover region have heart pathologies that you would expect to see in very old people but these are children groups like the iris turtle children's projects have organized teams of doctors from western europe the united states to go in it's

about what groups where they lack. this kind of specialisation and medicine and do just like a mash unit hundreds and hundreds of heart surgeries on children some put patches on their hearts because they have holes in their hearts and it's the radioactive cesium and actually the doctor dr bender subsidy and valorous who figured out what was going on was imprisoned by the dictatorship about others to try to shut him up because the belorussian dictatorship has a pro nuclear power agenda and they wanted this guy to go away in we were just having a laugh and three weeks for him he's forty year license to operate expires what's going on up in vermont all kinds of stuff is going on and we have a march against nuclear madness page on our website and on facebook listing all of the fukushima commemorations on march eleventh and the rest of the month in vermont what we're probably looking at on march twenty second which is a year forty plus one day is large scale civil disobedience in a nonviolent tradition there have been civil disobedience actions led by

grandmothers one woman frances crow was in her ninety's and one hundred times that vermont yankee the past five years i think there's going to be a lot more people on march twenty second at the front gate i lived in vermont for a decade i can tell you that people in that state are really upset about that nuclear power plant kevin thanks so much for being with us thank you for the great work you're doing it nuclear or the clock to nuclear disaster here in the united states is taking let's get nuclear power the most expensive and most dangerous form of energy on the planet before we regret what might happen. it's thursday so let's get a geek out on some science new research suggests but not the cylinder resistant staphylococcus oren's better known as the highly aerobatic resistant super bug

mersa a flesh eating bacteria that's killed so many people may have evolved its defenses to it have biopics on a factory farm a paper published by the american society for microbiology lays out how a human strain of mercer was originally drugged to feed it will then transfer it into a pig population were developed its resistance to antibiotics and then bounced back into the human population where it's going after us like most forms of livestock pigs are often fed antibiotics to help them grow faster and prevent the actions that come with the crowding and horrible conditions in factory farms as a result any infection they have like mersa becomes immune to the high levels of antibiotics in their systems the fact that pigs have played a role in creating the human superbug actually shouldn't come as a surprise considering the pigs and humans are biologically quite similar until the human insulin drug was made in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight pig insulin

was routinely used to treat diabetes in humans new studies also suggest that implanting embryonic egg insulin cells in diabetes in diabetic patients pancreas is may actually help them produce their own insulin hypothyroidism one of the most common healthy ailments and women in the united states is often treated with help from or bone extracted from pig thyroid gland. but the similarities between man and pig don't stop there researchers even been able to produce pigs that were able to generate human blood cells by injecting human blood stem cells into pig fetuses similarly scientists have also just suggested that human organs could be grown inside pigs for use in transplant surgeries all of which highlights how insane it is to use factory farm techniques were animals live in tiny hands soaked in their own excrement unable to move or ever see sunlight all the while being injected with hormones and antibiotics peta is right about the cruelty and inhumanity of this

kind of behavior toward our fellow mammals and if we keep it up we may well start seeing epidemics of killer bugs that no antibiotic can treat effectively throwing us back to the nineteenth century when it comes to dealing with infectious diseases . andrew breitbart the guy you were just watching died last night at the age of forty three enter lived in a paranoid libertarian i got mine and screw you world he was the perfect right wing front man i know he was on my show many times over the years and he never failed to push that cruel libertarian line that anybody who couldn't claw their way to the top didn't deserve any help from the rest of us and anyway it's really quite sad it

ended ever realize that we're all in this together that every individual clod of humanity is part of the continent of humanity as john donne wrote wrote in sixteen twenty four in his devotions upon emergent occasions perchance he for whom this funeral bell tolls may be so ill that he doesn't know that it tolls for him. no man is an island andrew and tire of itself every man is a piece of the continent a part of the main if a clod be washed away by the sea andrew europe is the less as well as of a promissory work as well as a house of your friends andrew or of your own words any man's death diminishes me because i am involved in mankind therefore andrew don't alice for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee. was in good journeys.

put a picture of the need when i was like nine years old until she told the truth. i think that since i am an old get of friends that i was proud because she is a pretty. big yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with its place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

here take my take is your chance to send in your questions comments rants and observations about anything we talk about here on the big picture or during my radio show that i first comment comes to us from jeff on our facebook page here's his suggestion to reduce the price of gas in america he says would concentrated efforts to not why gas on a certain day or weekend made more of a point than just more attempts to conserve fuel and we can kind of strike of such a cause of such cause them to flinch. well here's here's my problems first of all if you said ok you know friday of the week after next everybody america's going to buy gas gas companies wouldn't care because they know that everybody would buy extra gas on thursday and on saturday i mean people are still going to drive what they're going to drive so they just buy it on different day secondly boycotts generally don't work there's there's not much of a history of successful boycotts in america and it also boycotts suggests that you

know if the person with the most votes or the most dollars is the most votes that's not that's not a good idea so what we really need is a new energy policy and that needs to be coming out of the white house and out of congress the white house has proposed if the republicans in congress don't like our next comments one comes from paul who tweeted this after seeing ben cohen on our program tuesday night at tom underscore harben how about asking ben and jerry to make occupy ice-cream it be a great way to make money for the occupy movement well. perhaps i don't know that's a business decision that they have to make or their company has to make but i think frankly though that their private philanthropy is great and it's more than enough so impressed to see you know senior level major businesspeople aligning themselves with the occupy movement and saying yes let's make something happen that's just absolutely great and i wouldn't be surprised to see the ice cream appear but who

knows and our final common of the night comes from our tom hartman message boards or tom harkin dot com calipers and said any tax rate over fifty percent is inherently immoral and the state confiscates over half of the workers income that worker has the every right to ask oh does he in fact get to work for every day get up every day to work for is it himself or is it someone else in essence that is nothing short of slavery well first of all. the ability in america at any time in the history this country has ever paid fifty percent income tax or above that on the first money that they make on the middle class money that they make on the basic money the old ninety percent tax rate used to kick in around what in today's dollars would be around six seven eight hundred thousand dollars a year or so and at that point so we're talking about marginal tax rates top tax rates and at that point you know you're basically just taking back from people what they're i mean people who are making enormous amounts of money are heavily using the commons i'll see if that's what are you getting for that money you know in

denmark i interviewed a very conservative politician said you want to know you're paying fifty six percent income tax but you feel terrible about that and he said no he said i get free health care i got a great retirement i'm getting good you know good college my kids go to college for free i get my money's worth this is a topic i talk about my book rebooting the american dream we're going to send you an autographed copy so that you can learn more about it that's pretty that's it for my take your take tonight if you like your comments and questions to be heard on the side in the big picture and would like a chance to get one of my books listen up. it's just. it's the good the bad of a very very close so. the ugly good ben patrick patrick a former n.f.l.

player pulled a group of people from an overturned crash ban in phoenix last week after told reporters that he smelled gas at the crash site and you immediately need to take action to help with some friends who managed to get all the victims safely out of the crash scene after describes saving the people as an out of body experience and when asked about his heroic actions he said that's what i was raised to do people need help you help good and you better go back up bank of america bank of america is find introduced a new monthly fee for customers who have checking accounts unless they agree to bank on line buy more products or maintain certain balances in their accounts the new line of fees would range from between nine and twenty five dollars a month because of risk avoid the fees by maintaining minimum balances using a credit card or taking out a mortgage with the bank bank of america executives are now trying to attach a fee to anything they can to make a buck off the american people are taking their customers hostage in the process and the very very ugly chief judge richard siebel siebel at george w.

bush court appointee to the federal district court in montana forwarded a racist joke email suggesting president obama's mother had sex with a dog siebold tried to explain why he sent the e-mail but it's really a pretty feeble excuse to say you did it not because he's a racist but because he despises the president now anybody who comes before judge siebel with any sort of discrimination suit which is a pretty common thing in federal court will wonder about this judge's. biases that it's very clearly. the economy improving republicans have started attacking president obama about rising gas prices some forecasts show gas prices hitting five dollars

a gallon this summer and the right months ago believe that these high prices have something to do with president obama's rejection of the keystone pipeline or maybe his refusal to expand drilling in alaska or just it's downright hatred of america of course they want you to believe that the united states has a shortage of oil and that if the president were just a drill baby drill and prices gas prices would plunge but it's not true not even close to true the united states is not short on oil we are a war in oil products in fact we have so much oil products that we're trying to get rid of that much of it by shipping it overseas as bloomberg reported yesterday for the first time since one thousand nine hundred forty nine at sixty two years ago united states is now a net exporter of oil products that means we shipped war loyal products out to places like south america europe and asia then we imported from around the world in

fact every single day in two thousand and eleven will corporations ship about four hundred sixty thousand more barrels of oil out of the country then we imported into the country that day so if gas prices are rising because supplies in the u.s. have dropped why are we getting rid of so much gasoline by exporting it. well frankly it's because the president can't legally tell a multi-billion dollar transnational oil corporation where to sell their oil and these corporations don't give a damn about gas supplies in the united states because they're getting a way better deal taking their oil products and selling the elsewhere and that's exactly what they're doing and that's why they want to keystone pipeline it wasn't to replenish america's supply of oil it was to replenish the supply of oil that they want to exploit anyone else find it curious that they wanted that they wanted the keystone pipeline to be extend all the way down the gulf of mexico it's because that's a major export hub it had nothing to do

a transporting oil to retailers across america they already have that going to st louis and would river it had everything to do with getting into the shipping lanes as easily and quickly as possible presidents actually got a pretty decent job of reducing our dependence on oil from the middle east reducing it more and more each year he's been in office which is a far better track record than president bush it. but despite these reductions gasoline prices are going up because the oil companies are taking more and more of our refined gasoline put it in giant tankers and saying psion are so if you really want someone to blame for rising gas prices blame or called brothers and executives the exxon mobil and shell and blame wall street which is again throwing its full bore into oil speculation spending hundreds of billions of dollars betting on futures and creating artificial demand further jacking up the price of gasoline just like they did in two thousand and eight that's the real story behind rising gas prices in america but there's something else going on here that we need to

address and bats this the united states is quickly becoming the world's dirk pitt we're the nation where the dirty work of refining crude oil and turning it into gasoline and jet fuel is don't work that inflicts tremendous damage on the environment and the health of our population is the kind of work he expect to see in the slums of developing nations where there aren't regulations or strong governments looking out for their people it's not what you would expect to see in the united states but thanks to thirty years of coddling oil corporations giving them subsidies and tax breaks and not seriously cracking down on their smokestack emissions they found a real cozy place in the world to do their dirty work right now our backyards down south texas louisiana cancer alley after all they don't have to pay for any of their own extra nowadays like the increase raises cases of asthma and cancer that their pollution causes those costs are carried by we the taxpayers through medicare

and medicaid are out of our own pockets when we ourselves are family member states they don't have to pay for the damage they're doing to the environment pumping millions and millions of tons of carbon and other pollutants into the skies every. we have to pay for that damage and the damage when free climate change will induce weather like massive tornadoes tearing through our country like the one yesterday in harrisburg illinois and as republicans in congress and state governments across america launching an all out assault on the e.p.a. with the help of quote brother funded right wing think tanks like the american legislative exchange council and the cato institute you oil barons are getting more and more preferential treatment in the united states all the while gas prices continue to climb americans get sicker and sicker and ecosystems are ruined for future generations so let's take the politics out of this debate republicans can point their finger the president all they want but what they are ignoring is the bigger picture there we are now still reliant on the nineteenth century energy

strategy of fossil fuels all the rest of the moral world is moving out of the twenty first century strategy of renewable energies and we're stuck because we've got oil barons by our elected lawmakers and sabotage any efforts to end our addiction to dirty postle fuels these people are hell bent on sucking out the last trillion dollars of oil from the ground embedded in rocks fracking and out of the deep underground underground deep under water no matter where what they do no matter what damage it does to our nation they want. price of oil is going up today because of what they're doing and in the future as well supplies dwindle and our government can no longer afford to subsidize the oil corporations and five dollars a gallon for gas will start to look at a bargain and if we don't have a copper at comprehensive alternative energy plan in place by then then you can kiss the american middle class goodbye for a long long time it was nine hundred seventy nine when jimmy carter gave

a speech in which he said that america would never again import more oil than we did in one nine hundred seventy eight and he any and then he added to that the by the year two thousand and twenty percent of the electricity in the united states would be produced by solar powered by a so a national solar bank and had ronald reagan not blown up the legislation that jimmy carter put into place we would hit those goals long before the year two thousand but reagan came in with money from big oil and big coal and took the solar panels off the roof and that was the end of that we need to get back to a rational energy policy as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered this is our website the thom hartmann dot com free speech that or. you can also check out our two you tube channels or links it's on hartmann dot com their show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes and you can visit thom hartmann dot com to download our daily audio podcasts of our daily three radio show and we have an i phone i pad app of the app store it says feedback on twitter it's all under score arbonne on

facebook it's one of these for arbonne blogs message boards and for the full timers . and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active tag your city. since. her.

leg in. the back more news today violence is once again flared up the first these are the images go girls and seeing from the streets of canada asked struggling corporations are on the day leg. length. of. the tank.