blogs are in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture house republicans passed the paul ryan budget today in the same sort of austerity budget as triggering riots across the atlantic so how long until similar unrest hits america special with the supreme court ready to rip health care coverage of the hands of tens of millions of americans also congress bow down to the big oil kings again today keep it in place subsidies that rob americans of forty billion dollars just how harmful is russian

its commitment to big oil and corporate greed and more than a year into the nuclear crisis a push imma radiation levels have now reached their highest point yet where does all this mean and what should nuclear supporters in america be taking away from it into prices. you need to know this today house republicans passed their infamous paul ryan budget it kicks tens of millions of americans out of their health insurance plans to pay for a three trillion dollars tax cut for the nation's top one percent ryan's budget has no chance of passing the senate so it really was nothing except to their millionaire and billionaire campaign donors that should republicans win big in november and the paul ryan budget could become a reality for our nation and if anyone wants to see

a glimpse into the future of america under this budget plan all they have to do is look across the pond to see what's happening in europe today spain was shut down as working people from around the country went on strike and took to the streets in protest against an austerity budget that's. jobs and ripping apart the spanish social safety net i've seen similar unrest everywhere austerity has been enacted from athens to rome to london to now madrid austerity doesn't work it never has and it never will but the bigger picture is this things may get even worse here in the united states at this conservative vision of austerity is an active state side while spaniards are protesting the republican paul ryan style austerity budget at least they still have health coverage even when they lose their jobs the same is true of the citizens of every other industrialized country in the world except the usa and now the supreme court may well strike down the individual mandate part of

obamacare but leave in place the parts of the law that require health insurance companies to actually pay for getting you well what does this mean according to a list of fox a senior v.p. of blue cross blue shield she said this is a direct quote unquote people can literally buy coverage on the way to the hospital and drop it the next day and quote it would devastate the health insurance industry which frankly in my opinion doesn't deserve to exist and throw a terror health care system into chaos in other words this is a great opportunity if they do it we already have a very good national single payer health care care program or insurance system here in the us it covers every american over sixty five years old whether they're a billionaire or whether they're living in poverty it has never ever missed a payment to anybody. this system this national single payer system that we have right now in the united states costs about three percent overhead instead of thirty percent more or less at the for profit companies skim off the top it's more

efficient it's more cost effective it's called medicare and it needs only three basic adjustments first take out the republican poison pill that forces medicare to pay ten dollars for an aspirin that the v.a. can buy for a penny let medicare negotiate drug prices that will save you six hundred billion dollars right off the bat over the next decade second lower the eligibility age from sixty five to birth and third raise taxes to pay for it even was slightly higher taxes we'll be paying less than what we're paying right now in our insurance premiums so that we can pay for gold plated faucets in the bathroom of the corporate jets. this is the best way to bring about a middle class but aside from the obvious and fairly easy reforms that we need to make our health care system work what else can we do to save the middle class of extinction joining me now to talk about this issue is robert borsak co-director of the campaign for america's future and boehner and president of the institute for america's future we welcome back are you great to have you with us spain was in a total lockdown today even the airports largely shut down workers across the

nation protesting the paul ryan i and rand vision of spain actually. but could the same thing happen here if the republicans take control no i don't think that because i think they want to do tax cuts to the extent that they're not really going to do much budget deficit reduction they're going to they're just taking money from working people and poor people and giving it to rich people the actual deficit reduction is not all that great so they'll do it like reagan did in the first bush in the second bush they'll run the debt up even greater well this is this is the old two santa clause three that you whisper laid out in the late seventy's they may try to replay that they believe in you know tax cuts on the top end cuts for programs for working and poor people and in the ryan budget it's basically medicare and medicaid that really take the hit plus every expenditure that the government makes on a day to day basis the education budget the budget that oversees whether we have

epidemics in this society the environmental budget all of them in the ryan plan get reduced to nada zero by the year two thousand and fifty i mean he literally eliminates the civilian side of government he does away with c.d.c. as it would or you name it it's gone under his budget now it's not going to happen but what's he going to replace it with you know he's going to some some somebody say figure out how to make a buck on the c.d.c. the states will do it and they block grant as much as they can stand her to sars they they they this is a very radical and extreme vision of a. erica and he sort of got it's an irresponsible document he's gotten away with presenting it as if it were a deficit reduction plan it's really not it's a redistribution upward well in actually increases the deficit over time so what kind of legislation is there out there that the american people need to know about that that are alternatives to this or that in part could help bring back the american ones whether congress voted today on the on the congressional progressive caucus budget which shows you can invest in jobs now put people to work get the

economy moving and over the course of ten years with progressive taxes raising taxes on the top in forcing wall street to pay for the mess that has caused not letting corporations use tax havens to avoid taxes here at home you can pay for it and have more deficit reduction than paul ryan has in his watch it so you can actually preserve medicare preserve social security invest in education put people who work in with progressive taxes have more deficit reduction at the end of ten years i didn't has that seventy eight votes in the house but that's a good start as there are on the other hand i have heard in virtually every media across the united states you know from n.p.r. and imus and you see on one hand to you know right wing talk radio everybody has been talking about the paul ryan budget i have not heard in any major media even a mention of the fact that the house progressive caucus which is nearly one hundred

members of a lot of people and they've got a really good budget that as you point out actually works ten no coverage now no it's like it because it was going to pass republicans control the house there's riots it's going to pass the house will pass it's a right no one passed the senate and i think you know the they've got fox television they operate they they do this stuff they roll it out like a like and sell it like it's cheerios and we do a worse job of that but it americans really have to understand there's a real choice here and we're debating a choice that's fundamental because the right. and you go down the republican line and you will literally cut medicare people will pay almost twice as you know three times as much as they do now on medicare you will end it as we know it as a program you will eliminate all of the things that we just assume governments want to do like invest in education like protect the environment like control of diseases and monitor diseases in the society. the infrastructure bill they couldn't

even pass the transport bill today and if you go down the ryan road there won't be money for that that kind of rebuilding the america so this is a very radical vision that really well will destroy the very rudimentary of a successful society and i think what they're discovering in europe you don't invest in the area is vital to your future whether it's efficient roads and airports whether it's an education system that gives your people the best education in the world you're not going to sustain a competitive economy over the long term and we're going to face we face that choice with these two budgets and with the politics of the next period and i hope that the election gets framed around that i think americans too often just don't understand the choice and ryan makes it very clear. tax cuts on the top end and program cuts across the board for working poor americans and the congressional budget. congressional progressive caucus budget makes it clear there is an

alternative you can pay for it and you can best and putting people to work now and rebuilding our country i forget who famously said it but it was words to the effect of the problem that americans that america has that europe doesn't have is the european working class people know that they're working class people in america they think that they're temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. i thought it would go right through that i don't know i think people now are struggling i think that they're what they are is skeptical that government's going to help at all and so. the part of the conservative argument that can grab people is the sense governor is going to waste your money we'll give you a tax cut in fact that tax cuts going to the millionaires but really give you a tax cut and you won't miss anything we cut in terms of what government does and it's only after it's cuts only if you see the teachers laid off in your schools you don't react when your school goes to a four day week because they can't afford five days you know then you start to realize the cost when the roads bridges collapse and your car you start to realize

you've got a really has a real role in the half minute we have for your thoughts on what might happen if the supreme court briefs this thing apart this is the health care's that i actually think that supreme court is going to uphold it would be a stunningly political outrageous decision on the level of court bush v gore when they gave the election of bush. for them to to overturn it if they overturn it then we know what from the republicans the leader of the senate is said we're not going to replace it with anything so that means thirty million americans who would get health care won't get it children that are now covered won't be covered everybody when a preexisting condition is going to get booted out immediately by the insurance companies they're not going to cover those people and americans are going to understand are going to go back to a health care system that covers fewer and fewer people at greater and greater cost . and as more and more dysfunctional it was great to see you thank you for joining us this upcoming election in november is so vitally important for the middle class

at stake will be what type of america we want for ourselves and future generations we want one or both the million or congressmen like paul ryan are calling the shots and over our economy and government to their wall street and big oil campaign donors who want to united states where we the people are calling the shots and building a sustainable and prosperous economy rooted in a strong middle class that's the choice and it's up to progresses to mobilize and good actor. coming up after the break today even though a majority fifty one percent of u.s. senators voted to end the taxpayer subsidies for big oil republicans in the senate filibuster the bill so it couldn't go to the house for a vote or the president for his signature because of this republican obstruction well subsidies will cost you and me the american taxpayers pretty billion dollars over the next ten years just how far could that money go if we weren't giving it as a gift to big oil.

if we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know lived through. i have a confession i am in total get a sense that i was contracting hip hop music and pretty soon. he was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world without you it's played.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm trying hard look at the big picture.

americans are getting screwed by big oil that's the essential message coming from the white house rose garden today president obama called on lawmakers to cut off billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to trans national oil corporations take a look. american oil is booming the oil industry is doing just fine that's why i think it's time they got by without more help from taxpayers who are already having a tough enough time paying the bills and filling up their gas tank i think it's curious that some folks in congress who are the first to belittle investments in new sources of energy are the ones that are fighting the hardest to maintain these

giveaways for the oil companies. shortly after the president's message a majority of senators voted to end the subsidies for big oil unfortunately democrats couldn't get the sixty votes needed to overcome a near unanimous republican filibuster and over on the house side things aren't any better for those who want to end the corporate welfare for big oil today house republicans approve the paul ryan budget plan which keeps intact those very same oil subsidies that will cost the american taxpayers forty billion dollars over the next ten years includes oil companies like exxon mobil that made a forty one billion dollars profit last year but paid a mere thirteen percent corporate tax rate is around the asking. so just how detrimental use our nation's commitment to big oil especially when other nations around the world are doubling down on clean energy joining me now is miles graham blogger of the national wildlife federation miles welcome tom thanks for having me great to have you with us first of all does the vote this house in the senate they surprise you it doesn't surprise me at this point to me you know at a time when the you five biggest oil companies and that's all we're talking about

here to cut subsidies from the two point five billion just those five companies made one hundred thirty seven billion in profit last year alone i think they consider that you want it will be a hundred thirty five thousand million i mean it's thirty five million mind bogglingly yes it really is and. that's the well actually i think the killer question is what could we have done what can we do with one billion dollars what can we do with forty billion dollars we should be building up windows across the country we should get one solar power plants across the country obviously with wildlife in mind obviously with communities and mine but offshore you know off the atlantic coast we could be having jobs thousands of jobs not only putting up the bills but transporting them across the country building them in factories far from the coasts yeah i talked to a german economists today on my radio program and he said that they're you know they have so much solar energy now that they're having to rebuild the grid system to a smart grid and they're building windmills now or way up in the northern part of germany

and he said you drive on the autobahn images windmills right and speaking of driving the obama administration recently said a fifty fifty four point five per gallon. you know fuel economy standards for twenty twenty five we're looking to double fuel economy standards by that americans are already saying well i'm out right and in fact our demand for oil right now is lower than it's been absolutely about a decade or so certainly and when you hear people say that we should be cutting the subsidies you know drilling is the highest it's been in eight years our demand it's the lowest gas prices are still looking at record highs so why. our demand is still high and you know america has two percent of the world's oil reserves and we use twenty percent of the oil you know. what do we expect these oil companies to go find it we've only got two percent of the reserves that they can go get for so it's time for us to move the alternatives that's the only way we can save american families money what's the argument that the oil industry is making for why they need subsidies and why is that a bogus argument if you think that is why i think you know if we drilled everywhere that big oil bounces the grill would only be saving a few pennies and that's years from now when that production does come online but

look at the risks how much did it cost to clean up the b.p. oil spill in the gulf how much it cost to see what kalamazoo river oil spill in michigan as yellowstone spill over in montana and if you look at drilling in the arctic if they can't stop an oil spill in a placid gulf of mexico how are they going to stop it under arctic ice yeah that's a damn good question. how do we break through a congress that has been bought out by the oil industry of. or is there anyone actually probably the let me make this a twofer is there any possible explanation for the republicans in congress voting the way that they did other than that they've been bought out by the oil industry well i think you're seeing a political politicization of the issue this year in two thousand and twelve but i think long term all progressives can do is keep sending the message that we want clean air clean water safe for the plants for our wildlife right now doesn't that to a large extent mean we need to get the money out of politics well the citizens united decision certainly has had the opposite effect and i think you see big oil putting

ads up all across the country hoping to scare these members of congress and to protecting their subsidies and at the same time big oil is running all kinds of advertising millions tens of billions of dollars worth of advertising on the networks you know with these feel good ads then it's not like i'm going to go out and buy an oil drilling drilling rig i mean you know what are they trying to sell me that i'm trying to study anything or trying to hand money out of the networks to say we'll lose this money if we do news stories that expose what's going on or it might be paranoid i don't want to be too negative here we saw the obama administration roll over a new carbon rule for coal fired power plants hopefully you know eliminating those down the road we've seen fuel economy standards we are made. progress here the question is are we making enough at a time when climate change is really sending us red flags you know he waves across the country to spring that we need to act now miles thank you so much for the great were thank you they spoke up about it germany just announced a two hundred sixty billion dollar investment in clean renewable energy the latest is the largest investment in energy that that nation has made since world war two

what prompted this massive investment in clean energy it was the decision to completely gets nuclear power over the next decade after seeing what happened in japan with the fukushima nuclear disaster a disaster that is still ongoing. more than a year into the nuclear crisis of focus shima radiation levels have now reached their highest point yet within reactor two at the crippled plant at ten times the immediate refill those tepco is randomly find new robots or equipment that can sustain the radiation to locate and remove melting nuclear fuel that's right their current robots the equipment and work within such a highly radioactive environment bats how bad the situation is to make problems worse levels of water within the reactors need to keep needed to keep the corps from melting down or getting dangerously low so what does all this mean and just how closely should lawmakers who are addicted to nuclear power here in the united

states watching kevin camps joins me now he's the radioactive waste watchdog the nuclear kevin welcome back thank you first question kind of. going back in time my my son actually. sent me a. link to a u.s.g.s. report that apparently just came out showing all the places around the united states where the cloud from fukushima hit us and you describe what that is and how bad it is well u.s.g.s. the u.s. geological survey has a monitoring network for radioactivity falling out from the atmosphere in rain. into the drinking water supply and what this new report shows is evidence that they gathered in the days and weeks after the fukushima catastrophe began to fall out of radioactive iodine one thirty one radioactive cesium one thirty four cesium one thirty seven here in the united states they have monitoring systems all over the country in fact in my hometown kalamazoo michigan i didn't know it but on their map

there it was and sure enough radioactive cesium one thirty seven allow him to talk to the levels in kalamazoo michigan what u.s.g.s. was quick to say as most of the federal agencies do it was not harmful levels the public health but again that's thing is a not harm. wise in the face of the evidence that the national academy of science has for decades now that any exposure to radioactivity carries a health risk so you can't say it's safe what they're really saying is to them and their cost benefit analysis it is acceptably risky so it has already nuked this country and presumably the rest of the planet. with the reactor to now i mean the instantaneously fallacy of the you walk into it you're dead level it's now ten times that in this reactor how are they possibly even working around this how do they get this bed and where could it go well without radiation shielding as you say within a few minutes at most you would get

a fatal dose of radiation and that's why no people are going in there they're trying to send remote probes in there they can't send robots and they don't have the technology and this is where the decommissioning bill for these six units at fukushima dai ichi well easily be in the times of billions of dollars if not more and that hundreds of billions of dollars perhaps just to decommission to take that place apart and deal with it and it reminds me of chernobyl in the initial weeks and months of chernobyl they tried robots but it didn't work and they had to get some stuff done so what do they do they threw countless thousands tens of thousands of privates in the army at that thing they had to build that sarcophagus out of concrete and steel in a six month period of time and you know countless thousands of irish from their radiation exposure and in japan they had you know there was the famous fifty but there's been a lot more than fifty people who have been exposed to the to countless thousands unfortunately the japanese not is involved in recruiting people to work there are people who are in desperate straits that's who they're getting to work there are

some cases. with radiation levels this high it is that indicate that there might be trying to send their own kind of melt down where we could see an explosion of of steam that will blow more radioactive material in the air that might end up here in our. brain water. i think anything's possible tokyo electric has now admitted a year later that there's only two feet of water and unit two they had said before that there was thirty three feet of water in there everything's under control it's being cooled you know this latest news is there's two feet of water in there the question is is the melted down core even covered with water and then the word is that you know one probably is the worst of all and then you know three is probably worse than unit two as well i mean unit two if you look at it from the exterior it looks largely intact there's a single hole in one of the walls the explosion in unit two was internal to the containment structure unit three was the biggest explosion while you showed it in the intro that reactor building is

a pile of rubble at this point and you know want also saw for the first another dramatic explosion so the situation is anybody's guess tokyo electric you know the japanese public attitudes are their lips moving now they're trying that towards tokyo electric am the federal government of japan some good news is the prime minister of japan who is serving on the catastrophe began and was quickly ousted some months later. he's now devoting himself to nuclear activism he wants to abolish nuclear power in japan and in fact out of the fifty four atomic reactors in japan there's a single one operating right now and it's going to shut down in may for maintenance and the thing is the local governments are saying no you cannot restart these plants and the federal government is trying to restart them so it's a dramatic struggle to keep these things shut down and it raises the question if they're all shut down and the lights are still on the why do we even have them. and because somebody has sold them a bill of goods the same bill of goods that we got sold back in the sixty's and so

what should our viewers be keeping an eye on with regard to fukushima any danger to the united states danger to the japanese people in japan. i mean given that the winds come this way. one of the biggest risks at fukushima dai ichi is a unit for the storage pool for high level radioactive waste but the entire building is listing including the pool so what they have a steel jacks under the pool to try to keep the floor from falling out or the pool from tipping over if that cooling water supply is lost it will be just a few hours at most before that waste is on fire one hundred thirty five tons outside of any radiological containment those would be direct releases into the environment one hundred percent of the radioactive cesium one thirty seven would be released the environment in those flames and in that smoke but by way of comparison we have the name of the plant in the united states including exact replicas of focusing the daiichi much more waste than our pools are made to five hundred tons

of rubble kevin thank you very much for being with us and. we'll be back. if you just put a picture of the need for those like nineteen years old and just you know live through. the contest and i am going to get a sense that i was traveling because he is taking an interest. yesterday. i'm very proud of the 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 you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .