meltdown

The news today from Japan is that the leak at the Fukushima Daichii nuclear power plant has been stopped but the crisis is far from over. Radiation levels remain high even outside the evacuation zone, contaminated fish are turning up, and the government seems to be insisting on business as usual, according to Aileen Mioko Smith. Aileen is executive director of Green Action Japan, and spent time studying the impact of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, and she joins us via Skype to give us the latest on Japan's crisis. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"Quite frankly, with what's happening in Japan, I think not only us, but a lot of other people are going to have to review our sense of comfort about that," says Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers union. Gerard himself was once a union representative at a facility that mined and refined uranium, and he represents many workers in such dangerous conditions across the country today. The USW has long been part of the Blue-Green Alliance, creating a labor-environmentalist coalition, but stopped short of calling for an end to nuclear power--but will that change after Japan? Leo joins Laura via Skype to discuss the crisis in Japan, the situation of the workers there, and why this crisis is linked to workers' protests around the US.

How much senior executives earn, in cash and stock, is public information. How they make it is public too. Trouble is, the two are barely brought together in reporting. One story's a business story, the other's, well, for the "human interest" file. As all humans have a reason to be interested, let's pull the pieces of one tale together. Let's take Wells Fargo, the bank whose CEO just topped the charts -- as the top earner in the country for 2009. According to analysis released by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm, Wells Fargo CEO John G. Stumpf was paid a personal best of $18.7 million in cash and stock in 2009. That's up 64 percent from two years earlier. That means that Mr. Stumpf is making twice as much as Lloyd C. Blankfein, his counterpart at Goldman Sachs -- the "great vampire squid" himself. Does that make Stumpf Mr. Super Squid... ? More names might come to mind if the public were reminded of just what's been going on at Wells Fargo on his watch. The company is currently being sued by, among others, the city of Baltimore, for civil rights violations related to racist lending practices. As we've reported on this program, Wells Fargo made a bundle, selling risky, high-cost subprime loans to African Americans, including long-time African American homeowners. On GRITtv last year, former subprime mortgage broker turned whistle-blower Beth Jacobson described how African American brokers were sent into Black churches: "Plenty of people there might not even have thought of taking out loans or leveraging their property," but through Black churches loan officers found a motherlode of clients who they steered into subprime loans, even clients with good credit scores. The rewards for the brokers were massive: what some Wells Fargo brokers called "ghetto loans" brought upwards of twice the fees that they could make off prime-rate kind. But the cost for borrowers ? and cities like Baltimore ? were deadly. Now Baltimore's suing, foreclosures are continuing... and Stumpf's the country's best-paid CEO. A footnote? Hardly. Of human interest? I think so. -- Laura Flanders

Last month, the House passed a watered-down version of a financial overhaul that included a new consumer protection agency. But the bill has to make its way through the meat grinder of the Senate, where according to Barney Frank, who shepherded it through the House, it stands a very good chance of being gutted further. Thanks to the Huffington Post Investigative Fund for the video.