however. up in the low nischelle we look at the real headlines with none of the mercy or live out of washington d.c. now it's no secret a gas prices are skyrocketing and that means the oil companies are bringing in the big bucks so should they continue to be allowed to get subsidies from the government we don't think so well find out of politicians agree then president obama is working on executive order to force government contractors to reveal their political contributions are republicans of course are up in arms about it so we'll

talk about the slow road to transparency and then when it comes to the debt ceiling we know that several republicans are in favor of raising it but did you know that some democrats are now vowing to vote against it to do so now that we know of a bipartisan effort to go against the president's wishes as i mean the white house has completely lost the deficit battle and it was a royal occasion kate and william were married this morning and people in america woke up really early to catch every single minute of it on news networks but for those who care about i don't know what's really important in the world what the hell are we supposed to watch and it's friday so i think we all deserve a toast to happy hour raise your glass and watch as artie's jenny churchill mike moynihan and myself discuss the stories creating a buzz this week we're saving that for the end of our show up first our top story. prices are rising and economic growth is slowing down here in the u.s. the five big oil companies are raking in the dough this week they released their first quarter. nicks and exxon mobil the largest oil company in the country

reported a ten point seven billion dollars profit just in the first three months of this year that's a jump of sixty nine percent from the same time in two thousand and ten chevron the second largest oil company didn't do so bad themselves reporting profits of six point two billion up thirty six percent from last year so you would think that. since the gold profits are reaching near record highs maybe they don't need all those billions of dollars in subsidies from the federal government maybe what the democrats have been trying to push for years cutting from forty eight billion in those subsidies might actually come true if republicans would just get on board and they almost out of support. the all the. stuff sure. i agree with tom when the federal government is sure the romany's what we need is unfortunately but we need to. go. there you're there for sure so

you'd like to see those subsidies the oil companies and their leaders any kind of world series. of boehner has already walked back his statement paul ryan and daniel webster despite what they say their voting records prove otherwise so when are we going to start seeing some rage from the people joining me to discuss this from our studio in new york is kelly evans wall street journal ahead of the tape columnist kelly thanks so much for joining us tonight first orders i don't argue with me here there's something that just seems wrong when the economy is bad when unemployment is so high and gas prices are rising that you know these giant oil companies the oil producing nations are really just having the time of their lives raking in all the money. i don't know i think it might offer a little bit of perspective here first to put that that the perspective of forty eight billion dollars worth of tax breaks here exxon mobil in the first three quarters of the year and they're the biggest u.s. company by market cap not just the biggest oil company they made one hundred

fourteen billion dollars the u.s. federal deficit budget deficit this year is about one and a half trillion dollars so while it's tempting to sort of look at these tax breaks as a sort of just an easy way to fill those coffers it's it's a drop of water in a very large bucket so what's happened here quite quickly and unsurprisingly is it's become much more of a political issue really than one that has anything to do with the budget deficit. might be a drop in a very very very large bucket but the thing that politicians have done here especially republicans is to make it about taxes they don't want to raise taxes on these giant oil companies and the corporations because then you're stunting job growth but if you really think about taxes exxon mobil didn't even pay any taxes last year i'm not sure that's correct but i do think that it's tempting to look at the oil companies as a convenient target when gas and oil prices are high the reality is that here in the u.s. we pay a lot less than a lot of other countries countries. doing for

a long time that that's actually the wrong thing that should happen that when we get gas prices high as we did in two thousand and eight we should try and keep them there to help change behavior and try to keep people or try to shift behavior away from high consumption of gas and oil so that we're less dependent on them when prices do rise because look as much as we'd like to think that we can just point a finger at some of these companies that would magically bring gas prices down nothing could be further from the truth these are powerful global forces at play it has something to do with the run up in speculative. speculation activity on wall street as well but there's nothing that raising taxes by a couple billion dollars on these oil companies is going to solve that problem and i'm afraid it's distracting us from the bigger picture well i think what's what it's distracting us from is that instead of perhaps raising some of the revenues or the taxes on these oil companies or instead of cutting programs that actually could be helping some the lower income americans and what i was talking about in terms of exxon paying no taxes last year is that's what came out after a lengthy investigation from the new york times but since you brought up

speculation the market manipulation the obama administration has now announced they're going to have a task force look into this but you make that task force do you think they're going to find anything is anyone actually going to start investigating anything. i'm not big on task forces in general we saw a similar group looking interactivity back in two thousand i do think there's a lot of work that needs to be done to parse out just how much the financialization of commodities oil and otherwise is playing a role in their runup it's a huge issue unfortunately a little bit hard to disentangle and so we haven't really seen any clear cut answers three years now after what happened in two thousand and eight and we don't really have now a lot of information to help prevent a similar outcome this time around the other reason why i and i wrote about this in one of my columns the other day why i see these high oil profits is almost a bit of a warning sign is that the last time this happened they weren't sustainable design high oil prices were centrally solved themselves because they got to the point that they were so high that people cut back a lot of industries to cut back on their usage and so they then we had the

financial crisis which obviously quickly turn. things around the real question here now as we have prices at the pump out twenty cents off their two thousand and eight peak acting is a real drag on the u.s. economy is will high oil prices collapse the way they did a couple of years ago will they not just how much potential is there to try and get windfall profits tax on some of these oil and gas companies right now these are really difficult issues that i'm not sure congress is going to be any more insightful on or better able to sort of time than anyone else and remember a lot of these tax breaks go back to trying to encourage oil and gas companies for exploration and some of these other things over the years that we thought would help hope it would help to bring oil prices down then as we've come to realize it's just kind of it's just kind of a fringe issue in the bigger picture here yeah it definitely doesn't encourage them to to change any of their practices is the same thing as allowing these industries to regulate themselves you're never going to see any actual change about there but you know maybe congress isn't are the ones that can handle it president obama's task force is what can handle this donald trump seems to think that he has all the

answers solve let's take a look at what he had to say about it. do you want to know my money. because we know you are. right. what do you say i mean does the donald really have the right way to go about it you just call and you say you put those prices down or else. i think that makes my point which is that this is quickly turning into a political issue that people are using to pander to the real serious financial trouble that a lot of households are in i think by not having a mature discussion about what's really driving the prices higher we're only doing ourselves a disservice and i think what i would really like to see come out of this is maybe just a recognition that we are held to the forces of strong global demand of relatively limited supply of oil you know it's been years and years of us sort of pretending that this isn't an issue or that it won't be won when oil prices are low i think

what the reality is now staring us into the face and nothing no comments from donald trump or even from republicans or democrats right now really show me that people are starting to think seriously about how to address this in the reality maybe keeping gas taxes higher now to generate more income for the budget long term and help trying to actually shape behavior people definitely need a wake up call in with you there kelly thank you so much for joining us tonight of course thanks for having me. now still to come tonight president obama is working on an executive order to force government contractors disclose their political donations i don't publicans i don't like the sound of it but isn't transparency a good thing and that while the debate over raising the national debt ceiling carries on there's a new congressional members who may be planning to vote against it and there are democrats so now the president's own party is going against them does this mean that he's lost the fight for this cause by issue with politico's de tat nice after the break.

let's not forget that we have an apartheid regime in britain. i think. either one well. we haven't got the live shows the keeping safe get ready for freedom. a charge in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

new web site with twenty four seven live streaming news times what to do about the ongoing financial heart unlimited high quality videos for download. and stories you never saw on mainstream news. these. posts aren't. just. guys welcome to shell and tell me alone a show we've heard our guests have to say on the topic now we want to hear from our audience just go on to you tube to video response or to twitter for fun of the questions and please post on you tube every monday and on thursday the show long response to. your voice.

the gaming community has been on pins and needles after word got out of the sony playstation three it suffered a major breach earlier this week tech site started reporting that sony suffered an external intrusion which forced their online network to shut down and as details of that intrusion start to leak out we've now learned that pro players personal information was breached and was breached massively i'm talking user names addresses e-mail addresses birthdays network passwords and log ins and we should point out here the for the first few days the tech sites are reporting this unprecedented breach so he decided not to make any kind of public comment it wasn't until days later when the tech giant decided to finally send a letter to each of their users to inform them of this major problem and in the e-mail they stated we have discovered that between april seventeenth of april nineteenth certain playstation network and create also the service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized

intrusion into our network now the letter then went on to give users the bad news about what private information had been released to the public we are happy to report at least one piece of good news for p s three owners turns out that while the hackers do possess some personal information your actual credit card data was encrypted meaning that they cannot touch it so all gamers breathed a slight sigh of relief there i would like to take a moment to ask sony where the hell. there are priorities like if you remember a few months ago we told you about how sony filed a lawsuit against george hotz when he released the code online to show other gamers how to modify their consul and even use pirated games on their system so he had absolutely no qualms about going after hotspurs attack on their gaming system they took him straight to court so keeping all of that money we can't help but wonder why hasn't sony take more steps to protect their customers they spend so much effort tracking down one guy who damage their bottom line meanwhile they leave their own database open to hackers who potentially have gained enough information

to perform identity theft on seventy seven million users so maybe sony should retract some of their vast resources to protecting the personal information of customers the people who have made sony what it is rather than waging a legal battle against one lonely hacker george hotz and several governments it is taiwan canada the u.k. and the us seem to agree are currently pressing sony for information on this very serious breach but in the meantime sony is hanging its head in shame because frankly this kind of data breach is one of the biggest and one of the most embarrassing and gaming history by the way x.-box fans are growing by the minute. according to the white house the president is considering an executive order that would force government contractors to disclose their donations to political candidates and organizations and the president says it's about transparency about letting the taxpayers know more about the contractors that see federal funds which by the way in two thousand and ten was about five hundred thirty five billion

dollars worth but oh boy lawmakers and contractors are really not happy about this one in fact senator susan collins mitch mcconnell and twenty five of their republican colleagues have already written a letter to the president asking him to please reconsider and their complaint is that this is going to insert politics into a selection process that's supposed to be fair but our politics already there are discuss this with me is kevin zeese co-founder of voters for peace and executive director of cumhal america kevin thanks so much for being on the show tonight i will be here tell me first of all if you're with me here think about how many factories there are around the country the fact then that consistory and work at these factories and that plays in our politics are very much already involved it comes to government contracts and i think there's a lot you take the politics out of it because it will bring transparency people see what the truth is what the will see the real playing field and will create a more even playing field if you will know what the story is and the fact that the contractors and their colleagues in the congress are if you so strong it just makes

you want to have more you know when i use a practice law and i when the prosecutor was not giving me the evidence that i was going to discover a new you have something to hide so in the height of the ball i want to see that more so i think there's something to hide here we should really push transparency aggressively and we need to because our elections are becoming nontransparent as corresponding to those in the last election alone three hundred million dollars was spent in and that's an off year election in anonymous donations and so we're seeing less and less transparent electoral system don't know who's behind what not to give you a return so this is a good small first step that i would you take immediately that is are also. way that this is going on here because contractors technically aren't supposed to donate to political campaigns directly so does that mean that if there are any political contributions and they must be going to these out there outside organizations where you don't know exactly there's a lot there's lots of indirect ways to get money into politics and to make payoffs to get these returns and it's a really good deal you can get

a pretty small donation and you can get ten times return a thousand donation lead to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand dollars in contracts so we need to know this kind of stuff this is a democracy of the people and by the people for the people don't know what's going on and so we're going to have this our system we hide critical facts like who's paying for what and what are they getting in return it makes the market even less real and it's especially fair and important i think if you consider the numbers involved here like i said just in two thousand and ten five hundred thirty five billion dollars worth of these government contracts federal contracts were awarded but let's talk about what usually happens at these contracts right there are going to let's talk about the f. thirty five strike fire this is a project that might come up and what happens is that it starts extending the production and being delayed somehow it ends up being a twenty year long project just to develop it and now the pentagon has recently released figures that lots of margins at thirty five are going to cost us over

a trillion dollars over several decades that doesn't say one trillion dollars i'll tell you if you look at all the weapons systems that we're producing you'll find have to be a very common story we've created a military conflict and that's out of control we were bloated military budget if we're not going to face up to it we're not going to control deficit and that's the one thing that both republicans and democrats have taken off the table defense spending military spending it's not even defense which version or things of military military spending is fifty five percent of the discretionary budget if you add in the intelligence budget and homeland security it's sixty six percent of the discretionary spending and both parties have take it off the table and it means. although it all goes on the people themselves cities and so we see a lot of weapon systems with cost overruns delays that i don't even need anymore and i i bet you we saw the contractors who were given money to politicians we'd see why those programs keep continuing now this also obviously goes back to the citizens united ruling as we were saying last year the congress actually failed to

pass the disclose act which i force corporations so here the guys are the president is going about it in his own way he's trying to issue a recall and it hasn't officially made the announcement yet an executive order to force this on some government contractors and i think that he like executive orders well i'm glad he's doing it and doing what he can do if he does it we'll see because you know he hasn't done it yet he's going to push back he might back down as he's done too often but this is you know this is important we have a project called protect our elections or we're very focused on government transparency transparency elections and as i said unless there's a one hundred million dollars spent that was from anonymous donors right now the department of justice could be enforcing existing was forced to end transparency what they're doing people like karl rove the chamber of commerce american crossroads what they're doing is they're a voice in the election was the federal election laws which require you to tell where the money comes from and what they do to avoid it is they set up a nonprofit a five a one c. forgive zation which is a lobbying group which is not intended for elections where they use an only for

elections which is a violation of tax law and a violation of the election law and department justice has the power to enforce their criminal with the criminal law violations the election was partly judged to be doing that's we want to see in the next election even more massive spending i'm sad to say though the democrats have said rather than fight them they're going to join them sort of like you know what i was raised a billion dollars openly and which is the raise from anonymous donors to these nonprofits and run independent can supposedly independent campaigns or be taken the place of political parties which is going to be their strong a billion dollar presidential campaign you're probably talking billion dollars in these anonymous donors as well that's right we've also require that here on this show today democrats. just decided if you can't beat em then join every career and i can't really blame them though because you still they still want to win the election because think about it if the democrats do win the election is there any chance to look at this close that fast i doubt it because they're playing the game the democrats win playing the same corporate giveaway game since the one nine hundred eighty s. early ninety's they can have

a court administrator and they decide they can do same with republicans obama took twenty million dollars from the health insurance industry he's given one hundred million dollars in tax subsidies and you will know he's paid off ten times the donation so i'm i'm sad to say we're not and see the only way to get this everything else in this country is of people get organized educated and mobilized it's going to take massive effort by people to take the government back and take control to really make it govern the people right now it's a government of corporations both parties are corrupted by corporate money we get organized mobilized to take it all back oh why is it always the conclusion of every single interview that everybody is evil with you want to know how exactly we put everything into everyone's leave all together but i can't thank you very much for joining us tonight thanks for now the clock is ticking according to treasury secretary tim geithner the u.s. will reach its debt limit by may sixteenth and walker half of a months ago aside from a few defiant tea partiers the political establishment agreed that not to raise the debt ceiling would be catastrophic. it would be catastrophic not just first the

united states but for global financial markets if the us did not we hafe responsibly these are the steps if we hit the debt ceiling that's the essentially defaulting on our blog asians which is totally unprecedented in american history the impact on the economy would be catastrophic i mean that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in two thousand and eight. now fast forward to today and it's not just republicans who say they won't raise the debt ceiling unless significant budget cuts are passed with it even democrats are joining the chorus people like senator kent conrad joe manchin and mark pryor so when even the president's own party doesn't want to tell the white house line to pass a clean debt does that mean that they've completely lost this political fight here of this concert with me as politicos. they thank you so much for being here tonight

like i said a couple of months ago except for some tea partiers you even had john boehner you had republican leaders that were saying this is going to be catastrophic we can't let it happen we can't even toy with the debt ceiling and suddenly it's fair game hey it's just something you throw in there every day what happened i think you saw the political environment and by the way i mean democrats you're right a lot of them thought that this was going to be an easy vote for them they'd be able to vote for this up or down there wouldn't be a controversy they have the votes they still the majority in the senate but i think the political calculus now because of all the concern about the deficit that they're hearing from their constituents and there's still that lingering message from twenty two and about spending that is in a lot of their minds heading into two thousand and twelve now a lot of the senators as you mentioned are saying ok maybe we do need to do this with some mandatory spending cuts which is the republican argument exactly that's the republican argument so i just can't understand why the democrats i mean they've paid for later already so many times right we saw with the bush tax cuts we saw

with the government shutdown debate now. it's coming here but don't they have a political philosophy don't think that spending is the way to get us out of a recession to get the economy pumping again but they just that all of the window that's the argument the liberals will say that don't capitulate this is too important you should stand your ground and say look if you guys are going to make this default it's going to be on your backs you're going to make that but we will do it but the problem is a lot of these senators lost their colleagues in elections and they're in states were fiscal issues are resonant and they're also i think campaign as moderates in some of these states and say we care about fiscal responsibility that's always the democrats well what are you doing about it polls show that voters still trust republicans more on these fiscal issues they don't agree with those specifics you get specific in the polling drops but they still agree that something needs to be done and i think the democrats see that writing on the wall and then is it ok for me to say that voters are idiots because republicans don't want to raise taxes on the rates and they want to cut programs for all of those americans that are for

some reason trusting them they don't want to cut defense spending i just don't understand where the mentality is here i don't understand the tax issue either i think i think it's a fair point i don't know if it's a communication problem the democrats don't have but the democrats have never won a tax argument i mean can you remember an argument even if it's about raising it on the wealthy people that are in those income bracket brackets will say you know you can't do it because i hope to be there some day that's that's the argument but in this debate the democrats aren't framing it the republicans are out there saying we're going to raise the debt limit we want to see mandatory cuts and they're going to their districts they're saying these things and little by little statements come out from democrats first then we're saying anything now they're peeling them off saying ok maybe we do need to do this so unless someone makes the tax cut argument or makes the stronger argument of these programs it's not going to be effective but i think they're starting to with the ryan plan which is different you say tax cuts i think the democrats always lose every single argument and you just are horrible about something but if there's somebody that should be able to really get involved here it's the president the president is the one that's telling. his own party know

we have to have a clean bill don't capitulate and they're going against him so does that mean that he really has just completely lost it is lost his own party he's just lost a little he's lost his whole party yet but i do think you have a fair point if there's a break there i mean the president has treasury secretary geithner go on the sunday morning shows very high profile to say this has to be done this has to do it's going to be it has to be done it has to be coming clean bill that's not going language a clean bill but we've seen the president come out you know recently say this we're going to watch as language in the few weeks to see where he moved as he moved where the senate democrats are moving this is going to move because we were to lose our it is just going to get you know i'm disappointed because i want to fight you know when i hear people like harry reid saying well the white house can speak for themselves but we're going to do our thing i want to get his own party in order here let's look at some polls that also help me to try to somehow understand the mentality of the populace here you know recently we saw a poll that said that only sixteen percent of americans actually favor raising the

debt ceiling and we have to wonder is that because they don't understand what the consequences might be for the entire economy but then we also see a new gallup poll that came out today says that forty seven percent of americans now are not looking favorably upon the tea party so is that a sign that something is changing i think there's two separate issues because the tea party has its own identity and sometimes people see these people screaming in terms of tea party very much driving especially the republicans to go against the step oh absolutely but if you take those two issues out i don't think people understand exactly what the debt ceiling is very complicated i could sit here and explain to you every program that would you know all the effects that would happen if we didn't raise the debt ceiling you listen to the experts and they say catastrophic things i think you separate that out from the tea party which has more mixed image because some of them have been you know have presented themselves as you know making valid critiques and are credible on some of these issues but some of these people just hate the president and want to go in scream at him no matter

what he does so i think they're. the message gets mixed and i think the debt ceiling is very complicated for people to understand and who is articulating the message on the debt ceiling why doesn't the president or someone from the senate and the democratic party lay out exactly what it would mean if this didn't happen in you know in basic terms like a toy second graders i mean that sometimes that's what you need to do i got to say so not only are off it just seems like a big word but you don't actually get any visible visualization there really i mean we talk like try to simplify the message don't get too complicated so people can understand it at home and beyond are doing it today thank you so much for joining me tonight sure thank you now coming up after the break thanks to all time winner is one of the united states most prolific islamic popes and this time he's going after the top brass in the military claiming that he's been out for a walk by muslims we'll have details on that in just a moment and people across the country were glued to the television to watch the royal wedding this morning but for those who are interested in more hard hitting real news they are probably disappointed by the wildlife coverage of buckingham

palace so why did the media forget all about the real headlights of the cliff and how and when we return. we. will be. safe getting ready.