blogs are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture remember when our lawmakers promised they would end too big to fail but we didn't and now too big to fail is even bigger shocking numbers are getting wall street's wealth inequality coming up in just a moment also the more we learn about paul ryan's budget the worse it gets regardless and send it to the floor of the house of representatives for a vote in the not too distant future so the republicans really vote for more corporate welfare for the top one percent while taking away health care from the

ninety nine percent and president obama caves into political pressure and gives part of the i excelled keystone pipeline project a green flag why do you do this and what are the political consequences of. the need to know this too big to fail is bigger than ever the federal reserve bank of dallas is out with its annual report on america's banking industry in the numbers are shocking currently only five banks control more than half of all the industry's assets that's right the top five banks in america own fifty two percent of all the wealth in the financial sector put that in perspective in one nine hundred seventy the top five banks control only seventeen percent of the industry's assets not only that the total wealth own by the top ten banks in the nation now equals half of america's total g.d.p. more than seven trillion dollars of wealth in the hands of the top five wall street

giants he's startling numbers have prompted the president the dallas fed richard fisher to call for breaking up the big banks warning that they become so large they not only threaten the federal reserve's ability to conduct monetary policy but also . his words erode faith in american capitalism fisher also called for tough new financial reforms to strengthen the dodd frank wall street reform law so what are the economic consequences of this concentration of wealth on wall street and how do we take the dallas fed presidents fischer's advice and break up the big banks here to offer his take on this as well as turbo turbo bill former investment banker goldman sachs and currently a senior fellow at demos walls welcome did i mangle your last name who did great elbowing thanks for having me it's great to be going through joining us how exactly is the too big to fail became even bigger well the concentration. one of things that happened was during the financial crisis the concentration got

even more severe as certain banks just evaporated the other thing that's gone on is to sort of recognize that this isn't just something that's happened recently this is been something that has been going on for a period of thirty to forty years and so there's a certain inertia to it that has it's actually not as surprising as one might think if you if you really just sort of focused on what's been going on so we can hear it we can track this back to one thousand eighty two when ronald reagan ordered the justice department of basically stopping force in the sherman antitrust act to have sort of this wave of merger and acquisition mania in the country absolutely and it not only is that a too big to fail issue which of course it is. and also the go beyond too big to fail and it goes to. because other things have been happening over that thirty forty year period of course asset concentration we talk about that but in a percentage of the g.d.p. but there are things that happen is that the profitability of the banks as compared to the profitability of the entire corporate sector has grown and thirty three

percent of all profitability is is financial services profitability which makes nothing. they manufacture nothing and that's that's entirely ok so they make but they make bonuses which have also been going up right but by adam smith's definition they're not creating wealth i think that's a huge problem yes i think what it was because the other thing that's happened and there's been some good academic work on this recently is that the fundamental role of the financial system is to take money from savings and pension funds and put it into productive uses factories bridges airports that sort of thing. and vile technology is boom and and you would think that the process would have gotten much more efficient in fact what their part we're finding now is that's gone the other direction getting money from people that have it to the production sources as act. you've gotten us efficient more costly so what that really means is exactly what

you're saying is that the financial services industry is actually siphoned off right from that it was a pipe going from one place to other people tapping into it and pulling right what and you know while the creation of actual wealth is not off shored because of the changes in our trade policies since since the reagan era and so you know manufacturing the creation of real wealth is gone and financialization of the moving around of money so that it can be skimmed off to the top as is running our country so how do we what we do about this and specifically what does dodd frank do about this that the president of the dallas fed was calling for and does a few things and and i does some things that are quite important and all of these things are being resisted vigorously by the big banks not a shot here. but one of the major factor features of the dodd frank act is the vote so-called local rule which effectively prohibits banks from from doing proprietary

trading so not only is that cut down and also hedge fund investing but not always that cut down the risk that it reduces the business lines that the banks are or actually engaging it and will cut down on a lot of the assets and profitability. that's got to be actually being enforced or it's not being enforced that was the rule was proposed. and. the over and over again dodd frank rules get proposed and then then that's where this guerrilla war starts where the banks start trying to lay is that change these laws have to be legislated into existence nobody just laid there this is the executive branch that this is just. the volcker rule in particular is a number of different agencies the fed f.b.i. c o c c s c c c f.t.c. every letter and all of those except the fed that if the president said do it it

would get the correct right so why isn't it getting no it's not getting done because. because there are a lot of pressures that are that are effectively brought to bear primarily via congress on these agencies for instance the c.f.c. sees budget. there near their jurisdiction. triple quadruple. in their creditors try to and they think they're derivatives right which is this three hundred just really want to start out exactly so you'd think they'd be people that you you'd invest a couple bucks and in fact what's happened is congress has said squeeze them hard on their budget so there's this dynamic that goes on and it continues to go on which is a fight between the regulators in congress how do we get the american people to be the wind behind the back of the president and others who would like to resolve this problem when the even just you know list that alphabet soup of of acronyms.

how do you reduce this to a bumper stickers of something can get done because it seems like that's the only way to get anything done you know in terms of rousing public opinion well i got a thought about that if you if you think about that pipeline and tapping into it and drawing the wealth off into the financial services industry in the bonuses and the houses in the hamptons and how unproductive that is that it's not that hard to connect that up to issues like why is it so hard to. to get jobs back in the place where they should be after recessions why why is it a shock that income disparity has grown i think it's important to sort of draw the connection but that's the sort of what elizabeth warren has been saying that the economy isn't coming back because the banks are holding it back that's right and government can play a role in making them behave like they used to right now absolutely and i and i think that's an important the important thing which is to start articulating why is it that in the deregulated world the effect is all these bad things with the

banks would have you believe that the chamber of commerce we have you believe the regulators take regular action often things will be completely efficient in business a war under forty well in fact it didn't happen that way. and brought us this disaster yes wallace we're out of time thank you so much dr appreciate the great meeting you. in his eighteen eighty eight state of the union address then president grover cleveland told the nation that was then under the control of robber barons corporations which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law in the service of the people are fast becoming the people's masters where we are again today with all of the slaves to wall street let's look at the bigger picture here though how do you know the question how do these banks get so big it really began as as was just point out with ronald reagan in one thousand nine hundred two stopping the justice department from the force of the sherman turn antitrust act which led to a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions the big getting bigger the monopolies forming

in every major industry this isn't just banking the m.n.a. an l.b.o. mania of the early eighty's people like michael milken and karl out of for over two hundred years in america every town and every shopping mall had its own unique character stores and manufacturing companies were family owned and passed down for generations but today if you got in an airplane and jumped out of fifty thousand feet and landed in any way and in part of america you have no idea where you were you just see this exact same handful of fast food joints of the same handful retail stores and the same banks that you see in every mall in every downtown across america. so today i handful banks control most of america's wealth and wherever you go in america you see the same banks because no president since reagan has undone reaganomics the last presidents to enforce the sherman act were jerry ford and jimmy carter who broke up a t. and t. which since reagan as reassembled itself so now just like a handful of big banks we only have

a handful of cell phone companies and landline phone companies the same way we have a handful of big ad companies that control most of our food supply the same way we have a handful of big media companies that control more than ninety percent of everything you see hear or read on t.v. the internet radio and over fourteen thousand newspapers and magazines fewer than a dozen companies the same way a handful of oil companies control the oil and gas market the same way a handful of automakers make all our cars the same way a handful of drug companies make most of our drugs the same way and full of retail you've started to notice the theme here and full of companies own most of america's retail sales of pharmaceuticals food toys clothing you name it there is a concentration the same way a handful of entertainment companies own most of our movies the supreme court has given them control over our elections after starting with reagan a series of presidents have allowed them to get bigger and bigger and bigger and

bigger it becoming like you know the giant squid as it's called what it really is is monopoly that game was invented back in the one thousand nine hundred eighty nine hundred twenty s. to tell americans what americans about the dangers of monopoly which brought us down in one thousand nine hundred ninety. and you know we need to understand is that you know that monopoly like this corporatocracy of this was. really triumphantly i mean having two three four five companies basically control entire industry in the case of the oil industry everything from from pumping it out of the ground all the way to pumping into your car is destructive to competition it's alternately destructive to capitalism until that lock on this is broken things aren't going to get any better coming up after the break paul ryan released his corporate friendly budget yesterday so why are mr ryan and his colleagues so out of touch with the american people why are they proposing a budget that would do more damage to our already fragile economy.

if we just put a picture of the need for those like nine years old so she told the truth. i am going to get a friend that i was driving because he's sick and. he was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with its place.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

the more multi-millionaire congressman paul ryan's budget proposal is scrutinized the more americans realize how screwed they are if it's ever been acted on wednesday night ryan's budget narrowly passed out of his committee by just one vote that means the entire republican controlled house rather a chance to vote on ryan's a vision for america at least forty eight million more americans without health care and make the top one percent three trillion dollars richer and now there's another little gem in ryan's plan coming to light the sell off of america's public lands the ryan budget proposes selling off more than three million acres of public

lands a little longer we the people in states like arizona colorado new mexico several others and the land would be sold by as corporate or billionaire better at a. fraction of its real value at the same time ryan's budget preserves forty billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies for transnational oil corporations over the next decade an industry that just last year raked in one hundred thirty seven billion dollars in profits this is corporate welfare at its most extreme and a glimpse into the corporatocracy republican party is dragging its own accord so buyer paul ryan republicans so out of touch with the american people and why are they proposing a budget that would do incredible damage to our economy your offer to take on this is rebecca ras media outreach director for americans for limited government and a columnist at net right daily dot com rebecca welcome thank you for having me glad to have you with us here. first of all do you disagree with my premise that this is a destructive budget. actually we tend to not support his budget just because we

don't think of our not on some issues yanks that are going to you think he throws you know disabled kids off the bus he throws old people off the bus and throws the middle class off the bus he has three trillion dollars to rich people what more would you want. for my perspective on what i've done more study on it and the welfare part of the last thing we need now we need to keep those poor people in the teeth more definitely not i firmly believe that there needs to be a safety net that should be looked at as there are some of the welfare programs in the u.s. today no one has ever looked to how they interact with each other very much like they were with pollution along. yeah the different their means welfare so they're the kind that phase off so i earned it and i'm trying to head for yes i actually have those clothes a lot of those calls are my. about nothing for the world for it's like whoa so why do we have you know we have these well for the great society welfare programs

or i'm assuming what you're talking about when johnson come. in five years i mean cutting poverty in half in the united states he created a launching pad for african-american middle class that has become vibrant in those sixty years of the fifty years since that and and and also and among a lot of poor white people and in particular in rural areas. bill clinton took a meat axe to about bill clinton and newt gingrich and converted it to tamp for your welfare to work program which seemed like a great idea when we had this wonderful bubble economy but now that we're in a recession a lot of these people are just. they have so little that they can't afford food or medicine. why would you want to squeeze them but it's interesting you bring that up because i personally do not think these people want to have to live off the government i think they want to be in the senate and be successful course what happens is these welfare programs there's no inner i mean they don't measure how

they interact is but no study done so what happens is if someone is on say example i use a single mom living in virginia with two children and say she makes three thousand dollars a year if she somehow gets a raise you know it's just enough to be given a raise she might all of a sudden at one dollar more lose her health. care and lose her child support you know so well this was and she has the math government welfare programs right and they need food stamps. to aviate shay's off does not correspond with how the income rises so it actually hurts these people more and it keeps them on it so i would like to see him. well you waste all these programs to see how they interact in that way we can backpack family in the ones we know work you know i agree with you all the ones that do not work i agree with you back in the sixty's at the at the minimum wage or the poverty level a person could actually more or less survive now they can't because the wages of been flat for thirty years thirty years reaganomics flat no wages and i mean all

this money is on the top one percent two hundred seventy three percent increase in wealth but not the average person so why don't we just raise the minimum wage to the other interesting point because then that relationship would be they would actually be stepping into if they got that one dollar raid the person would be stepping into a wage where it didn't matter that there was there for instance well actually another study that i looked into was and it's basically a loss from zero to forty thousand dollars if you include money you made and the government subsidies so it's kind of a loss for their swords against the new gas kind of new way to get a five so if you look at that hourly rate i think it's a little bit less than twenty dollars per hour and that would be going up a far cry from minimum wage and honestly when make spend minimum wage denmark is eighteen dollars and some reasons why you gotta do what makes sense here i mean if you raise it out my ass you know mcdonald's will. are charging a ten dollars or

a no you know you go they don't try to say screen will be fit to make you think that mcdonald's are you ok we'll have to continue this conversation that it was a day so much for being with us them and speaking of giveaways to big oil president obama was in oklahoma today where he reversed his position on the keystone x.l. pipeline as fast tracking approval of the southern portion of that pipeline to take canadian tar sands from canada down to shipping lanes and texas i mean let me just show you this the current pipeline runs from canada to cushing oklahoma and as you can see right here and the full proposed pipeline not supported by the president would have crossed the border the u.s. border in montana going down to cushing in the gulf coast the part the president announced today that he will support runs from cushing oklahoma down the gulf coast so why did the president reverse course here and given to most of the demands of big oil and what are the political consequences of such

a decision here to offer his take on this is carl fresh syndicated columnist and partner bullfight strategies karl welcome back thanks for having back to great to have you here so what happens today. the president gave a speech. i wasn't surprised as many people were i mean when the president came out and said that he wasn't going to allow the full pipeline to go he did say that he supported the southern part of the pipeline to be built that being said i think there's a lot of different dynamics here i think what it shows is this is really a compromise with the right what it shows is that the right is more interested in investing in a canadian company then it is in investing in our own roads our own bridges our own schools and crumbling infrastructure and sort of talking about moving people fast in the country great high speed rail we're talking about moving oil fast canadian oil right down to the gulf of mexico we can be exported to insure and i mean we have to be clear that the attacks on the president from the right when it comes to oil and energy production. and alternative energy and fuels are completely baseless

there's been more rigs approved in our coastal areas than any president i think the last eight years there's been more drilling than we've had or more oil being produced out of our own resources than ever and that's why sixteen in real numbers and if the right wing talking point was true that more drilling would lower the price of gas we would have seen it by now in fact there's their start i think a.p. had a story out recently that showed that over a thirty six year period there is no correlation between the oil that we're producing as a country and the cost of gasoline there is drill baby drill is a nonsense popper's you know it's shrill baby shrill is what it is a real broadway from right wingers who play to an american populace that is worried about putting food on the table not paying attention to the finer what isn't isn't what we saw today the president taking away a bumper sticker from the right wing as he goes into the election though the

mistake would be saying that that's enough for them to take away the bumper sticker . given everything they want and they'd and they'd still be yelling so why give them anything if if if that's the case or is our is what we're seeing right now the consequence of citizens united that you had jack who are the. american petroleum institute president famously came out and said when president first just before he announced he said there's going to be a political price if he says no keystone x.l. short i mean this if anything what this is going to do is it's going to divert oil it's being refined in the midwest down to the actually rather easy to sell gas and which will raise the price exactly so it could it could it be that basically he's he's just looking at this gone right ok the oil companies will take me out with their with their super pacs well the big threat of citizens united is not necessarily people spending money right it's the threat of people spending money. a smart wealthy man will not write a check for. hundred million dollars to make something political happen full

threaten it so they don't have to do it. you know and there are there's every reason to believe based on the numbers that we're seeing candidates fundraising that this president will be well outspent by corporate interests seven out of every ten republican dollars raised in this election cycle and corporate moneys from citizens united this president has a lot to be worried about i will say that the notion that the president has much to do with the price of gas you want to know where this president has made strides in fighting the impact of gas the price of gas is the go on with the auto industry to make gas cars more fuel efficient that saves you know people a significant amount of money based on the fueling of their car and it also has good impacts in terms of climate change so those are things that he should be trumpeting more i think the biggest problem is that restriction is ever had is that it doesn't take victory laps when when he saved g.m. there was no victory lap and ten months later when health care passed there was no

victory lap you know what he has he's a constant. to the right i don't know that and start drilling for oil personally but an aircraft carrier in lake michigan here to talk about what do you have done i mean people need to know what the president's record is so that politicians like newt gingrich can't go out there and say i have a magic wand and i can make gas to fifty a gallon overnight it's just not true don't don't think as we actually get into the campaign season you're going to start seeing that kind of pushback that if he was to be doing that loudly and a lot of it right now might he might burn through political capital is it or create the impression of him as just a just a politician and not as the president will and so much of the political option right now is still for some reason going on in the republican primary my favorite reality show and i think that he has every reason to believe that it's really going to heat up when that is settled when that's settled we don't know. that being said i think that these. but the candidates are opening themselves wide on this issue

you know if they want to bomb iran then they better be looking at you know the increase of gas prices so i think that's why they want to well is because it will help the united states you know you can do a great depression sure you know just before. you want to fight gas prices that's one way you can do it really quick there you go thanks a lot for being with us the analysis the keystone pipeline project estimates that it'll create only four thousand temporary jobs and will actually raise gas prices by two thousand and twenty cents and that's analysis from the company trans canada that's building the pipeline unfortunately in today's political climate of slanted media outlets and super pac negative ads president can't tell the american people what's really going on instead has to cave to big well this is partly the president's problem mostly an indictment of our political system that's been so badly broken by our supreme court. after the break your bullying republicans in tennessee are trying to do with the public school system they all about the latest battle in the right wing war on science in just a moment. sometimes

you see a story so you think you understand it and then something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize that everything is all. part of the big picture.

mr.