well i'm tom are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. two bombings at the finish line of the boston marathon today have shocked and terrified the nation what's going on in boston and who's behind this brazen attack to talk a journalist very no one live from the ground in boston in just a moment and today is tax day well it tell us they hate it america's hedge fund manager financial elite should love april fifteenth with all the loopholes and subsidies they get how did hedge funds get so powerful and why do we give them so many privileges. you need to know this just hours ago a series of explosions rocked the city of boston on the same day that that city played host to twenty seven thousand runners and the world famous boston marathon reports suggest that small improvised explosive devices were behind the explosions

and reports also suggest that at least a third i.e.d. was discovered by boston police and successfully detonated without further injuries as of now there have been over one hundred reported injuries and two confirmed fatalities including an eight year old child there's no word yet on who was responsible for the attack although it has been officially labeled by the f.b.i. as a terrorist attack here is part of president obama's statement on the attacks. we still do not know who did this or why and people shouldn't jump to conclusions before we have all the facts but make no mistake we will get to the bottom of this and we will find out who did this will find out why they did this any response any responsible individuals any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice . joining me now via skype for more on the tragic events and boston today is barry nolan former teen you get is caster for the b.z. t.v.

and boston and a professor of journalism at boston university barry thanks for joining us. glad to be with you tom can you give us a summary first of all of what what happened today and where we're at what our state of knowledge is right at this moment right around three o'clock long after all the. internationally competitive runners had finished the boston marathon an explosion went off right at about six thirty nine boylston street just about half a block from the finish line people were just coming up on the finish line after twenty six miles an explosion on the south side of the street that was against a building that was sent by that kind of snow fencing that they put up for advance to keep crowds back the force of the blast echoed off that building and came out into boylston street it blew out windows all along the ground floor it blew windows

as high as the third story in a building where it seems like the blast was centered. people began to move away from that and go and attend to the entered one about thirteen seconds later a block and a half further west another explosion went up and just as when the second plane hit the second building at nine eleven now you know that something larger is going on. immediately people began to respond to people that were clearly severely injured there on the street there was immediately blood all over the sidewalk. there are now reports that as many as one hundred people have been admitted to the local hospitals we have today as you mentioned including an eight year old child. the reports are and very little is confirmed just as we remember

from the early reporting newtown tragedy much of the early reporting isn't accurate but there are certainly reports that the police found two additional explosive devices and disarm them and there is report that an additional explosive device went off the j.f.k. library which is some distance away now i understand that the the fire or the event that happened at the j.f.k. library in all probability was coincidental and was apparently a fire. we i've seen and heard reports that call it both the reports that have called it a it at first they thought it was a hundred but then they decided you know it must have been an explosive device and then i heard well it was not an explosive device it was probably just like trickle fire which is not uncommon so we don't know yet intel the

until the police have more press conferences we won't know anything but with any certainty there's also been a report here in boston. there are actually it was first published the first place i saw it was published in new york that a saudi national was under arrest at a hospital who was badly burned but i haven't seen additional reports that suggest that's the case. so bottom line right now we don't know who put this thing together although it does look like these devices at the very least had shrapnel. well it's hard to tell there were some just terrible terrible heartbreaking injuries including one man there the early reports are he just finished the marathon and had both his legs blown up there's some terrible pictures floating around. some of the injuries are just terrible. but

we don't know it's too early to know if it's because there was shrapnel you know you've seen the pictures of nails taped around improvised explosive devices we don't know if it's something like that or if it was something related to the plate glass windows that line all of boylston street on the ground level and when that explosion went off. bounced against that wall blew in windows blew out windows. the glass rained down from the windows that were broken above last reflected out so there was an awful lot of stuff to just blow around even if it's you know in case the nurse when this happened very you were at a. television reporters event and later drove through or under the area. what's what's the sense of the city. this is the place where i

got really interesting sense of this city was i happen to live right by our great kill and i crossed it a little while ago. and usually about this time people start out and hopkinton and they'll run through the night just finished twenty six miles and there are people that. go up there and salute these people and cheer him on as they're dragging along twelve hours after the start of the race are great was absolutely deserted and except for a handful of people that were sort of walking around the way people do with a thousand yard stare just not knowing what what what should we do we had a plan what which should we do now i don't know where my friends are i don't know where we're supposed to go the green line shut down the cell phone service was ended. in

a in an abundance of caution just in case somebody was trying to use cell phones to set off explosive devices people as i understand it the best way to get it in touch with somebody if you have friends or loved ones in boston you just want to check in make sure they're ok if they're anywhere near downtown you probably can't get in touch with them by cell phone so people have turned to text messaging which works apparently on a different system and you can get through or through social media a lot of people are turning to twitter and facebook to find comfort to know that their loved ones are ok we're talking with very nolan professor of journalism at boston university for reporter for the b.b.c. and. barry the the. the shutting down of the cell phones at first i think there was an assumption that the system had simply been overwhelmed. are they still but then you know it came out that

apparently they were shut down so that these phones could not be used as det detonating devices or to initiate some sort of detonation are they working again hollow are people getting in touch with family and friends what's what's the situation what should somebody do if they if they if they have family or friend there if you have family if you call somebody and you can't get a hold of them. don't immediately assume the worst or the or anything try your next fallback should be tried texting because texting works on a separate system. once communication if you can get them and they don't respond by text try twitter or try to check in to see if they've posted anything on facebook it's interesting we live in

a new age and text book has been facebook has been a great comfort to my son goes to be you and he has found out a great many of his friends have checked in on facebook that i'm ok i was a couple blocks from the explosion was really scary but i'm i'm ok while also social media's is carrying this and. any any further. further thoughts on where this might go is there i realize it's way too early to speculate about. you know who what why but april fifteenth is a very significant day several levels of boston is about it absolutely is if you. april fifteenth in boston it's patriots' day. and from the finish line of the boston marathon it's not a long walk to go to where the tea party took place boston harbor there's still

a great museum based on a ship that celebrates the tea party april fifteenth is of course the day that many people that are. beyond the far right. think of as a very important day because it's a day that represents tyranny right now we're also discussing. the. changing our gun laws and. the news came out today that. senator harry reid believes he does not yet have the votes to pass new gun regulations to fight gun violence that's an issue that has produced i do work for congresswoman carolyn maloney and when she proposed one of her gun regulations she received death threats so all these issues tax

the tea party and guns were coming up on the anniversary of the oklahoma city bombing. it was basically generated by the belief timothy mcveigh's part that the government his own government had become tyrannical which is something you hear echoed on the far right these days so if you weren't to make it and of course this is the city where two of the planes on nine eleven where the nine eleven conspirators came here went to boston logan airport. never forget that picture of that man i guess his name was with those cold dead eyes walking through the through. there i walked through a thousand times myself very very worried if we had we had to wrap it up here but working we'll check in with you at the bottom of the hour for an update we find very ill and thank you so much for. let me let me use one wouldn't let me ask you

a question. here on this board is what we have in the bank we have are not. going to do is this is just. staying there again you're in a situation where b. and i don't even talk about surveillance me. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm trying hard welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot of money country music stars are a fool you know what that is my other terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want the usa to feature isn't the only liberal and the christian public. is usually the voters but. you know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that sells of sensationalistic garbage because that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that . looking for every doc in the field that while we won't find it here if you're looking for relevant stories unique perspective from top class scans in authority.

welcome back today is tax day and while the rest of us scramble to meet the midnight deadline for tax returns the richest one percent of americans will sit tight and comfortable knowing that they've gamed the system once again combination of subsidies and prefer and privileges is transformed the i.r.s. into one of the federal government's largest welfare programs at least for the super rich just two years ago exxon mobil the most profitable corporation in human history raked in seven billion dollars from tax breaks alone as senior general electric paid zero dollars in corporate taxes that's right zero zilch the official corporate tax rate in the united states maybe thirty five percent but loopholes and subsidies supported a lobbied for by major corporations and very very wealthy individuals have whittled

the effective corporate tax rate down to about twelve percent tax deductions for vacation homes and yachts meanwhile son tens of billions of dollars annually back into the pockets of the wealthy while oil tycoons and jet owners get their fair share of government handouts perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of our regressively redistributionist tax system are hedge funds and their managers low taxes on capital gains and the carried interest loophole allow wealthy financier's like mitt romney to pay lower tax rates than regular working americans just because they make their money from investments and absurd idea when you consider the tens of millions of dollars romney and other hedge fund managers reap in every year our current tax code is the modern day version of the feudal laws of medieval europe its myriad loopholes and deductions create a system of privileges that help the rich stay rich while sucking billions and billions from the treasury and the working class every year putting in the public

interest research group tax breaks for the wealthy cause the average us taxpayer about a thousand dollars every april most small sum for the millions of americans struggling to make ends meet. the worst economic downturn since the great depression or is manipulating the i.r.s. isn't the only way the financial elite stays on top i'm joined now by leslie a paul journalist and author of the new book how to make a million dollars an hour why hedge funds get away was siphoning off america's wealth welcome thank you so much for having me what a contribution. so let's start at the beginning not to make a million how do you make a million dollars an hour well i think the answer is real simple you have to cheat i mean some of the cheating is legal some of it is barely legal and a bunch of it is flat out illegal really don't make that kind of money in a hedge fund which is an investment fund for the super rich unless you know the outcome of the race before you run the race nobody puts this kind of money on the

line unless they're pretty sure they're going to win their bets so when i i got involved in doing this research about hedge funds because i noticed that their incomes were absolutely outrageous i found out that the top hedge fund guy made as much in one hour as the average family made in forty seven years oh think about that one hour equals forty seven years how do they do that what value do they create for the economy by doing that it turns out the answer is almost no value it's what economists call an economic rent the rhetoric rest of it call us call it a ripoff. and it's just put it blew my mind entirely when i start to see what they did i remember when the hedge funds became. started reading about them in the new york times the wall street journal or that it was maybe fifteen years ago twenty years ago and it was kind of this new thing maybe even

a little before that and you really had to be a millionaire to even money in fact they had limits i think you had to have a net worth of over a billion dollars and you had a quarter million dollars because there was so much risk. associated with it and they were to hedge against problems in the marketplace and you might lose you know there was this whole of this is just a protective vehicle it's like a it's like a you know the rubber bone. you know are. missing a metaphor here but. how did they go well first of all were they ever that and if so how did they go from being basically protective devices or safety valves for investors to being money machines well they may have been about hedging back in the sixty's as a way to get it but by the period you're talking about is when we deregulated finance and we deregulated finance the money that flowed up to the top one percent was enormous it stopped going to working people went to the one percent so there

was a huge amount of money to play with and these guys came came around and said hey give me your money i will play with it and you're going to make a fortune and they came up with a lot of ways to make a fortune that involved insider trading now high frequency trading which is you know strikes me as something that should be illegal but it's barely legal in my opinion. but they came up with ways to bet and win the bet let me give you one example the blue one by the way the proprietary trading desk inside of the big banks they're hedge funds too and they invest in hedge funds so there's there's a kind of symbiosis between the hedge funds and the large banks here's an example. you might have heard of the famous abacus trade it was about designing a housing security it was designed by a hedge fund so that it would fail. so that hedge fund could collect an insurance policy on that's a sort of good bet on its failure and make more on the bet than they made of the

failure but they designed it is well it's like you would go out and sell a house that's going to burn down in six months and you're holding the insurance policy you the seller is holding then you make sure that the insurance policy is worth more than the house absolutely and one hedge fund guy and made one billion dollars a week with a b. and goldman sachs got caught because he didn't tell the investors that by the way the guy designed it to fail goldman sachs had to pay a five hundred fifty million dollars fine guess how much the hedge fund guy had to pay guess zero zero because he was he didn't have to disclose so he was in cahoots with that with the big bank and i'm going to tax paid five hundred million dollars or so i fifty but but the over a billion dollars was made on this deal by the hedge fund so this is just like a cost of doing business they they don't you don't make this kind of money unless you are very very sure you're going to win the bet take high frequency trading.

it's done in nanoseconds by the time you press the button on your each trade account there is a hedge fund that bought the share and sold it back to you made a few pennies profit because they can see you coming they're working in a different time uniform verse they're working in nano seconds you're working in seconds minutes there's a guy who's doing this who bragged to the press that over the last five years the he had had a losing day in five years and the longest he ever held a stock was for the longest two seconds. so there's half or more of all the trades in the stock market are these high frequency traders holding it for less than two seconds we used to make things in this country for adam smith wealth of nations seven hundred seventy six. his whole point was that the wealth of a nation is what it makes the example that a year. it was a tree limb on the ground has no intrinsic value other than perhaps to nature but

if you apply human labor to it and carve it into an axe handle you know have something that has wealth and that becomes part of the wealth of the nation at least for the couple of generations until it you know deteriorates and we used to make things in this country and finance used to be this boring green eyeshade bankers hours the banker lived in the middle class neighborhoods. what happened once we took our foot off the neck of wall street it became a gigantic casino again now it was this ninety nine and two thousand the commodities futures modernization act but actually stories are only wildly arts in the late seventy's with carter proceeds during reagan's excel or rates during the clinton administration and then all the things that you did discuss that created the ability for these hedge funds and the large banks. to go wild now think about

this apple in two thousand and ten made about twenty billion dollars i had fun with a hot apple had seven hundred thousand employees around the world and contractors and actually made products right that we like. a hedge fund made exactly the same amount with less than one hundred employees how do you do that. how do you do that you take you don't make true takers the people who are siphoning off our wealth are these hedge funds right now we don't even know they're working in the shadows we don't even know they exist they are stretching the whole income level. the distribution of income the united states is being stretched way out of proportion by these guys they make. i estimated the top ten hedge fund guys make forty times as much as the top ten. movie stars. and we and what they do for the economy is virtually zilch as far as i can tell you know. jim cramer

the guy from mad money he he actually confessed that he ran a hedge fund for ten years and then ten years later he actually confessed. on a website and he said that everything he did was fiction he used to manipulate his fellow reporters on c n b c by giving them false tips so his hedge fund could make bets based on the false tips. he said if you are not oil i see not in jail because it was ten years later the statue of limitation and he said if you're not willing to do these things you should not be in the hedge fund business why you know if this is putting our economy our risk for the money out of out of the middle class it's creates creating huge economic this distortions i mean we're wealth inequality united states is among the worst in the world now whereas you know when reagan came into office we were pretty reasonable. in the minute we have left here. is anybody going to do anything about this or any serious efforts elizabeth warren

males are some of those where you know we were we had a chance store in the occupy wall street period had that turned into a sustained populist movement i think we could have gone after these guys you know the california nurses association the national nurses united is pushing the financial transaction tax the robin hood tax that's a critically important for this because these. folks are extracting a hidden tax from us if we had a tax on their. rapid sales of stocks and bonds we we could have free higher education and that and that state tax we had in the united states from it was eight hundred ninety eight until one hundred sixty four as i recall and f.d.r. kicked it up at thirty five to pay for the see if my recollection is right it was we look at europe eleven countries in europe are the two one of these taxes i asked . a little tiny tax on each stock i asked him guy there's office whether he would support it and he came up with all these you know they came up with these excuses about how they thought it would be inefficient and it wouldn't be able to keep up

with the competition meanwhile the competition is instituting in other words the the the billionaires the hedge fund guys have so much money that they basically own this absolutely and the way to get them ultimately is we're going to have to be in build an independent populist anti elite financial elite program and constituency we're going to have to do what you leslie thanks so much thanks a lot though the book how to make a million dollars an hour why hedge fund managers hedge funds get away with siphoning off america's wealth thanks. coming up under governor rick snyder's stewardship michigan has passed harsh right to work for less laws and gutted union rights now michigan's democrats are proposing a state minimum wage of ten dollars is this what the wolverine state needs to jumpstart its economy and rebuild its middle class panel as. an update about boston right after the break.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see so. the other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. of potentially deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast it's expected to hit stunning in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. but we're watching is the very heavy snow moving into boston proper earlier today it was very sticky you can see it start to become much more powdery down to the bottom line there is still a lot of snow out near

a place for snowball fight if. decent it is been a pretty incredible day there and the record snowfall throughout much of it might still be a slog through driving lessons some emergency vehicles are exceptional. the worst cure for those things. white house to give it to a radio guy and call it a zero minestrone click off that i want you to watch closely to do because you've never seen anything like this i'm told.