yes it's hard to see how rights and protect can be applied to somewhere like syria for example you really read my mind you read my mind exactly ok. but i think i think its use in libya was very successful this wasn't regime change it was a revolution and. what whatever they were there with the new and original star the recognition nic there were no injuries each agency and when it did witness bin regimes if there had a little nato bombs in there would not have been a regime change without nato bombs r.v.s. well i think you're probably right. going to go on it was very clear from what was said beside what was said selfishly it was very clear that the countries involved including the united states welcomed regime change if you look at the interviews that president obama secretary clinton and so on secretary gates at the time gave it was very clear from the beginning that in

a sense the coalition would not simply abide by nine hundred seventy three implications of one thousand nine hundred seventy three but that the regime change was very much part and parcel of. collective durgan i could say with you wasn't that an abuse of the resolution resolution one hundred seventy three. well i think there are many people that argue that indeed what the coalition then they went far beyond demanded that nine hundred seventy three allowed for them and therefore i think your question about whether the responsibility to protect still can still work is indeed a very good one libya indeed was a very unique case and part because of the language that was used by the regime and so on and so it becomes much more difficult remember in libya you had the arab league on board very early on you had the fact that russia and china were willing to abstain or rather than veto nine hundred seventy three i think that becomes much

more difficult in a case like syria where particularly russia has a more direct interest it doesn't make it impossible i think but the diplomatic process to get to the kind of nine hundred seventy three type of resolution that we've seen on libya will prove to be much more difficult in syria and perhaps in the end may not happen ok diana fine go to you can you tell me who the hell is the n.p.c. who are these people after all these months it's still very opaque who are they. well you know we we know that these are people who who who were privileged and under the old regime and who decided they could be more privileged under a western style regime i think you know this thing about wanting democracy when when it seems that i enter here because this is not your only us when i have even finished i haven't said anything and you're interrupting me and i am saying there

you have. it it which are simply not true what my problem. my problem with the m.t.c. is that a lot of the. exiles that have come back and some of my actually lived in the suburbs of langley and that's my issue ok my issue is that these are western sarah gets and i saw this as a matter of fact one of the issues and libya is right now that when you talk to libyans they refer to the t.n.c. the transitional council as a government of foreigners and so i think you put your finger right on the mark these are not cronies of gadhafi as a matter of fact most of those people have been arranged out the t.n.c. has brought in and i'm not even if you were going to. lose a number of them were exiles. in a sense that is part of the problem and why they are not legitimate is because they really have no standing in the country at this point to make you want to jump in they're going to have to remember with the end to see that many of these are brave people who were

a great risk from gadhafi when they joined the revolution of the last radical of being. able to go down anywhere you want to realize what a good escape i think i mean these are people that had western backing. the now we live you went to see them took them to paris they were not risking very much they were sitting in benghazi under western protection whatever happened to the rest of this is they were already taken care of nic this is a this is a ridiculous see this is really going to. so little guys who went into a sort of support were put in power by the west and if you had been in benghazi and seen the chaos of it in february march there was a spontaneous revolution and the people who stepped forward to join me and to see were completely disorganized there was no western backing for them at the beginning they call western backing later when he was under attack actually from good from curfews time but i think this was so this was a revolution it wasn't

a regime change the writ of revolution came first and then the western backing came . and it was a rebellion if you it was a rebellion that was very quickly an armed rebellion and it is quite normal for governments wherever they are to repress an armed rebellion i'm sure that would happen in the u.k. as it is the only i did say so anywhere else and we cannot go around the. world supporting every single uprising in every single country no we just chose it because they don't like gadhafi and i thought this was an easy one this would there was no real armed forces as mr vandeleur have pointed out there was no real army it was a looked like a very very easy war to win and it was pretty easy although it took longer than they wanted and then afterwards there's chaos but as far as getting rid of could

think it looked so easy it was tempting and that's why he did that and now they're going to point out there's a lot of oil there as well or that i can change gears really change gears here there's a lot of oh oh there's a lot of money there's a lot of there other jerk i'd like to go to you first it's a little out of resources and i listen i was so let me change here is we're running out of trying to help a africa become independent i want to change gears here and i want to go to work first i mean i want to look at interventions here and i'm going to include afghanistan and iraq ok when we have regime. change do you think that countries where there's a western intervention like we have with libya we have with iraq and we have with afghanistan and then compare it to like where there wasn't and there is a regime change when we look at tunisia and egypt don't you think it's indigenous change of power there's a better chance for democracy like we have in egypt like we have in tunisia because western interventions military interventions slow it down or curb it or warp it and that's what we're seeing right now do you think that's fair. no i think that's

a fair point to make i think if you have western intervention it creates inevitably and i think we will see this in libya sooner rather than later also it creates some kind of resentment and so if you can have a kind of if you want to an indigenous movement against those in power in the end i think it's tells spells greater success but we should qualify that also if we look for example at egypt where you know the rebellion was indigenous was really local as a matter of fact we've not seen a great amount of change and egypt and it looks as if egypt in the end to may look very much the way you did before the rebellion started a year ago so i think in principle it's right and i think certainly in libya does it will turn out after said this all along to be much more of a nationalist uprising than anything else and so eventually i think. it will come to some extent haunt the west but i think you're absolutely right local is better

but we haven't we should remember also a local was possible in the case of egypt and tunisia very you had a national army that could serve as a buffer between the regime and the people the point was that in libya you had no national army you had militias that stood you know i have to be has the dead were there at the behest of the gadhafi government when in libya the uprising started you truly had an implosion and what read it was revealed was what we haven't seen in every other country so far that there's a total vacuum of power a total vacuum of institutions that the other speakers have really talked about and that makes it much much more difficult whether that is with western intervention or without western intervention to create a modern state in libya ok ok nic i'm going to you the last word you have thirty i know that is i know you want to make please let me go to nic because you're going to get messier in libya. well yes i think it is going to be messy i think there's

going to be several years of turmoil there maybe some bloodshed and maybe fighting between militias but i don't think it will become a civil war and you have to remember we're talking about western intervention this is a very limited western intervention how many western troops are there in libya at the moment. ok gentlemen and lady look like you all look like your own separate militias on this program many thanks to my guest today in hanover paris and in london and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are to see you next time and remember. to. download the official antti allocation to your i pod touch from the camps to.

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welcome to the lone a show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey working we live in washington d.c. now and i are going to take a look at new economic figures coming out for the us ample take a look at some of the goals that obama laid out in his state of the union address that includes the you in the new unit take on mortgage fraud reasons anthony rand is going to help us hash it all out then we're going to speak to the very first official occupy candidate his twenty nine year old who considers himself part of

the occupy philadelphia movement and he's running for congress in the democratic primary so is going the way of the tea party really going to be looked at in a positive way by the occupiers and as republican candidates bemoan the influence of negative campaigning in the elections we'll speak to somebody who's been doing opposition research for years and has written about this political underworld in a new book so just how much money goes into it and what are the shady practices that most americans don't know about we're going to all that and more for tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so it's a nice we're going to start off by doing a little bit of backtracking you see last night there was yet another republican debate this one hosted by c.n.n. and moderated by wolf blitzer and conspicuously absent from last night's debate was talk about defense spending and whether it's the right or wrong way to go a little odd considering that in debates prior we've heard the candidates say

a lot about what they think needs to happen there i don't want to cut defense money i want to bring the troops home i'd probably have more bases here at home we were closing them down in the one nine hundred ninety s. and building them overseas that's how we got into trouble so we would save a lot more money and have a stronger national defense and that's what we should do we have for as you know in states who said he is going to cut veterans' benefits cut our military at a time when these folks are our four five six seven tours coming back in and out of jobs sacrificed. everything for this country in the present states can't cut one penny out of the social welfare system and he wants to cut a trillion dollars out of our military and hit our veterans and that's just just under this president in a prior presidents we keep on shrinking our navy our navy is now smaller than any time since one thousand nine hundred seventeen and the president is building roughly nine ships a year with a raise that to fifteen ships a year not because we want to go to war with anyone but because we don't want

anyone to take the the hazard of going against us we want them to see that we're so strong they couldn't possibly defeatist. right so you could be saying well no no we've already heard what the candidates have to say about defense spending why would we want to listen to any more we see yesterday the obama administration released their defense budget with all of the details i mean they laid out specifically where the four hundred fifty billion dollars in cuts over the next ten years will be falling so you think now there's an official plan c.n.n. it would have made the candidates revisit their statements from paul for example and i think we already know how ron paul's feel about all this feels about military spending so maybe we wouldn't be really heard anything new there but mitt romney the candidate would constantly be mown what president obama is doing to this country supposedly apologizing for america abroad which by the way he's never done and cutting the navy and making us less safe or rick santorum who thinks that all the defense cuts are falling on the backs of veterans and instead of offering up

that the administration cuts from some incredibly expensive and completely unnecessary weapons systems and says instead it says chop away its social programs so let me just give you a few details about what exactly is in this new plan that president obama and leon panetta have laid out if you want a really good read out i suggest you get a wired stage room but i'm just going to point out a few important facts. first and foremost if you want to address mitt romney's claim that our navy pales in comparison to the navy that we had in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight at the obama administration is not building enough ships that he build fifty to year once break a few things down there right no the obama administration is not going to be building fifteen ships a year because guess what mitt that will cost billions of dollars more and here i thought you were in a fan of big government spending secondly to even try to compare our naval fleet today to that of nine hundred seventeen is absolutely ridiculous and anybody who works in defense can tell you that the entire point of the new strategy the new weapons of the us is supposed to be about is all about quality and not quantity

remember panetta is whole line about a smaller leaner but more agile flexible and technologically advanced force so some ships need to be retired because they don't even have the capability to shoot missiles the way the latest ones do now there are substantial cuts being made to military personnel and to veterans benefits personally i think that we're going to do just fine with eighty thousand fewer troops and twenty thousand fewer marines at the entire plan from now on is not to long out drawn long drawn out land wars anymore especially if you consider that a lot more money is going towards buying fancy new drones according to obama's new budget there is going to be funds for sixty five new predator and reaper drones now what i think is complete b.s. is that the f. thirty five joint strike fighter family now the most expensive weapon system we've ever invested in just got a reboost from defense secretary leon panetta despite consistent flaws being found so that's what should go not the funds to the veterans benefits but anyway i think

i'm getting ahead of myself here the whole point is that where defense cuts will land is now very clear thanks to this very detailed plan that has been released the secretary of defense the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff all say that just because there are cuts coming in no way does that lead to a military decline in fact defense spending is going to continue to grow for the next ten years even with the four hundred. billion cuts it just won't grow as much as it has been every year since nine eleven and so when you have so many of the republican candidates attacking the president for defense cuts being hypocrites calling for less government spending and yet wanting to build fifty new navy ships a year you just would think that maybe c.n.n. and wolf blitzer want to ask them a few specifics but tell them to quit their grandstanding and point out exactly what it is that bothers them in this new budget but i guess there just wasn't enough time for that last night they had much more important questions to ask but ask each of these gentlemen why they think vera was would make

a great first lady congressman paul. so who's going to be the best first lady question away but as commander in chief what exactly do you think of the strategic outlook and the increased spending on defense has been laid out by the administration and the pentagon yeah that little bit they chose to miss. well there are some new economic figures coming out today showing that u.s. g.d.p. expanded at a two point eight percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year that was the fastest pace in want to have years for u.s. economic growth of it was again lower than what economists were expecting to answer why maybe we should look at government spending which fell by two point one percent in the last quarter which is the biggest drop since one nine hundred seventy one according to bloomberg and we can't say that these warnings have been made before specifically by the federal reserve chairman ben bernanke and when he cuts it's

going to have an impact on growth but do these numbers tell us the austerity is the right or wrong way to go here to discuss it with me is anthony rant as the director of economic research for the reason foundation anthony thanks for coming back on the show are we think of this g.d.p. growth two point eight percent is it good or is it just not good enough it's a really weak number i mean not only were people expecting more but more importantly if you look at what comprises most of what is in the two point numbers it's inventory building and we saw this happen last year where towards the end of the year there's a lot of inventory build up in most businesses didn't quite meet the demand and so you're going to see lower economic growth coming in the next couple quarters if that's really sort of where the trend is at but the other thing is a majority of g.d.p. numbers that have come out the first quarter first the first time advanced numbers are come out over the past four or so years they get revised down so it's two point

eight for now but if the trend of what we see now that be a is anywhere close to where it's been the numbers probably going to be revised down a bit lower than where it's at stephen weaker and you would think that after all that stimulus spending that we would be you know in such a fantastic place for the stimulus spending is long gone right and so this is part of the problem here is that like i mentioned the government spending went down by two point one percent. yeah i think like that and bernanke you say that this is what happens when you cut and so i mean do you think that affects the discussion at all either every republican candidate is still calling for more cuts in government spending and they think that a magically make the economy grow well to the degree that growth in the economy is dependent on the government spending that when you cut the you know when you cut government spending then you're going to have a drop off in the economy i think that's where the idea that austerity is helpful sort of comes into play here is it's not helpful in the immediate quarter after you cut it's helpful down the line because you're removing a government which is in sort of intruding on the private sector and then when to

pull back the government you are the private sector to step in a place then you know three four quarters down the line that's really going to see a lot more robust growth what we have seen over the past three years of sort of massive spending and bush you know the bush administration spending is just even both negative growth in two thousand and nine but even then coming out of the recession you know one percent growth one point seven one point three two point eight revised down to two point three just really tepid growth not the kind of robust growth that we're used to seeing in an economy that's largely driven by the private sector what do you think about ben bernanke coming out this week essentially saying that interest rates are going to stay where they're out until at least twenty four you know some people get overly excited about that because that means that interest rates are staying low but it also seems like kind of a gloomy outlook because he's saying that we think things are still going to be pretty bad moving along pretty slowly for the next two to three years at least he's being honest this time as opposed to last year in the face of that had this really rosy outlook about two thousand and seven which are two thousand and eleven which i thought was going to be ridiculous at least to being honest this time but the idea

that we're going to keep interest rates low through two thousand and fourteen if you look at i mean that was just the phone see decision if you look at some of what the other fed governors are looking at their thing about two thousand and two two thousand and sixteen it is it is unbelievably asinine there's no other word for it i mean it is it is mind boggling you're wrong. the approach of the fed has been. highly interventionist over the past several years it is done absolutely nothing positive q.e. two absolutely operation to us absolutely if you ask anybody that's looking the markets. do you mean the exact same words unless you're some of the people that are able to benefit from a lot of the carry trades and be able to use this free fed money to invest on your own behalf beyond that it's not helpful at all and the idea that we're going to continue to be pushing this out through at least two thousand and fourteen is that's really dour that's you know that's going to be making this vision of what we could be that long come true and so this is where we get to the problem that you

and i consistently talk about is that perhaps before you think about having incredibly low interest rates you need to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people that have homes that are underwater right that are already just so far down in the dumps that they can't even take advantage of these things right now and so president obama in his state of the union address announced i don't don't know why it took him three years to do it you know to finally create a unit to look into some of the mortgage fraud what do you think that what's going to help we've got people that have been looking into mortgage fraud you've got state attorney generals that would look into mortgage fraud if you have with you your attorney general eric schneiderman all that well and he's got a lot of her exact about. hardcore about it and he's been hard core since he stepped into office as attorney general and he's going to be leading up this unit which is basically just a federal version of what the states have been doing already. it's it's great we need to be stopping mortgage fraud i'm not in favor of mortgage fraud but this federal unit does almost almost nothing to change the actual nature of what's going

on in our in our approach why they do you know because they don't know how or because they can't for example let me tell you about a little story that we did on yesterday's show in arizona where the state is trying to do this and look into bank of america and suddenly all these people the filed complaints are no longer calling them back turns out the bank of america said hey i will help you re modify you know give you a lower rate if you promise to never ever speak ill of us. and they just silenced everybody and i guess when you need help from the bank what are you going to do it all right well i mean that it's coming out of a meeting in a box of all of that in the federal government or a unit possibly when there's a federal government can do just as much about that as arizona government can a story like that comes out which is pretty ridiculous by a bank to say something like that and it gets out of the media and then you can crap all over the bank for saying that having a federal mortgage unit doesn't make those stories come out anymore in the states you know it's again it's not but we're it's not that i'm saying let's have more mortgage fraud it's let's not depend on this federal mortgage unit to do anything more than what the state attorney generals have already been able to do i don't

think it's going to help much we shouldn't be putting our faith in another one of these programs because it is largely a smokescreen just like the federal refund program that was also announced in the president's state of the union he said in context of we you know we need to get construction workers back on the job and we have all these homeowners that are underwater and people are struggling to make their mortgage payments so we're going to take a fee we're going to put on the banks and we're going to have a mortgage refinance program for people even beyond fannie mae and freddie macas essentially what he said but to be able to qualify for any kind of a program like you outlined last what the when the details come out is completely different than what he said you're going to have to be have been current on your mortgage for six months or more so it means that this program only helps people who have been able to make their payments presumably people that don't need federal government money to be able to make their payments so that's you know up to three thousand dollars as what he had around three thousand dollars that's that's great that's money but that's that's a stimulus really doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't help everyone is any of our towns really good in a state of the union address it's only going to do that i'm going to finance it on

our mortgage fraud unit sounds really great in a state of the union but it doesn't help us really quickly to timothy geithner and i guess this wasn't really shocking but he basically told bloomberg in an interview that if a lot gets reelected he's not going to be sticking around for that second term. right is i mean you're out of here yeah but i don't know. that i don't change their mind is very how much control how much you know of the moves you think are really plays well at the very least a guy who was deeply involved in the federal reserve in new york fed has oversight of wall street directly over the entire build up of the mortgage bubble the financial crisis at the very least that person should not be the secretary of the treasury so do you have any faith that he won't replace him with somebody just like i don't i mean you know they'd be laughing as he goes into the ice will daley anybody any brains and somebody else maybe just maybe just as bad but it almost can't possibly be worse than then having somebody that was deeply involved in all

that continue to try to clean up the mess and not be able to do anything about it well we will see hopefully he makes a better choice hopefully exhibitor anthony thanks much for joining us tonight. well coming up next with a show you some shocking statistics on private prisons holding on documents that immigrants are going to take a look into opposition research and the industry that can make or break political campaigns. people calling like you said for free and fair elections. and they're still reporting from the it's about clinton as you can hear behind me loud explosions. i mean.

i get it gave. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly 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 tom harpur welcome to the big picture.