welcome to the ilona show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey working we live in washington d.c. now today 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 randy 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 will 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 morphy 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 probably have more bases here at home we were closing them down in ninety nine is the building i'm 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 the president on states who said he is going to cut veterans benefits cut our military at a time when these folks are four five six seven tours coming back in. out of jobs

sacrificing 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 that discussed under this president and 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 to the hazards of going against us we want them to see that we're so strong they couldn't possibly to feed us. 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 ron 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 mones what president obama is doing to his 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 weapon 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 or room but i'm just going to point out a few point 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 two year olds break a few things down there right know 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 and that 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 veterans benefits now 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 would tell them to quit their grandstanding and point out exactly what it is that bothers them in this new budget but no i guess there just wasn't enough time for that last night they had much more important questions to ask. but i ask each of these gentlemen why they think very wise 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 for 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 if these warnings have been made before specifically by federal reserve chairman ben bernanke but when you cut it's going to have an impact on growth but do these numbers tell us that austerity is the right or wrong way to go here to discuss with me as 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 over 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 out so it's two point eight for now but if the trend of what we've seen out of. is anywhere close to where it's been that number's probably going to revise down even lower than where it's at stephen weaker and you would think that after all that stimulus spending that we would be 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 actually did people like 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 good 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 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 fact that it had this really rosy outlook about two thousand and ten which are two thousand and eleven with all that was going to be ridiculous it was to bring us 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 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 twist absolute futon if you ask anybody that's looking the markets. do using 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 there 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 about 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 or you wouldn't you

know you're going to general direction i mean all that well and he's got a kind of resent 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 year 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 and look at what in our in our approach why they do that because they don't know how or because they can't for exams. 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 that filed complaints are no longer calling them back turns out the bank of america said hey you will help me re modify you know give you a lower rate if you promise to never ever speak ill of us again 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 but they are making it impossible 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 it was but to be able to qualify for any kind of a program like you outlined a less 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 bill it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't help any of our towns really good in a state of the union address it's not like they're going to do that i'm going to try and sort of 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 obama gets reelected he's not going to be sticking around for that second term. read it i mean you're out of here yeah but i don't know if i can i am i fear not i'll change the meaning of the regime 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 name of the actual daily anybody any brains and somebody else maybe just maybe just as bad but it almost can't possibly be worse than them 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 i well we will see hopefully he makes a better choice hopefully exploratory anthony thanks much for joining us tonight. well coming up next we're going to show you some shocking statistics on private prisons holding on documented immigrants and we're going to take a look into opposition research and the industry that can make or break a political campaign.

well. it's technology innovations all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered. well by now it's no secret that immigration is an issue that most if not all americans have a very strong opinion on and this monday when n.b.c. hosted a republican debate mitt romney had the following suggestion as a solution to this immigration problem well the answer is self deportation which is people decide that they could do better by going home because they can't find work here because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here and so we're not going to round people up. now last night's c.n.n. debate immigration talk continued with mitt slightly just slightly backing off that

plan meanwhile president obama who got the majority in two thousand and eight and yet hasn't delivered on his promise of comprehensive immigration reform reminded voters in a state of the union address this week that it is still part of the plan. payments of action of excuses we should be working on clamp lanson immigration reform now. now another thing the president did that night was reach out to republicans and talk about how where students are involved he's been very tough and border crossings have decreased but it's not really something to brag about from a human perspective we told you before about obama's record setting deportation record his administration sent three hundred ninety six thousand undocumented immigrants out of the u.s. and that was just in two thousand and eleven let's take a look at this from a different perspective a daily perspective to the huffington post is found through a freedom of information act requests that ice is responsible for holding thirty

two thousand people in immigration detention without any charges on a single day and that was october third of two thousand and eleven now amongst those who were arrested forty percent were convicted of any crime nor awaiting a trial the rest are there for low level offenses like duis or minor drug charges and only a few of them were actually accused of violent crimes to having imposed does make a good point here that being an undocumented immigrant is on its head a civil offense and not a criminal one met immediately with the punishment of spending time behind bars so why are so many of these immigrants actually ending up in jail we see it all comes down to money private prisons that make a killing of undocumented immigrants because they can hold them in their prisons allowing the detention centers to meet their financial goals and a statement of as you see the corrections corporation of america wrote immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal state and local level also could it materially adverse impact us so for them a locking up immigrants and throwing away the key is simply

a business strategy the private prisons choose to overlook how this affects those behind bars who are too often forgotten they also forget how this affects american taxpayers it costs about two million dollars a day to keep immigrants detained while i sorted out their paperwork and decided what to do with the. people and what i said the obama administration are doing with undocumented immigrants is completely ridiculous they're clearly making a business out of rounding people up not consider the fact that these are humans they have families they have their own lives to live and i swear that they're trying to shift away from detaining innocent people with new policies but with figures like the ones we've just shared with you seems like they say one thing and do another so hopefully this will get the american people to wake up and take note of our screwed up policies and encourage our lawmakers to try to make it right. well the two years since the citizens united ruling we've seen shifting attitudes not only as public discontent growing towards the influence of money and politics but so was the discontent from republican candidates gingrich and mitt romney of

recently be mown the negative campaigning done by super pacs you see digging up the dirt on candidates as exist in our system for a long long time there's just more money and more of it is nations putting that kind of stuff out now and in fact if play such a vital role and is so ingrained that sometimes the candidates themselves forget what their own campaign's put out to attack their competitors take mitt romney at last night's debate for example. the rhetoric on immigration go there has been intense as you well know as all four of you know anyone who watches television goes you've had a good running saying that speaker gingrich called spanish quote the language of the ghetto what do you mean by that i haven't seen the ad so i'm sorry i don't get to see all the t.v. ads we did double check just no governor that we talked about quoted you as saying that speaker gingrich called spanish the language of the ghetto we just double checked there was one of your ads it's running here in florida. on the radio and at the end you say i'm mitt romney and i approved this so it is

a very serious question. so who are the people who work for various campaigns across the country to find the negative stories and dig up all the dirt and how does it really affect the playing field joining me from our studio in new york to discuss this is somebody who's been uncovering the barry truth about political candidates for years huffman the author of the book we're with nobody to insiders reveal the dark side of american politics out i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and first you know tell us how many years exactly did you spend you know how long you've been working on digging up dirt on people. well thank you for having me and i should correct one thing my partner in research michael rigby and is also my co-author of the book we've been doing it for eighteen years and so all across the country and it's just sort of been a long very interesting road trip about not only politics but just about the country and the way the political system is evolving over time but so how have you

seen it evolve in the last eighteen years that you've been doing this you know what is it that you think that the average american probably has no idea is going on behind the scenes when when candidates are campaigning. i think when we started it was easier to shop voters you know eighteen years ago people were just they hadn't been exposed to as much the biggest change probably that we've seen is in the current cycle after citizens united. you can't overstate the importance of what this is done the money that has been pumped into the campaigns in ways that are not precisely accountable to the candidates themselves and so that negative ads that you're seeing on t.v. are all based on opposition research that someone is doing out there that's changing the landscape completely and the internet of course has had a huge impact to our whole purpose is to document information the internet sometimes puts information out there that becomes true but repetition without

documentation which is a little distressing to us having done this for so long was the mention of course that citizens united is change the playing field so i'm assuming that demand for people to do opposition research has gone up and what kind of an industry is this exactly how much money are we talking about and how much more can we seeing it skyrocket. well you know if it goes through the whole stretch every strata of politics so a presidential campaign could be hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes we might actually work on a very small campaign. it depends on how how interested they are in winning that race and that maybe just a few thousand dollars you know you have to be very flexible but we haven't really seen the full impact of citizens united yet because this is the first election that has come about since that ruling and with the super pacs able to invest unlimited funds in political campaigns some of which is not entirely transparent and which is

not necessarily linked to the campaign you just have a entirely new mechanism for exerting great influence over over the election well how much do you think that negative campaigning really works you mentioned that it's a little tougher to shock you know the voters these days so what is it exactly that you think might really make or break someone it seems like infidelity doesn't really matter either. yeah i think in the case of infidelity normally the problem would be how the candidate reacts to it which is often the problem with opposition research is you know you throw something out there and maybe the voters don't really care but when you see how the man reacted which i think was the case with herman cain i think his response to the attacks were as much of a problem as as the actual meat of the attack but the whole what we're seeing with the opposition research going on right now is it's just it's more of

a pervasive picture of the candidate that's being brought in from a lot of different sources you don't have people that are just saying oh there's this one thing he had a dui or whatever you know there used to be you would just fund this one thing you would throw that out there and they would build a whole campaign around it and now there's more of a comprehensive look at a candidate and you look at what what we know about him then how that might indicate how he's going to lead in the future so it's a little more nuanced now than it was is there anything that is too racy or that goes too far have you ever found some kind of dirt on a candidate that. even their competitors weren't willing to put out there to the public. absolutely and people are always surprised to hear that but you can't campaigns really don't especially congressional campaigns. statewide campaigns presidential campaigns or their own animal but but they don't really want to go deep negative if they don't have to because there's always the risk of blowback and

so yeah we have definitely brought things into them that they look at and everybody's like whoa you know i don't want to even be associated with that and any advantage sometime in that. well i can i won't i can't name names because you know it was a confidentiality agreement with the campaign that we were actually working for but it was it was a case where there was some question of some criminal activity that and allegations of sexual abuse of children and because they really couldn't be proved and this was years ago so don't get excited i'm not you're not going to have to go find out who this was but it didn't come out because our candidate just said you know we're all going to look bad if this comes out we had mixed feelings about it because it did seem a little you know and a little slimy but if it was true it needed to be known and as it turned out the candidate was elected and imploded

a lot of other things happened that work sort of related to what had happened before but that's and there were a few other cases where on at least that's how do you because we'll have time for one more question here you know the book is called we're with nobody so how does that work where you work for anybody you don't care what their political background is you have no allegiance to a political party or their ideals. you know i'm a democrat and that those are my ideals they don't really come into play in the way that we do our work because we have to be objective we mostly work for democrats who work for republicans against republicans because we're. we're going to research you and your opponent and we're going to look at you the same way and the only way our ideology comes into play is and who gets our awards. well it's very interesting and i think it's something that you know most americans have no idea what a huge industry this really is and how much it drives campaigns that thanks so much for joining us tonight. thanks for having me. on the show the

gingrich campaign are trying to pick a fight with mitt romney. based on the beliefs of the occupy movement is the first official occupy candidate but could we see all the. liable is gone and singapore this is our team glad to have syria as a result of almost a year edges closer to the capital as armed opposition fighters try to control of the outskirts of damascus meanwhile the united nations security council is considering another motion on a possible resolution to the conflict but with sharp differences among members on how to give the prolonging the bloodshed. with leaders are accused of

torturing and killing the detainee used by humanitarian aid organization medicines sans frontiers is pulling out after seeing evidence of gross abuse of a detainee is raising questions among human rights groups about the only goal of how. close to cyber war thousands gather outside the polish presidential palace in the country's seven day of protests against an international web anti-piracy which activists say threatens internet freedom with warsaw has signed up to a french m.e.p. has also put over the so-called. calling of the controversial treaty and trade. those are the headlines up next to the second part of the show from our washington d.c. studios.