actually think to take a long hard look to decide what are we going to do going forward because where we're flexible is troop counts we can move up and down in that but when it comes to technology speed things like a lot of manning people do a fifth term you're you're completely right on this time i think what we hopefully will see from the pentagon leon panetta is they will say let's make some cuts and some of the systems that we're not using i'm pretty like i mean there's little so many things that you could turn switches off at the pentagon and i guarantee you nothing would happen that's which cost us a million dollars to put up and to begin with so i think you will hopefully see some about a balanced approach from leon panetta going into this on ways that we can sort of help to make sure that we're not cutting retirement for our retired soldiers and our soldiers are calling on the ground but one thing that i do want to point out is that you know this culture of war that the republicans are trying to perpetuate now they're out there saying this is horrible you can't cut the defense department all of these costs are systems that we're not using on top of that we're keeping our troop levels above the troop level that they were before nine eleven and on top of that we're not in war ladies and gentlemen we are not in war right now we have no active war our job what and where the focus of the money is going is the special operations like troops that would kill present that killed osama bin laden and

that's where it needs to go and we need to get smart rather than big ok last question quick fire one of the big stories of the week was a dust up in the phoenix desert president obama and arizona governor jan brewer had what reporters are describing as a heated exchange over how brewer characterized a meeting the two had back in two thousand and ten in her new book but i have a feeling there's more to the story that hasn't come out yet so what was jan brewer really telling president obama on the tarmac wednesday did she say. against you mine freddie and your little guy too or i've never seen you can you know up close can i touch you or not one more step till i see your papers please i think i think she may have actually been plugging the book because if you saw the reaction after that amazon it like went through the roof as soon as the president mentioned it so yeah i think she may have been plugging the book and i think it's the you know his president is born his father was born in a foreign country would be illegal. and i think. she was saying i don't have to run

a present for president so my book and frankly i think that what he was saying was just hold still we need to get a good shot so i can sell more of my books. it's amazing we have a consensus guys thanks so much vince richard. dan thank you very much for being with us. so let's say there's a bank in fact let's say there's a bank that calls itself the bank of america that's a pretty high standard for a bank to hold itself to the bank of america what kind of behavior would you expect from the so-called bank of america expected to be right in the thick of the

financial crisis that destroyed the american economy in two thousand and eight and then had to come begging to we the taxpayers customers of the bank for a bailout to the tune of forty five billion bucks would you expect this bank of america to be in the business of. merican home buyers conning them into buying risky subprime mortgages even though these same homebuyers could have afforded safe fixed rate mortgages would you expect this bank of america to thank us the american taxpayers for the forty five billion dollars bailout by trying to impose a five dollars credit card fee for using a.t.m. . how about this would you expect this bank of america to take our most important right as americans a right to free speech and tell us customers of the bank as long as we want to do business with them we have to give up our first member rights i wouldn't expect

that and i don't think that you would either if that's exactly what the bank of america has done over the last few years and is doing all right now. businessweek is reporting that the bank of america is trying to impede an investigation by the state of arizona fishel investigation into that banks mortgage lending practices and they're doing it and that what the bank is trying to do is stop this whole investigation by cutting a deal with the homeowners that have been screwed over in the past and the deal works like this the bank of america will modify the mortgage for any homeowner on the verge of default given lower monthly payments so that they can afford you know two percent forty year cut payments drastically what do they want exchange for that i mean you know sounds like a sweet deal right make your home affordable. change business week's this

is a quote from business week the borrower this is the this is the document that the bank is having you sign if you want to keep your house right the borrower will remove and delete any on line statements regarding this dispute including without limitation postings on facebook twitter and similar websites and not make any statements the defame disparage or in any way criticize the bank's reputation practices or conduct according to documents filed in state court in phoenix the borrower's name and address were redacted. you get that after there after they screw their customers into an exploding mortgage the bank of america is offering to help out we'll help ya doubt they're worried here will extend the term of your lawn all the way out to forty years will take the interest rate down to two percent it's

going to be easy in your payments are going to be cut dramatically you can afford to stay in your house but only as long as you promise to keep your mouths shut and not talk smack about the bank of america. but the bank of america is trying to do basically is to white watch the internet maybe we the taxpayers should have made a similar deal back in two thousand and eight gabb bank of america will give you a forty five billion dollar bailout it should be the second largest corporation in america behind walmart. companies of course but in exchange for that you'll have to refinance all our homes let us opt out all those crummy mortgages shoved down our throats or you hustled us into or you didn't even tell people they were eligible for. the the that they were eligible for good ones. also you have to stop buying and selling dangerous derivatives that ken lay and phil gramm

helped invent back when phil graham's wife wendy was on the board of enron and caused this crisis in the first place the commodity futures modernization act that led to all these derivatives weird sadik financial instruments that crashed the system no more fine print no more huge overdraft fees to bitch do we have a deal. unfortunately it doesn't work that way in the united states of america because corporations which aren't just people but are super people have far too much power they have the power to silence us and avoid punishment for their crimes you know all the time you hear republicans in the tea party and libertarians say do you really want the government telling us what we can say you are the government telling us what we can do or what we can buy but never is the other half of that question asked which is do you really want transnational corporations like bank of america to be so big that they can tell us what we can say and i know i'd much

rather have government telling me what i can do because at least then i have a say i have a vote and i can throw the bums out of office if i don't like what they're doing or try talking to a c.e.o. of a major corporation tried telling the bank of america c.e.o. that you want him to refinance your mortgage try go into corporate headquarters and protesting against unfair mortgage practices because what'll happen and get arrested corporations have no accountability to the people whereas the government actually does no congressman can punish you for talking smack about him you can even trash him in a t.v. ad the point is this is just the latest example of the challengeable power of corporations in america and how they use it to screw we the people over to the point that we're not even allowed to speak the truth but there's a glimmer of hope here corporations like the bank of america know that their grip on power is slipping they be stupid not to know with all the action on the streets

over the last four months occupy movement and they know that social media is an important tool for organizing the people against corporate power just look at what happened during the arab spring that's why the bank of america is making this ridiculous effort to censor twitter and facebook it's a sign of fear of weakness and it's a sign that what we the people have been doing the doing for the last few months is working. so let's keep it up go to move to amend or get involved as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech dot org and r t dot com also check out our two you tube channels there are lots of thom hartmann dot com shows also bales of free video podcast on i tunes and we have a free thom hartmann i phone an i pad app at the app store you said his feedback at twitter at tom underscore hartman on facebook at tom underscore our our blogs message boards the telephone comment line at tom r. . and don't forget democracy begins when you show up and you say i'm going to

participate i'm going to get out there i'm going to occupy something to show up show up at a political party show up at a rally join a movement movement politics get out there get active tag your it see next week. we'll see the. technology innovations all the developments around russia we've got the future covered.

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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 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 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 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 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'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 a president in 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 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 got 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 hazard of going against us we want them to see that we're so strong they couldn't possibly the fetus. rights 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 and he build fifty two year 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 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 to veterans benefits now personally i think that we're going to do just fine with eighty thousand fewer troops and twenty thousand fewer marines that 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 and 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. the 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 the 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 asked 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 if these warnings have been made before specifically by federal reserve chairman ben bernanke and when the cuts 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 it with me is anthony rent as the director of economic research for the reason 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 buildup 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 out so it's two point

eight for now but if the trend of what we see now that the is anywhere close to where it's been the numbers probably get revised down even 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 this you know the 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 then yeah 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 if 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's 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 out this week essentially saying that interest rates are going to stay where they're out until at least twenty four teen you know some people get really excited about that because that means the 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 the 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 sea 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 kerry trees 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 jobs 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 attorneys generals that would look into mortgage fraud if you have with you you're going to general direction i mean we all have to go and he has got a kind of cards that are about. hard core 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 that 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 we'll 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 making it impossible to do 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 state 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 you know it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't help everybody 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 aren't 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. it i've seen around here yeah but i don't know how much fun i don't change there how it is racial how much control how much you know of the moves you think are really plays well at the very least geithner 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 eyes 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 we will say hopefully he makes a better choice hopefully expenditure and 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 there it's about clinton as you can hear behind me loud explosions that lead. me to.

go they gave. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so 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 tom harvey welcome to the big picture.