welcome to the loner show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey coming live out of washington d.c. and tonight we're going to host our monday hangover panel taking a look at the rejection of austerity elections in france and greece protests in quebec and how could we forget about occupy the people are speaking but will politicians listen up then it turns out that the f.b.i. has been lobbying the top tech firms out there to not oppose a new bill they're pushing to create back doors so the government can have more access to your communications for surveillance purposes not only does that sound a lot like the one nine hundred eighty four come to life but can't the government

already get that access sanchez is going to break it down for us and our conservatives more susceptible to fear than liberals joshua holland is going to talk to us about some new research out there that suggests yes we're going to all of that have more freedom night including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the main three media decided to miss. now if you watch our show regularly then you've heard a lot about the f. twenty two raptor and the numerous problems that the stealth jet has had not only cost overruns which we'll get into in a minute but don't forget the entire fleet was grounded because of oxygen problems which were affecting pilots then the air force decided to let them fly again despite the fact that the problem had not been resolved now this weekend sixty minutes actually got to air force pilots who have refused to continue flying the jets to sit down and talk with them about it. when i did make that decision to to

pull the emergency action ring i couldn't find it i couldn't remember you know what part of the aircraft that was in the air force's josh's extreme disorientation resembled a condition called hypoxia or oxygen deprivation and for the twenty two pilots the vast majority will be coughing a lot of times other things laying down for bed at night after flying and getting just the spinning room feeling dizziness tumbling vertigo kind of stuff i had heard that other pilots because of their fears of crashing from their own vertigo whatever that they're taking out additional life insurance policies they are you know absolutely we are waiting for something to happen and if it happens nobody's going to be surprised i think it's a matter of time in your opinion is the f. twenty two safe to fly i'm not comfortable answering that question directly i am

not comfortable flying the f. twenty two right now. i am currently no flying the aircraft. let me just fill you in on the risks that these two pilots have taken in speaking out to the air force is a policy that if you refuse to fly your fired both of these men and have gone to congressman adam kinzinger of illinois who is himself an air force pilot to gain protection under the military whistleblower act i hope things go right for these two pilots that there are afforded protections and i think they're going to need this congress and because the pentagon does not exactly have the best track record in fact the project on government oversight recently got their hands on an internal pentagon report from two thousand and eleven that shockingly wasn't publicized before that shows the persistent sloppiness and disregard for the rules was in effect at the pentagon when it came to protecting whistleblowers but anyway let's get to the core of my argument tonight i think that it's great that sixty minutes did this story it's incredibly important we shouldn't be expecting our pilots to

risk their lives because of technical difficulties in the machines of their flying which the air force knows exists and yet hasn't fixed but in order to really put it in for of fact it as to what a giant error this is we have to talk about cost we have to ask why contracts worth hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are resulting in faulty cell fighters for whatever reason sixty minutes is kind of glossed over this time around odd considering that they had done a piece on the f. twenty two way back in one thousand nine hundred four and they kind of addressed it that. it was to have one mission against one enemy the soviet union well the soviet union maybe didn't buried but not the air force's new f. twenty two in fact getting in the air by the year two thousand and four is still the air force's number one priority and at one hundred sixty two million dollars a copy the fleet of f. twenty two would cost taxpayers more than seventy billion dollars making it one of the most expensive planes ever built. so that was in one nine hundred ninety four

today the estimates for what it actually cost per jet have skyrocketed depending on what measurement you use it's anywhere from one hundred thirty million to up to three hundred and sixty million per f. twenty two and how is there such a huge difference in the possible cost well it's a sad story that includes a lot of maintenance and upgrades to modernize the world's greatest fighter jet despite the fact that they were brand new so even though the government accountability office found that sixty seven billion dollars had already been spent they've estimated that at least another nine point seven billion would be spent on modernization another two billion on reliability improvements i think we can all guess what that's supposed to mean let's also not forget the best part of this original sixty minutes report was that it mentioned that these great stealth fighters were created to counter the soviets a threat that doesn't exist anymore and so this project which is one of the most expensive in history wasn't even used in iraq or afghanistan that know why sixty

minutes chose not to delve into it this time around i would definitely say that that was a miss but while they are at least highlighting the issues with the f. twenty two i have yet to see the rest of the mainstream media the cable networks really devote any time to this issue because the thing is it's not a one off there are contracts that are awarded to defense contractors who fudge chest tests and statistics to create weapon systems that don't work and we're the ones that are footing the bill and there's barely any accountability out there this is a big why it spread problem when you talk about the numbers and with all the talk about budget cuts in priorities the ryan budget the wants to get social programs in order to not come from defense it's not like they haven't had ample opportunity to bring it up but they don't once again they choose to miss. all right so it's only monday but there is a lot to talk about because the news does not stop over the weekend of boy it was

this weekend elections in france that resulted in sarkozy being kicked out the socialist candidate promising the end to all stared being voted in elections in greece putting the bailout in jeopardy and bringing in some hard core right wingers maybe also a rejection of austerity and student protesters in quebec are calling for free tuition so we're definitely seeing a shift in the public mood and we have to ask how all that is playing out here at home and our election will also center around the economy on monday hangover panel is here to hash all out. for you. joining me to discuss the evening is anthony read as though director of economic research for the reason foundation and eric thompson senior editor at the atlantic gentlemen thank you for joining me this evening good to be here ok so let's just recap what happened this weekend a little bit right if you want to talk about france francoise hollande the first socialist president has been elected now in france since the one nine hundred

eighty s. he's running on anti austerity pro growth he's going to scrap tax breaks for the rich that sarkozy put in there he wants to create he wants to get more from the people that are making a lot off of financial transactions and he saw himself as mr normal. the president of the ridge i guess you could say image that a lot of people got out of him in greece it's a little bit less coherent right because you have all of the mainstream candidates as you like to call them the people who have been going on are going along with with the austerity measures that have been inflicted upon greece because of the bailouts and so they're out and now you have some really far right wing parties that are gone a lot of support some really far left. parties that think of doing it that way but i've got more support things aren't resolved there yet but how do you think we should look at all of this i think this was a weekend of uprisings this is exactly what the e.u. didn't want to turn towards radicalization and it's exactly what a lot of people who said austerity isn't going to work said would happen if you

force a population that's already going into recession they're going to feel like their rights are being taken from them that their economic rights are at jeopardy and they're going to vote for somebody not in office whether it's from the left or the right i think we saw that in greece and i think to a certain extent we saw similar frustration with government in the direction of government in france and so even though we saw far right candidate brought to power in greece and a left candidate brought to power in france i think it was it was part of a similar attitude of whatever's happening right now we don't want to i think there's actually a couple different stories here i think i think. it's understandable psychologically the austerity measures don't feel good and so you're going to push back against what are looking looks like foreign powers coming in and telling you what to do which is why the far right groups the ones that are very anti immigrant and it's more of the first things that they said it's like what's the first thing you want to do we want to get rid of all the illegal immigrants the gain some sort of foothold in greece in france i sense that it's more of

a pushback against than actually a lot of favoritism towards the policies that president hall is going to put in place even he has admitted that his seventy five percent tax on millionaires in france isn't going to do that much to add to the budget i think there's definitely a protest movement but it's coming from a couple different sources i know i thought about seventy a fair assessment right and i did love everything into one piece there but the truth is when you say obviously the people are going to have a psychological reaction to stuff like this they're not going to like austerity because always in the short term when you inflict on sturdy then that means that you're going to suffer right wages are going to go down or your standard of living is going to go down in certain respects but a lot of people are using this as a point to say that austerity doesn't work austerity has failed and so we should. that here what he said i think the greek people have a good question when they're essentially saying at the polls tell me how this ends right now and unemployment is rising the economy is shrinking and yet still harsher austerity is scheduled to be on the horizon and they're saying what exactly is the

plan here what at what point are we suffering enough to do to a certain extent that germany says it's all right now we're going to unleash the next round of bailouts i mean one of the problems i think that europe has in general right now is that it has a monetary union without a fiscal union so in the united states if mississippi has a bad year bad decade bad century we don't debate whether or not we should raise taxes civically there or cut spending we just keep paying the medicaid that's because we're a fiscal union europe is a bunch of extremely different countries pulled together under one currency and that was falling apart and it doesn't make any sense for greece to be in the same currency as the rest of the european union but in the short term they're going to be and the result of that is going to be incredible pain for the greek people until they force the german and governments to either give them some sort of remarkable bailout or set forward the past that they can leave the european union and well i think one of the things that greece has to grapple with is not the sort of the question is is austerity working but is that particular austerity working because greece is actually it's almost the worst of all possible worlds for the greek

citizens because they have to go through all they have to take all this pain where bondholders are not having to take as much you know maybe fifty percent haircuts may seem like a lot but you know why why should it be seventy five percent haircuts for bond holders and on top of that greece is sticking in the fiscal union just in the monetary union just long enough for the euro to not hit other major european countries this bailout that greece has is not going to last for another ten fifteen years a venture to greece is going to have to default eventually greece is going to have to pull out of the euro when that happens the rest of europe europe is going to be more or less walled off from that effect and it's only going to hit greece greece should be upset not at a steady in general because the time. it is being forced upon them or the greek citizens have to go through pain the rest of europe doesn't have to feel the pain along with the well greased up an anomaly in that sense right but if you look at france if you look at the u.k. and people are specifically angry at austerity and so if you are a politician in the u.s. right now if you're mitt romney if you're barack obama here paul ryan they keep

putting budgets out there should you be paying a little bit more attention to your operate if you want to talk about another budget the paul ryan has introduced it once again very heavily social programs i think that a full one fourth of the budget in fact comes out of programs that directly help the poor and that includes meals on wheels food stamps and the like but he's doing that in order to offset cuts to defense and i mean i don't know is that a smart thing well it isn't so i don't say it was right everybody but i think it's unsurprising to note that both parties see in europe the validation of their own argument you know europe is a rorschach like any other piece of news and each side sees oh my god this proves everything i thought beforehand magically i mean the democrats are saying i think with with this race in this that this shows that austerity doesn't work that you can't enforce spending cuts and tax and we're not going to tax increases in the u.s. but spending cuts in a population that isn't growing very fast if you can't export your way or depreciate way out of the problem republicans like paul ryan are saying the reason

that we're in this situation the first place is because we didn't have smart budgeting and so this is a smart budget to prevent us from ever becoming like greece so that's what each side is saying. everybody you know what it was the point that really you can read almost whatever you want to europe we shouldn't be upset with the paul ryan budget throwing so much money at defense spending because of europe we should be upset it just by the very nature you know whatever on the opening story there's a lot of problems with that with the ryan budget and with how much money you want to spend a defense going forward in and of itself that can be a reason to sort of be frustrated the one thing to point out those the one thing the right budget does does not do is it's not gutting social programs as much as it's funneling a lot more. me towards governments towards military spending than it is toward social programs going forward the budget as a whole doesn't really cut spending it's it's all one sort of big. myth sort of it's a smokescreen that he's waiting out there to take the money away from one program

when you give it to another program then you're still cutting money from the president and they're going to be very well lot of other maybe you can put it that way but that doesn't mean it is over time. the size of government particularly by simply not paying medicare and social security the way that we expect it to i guess you can talk that much about social security but he's been for privatizing in the past i mean what's really happening is that he's he looks at all you know nine mandatory spending and he says let's shrink everything that is in defense to the point where you can you know john in the bathtub and then with defense that's more let's keep it where it is because i know that no republican is going to vote for a plan that shrinks defense the same way that i saw government republicans the just love to spend spend and spend and spend on defense i was going to play it out today but running out of time that was boring to me i want to talk about housing really quick anthony because i know that you recently put out a new report where basically you're arguing that the government just needs to get out of the mortgage investment market and sell let us hear more about the government has ninety percent of the mortgage origination market right now last

year ninety percent were government backed that means that combined with the bailout so we had for fannie mae and freddie mac. taxpayers are on the hook for five point eight trillion dollars and rising trillion five point eight trillion of mortgage debt that does not and that's before we even get into you know the larger budget concerns in the debt we're talking that needs to be rolled back and if you ask the white house they say yes we the government shouldn't be backing ninety percent of the mortgage market the house republicans of course are going to say the same thing the problem is as it stands right now there's no private sector money flowing to housing because a whole series of road blocks which is what we talk about in our study one of the big things is that right now the fannie mae and freddie mac. they have a big price competitive. they can out price anybody in the private sector towards buying mortgages so you don't have any private sector people coming in and competing with them and another big problem is that you have rating agencies that nobody trusts so private sector doesn't have any good way of measuring the risk in

these mortgages so they're not going to want to get in the game really quickly do you have any response to that conclusion or i mean one irony of this is that nobody's buying homes so you know one way to shrink the amount of mortgages that are on the government's payroll is for no one to take out mortgages anymore and it's interesting that you know we built so many single family homes in the run up to the great recession and right now we didn't we didn't build enough multifamily homes enough condos and that's where people really want to go right now because the young people who would be first time homeowners right now aren't buying houses because they're not making a lot of money and they're nervous as heck about the market so i think you know there's an irony here that we're becoming a nation of renters in a way that might actually help this debt burden that is on the government's budget yeah you're either or you're either living with your parents if you're a young person or if you can get out of your parents then you're definitely renting summer gentlemen thanks so much for joining me today thank you you thank. i have got to take a quick break but coming up that's the i once heard to be easier to spy on you and i want the tech companies to help us.

sometimes you see a story so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else. part of it and realize that everything you. are.

right it's time for you said it i read it right take time to respond to my brilliant and engaging viewer comments from facebook twitter and you tube because he has me to say i do listen now first i would respond to somebody who commented on our mainstream there's about the f.b.i. taking down another self created terror plot right that dead it tweeted at the lone a show are you seriously defending the halfwits that tried to blow up that bridge can you tell me your theories on roswell too well either you were listening to my

main three minutes or you choose to live in ignorant bliss where you believe everything off already tell you but the point is that even if these guys were half way through the trees to describe them we have to ask questions when the feds help conceive the plots find them provide the fakes plosives give the suspects ideas of how and where to use that even more importantly because this isn't some random conspiracy theory or a one off increasingly in the years post nine eleven we've seen many cases that look a lot like entrapment like i mentioned last week the new word for the christmas tree by. many others out there so you have to ask yourself do you want the author already creating criminals or catching real ones and i'm going to let the latter and next we have a common response to our skits poking fun at the obama campaign slogan for two thousand and twelve forward him ask radio set on used to be i hate the slogan it means let's forget about the miserable fails of the president the past four years and continue to not do anything about the heinous war crimes twelve to five years ago and you know why you bring up some really good points this is the

administration that's taking a line of look forward and not back time and time again that does include some of the were heinous acts of the bush administration like torture and the president talk about the wars that he inherited but he's too afraid to actually go after those who hold positions of power and then hold them accountable i also argue in much the same with wall street right they've got a lot of public chiding from the president when it's convenient when it suits his campaign which just released a new video pointing to how horrible the economy was when he took office but again no one has actually been held accountable and the truth is you can't always well in the past you need a leader that's going to think about the future of the country but when you let some of the biggest crimes go by without providing any closure makes it pretty damn hard to just move on and hope for the best but maybe obama is hoping that the next president will treat him with the same kindness looking forward not back when it comes to killing us citizens without due process and tearing the constitution into shreds and finally revealing g r if i mispronounce that on you tube alone is can

you tell if she could work at fox news if only she got herself a lot of meat so yeah i'm a pass on the bottom e and on fox news but i'll take the cute my rantings and i value back with more as usual later in the week. well here's yet another reminder that the government will do everything in its power to be able to intercept all of your communications on friday seen as declan mccullagh reported the f.b.i. has been lobbying top internet companies like yahoo google microsoft and facebook to not oppose a proposal that would force them to ride back doors for government surveillance now they've been meeting behind closed doors with these companies and the f.b.i. as general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law to amend the one thousand nine hundred four law called the communications assistance for law enforcement act now to find out the first time that we've heard of the push for this policy the f.b.i. has for years been fear mongering about what it calls the going dark problem meaning that as technology advances the fewer capabilities they have for surveillance in their investigations but can they actually do all this without the

big tech firms publicly not opposing the bill and does the government even need a backdoor act that to get to your communications here to discuss this with me is joined sanchez research fellow at the cato institute thanks so much for joining us tonight for starters this isn't the first time that we've heard something like this right in two thousand and ten there was a lot of fuss and so is this just a continuation of that is this an expansion of it i mean if it goes back along in two thousand and ten in the early ninety's and the f.b.i. put out a memo threatening you know warning that they would be unable to do any kind of wiretaps because phones will be encrypted you know that their own reports haven't borne that out at all but that led to the so-called crypto wars of the ninety's and there was a big fight in the mid ninety's i saw a copy of the second issue of wired magazine it's all about this. crackdown on encryption or law enforcement go completely blind and of course the encryption that they wisely did not try to stamp out at the time has become the absolute foundation

of the modern internet economy you could not have an internet economy without global strong encryption and you know the truth is that at this point that cat is out of the bag and they were right then they made the right call then. even if you thought they haven't it's sort of too late now the tools to have security encrypted and dispersed communications are out there so you know even if facebook makes itself more than secure by try and writing in back doors it's not clear how much good that's going to do well so people are going to find ways around it but then if that's the argument then why is it so scary that they want the companies to create backdoor you know i'm just curious how much to be honest right how much can the feds already get how much can the n.s.a. already do they even need a backdoor type of legislation and it is a little surreal to hear them using this is going dark phrase when we live in really i think the golden age of surveillance i mean you know we're learning for example that even local police about departments now routinely use cell phones to

physically track people i mean the idea even ten or fifteen years ago all the names i wouldn't call that of the golden age if you're if you're in the business of surveillance but you know the the level of access to information they have now would have been almost inconceivable fifteen years ago the idea that every person is effectively carrying a tracking device around with them and so it's really these small exceptions that are being treated as a kind of crisis for law enforcement seems absolutely bizarre i think what they are worried about is that if secure communication is easy and universal you know you're never going to get the smart criminals who know enough to use their own encryption maybe what they don't want is sort of stupid people stupid criminals basically to accidentally get the benefit of secure systems for everyone the trouble is you know building in a back door does mean pretty much by definition you have to engineer everything to be less secure for everyone are they mostly worried about you know are they focusing on e-mails on facebook messages that you write with your friends or is

this about using skype or are these areas where it's really about having a video chat or or a call somebody that they can't get into also in terms of the problems they have now i mean we know pretty well that they're not revealing their. turned away when they go to google or facebook you do imagine that they might have a problem with skype which is an end and peer to peer system meaning there isn't a centralized point to wiretap and it's actually i mean really disturbing thing about this is that if you take seriously what they're proposing entire architectures for communication would be illegal because there isn't a way to build a truly peer to peer and was a very efficient and secure way to do communications but there isn't a way to do that with some kind of centralized backdoor so what they would effectively be saying is that whole architecture that whole model for communications would have to be the way that the legal but so that this is why we're like the politics that have become so interesting right so they're they're

flying to silicon valley they're having these back to our meetings with these companies and they're just trying to get them to not even come out and publicly support the bill but just to not oppose it like to not create a fuss i mean what are the chances that they could get the companies to do that to play along you know i think it depends how much is in it for the companies you know if stuff like this has. you know various kind of exemptions from liability and particular if it has the potential for paying it i mean a lot of different kinds of surveillance involve the government basically paying these companies for their time in trouble so if you raise the fees high enough you can make that a winning proposition for them you have to assume that the f.b.i. is doing right now is looking at what happened with sopa and realizing that you have a lot of people who are networked who weren't necessarily watching political news very closely but that if let's say we keep or google or facebook decided that they were opposed enough to something to stick a link there i think. that you can they will they learn you can generate tens or

hundreds of thousands of call millions of calls but don't you also have to hope that then maybe the googles and the facebook you know of the world after seeing what happened with sopa and what their opposition to it did in terms of helping put the. sure on that they could actually try to stand up you know against going to increasing surveillance state and take a stand now where these are these are these are private money making companies and there's not usually a lot of profit in standing up against the government as a general rule so i wouldn't i wouldn't hold out too many hopes there at least as long as the f.b.i. is figuring out a way to make this worth their while to keep quiet about at least oh that always makes me feel great i heard julie thanks so much for joining us tonight my pleasure . so to come tonight we're going to bring you the latest from chaos sends a rainman think it will and then it's fox news successful because republicans are more susceptible to fear than liberals are going to dive into that topic and return .