i built a little 100-milliwatt transmitter which will reach like three houses around your house. i had a record player, is very into electronics, is a ham radio operator when i was 13. i built a little radio station and i did that at home when i was a kid. when i was 16, i got a job at msu and brody hall and the radio station. this is a a major dorm that had a radio station. i did that for about six weeks, made a tape and got a job at w itl, w itl lansing michigan, which was a country western station. number one station in lansing. i was a weekend dj and i thought, i hated country music and i discovered that i absolutely love country music. i was a teenager in the 60s and was like rock 'n roll or nothing. i worked there for a year and then did an online show, did top 40, then went back and did news for seven years. and then i got out of that and in 2002, november 2002 in thanksgiving we're living in for mark, i joe back to michigan with to visit with my wife's family and all of the way there all i could get was it was odd it was like someone repeating themselves three or four times on a 14 hour try. he was doing a live room mode from habitat for humanity and he was talking about how no liberal is going to get this house. which offended my sensibilities but more than that i was thinking, half the country. a cry, roughly. not like we are a totally red country. there has to be a market for the left-wing market of what hannity is doing. so i wrote an op-ed for common dreams in december 2002 title thousand two title talking back to talk radio. it was a business plan. i've been in radio, i knew how work. here's how you can do it from a business point of view, from a programming point of view. i put that out there. then i thought, and 97 we sold an ad agency in atlanta, and we are were essentially retired. i thought thought maybe that would be fun to try this out. so i put my money where my mouth was and we found a radio station in vermont that put me on the air for two hours on saturday morning after the swap meet. for a few months there i did a morning show, about half the calls i got was that is a john deere tractor still available? again i made tape and brought it to the america network and it is out of detroit and they pick me up and found 29 stations in serious xm. that's how the show started, and then i was asked to go to chicago, they read my article and were start thinking of starting to a network. after after a year or so of competing with air america, maybe two years, they started syndicating my show. i always on the show. i think i was was the only show, ring of fire was the other one, only two shows that were owned by the host as opposed to not. host: why do you think air america when under? guest: i think it was a mixture of things. the biggest one is they were undercapitalized. fox news, roger ailes back in the nixon white house had proposed or signed off on a proposal of gop tv which was an early fox news. nixon couldn't raise the money so never happened. then he met murdoch and murdoch said sure let's do this. they lost $100 million a year for roughly five years before they made any money. you could say hey sean hannity lost them. in the aggregate may be $400 million. isn't that a terrible failure. while no after the fifth year they start making money and now they make a lot of money. when they declared bankruptcy i think they had gone through like 16 or $17 million over five or six year period. not a lot of money for a national radio network particularly one part of the business model was a net radio station. so i think being undercapitalized was the biggest thing. there was a management problem. some people in management should not have been there. there are some programming issues that i disagree with. i thought there creating some programs are more like television and radio. there is a a real big difference in those mediums. i think the big problem --dash. host: in several of your books you talk and about being a serial entrepreneur. guest: yes i started in 17 from a tv repair shop it was in the back of a headshot. it was joint with a tv antenna on it. then we got a little less hippie, what i was doing was the guy who owned the head shop, i rented a shell for him for $25 per month. people would bring electronic equipment into be picks. i would pick it up at night and fix it. i would bring it back the next day and he will collect the money and took a percentage of the money. i think it was a quarter. we grew out of that shop in about four months so we moved down the street and had four technicians and six or seven employees total. my soon-to-be wife was my bookkeeper. it was the first business i ever owned. it is the only business i started that went on the planes. i learned a lot from that. and then after that we started an advertising agency in 78, the reason i moved to new hampshire. in 83 we moved back to them it started a travel agency. built that from nothing up to about $6 million. it sold in 1986. retired to germany with our kids for a year working and living with a nonprofit organization with salem international. then we came back in 87 from germany .. to atlanta and started an advertising agency and that is the company i sold in 87. ninety-seven. it was going to be a hobby. now i'm doing for hours of media every day, five days days a week. host: where you living. guest: i've live in the southwest washington dc. spee1 what did you start and why did you start writing books? guest: again it goes back to my childhood. my mom was was an english major. she graduated magna cum laude in the late 40s. her aspiration was to be a writer, she held a writer's way of what people think today of movie stars. my dad dad had 20000 books in the house. he had it organized like a library. he was a very organized guy. i started writing as a young teenager. by the time i moved out of the house at 16, i had 56 rejection slips and papered my bedroom wall. mostly for bad poetry and true stories. i just kept doing it. now i have, i think 25 books in print. spee1 the first several books he wrote were about attention deficit disorder. guest: several that i published yes. i had written written probably ten or 12 books before that. none of them, thankfully were published. it add. that that was the product of two things. i was the executive director of the presidential facility in new hampshire, my wife is the program director. my job was to raise money and publicity and things like that. the administrative stuff. i notice that virtually all of the kids that came in were coded as hyperactive or back then is referred to as hyperkinetic children. in 1978, the year we started that, the year before that ben had published a book why your child is hyperactive and he proposed that it was a food issue. that that these children were reacting to and functionally like an allergy. he was an allergist by the way so he had certain bias. we did a study on our kids over six month period putting them on his diet and what we found is out of 34 kids, we had one that we could turn on and off like a light switch by taking stuff in and out of his diet. he also had horrible psoriasis and it seemed to make his rises worse. for a very small subset of the population there is that allergy pop entrée connection. for most i think it's a way of brain wiring. my first published piece on that must've been in 1980. it was in the journal of molecular psychology on the hyperkinetic syndrome suggesting that it was not a disease but a simply different way of having your brain wired. when one of our children was diagnosed with adhd in high school, in the mid- 80s, the psychologist that in the room with him and said, forget about going to college, you you should become a car mechanic, you're good with your hands. by the way, if you're going to be a car mechanic, work on something where the pay is better. at this point my son had tears in his face. he wanted to go to college. and i thought, this sucks. it was a terrible way to describe this. so i wrote my first book, add a different perception. essentially to my son and saying you're not broken, your nothing is wrong with you you have a different skill set. you also have a lot of people in your tribe and now he has a masters degree in science, he's running the business of his own based in a field, god bless him. so i wrote a few books on that. that became a time magazine it became a national bestseller. my publisher said he wanted another book and another book. host: who are we talking about, this is a quote. he is the poster child for add, if he didn't have add we went have united states of america. guest: probably ben franklin. it's been a while since i wrote that book. clearly in add, different perspective i profiled few different people and i recall ben franklin, thomas edison, sir richard what's his name, say mean as a guy who married elizabeth taylor, burden. he was such a classic case. probably he had add to given his bouncing around and whatnot. host: why do you say that about ben frank? guest: ben franklin never held one truck for more than three years. he reinvented himself himself over 30 times, literally changed his profession. moved all over the world. he was easily bored, i think add can be for a person who has a lower iq, more of a challenge than someone like franklin who is a genius, it can be a really useful combination. i think it for everybody can be useful. host: would you say he is a serial entrepreneur. guest: yes definitely. an inventor, writer, publisher, and like i said he helped create united states of america. host: 2004, what would jefferson do, what where did that become from? guest: i wrote that book because i kept encountering revision of history, specifically and particularly about jefferson. it was about a resurgence of interest in jefferson, largely after 911. there were a couple of historians who had quotes, not sure sure they had degrees in history, who suggested jefferson was a bible hunting christian and america was founded on christian values means there several very well organized groups out there pushing. a number of other myths about jefferson that i thought were important to knock down until the actual story. one to tell the life of his story and what he did, what he was promoting. host: i think you write about the fact that living in new hampshire you discovered some jeffersonian materials in the house you're living. guest: it was vermont actually. in fact that's really what got me into it. i had forgot about that. as time passes. we bought this house in 2001 in montpelier. in the addict there were a few boxes of old books. they were just horribly weather damaged. they had no value. whoever had the house before just left them there. in fact they had been left there for a long time, their newspapers in, there are newspapers in the box from the 1930s. there were ten or 20 volumes that that elected writings of thomas jefferson's which had only been published once in the history of the night states. it was in 1909 by the thomas jefferson memorial association. it has his personal diary, letters, biography, all of the stuff. i was retired and i spent a year living inside of jefferson's brain. then i am reading all of the stuff in the world and it completely contradicts what i learned, i realized that there's something to be said for objective voice of history. jefferson and a lot of his writings is thinking about the posterity, thinking about his own reputation. the history is fairly clear. that also led me to, when i started writing a book the first draft became - jefferson would be horrified by the corporation of a person. host: why? guest: the corporate performance in modern performance, although the company was the first modern corporation that queen elizabeth charted in 1601. she did that and made a fortune on that. her and other members of parliament. then they chartered another company. in 1773 jefferson had published a pamphlet called a summary view of the rights of british americans, as i recall. it's been a most two decades. it was basically a booklet about how to be a good british citizen in north america. that was in the summer. in late fall or early winter england was suffering through a recession, a serious recession and so they passed an act. for some reason most people think it was a tax on tea, what it was actually the east india company was almost all owned by members of the parliament and royal family. the british east india company was going down the tubes because of the recession. they had a monopoly on most of the business in the united states. teat was what everybody drank. people did not not drink coffee in the early colonies. on every block had a t-shirt shop on it. it is a cultural centers it was the largest corporate tax cut in the history of the world at that time. not only did the east india company have over 10 million pounds, it was a massive amount of tea in stock in the uk. they are ready pay tax on it. so it was a tax rebate on all the stuff. so they got money back from the government and the goal was to sell that to north america. the problem they're having is half of the tea being consumed in all of these tea shops were from smugglers. it was being brought in illegally and they tried stopping that trade, they went all the way back and they couldn't stop it. there's no way to stop it. so they decided to undercut it. so the company was bringing all this discounted tea into the united states. the citizens citizens from philadelphia to boston just freaked out. they started this huge campaign to block petit from coming inches in charleston they prevented him from coming into the harbors, and in d.c. too. but they found a dock and that led to basically $1 million, in today's in today's dollars act of vandalism. they vandalize three of the ships, quietly, respectfully, interestingly enough. i tracked down a copy of the only eyewitness account and got the original book which was published in 1883 and it was george roundtree hughes. it had a long title. in fact he was the guy who came up with the phrase boston tea party. you know 50 years later but a much everyone is dead and he had been 16 or 17 years old he participated in it. he wrote the book and it was remarkable. this was an active and alyssum against the largest corporation in the world. so when he say why would jefferson be horrified by it, it be the corporation as a person. after the boston tea party jefferson stop talking about how to be a good citizen in the united states and started talking about separation. this led to 1776. so in a very real way, america was founded on a revolt against corporate power. host: that's what you write on equal protection. the revolution was the vote, the misbehavior of corporation, our our nation was founded in anticorporate policy. guest: sure. host: you also a theme i picked up in your book was that we were not an aristocracy. the white men who formed our nation were not necessarily an aristocracy, or rich aristocracy. host:. guest: that was one of the most fascinating things i got out of jefferson stuff. and digging deep into the history of that era. it's what would jefferson do. the myth of the rich founders. there's been a few good histories about that and published since that time. the wealthiest man among the people who signed the declaration of independence was john hancock. his network in today's dollars or in $2004 when i put the put the book, would be about $700,000. he was not a mind-boggling rich guy. some of them had fancy houses but their fancy houses in the standards of north america. they went even be considered a squires house in the u.k. these people were not rich. they were rich people at the time of the american revolution. the johnson family for example, they had a castle on the hudson. several hundred african slaves, several hundred european slaves, as knights of the roundtable. they re-created this. they were. they were fabulously wealthy. there were a number families like that. virtually all of them left. after the revolution, jefferson died bankrupt, washington died bankrupt, madison was having problems, they were all just skating by. among the slaveowners slaves or their principal asset. a terrible and and grim part of our history also. the other part was jefferson worked aggressively to try to stop slavery. when he was in his early 20s he introduced legislation, he was punished by it that they passed a law saying if anybody in virginia previously that slave would be arrested and as i recall, something like two years of hard labor and then sold back into the slave market. so i just want to set the record straight. host: from your book, 2013 book the crash of 2016. history tells us that when the foundations collapse and societies cultural core is hollowed out and the madness takes hold, its members will pretend all is well. life seems to go on as average citizens try to get by while the very rich you understand what is happening consolidate their power and wealth before the final crash. guest: is a fairly typical cycle. people see these things coming. when we started the children's village back in the 70s it was a vegetarian program by then. i've been a vegetarian since 68 or maybe 67. so we have some promise to vegetarians on our board. gary swanson was one of them. i used to go to new york every six months and we would make dinner in our apartment a chat. would stay up to the wee hours and talk and tell wild stories. joe kennedy was the object of her scorn, she talked about he got out of the market, how him and all of his buddies knew the crash was coming in 1929 and all this stuff. i thought it was interesting, it seems like we are recycling that now. sort of a similar. host: back to the crash of 2016 book, you write in here that the beginning of the end of the crash of 2016 occurred in 2009 when brock obama became president. guest: what we hoped would be the beginning of the end. the first stimulus, at the time we're losing 750,000 jobs a month. $800 million stimulus that we did here in the united states, one third of it was tax cuts which don't really stimulate the economy unless there at the very bottom of the economic ladder most of them weren't. the jumpstart is a out of the horror that we are experiencing them. they couldn't get a second one or larger one. i think it was robert or paul who said there is a $2 trillion hole in our economy and we passionate within $800 million patch. it wasn't enough. we patch. it wasn't enough. we also didn't change the fundamental. we didn't reinstate or bring up hold the banks accountable for what they did. we didn't change the derivative markets or make them more transparent, or even stop them altogether. at the time, in 2007 before the big crash, there is $900 trillion of derivatives out there. magical securities that are made up out of underlying assets. in this case mortgages. so you have a million dollars in mortgages, you put insurance policy on it for 1 million bucks in the new place a bet on it which is what they're doing. the new place about on the insurance policy and any place a billion-dollar but i'm hundred million dollar bet so on. they just get bigger and bigger. the gdp of the entire planet was in the neighborhood of $56 trillion. we had 800 to $900 trillion of derivative. >> .. >> guest: out of this industrial order, it was fairly predictable that a group of economic royalists would arise to try to take control of this, you know? these economic royalists tell us, you know, he went after 'em. and it really was, you know, it was the big money fat cats who crashed the economy in '29 and who fought fdr throughout his presidency. and it's the big money fat cats who are crashing our economy right now. >> host: thom hartmann, in your book, "rebooting the american dream," the math is pretty simple. when the uber-rich are heavily taxed, economies prosper and wages for working people steadily rise. when taxes for the rich are cut, working people suffer, and economies turn into casinos. >> guest: yeah. and if you look at the time in the united states when the middle class was most prosperous -- and this is the thing, you know? we measure prosperity in the united states, we tend to look at the big numbers like gdp or the stock market. those are not really the numbers we should be looking at if we're concerned about society as a whole, it should be how healthy is the middle class. and so what has happened over the years is that, you know, with this, with this massive deregulation the middle class has been collapsing steadily, and the very wealthy have gotten super wealthy. i got this up close and personal. i learned this lesson myself in 1974 or '5. terry o'connor was my business partner. he recently passed away, and he and i owned this herbal tea company, and we were making a lot of money. it was, in fact, it was a side business of the herbal tea company. we were selling ginseng to larry flynt. he was selling it in "hustler" magazine, and he made a million bucks literally, and we made a couple hundred thousand which was big money in '73. and my cpa came to me, and he said, you know, you're getting close to, as i recall it was a 40 or 50% tax bracket, and he said you need to stop taking money out of your company and reinvest it and grow the company, because it's an asset that you own also. and it won't be taxed. but, you know, if you just keep taking this money out, it's pay. and so i did. and, you know, we added another product line, we added another seven employees, we grew the company. and that's what happened back in the '70s when the top tax rate was 90% or 74%, i forget when it -- i think johnson dropped it down to 74% in '67. so, yeah. and back then the average ceo made 30 times what his employees made. i probably made six or eight times what my employees were making at that time. and there was a reason for it. if you made more than that, you got hit with these huge taxes. so keep the money in the company. pay your employees well. all our employees had health insurance, all our employees were well paid. we had other benefit programs for them. when we opened the travel agency in '83 in atlanta, we had health care -- or we had not only health care for all our employees, most of the people working, the travel agents, were young women who had kids, we built a daycare center inside the travel agency. it was just a little, kind of a corner, but it worked. companies don't think like that anymore. now it's how do we squeeze every penny out of this so that we can pump that money up to the guy at the top or the stockholders. and if there is a high tax level at the top, then the guys at the top say, okay, i got my 30 times, that's cool. you know, i mean, it used to be that the ceos lived in the neighborhoods of the middle class. with the exception of the very, very uber-rich. and our economy is so different now than the economy that i grew up in. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly "in depth" program where we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work. this month it's talk show host and author thom hartmann. as he indicated earlier, he's the author of about 25 books or so, and we'll be talking about them over the next three hours, showing you those covers as well. but as we always do on booktv live programs, this is an interactive program, and we want to hear from you as well. so be you'd like to inter-- if you'd like to interact with author thom hartmann, here's several ways of doing so. we're going to begin with the phone numbers. 202-748-8200 if you live in the east and central time zones. 202-748-8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. you can also text mr. hartmann a message, 202-717-9684. again, that's just for text messages. and if you do send one, please include your first name and where you're texting from, the city you live in. we have other ways via social media of getting ahold of our guest, and that includes e-mail, [email protected] is our e-mail address. you can make a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv, and finally, twitter @booktv is our twitter handle x. we'll begin taking those in just a few minutes. mr. hart hartmann, i want to show some video and have you explain what this is. >> guest: uh-oh. [laughter] all of the money that was spent on television advertising by john mccain and barack obama together, obama spent about, what, $600 million? $800 million? >> it was 1.2 billion, all in. >> oh, okay. >> moveon.org, everybody on the left -- on the right it was about 60. >> 6 or 700 million. >> yep. >> so it wasless than $2 billion. $2 billion is chump change for the health insurance industry, for the pharmaceutical industry right now. it's walking-around money for the oil industry right now. they could -- these large corporations can now say to any politician in america we will make you, and you will be where you are forever, and when you retire, you'll have a good job with us for millions and millions of dollars a year, or we will destroy you. and they can absolutely make good on that threat. how is that a good thing for america? >> well, let's just start with the very fact that that wasn't my intent of why -- >> i'm not saying it was your intent. that was the outcome. >> but what i -- >> and i'm not blaming you for that. >> look -- >> i'm just saying, what do can we do now? if you and i agree that's not a good thing, what do we do? >> i believe in more speech, and i believe that the american people are smart enough to understand. and i give the american people credit for being smart enough to know when they're trying to be bought. so i am not afraid of some big, evil corporation who's going to run a bunch of 30-second ads before an election. >> host: thom hartmann, what have we been watching? >> guest: that was david bossy, the president of citizens united which produced a hit piece movie on hillary clinton. i think david would probably describe it that way too. and they were going to play it within the 90-day window when the federal election commission said you can't do political activity, you know, within this 90 days prior to an election. he took that case to the supreme court and won. the supreme court ruled, yes, we affirm corporations are people going back to 1886, we affirmed the 1976 buckley v. vallejo decision that spending money on politics prior to '76, 1976 it was considered a behavior which could be regulated. since 1976, that supreme court case that louis powell was very instrumental in making that happen, it has been considered a protected first amendment free speech. and, and i think time has proven me out, you know? look at the -- donald trump is agreeing with me right now, right? they're all owned by the rich people or the big corporations! marco rubio has his own personal billionaire who has been responsible for virtually his spire political career. jeb bush, i'm sure, has many. and not to mention family riches. you can just go through the list. and when they lose their billionaires or their billionaire backing, they have to bail out. and to some extent, this happens on the democratic side as well. the notable exception right now being bernie sanders, which is fascinating, by the way. >> host: you talk to bernie sanders on a regular basis, don't you? >> guest: yeah. when i live inside vermont, he came on our -- lived in vermont, he came on our program and took calls. and it was so novel to have a member of congress, a sitting member of the house of representatives who would take calls unfiltered, unscreened. i mean, my wife was call screener at that time, louise. and basically all we looked for was people who were drunk or profane, you know? be they called up swearing or sounded crupg, they didn't -- drunk, they didn't get on. and bernie just started taking these call, and we called it brunch with bernie, and we've be doing it now since 2004, every friday. and it was, it was amazing to me to discover a politician who never bs'd us, you know? never tried to do the slick, you know, oh, the wiggle words, you know, the weasel words ask all that kind of stuff. if he believed something, he'd say here's what i believe. if he didn't know something, he'd say i don't know the answer. frequently he'd come back and say, hey, somebody wanted to know about this. and i'm just amazed and impressed by senator sanders. >> host: but you interviewed dave bossie. >> guest: yeah. >> host: do you often interview people who you don't agree with? >> guest: more often than people with whom i do agree. yeah. it's -- i think that talk radio, basically, there's a couple of different categories of ways that you can do radio, and this goes back to some of the early articles that i was writing when i was just playing with the idea of doing it. one is the guest-driven show. and, you know, which is popular. it's more popular in television than radio. but the problem with a guest-driven show is the show's only as good as its guests, and you can't always get great guests. you can have a caller-driven show, but then your show's only as good as your callers. you can have a news-driven show, which is basically what cnn does, and look at what happens. when you have a crisis, ratings go up, or if not, they fall in the tank. you can have a host-driven show, and rush limbaugh really invented that genre.. we decided it would be a host-driven show because i knew radio, and i knew my topics. so most of the radio show is just me talking to listeners. and there's the old adage people slow down for fistfights and car wrecks. you want to make it entertaining, you want to make it interesting. and i actually respect most of the people on the other side who i debate. my father was an eisenhower republican, republican activist -- >> host: goldwater republican, wasn't he? >> guest: when i was 13 years old in 1964, my dad and i went door to door in barry goldwater. in my heart, i knew he was right. i had read none dare call it treason, and i was convinced that the state department was filled with communists, and this was it. three years later i -- the vietnam war, in large part i think, completely changed my political perspective. then from the time i was 16 until my dad died in 2006, he and i fought like cats and dogs about politics. after the first couple years, i mean, he actually threw me out of the house over a political argument one night when i was 16. but after a couple of years, we figured out how to do this without hurting our relationship. and my dad was my political foil throughout my life. he died a republican. in fact, his two favorite pictures -- when my father was dying in his loving room, my brothers and i and a couple of their wives always were sitting with him, and as he was drawing his last breath, i was sitting there with my hand on his shoulder, and i looked across the bed that was in the living room now, and there on the wall were these two pictures; me shaking hands with pope john paul ii, and george w. bush on the aircraft carrier abraham lincoln declaring mission accomplished. and those were his, you know, that was my dad, you know? and so i discovered, i learned that you can have a knockdown, dragout with somebody and still respect them and love them even. and so that's become sort of a trademark of both my radio and tv show, is to bring on both sides. i also think it's good for our viewers and listeners, because they get to hear both sides of the argument. you know, like david bossie saying, you know, i want more speech. well, that's fine, you know, we all want more speech, but to say the american people are smart enough to figure out, you know, to see through lies in advertising, for example, if that was true, then the industry that i -- i owned two ad agencies over the years. the industry that i worked in for the better part of a decade would not exist. i mean, you know, if advertising didn't work, nobody would be doing it, and we'd have a completely different media model, completely different business model. advertising does change people's minds, and if you spend a billion dollars on advertising, you will produce a shift in opinion. and whether that should be done solely by and for the benefit of very wealthy individuals and large corporations in the political sphere or not is my fundamental disagreement with david. and with scalia and, you know, the others on the court who voted for citizens united. >> host: what's your reputation amongst conservatives? >> guest: i'm not altogether certain. i know a number of them i know and like and i am friends with. there's a couple of conservative web sites that love to do hit pieces on me, one a couple days ago that was -- actually, there were two in the last week. one was actually pretty straightforward, pretty honest, you know? i had -- senator whitehouse had called for corporations that fund climate denial to be prosecuted under the rico act the same way the tobacco companies were prosecuted in 1999 under the rico act for funding denial that tobacco causes cancer. and that was a successful prosecution, by the way, 2006. the tobacco companies had to admit, yep, we were engaged in a crime. and so i went on the air and, you know, debating with a can conservative who was -- with a conservative who was defending climate change denial and saying, you know, if you're one of these guys who's putting out the money and hiring the people and getting the message out, that's organized crime under the rico statute, so you should be in jail. and they did a piece on this and i thought, you know, okay. they were criticizing me for it, but it was an honest portrayal. a couple days later somebody in the conservative media did a long hit piece on me where they took a logic chain that i went through on the air and deleted the entire middle of it. it was just a completely dishonest hit piece. so first one i credited the author. i mean, you know, as like p.t. barnum said, as long as you spell my name right, the second one i just ignored. but i think, i think -- >> host: but they're willing to come on your show. >> guest: oh, yeah. yeah. regularly, many of them and over many years. i've gotten to know many of them quite well. >> host: from your book "cracking the code: a note to the reader," this book is written in a new language. every word means precisely what it says. the tools of communication revealed herein are also used in its writings. and you go on to say that my aim with this book is to give you the tools to tell the liberal story and tell it well. >> guest: yeah. that, that book started out as a book about neurolinguistic programming and lp which is -- nlp, which is a construct for communication. but it was a political year, as i recall i wrote that in 2000, what, 4? or 2008. >> host: i'll confirm that in two seconds. >> guest: yeah. it was one of the presidential years. maybe it was one of the interstitial years. whatever, i wanted it to be a political hand guide for -- >> host: '07. >> guest: yeah, so this was for the 2008 election. understanding not only how language works, but how to use language successfully. >> host: what's an example? >> guest: the classic example is frank luntz renaming the estate taxes the death tax, you know? it completely shifts the frame. >> host: pretty effective, though, budget it? >> guest: it was and continues to be. it didn't come out until much later that a lot of the early research into what kind of wording would cause people to turn against the estate tax was funded by the walton heirs. and to the tune of a fair amount of money. and, yeah, it was effective. >> host: this facebook comment, and this is from phillip, thom, you are simply the best. you can tell you have done your homework. my question is, will americans vote for a jewish democratic socialist senior citizen who by most educated people's estimation would make america great again? >> guest: yeah. i, i respond to that question with a question, which was posed to me in the fall of 2007 by, i believe, the number two guy in the democratic party in california. he might have been just been the number two guy in the democratic party down in los angeles, but whatever. and he was african-american. and he came on my program, and he said -- this was when hillary clinton and barack obama were fighting it out -- and he said nobody in america, at the end of the day, you know, we can talk about all we like about our first black president and all this kind of stuff, but nobody's going to vote for a guy who has only been in the senate for two years, has basically very little experience in this field. he's african-american, and his middle name is husain. it ain't gonna happen. and this was an african-american democrat. saying this on my program. and he was like, you know, we have to get out there, and he says i want to talk to the black community, we have to support hillary clinton because barack obama, there's no way he's going to become president. and, yeah, you know? guess who's president. [laughter] so i think it's entirely possible that america will vote for a 70-something jewish senator with a new york accept, because -- accent, because what he's saying is right. and, you know, this is the thing that i learned in vermont. the reason i lived in vermont for ten years, and if you go up and drive around the northeast kingdom which is the most conservative part, the most rural part of vermont, it's solidly red, and you just -- drive along the road, and you will see in the election year i remember 2000, in the election year there would be a bush for president sign and a bernie for congress sign next to each other in lawn after lawn after lawn. bernie consistently carries in the neighborhood of 20% of the republican vote in vermont. he was reelected with either 71 or 74% of the total vote to the senate. and vermont is not, you know, a hippie haven, solid blue state. the two largest cities are, burlington and montpelier, but you get outside those two cities, and you are looking at, you know, red state, rural, conservative republican country. and they have embraced bernie, because he's a truth teller. he's a radical truth teller. >> host: why'd you move to washington? >> guest: we moved to washington, d.c. five years ago. there was an opportunity to do a tv program on the rt network which is owned by the russians, and it's their -- they wanted to get into, put an oar into the water of al-jazeera and cnn international and bbc and all that. and i said, you know, i've always owned my own show. i won't become an employee. i have to have absolute editorial control by contract. and if you're willing to go along with those terms, which i'd had this conversation earlier with one of the big cable networks here in the united states, and they were unwilling to do that. they were, like, you're an employee, you'll do what we say or not, or you won't work here. rt said, no, we'll give you your own show, we'll carry your show. it's also carried by free speech tv. and so, you know, hey, it was something pun, you know? it was my -- something fun. it was my a.d.d., i guess. >> host: and that show is still on the air, 7 and 10 p.m.? >> guest: yes. well, it's a one-hour show, and it runs at 7 p.m. on rt. >> host: and your radio show? >> guest: it's on siriusxm, also simulcast by free speech tv on dish and direct and a number of cable systems. >> host: and you can listen at thom hartmann.com as well, right? >> guest: yeah. and you can find links to all that stuff. and however you spell it will get you there. we've got all four misspellings. laugh. >> host: thom hartmann is our guest. we're going to begin with a call from david in hope sound -- actually, marie in san diego, california. hi, marie, you're on with thom hartmann. >> caller: hi, thank you very much. i'm so delighted that mr. hartmann is on the air. i am a volunteer with a community radio station in stand yea owe -- sand san diego, and e carry mr. hartmann's show, and we're so grateful that we're able to bring it to a san diego audience. where the political climate is changing from a very conservative population to going to more liberal, and we really appreciate the brunch with bernie and the guests that mr. hartmann brings on. i have three questions. in light of the most recent shooting, i'm wondering if there is something in the dna in america that we -- for celebrities and others, if we hear something we don't like, that there are death threats. secondly, i wonder if -- i keep hearing that people have short attention spans, and we're talking about some of our programming on our community radio station about the length of coverage that we give some things, and i disagree. i think, i credit people with being more interested than just trying to encapsulate things, and i was wondering how mr. hartmann feels. and earlier -- >> host: kuhn what, marie? we are going -- do you know what, marie? we are going to leave it there. any response to for that caller, mr. hartmann? >> guest: sure. first of all, with regard to shooting, i don't think there's anything unique in the american dna that causes us to disproportionately murder each other with guns. i agree with president obama that we are awash in guns, and so somebody who is crazy or violent or angry or suicidal, let's remember gun suicides are one of the, you know, biggest causes of death by guns in the united states, if you can just reach over, grab a gun and bang like that, it's like, hey, it's over fast. or, you know, this young man who shot up roseburg, oregon, you know, if you've got 15 guns, you know, you can do a lot of damage. so as president obama pointed out, we have no more or no fewer crazy people in the united states than they do in france or germany or the united kingdom or australia or any place else. what we do have, the difference between us and all those other countries is that in those countries if you're a sports shooter, you have to be licensed and some of them insured, and your gun is registered. and, or if you're a hunter or if you want a gun for personal protection. and i've always advocated that we should treat guns the way we did cars. back in the 19 teens when cars started becoming ubiquitous and also started killing people, the problem was what do we do with these things? they're killing people. so we came up with standards, you know? like yellow light, green light and those kind of things. but one of the most important standards we came up with was if you're going to drive a car you have to, a, prove you're proficient, have a driver's license. b, you have to have liability insurance, so if you injure somebody else intentionally or unintentionally, they are covered. and, c, the car has to be registered with a chain of ownership. the liability insurance, i think, is one of the most important ones. and this is something that i would think that conservatives would embrace, because it's a market-based solution. if you had to have liability insurance to own a gun, it probably wouldn't be particularly expensive. it might be $50 a year, $100 a year. but if you've got three duis, i'm guessing that the insurance actuaries or a conviction for domestic violence or you robbed a liquor store three years ago, i'm guessing those actuaries would go, okay, this guy's price is going to be $4,000 a year for his liability insurance. so what you would see is the marketplace putting pressure on just like they do with drunk drivers, you know, with the car insurance companies. they a jack up your insurance rates. and so i, that's where i would start, actually, along with closing the gun show loopholes and things like that. i don't think there's anything unique about us except we're awash in guns, number one. and with regard to the wall-to-wall coverage which we've been watching for the last couple days, yeah, i agree. in fact, louise and i were watching, i think it was msnbc the other day, and the host was slowly, painfully, you know, we don't know yet and all this. and i'm like, can't you say in other news around the world, you know, let's go now to the refugee crisis in europe. let's talk about -- or something, you know? but we live in a, if it bleeds it leads world. it's all about ratings. it's all about making money. which it didn't used to be when i was doing news in the '70s. because of the fairness doctrine which did not require be you've got a liberal on, you've got to have a conservative on. that's a canard. the essence of the fairness doctrine was that your license will not be renewed if you do not program in the public interest. and the principal way that radio and television stations programmed was by carrying news. and as a news reporter in a local station -- and our news division lost money for witl. there were four or five of us working in news. that was the license for the station. and in '87 reagan stopped enforcement of the fairness doctrine. and within six months, cbs has moved their news, their vice president of news over to work under the vice president of entertainment. and turned their news division into a problem-making -- profit-making thing, and within a year the other two networks had done the same, and now it's all news for profit. and that's why we have info-tainment, frankly. and that's why the news will focus on a certain topic, because they think it's going to draw the most eyeballs. >> host: i remember reading that you don't think a fairness doctrine is necessary for radio. >> guest: yep. >> host: is that correct? >> guest: i don't think the way that the fairness doctrine was characterized and to some extempt, you know, like if a television station editorialized and said, you know, we think bernie sanders is a terrible guy, then the fairness doctrine required after that editorial somebody would come on that said, no, bernie sanders is a decent guy. but that was about it. and back in the day radio and tv stations used to do editorials. and so there was some balance in that. but in terms of guests, no. i see nothing wrong with a station carrying conservative or progressive programming all day long. i don't want the government involve inside telling us how to program. -- involved in telling us how to program. i think that the role of government historically is sort of like the role of the nfl, you know? you've got the game of politics, you've got the game of business. these are basically, you know, activities that we participate in not unlike a football game. and the nfl says, okay, there's 100 yards on the field, here are the rules, here's the punishment for breaking the rules. they define the rules of the game. and the rules of the game prior to '87 were defined in a way that encouraged a well-educated populace. since '87 the rules of game in news anyway have been completely changed, so now it is we get the news that makes the most profit for the people delivering the news to us. the point he made there as it's not a get gun control it's about our safety night to most other industrialized countries has far more generous social safety net. it just seems that we witness this slow motion train wreck and the destruction of middle-class and the cheaters are prospering. no one has been punished and sent to jail for the wall street takedown of the economy. the same can be said of the invasion of the activation of iraq. richard wolff's oregano guest on guest on your show, he makes the point that americans no longer have any leverage against hypocrisy. were not needed as workers with the free trade agreements. whereas markets are opened up overseas. so can you talk about the taft act and how americans have no leverage to fight back so let's back up for a little bit. unions do not have so you had a really good chance of being killed. a lot of people died. in particular between the 1870s when we began to industrialize in the 1930s in the 1935 it became legal and protected and the right to unionize was protected. unions are democracy in the workplace. therefore i think very important. in 1946, for the first time since the election of 1932 the republicans took control of congress for two years. passed the act that allowed the individual state to basically opt out for the right to work and i call it right to work for left states. this was largely confined to most of our history since 47. although now you have scott walker who did it in wisconsin, i think rich snyder in michigan. i'd have to go back to look. this is the beginning of the war on labor. then it really wilds to the reagan administration. if you you look at the productivity and workers wages to the ronald reagan administration. as workers were more productive they may more money for their employers, and more money for themselves. 1981 uc it go up and wages flatten up there actually lower than when reagan came into office. this is the natural conference consequence of that. in response to the large part of ralph nader and richard carlson. ralph nader and richard carlson. and they're trying to regulate our businesses. and we need to fight back. traditional is that we have to set up think tanks we need to take away over the congress and political party, we need to gain control over the media he went control over the media he went list and there's a whole chapter and i see this as a starting point as the deregulation of the banking administration. >> along with a whole bunch of other. host: between that and free trade where we are basically the only country in the developed world that no longer protects our workers. used to be everybody did it with tariffs. with alexander hamilton and 1781. he was adopted in large by congress and executive action by 73. tariffs which are taxes on imported goods. this is what donald trump talks about fine let them, but if that is the border will be a 35% tax to come into the united states. that's called a terror. tariffs provide 100% of the revenue of the united states from 1787 when we officially started as a country until the civil war. 100%. from civil war to world war i there's two thirds and three quarters that decline. from world war want to world war ii as a third of our income. during that time and up until the 80s the average tariff rate fluctuated between 20 and 30%. so the theory was as hamilton laid out, to make a pair shoes or you can make a pair shoes in china with 20 cents for the labor. in the shoes come in from mexico we'll hit them with a $.50 tax, when they come in from china will hit them with an 80% tax. it will cost you to make shoes anywhere in the world, you mice will make them here. we used to used to make shoes here, blue jeans, clothing, chairs and now we don't make any of that stuff are very little that stuff. they did away with our tariffs. other developed developed countries like china, taiwan, which arguably is a developing country, japan, all european countries they had in the background what they could use they said will all join or drop our tariffs. so the terrace now around 2%. we. we have all dropped our tariffs. they use their value added tax as it functional tariff. the way that tax works is every time you add value to a manufacturer you pay a small tax. so when iron ore is mind and melted into iron, there's a small tax. when you have iron converted to steel that a small tax, and so on. so in germany for example the average tax on a car 17%. german taxpayers pay that. so the way they use this, and all these countries are doing this except us, we are like the village idiots, i'm finding myself channeling donald trump may the way more than i would like to. what they do is they say if you want to ship a mercedes to germany to the united states, we are are going to give you a 17% reimbursement of the tax because you're not a german. on the other hand if you want to take an american car and sell it in germany were going to put a 17% tax on it when it enters our country. that is functional and import tax. when you combine the two, you have a 37 or 38%, 34% functional tariff. that's why all these companies are running huge trade surpluses and we are running deficit. it really flipped in the 80s when reagan came into office in 1981. we were the world's largest creditor. more countries owed us money than any other country in the history of the world. we imported raw materials. we imported iron ore, we imported wood, we manufactured things out of it. imported what, we manufactured things out of it. we are the largest import of materials and finished goods. that is the sign of a healthy economy. we had a net positive trade balance. we were a key milady money from other countries and we are investing in other countries. which some people decried as neocolonialism, but whatever. by under the herbert walker bush era we had become the world's largest debtor. we became the world's largest importer of finished goods in the world largest exporter of raw material. so now we ship coal, iron ore, and would to china and, and wood to china and they ship us back to computers, furniture, and you name it. then we owed them, i think their trade deficit is like $200 billion per year. consequence of this is that not one seventh of all aspects of the united states is owned by foreigners. if you end up with the rest of the world is ending up with roughly $600 billion in surplus dollars because we borrowed from the chinese and bought their stuff. they got the dollars. where do you spend dollars. here ultimately. so if you nights ago i was the un for the general assembly and we're in the walter for his story zero, just what it just got bought. not that i'm trying to promote zeno phobia, i just don't think it's a good thing when one seventh of your country is no longer owned by your countrymen and women. so, anyway. long response to i think the caller asked me what was. host: from your book you list and hear alexander hamilton's' 11-point plan for american manufacturers. those strategic strip proposals great the industrial powerhouse the world has ever seen and after more than 200 successful years were abandoned only during the administration of reagan, george bush and bill clinton. and they remain appended to this day. let's begin. here's the cover of the book. rebooting the american dream. is that something you are interested in reading about this text is for you. thom hartmann, why is citizens united not okay but unions are in entirely political? also should unions be taxed 35% my corporations? guest: first of all unions are nonprofit organizations. they don't generate a prophet. there be nothing to tax. secondly, the confluence of citizens united and i'm guessing the question was should unions be able to run ads in favor of or opposed to candidates the same as general electric and/or one of the other groups. my answer to that is no. i don't think any corporation, and unions are corporations even though there are nonprofit corporations, i don't think any corporation should have rights guaranteed under our constitution. i think that would work to the benefit of humans actually. if we are to say, we are going to reverse citizens united and not just for corporations but you for unions as well. by the way taft-hartley limited political activity. and right now if you pay union dues, if you are in a union there are two things you pay that union. i'm familiar with this. dad was, worked in a union machine shop for 40 years, two of my brothers are working with the union electrical workers. you pay the union dues which basically pay for the lawyers who represent you if you are in dispute with your employer, the negotiators to negotiate a pay package and those kind of things. and then you can also pay into the union fund. that second category payment are voluntary. you can simply, in some cases opt out in some cases opt in but you can say to the union, you may not use my money for politics and i'm not going to give you extra money for politics. a lot of people do that. frankly, i don't have a big problem with that. i think unions should be represented. the weight is a benefit union is if we were to set at&t and the union, both can engage in political activity anymore. they can't own a congressman, favor congressman, they can't run television advertising. so now the president of at&t sends a letter to all of his employees say we think mitt romney is the best candidate, you should get out help him. what's. what the average employee going to do? the presence as i should do this, not going to influence me. on the other hand the union is a democracy. it takes a 50% vote of the employees to create the union, a 50% vote can dissolve the union. if the union is going to take a political position has to be the majority, the majority vote. so when the union holds an election to decide who we are going to represent, what are we going to do, were, were asked their members what we're going to do, you see this right now with a few members of whether to endorse hillary or bernie. there's a big exit issue on this now. the union if they don't put a penny into that campaign, you, you now have the union member, if it sends it out to the members and said the majority has decided were going to endorse a nominee, then it's maybe one of the larger unions in the united states. even if they don't spend a penny in the political world, then i probably at least half of their members who are willing to show up and help out, they'll do it my dad might and 64 and share the message. because it's democracy. it's a group that is there for each other rather than purchase the employer. next call. and noises coming out of the ceiling here. we'll just keep moving. adrian is in houston texas you are on with author and talkshow host, thom hartmann. >> think you might brother lives in california. he talks about tom all the time. i'm glad to talk to him. he mentioned and i was so grateful because elizabeth warren is the only person that i've seen that has brought this up. when the crash happened in 2008, that the first thing that came to my mind. glass beagle. that was a slippery slope. i feel like you know what happened to us and i wondered does he think we will ever see anything like that. and let's not leave nafta out of this. so it almost makes me think about the democratics and the republicans why the electric is mad. all of us. we don't be like there is a dimes were the difference. guest: in the early 30s and either 33 or or 35, the glass beagle act separated investment one of the things that promotes the great crash and made it so bad the weeks that roosevelt became president's every bank failed. which was an was an amazing thing when he think about it. the reason it was so bad is the banks were also casinos. their running stocking gambling operations and everyone was getting in on it. winning to the great crash of 89. so the checkbook savings operation went down, all those kind of things. my mother's family was fairly prominent and they lost everything in the crash of 29. the bank that had all their money said sorry we don't have your money were closing your doors. this happened to millions of americans. so a glass beagle did was say that boring banking business that boring banking business basically the economy to have a checking account the savings account and get business loans in a mortgage, that is now going to be done in one area banking that is old-fashioned, boring, banking hours banking. it's protectively moderately profitable but it is basically boring. the gambling stuff. with the stock stock market go to a brokerage house. go to a bank that is an investment bank. c had the rise of the merrill lynch is an they were kept separate from 35 as i recall recall up until either 99 or 2000. 2000. there are two things he wanted. he wanted to be able to speculate energy as if it were commodity and he couldn't. he wanted to be able to get the banks off his back. he had 800 different companies and he was shifting things around to make this one looked comfortable. the bank bank started to catch on to them. he wanted to own his own bank. she was on his board of directors for a few years, phil gramm introduced legislation to do this and what in my opinion what kenley wanted into pieces of legislation. one was the commodity act which led to the deregulation of commodities and led to the derivative thing we talked about earlier. the second was finally witchery peeled the glass beagle act. the argument that graham and his allies made was that the glass be glad had kept us from having a banking crisis it is time to retire it. think if you made that argument in 50 or 60 on the floor of the senate, when their senators who were alive in 1929, they would have laughed him off if they didn't want them out with a pitchfork. because as arnold says the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable. we don't remember the genesis. so pretty much everyone was dead to the great crash in 1999. spiegel and the banks and houses emerged and were back where we were in 1929 which is something we need to do something about. senators and has called for a reinstatement of the glass siegel and i think we need to do that. i don't remember her second point. i'm sorry. do you. host: were going to move on and will get this question from fran in los angeles. what one book written by you or anyone else, gives the best information on income inequality? guest: probably screwed. screwed is a book that i wrote a few years back about the plight of middle-class in the united states. about how we got here and the crash of 2016 has a lot of that material as well. i forgot tried to get back to first principles, thomas hobbes, john russo, and right up until today. that would be the book. host: john in florida please go ahead. >> good afternoon. i always hate waiting because there's so many other questions i want to ask. a few comments if i may. i grew up in it them a credit household and my father belonged to the international brotherhood of electrical workers. now i am a flaming conservative. i always love the margaret thatcher quote that says socialism is great until you run out of other people's money. as far as the right to spend money for elections, that is a critical thing. it is not not taught anymore. i was taught critical thinking growing up in the 60s. guest: your making the argument that if someone runs an ad on television and says hey if you take this pill it will carry of this. it doesn't tell you it made us a cause that. that we can critically think our way out of bmi to in a television ad. >> you have investing those commercials. i see i see that fine print and the guy talking a mile a minute. your arms might pop out in your arms might fall off. anyway driving is a privilege not a right. guest: actually article one authorizes congress to build roads. it's in the constitution. >> will that has nothing to do with driving. did they have a license to drive a horse and buggy back then? the the right to bear arms is in the constitution also. guest: in order to maintain a well regulated militia. >> i thought i could be with you saying i was raised in a democratic counsel, that we would get up on the right foot. my question to use and i'll give you a clue i'm from connecticut now read you something. the quotas and extracting her principles which jesus taught we should have to strip off the artificial investment in which they have been muffled. there'll be found, remains the most most sublime and the relevant code of morals which is ever been offered to man. that is a letter from thomas jefferson in 1813 to john adams. i'm not saying that jefferson was the greatest christian of all time. guest: have you read the jefferson bible? >> i know he cut out. guest: he cut out all the miracles. he did not believe jesus was divine. that book is still in print by the way. >> okay but how do you explain the quote i just gave you. guest: >> john were going to leave it here. thanks for participating today. mr. hartman. guest: it's true. jesus taught more principle. it's also true that these are part of our dna. that is a species alters them is natural to us. six -month-old babies you see them unhappy when one baby is given more than another baby. fairness is in rda a. socialism is in our dna. there are tribes over the world that have never heard of jesus that lives in a very altruistic fashion. and they always have. in fact this is one of the things that amazed me while reading jefferson's work. when he was a child, his father was a surveyor and at the time probably 80 or 90% of virginia. his father spoke five different indian languages. he would travel with his father when he was out surveying these indian territories. he would live with native americans. he was so impressed by their high moral character and he writes about it over and over again. actually at one point he dances around the edge thinking maybe the native americans were actually genetically superior to the white year. european. it's stuff that we laugh at an hour be disgusted by. in any case it was so impressed by the native american. so saying something nice about jesus does not make one a christian. jefferson very clear that the frauds of the clergy as he referred to it probably 40 or 50 times were one of the big crises that could face america had a series of interesting letters in 1787 madison was helping read the constitution. madison was jefferson's protége. they are very close friends. madison was about 20 years younger. madison as i recalls a presbyterian, but he was a christian. jefferson was a deist, not a christian. they believed that some intelligence brought the university to be and then just up back. that quote god doesn't appear to day-to-day life. but everything that that came out was sacred and divine. so deist would see it as 11 sacred but would not pray to anybody. prayer was not a part of it. jefferson and madison have this correspondence were madison was concerned that if government ever started subsidizing churches or even providing with very specific protection, this turned into quite a discussion, that the churches would become corrupted and madison was very concerned about christianity. he did not wanted to be corrupted by government. jefferson was concerned about a priest becoming a member of congress he thought members of the clergy should be banned from political service. he never came out a specifically bandit but he was worried about it and concerned about it that religion would corrupt government. so his government, corrupt religion or religion corrupt government. so madison got his see i told you so within a few sore weeks of presidency in 1809 as i recall. he vetoed up until that point, george washington put into place the first welfare program in the united states. it was to pay for the poor houses in washington d.c. to paper medical care, housing, clothing. the federal government paid for it directly. the george washington administration through jefferson and madison administration. in the first week of adam administration they passed a law saying it would be routed through the churches. because it's a christian function. that was james madison's first veto. he said no we are not giving federal money to the churches, it will corrupt the churches and this will establish a precedent. it is not going to happen. so now we look back at this naïve debate that they are having about which is more dangerous, the church taken over government or influence in government, or government funding churches and thus making them changing their nature and character. host: thom hartmann is our guest, david is in florida. host: tom hartman is our guest, david is in florida. good afternoon to you. sorry i missed you when you were in washington to things, number one, at the beginning of the program mr. hartman, you mention that you started your talkshow and reaction to fox and talk radio. well talk radio and fox came to existence in cbs and abc having a monopoly on news distributions from the west. so let's go back to the beginning. that's number one. one. number two. i would like you to contrast how conservative speakers are treated on campus these days with the way bernie sanders was treated with at liberty university. not exactly leftism when he spoke there. i think that gives you a good insight that those contrast it gives you good insight as to how liberals act these days. guest: i'm not sure what the question was. it's a nice creation story. i don't think it's accurate. or you could say. if you you really think the facts are liberal then yes the news is all liberal. so if you want to promote something that is not fact like hey let's pretend the climate is not warming up. let's pretend tobacco doesn't cause addiction or cancer, which was a generation ago but these kind of conservative positions let's pretend the war in vietnam was a wonderful thing. if you want to have your own facts and they're not really facts, fine. i think one of the reasons why liberals general do better on college campuses and conservatives is because many of the conservative positions are basically antiscience, anti-fact. try to. try to claim that the world is 6000 years old, try to deny global climate change and global warming and the science behind that. the republican party in the united states is the only political party in the world, in the world that says global warming is not happening. talk to conservatives, i, i have done it, i went to denmark and i spent a week there in radio and interview the top politicians in that country. i was okay, you're conservative, you must deny global warming is happening. no no we know it's happening. well you must hate the national healthcare system, oh no we don't want to do away with that. oh you're conservative you must want to do with the fact that when people want to go to college in denmark they get a 200-dollar month stipend and tuition is free to help for books and run things. oh no i would not want to do that. so what makes you conservative. invariably it says we don't want anymore immigrants. if you're conservative in europe with your anti-immigrant. the the other thing that concerns me frankly, increasingly is that politicians and media that identify themselves as conservative are really functionally shows for large corporations and wealthy people. the goal is to get the average working person to think and behave the opposite of his own best interest. to support reaganism, to support nafta, captiva, and shaft. bill clinton played a big role in that. this is that. this is bipartisan but it is considered a conservative. it has destroyed the manufacturing business. the fact that wages have flattened out, ethel kurt in 1951 and one in a conservative mine, the bible, my father made me read that book. it was fascinating. it was a book that started william f buckley and is still in print. many anti- conservative can recite a chapter and verse. essentially in the book he said this middle class is growing in 1951. if middle-class gets too big then you will see social upheaval. you'll see people who have been previously marginalized. it might even get violent. everybody said this is crazy right wing french. then the 60s happen. 1962 on the birth control pill was legalized. it was on the market by 65, 66 it was widespread. this led to women now having significant control of their own body. and and now we would like equality in the workplace as well and you had the civil rights movement in 1960s. you had the beginning of the gay rights movement. and stonewall and all that same weight what about us. that he had young people saying hell no were not going to vietnam. they defined their elders, defined their government. conservatives said oh my god and in response to all of this, the conservatives say russell kirk was right. we have to reduce the wealth of middle-class. so people do not feel free to go out and write. and 68 i was in the streets when the police were throwing teargas grenades. the essence of the whole thing was, i i pay for my college tuition working as a part-time dj making $2.35 per hour and working at a dishwasher at bob's big boy and changing tires and pumping gas at the exxon station. mostly in the summer you could work your way through college. my wife worked her way through college as a waitress. we felt empowered. if we are out in the streets protesting the policies of our government we didn't feel that we be wiped out. nowadays, you have 20 or $30,000 in college debt, you're only halfway through your college career and you get in trouble for protesting and suddenly you have a police record, kk credit, and so on. the lockdown of dissented the united states has been driven in large part by economics since the 80s. this has been the essence of reaganism, in my opinion. you can say it has led to more stable society and the big classic difference between liberal conservatives is that liberals adjust i'm going back to don mauch and thomas jefferson who said the u.s. constitution should be revised every 19 years which is just one generation. liberals with eight social change should go forward and it should go forward as fast as possible. conservatives on the other hand is a man who stands astride with his hand out shouting stop. conservatives are all in favor but they wanted to go gradual, incremental and not in a disruptive fashion. both of those argument are legitimate. what i i think the modern tragedy is a word conservative is him has been hijacked. as i said my father was a conservative. dwight eisenhower ran in 56, go to your google machine and look up 1956 republican party platform. dwight eisenhower ran for reelection and said we have expanded social security, we have increased social security and we have added more than 2 million people to social security. we. we have expanded union rights. we have added x number of new members. where building a highway system across the country. we we are building out a national infrastructure. i can't think frankly, and this comes up a few times bernie was on my program a few years ago and was talking about this. he said what i will quote myself, i can't think of any position that bernie is holding right now that eisenhower would not have supported. that's how much, i think america has always been an eisenhower kind of country. to date that would be referred to as democratic socialism or social left, or whatever. but i think both the democratic and republican party has moved so far to the corporate side, to the billionaire side to represent their interests. the average working person is in the middle of nothing. that's what i think burning holds 20% of the vote, those are my dad republicans those are my the republicans that get it. if you. host: we are talking about tv with all the her tom hartman. his most recent books include rebooting the american dream, 11 ways to rebuild their country. tom hartman reader came out 2011, the crash of 2016 came out 2013 as well. last hours of humanity, warming the world to extinction about humanity, warming the world to extinction about global warming, also in 2013. the american revolution of 1800 how jefferson rescued democracy from tierney impaction, and what this means today. fortieth anniversary of that came out 2014. death in the pines which happens to be a novel. guest: which i wrote about 14 or 15 years ago. host: we been talking about bernie sanders, we want to sure viewers a little bit about interviewing or chatting about senator sanders on your show. we'll show you tom hartman's answers to here are a few of our favorite things. our show show will continue live in a few minutes. >> i've said over again i think you can boil the entire conservative economic to two words. cheap labor. >> that's right cheap labor and defense of the wealthiest people. i think what we have to do is it nation, where the last days of the very intent campaign and all kinds of ads are going on the air. i think we have calmed down a little bit. just ask ourselves some very basic questions. one of the questions is what ronald reagan aston 1980. how are you better off today than we are four years ago. >> very simple question. >> the answer to that for all of you out there who are millionaires and billionaires, if you're not concerned about the future of this country and you're not worried about the kids and grandkids, i can understand your voting for george bush. it's a rational decision, bad one but rational. but if you are an ordinary working person, you have a president of the united states whose trans- federal labral standards with throat 6 million workers off of your over time. and you're going to vote for george bush? ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> and tom hartman, who is jack vance and what is shy. guest: he is a science-fiction writer for large part. he wrote a lot of other things but his science fiction is spectacular. from the time i was able to read i've been a science-fiction junkie. jack vance just recently passed away, his writing is of such an extraordinary caliber that i consider it literature, not just science-fiction. it is brilliant writing. i own every book he has ever written, i have been collecting his stuff and when i add book was published in 96 in there about tim underwood who is the owner of underwood books also published jack vance. i didn't know that. one day i was on the west coast in the san francisco area and tim said i'm going out with jack vance later to you want to join me. it was sometime ago. i said wow, jack vance. i went to. i went to dinner and got to know him and his wife, it was just amazing. when we are living in atlanta at the time when jack went to florida, he drove, he was becoming blind at that point. his wife drove down to florida to accept the grand master science-fiction award. they stop at our house in atlanta and stayed there for three days. jack, in my office wrote, he wrote me into one of his last books. i just love his writing. more people asked me what i'm reading right now and i would say shy by jack vance. it's been decades since i've read it so it seems all new. host: your publisher for the most part is a group called eric poehler. guest: they publish most of my economic and political books. shit publish crash 2016. that was the only one i could find. a book was published by penguin. host: did you choose to go to barrett for some reason. guest: it's a really good publishing company. they established a relationship with them and i was pleased that they did. they have a foundation foundation of good works. out of the prophet. it's based in san francisco as i recall. they really care about books. they take good care of their authors, they keep books going. they haven't gone full corporate host: we asked you, what are your favorite books, what are they? guest: i think probably the most consequential books i have had or had the potential impact is a book i wrote in the '90s is about oil. oil was captured as sunlight years ago as a plant material settled in the ground got compressed over time. it was about the end of the era of oil. a book called walking your blues away which is a do-it-yourself psychotherapy book and doing the research for that i discovered an astonishing thing about sigmund freud that i don't think anyone else has ever known. think that book has the potential to change psychotherapy. host: what did you discover about freud. guest: it goes back a little bit. when i studied and he he wrote the introduction, he talked about how when we have bad painful memories comfort or any kind of memory actually, we store them in specific places. if i were to ask what color is the floor in the kitchen at home? what color is it. host: it's would. guest: so you just look down into your right so that's where you store it. there is a place in your brain that correlates wherever your eyes go. it's actually part of our brain that is physically available to us. the eyes are the only part of the brain that can reach the outside of the body. they they reflect activity going on in the brain. so a person makes door memory over here, and sometimes restore them just as feelings in here, or here or whatever. so what richard had developed was a technique where you would move the location of the memory. he concluded the place for the memory is stored is a part of a giant filing system in the brain. the filing system actually has a method to it. the method is emotion. we tend to store things in particular places based on the emotion. the way it works is will he fall sleep at night there's a one-day scratchpad for the brain. it basically knows everything that happened today. it does not no time beyond now or this day. at night when we sleep, willing dream the hippocampus or this is the most widely accepted theory, the hippocampus is dumping the data into the brain and figuring at what to keep and throw away where to start. we call this dreaming. seems confusing and primal but really the brain is the sorting things by emotion not by logic. with a posttraumatic stress disorder what happens is someone during the course of a day, experiences something so horrible, the death of a comrade in war, a car accident, people who are witnesses to the shooting in oregon, the police officers came and had to look at these awful bullet ridden bodies. you go to sleep in your hippocampus is okay here's what happened today and the rest of the brain says can handle that. hang onto that for another day. you wake up and that memory is just as if it happened that day. you talk with someone who is ptsd and they will say, 20 years ago this happened to me but i remember it like it was yesterday. that is one consistent characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder. so what he said was that memory in the hippocampus is associated with memories and the rest of the cortex. if you can start breaking those down into component pieces, the brain can absorb him, take them out of the hippocampus and and the ptsd. the way he did it was he within take a memory and change it location. for example if you can think of some minor irritation you have had in last few weeks, waiter who treated you badly, taxidriver, can you think of one. host: yes. guest: where is it when you think of that memory. and i couldn't ask you what that memory is i'm just asking you when you look at it wears it. host: over here. guest: so grab that pitcher and move it over here. now make a black and white. can you do that. host: i don't know. probably not. guest: what richard found was the you laughing, did you actually move the pitcher. host: no not at all. you'd don't get to play psychologist on the spot. host:. guest: the essences if you move the memory it's going to different filing place. it goes to a filing place that all that's kind of funny. so the way he would do this is he would have people move their eyes the back and forth .. and forth. also when your eyes cross the midpoint you are shifting from one side of the hemisphere to the other. the hippocampus is like brain stands. we have a logical brain and emotional brain essentially, i'm really simplifying. the goal is to fully integrate these horrible memories so they can be processed. by ms. moving the ice back and forth across the center point you are smearing the memory around the brain that it can be dealt with. typically it means changes. so when i started digging into this schapiro has developed mdr, it's been a year since i wrote about it. it's a technique used by the military where a person sits in front of another person it says watch my finger while you're thinking about that horrible event. things change, they change very rapidly. i was demonstrating this with steve larson in a counseling center and there is a fellow there who one of his patients. he had been in vietnam, he was in mih. he was responsible for airlifting out people who were wounded. they are on a mountain, a horrible firefight and he was pretty sure there were not no vietcong around he called and the choppers they loaded up, he looked around and said everything is fine so take off. they got 300 feet in the air and missile came out and body parts rained down on him. as he was trying to tell us the story he started sobbing. in fact he was on 100% disability. he was unable to work for decades. he would a few times a day just burst into tears because this memory was still today's memory. so i sat him down and i went through this move this thing around technique, i wasn't using a finger, i was just having him move it from place to place. after about four, two or three minute rounds of doing it he suddenly started laughing. he said why you laughing. he said the memory just became black-and-white this happen 30 years ago, it's just funny that i've been torturing myself all of these years. suddenly he had a logical take on it. this is like more than a decade ago. i got an email e-mail from him last year saying i'm still fine. i'm back in the workforce, i'm doing fine. size wondering about the history of this. i knew when i was a kid i studied hypnosis and hypnosis is part of nlt. one of the most famous hypnosis-mesmer was an austrian he does discovered that he would run his finger back and forth with his patient and he was able to solve what hysteria was the big issue back then. which is what we call ptsd today. it has all kinds of physical manifestations too. the conditions can be more physically vulnerable. he he concluded that it was the moon. the way he did it was he would have one hand in the air together energy from the moon and the other hand would be directing that energy into the person's eye. he became incredibly famous. ben franklin went over to paris, the french scientific society, they, they invited mesmer down and he taught ben franklin and they spent days working on the stuff. he had centers all over europe, mesmerism is a big deal. but he was promoting the moon which seems kinda weird. in 1834, as i recall there is a scottish psychologist by the name of james braid, he said this is nonsense, this moon stuff. this is eye fatigue or something like that. i'm going to prove it has nothing to do with the person. mesmer was created this personality and capable of getting the moon energy. i'll do with a pocket watch and prove it has nothing to do with me. so watch it watch go back and forth. it worked. and he named it hypnosis and that's where the word came from. price that is called mesmer. host: so you follow the history of this to the 19th century. guest: i studied many years ago and read a book they co-authored it was his breakthrough book. in that book and other papers i cite them in my book, he said i use hypnosis. i use it diagnostically and therapeutically. he would use hypnosis to relax people, when when they were telling their stories, it was moving the finger back and forth in front of their face. sometime it was stroking left arm right arm causing the brain to have to shift left brain right brain while discussing trauma. he was having fabulous success. he wrote a book about it. then in 1898, as i recall sigmund freud stopped using it. >> .. >> and so i was wondering why did they stop in 1988? i couldn't find it anywhere. by coincidence at the time i was fascinated by a comment that abraham lincoln made when he met her in 1861, i believe it is. the most widely sold red book in the book. and he said, so you're the lady who started the civil war? to our extent had a great attribute. anyway, what were the best selling books in the 19th century, maybe you have to go back and read a couple of them. there was a book who had always, i think he wrote the three m muskateers. they go, uh. who is this guy? everybody was reading it. a story of a 16-year-old girl in france, in parís, who was a model. there were four art -- artists, using the watch and hypnotizeed this woman. she would sing everybody who had ever sang in the history of the world. audiences loved it. he would take her back in the hoom -- room and exploit her sexually. at the end finds out what is going on and breaks the cycle and both of them died. his name was vengaly, the bad guy. and the principal readers of these books. >> women, 95% of the patients were women. he describes. it's a page and and a half description and it was exactly the technique used. so these women read these books, oh, my god, they can steal your soul, make you do all these things, horrible things would happen, and one of these women walks in and screamed. so as a result in my opinion and i had nothing other hand the historical timeline to back this up, but vanished in 1998 and because i believe and it took 70 years to come back. so the technique at that time -- i was teaching and i had -- i was doing an insulting practice over the telephone mostly with psychologists, psycho therapists and doing workshops all around the world. i started with many of the therapists who would call me up and say, okay, how do i do this with what. if you would ask some of your patients to just try something really simple and let me know what happens, i appreciate it, have them go for a walk. let me back up just a little bit, my first question start it had whole thing. 10,000 years ago we go out to hunt the mammoth. og is pretty bumbed out and traumatized. right left, left foot and the opposite hand swing. this is bilateral. if we cut ourselves, it's all healed up now. there was a scar here from my cat just, you know, a week ago, bright red and everything. what would the mechanism will be and maybe it's walking, because it's bilateral. have your patients go to a 20-minute walk every day and think about the crisis that they are dealing. what i started getting back from the folks is we are seeing really rapid clinical resolution of intractable issues. and so, you know, at that point, i was like okay, i had to share the story. now you know the whole book and don't need to buy it but basically how to do it yourself. >> we have a little bit an hour left with our guest, 748-8201, mountain and pacific, you can send a text message 202-717- 202-717-9684. we will also show you the different ways via social media. you can get ahold of us here. thanks for holding, you are on with tom hartmann. >> what an honor to speak with you. [laughter] >> there you go. >> caller: i used to listen in portland, oregon. anyway, i was wondering, i hear comments from the event with sarah -- sarah she gets oil money from the oil companies, but anyway, why -- i think a good society brend -- blend the two because not everything has to be for property -- profit. [inaudible] >> why don't see in assembly lines. >> what are you retired from? >> caller: barber. >> guest: have your political views changed? >> caller: yes. i grew up under fdr and harry truman and eisenhower and they were pretty equal parties, but i think they've all shifted so far to the right that republicans have gone to insanity and democrats have gone to republican mode. >> host: thank you, sir, for calling in today. >> guest: it's an interesting one. if you -- if you believe in having social security, you are a socialist, if you believe in free education, you're a essentialist, a democratic socialist. if you believe in public streets, you're a socialist. america was founded on socialist, semisocialist values. the socialism is let's clearly be fine and what is the public spirit and private spirit. the problem with the word is that the soviet union called themselves union soviet socialists. people think socialists means soviet union. they were appropriating the term. they were not even good communism. they were basically vladimir, were strong then essentially a dictatorship of some sort. and so, you know, that's not socialism. democratic socialism is what we have here in modest and what the caller was referring to sarah palin. in alaska they have the fund. they would authorize a check to every man, women and child in alaska. if you're going to drill oil, you're going to pay us for that oil. enough a price that we get permanent fund. it's a guarantied minimum fee in alaska. i wouldn't call her intellectual challenge. i think she's a smart woman. so the i think that the words socialist is losing itself sting. it's stimulating a fascinating conversation about where there's the dividing line. it used to be conventional wisdom that the public sector, the government sector is what we all collectively own, is what we collectively administer and should only be done in those areas that are natural monopolies. it's the most socialist of all to provide medicare, clothing, food, so that's something, it's in the constitution, we are going to have the military, roads, these public schools are not in the constitution but this is something that we decided to do and we got more socialists over time. i don't think any american wants to buy jeans, shoes from a government. nobody wants that. i do think, though, that we have wandered now as a consequence in large part of reaganistic that the private sector always does right, which is both are false. area of privatizing things that shouldn't be privatized. epa hiring private contractor to look into the gold mine which had spill in the river. what's a company doing for? they're funned to make company. they are going to look for every corner that they can cut. i'm not really sure dangerous stuff cleaning up mine sites, should be a nonprofit corporation or government employees, but the government employees of the epa have be cut over the years, the size that it should be now is considerably smaller so they have to outsource these things. same thing with the military. you end up with snowden. just speaking for myself, i think we've got way too far and there are things that the government can do well and does do well that we should be encouraging the government to do. number two, we should be looking at the area of natural monopolies. how many companies can bring cable tv in your house, typically one, telephone service, typically one, the sewage, these are all natural monopolies, you don't have five power lines, so if these are going to be actual monopolies should not be private corporations or corporations. higher reliability, higher performance because they don't have to skin 20% off the top to give to ceo or stockholders for dividends and mission statement is not we are here to make money, we are here to make sure you have reliable electricity. i live in portland, for example, the city of portland wanted to buy it. we will not sell it to a government entity. we will sell it to private entity. only the free market. i'm a total free marketer, serial entrepreneur. it's time to have the conversation. is it time to start looking at the fundamental principles of how we organize our economy, there's a distinction, i get people calling to the show all of the time, usually conservatives that don't understand what conservative means and they'll say, i'm a capitalist, i'm like, really, how much money did you make from your investment last year. i don't know $35 in the ira. you're not a capitalist. they live on capital. capitalist is a person who invests their money and lives up from investment. we decided that that was such a noble thing that we would give them a different tax rate than people like you and me. you and i could round up a 39% tax rate. capitalists right now have maximum 20%. their income is 20%, you know, whereas a brain surgeons hits ceiling at 39%. ronald reagan said it was crazy. do you think that a millionary should be paying lower income rate than a high school. no, you're right. they shouldn't. for one year during reagan administration capital gain tax were identical 28% for one year. the corporations got the better of reagian and the split broke out again. you know, there's really not that many cap alists in the united states. there's probably fewer than a couple of thousands. other than retired people who are living off investments. >> host: from your book larry said he didn't see a dime's worth of different between the parties. what about creating a third party? >> guest: yeah, i think i've -- i don't i don't remember what i wrote about third party, it's been more than decade that i wrote that book, or in the neighborhood of a decade, but one thing that i do believe right now, and this is why i think bernie's candidacy is so noble, you look at -- it's not true that it may have cost al gore the election, but it is widely believed, and typically what happens is third parties end up harming the party -- the mainstream party that's closest to them because -- i'm going to run in democratic primary and if i don't get it, i'm not going to run. >> host: alternative parties have an important place and those in them should continue to work for their strength and vitality, their -- they're essential as incubators, that does not mean they're alternative from election parties when election roles around. >> i think they're great in that they stir conversations on the edge that moves them, on the other hand, i don't think it's great when a politician of, say, you could do it republican or democrat, but a district that really would typically vote democratic ends up with a republican member of congress because a party district typically elect republican because the party was super active. >> host: please go ahead with your questions for tom. >> caller: good morning, peter, tom, good morning, c-span. you have heart and you've got smarts which are two things that are in short supply. here is my question, your association with bernie sanders as a radio guest goes back decades when he was beginning in local politics in vermont, so it's safe to say that you have gotten to know him as a politician and human being, what is something about senator sanders that most voters don't know that if they did know it, they would understand why he would make an awesome president, and also, as of right now how would you gauge his chances if nominated? >> guest: okay, with regard to chances, i just don't know. these things are very, very difficult to predict. with regard to who is bernie, i'll just tell you a quick story, when we were first talking about bernie being on our show, he had been on the program a couple of times and thinking making regular feature of the show, bernie becomes the show for an hour and usually callers calling me instead of callers calling bernie, we were going to get together and talk about this, have a conversation. bernie's guy, chuck shows up, and bernie comes in, you know, like a world wind, his hair was skewed and on the phone, and we're sitting there and kind of comes over and half sitz down and he says, really, really, okay, i'll be there in 30 minutes. don't worry. no, i will be there and hangs up the phone and the waitress is walking by, he doesn't physically grabs her. bring me something with chicken. right now, i have to run. she runs off to the kitchen. he says, we're assembling a group of people in front of their factory in half hour for demonstration, i have to be there. he was the congressmen of vermont. you know, bernie is all business i don't know bernie as a human being beyond the conversations, i've never been to his home, i don't know his family. he's so committed to work and nation that it always seems to come first, at least from what i can see. >> host: katherine, florida. good afternoon to you. >> caller: yes, wonderful show. like most americans i support common sense -- >> host: i'm going to hang up on katherine because he calls in all of the time as different names and talks about the same issue. she doesn't really add to the conversation that we would like to have with our guest, but so i apologize for that. tom in which he chesapeake, massachusetts. >> caller: i like c-span and different perspectives. tom, i really enjoy listening to you. anyway, my thought here is i think over the years i've been more conservative and -- >> guest: what does that mean? >> for me, i find liberals to be much more bigoted. >> guest: you've become more tolerant and inclusive of the people of color? >> caller: i've always felt that way. for example, myself, i lived in africa for a couple of years in the time when the peace corps was kicked out of tanzania, i was a volunteer there. you know, and i've been traveling or whatever and i really do enjoy people and i'd like to see people do well, but i think maybe the biggest thing because there's so much talk, i just got a little more conservative about my opinions, for example, i didn't like what's her name -- not being allowed to speak at university. i thought that was terrible. an experience that needs to be heard. >> guest: i don't know who that is and speak about it. >> host: do you listen to tom's radio show? >> caller: no, i haven't. >> host: we appreciate you listening. i want to follow that up with an e-mail from pam in birmingham, alabama. this might be part of an earlier caller, democratic manage, it seems it makes no difference which party is in power. that makes people get cynical about the system. here i am a democrat in a red state, what can we do to change minds and hearts? >> guest: this is a real problem from -- for the democratic party in fact, let me just put this in my own words. reagan had declared war on organized labor and he won, you know, all these things. first antilabor, secretary of labor in the history of the united states, et cetera, and the -- as labor was collapsing in their -- you know, unions were getting smaller, they were also getting less wealthy and unions had been a large source of money, and so the -- some strategic democrats are looking around going, okay, what's next? how do we survive to the republican party? they survived basically by being on the side of big business, it's a party of business. back what was good for general motors that was good per america, but the democrats had been the party at labor, now we can't be labor anymore. there's some businesses out there that are less toxic than others. let's become a party of the banks, they are not toxic and they have a lot of money, let's become a party of big business but softer business, a business that everybody respects, and so the democratic party through the democratic leadership counsel and bill clinton was governor and sitting them down and saying, you want to join me on this thing, we are going to take over the democratic party and rebrand it and i'll make you president. and look what happened? the democratic party has become by and large since 1991 or '92, the party of some big -- this is what bernie sanders is making a turn away from this saying, no we are not going to be the party of any business, we are going to be the party of the people, the people. let the republican be parties of billionaires, big corporations. that's why i asked tom what being a conservative meant. well, i oppose abortion. i don't know if that's a conservative or liberal position. i have four guns, i don't want to give them up. how did this become part of the issues? oppose abortion, cristian. what it has to do with politics. what has happened is that the party which is representing a very small slice and doing a very good job representing a very small slice of 1% in america has -- can't get elected. the republican party can't get elected, we are the party of billionaires, corporations, it t was mostly republicans who voted for democrats were very opposed to it. and we're going to be -- they simply said we're the party of big business. nobody would vote for them. okay, you have 15 million cristians, we'll pick them up, you have 100 million racists, we will pick them up, 30 million people who hate abortion, we will pick them up. they have issues that don't hurt big business at all. it's become a coalition. it's sort of like the way governments are governed with coalition. and i think that that -- and thus, people say, okay, well, i guess if i'm oppose today abortion or cristian or whatever, i must be for a republican. the republican party has told me that before. .. >> guest: i was -- dick gregory and i were flying to uganda during the war with it diamin, and the international charity organization i mentioned set up a program, which is still there, still running. and we started talking politics, and he made the comment to me. he said it with the perfect comedian's timing. when you have something good, you don't have to force it on people at the barrel of the gun. they will steal it. that is what is happening. countries flipping small d democratic, people are rising up and saying, we want our country back. it's a brilliant statement and one of the chapters in "re booting the american dream," a call for us to key calibrate our foreign policy. >> host: linda in phoenix. >> caller: i'll be as quick as i can. talking about the -- both the democratic and republican parties, and also a little earlier you said that the extremes were moving more towards towards towards the corporations, and that to mouth a quote from mussolini. fast shipment should more appropriately be called corporatism because it's a merger of state and corporate power. and i -- by the way, i feel the burn. i'm a big supporter. and i'm a political junkie, and i wanted to know if you would comment on that, andles -- and also what you think of the tpp. >> guest: i call it the southern hemisphere trade gravity. s-h-a-f-t. nafta and shafta. and i'm opposed to all of them. so, the fascism part, yes. this is a word that was invented by mussolini's speech writer and ghost writer, and who probably was the origin of the quote. it's certainly mussolini said that repeatedly. in fact when the took over italy, they dissolved the parliament, and instead of having what would be our equivalent of congressional stricts elect representatives to the parliament, the largest corporation in each district sent their representative to parliament. in fact he called it the -- my lousy italian -- the chamber of the fascist corporation. and harry wallace wrote about this in 1944. "the new york times" asked him, what about american fascists? and he wrote a brilliant piece in "the new york times" where he said the fascistover ha worry about are not the knee foe nazi. they're the corporate powers reaching out for control of our government because they already control the economy, and if they can then control the agency which makes the rules for the economy, they will have unlimited power. and that is a danger and that is fascism. this is the vice president of the united states in the 1940s in the "new york times." i think that he was prescient. it's gotten worst. people think you're talking about naziism when you talk fascism. they were not functionally fascist. >> host: would hwa a would be the effect in your view of tpp? >> guest: it's essentially a fascist argument. you get these tribunals. these three-judge tribunals made up of corporate lawyers who have the power to override laws made here in the united states. we already saw this with nafta. 30 years ago the humane society of the united states started a campaign, took 24 years to do it, to end the -- to change the way that tuna were fished. tuna typically swim underneath -- schools of toupe no swim underneath school of dolphins. there's messy eaters. they eat something, the stuff filters town and the tuna eat other. so they're eat. theovers of the dolphins above them. so they would come with giant net nets, whenever they statue dolphins, and the dolphins would die, and so the humane society said, let's require long line fishing. like the fishing pole kind of fishing. you have a thousand likes but below the dolphins down where the tuna are. we made this law in the united states. dolphins safe tuna. major accomplishment, made a law as a result of the public, the vast majority of the public sailing, this is what want. we're concerned about the future of the dolphins. they're mammals, they're smart, like us in some ways. let's have humane fishing. as soon as we signed nafta, fishermen in mexico, which were still using the net, sued us and said you can't have that law. that's an unfair restraint of trade. it means our product, our tuna caught off the shores of mexico cannot be sold in the united states. that's a violation of the north american free trade agreement and the world trade organization rules, and we had to back down. we had to change our laws. this is -- there's hubs of examples of this. that's probably one of the more famous ones. tpp will do the same thing, only with pharmaceuticals, banking, the lowest common denominator, most corporate friendly, least good for the consumer policies are going to become law that is enforced by the corporations themselves in courts that are run and owned by the corporations themselves but have the power to overturn united states lawmaking. in my opinion, any conservative should be saying, hey, wait a minute. this is so wrong. the conservative argument against the u.n. was it was a surrender of sovereignty and it was, we gave up our truth be able to start a war because we decided we wanted to do it and said we will not enter a war without the body of nations saying, yes, you can do that. and we have stood there all these years. conservatives said, wait a minute, you're surrendering sovereignty to the rest of the world. that it wrong. we're eunited states. we answer only to ourselves. many of the same people are saying butt pp, and a half tacoma shafta, cav tacoma they're fine, it's wonderful stuff. and that's point how conservative no longer means defending the constitution. i means now defending the interests of big transnational corporations and billionaires and then the put this patina on it to make it seem like the average guy can vote for them. it's the only way they can win elections unfortunately. >> host: this text: please tell us the name of thom's book about emdr. >> guest: called walking your blues away. >> host: there you go. nancy, redondo beach, california. >> caller: thank you, peter. thank you, thom. i just love you and enjoy you so much. my question is, what can the average person like me do to really change things about what is going on in the middle class? nothing theoretical, just a step-by-step, i e-mail, i protest, and i still feel like i'm in the same place. i'm just wondering what an average person can do to change things and i'll take the answer off the air. >> guest: thank you very much. i think that it was first a norwegian economist who suggested -- i think mcdowell and the continuing point reprised some of this -- suggested that when a certain percentage -- seems to be in the neighborhood of 20%-25% of the population -- firmly believes something that is outside the mainstream of how society is going, the society will change to accommodate that. we saw this with the reagan revolution. not a majority of the americans who agreed we should cut taxes on billionaires and cut taxes on corporation and raise taxes 18 times on average working people as reagan did. it was a small group of people but they were able to convince enough people, that 20-25%, to basically flip our government. so, i think the thing that you can do to most effectively change things is wake people up. have conversations with your friends. whether it's on the telephone, over coffee in your kitchen, whether it's at the local community center, whether it's on facebook or twitter or your favorite web site, educate your friends and your neighbors. let people know. if everybody -- on either side, frankly. i would say the same thing to republicans of good will. we all should become -- evangelist is perhaps too strong of a word but awakeners, educators, when you actually have the facts on your side, it's easy. >> host: hi, thom. my name is kelly, text message. i wondered if you would talk about your vegetarianism. love your show on syria. >> guest: i became a vegetarian when i was 16. that would have been '67, in response to the vietnam war originally. a statement of nonviolence. and within a year of that, i had gotten into tm and other spiritual practices that led me to conclude that vegetarianism was also a more ethical way of living, and then i started reading the literature on vegetarianism, and decided it was probably a healthier way of eating, and so then a vegetarian ever since then, and mostly these days a vegan. i think that you can make an argument that eating small fatty fish periodically, like once a week -- a study that was done a couple of months ago you can find -- actually not sure of the web site -- it was a study of nordic population and they found the people who ate small fatty fish, one serving once a week or more, had better cognitive abilities as they aged past 50 than the people who ate none at all. so if somebody was eating for maximum health that would be the one caveat i'd put on it, which i'm sure it's got every vegetarian and vegan in country go, no! kippering her, sardine, they're not filled with mercury and poison. that's the only caveat. i feel great. we raised our kids vegetarian. i've seen it. it works -- it's walking lightly on the earth, too. i think there's something to be said for food density. the more a food is -- like you take a hundred pound of grain and run it through a cow and you get a pound of beef. that's denser food. as we he shifted to denser food, mostly with fastfoods, we're starting to have weight problems, and i suspect there's something there, too. when eat vegan, file lighter. >> host: who is master stanley. >> guest: he was a fellow who was a -- he ran-was the pastor of the coptic temple in detroit in downtown detroit. used to be the governor's mansion in the 1920s. and big old building. and i became his student when i was 17. went through a couple of years of kind of learning the stuff. a christian organization that had some very loose ties to the orthodox coptic church in egypt but very loose. he came to the united states in the 1920s, and did tours around the country. could stop his heart. he was on "you asked for it," a famous tv show, died brought back to life. and master stanley prescribed vegetarianism. a big fan of it. for spiritual practice. and i got into that. then when master stanley died, for a couple of years, john davis and i and a couple of other people became the -- i was one of the rotating pastors for that church. i was odaned and have done a butch of -- ordained and. >> are you a coptic christian today? >> guest: if had to choose an affiliation, sure. >> host: what is the difference between mainstream christianity and coptic christianity? >> guest: master stanley's coptic organization is based in grand rapids, john davis is running it, who is along with me and a bunch -- a group of 12 other people were hard core disciples of master stanley. has become more like unity, or the more progressive denominations that are willing to enter tape things like meditation, and vegetarianism. it's not the, let's dress up and look pompous like the official orthodox coptic church. bay went rouge. >> host: eric from erie p.a. >> caller: good afternoon, thom, it's eric in erie. i love ha of the his on your forum where we can does your books and gut of the daily politics i want to know your takeaway, out in that we have a lot of years of data, on the adhd boys that were heavily method indicated in kind of a knee jerk axe. i was one of them. what we have seen in their later life, particularly relating to ways they seek to balance their own brain chemistry later, self-medication, depression, things like that. what's your takeaway in terms of that, and also, i carry a message, man. whenever i encounter a kid getting the add rap, i take them a side and say, listen, this is an advantage. you can do a lot of things that knock -- nobody can do. you have powers that they don't have. so, find those, use those. >> guest: yes. excellent questions. consequences of meds and school. okay. here's -- first of all my hypothesis on add. when my son went through this, it provoked this sort of like with the hypnosis stuff. what is going on with this? it occurred to me that prior to agricultural revolution, 10,000 or 11,000 years ago we were haul hunter-garterrers -- adds characterized by the principle behaviors, distractibility, impulsivity, and a need for high levels of stimulation. high levels of arousal. so, in school we view those things -- distractibility, the kid looking at the bug on the ceiling instead of looking at the teacher. impulsivity, the kid is blurting things out. the kid is constantly getting into trouble, figure ought ways to be stimulated, and it's behavior we try to crush in schools historically. but if we were in a hunting-gathering society and we're going to you the forest looking for lunch and we're not constantly scanning the environment, we might miss that rabbit that just ran by that's going to be lunch or the bear back there that wants to make us lunch. so distractibility would be an asset the that world. impulsivity. you're chase as deer -- a rabbit through the forest and a deer runs by. die go after the deer or the that sit down and make a graph here and on one side but deer, the other side rabbit bit, assets and liables. the deer is more meat but harder to catch. no, you don't have time for that. you have to make an instant decision and act on it, and literally the textbook and dictionary definition of impulsivity we act before we think about it. that would be an asset in that world, not a liability. and the need for high levels of stimulation and arousal. who is going to get up in the morning and say,'ll go out in unkell or the forest where -- jungle or the forest where people want to eat me and find lunch. somebody who is not intimidated by high levels of arousal. the best hunters will be the people that love that. oh, boy, adventure. that's add. those are hunters. but then in the farming revolution came along, those skills are the opposite of what you need in farmers. once you settle on as a farmer, your plant your wheat and sit on the front porch waiting for the shoots to come up and you sit there weight nor the wheat to grow, and for somebody who is add, that would be painful. but for somebody who is a good farmer, can just sit here. and i don't need a lot of arousal, and i'm not going to make any impulsive decisions, and i'm -- and then when the harvest comes in, going out and picking bugs off plants day after day, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, this is what we do. and that then became putting a bolt on a nut -- or a nut on a bolt or whatever the proper language is in a car factory, on aamiably line. we all became farmers and built our schools literally out of this agricultural model so much so we take summer off so the kids can bring the crops in, and on the industrial mod that henry ford pie feared, our schools have become an assembly line. so our schools are structurally hostile to the kind of brain wiring that brought the human race to where it's at. the ben franklin and tom miss edisons. both of whom dropped out of high school, bill the way, and -- by the way. thomas edison was kicked out when he was 7 years old. so that's why i say if you have add, you're a hunter in a farmer's world. then the question of medication. paradoxically, stimulant medications causes people who need a sense of stimulation to relax. because now, hey, i'm still lated so i can pay attention. so, the question then is, if you're going to have a farmer-based classroom, do you medicate your kids or not and turn them into farmers? basically what stimulation made indication is they turn hunter kids into farmer kids. there's a whole scientific explanation i can lay on you but far more granular than we need to get. i personally believe, and i've seen this in a lot of kids and although we weren't using meds in the program for abused kids we started in the '70s, but i've seen in my family and others, my brothers' kids and friends, a personally think that failure in school is more destructive to a child than taking a stimulant medication. time may prove me wrong but i'm not an absolute opponent of stimulant medication for kids. i've tried them myself and i know how they work. know i can focus better when i take them. i just don't like the way i feel. i think this is like a lot of them who got caught up in cocaine and meth, they're probably add people because these are stimulants and the bring them down or stabilize them so they can function in boring jobs. we once had a bookkeeper who screwed up our taxes year after year. he was the cousin of a close friend of mine. and final live i sat him down and said -- he was so add but his father has been a bookkeeper and his grandfather same you shouldn't be a bookkeeper. said you should be a salesman for your can'ting company. selling is a hunting job. you're on the hunt. and she shifted and became a saysman for accounting services and really grew the firm, and stopped screwing up my taxes. a wonderful thing. but that said, i would say that providing medication is a step but i don't it's the optimal step. the optimal step is to re-invent our schools. that's one of the crusades i've launched with my books about re-inventing the schools can the most comprehensive one is the "complete guide to adhd" where i go into the history of schools and queen teresa of austria, and where parents would bring their children and half the year they would spend -- the other half they would be educated, and the education was how the government paid for the -- or the spinning of the cloth is how they paid for the education, and the education is what the kids go in exchange for the work they did, and then over time that changed to a public school model as we outlawed child labor, and i go through the whole out of education. >> host: diana you're on booktv. diana is in illinois. >> caller: hi. i love c-span. just wanted you to know. my question, thom, is you do support bernie quite readily, and i do think he is a good person, and i have always followed his programming on your program. however, i don't think i could vote for him, and the reason is that he is for the drone program, and he is very strongly militarily involved with the drone program, and i do -- i just couldn't vote for him. so, thank you for your time, and let me know how you respond to that. thank you. >> guest: sure. bernie has been a guest on my program eave friday for a lot of years and i never heard him speak highly of drones. feel the burn.org is the best web site for bernie's positions on the issues. i have to look it up. but all that said, yes, i support bernie sanders, i also support hillary clinton. i think that she has the potential to be a great president. and people say, oh, but she was on the board of director's of walmart and they take money from corporations and have a superpac, as if to imply she is corrupt. we need to remember that franklin roosevelt was the governor of new york state during the period which led to the great depression, and that all happened in new york state. that was wall street. his attorney general, the new york attorney general, i going after the banks but roosevelt's attorney general did not go after the banksters. roosevelt was part of the machine. he was being investigated. for corruption for corruptly appointing a judge when he was running for president. you can argue he was the corrupt governor of a corrupt state. he became president of the united states during a time of great national crisis and he flipped. he became in my opinion, one of the best presidents we have if had, and that's not to say that hillary clinton is corrupt or whatever, but the point is that he knew, what franklin roosevelt knew, from having been governor of new york, and having been as corrupt as he was, he knew where the bodies were buried, how to get things done. all of those are true of hillary clinton. she has tremendous leadership capability itch would prefer bernie sanders as president. but if it's hillary i will vote for her with no hesitation because i think she would be a great president, particularly in a time of crisis, and i think that we are -- i know that we are in a time of crisis worldwide, and i believe that an economic crisis is coming as well. >> host: clark bloomfield, new jersey, please go ahead. the last call today. >> caller: okay. hello, gentlemen. i wanted to criticize tom but i have four things want to say. two of the first two criticisms but i'll let that slide. i just want to ask you two questions. your drive -- you said before your life changed on the vietnam war, that event changed your life from being a republican to a democrat. that i don't understand that because the vietnam war was a democrat war. it wasn't even a war. it was an illegal action. >> guest: yes. >> caller: it was -- just blow mist mind -- >> host: would you like him to explain that clark? thank you very minute. >> guest: sure. first of all the vietnam war didn't turn me into a democrat. i was largely apolitical in a partisan way until probably 15 years ago or so. i was more a pox on all their houses. it caused me to question my own government and question the wisdom of politicians politiciad mow to -- a lot of white house grew up in that time realized he had been lied to. the gulf of tonkin revolution was a eye. lynn on johnson was great president except for the vietnam war thing. it wasn't just a democratic war. richard nixon continued and it sabotaged in 1968 nixon sack document had lyndon johnson's attempts to negotiate a truce. he had worked out. and the johnson library released a tape of johnson talking to everett dirksen in which he is saying, they're over their telling tu not to negotiate with me until after the election. this is treason. and everett dirksen says, i know. can you talk to nixon and get him to stop? nixon wouldn't top. it was a political awakening for me. not necessarily a shift from republican to democrat. >> host: what rut go to talk about tomorrow on the show? >> guest: i don't know. i'm sorry. what's so wonderful about doing a talk show -- i'm guessing you have a sense of it, too, doing these shows -- you just never know what is going to come up and you work with what is in front of you. so, after we're done today i'll be going back home and going through all the news and looking for -- in particular the stories that north necessarily the ones everybody is talking about. the ones that actually -- important things. >> host: are you working on another book? yes, couple of them. i'm working on one about the supreme court, and this is an area where i agree with phyllis schlafly and newt gingrich. i want to approach them about writing a forward or a blush. i have had them on my program and we absolutely agree on the stuff about the court. >> host: for the last three hours thom hartmann has been our guest. booktv now continues. thank you for watching. >> at the cover of the book we'll talk about next on booktv "the son also rises" ex-gregory clark the author, a professor at uc davis. the message in your book, it matters to whom you were born. >> guest: absolutely. the book is really concerned with trying to establish how much does it matter? what -- not just who your parents are but