Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20151010 : comparemela.com

usually the major dorms had a radio station. statio i did that for about six weeks, made a tape, got a job at w itl. the be itl lansing michigan, mic which was a big country-western station. number one station in lansing. i was a weekend dj and i hated country music and i discovered that i absolutely loved country music. i was a teenager in the 60s and it was like rock 'n roll was nothing. i worked there for a year or so and that in did an all-night showg., progressive rock show ad then went back to woodland ended news for seven years. then i got out of that in 2002,. november 2002, thanksgiving we were living in vermont and luis flew back to michigan, to visit her family for thanksgiving and all the way there all i couldbe get was-- it was odd, it was like sean hannity show repeated itself three or four ship times on the port and were and he was doing a live remote from habitat for humanity and he was called at hannity for humanity and liv talking about no liberal will get this house, which kind ofndh offended my sensibilities, butoo more than then iw was thinking half of the country votes democratic, roughly. not like we are a totally red country. we are a purple country. there has to be a market for the left wing version of what hannity's doing, thought i wrote an op-ed for common dreams probably around december 2002. it basically was a business plan i have been in radio.e and been inha the business. i know how it works and here is it was how you can do a it from a h business part of you and upou cn programming point of view and put that out there. then thought-- in 97, we had sold in ad agency in atlanta, so we were essentially retired. i thought it would be fun to try this out see if we can do this.h so, putting my money where my mouth was, so we found a radio station burlington, vermont, that would put me on the air fon two hours on a saturday morning after the swap meet and for a few months there i didn'ttwo hor morning show, about half the mon calls i got work is that john deere tractor still available. moing but, again we made a tape and took that to america radio network, which at the time wasa? the only progressive radio network in america, preceded error america. it was owned by the uaw. they picked me up and put us on 29 stations and serious xm ore sirius at that time. xm was a competitor. that's how the show started and then--ti and shelly asked me to come out to chicago and meet with them. they had read my article and were thinking of starting a network based on what i had written about and they startedot air america.o after a year or so of competing with air america, maybe two years or whatever it was they started syndicating my show. but, i was owned of the show and ye i think i was the only show-- my ring of fire was the other one. the only two shows that werehe s actually owned by the host as oppose to the station., >> host: why do you think air america when under?osed t >> guest: i think it was a ho mixture of thingsst. amera when the biggest was was they were wa undercapitalized. back when he was in the new nixon white house and have proposed or signed off on a proposal for some to call gop d which was an early foxnews and a nixon could raise the money, so it never happened and 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, so you can say, sean hannity last of them said in the aggregate baby $400 million. is in that a terrible failure? no, that's not after the fifth year they caught an audience and now they make a lot of money. when air america declared m bankruptcy i think that conjure fa something like 16 or $17 millioa overki five or six year timefra. when not a lot of money for a ove f national radio network. particularly, one part of their business model was leasing. rado so, i think beingwo undercapitalized-- and there were some management problemsio and some of the people in management really shouldn't have been there and there were some programming issues that i disagreed with and that theyhere mire creating some programs tham were more like television and radio and there's a real big difference of those mediums. b i think the real big problem is that they were out of cash a. pl >> host: in several of your books you refer to yoemurself ab serial on spin your? >> guest: yak, i started my first business when i was 17, a tv repair shop and stereo repair shop. >> host: a head shop.bout beinga >> guest: in the back of a head shopes and we called at the erotic-- electronics and joint with a tv antenna and then we got a little less hippie andthea what i was doing the guy who owned the head shop, i rented a shelf from him for $25 a monthd then people would bring electronic equipment and and it i would pick it up and take it home and fix it. i would bring about the next day and he would collect the money and he took a percentage of the money to. reed a s we grheew out of that shelf in money and took a per about four months and moved down the street and rentedk a place and ended up with for technicians and six or seven employees total. my soon to be wife was our bookkeeper and it was the firsts business i ever owned and also the only business that i started that went down in flames. i learned a lot from that, an awful lot from that. yeah, and then after that we th. and then started an herbal tea company, an advertising agency. we moved to 78 and started a community for kids reading 83-- we moved back to atlanta and. started a travel agency andk to built up from nothing after age. about $6 million value and got on the front page of the "wall street journal". sold it and 86 and moved to germany with our kids for a year living at and working with therr nonprofit organization i had been working with since 1978. we had base the community for these kids on then we came back and 87 from germany and back to atlanta and started an advertising agency and that is the company i sold and 97 and we moved to vermont to retire and start the radio show, which turned-- it was going to be a hobby and now i'm doing four g hours of media every day five days a week. >> host: where are you living? >> guest: .in the southwest in washington. >> host: when did you start and white did you start writing books?hog >> guest: again, this goes back to my childhood. my mom was an english major and graduated from msu back in the late 40s and her aspiration c was to be a writer and she held writers the way people today think of movie stars. my dad had 20000 books in the house. a he had organized like a library. of w very organized guy. i started writing as a youngeryd teenager and by the time and moved out of the house with i was 16 i had paper may butterball rejection slips. beoom wa i just kept doing it and now iyd have got i think around 25 books i in print. >> host: the first several books you wrote were about attention deficit disorder. >> guest: first several i published. i had writtent.ok probably 10 o2 books before that, but none were ever published. arthur c clarke says your first million is your practice and that's true. add and thatan was a product of two things. i was the executive director of. the residential treatment facility in new hampshire. my wife was the program director. so, my job principally was tmpo raise money and do publicity and things like that. but, i noticed that virtuallyith all of the kids came in were coded as hyperactive or back then it was referred to hyper kinesis syndrome, hyperkinetic children in these kinds of o things and in 78, the year we started that-- i think the year before that feingold publishes y book, white is your child hyperactive. he proposed it was food thathado these children were reacting tod with a functionally allergy. he was an allergist by the way, so he had a certain biased. we did a study on our kids over six-month time putting them on his diet and weight down at a 34 kids we had one kid we could turn on and off like a light switch with his diet, but hehis also hwead horrible psoriasis.ia they seemed to make his psoriasis worse, so i think ford a small subset of the population there is that allergy connection , but foremost i think it's a way of brain trwiring ani published my first published piece on that around 1980 and it was the journal of molecular psychology t suggesting that it was not a disease, but simply a of having your brain wired to. when one of our children was diagnosed with adhd in highferew school in the 80s and the psychologists that in the room with him and said forget about going to college, you shouldm become a car mechanic . and you're good with your hands. go by the way, if you're going to be a car mechanic work on the foreign-made cars because they make more money. at this point my son is like in tears because he wanted to go to college. i thought this sucks and this is a terrible way to describe this, so i wrote my first book add a different perception ando essentially two of my sonsy to saying you're not broken there's nothing wrong with you. son of different skill set than mant other kids, but there are also a lot of people in your tribe and he has a masters degree in science business of his own, god bless yes, i wrote a couple ofin books.n became a national best seller and may publisher was like i bem want another book in another book. >> host: who are we talking about, this is a quote from you, he is a poster child for add and if he didn't have add we wouldn't have the united states of america?ational stseller >> guest: probably been franklin. is been a while since noith wr , this those books. i po in fact, in add a differenthave perception i quoted a couple ofa people and as i recall it's beee , sirlin, thomas edison richard what's his name, same differen name as the guy who married elizabeth taylor. >> host: burton? his name, >> guest: yes, burton. he was such a classic and probably richard burton given his bouncing around what not. >> host: why do you say that about been franklin? >> guest: if it better franklin never held one john for more than-- job for more than three years and reinvented himself over 30 times and literally gues changed his profession. he lived all of the world. yes. he he was easily bored and i think add can be for a person who is-f who has a lower iq is more of a challenge and for person like franklin, who was a genius andho had add it can be a useful culmination. i think for everyone it can be a useful commendation. >> host: would you say he was a serial on your? >> guest: yes, he definitely was an inventor and writer and publisher like i said he helped gues create united states t:of ameri. >> host: 2004, what would joseph and n-- jefferson do. where did that but come from? >> guest: i wrote that the because because i kept encountering revision of history specifically and particularly about jefferson. it was kind of a resurgence of hi interest in jefferson, largely after 911, but there are about r couple of historians that i'mte1 not sure have degrees in history who were suggesting that jefferson was a bible thumping christian and that it's part of this whole america was founded on christian values and there are several very well organizations pushing and a number of other myths about jefferson that i thought wereffo important to knockdown and just told actual story of jefferson's life and what he did and what hr was promoting. >> host: i think you write about the fact, living in new hampshire you discovered some jeffersonian material in the how she were living in. one >> guest: yes, and vermont, actually. and that's what really got me into it. i had forgotten about thatishe.w hous passes.the we bought this house in 2001, i think it was and in the attic there was a couple of boxes of1n old books in the attic of the carriage house that was attached to it and they were horribly weather damaged. whoever had the house before us just left of them there and in fact they had been left for a long time. there was 10 or 20 volume set, because a 20 volume set of collectiveve writings of thomas jefferson which had 0sonly beens published once. it had his personal diaries and all of his letters and autobiography and all of thiss f stuff and i spent a year-- ihise mean, i was quote retired and io spent a year just reading andleo living inside jefferson's braina and then like i said i'm reading all this stuff in the world thas completely contradicts what i just learned and i realizedcompd there icis something to be said for a objective bull-- voice ini history and jefferson in a lot of his writings was thinking about the posterity, think about his own reputation, presented ao himself well, as you would expect.y, thinking abou but, the history is fairly r clear. led me to that book and that also led me to-- when i startedr writing that book the first led draft became the book under equal protection, actually. jefferson would be horrified by the idea-- [inaudible] by the cooration >> guest: for small the corporate and its modern form--r although the british indian company was the first modern corporation, queen elizabeth the first charted it in 1600 in the first corporation was the golden hind and she did that and made a fortune. her and the members of parliament.. in 1770, three, jeffersoniament. published a pamphlet called a pd summary view of the rights of british americans, as i recall. it's been almost two decades since i've read this stuff. it was basically a booklet about how to be a good british citizen in north america. a that was in the summer. w the late fall or early wintet england was suffering through a recession, a serious serious recession, worldwide recession.u so, they passed that tea act, d so which were some reason most people think was a tax increase on tea, but what it was actually, the east india compano was almost all owned by members of the british parliament and members of the royal family and the company was like going down the tubes. it they had a monopoly on most of the businesses in the united states andar t was what everyone drank.of the people didn't drink coffee in the early colonies and every block for every other block at a tea shop and it was kind of this cultural center and so the tea active 70 and 73 was the largest tax cut at that point in time, corporate tax-cut in the history of the world that not-- thatesor east india company had over 10 million pounds as i recall or whatever it was, a massive co amount ofmp tea in stock in thek and they had already paid taxes on. so, it was a tax rebate on allo, of that stuff, so they got monet lack from the government.s a tal the goal was to sell that tea into north america because the problem they were having in t north america was about half of. the teeth being consumed inthe r these tea shops was from quote smugglers, the dutch trading companies are trading tomug american trading companies and was being brought in illegally.. they tried to stop the trade ans they would cooperate back to captain kidd, let's hire a pirate and stop. there was no way to stop it, so al they decided tol undercut it, o the british company was bring it this super discounted teat s in. the united states and the citizens from philadelphia up to boston freaked outso and started this huge campaign to block tea from even coming in and in charleston they prevented them from coming to the harbor. but, they finally docked in boston. that led to basically a million dollar in today's dollars act of vandalism. they vandalized three of the ships quietly, respectfully, heterestingly enough. i tracked down a copy of the only eyewitness accounts and got the original book that was published in 188i 3. publhed it was george roundtree hughes w and it had a long title. in fact, he was the guy that tit came up with the phrase boston tea party. they had all sworn an oath of silence to each other and this was 50 years later and pretty much everyone else was dead and he had been 16 or 17 years old when he participated. so, he wrote the book and it wos remarkable. it was an act ofve vandalismhe e against the largest corporation re in the world. so, when you say why would jefferson be horrified by the idea that a corporation was a personso, after the boston tea party jefferson stop talkinga about how to be a good citizens in the united states of the uk and started talking about separation and this led right to 1776th, so in a very real way america was founded by a revolt against corporate power. >> host: that's what you write i ti on equal protection, theotec american revolution was intact provoked by the misbehavior of a the british corporation. our nation was founded in an anticorporate power fury. >> guest: it's true. >> host: one of the things i picked up in your book was that. we were not an aristocracy, the white men who formed our nations were not necessarily an erica stuck-- rich landowners.ocra >> guest: that was one of the most fascinating things i gotach out of reading jefferson's stuff and digging deep into the history of that era.t that is in: what would deep int jefferson do.o there have been a couple of good it histories about that's, publishd since that time. the wealthiest man among the people who signed the declaration of independence wasm john hancock. cos net worth in today's dollarn or in $2004 when i wrote the book would be about $700,000.$2t he was not a mind boggling rich guy and land had very little value. some of them had fancy houses, but they were fancy houses for the standards of north america and would not have even considered a squire's house in but th the uk.ei these people were not rich. there were rich people at the time of the american revolution. the johnson family, for example who had a castle on the hudson, several hundred slaves.le, knights of the round table. i mean, they had kind of re-created this whole thing and they were fabulously wealthy and there were a number of people, like that.they re-crd this. that fthamily fled to canadaeal. during the revolution. after the revolution, i mean, jefferson died bankrupt. washington died bankrupt. madison was having problems.uptg they were all just skating by and among the slave owners, slaves were their principal assets.s or terrible and grim part of our history. the other part was jeffersonm worked aggressively to try to stop slavery, which is a part on history .-dot so often told. when he was in his early 20s to he introduced legislation against slave labor in virginiai he was so punished by a they passed a law saying if anyone in virginia, freed a slave that tht that slave would be arrestedhe. as i recall it was something like two years apart be soldwo s back into the labor market. har >> host: from your book, 2013 took, the crash of 2016.t tt history tells us that when the straight foundations collapse in the13 bk society's cultural core is 2016. hollowed out in the madnessor 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 who understand what's happening consolidate their power and wealth before the is final crash. >> guest: yes, fairly typical cycle.takee the veich people see these things coming.l when we started the children's village back in the 70se., it was a vegetarian program.ren's i've been a vegetarian since 68 or maybe 67. 68 so, we have prominent vegetarians on our board and gloria swanson was one of them and i used to go to new york every six months and we would have dinner together in her apartment and shot. she would tell me these wild stories and joe kennedy was thet perennial object of her scorn and she talked about how joe kennedy got out of the market. how him and all of his mutt buddy's new the crash was cominh in 1929 and all of this kind of stuff. i thought it was interesting. it seems like we are recycling9a that now with a similar periodn. >> host: back to the crash of 2016 book, you write in here that the beginning of the end of the crash of 2016 occurred inera 2009, in january when barack obama became president's. >> guest: what we hoped would be the beginning of the end.t. nne first stimulus-- i mean, ati the time we were losing 750,000 jobs a month and that $800 billion stimulus that wefis did here in the united states, a third of it was tax cuts, whichu don't generally stimulate the economy unless they are at the very bottom of the economic ladder and most want. but, it kind of jumpstarted us out of the four that we were most o experiencing men.f w't but, then they couldn't get a second one or larger one and we really-- i think it was robert rice that said there were 2 trillion-dollar hole in the side of our economy and we patched with ant 800 billion-dollar patch and it was enough. we also didn't change the fundamentals. we did itwh-- we didn't break up the big banks or hold banks accountable for what they did. ndamen we didn't change the derivative markets. we didn't think the more transparent or even stop them altogether. at the time in 2007, just befor. the big crash we had-- there wav in the neighborhood of eight to $900 trillion of derivatives out there. these are kind of magical securities made up out of anon e underlying, they derive theirgi value from an seunderlying asser and it in this case mortgages.ie yet these mortgages and you put a insurance policy on it and then you place a bet on the insurance money and you put your bet on the insurance policy ofn. say a hundred million dollar bet th that that $100 million will goe better than you place a billion dollar bet on it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. the gdp of the entire planet is in the neighborhood of j $56 trillion and we had 800 to 900 trillion dollars in derivatives.f when that collapsed it was massive. get down to around three or 400 trillion and no one is sure numbers, by the way, because the bank of international settlements or collects. we are back up now and the best guess is in the neighborhood of seven to $800 trillion in derivatives, so it's like we didn't fix these things, which is why am suggesting the crash is not stopped. in fact it will happen and only get worse. >> host: who are the economic royalist you refer to? >> guest: that phrase that i borrowed with acknowledgment from franco roosevelt and my favorite of his beaches was his acceptance speech in 1936 in philadelphia, as i recall, july 1936 and where he talked about the economic royalist. he said out of this industrial order it would seem it was grouf fairly predictable a group ofrie economic royalist have arrived to try to take control. the these economic royalist tell usr -- he went after them. theconomy it really was, you know, the big money fatcats who crash the thrh economy and 29, and who fought fdr.t is the big money fatcats who ar crashing our economy right now.o >> host: thom hartmann in your book we booting the american dream. healy the mass is pretty simple whenta the uber rich are heavily passed rking the commies prosper in wages foa working people steadily rise. when taxes for the rich are cut, uerking people suffer and>> g economies turn into casinos. >> guest: when you look at the time in the united states when the middle class m was the mostt prosperous and this is the thing, we measure prosperity in the united states in 10 to looka at big numbers like gdp or the stock market. those are not the numbers we h should be looking at. it should be how healthy is the middle class. so, what has happened over the years is that with this massive deregulation the middle classe has been collapsing steadily inw the wealthy have gotten super up wealthy. i had this up close and 19 personal, learned this lesson myself and 1974 or five, mydway, business partner had recently and i passed away in he and i have owned this herbal tea company were making a lot of money.balta in fact, it was a side businessg that the herbal tea company and we were selling ginseng to larry flynt and he was selling it in hustler and he made a millionsaw bucks literally and we met a couple hundred thousand in those big money and 73 in my cpa came to me and he said, you know, you are getting close to as i recald it was a 40 or 50% tax bracket and he said you need to stop taking money out of your company. .. 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. pay your e there is a reason formp it. if you made more than that you got hit with these huge taxes, so so keep the money in the company. p pay year in ploys well, all of our employees were well paid and had other benefits. when we open open the travel agency and 83, we had healthcare in all of oure employees and we built a daycare center for our employees. top it was just a little corner, but it worked. companies don't think like that anymore. now it is how do we squeeze every penny out oo this. mean, if there is a high tax level at the top and people say i have my 30 times, that's cool. it used to be ceos lived in thet neighborhoods, with the thception of the very uber rich. our economy is so different now from the economy then. w host: good afternoon and welcome to c-span2. this is when we invite one but author on to talk about his or o her body of work, this month, it is talkshow host thom hartmann.v as indicated earlier as indicated earlier he is the author about 25 bucks or so and will be talking about them in next three hours. showing you those covers as well. as we always do on book tv, thie is an interactive program and we want to hear from you as well. if you want to interact with our guest, author thom hartmann here several hartman here several ways to do so. begin with a phone numberxt (202)408-8200. for those of you in the mountain time zone you can also text ao message (202)717-9684 that is i. just for text messages. if you do send one please include your first name and the city you are living in. you can contact social media including email at book contact social media including e-mail@booktvasc-span.org. you can make a comment on our facebook page. facebook.com/book tv. finally, twitter, at book tv is our twitter handle. will begin taking those in a few minutes. mr. tv is our twitter handle. will begin taking those in a few minutes. mr. hartman i want to show some thdeo and then have you explain t at this is. m >> all of the money that was spent on television advertising by john mccain and barack obamao together, obama spent about $600 million, $800 million. dollars, $800 million. it was 1.2 billion all in.n it was less than two billion. $2 billion is chump change for the health insurance industry right now. it is chump change for theo pharmaceutical industry right now. it is walking around money for the oil industry right now. these large corporations can now say, to any politician iyonjoeya america, we will make you, and a you will be where you are forever and when you retire you will have a good job with us fon millions of dollars a year, or we will destroy you. they can absolutely make good on that threat, how how is that the good for america? >> let's just start with the very fact that wasn't my intent. good'm not saying that was your intent, that was the outcome. i i'm not blaming you for that. i'm just saying look, what dheoe do now? we agree it's not a good thing.n >> i believe in more speech. i f believe the american people are smart enough to understand, i give the american people credit for being smart enough to know when they are trying to be bought. i am not afraid of some big,atch the presidporation who is goingo run a bunch of 32nd ads before no election. host: what have we been watching question marks speak to that wa. david bossi of citizens united.o he produced a hit piece movie on hillary clinton.is guest: they were going to play it within the 90 day window when the federal election commission said you cannot doe politicalio activity within the 90 day prior to the election. he took that case to the supreme court and bh won. the supreme court ruled yes, we affirm corporations are people, going back to 1886. we reaffirm the decision that prior to 1976 it was it was considered a behavior to be regulated. since 1976 that court case was instrumental in making it meppen. it is considered a protected first amendment of free speech. i think time has proven me out,s look at, donald trump isai agreeing with me right now. all the rich people, marco rubio has his own personal billionaire who is responsible for his entire political career. jeb bush probably has many not to mention family riches. when they lose their r billionaires or their billionaire backing, they have to bail s out. to some extent this happens on the democratic side as well. thu notable notable exception would be bernie l sanders. s nov host: you talk to bernie sanders on a regular basis. guest: yes, when i lived in in vermont he came on our programde and to calls.ed it was so novel to have a membet of congress who would have and l take calls on filtered, unscreened. basically all we look for in dit terms of not letting people on the air as people who are drunk or profane. if they called up swearing they didn't get c on. e bernie just darted taking these calls. for an hour we called it lunchat with bernie, we've been doing it since 2004, every friday. w it was amazing to me to discover a politician who never tried to do the weasel words and all of that stuff. if he believed something he would say this is what i believe, if he did know the answer, he would, he would say i will find out and he would come back the next week with thu answer. i am amazed and impressed by senator sanders.le host: you interviewed david>>uet bossi, do you often interview people you don't agree with? guest: more often than i interview people with whom i agree. thi i think talk radio basically there are a few different in categories of ways you can do radio, this goes back to some of the early articles i was writing when i was playing with the idea sf doing it. one is a guestroom and show, the this is popular it's more only popular in television than radio. the problem with that is the show is only as good as itst guests. you can have a collar show but then your shows only as good as your callers. you can have a sdh news driven show which is basically what cnn does and lood at what happens when every tgen. crisis, ratings go up and when there's not big on the tank. or you can have a host driven show and rush limbaugh really have that area. when we put it together i knewes it would be a host driven show because i knew radio and i knewn topics. f most radio shows when you're sio talking to listeners there's the old adage that people slow down for car wrecks, you you one make it entertaining and interesting. i actually respect most of the >> people on the other side who my3 debate. my father was an eisenhower964,a republican activist.eart, host: goldwater republican wasn't he? guest: my dad and i went door ti wasr for goldwater, in my heart i knew it was right. t i was convinced that the state department was filled with communist where going down the tubes. three years later i completelytf change my pinnacle perspective. from the time i was 16 until until my dad died in 2006, he and i fought like cats and dogsp about politics. after the first couple of years he threw me oute of the house over a politicalpi argument one night when i washe 16. after couple years we his figured out how to do this without hurting our i and relationship. and my dad was my political foil throughout my life, he died republican. his two favorite pictures, when my father was h dying, in his living room my brothers and i and the couple ol their wives were sitting with him, as he was drawing his lasta breath i was sitting with my hand on his shoulder and i looked across the bed that was in the living room and there on the wall were these two hisu pictures, me shaking hands with pope john paul ii and george w. bush on the aircraft carrier saying mission accomplished. so i discovered and learned that you can have a knockdown, drag i out out fight with someone ands still respect and love them. so that has become sort of a, be trademark of book and realityth shows 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. like david bossi's and i want in more speech. that's fine, we all want more speech but to say the american people are smart enough toat figure out, to see through lies in advertising for example. if if that were true, the industry, that i own two agencies over thd years, they would not exist.goe if advertising didn't work nobody would be doing it.opinn. we had a completely different business model and the fact of the matter is advertising does soly b people's minds. if you spend a billion dollarsf on advertising you will have a shift in opinion. se whether that should be done by the development of wealthy individuals and corporations in the political sphere or not, that is my disagreement with david.no host: what is your reputation among conservatives? guest: i am not altogetherti certain. i know a number of them i know and like, i am friends with - them. in there is a couple of conservative websites that love to do hit pieces on me, there- n are two in the last week, one was pretty straightforward anded honest. compantor in the white house had called for a corporation to funu denial to be prosecuted under the rico act, same weight same way tobacco companies were prosecuted in 99.and so that that was a successful prosecution by the way in 2006 with tobacco companies had to hi admit yep we engaged in a crime. so i went on the air debating with a conservative who was defending climate change denial and saying if you are one ofin i these guys hiring these people get in the message out, that is is organized crime under the rico statute and you should be in jail.ys la i they did a piece on this and they were criticizing me for it but a few days later they did ad long hit piece on me where they took a logic chain on the airike and deleted the entire middle of it. it was a completely dishonest hit piece. rht, the first when i talk about on the air, credit the author, theo second one i just ignored. yea host: but they are willing to come on your show.>> hosrom guest: oh yes, regularly. thi many over many years i have got to know quite well. t host: from your book, crackingso the code a note tok io the reado this book is written in a new language, every word every word means precisely what it says. w. tools of communication revealed here and are also used in itsth writing. you go on to say my aim with this book is to give you the tools to tell the liberal story until it well. guest: yes.p h that book started out as a book about neural listed programming which is a way of communication. it was a political year, if i recall i wrote wrote that inye 2004 or 2008. s. was one of the presidentialpoca years. maybe it was one of the other years, whatever, i wanted it tog be a political hand died.la host: 2007. h guest: that's why it is calleds cracking the code. understanding how language workf in understanding how to use itt, th successfully. spee1. host: what is an example? guest:ouit a classic example is renaming the state tax the death tax.idn' it completely shifts the frame.y host: it was effective though wasn't it?rn ast guest: it was it didn't come out to a lot of research what kind of wording would turn against the estate tax. it was followed by the walton errors.ip they had a fair amount of moneys it was effective.e host: this facebook comment from philip, tom you're simply the b best.ake you can tell you have done your homework, my question is, will, will american vote for a jewish, democratic socialist who by most educated people's estimation would make america rate? guest: i respond to that with i the question.be it was posed to me in the fall of 2007 by, i believe believe-a. the number two guy in the democratic party in california. he was african-american, he camy on my program and he said, thisk is one clinton and obama were fighting it out, he said nobody in america at the end of then democrat.an talk all we like about the first black presidenty nobody is going to vote for aan guy who has only been in thevegt senate for two years o, has very little experience in the field, he is african america and his'sn middle name is hussein. it and c can happen. this this was an african-american democrat same as on my program.hink we have to get out there, we have to support hillary clinton because barack obama is there's no way he will become presidentw yeah, you know guess who's president. vermo i think it is entirely possible that america would vote for a 7d something jewish senator with a jewish accent. what he is saying is right.f the reason i lived in vermont j for ten years the most conservative part is solid we f read and you drive along the road and you see in an electioni year and there be a bush for president sign and a bernie forn congress sign next to it. uponth after long, bernie consistently carries in the neighborhood of 20% of the republican vote in me vermont. he was vermont.yo he was reelected in 71 or 74% o the total vote. it's not a solid blue state, thu two largest cities are a burlington and montpelier, but if you get out of those citiesoo you are looking at red state, ublican.c.rvative rep they have embraced bernie. host: why did you move to washington? guest: we moved five years agono there is an opportunity to do a tv show. it was was owned by the russians they wanted to get into --dash i said i've always on myt own show, i will not become an employee. i have to have absolute editorial control by contract, if if you are willing to go y along witho those terms which i had the conversation earlier sai with the big cable networks in the united states, they were unwilling to do that. rt said no, we will give youyou your own show-can we will, it was something fun, it was my add i guess. i was bored let's try something new. host: that show is still on thea >> gue guest: it runs in my radio show runs new to three.te it is simulcast as television by free-speech tv on dish and lks direct. mspel a number of cable systems. host: you can listen to thomhan haourtmann.com as well. guest: you can find links tweo a that stuff there.om however you spell it will getou- you there. host: tom hartman is our guest, let's take some calls. here's a call from david,th actually marie from san diego, california.mmunra >> caller: i was so delighted that mr. hartman is on the air.r i'm a volunteer with a communite radio station in san diego t, kk and sj working for social justice. we carry mr. hartman's show, wel are so grateful we are able tocn bring it to san diego audience. where the political climate is changing from a very conservative population to a more liberal, we really appreciate the lunch with bernie and the other shows he brings on. i have three questions. if in light of the most recent shooting, i am wondering if there is something in the dn ta and america, for celebrities and others, if we hear something we do not like, that there are death threats. secondly, 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 we give to somethings. i disagree. i credit people with being more interested than just trying to encapsulate things. i was wondering how mr. hartman feels. host: marie we are going to leave it here. we have a lot of colors on hold. any response. guest: first in regards to shooting i don't think there is anything unique in the american dna to disproportionately murder each other with guns. i agree with obama that we are awash in guns, someone who is crazy or violent, or angry, or suicidal, let's remember gun suicides are one of the biggest causes of death in the united states. if you could just reach over and bang like that, it's over fast. for this young man who shot up in rows berg, oregon. if you have 15 guns you can do a lot of damage. as pres. obama pointed out, we have no more or no if you are crazy people in the united states than they do in france, germany, and the australia, or any place else. the difference between us is in those countries if you are a sports shooter, you have to be licensed and some of them insured. your gun is registered. or if you are a hunter, or if if you own one for personal protection. i've always advocated that we should treat gods the way we treat cars. back in the 19, teens when when cars becoming ambiguous and started killing people, the problem was they were killing people. we came up with standards, yellow light red light. one of the most important standard is that you have to drive a car you have to a have a driver's license, you have to have liability insurance so if you injure someone else intentionally or unintentionally, they are covered. see, the car has to be manufactured with a chain of ownership. liability insurance is one of the most important ones. this is something i think conservatives would embrace because it is a market-based solution. if you have to have liability insurance to own a gun it probably would be particularly expensive, might be 50 be 50 or hundred dollars per year. if you have 3d, i'm thinking that or you rob a liquor store three years ago, i'm testing those actuaries would go this guys price is going to be $4000 per year. what you would see as marketplace putting pressure on just like you do with drunk drivers for the car insurance companies. they jack up your rates. that is where i would start actually, along with the closing the loopholes. i don't think there's anything unique in it. along with the wall-to-wall coverage we been watching for the last few days. we have been watching msnbc the other day, the host was slowly, painfully, we don't know yet, all those words, can't you say in other news around the world, let's world, let's go now to the refugee crisis. or something. we live in a if it leads it reads world. which is all about making money. it didn't always used to be that. when i was doing news in the 70s, because of the fairness doctrine, which did not require if you have a liberal on you have to have a conservative on, the essence of the fairness doctrine was that your license will not be renewed if you do not program in the public interest. the principal way the radio and television was by carrying news. as a news reporter in the local station, our news division lost money. therefore five of us working, in 87 reagan stopped enforcement of the fairness doctrine. within six months cbs had moved their news over to work under the vice president of entertainment and turn their news division into a profit-making thing. within a a year the other two networks have done the same. and now it's all news for profit. that is why we have infotainment instead of real news. that's why the news will obsess on a particular topic because they think that will draw the most viewers. host: tom hartman, flipping through through your books and i remember reading that you don't think of fairness doctrine is necessary. guest: i don't think the way the fairness doctrine was characterized, and to some extent if a television station editorialized and said we think bernie sanders is a terrible guy, then the fairness doctrine would require after that editorial someone would come on and say no bernie sanders is a decent guy. that was about it. back in the day they used to do editorials, so there is some balance in that. in terms of gas. no i don't see anything anything wrong with people carrying progressive entertainment all day long, i don't the government involved. i think the role of government, historically is sort of like the role the nfl. you have yet the game of politics, the game of business, these are basically activities we participate in, not unlike a football game. the nfl says okay there hundred yards on the field, hear the rules, here are the punishment for breaking the rules. they defined the rules of the game. the rule prior to 87 encouraged actual news. since 87, the rules in the game of news anyway have been completely changed. now it is we get the news that make the most profit. whether that is the fact that nbc also owns nbc universal, so instead of news tonight were going to talk with the movie star of the universal movie. not to pick on nbc, everybody does it. i don't like it serves our democracy well. host: sean and battleground washington please go ahead with your question for tom hartman. >> caller: tom it is almost been 30 years since michael moore made his documentary, roger and me. he went on went on to make from combo up on trying column fine and he said it's not about gun control is about our miserly social safety net, most other countries have more generous social safety nets. it just seems that we have witnessed this slow motion train wreck with the destruction of the middle class. 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 regular guest on your show, he makes the point that americans no longer have any leverage against the crop bureaucracy. were not needed as consumers as new markets are opened up overseas, could you please talk about the taft-hartley act and how americans have no leverage to fight back against wall street, go bernie. guest: taft-hartley, backup up a little bit prior to 1935 unions did not have federal protection, so if you are unionizing in a company that hired other strike buster groups you had a good chance of being killed. a lot of people died in the union movement particularly between the 1870s when we began to industrialize the united states in the 1930s. with the act in 1935 unions became legal and protected, the right to unionize was protected. unions are democracy in the workplace. therefore i think they're very important to work with. in 1946, for the first time since the election of 1932 the republicans took control of congress for two years. they passed the taft-hartley act which blew a big hole in the side of the wagner act and allowed individual states to opt out of the union protection and become a so-called right to work. this was largely confined in the deep south for for most of our history, since 47. now, scott scott walker did it in wisconsin, john casey in indiana. maybe brooke schneider in michigan. this was the beginning of the war on labor on working people in the united states. then it went on steroids with the reagan administration. if you look at the history of productivity and workers wages, the george washington administration to the ronald reagan administration, those two numbers climbed in concert with each other. as workers were more productive, as they made more money for their employers, they made more money for themselves. in 1981 you see these lines diverge. productivity goes up and wages flatten out. wages right now are below right now when a like reagan was elected to office. this is the natural consequence of that. in response, and large part to ralph nader they talk about unsafe at any speed. these books have created consumer movements and these are trying to regulate our businesses and trying to politicize our businesses. we need to fight back. traditionally business has not been political and they need to become political, set up a think tanks and an organization that will take over congress, control the political parties, gain control of the media to the extent possible. he went through through this list, in my book, the crash of 16 there's a chapter on lewis palm in there. with the deregulation of the banking industry that fdr put in place, along with a bunch of others. between that and so called, free trade, we're the only country in the developed world that no longer protects our workers. it used to be everybody did it with tariffs. this was by hamilton in 1791, it was adopted in large part by congress and tariffs which are taxes on imported goods. this is what trump talks about if they want to build a park in mexico, fine let him but when that car hits the border they'll be 35% tax on the in the united states. that's tariffs. they provided 100% of the revenue they provided 100% of the revenue that supported the federal government in the united states. from 1787 when we when we officially started as a country until the civil war. 100%. in the civil war to world war i there were two thirds and of the revenue. from world war i to world war ii it was one third. during that time and up until the 80s, our average terrace rate fluctuated between 20 and 30%. so the theory was, as as hamilton laid out if you make a parachute in connecticut or you can make that parachute was in china with $.20 of labor when they, in from mexico will hit them with a 50% tax, it is going to cost you the same to make them anywhere in the world, you don't have to you might as well make them here. other countries, other developed countries, look at look at china, taiwan, which is a developing company on chang country, all the european countries they had in the background something they could use. they would all say will join and drop our tariffs. now tariffs are around 2%. we have. we have all dropped our tariffs. they use their back tax, value added tax as a functional tariff. the way that works is every time you add value to a manufactured good you pay a small tax. so, when when iron or his mind and smelted into iron use pass small tax. when that is converted into's steel, you pay a small tax, convert it into a car door door and you pay a small tax, so with germany for example the average tax on a car 17%. german taxpayers pay that. so the way they use that, and all these countries are doing it, except us, except us, we are like the village idiots. i find myself channeling donald trump way more than i want to, in any case he is right on these things. what they do, as they say if you want to ship a mercedes to germany to the united states, we are going to give you a 17% reimbursement for that tax so that is a subsidized export. if you take an american car and sell it in germany, we are going to put a 17% tax on it when it enters our country because our cars have a 17% tax. that's essentially an import tariff. when you combine. when you combine the two you have a 34% functional tariff. in both direction. that's why all these are running huge trade surpluses and we are running deficits. it really flipped in the 80s when reagan came into office in 1981, we're one, where the world's largest creditor. more countries owed us money than any other time in the world. we imported raw materials, we imported word, we manufactured things out of it. where the largest importer of raw materials and the largest exporter of finished goods. that is the sign of a healthy economy. we had a net positive trade balance. we were accumulating money coming from other countries, so we were investing in those other countries which some people decried as colonialism, but whatever. by the herbert walker bush administration we have become the world's largest debtor, we had become the world's largest importer of finished goods, and the world's largest exporter of raw materials. now we ship cold, iron ore, and wood to china and they ship us back computers, punitive furniture, you name it. we owed them our trade deficit is i think $200 billion a year. the consequence of this is now that one seventh of all assets in the united states are owned by foreigners. the rest of the world is ending up with roughly $600 billion in surplus as we borrowed from the chinese and then bought their stuff. we got. we got the stuff, they got the dollars. so a few nights ago i was at the un for the general assembly and we had a dinner in the waldorf-astoria, just what entrée guess what, just cap up by the chinese. not that i'm going to promote xena 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. along response. i think. host: from your book rebooting the american dream, you list and hear alexander hamilton's' 11-point plan for american manufacturers. those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world has ever seen and after more than 200 successful years, they were abandoned only during the administration of reagan, bush, and clinton. they remain abandoned to this day. again here's the cover of the book, rebooting the american dream. if that if that is something you're interested in reading about this text for you, tom hartman why citizens united not okay, but unions are entirely political? also should unions be taxed 35% my corporations? guest: first of all, unions are not-for-profit organizations so they don't generate a prophet, there be nothing to tax. secondly, the confluence of citizens united and unions, 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 fund groups can. my answer to that is no. i don't think any corporation, unions are corporations even though they are nonprofits, i don't think any corporation should have right to guarantee under our constitution a free political speech. i think that would work to the benefit of unions actually, if we were to say we will reverse citizens united and not just the corporations buffer unions but for unions as well. by the way, taft-hartley limited political activity dramatically. right now, you pay union dues, if you are in a union there are two things you pay that union. i'm familiar with this, my dad worked in a union machine shop for 40 years, 22 of my brothers have been union shop stewards. you paid the union dues which pay for a dispute with your employer, negotiators to negotiate your pay, you can also pay into the political action fund. it's typically not it's typically not called that but that's what they are. that second category a payment is voluntary. you can simply, in some cases opt out or in some cases you have to opt inches you can say to the union, you may not use my money for politics not going to give you that she's were politics. a lot of people do that. frankly, i don't don't have a big problem with that. i think unions should be representative of workers. the way that this would benefit is that, if we are to say at&t and the union both can't engage in political activity anymore. they can own a congressman, favor a congressman, or run television ads. so now the president of at&t says a letter to his employees and say we think romney is the best president we think you should get out help them, what is the employee going to do, they're gonna say it doesn't influence me. on the other hand, union is a democracy, takes a 50% vote to create the union, a 50% vote to dissolve the union and if the union is going to take clinical position it has to be the majority. the majority vote. so when the union holds an election to decide who are we going to represent, what are we going to do, ask their members what they're going to do, you see this right now with a few unions that are debating whether to endorse hillary or bernie for example. when that happens, the union even if they don't put a penny into that campaign, you now have if the union sends out a letter to the members and say over 50% said we are going to endorse national united it is the mostly largest women in the united states, even if they don't spend a penny and the political world they now have probably, at least half of their members who are willing to show up and help out. they'll do it my dad and i did and 64 and go door to door to share the message with people. because it's democracy. it is a group that is therefore each other rather than just for the employer for example. host: next call, some noises coming out of the ceiling here, we'll just keep moving. adrian in houston texas. >> caller: thank you, my brother lives in california he talked about tom all the time. i'm glad to talk to him. what he mentioned i was so grateful because elizabeth warren was the only person that i have seen that has even brought this up. when the crash happened in 2008 that is the first thing that came to my mind, glass-steagall. that was a slippery slope. i feel like that what happened test, i wonder does he think we will ever see a facsimile of anything like it. let's not leave nafta out of this, that messed up the economy. it almost makes me think that democrats and republicans, why the electric is mad. all of us. we don't feel like there is a dimes with the difference. >> caller: glass beagle for those who don't know what we're talking about. guest: the glass steagall act separated investment banking from retail banking. one of the things that provoked the great crash and made it so bad the weeks that roosevelt became president is everything failed. it was an an amazing thing when he think about it. the reason i'm so bad was banks were also casinos. they were running start gambling operations and everyone was getting in on it leaving up to the great crash of 29. when gambling operations went down the checkbook went down, all those kind of things. my mother's family was fairly prominent in the 20s, 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 our doors. this happened to millions of americans. what glass steagall did was say that boring banking business, which is basically the lubrication for the economy, the the ability to have a checking, savings account and get business loans in a mortgage, that is now going to be done in one area of banking. the old fashion, bankers our ranking. it it is predictable, moderately profitable but basically boring. the gambling stuff, go to a brokerage house. they go to a bank that is it an investment bank. so you have the rise of the merrill lynch's, and the rise of the banks. they were cap separate from 35 as i recall up until 99 or 2000 when can lay of enron, there two things things he wanted. he wanted to be able to speculate energy as if it was a commodity, he couldn't. he wanted to get the banks office backs. he had 800 different holding companies and he was shifting money around to make this company look popular. banks were catching on to him. he wanted to own his own bank. the board of director for a number of years, phil gramm introduced legislation to do this and to do in my opinion what can lay wanted, in two pieces of legislation. one was to come out of the modernization act which was the deregulation of commodities and led to this whole thing earlier. secondly was the blindly which repealed the glass-steagall act. the argument that graham and his allies made was the glass-steagall act kept us from having a banking crisis from 1935, it didn't work it's time to retire it. he retire. he made that argument in 1950 or 60 in the senate when there were people who were alive at that time. when the last man who remembers the horror of the last great word died, the next great war becomes inevitable. we don't remember don't remember the genesis of the awful stuff, pretty much everything was dead from the great crash in 29. the banks and the gambling houses merged and we're right back where we were and 29. it is something we need to do's something about. senators has called for a reinstatement of the glass-steagall act. i don't remember her second point, sorry. do you? host: we are going to move on. 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 some years back about the plight of middle-class in the middle country and united states. the crash of 16 has a lot of that material as well. i went all the way back to the origin of the economy and the origin of democracy. thomas thomas hobbes, thomas jefferson, the enlightenment, right up to today. that was a good book. host: john in florida please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: good afternoon, i always hate waiting an hour so there so many questions i want to ask. just a few comments. i comments. i grew up in a democratic household, my father belonged to the international brotherhood of electrical workers. now i am a flaming conservative. i love the margaret thatcher quote that said socialism is great until you run out of other people's money. as far as the right to spend money for election, that is critical thinking, it is not taught anymore. i was taught clinic critical thinking growing up in the 60s. >> you're running the ad that if you it doesn't tell you that it might also cause that. that we can critically think our way out of b and in my two and a television ad. >> caller: you haven't been seen those commercials, don't you see that little fine print and the guy talking about miles a minute about how your eyes might pop out and him have to call your dr. immediately. anyway driving is a privilege, not a right. guest: actually article one of the constitution authorizes congress to build roads. >> caller: that has nothing to do with the driving. did did they have licenses to drive a horse and buggy back then. the right to bear arms is in the constitution also. spee3 in order to maintain out. guest: in order to maintain a well regulated militia. >> caller: i thought i could anyway my question to you is and i'll give you a clue i'm from connecticut and i will read you something. the quotas and extracting the peer principles that jesus taught we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled. there'll be found, remained the most sub- line and pennell event code of morals which is ever been offered to man. that is a letter from letter from thomas jefferson in 1813 to john adams. i'm not saying jefferson was the latest christian of all time. guest: have you ever read the jefferson bible? he cut out all the miracles. he did not believe that jesus was divine. he cut out all the miracles. applica still in print by the way. >> caller: how do you explain the quote i just gave you. host: john will leave it there, thanks for participating today, mr. hartman. guest: it is true, jesus taught moral principle. it is also true that these are part of our dna. all truism is natural to us. a six -month-old baby we see them unhappy when one baby is given more than one baby in their presence. it is in our dna for lack of better way of saying it. there are tribes over the world that never heard of jesus that live in a very ultra stick fashion. they always have, in fact one of the things that most amaze me when reading jefferson works was when he was a child, his father was a surveyor in virginia. at the time part of it was indian territory. his father spoke five different indian languages and jefferson would travel with him. he would live with native americans he was so impressed by their high moral character, he writes about it over and over again, actually at one point he dances around the edge of thinking that may be the native american were actually genetically superior to the white europeans. this is when genetic superior warranty was used as next use for slavery. stuff we would laugh at an hour be disgusted by. in any case, he was impressed by the native american so saying something nice about jesus does not make one a christian. jefferson was very clear that the frauds of the clergy as he read her to a, 40 or or 50 times in his letters were one of the big crises that could face america. jefferson and madison had a series of interesting letters, in 1787 when jefferson was in france and helping to the constitution. madison was jefferson's protists shea, their close friends. madison as i recall was a christian, jefferson was an open deist. deist believed that some intelligence brought the university under universe to be. that quote god does not interfere with day-to-day life. everything came out of something that is sacred and divine, deist would see the world is alive and say great but would not pray to anybody to do anything. prayer was not a part of it. anyhow, jefferson and madison had this correspondence, madison was madison was concerned that if government started subsidizing churches or even providing them with very specific protection, this turned into quite a discussion, the churches would become corrupted. madison was very concerned about christianity, he didn't want it to be corrupted by government. jefferson was concerned about a priest becoming president, or a member of congress. he thought members of the clergy should be essentially banned from political service. he never came out specifically but he was very worried about it and concern that religion would corrupt government. so is government going to corrupt religion or religion corrupt government. so he got his see, i told told you so within a few weeks the presidency in 1809. he veto, up until that point george washington put into place the first welfare program in the united states to pay for the poor houses in d.c. paper medical care, housing, food, the federal government paid this directly. washington through jefferson and adams administration. in the first weeks of the adams administration they passed a law saying that money would be routed to the churches, churches would take over that function. that was james madison's first veto. he said no, we are not going to get federal money to the churches, it will corrupt the churches. this will establish a precedent and use that word of corrupting, it is not going to happen. so now we look back at this naïve debate there have been about which is more dangerous, the church is taking over government, or government funding churches and changing their essential nature and character. host: thom hartmann is our guest, david david is in florida, david please go ahead. >> caller: good afternoon peter. sorry i missed you when i was in washington. anyhow, two things, number one at the beginning of the program mr. hartman, you mentioned that you started your talkshow and reaction to fox and talk radio. well talk radio and fox came to exist in some reaction to nbc, cbs, and abc having a monopoly on news distribution from the left. so let's go back to the beginning. alright, that's number, that's number 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 at liberty university, not exactly a passion of leftism when he spoke there. i think that gives you a good insight that those contrast gives you a good insight as to how liberals act these days. guest: i'm not sure what the question was. it's a nice story of the creation of fox news. i don't think it is accurate. you could say that if you think the facts are liberal then yeah 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 that tobacco doesn't cause addiction or cancer. that was a generation ago. these kind of conservative issues if you want to have your own facts and they're not really facts, fine. i think one of the reasons why liberals generally do better on college campuses is because many conservative positions are basically antiscience, anti- facts, try to explain that the world is 6000 years old. try to explain global climate change in the science behind. the republican party in the united states is the only political party in the world, in the world that says global warming isn't happening. talk to conservatives, i've done it i've spent a week there, i interviewed the top conservative politicians in the country. i would say okay you're conservative you must deny that global warming is happening. now we know it's happening you must hate that the national healthcare system. or you must want to do away with the fact that that tuition is free and help paper books. then what makes you conservative. invariably the answer is we don't want any more 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. which conservatives are delighted about, the fact that wages have flattened out all these years. in 1951 conservative mind, the bible of the conservative, i was -- it was fascinating, the book it said, started william f. buckley going, still in print, very important, any conservative can recite chapter and verse. ease tension in the book he said the middle class which is growing in 1951, if it gets too big you will see social upheaval, you will see people who have been previously marginalize demanding rights. the crazy right wing fringe and in the 60s, the 60s happened, the birth control pill was legalized, on the market by 65, 66 was ubiquitous, very widespread and that led to women having significant control of their own bodies saying we would like equality in the workplace, african-americans at the beginning of the gay-rights movement, stonewall landfall at and what about us, and young people saying i will go to viet nam, defying their elders, their own government which was what was predicted and conservatives said -- riots in response almost always to police violence in the inner cities. detroit, all in flames and the conservatives said russell kirk was right. we have to reduce the size of the middle class, reduce the wealth of the middle class so people don't feel free to go out and wyatt. in 68, i was in michigan, the essence of the whole thing was high paid for my college tuition, working as up part-time dj making $2.35 an hour, working as a dishwasher, changing tires and pumping gas at a local exxon station. mostly in the summer. you can work your way through college, my wife waked her way as the waitress at howard johnson. we felt empowered. if we were out in the streets protesting the policies of our government we didn't feel we would be wiped out and our lives would be destroyed. nowadays you have 20, $30,000 in college debt and only halfway through your college career you get in trouble for protesting and you have a police record and can't get credit, but walked down of dissent in the united states has been driven large part by economics since the 80s. this has been the essence of reagan. you can say it has led to a more stable society. the big classic difference between liberals and conservatives is liberals suggest, i'm going all the way back to john locke and thomas jefferson who said the u.s. constitution should be revised every 19 years which is one generation. liberals would say social change in a positive direction should go forward as fast as possible. if we make mistakes we will fix them and keep going. conservatives as william buckley famously said, stands astride the arc of history with his hand out shouting stopped. conservatives are all in favor of positive social change but they wanted to go gradual, incremental and not in a disruptive fashion. both of the world views are legitimate. what i think is the modern tragedy is the word conservative has been hijacked as i said my father was a conservative, dwight eisenhower conservative. dwight eisenhower ran in 1956, go to your google machine and look of 1956 republican party platform, dwight eisenhower ran for reelection on a platform that said we have expanded social security, we have increased social security payments, we had 2 million more people to social security, expanded union rights, added new union members, we are building the highway system across the country, building on national infrastructure, i can think frankly, questions come up a couple times, on my program a couple years ago, barry was talking about this. i don't want to quote bernie, i will quote myself. i can't think of any position bernie is holding right now that eisenhower wouldn't have supported. that is how much, i think america has always been an eisenhower kind of country. today that would be referred to as democratic socialism or center-left but i think the democratic and republican parties have moved so far, not even to the right, to the corporate side, to the billionaire side to represent their interests that the average working person is screwed. we are in the middle of nothing. that is why i think bernie holds 20% of the republican vote. those are the eisenhower republicans. if you have a helping middle-class -- >> we are talking on booktv with author and radio talk-show host thom hartmann. his most recent books include "rebooting the american dream: 11 ways to rebuild our country," the crash -- "the crash of 2016: the plot to destroy america--and what we can do to stop it" came out in 2016, the last hours of humanity, warming the world to extinction about global warming in 2013, the american revolution of 1800, how jefferson rescue democracy from tyranny and what this means today, 40th anniversary edition came out in 2014 and death in the pines which happens to be a novel. it got published this year. we have been talking about bernie sanders and we want to show a little bit of you interviewing or chatting with bernie sanders on your show, and show you thom hartmann's answers to a few of my favorite things and our show will continue live in just a few minutes. >> i have said over and over again, the entire conservative economic agenda down to two words, cheap labor. >> cheap labor in defense of the largest corporations in this country and the wealthiest people. i think what we have got to do as a nation, the last days of the very intense campaign, we have got to calm down a little bit and ask ourselves some basic questions. one of the questions is what ronald reagan asked in 1980. are you better today than you were four years ago. very simple question. that answer to that for some people, for all of you out there, millionaires and billionaires, if you are not concerned about the future of this country, not worried about your kids and grandchildren, for your own economic reasons i can understand you voting for george bush, that is a rational decision. a bad one but irrational decision. but if you are an ordinary working person you have a president of the united states has changed federal labor standards to throw 6 million workers off of overtime. that is you. you are going to vote for george bush? ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> thom hartmann, who is jack vance and what this tschatschai? >> he is a science-fiction writer. from the time of was able to read the have been a science-fiction junkie and jack vance recently passed away. his writing is of such an extraordinary caliber that i consider it literature, not science fiction. brilliant, brilliant writing. i alone every book he has ever written. i have been collecting his stuff from the time i was in my 20s. when i add book wmy add book wa in 96 or thereabout the owner of underwood books was also publishing jack vance. on the west coast, in the bay area tim called me up and said i'm going to jack man's's house for dinner. would you like to join me? this was 15, 20 years ago. wow! jack vance? i went to dinner and got to know him and his wife and his son, just amazing and when we with living in atlanta at the time when jack went to florida he drove before becoming blind, his wife drove him to exit the grand master science fiction, one of the top science fiction awards, they stopped in atlanta and stayed for three days, and i loved jack vance's rating. one of your people ask me what you're reading? i said tschai. it has been decades since last time i read it. >> host: your publisher for the most part is barrett kohler. >> published most of my economic and political books although they published crass of 2016, that was the only one -- random house published -- note, yes, random house published it -- focus your energy was published by pocket books or by paying glen rather. >> host: did you choose to go to barrett colder? >> israeli good publishing company. my agent establish a relationship and i was pleased that he did. profits from selling books based in san francisco. they really care about books. they keep books in print, they haven't gone full corporate. >> host: we asked what are your favorite books that you have written? what are they? >> guest: probably a couple of the most consequential books i have written that have had or have the potential to have a lot of impact. i wrote about will, "last hours of ancient sunlight," will this get in sunlight, settled in the ground, turned into oil. it was about the end of the kirov of blues away: practical bilateral therapies for healing the mind and optimizing emotional well-being". during research for that eyes discovered an astonishing thing about sigmund freud that i don't think anyone else has ever known. that book has the potential to actually change a lot of psychotherapy, what is going on the field. >> host: what did you discover and sigmund freud? >> guest: when i discovered richard baylor who wrote the introduction to a book called healing add, he talked about how when we have bad memories, painful memories or any kind of memory we stores and in specific places. if i were to ask what covers the floor in your kitchen at home? >> host: it is would. >> guest: you looked down to your right. there's a place in your brand it correlates with wherever your eyes go. part of your brain that is available to us, the eyes are the only part of the brain that can reach the outside of the body and reflect going on in the brain. soaker some may store this memory overhear, sometimes we store isn't just as feelings, sometimes year or whenever, what richard developed was a technique where you would move the location, the memory, the place for the memory is stored as part of joy and filing system in the brain, the filing system actually has a method to it and the mets it is emotion. we tend to store things in particular places based on the emotions and the way it works is when we fall asleep at night there is up one day scratch had called the hippocampus and it knows everything that happens today. it does not know time beyond now or this day. and that nice when we sleep or when we dream, the most widely accepted theory, it is dumping the day's activities in the rest of the brain to proce and figure out what to keep and what to throw away and where to store it and we call this dreaming and it seems confusing and primal, the brain is sorting stuff by emotion and with post-traumatic stress disorder what happens is somebody during the course of the day experience is something so horrible, the death of a comrade in the war, people who are witnesses to the shooting in oregon, police officers who came and had to look at these awful bodies. you go to sleep at your hippocampus said here is what happened today and the rest of the brain says can't handle that. hang onto it for another day so you wake up the next day and the memory is just as it happened that day. you talk to someone with psd the will see 20 years ago this happened but i remember it like it was this morning. that is the one consistent characteristic of true post-traumatic stress disorder. what richard said is that memory in the hippocampus is associated with memories and the rest of the cortex. if you and start breaking those into component pieces the brain absorbs the man takes about of the hippocampus and ends the pp s d. we will take a memory and change it. change its location. for example if you and think of some minor irritation you had in the last couple weeks, a waiter the treaty bad york taxi driver, can you think of one? where is it? when you think of that memory? i will not ask what the memory is, but when you look at it where is it? grab that picture and move it over its verbage now make it black-and-white. can you do that? >> host: i don't know. >> guest: what richard found, you are laughing. did you move to the picture? >> host: not at all. you don't get to play talk show hosts. >> guest: the essence was if you can get people to move their memories, the meaning of those memories change because they have gone to different filing place. this horrible experience has gone into the filing place of that was kind of funny. the way he would do this is have people move their eyes back and forth and back and forth and when your eyes crossed the mid point you are shifting from one hemisphere of the brain to the other hemisphere of the brain and the hippocampus is like the brain stem. we have a logical brain and emotional brain, i am hypersimplifying. the goal is to fully integrate these horrible memories so they can be processed. by moving the eyes back and forth across the center point you are smearing the memory around the brain in a way it can be dealt with. typically its meaning changes. when i started digging into this i found shapiro developed emotional desensitization reintegration -- it has been years since i wrote about it but it is a technique used by the military were basically a person says watch my finger while you are thinking about that horrible event. and things change and they change very rapidly. i was demonstrating this at steve larsen's place in the conference center some years ago when there was a fellow there who was one of these patients who had been in vietnam, a guy my age had been in vietnam and was responsible for air lifting out people who were wounded. they were in a horrible fire fight, was pretty sure and there were no vietcong, a round, call the rescue choppers, they landed, everything is fine, they got 300 feet in the air and a bunch of missiles came out of the jungle and body parts were raining down on him. as he was trying to tell the story he started sobbing. he was on 100% disability, unable to work for decades because he would start bursting into tears because his memory was still today's memory. i sat him down and wind, moved this thing around, moving it from place to place, and after about four, three minute rounds of doing this he started laughing. i said wire you laughing? he said memory just lost its charge, became black and white. what happened 30 years ago and it is funny how i have been torturing myself all these years. suddenly he had a logical take on it. this is more than a decade ago, 15 years ago. i got an e-mail from him last year saying i am fine, back in the workforce, doing fine. i was wondering about the history of this and i knew when i was a kid i studied hypnosis and hypnosis is part of that, milton erickson was one of the most famous medical hypnotist in the united states, and it is modeled on his work. i went to the history of hypnosis and got into anton mesmer in the 60s. he discovered he used his finger, you sit back and forth with his patients and he was able to solve what hysteria was the big issue back then which we would call pt sd and has -- these conditions are more physically vulnerable. he concluded that it was the moon. we did it was he would have one hand in the air gathering energy from the moon and the other in the eye. he became incredibly famous. they invited mesmer down. he called to ben franklin, spent days working on this stuff. it was a big deal. he was promoting the moon which seems kind of weird. in 1834 as i recall there was a scot a psychologist named james braid and said this is nonsense, this has to be eye fatigue or something like that. i am going to prove it has nothing to do with the person because mesmer was creating a cult of personality, had to be capable of getting the moon energy and all this stuff. cheese i will do it with a pocket watch and prove it has nothing to do with me. the watch goes back and forth and it worked. he named it narrow hypnosis and the next year he changed it to hypnosis and that is where it came from. snow then you follow the history of this through 1834 to the nineteenthcentury and i studied sigmund freud many years ago and read studies in hysteria, the book that he and joseph broward co-authored, the story and they worked on. in that book and numerous other papers, in "walking your blues away: practical bilateral therapies for healing the mind and optimizing emotional well-being," a use hypnosis, use it therapeutically. he would use hypnosis to relax people and when they retelling their stories, moving a finger back and forth in front of their face, left arm, right arm causing the brain to have to shift left brain right brain while experiencing, he was having success and he wrote a book about it. in 1898 as i recall sigmund freud stopped using it. everybody stopped using it and sigmund freud started using cocaine, he wrote love poems to cocaine. that book is still in print. he was convinced cocaine was the solution to everything and after a couple years his best friend died in cocaine psychosis, he himself was experiencing cocaine psychosis and he saw that it wasn't working and came up with the oedipus complex in 1901, 1903, it all has to do with your relationship with mother and father and in the early teens he developed this talk therapy thing. was never able to get that mojo back, have the success he had in 1898. when he finally committed suicide he was embittered and depressed and unhappy. i was wondering why did he stop? i started looking through the literature and couldn't find it anywhere. by coincidence, i was fascinated by anaconda and abraham lincoln made to harriet beecher stowe when he met her in 1861, she wrote uncle tom's cabin in 1843 or 48 and it was the most widely sold book in the world at the time. he said when -- you are the lady who started the civil war which to a large extent had a grain of truth. the best selling books of the 19th century, maybe i would like to read a couple of them. this book published in 1898 by george miliers who also wrote the three musketeers, i might be wrong. this book was the second best selling book in the nineteenth century. it was called trilby. most people go who is this guy? but everybody was reading it and the story of trilby was the story of a 16-year-old girl in france who was a model in an art studio and the artists, four artists at this large studio and one of them was according to the book and archetypical jew. this is the phrase to describe this character. he is described as a very negative character. this man knew hypnosis, using a pocket watch. he had no ties this young woman named trilby and taught her how to sing and they went on a world to work and he would hypnotize her at night, she would go on stage, sing better than anyone who ever saying in the history of the world. he would take all the money, take a back to the room in a state of hypnosis, exploit her sexually and in the morning she would wake up with no memory and tormented by what is going on here and at the end of the book she finally figured out what is going on, breaks the psychic bond with this man and both of them die like that. his name was svenglai. the principal readers of this book were women particularly upper income women in the developed world. probably 95% of sigmund freud's patients were when. in the book he describes -- exactly the technique sigmund freud was using so these women read this book, somebody hypnotize as you and can steal your soul and all these horrible things happen and one of these women walks into the office of a jewish psychiatrist, sit down and follow my thing. they ran out screaming. as a result in my view, i have nothing but the historical timeline to back this up, hypnotism vanished in 1898 because i believe of trilby. it took 70 years for it to come back in the 1950s when erickson started aggressively promoting medical hypnotism in the united states. so the technique at that time i was teaching, i was doing a consulting practice over the telephone with psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, doing workshops all-around world and i started with many of the therapists call me up and say how do i do this, and instead of my hourly rate, let me know what happens, i would appreciate it. have them go for a walk. the first question that started this whole thing, pete t. fd is new, 10,000 years ago, we go out to hunt the woolly mammoth and it decides to take him out, he is pretty bummed out and traumatized but he has to walk back to the tribe. could it be the process of walking, this is bilateral, the process of walking itself to heal the brain. we are still fuming mechanisms, it is healed up now. there was a scar here from my cat, bright red and everything. why wouldn't our brain be sophia link? maybe that mechanism is walking? it is bilateral. i said at your patients go for a 20 minute walk every day and while walking with nothing in their hands think about the crisis they are dealing with. and what i started getting back from these folks was we are seeing rapid clinical resolution. and at that point i was like okay, i wrote the book, now you know the whole book and you don't need to buy it but how to do it yourself psychotherapy. >> host: we have an hour less with thom hartmann on booktv, 202-748-8200 in the central time zones, 820 one in the mountain and pacific, send a text message as well, 202-717-9684. also show you all the different ways be a social media you can get ahold of us here. larry levin central area, washington. you are on with author thom hartmann. >> what an honor to speak with you. i am older than bernie sanders. give him a chance. i used to listen to you in portland, oregon and i was wondering, with sarah palin, bernie sanders is a socialist, we are supposed to think socialist is next to communist and it is a bad word with half the country already is socialist. if you look around especially sarah palin, she gets oil money from the oil companies. i think a good society is a blend of the two, socialist and capitalist because not everything has to be for profit and the other thing i wonder is why we never have more machinery? >> host: what are you retired from? >> barber. >> host: have your political views overdone years differed? have you changed? >> caller: yes. i used to think there was a nickel's worth of interest between republicans and democrats. i grew up under fdr and harry truman and eisenhower, they were pretty equal parties but they have shifted so far to the right zach republicans have gone into in sanity and the democrats got into the old republican mode. >> host: thank you for calling in today. >> guest: the socialist canard is an interesting one. if you believe in having social security you are a socialist. if you believe in having a republican education you are a socialist would you believe -- lease a democratic socialist which is what bernie is called. if you believe in public streets you are a socialist. america was founded on socialist or some my socialist values, kind of democratic socialism bernie talks about is let's clearly define what is the public sphere and what is the private sphere? the problem with the word is the soviet union call themselves the union of soviet socialist republics so people of my generation thing socialist means soviet union. they were appropriating the term. they were not even good communists. they were basically joseph stalin and vladimir lenin were strong men in a dictatorship of sorts. and so that is not socialist, democratic socialism. democratic socialism is what we have in a modest amount and what carter was referring to, sarah palin. every year she would authorize at check in the neighborhood of $3,000 a year to everyman, woman and child in alaska that came out of the interest the fund was strong and a permanent fund got the money from the saying if you're going to drill oil on alaskan land you are going to pay us and not a huge price but enough to have some in front so it is a guaranteed minimum income which is beyond what most socialists, sarah palin is an advocate or has been. i wouldn't call her intellectually challenged. i think she is a smart woman but in any case i think the word socialist is losing its sting in large part as a consequence of bernie sanders and it is stimulating a really fascinating conversation about where is the dividing line between public and private. it used to be prior to the reagan era it was conventional wisdom that the public sector, the government sector is what we all collectively own and administer and should be done for the good of all and should only be done in those areas that are natural monopolies or corporate government functions as designed in the constitution, we have a military, the most socialist of all institutions that provide housing, medical care, clothing, everything, food, so it is in the constitution to have a military, we have roads, these public schools are not in the constitution but this is something we decided to do and we get more socialist overtime. on the other hand no american wants to buy their blue jeans or shoes or computer from the government-owned, that would be communism. that is government control of means of supply and distribution, nobody wants that. i do think that we have wandered as a consequence of the reagan theory that government can do no right and the private sector always does right which is, both of those are demonstrably false. we have wandered into the area of privatizing things the shouldn't have been privatized. we have the epa having to hire a private for profit contractor to look into the old gold mine where they had this bill in the river a couple months ago. was a for profit company doing that for? for profit companies are first and foremost to make money. that means the company will be looking for every corner they can cut. i am not sure, dangerous stuff like cleaning up sites that should be done by somebody who's first commitment is to clean out mine sites which would be a non-profit corporation if you outsource more government employees, government employes of the epa steadily cut over the years, 5 sides that it should be smaller than what it is so they had to outsource these things. and the ed snowden of the world, can work for the government or private corporation. and the government can actually do and does do well, the we could be encouraging and the area of natural monopolies. how many companies can bring power to your house? one. how many companies can bring cable-tv into your house? typically one. or telephone service? typically one. coming out of your house, the sewage, water coming into your house, these are natural monopolies. you don't have five power lines as you pick which ones to buy from today based on the free market. if these are natural monopolies they should each be not-for-profit corporations or government entities. half of the electricity in the united states, they are consistently high reliability high-performance lower cost than for profit because they don't have to skin 20% of of the top to pay their ceos millions of dollars or give their stockholders for dividends and because their mission statement is not we are here to make money. their mission statement is to make sure you have reliable electricity. if you lived in portland which was spun off from and ron, the city of portland wants to buy it and they by the african prints and they said we will not sell it to a government entity. we will only summit to a private entity. it was so locked into this mindset that only the free-market. i, total free-market as you mentioned at the beginning of the show, serial capitalist or serial entrepreneur. it is time to have the conversation. have we done too far? is it time to start looking at the fundamental principles of how we organize our economy and organize our way of life? the distinction between capitalism and free enterprise is important. i get people calling the show all the time, usually conservatives who don't understand what conservative means, and they will say i am a capitalist and i was a really? how much money did you make from your investments last year? $35 on my ira or something. then you are not a capitalist. capitalists are people who live off of capital literally. that is a person who invest their money and lives off of it. somewhere back in the last 50 years we decided that was such a noble thing that we give them a different tax rates and people like you and me who work for a living. you or i could run up against a 39% tax rate. capitalists right now have a maximum 20% capital gains so their income is a ceiling at 20%, whereas a brain surgeon's income is a feeling of 39%. this makes no sense to me. ronald reagan said it was crazy. he said do you think a millionaire should pay lower income tax rate than a bus driver? he was speaking at a high school and the kids yelled know, he said you are right, they shouldn't. for one year during the reagan administration the capital gains tax and ordinary income tax were identical, 28% for one year. then the corporations got the better of reagan and this broke back out again. there are not many capitalists in the united states. probably fewer than a couple hundred thousand people literally living other than retired people who are literally living off of their investments, who put money into companies. >> host: from your book "screwed: the undeclared war against the middle class and what we can do about it" larry said he didn't see a dime's were the difference between the parties, you asked the question what about creating a third party? >> guest: i don't remember what i wrote about third parties. it has been more than a decade since i wrote that book in the neighborhood of a decade. one thing that i do believe right now and why bernie's candidacy is so noble is you look at it is not true it cost al gore the election in 2000. but it is widely believed. typically what happens is third parties end up harming the mainstream party that is closest to them because they sway votes away from them. bernie says i will run in the democratic primary and if i don't get it i am not going to run. >> host: alternative parties have an important place in american politics and those in them should continue to work for their strength and vitality. they are essentials as incubators of ideas, nexus points for activism. that does not mean they are an alternative to the two mainstream parties when election time rolls around. >> i am consistent in my philosophy. i think the green party and libertarian party are great in that they stir conversations on the edges moving into the major party. on the other hand i don't think it is great that a politician, republican or democrat, a district that typically would vote democratic ends up with a republican member of congress because the green party was active in that district or a party is that we elect a republican to congress and a democrat because the libertarian party was in that district. the level becomes problematic. the level of ideas, good stuff. >> host: scotch in san diego, go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: good morning. you are the brightest guy on talk radio today. you have heart and you have smarts which are two things in very short supply in what passes for political discourse today. here is my question. your association with bernie sanders goes back decades when he was beginning in local politics in vermont and so it is safe to say you got to know him pretty well as the politician and a human being. what is something about bernie sanders but most voters don't know that if they did know it they would understand why he would make an awesome president? and as of right now how would you gauge his chances of being nominated and elected? >> guest: with regards to his chances i just don't know. these things are very difficult to predict. with regard to who is bernie i will tell you a quick story. when we were first talking about bernie being on our show he had been on the program a couple times and we were thinking of making him a regular feature of the show which is a real break in format of my show. bernie becomes the show for an hour. usually callers calling me instead of calling bernie and i am the plane and see. we were going to get together in burlington and talk about this and have a conversation. the reason i shall about the restaurant and bernie's guy shows up, bernie comes in like a whirl wind with his hair askew and on the phone. we are sitting there and he comes over and half sits down and he says really, really, okay, i will be there in 30 minutes, don't worry, i will be there and he hangs up the phone and this waitress is walking by, the isn't physically grabbed her butt grab the waitress and says bring me something with chicken! i got to run. so she runs to the kitchen and we sat down and he says ibm is laying off 300 people, we are gathering a group in front of their factory in half an hour for a demonstration, i have got to be there, congressman from vermont. that was the one and only time i ever had a meal with barrernie. bernie is all business. he is so committed to his work and his nation, he always seems to come first at least what i can see. >> host: catherine from florida, good afternoon to you. >> caller: wonderful show. like most americans i support common-sense gun regulations but i believe our forefathers -- >> host: i'm going to hang up on catherine because she calls in all the time, as different names and always talks about the same issue. she doesn't add to the conversation we like to have with our guests. i apologize for that. tom is in massachusetts. >> caller: how are you? c-span, i love c-span and i like different perspectives and i really enjoy listening to you. anyway, my thought here is i think over the years i have become more conservative. >> guest: what does that mean? >> caller: for me, meaning for example i find liberals to be much more bigoted. you talk about multi-cultural, etc.. >> guest: conservative means to you that you have become more tolerant and 4 inclusive with regard to the glove color? >> i have always felt that way. for example myself, i lived in africa for a couple years. i was a volunteer at a time when the peace corps was kicked out of tanzania. i have done some traveling, i truly enjoy people in like to see people do well but maybe the biggest thing, so much to talk about, i got a little more conservative about my opinions. i didn't like kirstie alley not being allowed to speak at brandeis university. i thought that was terrible. and experience that needs to be heard. >> guest: i don't know who that is or what you are talking about. >> host: they you listen to thom hartmann's radio show? >> caller: no, i haven't. that is why i am glad you are on, i am listening, speak this afternoon. >> host: we appreciate your listening. i want to follow that up with another e-mail from ham in birmingham, alabama. an earlier caller mentioned nafta passed during a democratic administration so it makes no difference which party is in power. it makes people cynical about this system. i am a democrat in a red stain. what can we do to change minds and hearts? >> this is a problem in the democratic party. in the late 80s, rather than quoting him let me put this in my own words. reagan had declared war on organized labor in 81 and all these things appointing of the first anti labor secretary of labor in the united states, and as labor was collecting in the asset base unions regaining smaller and less wealthy and unions had been large sources of money. so strategic democrats looking around going union money is looking away, what is next? republican survived as a political party by being on the big side of big business as a party of business. you could argue it was a good thing. democrats had been the party of labour. we can't beat labor, there are some businesses out there and less toxic and others so instead of being the party of the tobacco industry back in the 80s that's become the party of the banks, they are not toxic and they got a lot of money. that's become the party of big business, softer business that everybody respects. the democratic party for democratic leadership council and all this kind of stuff, going to arkansas when clinton was governor and sitting down and saying you want to join me on this thing? we are going to take over the democratic party, read brand it. and the democratic party has become the party of something. this is where bernie sanders is making a turn away from this and saying we're not going to be the party of any business. we are going to be the party of people. let the republicans be the party of billionaires and big corporations. that is why i asked tom what being a conservative meant. people say i am opposed to abortion. i don't know if that is a conservative or liberal position or i have four guns, i don't want to give them up. i am not sure -- how did these become partisan issues? these should be issues we discussed, opposed to abortion, i am an evangelical question. what does that have to do with politics? what has happened is the party which is representing a very small slice in doing a very good job representing that very small slice of the 1% in america can get elected if they were simply to say we are the party of the billionaires, the transnational corp. nafta for example was signed by bill clinton but most republicans voted, democrats were very opposed. if they said we have the party of big business nobody would vote for them so instead they go 15 million evangelical christians, we will pick them up, 20 million homophobes, pick them up, 100 million racists, pick them up, 30 million people who hate abortion, pick them up. they take these issues that don't hurt big business at all, billionaires' don't care about and say we take strong positions with these groups. it has essentially become a coalition, the way parliamentary governments are done with coalition. and people say okay, if i am opposed to abortion or an evangelical quote christian i must be there for republican because they told me that. that is an unfortunate bifurcation in our politics. the democratic party once they started selling out to big corporations didn't stop. the progressive caucus of the democratic party is the largest source second-largest caucus in the congress, they still are consistently marginalized and my sense of it and i write about this in "the crash of 2016: the plot to destroy america--and what we can do to stop it" but not so much at the level of party, a good-sized economic crisis might shake up the democratic party if they go back to their fd are harry truman, frankly, lyndon johnson. >> host: this is a quote you call the most profound comment i ever heard about foreign policy and human nature. i don't know why america always think she has to run around the world forcing people to take our way of government at the barrel of a gun. when you got something really good and don't have to force it on people they will feel it. >> guest: dick gregory and i were flying to ghana during the war, the international charity organization and set up a program that is still there. and started talking politics and he made that comment to me only he said it with a perfect media's timing. when you got something good you don't have to force it on people with a barrel of a gun. they will steal it. that is what happened. countries that are becoming demographic are stealing back the country saying we want our country. it is a brilliant statement and one of the chapters of the american dream, at how to steal that based on that, to recalibrate. >> linda is in phoenix, hi, linda. >> i will be as quick as i can. talking about democratic and republican parties and a little earlier you said that the extremes were moving more towards the corporations. that brought to mind to me a coat quote from mussolini, fascism should be more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. i feel the burn, i am a big supporter. i am a political junkie and this doesn't leave my mind. wondered if you would comment on that and what you think of the t t tpp. >> guest: i call it the southern hemisphere asian free-trade agreement. i prefer to call it shafta. it is the southern hemisphere trade agreement. i am opposed to all of them. the fascism part, yes. this is a word that was invented by jihad bonnie gentile, miscellaneous speech writer and ghostwriter and who probably was the origin of that quote. certainly mussolini said that repeatedly and when mussolini took over italy they dissolve the parliament and instead of having what would be congressional districts elect their representatives to parliament the largest corporation in each district sent their representative to parliament so literally and in fact he calls it the chamber of the fascist corporation. this merger, harry wallace wrote about this in 1940, recall, 44, the new york times asked what about american fascists? he wrote a brilliant piece in the new york times, the fascists you have to worry about are not the neo-nazis, the fascist you have to worry about our corporate power is reaching out to control government because they already control the economy. if they control the agency that makes the rules, they will have unlimited power. and that is fascism. this is the vice president of the united states in the >> host: 40s and he was pressing, it has gotten worse. just don't like using the word fascism because people in your talking about not the isn't. the nazis read that call, they were not functional fascist. >> what would be the effect? 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 k i mean to say the said let's acquire one thing. we made this law, dolphin safe tuna. major accomplishment. it was made as a law as a result 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.

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