[The show was broadcast live from the Barrymore Theater in Madison, WI.]

Thom Hartmann: Jane Hamsher is the founder / publisher of firedoglake.com. Her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, AlterNet, The American Prospect. She’s been on all the major TV networks, her latest book is “Killer Instinct”. She’s produced such films as “Natural Born Killers”, and “Permanent Midnight”, and has just written just an absolutely brilliant piece, a blog here. I wanted to get her on to just raise these issues, firedoglake.com, Jane, welcome to the show.

Jane Hamsher: Thanks so much for having me, Thom.

Thom Hartmann: I think that in your, and the people here in Madison love you by the way. Say hi to Jane. [cheers] There we go. Jane, I think that the lead got buried in this article. I would like to read what’s about the fourth or fifth paragraph down, that I think is the headline for this thing. You say:

“People make a mistake when they think the battle for health care reform is about ideology,” in other words, Republicans - small government, Democrats - government can do things, all that kind of stuff. “It is not. It’s about who controls K Street and the cash that flows from it, which could fund a 2010 GOP resurgence -- or not.”

That’s a pretty scary though, that really none of this debate, none of the stuff that is going on has anything to do ultimately with healthcare. It has to do with whether the big lobby firms on K Street are going to be throwing their money for the 2010 election in the direction of the Democratic or the Republican party. Did I get that right?

Jane Hamsher: Absolutely. And that’s why the campaign that we have been running for the past three days. We've raised now almost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for members of Congress, including Gwen Moore, yea Gwen Moore. We have raised money for the members of Congress who have said 'we will not capitulate to this. We will not capitulate to the teabaggers, to the crazy right-wingers who are trying to dominate this conversation. We will stand up and we will say we will not vote for any Bill that does not have a public option'. Go Gwen Moore.

Thom Hartmann: There you go. So explain to our listeners how this works. I mean, you call out Rahm Emmanuel on this piece, that basically what he’s working on right now is making sure that the K Street money, and let’s make no mistake about it. The K Street money is billions of dollars, that that money, those campaign contributions, the hundreds of millions of dollars in TV ads that carpet-bomb the country on pretty much any topic. That that K Street money which largely went to Democrats in the last election, is going to continue going to Democrats versus Republicans and that’s what this is all about. This is a very cynical take on it, it seems. Back that up.

Jane Hamsher: Well, the first thing that people have to understand is that when the White House says we’re not negotiating this Bill, we’re going to let Congress do it, it’s just not true, and you can read it in the pages of “The New York Times” and the “Washington Post”. It’s not a secret. Max Baucus and people at the White House have been negotiating deals with what are referred to as stakeholders. The insurance industry, PhRMA, the AMA, all of the people who have a stake in what happens in healthcare, and the last thing that Rahm Emmanuel, someone who used to head the Democratic Congressional campaign committee, wanted, was to suffer a huge vote swing in the first mid-term elections, like what happened to Democrats when they lost the House in 1994 after healthcare failed.

Thom Hartmann: Right.

Jane Hamsher: So that was his big thing that he was nervous about.

Thom Hartmann: If I can just pause you for a minute. Are you suggesting that one of the reasons Democrats lost the House and Senate in ’94, was not just that Bill Clinton had failed to get healthcare passed, but because the money started flowing to the Republicans instead of the Democrats?

Jane Hamsher: Yes, I believe that they thought that was going to be the risk, that at the time all of the advertising that was, you know, poured into Harry and Louise and everything was all spent to weaken the Democrats, so basically whether that was true or not, that’s the mentality that Rahm Emmanuel went into this with.

Thom Hartmann: Right.

Jane Hamsher: So his goal was to keep that money in the coffers of Democrats, and they explicitly told them in these meetings “You can’t advertise against Democrats. That’s the price of being in these meetings. If you start doing that, you’re out of the meetings.”

And then when they negotiated the deal, or the one that we know about, with PhRMA, as we read in “The New York Times”, part of the deal was that PhRMA would spend one hundred and fifty million dollars on advertising in favor of this. [cross talk]

Thom Hartmann: Right, which is just chump change for PhRMA. And in exchange for that, they’re going to allow the government to essentially negotiate with them a two percent discount off retail prices over the next ten years, when the VA is negotiating thirty-five and forty percent, Canada is right now negotiating forty-five and fifty percent, all the countries of Europe are negotiating forty-five, fifty, fifty-five percent discounts, because that’s the typical, you know, pharmacies get that kind of discount. That’s wholesale pricing. The military is getting almost half off, and the deal that you’re suggesting Rahm Emmanuel cut with PhRMA in exchange for their not advertising against Democrats but instead supporting this, was saying “We will negotiate with you a two percent discount on pharmaceuticals.” Do I have that right?

Jane Hamsher: I think it was actually a little bit more pernicious than that, and it breaks down a little differently, but what is a ten-year sort of quick fix that keeps the White House from, that keeps government from being able to negotiate prices down for like the next decade, and pharmaceutical stocks went up when this deal was cut.

Thom Hartmann: Right, right.

Jane Hamsher: So they stand to make money not lose money under the terms of this particular deal.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, and that’s a pretty grim analysis. Jane, if what’s really going on is the struggle for, between the Democratic and Republican party, over this issue and presumably over future issues, with coal for example, when we get to carbon, if what’s really going on is the struggle over who’s going to get the money from the big corporations, isn’t the way to break this in part what you’re doing, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for candidates, and what we all should be doing. I mean all of us should be donating to progressive candidates and aggressively.

But, you know, it’s hard for even all the activists in America to come up with the kind of money that PhRMA can just, you know, throw out as, I mean, just one, the head of United Healthcare sitting on four hundred and thirty-three million dollars worth of stock options for the last four or five years of his work, and if he just decided to convert that into TV advertising, it would be more than the combined budgets of the McCain and Obama campaigns for the entire campaign. I mean, how can we go up against this kind of money?

Jane Hamsher: Well, that’s a very good question, and the point is that we will never be able to create that kind of concentration of capital, if that's the battleground we’re dealing with. But you have to remember that what they do with that cash is try to create what we have natively, which is public support.

So what we did was, we said progressive members of the House, people that we have elected, people like Gwen Moore and Tammy Baldwin to join together, and if forty of them joint together, they can keep any healthcare bill from passing that does not have a public plan in it. That doesn’t mean a co-op, that means a public, a true public plan. And if they do, because people in their communities tell them, this is what we expect of you, then all of PhRMA's money in the world cannot get that bill through. So the question now becomes, Gwen Moore has done a great thing. We need Tammy Baldwin to do the same thing, and if I have one thing to say to the people there in you audience today, it’s call Tammy Baldwin and say we want you to do what Gwen Moore has done, and pledge to support the interests of the American people over the interests of PhRMA. And that is how it gets done.

Thom Hartmann: Amen. And not just Tammy Baldwin, because we’re being heard all over the United States. We’re here in the theater, but we’re doing the show live all across the country, and so you know, people from Los Angeles to Boston, be calling, and from Dallas to here to Madison, be calling your two Senators, and your member of the House of Representatives, and the Committee Chairs, and just say, you know, we’re active, we’re pro-active and then look at all these organizations. firedoglake.com what’s the website that you’re raising the funds through?

Jane Hamsher: Oh, it's ActBlue, but you can go to firedoglake.com and get linked up to it. I just want to say that we’re focusing on progressive members of the House, because they live in progressive communities and they were elected on this promise.

Thom Hartmann: Right.

Jane Hamsher: If people who live in progressive districts have progressive values, tell their progressive members who are not at any risk from the teabaggers, because they don’t have a lot of Republicans in their districts, they need to, it's more, they’re in bigger trouble if they don’t. [cross talk]

Thom Hartmann: They’re our bulwark, they’re the wall, they’re the barrier that we need. Jane Hamsher, firedoglake.com, thanks, Jane.

Jane Hamsher: Thanks, Thom. [applause]

Thom Hartmann: Keep up the great work.

Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.