Thom Hartmann: You know, when Teddy Roosevelt took on the big corporations as the trust buster in 1907, broke Standard Oil into 28 or 29 little companies, they said ‘hey he’s grandstanding, he’s just doing that to get the attention.’ When Franklin Roosevelt, when Harry Truman was a United States senator and he stood up and he said 'you know, President, we’re in war and there are corporations that are making money off war', Franklin Roosevelt said, 'I don’t want to see a single war millionaire as a result of this war'. He empowered Truman, who was criticizing the Roosevelt administration implicitly by saying there are war millionaires being made. He empowered Truman to create a commission that looked into the war profiteering, the people who were condemning him were saying, 'oh, he’s just grandstanding' but he actually got results. The same thing with Pecora going after the big corporations, the big banks in the great depression.

Now, one of the, you know one of the hits on congressman Alan Grayson is, 'oh, he’s just out there grandstanding'. I got to tell you, I want more of it! I want more people to be standing up and speaking out in ways that people can understand. He’s got this bill called 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. I love it. Congressman Alan Grayson, welcome back to our program.

Alan Grayson: Thanks, it’s great to be on again.

Thom Hartmann: I think that what you are doing is absolutely spectacular. Well, actually, let me stop talking and let you start. The War Is Making You Poor Act. Tell us about it.

Alan Grayson: Well, it does three things. The first is that it says that the Pentagon is going to have to learn to live with only 549 billion dollars, which is it’s base budget for next year in the Obama Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Only 549 billion dollars. And that’s going to have to do more than just keep the lights on in the Pentagon. It’s going to have to pay for whatever wars the president wants to have including the two we’ve already got.

And that means that they don’t get the 159 billion dollars that they’ve asked for in addition to the 549 billion dollars that they want specifically for the wars. And I think we should take that money and do something useful with it.

So I asked the Joint Committee on Taxation what would it cost to eliminate the taxes on everybody’s first 35,000 dollars of income and they told me the answer was a mere 143 billion dollars. That’s what this bill does. It eliminates the set aside for 159 billion dollars for two wars we don’t need, don’t want, don’t make us any safer. It eliminates taxes on everybody’s first 35,000 dollars of income. For the 1/3 of America that makes less than 35,000 a year it eliminates taxes on them entirely. Oh, and by the way, it also reduces the deficit by 16 billion dollars.

Thom Hartmann: Amazing. I hope by the way that you don’t mind my comparing you with Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Alan Grayson: I don’t think I could ever wear his foot wear, but apart from that you can compare me to Teddy Roosevelt.

Thom Hartmann: Okay. Congressman Alan Grayson is with us. He’s just done some great work in Congress representing the 8th district in Florida. And Grayson.House.gov the website. Is there another website for this that we can send people to, sir?

Alan Grayson: Yeah. Well for this specifically there’s the website thewarismakingyoupoor.com. We’ve asked people to sign our citizen’s petition, become citizen cosponsors of this act.

Thom Hartmann: is that TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com?

Alan Grayson: TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com. and we’ve already gotten over 20 thousand people to sign up. We also have on YouTube our video of the speech I gave on the floor. People can go to YouTube.com and put in the word Grayson, G-R-A-Y-S-O-N, and up comes the video, the recent video, that I spoke on the floor concerning this bill.

Thom Hartmann: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you your thoughts on what should be done about British Petroleum right now.

Alan Grayson: Well, we’ve created these monsters called multinational corporations.

Thom Hartmann: Monopolies. Banking monopolies now we’ve got oil monopolies.

Alan Grayson: Right and it’s remarkable to me that they can destroy the environment, cause havoc for millions of people and their liability is limited to 75 million dollars which to them is a drop in the oil bucket. They, it’s insignificant.

Thom Hartmann: It’s a few minutes worth of revenue.

Alan Grayson: And think to yourself what that means, that mean that BP now has no incentive, no financial incentive to clean up at all.

Thom Hartmann: Right. And talk is cheap. They’re running around, quack, quack, quack. And BP we discovered now, the company that was responsible for cleaning up the Exxon Valdez was controlled by BP and they did a terrible job.

We’re talking with congressman Alan Grayson. I think this is just great, The War Is Making You Poor Act, and TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com the website. Congressman, what are the other issues that are on your radar screen right now in the minute and a half or so that we have left that you want people to know about?

Alan Grayson: I think we, in general, we have to push hard for the progressive legislation that has been bottled up while the Senate wasted over a year debating the inevitable which was to improve health in this country.

Thom Hartmann: Right.

Alan Grayson: Now we’ve got a clear opportunity with still 59% of the house being in democratic hands, the president being democrat, 59 members of the Senate. We should be pushing for the things that didn’t get done while the Republicans jammed up this entire country debating death panels for a year.

And I’m including things like the Employee Free Choice Act. I’m including all the things that we should have been doing from day one to show people in America what it would be like for this country if the progressive vision were actually realized. And now we need to push ahead.

And my bill, HR5353, the War Is Making You Poor Act, is a good example of that. What it represents is different priorities. My priority is not to see endless war. My priority is to see that the, for instance, the yoke of taxation on the working poor in this country is lifted.

Thom Hartmann: You know, most people, most Americans don’t realize that what ended the Vietnam war was not the beneficence of Gerry Ford, it was that Congress stopped funding it.

Alan Grayson: Well yes, and again, many people don’t remember this, but in 1968, the anti-war candidate was Richard Nixon. He had a ‘secret plan’ to end the war which was so secret that even he didn’t know it.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah.

Alan Grayson: And when he got elected the war went on for five more years. It’s amazing. We’re going to be talking a little bit more about this in the coming weeks. We ended a world war, the first world war, in 2 years. We ended the second world war and brought peace to the whole world in 3 and ½ years in the second world war. And yet we’re mired in Afghanistan for 9 years. And mired in Iraq for 7 years.

Have we forgotten how to end wars? We were so good at it at the beginning of the last century. What happened?

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. And our listeners, increasingly, are I think concerned that President Obama is not going to push a progressive agenda. How can they help push him to push things like your The War is Making You Poor Act, congressman Alan Grayson?

Alan Grayson: Sign our petitions, participate, sign up for our email information. They can do that either at our official website which is Grayson.House.gov or the campaign website, graysonforcongress.com.

Thom Hartmann: Great. GraysonForCongress.com. Congressman Grayson, thanks so much for being with us.

Alan Grayson: Thank you too.

Thom Hartmann: And thanks for the great work that you’re doing, keep it up.

Alan Grayson: Thank you.

Thom Hartmann: Anything that we can do to support that, I’m just gung ho for. One of the good guys in the United States House of Representatives. We’ll be right back.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.