Thom Hartmann: So what would you do if your house was on fire, the kitchen, you know, you’ve got something on the stove and it bursts into flames and it starts catching one of the counters next to it or the curtains on fire and you grab a fire extinguisher, it doesn’t put it out or maybe you don’t have a fire extinguisher, whatever. And it’s starting to spread across the kitchen, you run into the living room, you dial 911, you say my house is on fire, I need a fire department here immediately before this thing spreads and destroys everything I own, all my pictures, all my documents, all my you know my entire life, I mean you know please get the fire department here, and the person says what’s your address and you say okay I live at 4949 SW Macadam and there’s a long pause and they say I’m sorry you’re not covered. The fire department is not going to come. You’re on your own. Good luck. Click.

Or what if you dial 911 and they don’t ask that question and they send out the fire department and while the fire department is on it’s way out to your house they’re checking to determine if you have subscribed to the service. And then they radio out to the fire department as the trucks pull up to your house and they say don’t put the fire out, they didn’t pay. And so the fire men stand around and watch as your house burns down, as happened day before yesterday in Obion, Tennessee. Last week, excuse me it was last week. A family had to stand and watch as the fire department stood and watched this family’s home burn to the ground because they had not paid a $75 fee.

Right wingers all over the country are jumping on this bandwagon. Fire fighting should not be a public service available to all. There’s nothing on the constitution that says you have a right to fire fighting service. And don’t you realize, you know Hartmann’s been using this for years as an example of if your house burns down, we all pay to take care of that, so what about your body if that catches on fire. In other words he’s using it as an excuse, as an example to advocate for single payer healthcare insurance, we can’t have that. We’ve got privatize every damn thing in this country.

Well after this family’s house burned to the ground, this Tennessee county that is almost entirely republican controlled decided to expand the areas and the number of cities where you’ve got to pay a $75 annual fee or you are not covered by the fire department. Now this is nuts. I mean if they had a simple tax, you know if they just added it as a tax. The county says in 2008 it would have been a .13% increase on property taxes. So if you pay, if you pay $100 in property taxes, if I’m doing my math right, you’d pay an extra, well 1% of 100 is $1. So 1/10 of $100 is a dime. So that would be 13 cents. On a hundred dollars worth of property tax you’d pay an extra 13 cents. On a thousand dollars of property tax you’d pay an extra $13. That’s what it would cost.

And by the way because this $75 fee is essentially a flat tax what it means is that the poor people who are insuring their smaller homes, their trailers, their you know two bedroom bungalow, whatever it may be. That people who don’t have a lot of money who are insuring their homes are paying the exact same amount for fire support as the guy with the McMansion with 20 rooms that’s going to require five times as many fire trucks and twice as much time. The poor are subsidizing the rich in Obion County. It’s a flat tax, right. Only it’s not even a tax, it’s a fee. And if you don’t pay the fee your house burns down.

And this is the way the conservatives want it. This has become the new conservative talking point. This is a wonderful thing, let’s have more of this, let’s do this all around the country. Do you get it? This is that class warfare that they have been, that Ronald Reagan declared on middle class and working class Americans in 1981 that is continuing to this day. It’s insane. If everybody pays to fund the fire department, everybody pays a simple $75 fee, let’s even say it’s involuntary but it’s $75. Then you’ve got small homes paying the exact same amount for fire service protection as very, very large homes. That doesn’t make any sense.

I mean there’s a reason why you have a progressive income tax, a graduated income tax. People who make a lot of money, more heavily use the commons of the United States. They more heavily use our court system, they more heavily use our banking system, they more heavily use our police system to make their money, to protect their money, to invest their money, to move their money around. They more heavily use the infrastructure that we create so that business can happen in America. That’s why they pay more taxes. So shouldn’t it be the same thing with fire departments? No, no, let’s just have a flat tax like this or a flat fee, $75. That way the rich people won’t have to pay more, you know? Can’t have that.

Do you understand the logic here? This is the conservative logic behind the whole flat tax thing. Let’s have just a simple tax, everybody in America pays 17%, won’t that be wonderful? Well the fact of the matter is about 45, almost 50% of Americans pay no federal income tax. Doesn’t mean they don’t pay any taxes, they pay a hell of a lot of taxes. They pay payroll taxes, they pay FICA taxes, they pay sales taxes, they pay property taxes, they pay car taxes. They’re constantly paying. And frankly as a percentage of the amount of money that they have left after their living expenses are paid, working and poor people pay more in taxes than wealthy people do even though the wealthy people are paying more tax dollars. But as a percentage of their working, of the cost of actually living in the United States. But no, these republicans in Union City and in this Obion County, Tennessee, they want to… no. we’re going to make the fire department optional and it’s going to be a flat $75. Do you get how insane this is?

On top of that, I mentioned this at the top of the last hour. I want to get into this in a little more detail. This is a story that has been broken, Lee Fang broke this over at the Center for American Progress’s blog, ThinkProgress.org. I believe in giving credit where credit is due. I know that a lot of people will just take this kind of thing and run with it as if they just discovered it. Oh gee, let me tell you what I just learned. Well this is where I got this information because they’re the one who actually did the investigative reporting. And deserve credit for it and acknowledgement for it. It is brilliant.

The US Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donahue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce, has been bragging about how, originally, you know a month or so ago it was, “We’re going to raise 40 million dollars and take out democrats,” and then it became 50 million, now it’s up to 75 million. That they’re going to use to defeat people like Jack Conway and Jerry Brown and Joe Sestak, and Tom Perriello in Virginia and Barbara Boxer in California. Tens of millions of dollars in attack ads against these people. And keep in mind, in American politics, it’s a truism. The person who spends the most money is most likely to win the election.

But here’s the mind boggling thing. And I’ll give you all the details on this after the break. But here’s the short take-home message on this. The US Chamber of Commerce is laundering money from foreign corporations, including Chinese corporations that are owned by the Chinese government, to take down democratic candidates. Now why would the communist dictatorship of China want to help fund advertising in the United States which our Supreme Court, now that we’ve got five right wing, certifiable crazy, well they’re actually not certifiable crazies. They are corporatists. John Roberts made his living in the service of corporations and wealthy people. Same, all of these guys. Thomas, Scalia, Roberts. I mean just go right down the list, Kennedy, swing vote, anyway. They are absolutely all about where’s the money. I’ll give you the details.

**Commercials**

Thom Hartmann: Okay there’s a bunch of private money that is being used to attack democrats in this legislative session. And a lot of it, we have no idea where it came from. Peter DeFazio famously, on this program, talked about, the congressman from I believe it’s the 4th district of Oregon, Congressman from Oregon, Peter DeFazio, arguably the most independent and progressive member of the house of representatives. Somebody decided to take him out. They put this guy up against him, Art Robinson, check out the website, Who is Art Robinson? dot com. They put this guy Art Robinson up against him who is a wackadoodle.

I mean Art Robinson is a chemist who believes that he’s solved global warming, he’s figured out the problem and by the way it’s got nothing to do with man-made stuff. And by the way he’s home-schooled his kids and he thinks that public education is evil communist stuff, or words to that effect, I don’t have his exact language here but he’s opposed to public education. I mean he’s, his positions are shall we say delicately, outside the mainstream. And so this group dumps hundreds of thousands of dollars, so far a hundred thousand bucks or in the neighborhood of that, into this little congressional district in rural Oregon. Where the biggest city I think is Eugene, it’s a college, it’s the college town there. University of Oregon.

This outside, this Washington DC group dumps all this money in. So Peter DeFazio goes to the office of the Washington DC group with a camera crew and says hi, I’m congressman DeFazio. I wanted to disclose to you who my donors are, I’d like you to tell me who yours are. Where are you getting this money to go after me like this? Where are you getting hundreds of thousands of dollars to try and destroy my candidacy, and why for that matter. Well we know the why, it’s because Peter DeFazio doesn’t go along with corporate America. Peter DeFazio is to the house what Bernie Sanders is to the senate.

And so he asked a simple question and the guy who answers the door goes well I don’t know anything about the group, I just live here, I’m just the landlord. Turns out he is the guy that lied to Peter DeFazio’s face, is the guy whose name was on the answering machine and who was on the papers with the state certifying that he was one of the founders of this organization. Where the hell is the money coming from? We don’t know.

Now that’s only a couple hundred thousand bucks, maybe a million dollars, that organization. These organizations are being created on the average in Washington DC, in this city, they’re being created at the rate of one a day. But the granddaddy of them all is the US Chamber of Commerce. The US Chamber of Commerce has pledged to use 75 million dollars, now keep in mind, in most congressional districts, 200 thousand bucks is a hell of a lot of money to spend on a campaign. 3, 4, 500 thousand dollars, maybe a million. They’re going to spend 75 million dollars to take out enough democrats that the republicans control the house of representatives and take a few senators with them so that the republicans will be able to filibuster absolutely anything they damn well please.

And where are they getting this money? The Center for American Progress, ThinkProgress, Lee Fang writing in this morning’s ThinkProgress.org blog, they have figured it out. These guys over at the Center for American Progress, they have figured it out. “The Chamber has been very aggressive,” he writes, “with it’s fundraising, opening offices abroad and helping to found foreign chapters. They call them AmChams or Business Councils.” These groups then go to their local fat cats, their local large corporations and say pay us dues based on your size. The dues can be as much as a couple hundred thousand dollars. And in some cases the dues are just like you know a company wants to get something done, you know we’d like to, we’re a call center in India.

I had the weirdest experience today. I’m here in DC, I need two tables. I go online to let’s say one of the office supply, one of the national office supply chains. And I order the table for next day delivery from the DC store. I get a call this morning from a guy who is speaking very thickly accented English saying, “We did not get the pin number or the secret number on your credit card, could you give it to me again.” And I’m like “What country are you in, you know how do I know that you’re actually with this office supply company, this nationwide office supply company. I thought I was sending you know from, I was sending an order to a store six blocks from me.” And he goes “I am in Asia.” I said, “Asia, you mean India?” He goes “Yes, I’m in India. My name is John.” And I’m like “You want my, you want the secret number off my credit card?” “Yes we must have it to process this order.” I said “I put it in yesterday, it was accepted by the website.” “Yes but I must have it.”

You know it’s like what kind of security, what kind of assurance of security. We’ve got some fairly decent laws in the United States about identity theft, do they in India? I mean if this guy writes this thing down and slips it in his back pocket how many people are going to, and he gets fired tomorrow or gets laid off or just keeps his job. How many people is that going to get passed around to?

So anyhow you’ve got these foreign companies, you’ve got, let’s say it’s the company that’s doing this thing for the office supply company. And you’ve got democrats who are introducing legislation that says if you want to send your call center jobs to India, you have to pay a tariff, you have to pay a tax on that cheap labor that you got from India. The way it used to be. The Chamber of Commerce and the republican party stopped that dead in it’s tracks. There’s a bill to that effect just a week or two ago in the US senate, got stopped dead in it’s tracks.

And now we find that the US Chamber of Commerce, where are they getting this 75 million bucks? They’re getting it from China? From Chinese companies, from Indian companies, as in the country of India, from Egyptian companies, from Saudi Arabian companies, from foreign firms like BP, Shell Oil and Siemens? So a Saudi company, what if the Saudi company was set up by say Osama Bin Laden. And he wanted to make sure that say for example you know America bleeds itself dry in a phony war. Because he said, after all, in 1998 that’s what he was going to do. Just throw a few million bucks to the Chamber and say here’s your lobbying goal guys, don’t’ even need the chamber, frankly.

**Commercials**

Thom Hartmann: I don’t, just what happened to the guy who works at Staples or Office Depot or whatever the name of the company was that just this local company. I just wanted a table, right, and I wanted it delivered six blocks away and I’m talking to a guy in India. And here you’ve got the US IBC. The US India Business Council. It is the Indian, it is one of the Indian groups that does business in collaboration with the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s actually, well to quote the good folks, the fine, Lee Fang over at Center for American Progress. “The US Chamber of Commerce operates in India through a group called the US India Business Council,” US IBC.

Now what’s the US IBC all about? They quote, they say, and this is from their website. This is what the US IBC says about themselves, this is what they’re bragging about. They say that “We can play a helpful role in guiding US companies to India while supporting various policy initiatives,” say what? You mean like lobbying? Support, because policy initiatives is like you know wonk talk for change laws. “Supporting various policy initiatives that will enhance India’s reputation as a major manufacturing and investment hub.” In other words, don’t put your money in Sheffield, Connecticut. Don’t put your money in El Sobrante, California. Don’t put your money in Indianapolis, Indiana. Don’t put your money in corporate America, don’t put your money in San Francisco or in Miami. Put your money in India. That’s this company’s goal. Or this organization, the US IBC.

And this organization shovels 200 thousand dollars to the US Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce is using that money to take down democratic politicians who want to stop the practice of outsourcing. Do you get it how totally bought and sold this country is because of the Roberts Court? Because of the United States Supreme Court and this insane Citizens United decision that was nothing, it was just like Bush v. Gore. It was nothing more than a giveaway to a particular interest group, in this case just like in Bush v. Gore, the rich, the powerful, the corporate. Nothing more, nothing less.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.