Thom Hartmann: We’re going to step out a little bit in this hour and kind of replicate our Brunch with Bernie at a certain level. Congressman Peter DeFazio is a good friend of the show and one of the finest members of the United States House of Representatives and in fact Bernie gave him a shout out this morning on the show talking about what a good, an excellent legislator he is. And he is. And he’s a, the congressman from, congressman is it the 4th district of Oregon?

Peter DeFazio: Yes, 4th district.

Thom Hartmann: Oregon’s 4th district, I’m sorry I always mixed them up.

Peter DeFazio: 38th largest district and land area in the Congress. Very large, very diverse, have a university community and a very large rural area and half the Oregon coast.

Thom Hartmann: Right. And the strangest thing has happened and I know we’ve been through this before on this show but it’s been a while and listeners turn over and somebody might not have been in their car so I’d like you to just kind of repeat it from the beginning and then in the second and third segment here we’ll take calls from our listeners about it, on pretty much any topic you want. I’m going to ask Julie to go through and reset all our calls and just you know say that we’re only going to be taking people who want to talk to Congressman DeFazio for the next 40 minutes. But Congressman, who is Art Robinson?

Peter DeFazio: Ha. Well Art Robinson is a gentleman who lives in a distant corner of my district on a survivalist compound who has two claims to fame. One is he has written and sells a, you know, a Christian home school program based on the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Some of the writings of an ultra radical theologian called Rushdoony who proposed that we replace the constitution of the United States with the Old Testament. So that’s one side of Art Robinson which gave him a national network.

And then the 2nd is he has a mysteriously funded institute where he is doing research including research on the beneficial impact of radioactivity on human beings. Tremendous advocate of nuclear power and has become very prominent with something called the Oregon Petition which is a proof that global change is as he said it in my Eugene debate, “a conspiracy, a plot, a hoax, to enslave the American people,” and as my local liberal newspaper reported, he is a “climate change skeptic.”

Thom Hartmann: I would use the work crackpot, but you know I’m not a newspaper and I’m not a congressman.

Peter DeFazio: Yeah I know, but they, it’s just, that’s how pathetic most…

Thom Hartmann: And people can learn about this by going to WhoIsArtRobinson.com, right?

Peter DeFazio: Yeah, WhoIsArtRobinson.com. I mean he has called to abolish all public education although he is lying about it and saying well no he just said that once ten years ago. Not. He said it 14 times. He said it definitively. Now he says oh I just meant the Federal Department of Education. No he thinks all government support for all education at all levels should be suspended and says within six months we’d have a better system provided by the free market.

Now you’d think someone like this would stand no chance. But, he has, in a very questionable manner since it’s prohibited according to FEC rules, raised over 1.2 million dollars by using his newsletter to solicit folks to contribute to him. And then he has one very special friend on Wall Street named Robert Mercer, Robert Mercer is described in the only article I’ve seen about him, as saying that you know he’d be happy if he never talked to anyone again, he likes to go home and play with his model train which he paid two million dollars for and he runs a mathematically driven high volume hedge fund on Wall Street. On one day, one of his funds, which has two employees, traded 15% of the NASDAQ volume.

Thom Hartmann: Woah.

Peter DeFazio: I mean, that’s crazy. Yeah.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. And the average income, I don’t’ know how much this guy makes but the average income of the top ten hedge fund managers on Wall Street last year was two billion dollars. I mean that’s annual income, that’s a million dollars 2000 times in one year. I can’t imagine how you could spend, you know, you’d have to spend more than a million dollars, you’d have to spend a million dollars every morning and a million dollars every afternoon, literally, I mean, what do you, you run from store to store? I mean how do you spend, it’s just, it boggles my. So what this guy has done is he’s going after you because you’ve been calling for the regulation of Wall Street.

Peter DeFazio: Right. Well I mean you know I led the fight against bailout and people forget we actually beat the bailout in the house. Wall Street was shocked. They manipulated and tanked the market the next day, scared the heck out of people. The Senate came back to town, went along with Wall Street, and then a bunch of my colleague flipped their vote. I mean had we let them go down we would have been better off for it and they wouldn’t be back to their old ways which they are now.

Thom Hartmann: And you were opposed to bailing these guys out and now this guy’s coming after you with both barrels.

Peter DeFazio: Right. Well I don’t think, it may be more than that, I’ve proposed that Wall Street should pay for its own bailout by reimposing a modest tax on speculation, the tax similar to one we had from 1916 to 1966 when we created the greatest industrial society in earth and a tax that FDR had got Congress to double at the height of the great depression in order to rebuild the real economy of America.

Thom Hartmann: Right. It’s called…

Peter DeFazio: So he may be offended by the speculator tax or it may be one of two other things. I think that hedge fund speculators like Mr. Mercer should pay taxes at the same rate as working Americans. He doesn’t. They’re special. He gets to pretend all the money he manages is his and say its capital gains, carried interest, he pays 15% on his. And of course an army captain pays 25% on his income. But Mr. Mercer, he’s a master in the universe, special guy, so he can do this and he could be offended that I want to make him pay taxes like other people. Or finally he may be because he is one of these Benedict Arnold corporation guys. He has one of his hedge funds based in Bermuda, of course all the employees are in New York. And so he can avoid US taxes on that one altogether. So it could be any one of those things. Clearly I’ve made some very powerful enemies on Wall Street and he is out to get me.

Thom Hartmann: So this is what I find so mind boggling. Is that a, that this hedge fund manager has thrown six figure money into the campaign of a crackpot basically. A guy who is living on a survivalist compound in a fringe area of, you know in a remote area of Oregon. And suggesting that you know public schools should be done away with, etc., etc., a survivalist. And it’s almost like they’re saying to the rest of us you know we could put up Daffy Duck, we could put up somebody who has an IQ you know ten points below room temperature and it doesn’t matter. We’ve got enough money that we can convince average Americans that they should vote for that person or at least that they should vote against the incumbent and put the fear of god in any candidate who doesn’t do what Wall Street wants. And Art Robinson is actually in the polls within shooting distance of winning this race, if I have this right.

Peter DeFazio: Yeah, no it’s very discouraging. I mean people, I mean they’ve done two things. One is they drove up his positives better than he ever could by making him look better than he can make himself in his own advertising. 24 points in a week with ads. And …

Thom Hartmann: Wow. Well you know if you can sell Viagra with advertising, why not sell Art Robinson?

Peter DeFazio: Yep. And then they have relentlessly attacked me and tried to link me to Nancy Pelosi who is not quite in the single digits in my district but very close to it and they’re having some success with that. So, nothing about you know the positive things or changes that Art Robinson would bring about, what he would do is, he wants, he thinks I mean this is amazing. I mean I don’t’ know if you can believe this. But in my debate on Tuesday he said socialism destroyed the economy. And I said you know gee excuse me but I thought that actually it was kind of like Wall Street. I said you know, the biggest act of socialism I’ve seen in recent time in Congress was when Congress voted for, you know, to bail out Wall Street. I said that’s socialism and that I’m against, you know. But then his people are all booing. You know they’re all booing. They think that it was the government that caused this, that too much regulation of Wall Street caused the collapse of Wall Street.

Thom Hartmann: Amazing. Amazing. And there is this right wing story that you know various pieces of legislation that encouraged banks to, or didn’t even encourage. That suggested that, there was no mandate, that banks should not red line, basically. That that’s what led to the collapse and it had nothing to do with it, it’s just a patent lie.

Peter DeFazio: Right. Ninja, ninja loans were no income, no job, no assets, were not a product of the government. They were a product of greedy mortgage brokers who then dumped these toxic assets on Wall Streets who then multiplied their bad values by ten and sold them to unsuspecting people and bet against them.

Thom Hartmann: Right. Well let’s let people call and ask you about any topic they want. Any topic that has to do with politics or whatever. Congressman Peter DeFazio with us, for the next 30 minutes. Stick around.

**Commercials**

Thom Hartmann: Welcome back Thom Hartmann here with you. Congressman Peter DeFazio on the line. DeFazioForCongress.org if you want to check it out. And I encourage you to. This is a pretty important race, this is a pretty important guy in terms of advancing the progressive agenda. And WhoIsArtRobinson.com, also, very interesting. Congressman DeFazio, Chad in Missoula, Montana, we just went on the air in Missoula Montana this week. Chad you’re on the air with Congressman DeFazio.

Chad: Yeah it’s great to see a little parody in the commentary world here. Glad to have you. Now I’m wondering, it seems way back in the mid 2000s guys like Barney Frank, other senators, were making it easy for people who are unqualified to get loans and it seemed to me that these guys were just…

Thom Hartmann: Actually that’s not true, Chad. That is the great, you know that’s the great right wing lie. I find it amazing. You know we had, actually congressman, we had a fellow from Alternet on yesterday who did the investigative report on this. And those, that legislation which was the Community Reinvestment Act, did not, not only did not encourage banks to give bad loans but in fact required banks to give loans consistent with good banking practices. Do you want to speak to that?

Peter DeFazio: Sure. I mean what really happened here was you know these bad loans, mortgage brokers who were unregulated by the federal government, were making, the ninja loans and others, no income, no job, no assets. Became a very hot commodity on Wall Street because they were sliced and diced into packages which Wall Street was selling. And what happened is Wall Street then said jeez there aren’t enough bad loans to go around. They put a lot of pressure on brokers and others to get these bad loans out there but in the end there weren’t enough to go around so what they did is they created virtual bad loans. That is investment interest instruments based on packages of bad loans that they knew were bad loans. They sold to some unsuspecting customers of theirs these packages of bad loans and then often these firms themselves bet that the loans would go bad to make more money. So they, you know, this was actually, you’ve got to read Lewis’s book “The Big Short” to really get an idea of what went on here. This was unbelievable and I’ve got to say there’s a bipartisan problem that led to it. It was Bill Clinton and Robert Ruben of Goldman Sachs, then treasury secretary, who worked with the Republican Congress to deregulate derivatives and to tear down the walls between investment and comercial banking. And in that were all the seeds of this great disaster which under the care of the Bush administration became even worse. You know Chris Cox, certified idiot as head of the securities exchange commission who did nothing to step in, even when it became clear what was going on here was a scheme that was bound to collapse.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. And what you’re talking about I believe is Gramm-Leach-Bliley. in ’99 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, am I missing anything?

Peter DeFazio: No those are two very bad pieces of work signed by President Clinton with the urging of Robert Ruben.

Thom Hartmann: Okay that was the core of it. Yeah. Fred in Concord, New Hampshire. You’re on the air with Congressman Peter DeFazio.

Fred: Hi gentlemen. I, you know I listen to your show as much as I can, Thom, and you’re like the last bastion of sanity.

Thom Hartmann: Thank you.

Fred: To be on the radio or TV. And I just want to step back and I feel that we really are in this ideological war between the right and at this point they’re winning. I mean I feel democracy is dead. The Supreme Court ruling with Citizen’s United essentially will give the right wing limited amount of money. And I don’t know what can be done. The democrats have been so timid, even though they’ve had a majority in both the House and Senate that their, their shyness or being just absolutely fraidy-cats over confronting the right wing on things has just been shocking when you look around.

Thom Hartmann: Well let me submit to you, Fred, that you’re talking to a guy right now, Congressman Peter DeFazio, DeFazioForCongress.org, who is not among those timid democrats and that’s why they want to take him out. Congressman, do you want to speak to Fred’s concern?

Peter DeFazio: Yeah. Well no I share Fred’s dim view. I mean the Supreme Court opened up the flood gates here. I’m working with some folks here to prepare articles of impeachment against Roberts. I believe, you know we’re researching what he said in his confirmation hearings, but I think he probably perjured himself.

Thom Hartmann: Yes. And so did Alito.

Peter DeFazio: Since … activist. Yeah. But you know absent a change in the Supreme Court, we can move in two directions. One would be a disclosure which failed by one vote in the Senate just before Congress adjourned, at least. Because if you follow the national Chamber of Commerce, they’re getting a whole bunch of corporate money and they’ve been out front saying the beautiful thing about us as the Chamber of Commerce is we can launder this money and no one will ever know what corporations are behind it, and they don’t want people to know because they might boycott their products. So that’s one, that’s one way we could shut it off. The other side is unlimited contributions by right wing billionaires like this guy on Wall Street, Mr. Mercer, now that’s tougher. You know, we’ve got the clean elections act and some other things that we could do, more toward public financing.

Thom Hartmann: That’s the Supreme Court too. I mean the Supreme Court rolled that back in what was it 2004, 2006?

Peter DeFazio: And I understand that they’ve taken cert on a case to overturn public financing in Arizona of all places.

Thom Hartmann: Right. Which is a very, very weak public financing law when you compare it to Maine or to Portland, Oregon.

Peter DeFazio: Right.

Thom Hartmann: But it’s really pretty incredible. We’re talking with Congressman Peter DeFazio, DeFazioForCongress.org his website. Congressman we just have about 30 seconds before the break, not enough to bring another caller in although our lines are slammed. Do you want to take that 30 seconds and just riff on what Americans should be doing before we go into the break? We’ll come back and ask, you know have our listeners ask you more questions after the break?

Peter DeFazio: You’ve got to get out, knock doors, volunteer, join groups that turn out the vote. This is all about them depressing our turn out. They’ve had a campaign to do that, if they depress our turn out they win big time. If they don’t depress our turn out we’re in a fair fight here and we might yet get to keep the government of the United States in reasonable hands. So you know, phone bank, you can do it from home if you get in touch with the right group.

Thom Hartmann: There you go.

Peter DeFazio: Do it anywhere in the country.

Thom Hartmann: And there’s a lot of great groups doing it. DemocracyForAmerica.com, Progressive Democrats of America, PDAmerica.org, BoldProgressives.org, Ab Green’s organization. And of course, DeFazioForCongress.org, check it out and WhoIsArtRobinson.com. We’ll be right back.

**Commercials**

Thom Hartmann: Yeah it’s Friday. Normally it’s our anything goes Friday here but for one more segment, we want to keep around Congressman Peter DeFazio to take your calls. He’s engaged in a bizarre struggle with a bizarre right winger WhoIsArtRobinson.com will tell you all about it, who is being funded by a Wall Street hedge fund baron who doesn’t like the fact that the congressman< Congressman Peter DeFazio, has called for regulation of Wall Street and maybe even a tax on some of their activities. Possibly among other things. We don’t’ actually know what this guy’s motivation is except that this Wall Street baron, except that he’s funding, you know, a guy that I would call fringe beyond fringe. And so, anyhow, Congressman Peter DeFazio, welcome back to the show.

Peter DeFazio: Thanks Thom, appreciate it.

Thom Hartmann: Pick up some more phone calls here?

Peter DeFazio: Absolutely.

Thom Hartmann: And by the way let me plug your website. DeFazioForCongress.org. Steve in North Troy, Vermont. Steve, you’re on the air with congressman Peter DeFazio.

Steve: Hi gentlemen, keep up the good work. I think I found a way to explain some of this bizarre behavior. We’ve got a lot of off label promotion of drugs. I’ve seen so many people who are just like walking wounded. You know everybody over 40, 50 years old is on five, ten different meds. And a lot of them are being subsidized by Medicare and Medicaid. But anyway…

Thom Hartmann: So you, Steve, so you think that Americans are just, this is Soma. Congressman DeFazio do you want to comment on that or shall we pick up another call?

Peter DeFazio: Well I just would say after the Rachel Maddow show we got quite a few emails from people who had various diagnoses including what he said about my opponent.

Thom Hartmann: Hm, interesting. Walter in Springdale, Washington. Hey Walter, you’re on with congressman DeFazio.

Walter: Yeah, when Clinton first started campaigning he took money from the Chinese. He then took a defector, allowed a defector to come in and tried to run him straight into a web.

Thom Hartmann: Walter are you just calling to trash Bill Clinton?

Walter: No.

Thom Hartmann: I mean I do that a lot.

Walter: No, I’m not, I’m not, just listen to me.

Thom Hartmann: Okay, what’s your point, what’s your question for the congressman?

Walter: Two years to get traitors to release the ???? in this country?

Thom Hartmann: Walter, what’s your question for the congressman?

Walter: The question is when are you going to clean up the traitors? There’s mass traitors within the political process, or political field. And they’re destroying this country, they’re tearing us apart.

Thom Hartmann: Okay that’s an excellent question. Okay congressman DeFazio, your thoughts?

Peter DeFazio: Well we are being torn apart by some greedy self-interested people here. Wall Street pretty much has run the government of this country. They’ve got themselves totally deregulated, they gambled themselves into near bankruptcy or bankruptcy they then got bailed out by the tax payers and now they’re back to gambling again and now they want to be sure they never get regulated or are never required to pay taxes and that they can do what they want and they’d love to get a hold of people’s social security so they’re trying to buy Congress. So yeah there are traitors out there but not exactly along the lines, I mean, I don’t know any thing about these people from China. I do know that we have a failed trade policy with China, and everybody else we have a free trade agreement with. And unfortunately Bill Clinton was a big part of that, working with Wall Street and the multinational corporations.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah. Absolutely. Morty in Pasadena, California, listening on KPFK. Hey Morty you’re on the air with congressman Peter DeFazio.

Morty: Yes, thanks. It’s actually KPLA, Thom, I’m sorry. No it’s my fault it’s the Pacifica station which I also support, but I listen to you on KPLA.

Thom Hartmann: Oh I’m sorry, KTLK. Oh okay, KPLA. Great.

Morty: Yeah, real quick congressman. I heard yesterday and it might have been on Thom’s show that the DC, that the D double, DCCC is pulling support from their progressive candidates to give it again to the more Blue Dogs and I was wondering how much support you’re getting from the DCCC and if you’re not, do you also think you may be in trouble because of low information voters out there in your district?

Peter DeFazio: I’m getting, well they have forwarded some press releases for me to their national list so that’s the extent of the assistance they’ve provided and a little bit of research. And to my opponent. But no financial aid or advertising or anything at all from them.

Thom Hartmann: That’s bizarre.

Peter DeFazio: Well they just, you know, they’re, I don’t know. I mean I’ve raised concerns with them early on and spoke to, you know spoke to the head of DCCC and the staff and they’re not there, they’re not going to help. And in terms of low information voters, yeah that’s what this is all about. I mean if there’s anybody who would be hard, I mean I’ve got my local, largest local paper said how can anybody say that DeFazio is a Pelosi lap dog, look at this, he opposed her on the bail out, he voted against the cap in trade, and he’s you know on down the list. But this billionaire from Wall Street, that’s the only attack he has on me is to try and associate me with Nancy Pelosi with phony statistics about a voting record. They chose 14 votes out of 1850 and said I voted with her 86% of the time on those 14 votes which were hand picked by a Republican group and even though she didn’t vote on three of them. So their math doesn’t even add up. But yeah low information voters are buying it.

Thom Hartmann: Amazing, amazing. Jeff in Ashville, North Carolina listening on Maine FM, 103.5. Hey Jeff, you’re on the air with congressman Peter DeFazio.

Jeff: Hey thanks to you both, thanks for your great work, both of you. And I hope you get re elected sir. My question is having to do with, I mean, corporations have had pretty free access to Congress and the Senate pretty well with the special interest groups and the lobbyists. Now with the Citizen’s United Supreme Court has basically given them the green light to go ahead and buy the whole process. And you know in my mind this just spells the end of democracy. A very scary scenario. And so my question is what efforts are underway to challenge this travesty?

Thom Hartmann: Excellent question.

Peter DeFazio: Well you know the immediate reaction was to try and at least stem the corporate money by requiring a disclosure, it passed the House and failed by one vote to get past the filibuster in the Senate. You know so maybe that can happen during the lame duck I don’t know. That isn’t going to stem the flood but according to the US Chamber, you know a lot of the corporations that they’re laundering money for would not give money if their names were going to become public. So we could, that could help on the corporate side because they don’t want to upset their customers too much by supporting right wing wack nuts. So, but what you do about these independent expenditures and billionaires and that. I mean you know with this Supreme Court, it’s tough. It’s really tough. Absent a constitutional amendment which I would support to rein in the flood of money. They have said money is speech and corporations are people and you know and anybody can buy whatever they want. And I mean you can just think of it, I mean I don’t know how many billionaires there are, right wing billionaires, but I mean they could each adopt a candidate and say hey I’m going to buy you a seat in Congress and by the way there will be a few things afterwards I’d like but you know we’ll talk about that later.

Thom Hartmann: Right, and that seems to be what’s happening. And if you, my listener and viewer, if you want to support a, one of the genuine progressives in the US house of representatives in this race, go to DeFazioForCongress.org and check out Peter DeFazio’s website. Donald in Los Angeles, Donald? You are on the air.

Donald: Hi Thom and congressman DeFazio. Yes tariffs should be raised but also in the next 11 days remaining before the election would it be a good idea if this congressman and senator Bernie Sanders and Thom Hartmann also could contact the White House and suggest that what’s needed to be done in this campaigning is to campaign for the, you know what should have been people been talking about the tariffs, are ridiculous and killing the way it is now.

Thom Hartmann: To bring back manufacturing and a rational trade policy is that what you’re saying Donald?

Donald: Yes.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, okay. You want to riff on that, congressman?

Peter DeFazio: Yeah well for the first time, you know I’ve been in the house 24 years, and for the first time we had a pro-America vote in terms of trade for the first time in 24 years just before the house adjourned. We passed legislation, I would have liked to have made it a little bit stronger but it was legislation that would allow the US government clearly to retaliate against China for currency manipulation which is a part of the, the armamentarium of things they use to undermine our goods and to you know get us to run massive trade deficits and borrow from them. It’s I mean the Commerce Department is so pathetic under Democratic and Republican administration, its never changed. And they have said well they can’t file against China for currency manipulation because the law says if any American benefits from these things and they say American tourists in China benefit by a manipulated cheap Chinese currency so what if we’re losing all our manufacturing and industrial power…

Thom Hartmann: Right, people who can afford to be tourists in China can still buy cheap stuff, isn’t that cool.

Peter DeFazio: Yeah, so we had to pass a law to say no that’s not, we passed the bill. That’s saying no that doesn’t apply.

Thom Hartmann: We’re talking with congressman Peter DeFazio, his website, DeFazioForCongress.org or WhoIsArtRobinson.com and congressman we have about 60 seconds left. Not enough to bring another caller in before we have to wrap this up and then I’m just going to go back to my anything goes Friday thing. So if you could in this last little less than a minute, give us a summary of where you’re at and where you want to go.

Peter DeFazio: Well this really is a incredible battle with the flood gates that have been opened by the supreme court for our democracy. If they grasp control of both the House and the Senate, if they manage to make independents, progressives and democrats stay home, be indifferent about this election, they win. And once they win, I’m not sure how we turn this around. So people have got to get motivated, they’ve got to get out there. Otherwise you’re supporting their plan to corrupt and take over our system.

Thom Hartmann: Brilliantly said. Congressman Peter DeFazio. DeFazioForCongress.org. Get over there and help him out, please. Congressman, thanks for being with us today.

Peter DeFazio: Thank you for the opportunity, Thom, appreciate it.

Thom Hartmann: Good talking with you.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.