Thom Hartmann: And greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers of peace, freedom and the American way. Thom Hartmann here with a good nights sleep. Welcome back. Welcome back to me, I guess. Welcome back to you. It’s so nice to be in this, in this chair, sitting behind the good old working class stainless steel microphone. None of that pretentious gold microphone garbage. Anyhow, great to be here. And I promise I won’t swear at or lose control with any conservatives today.

However, I should warn you, in our second hour we are going to have Romina Boccia, I believe it’s pronounced, of the Independent Women’s Forum, the conservative group, on. We’re going to be talking about paycheck fairness. And I am just guessing, this is just a guess, that I’m going to make her head explode. We’ll see, we’ll see. You’ll get to watch it on TV or hear it on radio live. So.

And in our third hour, Fukushima Daiichi, my dear friend Ken in, he’s Japanese, who lives in Tokyo, he says in Tokyo they refer to it as 3011, has now been declared a 7 on a scale of 1 to 7, the same as Chernobyl. I wonder if they’re going to have to change the scale and make it an 8 or a 9, you know, take the scale up to a 10, because you know Chernobyl contaminated the planet but it really contaminated an area of a thousand miles around. Look at the pictures of the deformed babies that are being born around there. It’s just tragic. And you’re going to see something very similar to this over the next 20, 30 years in Japan. But not just that. We’re getting radioactive milk in Pennsylvania. I mean, this is, this is a worldwide wound to mother earth. So anyhow, we’ll be getting into that in our third hour. Paul Gunter is going to drop by again from the BeyondNuclear.org organization.

But in the meantime, fascinating, fascinating story here. Billionaires, you know the Koch brothers specifically, and their buddies, you know we’re not sure exactly who is paying for this, but it’s called tea party and that’s, you know, either multimillionaire Dick Armey, billionaire Koch brothers, other multimillionaires who are involved. Anyhow they’re rewriting the history and reality of America. They are literally training activists in guerrilla internet tactics. Yesterday for example, somebody called during the show and said, and it wasn’t a conservative who wanted to pick a fight with me which frankly I expected it was. You know when Julie said oh you’ve got somebody who wants to ask about German corporate tax rates. So I looked at Wikipedia and German tax rates and of course it’s been scrubbed by the right wingers, as has virtually all of Wikipedia. You, just passing reference. Yes that’s a 15% rate, oh plus they do pay the aforementioned taxes. You know stuff like that. I mean it’s just, it is astounding.

I have told you the story of walking through a right wing think tank and seeing cubicles full of young people, all of them with Wikipedia pages up. I have no idea if they are editing them or not, I’m not making that assertion, but that’s my guess. And I know that people are being paid to do this kind of thing at home. And I would love to see a Wikipedia that’s once again a Wikipedia. A genuine, what’s his name, Jimmy Wales, the guy who came up with it, whatever his name is, the founder. You know his vision was, you know, if enough people participate in this thing it’ll be a, you know, the information commons sort of like Jefferson’s vision of America. And it’s a beautiful vision. Jimmy Wales is his name.

But tragically what has happened is big money has gotten it. And so in order to get a true story, a straight story on how much German corporations pay in taxes, I had to go to a website that was not, you know, it was like Wikipedia was the first in the Google list and I went to the third on the Google list and there was the actual information in a fairly succinct fashion without lots and lots of obfuscation, confusion, and clear Heritage Foundation type language. But they’re not just rewriting the history and the reality of America on the internet. Or maybe they are, maybe actually this speaks to the whole internet, not just on Wikipedia.

But even more so, consider this. This is a video that has been released by an organization that is keeping track of what the tea party is up to. It speaks for itself. It’s a training session, there’s a room full of people, those of you who are listening on the radio as opposed to watching it on television, what it is is a room full of young people, I’d guess most of them are in their 20s. Given the help wanted ads that we’ve talked about on this program and I’ve seen on Craigslist and others have seen and outed, probably working at home, this is a training seminar. They’re probably working at home for, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 dollars an hour, whatever it is depending on their skill levels and how much they’re putting in. And there’s a guy up front who is in front of a Power Point presentation and he is teaching them what to do. Here it is:

"We’re going to go on this, we call it the American Liberty Tour, where we go to 18 cities, we hold presentations like this, educational seminars, we do blogger breakfast, where we connect bloggers in the cities and then we hold liberty rallies at night to get people fired up. Right, we just turn over cars, set them on fire (laughter from crowd). Over two hundred years ago, guys, a group of people just like you did something extraordinary. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They were activists just like you, I truly believe that, they were activists then, we are activists now. Make no distinction about it.

"So what do we do? We become digital activists. We identify the medium, we learn the medium, we manipulate the medium. It was printing presses then, it’s the internet now. That’s where we influence the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. The tea party’s got us running up the hills, the American majority is trying to give you the tools, the muskets, right? So here’s what I do. I get on Amazon. I type in ‘liberal books.’ I go through and I say 1 star, 1 star, 1 star. The flip side is you need to go to conservative, libertarian, whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. Okay? So literally, 80% of the books I put a star on, I don’t read. So that’s how it works, okay?

"There’s places, this is where your kids, I promise you, this is where your kids are getting information. Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster, those are places where you can rate movies, okay? So when you type in movies on healthcare or documentaries on healthcare, I don’t want ‘Sicko’ to come up, I don’t want Michael Moore to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day just ch-ch-ch-ch. So that’s guerrilla tactics. If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, right? A place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue. Give our ideas a fighting chance."

Thom Hartmann: “Control the online dialogue." Now those of you who could see that, at the very beginning he was showing very fancy, beautifully decorated buses, like the ones that the Koch brothers and Dick Armey pay for to move tea party people into things. This is a tour that’s going all around the country, training people. Let me just show you again if you can re-cue that, just the first ten, fifteen seconds. Just play that.

"We’re going to go on this, we call it the American Liberty Tour, where we go to 18 cities, we hold presentations like this, educational seminars, we do blogger breakfast, where we connect bloggers in the cities and then we hold liberty rallies at night to get people fired up."

Thom Hartmann: Okay, that’s enough. So you get it. This is a well funded, well organized thing, and here’s this toadie guy, this guy up in front, who, who I would have used different adjectives yesterday with, with a little less sleep, who is basically doing the work of the billionaires to destroy the middle class that I’m guessing he’s a part of. I’m guessing this kid wasn’t born with a 400 million dollar trust fund or a multimillion dollar trust fund like George W. Bush is. I’m guessing he’s just a guy who is being paid, you know probably a decent salary. You know the right wingers, they tend to pay 100, 150 thousand. Lobbyists in this town start out at 325 thousand dollars a year. He’s probably being paid well by the Kochs or whoever it is. But he’s basically betraying his own people.

And by his own people I mean the American people. These people are training the American people, going in and trashing my books, Michael Moore’s movies without even watching them?

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Thom Hartmann: Helping you win the water cooler wars, the number one progressive talk radio show in America, three, no four years in a row now. And welcome back, Thom Hartmann here with you. Billionaires, as I pointed out, are rewriting the history and the reality of America. But wait, there’s more. More damaging material is being discovered in the ongoing Chamber Leaks scandal. Earlier this year, investigative reporter with Think Progress, Lee Fong, broke the story of the US Chamber of Commerce contracting with private data security firms to launch cyber attacks against, threaten family members of, and discredit members of progressive organizations like the US Chamber Watch, the Union SEIU, MoveOn.org, ThinkProgress and others.

One that particularly infuriates me is that they decided to go after MoveToAmend.org, the organization that wants to amend the constitution so that the US Chamber of Commerce can’t use, and the Koch brothers, can’t use unlimited amounts of money to influence politics. The latest find is a Power Point presentation listing dozens of organizations and individual that the Chamber should, these are their words, from the slide, from the Power Point presentation, should “discredit, confuse, shame, combat, infiltrate, and fracture."

Now right now Congress is looking into the matter and whether or not these private, they’re also looking at whether or not these private data security firms are, you know have government contracts, I don’t know if that’s going to make any difference, given that, you know, in the House of Representatives, the guy in charge of this is one of the few members of the House of Representatives that ever actually pled guilty to a crime, Darrell Issa, small time crook who made his fortune off-shoring his car alarm business to China. And he’s also the richest member of congress at 400 million bucks. So I don’t expect any, I really genuinely don’t expect, I mean he wants to investigate Obama and democrats, right. Give me a break.

But what’s really going on here is that this is nothing more than millionaires and billionaires throwing around their power in America to destroy activists and average people. They’re using their hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in corporate cash in our elections. It doesn’t seem to be enough for them. They also want to crush any organization that’s willing to stand in their way. Aren’t you outraged by this? I mean this is, we’re talking the end of democracy here. What we are looking at is plutocracy, we’re looking at kleptocracy. We’re looking at America hanging by a thread. The American middle class is vanishing and turning into the poor.

Roger Ebert of all people, Roger Ebert, you know the film critic summarized this brilliantly in this piece he wrote on April 8th called “The One-Percenters." And a tip of the hat to Phil Procter, an old friend of mine and one of the four Fire Sign Theater performers who forwarded it to me. And thank you Phil, it’s always nice hearing from you. Roger Ebert’s journal, and here’s, he just, Roger Ebert, of course is a film critic and is an author and is a guy who has been around the block for you know probably as many years as I have. He gets how to say something in a way that you understand it. So I’m just going to share some of his actual words with you, hopefully few enough that it’s fair use.

He writes, “The upper 1% of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth, rather than income," that is, you know how much money, what you own as opposed to how much pay check you’re getting. “In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1% control 40% of all the wealth in this country." You got that? The top 1%, they’re getting a quarter of all the pay in the country, and they’re getting, and they own 40% of all the wealth in the country. That’s just the top 1%. And you know if you look back before Reagan came into office, and these are my words, not Roger Ebert’s but he’s got the stats here. If you go back before Reagan came into office the top 1% only got 12% of all the pay in the country. Now they’re getting a quarter so it’s more than doubled. And they only owned about a third of all the wealth in the country and now they own 40%. So they’re doing very well, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, Wachovia Bank, now part of Wells Fargo, he points out. You know, I remember seeing this story and it was, I read it in, I think it was the Financial Times and it was written in a way that was sufficiently obscure that I didn’t really understand its meaning. Roger Ebert lays it out. Basically Wachovia was convicted or has plead guilty to laundering money in a way that it has to do with Mexico. Now you know they’re not specifically saying yes we plead guilty to laundering drug money for Mexican drug lords or for weapons to kill people, thousands and thousands of people and destroy millions of lives. That’s not what Wachovia has plead guilty to. But I’ll let you guess, because nobody knows for sure, because they cut a deal.

But the amount of money that they laundered was 378.4 billion dollars, which is equivalent to a third of the Gross Domestic Product of the entire country of Mexico. One bank in America laundering an amount of money illegally that’s equal to a third of the total GDP of Mexico? If that’s not drug dealers and arms dealers, then you know, fill in your silly blank, you know? I’m a pigeon. In fact he says if a third of the Mexican GDP passes through your bank and you don’t ask the questions required by law, which they didn’t do, you are either A a criminal or B incompetent, I can’t think of any possibility. So how much of a fine do you think Wachovia paid for laundering 378 billion dollars? For making a profit of 12 billion? They paid a fine of 2% of the 12 billion. Less than 2% of its 12 billion dollars.

Meanwhile the head of JP Morgan Chase & Company, Jamie Dimon, he just got a 51% pay raise from the Wall Street Journal, Roger Ebert writes. 57 thousand dollars. That’s what the average US archaeologist made last year, it’s also what JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Diamond made every day of last year. 20.8 million dollars total.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.