Thom Hartmann: Welcome back, six minutes past the hour, Thom Hartmann here with you. And I am honored and pleased to have with me in the studio Chris Hedges. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the author of a new book, “Death of the Liberal Class.” And, “liberal is conceded too much to the power elite,” he writes on the back.

Thom Hartmann: Greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way. Thom Hartmann here with you. And boy a lot going on.

I’ve got a, well, President Obama is in India, I want to tell you about that. There’s an amazing piece in today’s Financial Times about how corporate America is not just happy that the Republicans won, they’re dancing in the streets. They are popping champagne corks, now this is my language, not theirs, I’ll tell you about that.

Thom Hartmann: Okay so who killed the economy? I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question, but as a genuine question. The main Republican storyline, the one that is pitched by conservatives and people who don’t want banks deregulated, is that back either during the Carter or the Clinton administration, pick your story, I’ve heard both, that there was legislature passed that encouraged banks, the Community Reinvestment Act, they encouraged banks to give loans to people who couldn’t afford to get actually loans.

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?