caliphates to the threat of shari'a law why are so many americans find into islamophobia it has something to do with the major cable news networks were feeding its viewers based on this after the. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through get through to putin may who can you trust no one who is interview with the global machinery to see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask what we do r t question more.

welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour blocks viewers aren't just the most uninformed cable news viewers are also the most intolerant a new report confirms what we all suspect that if you're in islamophobia you get the most bang for your buck on fox so-called news and later a daily take our eye opening trip to the dentist i had today confirmed what i fear most of the american dream is all the dead in america is headed straight for the futile dark ages.

want to know where islamophobia is coming from look no further than fox so-called news the brookings institute just released a new report charting americans views toward islam based on their political views and where they get their news turns out those who identify themselves as republicans tea partiers are far so-called news viewers feared muslims the most fifty two percent of fox viewers believe muslims want to establish sure real lot america compared to just twenty percent to watch c.n.n. and twenty nine percent are watching us and we see also sixty percent of fox viewers believe islam is not an important part of the american where the religious community or muslims are about would probably be more accurate way to say that again far more than c.n.n. and it was that we see a whopping sixty eight percent of fox viewers think the values of islam are at odds with the values of america far more than the thirty seven percent of c.n.n.

viewers and thirty nine percent of innocently see viewers of course considering that you know what comes across the fox so-called news airwaves on a daily basis this report shouldn't come as too big of a surprise. not all. muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are muslim if you are an eighteen to twenty year old muslim man you should be strip searched and if we don't do that there's a very high probability we're going to lose with marilyn building that victory mosque on what's in essence a burial site would be both disruptive and cold hearted for the families of nine eleven victims the most dangerous scenario is that radical muslims seize power and put shari'a law into place same thing now joining me now to talk more about fox so-called news is role in this right wing islamophobia machine is that giuliani reporter and blogger at think progress said welcome back thanks for having me thanks for joining us you know i want to get into this investigation that you all are doing in the book is reported on but even before that i'm troubled by the fact

that even twenty and twenty nine and thirty three percent or whatever those numbers were c.n.n. an emissary see viewers think that there is a disconnect between american values and muslim values when this is one of the three great religions of the book you know the three abrahamic religions that the the values of his law christianity and judaism as a value system i mean the procedures may be different are essentially identical. oh no that's exactly what's really shocking because if you look at the american muslim community it's probably the single most best and most modern in the liberal muslim community entire world i mean the muslim american community has been emigrating to the united states for decades and decades and it's always been a really valued and treasured part of the american social fabric the muslim americans have been elected to congress they've been able to lower positions they're probably authors of prominent activists people in the n.b.a. n.f.l.

you know muslims are all around us and they're not really that different from the rest. of the rest of the country that's why they emigrate here because they want to come to a great accepting country and what's really unfortunate is that we've seen not only fox news but really an entire islam a phobia industry and people basically for political favor for their own fame or fortune or demonizing muslim americans and unfortunately turning a growing minority of americans to feeling that they should fear muslims when really they are a fantastic part of the american community that makes us stronger just as all racial and ethnic minorities and religious minorities do so tell me about this islamophobia industry. how many many dollars are involved were they coming from and how does that work sure is so we actually put out a report the center for american progress action by the recently called fear it can basically it tracks seven large foundations and other donors that channel something like forty two million dollars a year in two books seminars tours for trade he is usually right it's

a multimillion dollar industry now and there are people who make their and you know their entire livelihood is based on pumping up this fear that america should be a lot of things that really you know had no was sort of relationship to what's actually you know threatening this country and threatening american lives in the middle class or rather just you know almost racist sort of fear you know in russell crowe's one nine hundred fifty three a conservative mind the seminal book. in the modern conservative movement he identified the ten tenets of conservatism and one of them this is i'm paraphrasing from memory but he said conservatives understand that people are more highly motivated by emotions than by reason of their color and i didn't watch it. fear is certainly one of the most powerful emotions why why why pompous why spend forty two million dollars a year trying to make americans afraid and i think a lot of this is the fact that the people who are doing this are you are gaining political power and they gain political favor and personal fortune from doing i

mean people like zuhdi jasser there are people like pamela geller very well fox news or other networks. tories and they are learning that you know unfortunately in this country right now fear sells and fear is selling very well for them and they're creating a base people like glenn beck you know made entire t.v. shows based on crazy hypothesis that you know muslims were trying to take over the entire world and teaming up with communists newt gingrich sort of said there was almost an islamist atheist conspiracy in the united states as absurd as that sounds i mean the people are saying that there's actually a lot of power to be found in propping up this fear and unfortunately it's something that's popped up especially among the far right throughout this country's history whether it was against you know irish catholics against the japanese against you know leftists against people in labor unions or women and unfortunately now the target is muslims and i think the positive thing that we have to look at here is the fact that most americans still in these polls do not agree with the basic concepts that you know fox and the far right and sort of

a great japanese the world are pushing at hamley pillars of the world are pushing and i think that most americans eventually are going to are going to sort of reject this sort of what when you exposed the funders and exposed to the the industry this one islamophobia history there was a lot of pushback i mean i was i was reading when blogs people call you names people liar being gentle. but kind of blowback did you experience and how do you respond to what was really interesting was that as soon as we started to expose these people for what they were which was basically making money off of fear and then we were part of the conspiracy of the islamic conspiracy come to the center for american progress and to come here to washington d.c. and it's really interesting some of you want to impose sharia law right we were the ones that are trying to push through a lot of you know there are people like frank gaffney doing this it was an old reagan hand you now has a sort of fear mongering to war and this is a man who also went after george bush and grover norquist are also being part of this conspiracy so you know where these people are coming from their you know they're not of sort of muslim dating anyone out there in the world. and and

have you and you've been successful in regarding their rebuttals. you know i think we have you know we've gotten a fair amount of media attention i think that a lot of not just muslim groups but a lot of other sort of interfaith groups and groups in america they're sort of pushing for religious tolerance you know groups that have fought for a long time for civil rights and civil liberties they've been allied with us and they help spread our message and i think that the reason that with the pushback has been so fierce because we have exposed them we are calling them what they are which is merchants of fear and we're saying that this is the sort of country that things are sort of that sort of thing should fly said thanks so much for being with us thank you great to see you last month the center for american progress released this report. on the networks of think tanks and their donors that have spent twenty four million dollars fear of muslims in america it's like these fear mongers get the biggest bang for their buck over the fox so-called news.

it's the good the bad of the very very aaron aisha's lee oddly the good california senator barbara boxer acted in president obama's decision last week to delay new regulations kerby pollution until two thousand and thirteen boxer encouraged environmental groups to sue the administration she told reporters yesterday i disagree strongly with the administration's decision and i hope billy's sued in court and i hope the court can stand by the clean air act clean air isn't something that we should be waiting around for and it's time for the president keep this campaign promise to heal the planet so if it takes lawsuits as senator boxer is suggesting for the bad alabama senator richard shelby shelby has been one of the most outspoken critics of the newly created consumer financial protection bureau

that works to make sure the middle class isn't screwed over by banks toure's again like goldman sachs even wrote an op ed in the wall street journal back in july in which he called the new consumer protection bureau dangerous well as the public campaign action fund discovered this week we now know why senator shelby wrote that op ed and most likely he hates the consumer protections but it's because he was on out by the banks toure's one day after writing the op ed shelby was handed a five thousand dollars campaign check. you guessed it home and sex so much money to unemployed americans need to send shelby for him to write an op ed on their behalf my guess is they don't know. and the very very ugly and coulter as more and more people realize coulter is just a hack trying to sell books and stop listening to her he always has a home on the couch over fox for that's where she was this morning attacking public school teacher. james hoffa is labor day rallies. this is jimmy hoffa president of

the themes are they using truck drivers and pipe fitters to get the story now is representing public school teachers from general gun teachers cafeteria workers fighting for every last bit of their government pension what effect from down in florida how does this tough talk back on the teamsters supporting drilling in anwar you know real jobs for real money as opposed to this little part of the i don't want you know fighting for nuclear power plants being installed this is should that is evidence of the decline of the nation that he's not even representing man what actual jobs he's represented the same job he was this public sector worker who doesn't want the kindergarten teachers of the thirty years and still has a bad memory from kindergarten after all she still has yet to learn the one important lesson from that grade play nice with others and that's very very. coming out when more people participate in our democracy is not supposed to be

a good thing i guess doesn't think so in fact he thinks it's close to criminal or a liberal. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through get through to people who can you trust no one who is you know you would be able to see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more.

so dog makes a healthy democracy some say it's a high voter turnout as in the more people who vote then the more the will of the country is reflected in the government however however over the last fifty years the average voter turnout in our national elections has dropped out about forty eight percent ranking us thirty eight the nation yeah nations like poland india and is still mia that's why several organizations have sprung up around america with the sole purpose of registering more and more people to vote just for greater participation in our democracy or conservatives have always been wary eye or voter turnout as a tory is republican strategist way rick said as are as the voting populace goes down our leverage frankly goes now another conservative matthew data is doubling

down in a way which is a message arguing that registering poor people to vote is vote like any doubt burglary tools to criminals and vote early joining me now to explain this position and why more participation in our democracy is actually a bad thing as matthew vega investigative journalist and author of the book subversion and matthew welcome thank you for to have you with us. democracy i think you can see why doing the poor well. the poor are part of democracy though i mean this in franchising any group of people is harming the small democracy no one including myself has ever and you did anybody should be disenfranchised the article that brought me here today that was in american thinker a few days ago i pointed out the clouds were given strategy which is the real thing and the idea behind it was to register as many people who were poor who were

welfare recipients in order the first part of it was to overwhelm the welfare rolls in the one nine hundred sixty. in early seventy's and that succeeded to an extent in michigan and in new york state in new york city however the second prong of it involved in acting the motor voter a lot of one nine hundred ninety three richard cloud we're going frances fox has been. going back used to talk about all the time after i told him about the strategy for i think i was the first according to the nexis database so i'm actually kind of proud of that anyway so i see my work talked about every single day i would say well they're your friends from their friends from the democratic socialism america but they they argued in one thousand nine hundred three article in social policy magazine the official magazine of acorn that and it was the article was very honest called toward a class based realignment of american politics and they said if you take advantage

of the apparatus of the welfare state and you. use class warfare techniques on people and emphasizing class warfare language no of course not because they are very clever academics these are your interpretations of what they said well they are very clever academics they've got to drive home the point that not that republicans want to serve them why would you call the president on america for wanting to register poor and i didn't call the president of america and i said that they clamored pavan strategy of registering welfare recipient president was was tomorrow and it was an american i said it was un-american but i didn't actually legal in that well he was in the sentence with i mean he was ok so let's just get it was that all right what happens if a lot of people. the idea behind the strategy not enough a straight lives just you and me what happens if a lot of people vote for people who are. encouraging poor people to vote.

like welfare recipients and what have you heard unemployed people but it sure well the idea of it was to harangue them into supporting redistributionist politicians so if poor people vote what happens is they elect officials who will take money from wealthy people and give it to them as our say and they will support redistribution of wealth policies that redistribute wealth you know i'm not i'm not trying to debate this whole you know i don't understand how to get to the essence of this so you've got a lot of poor people and they vote for politicians and those politicians pursue redistributionist economic policies welfare or taxes on the rich money comes from the rich because the poor people those poor people are no longer poor right know because they go to the money now if you encourage people to go on welfare they will stay poor you should not be encouraging people to to be on the dole to be unproductive so eventually you know you don't believe that eventually if people if

enough poor people are voting at those poor and those poor people are encouraging redistribution is policies that eventually but they are going to become a little. the history of america i mean lyndon johnson cup poverty in half in four years of the great society he was the classic redistributionist politician that you're talking about and when he cut poverty in half the effect of that was that he created an entire generation of of basically black middle class in the united states that didn't exist before that were to a large extent did next existed before i got i would dispute that according to thomas sol the great economists research there was a thriving black middle class and as you put it there's always long to long before going are going to be long before the war on poverty and the great while everybody probably shouldn't racialize it because a lot of the a lot of the middle class that emerged as a result of a great society was white there are far more people who are way to. no one in the

in the middle class who didn't have the courage because it a great thing but the problem no but it was certainly helped by i would dispute that ok so so your argument is that poor people should not be allowed to vote no i never i never said that i said that i said it's like the motor voter in one thousand nine hundred three that powered in pippen and i mention them again and you don't like that but you can measure them overly with it so i'm the art i was fans of color and yes i know it's hard to believe it has been on this program i know you know i don't doubt motor voter required that people be registered to vote and that it and it was illegal to even ask them if they're citizens that's going to be a recipe for fraud and we have got fewer than thirty cases of fraud a year even when when the bush administration spent millions of dollars with work and that's all we could put as a voter fraud thirty one million people live in two thousand and eight one four hundred thousand registrations were there oh no there was all could have been

attempts at fraud and one in five men right now in america are out of work or those because those people not be allowed to vote i never said they shouldn't be about everyone should be everyone who is legally entitled to vote. should be encouraged and should be allowed to vote but this strategy courage to not with tax dollars i don't i don't think any voter registration drives are a good idea and in fact over the loser the policy of the government to encourage people to vote is a bad idea i don't have anything that would be voter registration encourage democracy is a bad thing bertha lewis of acorn agrees with me she said that voter registration drives are nothing but trouble and if you look at australia where ninety eight percent of the people vote yeah. so ninety four of these are illegally idea of leader senator in austria ninety two percent belgium ninety one percent of poor people are all voting in those countries as countries in the ranges from. which countries certainly doing just fine australia's not doing too well that matthew

we're out of time but i for being with us that all right we thank you. as we speak republicans are working hard to keep the poor from voting over a thousand was a big energy boost in the past decade to make it harder for poor people to register to vote and even when poor people are successful in registering to vote they would seemingly end up having to wait five ten or more hours in line to vote on wealthy white aber hoods the way it is typically far less than an hour we're seeing right now is in the words of the advancement project the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century welcome to the new conservative america a nation of by and for the rich and to hell with the rest of our. i went to the dentist today to get a filling or place and walked out with. but more trouble in the extent of the

painful dental procedure was that the dentist told me was what he told me before he went to work i had thought about the posed offices financial problems and i told him my theory about how republicans want to privatized the post office in a place you know a little over a half million unionized workers with a little over half a million taco bell wage employees and that's when he said words to the effect of well at least detroit understands what's going on they have new hires coming into the auto plants they're make and thirteen bucks an hour no reason to pay someone thirty bucks an hour to put screws on a tire i mean really wanted to say to him that the reason why automakers in detroit used to make thirty bucks an hour was so they could become part of the middle class raise a family have a home and cars take vacations put their kids through college that then our government will lead to a strong middle class was good for the country and wanted as many people in that middle class as possible people who could spend money people who could afford a good education who could invent and innovate in that happiness that thomas

jefferson wrote into the declaration of independence. my dentist was a young guy probably in his thirty's and doesn't remember what a made america was like before reagan when taxes on the rich were above seventy percent when two out of three workers had a union job or its financial equivalent and when our social safety net cop people when they felt back then you didn't need a college degree to pursue the american dream if you worked hard you kept your nose clean you can get by with just a high school diploma but now thanks to the thirty years of reaganomics corroding the american dream instead of new auto workers in detroit getting a shot at the middle class they're destined to join the ranks of the rapidly expanding who are the working poor here in america according to a new report from pew one in three people who grew up in the middle class in the one nine hundred seventy s. have now dropped out of the middle day and are part of the working poor they just couldn't cut it anymore and the new america are billionaires and their bought off

follow titian's have raised the bar for entry into the middle class higher and higher until eventually very few people can actually climb over it and more and more people have just accepted that as the new normal rather than pushing back against this downsizing of the american dream and asking why are we keeping more people out of the middle class instead of bringing more people into it that's what i wanted to ask and that's that since i was about to start a drill in my mouth i decided to stuff it but it's the same story here from young conservatives who have have on my show all the time they also don't remember what it was like before reagan but since they have their college degrees they think they're going to be just fine chasing the new american dream and to hell with those who didn't go to college they don't deserve a good life again. what these young college educated conservatives don't realize is they're in the crosshairs next this year for the first time ever student loan debt in the united states outweighed credit card debt trillion dollars the average

student leaves college already twenty four thousand dollars in the hole and job prospects are getting dimmer and dimmer as today's unemployment rate among eighteen to twenty four year olds is over sixteen percent so at this rate even a college degree doesn't guarantee entry into the middle class anymore in america welcome to the college graduate the working poor class but the sad group of americans who thirty years ago would have enjoyed the perks of living in the middle class but in today's new american dream are stuck in low pain dead end jobs what working people around the nation are facing now is a whole new generation coming to power today people like paul ryan and eric cantor people like my dad as well who never knew what the american dream used to stand for and instead they've bought into the vision of america promoted by billionaires an oligarchy one of a wealthy ruling elite looking down at a vast underclass of working poor and

a sliver of something that used to look like the middle class it's not about failed supply side economics anymore it's about a great forgetting to use daniel quinn's term and a reeducation of this nation. just getting by is now the new normal and if we don't remember soon what the american dream used to stand for and just how important the middle class was in making america the economic superpower that was for most of the twentieth century that america will quickly come to resemble mexico let's stop forgetting and start remembering. that's the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered as our web sites of tom hartman. free speech dot org dot com we also check out our two you tube channel so our links over thom hartmann dot com entire show is also available as a free podcast on i tunes and have a free tom hartman i phone or i pad app but the app store is in this feedback

a twitter and tom underscore are both on facebook it's on the score of our blogs message boards and telephone lines all over town. and no forget from ocracy begins when you show up when you participate get out there get involved show up and be a part of this country your it will see them.

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