Seeking and Finding Wholeness

Thom Hartmann is the nations number 1 progressive talk show host. His radio show and books offer a wealth of knowledge in history and politics, also in ADHD.

He is very level-headed and has a very wise view of the world. I listen to his show as often as I can; every time I listen to his show I get educated, and I’ve been listening for 2 years now. He is an award-winning author of twenty books in print in four continents and 18 languages.

I agree with a lot of what he says and I also learn a lot from him. I am a very pleased listener and supporter.

For that and more, Thom Hartmann has earned his well deserved spot in my ‘Best Of” list.

Thom’s official website can be found at:

http://www.thomhartmann.com/

Find Thom’s blog here:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/category/thom/blog/

Listen to him on your local progressive radio, find stations here: http://www.thomhartmann.com/newstations.php

Find show notes here:

http://www.thomhartmann.com/category/radioshow/daily-stacks/

Download mp3s of Thom Hartmann’s radio show (from KPOJ): http://www.620kpoj.com/cc-common/podcast/single_podcast.html?podcast=hartmann_nationwide.xml

About Thom:

Short Bio (from http://www.thomhartmann.com/)

Thom Hartmann is live daily from noon-3 PM ET in Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Grand Rapids, and on over fifty other stations nationwide including Chicago, Washington DC, Santa Barbara, Minneapolis, and on XM and Sirius Satellite radio. He is also a four-time Project Censored-award-winning, New York Times best-selling author. His national daily progressive radio talk show, now in its sixth year on the air, replaced Al Franken on the Air America Radio Network, is also distributed to radio stations nationwide on the Jones Satellite system. More people listen daily to the Thom Hartmann Program than any other progressive talk show in the nation.

Talkers Magazine names Thom Hartmann as the 10th most important talk show host in America, and the #1 most important progressive host, in their “Heavy Hundred” ranking. Check it out at www.talkers.com

Longer Bio from (http://www.thomhartmann.com/2009/02/28/about-thom-hartmann/)

Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also is an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) of The New England Salem Children’s Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children.

Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. He is the former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, and has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom’s books), he was the originator of the revolutionary “Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis” to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the “Younger/Older Culture model” for describing the underpinnings – and possible solutions – to the world’s ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural “stories” which go back thousands of years. His most recent books are “Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class,” “The Edison Gene,” “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,” “We The People: A Call to Take Back America,” and “What Would Jefferson Do?”

Hartmann’s books have been written about in Time and many other magazines, he has been on NPR and BBC radio and CNN television (among others), mentioned on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people on five continents over the past two decades.

One of his books was selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian for its “visionary use of information technology to produce positive social, economic, and educational change in medicine.” His book The Prophet’s Way led to an unsolicited invitation to a private audience with Pope John Paul II in 1998. His book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight led to a September, 1999 unsolicited invitation to spend a week with His Holiness The Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India, and inspired a web-based movie (”Global Warning”) written and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.

A recurrent theme in Hartmann’s work is that all true and lasting cultural change begins with new insights propagating through enough people to reach a critical mass. History demonstrates, he says, that “when stories change, the world changes.” (Good examples from the 20th century are the stories that women in America should not be allowed to vote, or that African Americans should have separate facilities and schools.) Once these millennia-old toxic stories began to break down, cultural change came relatively quickly.

In the radio field, Hartmann worked from 1968 to 1978 as a DJ, reporter, news anchor, and program director for a variety of commercial radio stations, and today hosts a daily nationally-syndicated talk show. He’s also contributed to the American economy: in the business world he has founded seven corporations over the past 30 years, five of which he has sold and are still thriving and one, a nonprofit, most recently featured in a 2005 photo in Newsweek.

Coming back behind the microphone, Hartmann began in Spring 2002 a “liberal” talk radio show syndicated on stations from coast to coast, on the Sirius satellite radio system, and streamed live on the internet.

An inveterate traveler and sometimes a risk-taker, Hartmann has often found himself in the world’s hot spots on behalf of the German-based Salem international relief organization or as a writer, a situation which causes his friends to sometimes wonder aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not and never has). He was, for example, in The Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Uganda during the war of liberation by Tanzania; in Hungary when the first East German refugees arrived; in Germany when the wall came down;  in Beijing during the first student demonstrations; in Thailand when the military coup of 1991 occurred; in Barbados during the 2004 anti-government strikes and shutdowns; in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, during the spate of killings of presidential candidates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifada started there; on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down; in Kenya during the first big wave of crackdowns on dissidents; and in Venezuela during the 1991 coup attempt. He has been successful in avoiding some disasters, however. For example, he was out of the country when George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate.

The father of three grown children, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Louise, to whom he’s been married for over 35 years.

About Thom from Wikipedia:

Thom Hartmann (born May 7 1951) is an American radio host, author, former psychotherapist and entrepreneur, and liberal political commentator. His nationally-syndicated radio show, The Thom Hartmann Program, airs throughout the United States and has between 1.5 million[1] and 3 million[citation needed] unique listeners every week. He is a lay scholar of the history and textual analysis of the United States Constitution, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), electronic voting fraud, and environmental issues like global warming. Hartmann’s original article “Talking Back To Talk Radio” became part of the original business plan of Air America Radio. He replaced Al Franken on the network on February 19, 2007. In February 2009, Talkers Magazine named Hartmann the tenth most important talk show host in America[2], defining him as the most important progressive host in the country (the nine above Hartmann are conservatives). On March 1, 2009 Hartmann moved syndication of his show from Air America to the former Jones Network, now owned by Dial-Global (which also syndicates Neal Boortz, Ed Schultz, Michael Smerconish, Bill Press, Stephanie Miller, and Clark Howard).

Early life

Hartmann was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and grew up in nearby Lansing. Interested in politics from a young age, he reportedly campaigned for Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election. By 1967, Hartmann was studying at Michigan State University and working as part-time news announcer at local country music station WITL while protesting the Vietnam War with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He received his C.H. (Chartered Herbalist) degree from Dominion Herbal College, an M.H. (Master of Herbology) degree from Emerson College, and a Ph.D. in Homeopathic Medicine from Brantridge in England.

Beliefs

Hartmann is considered to have progressive/liberal politics (although he describes himself as part of the radical middle).[3] He is the author of numerous books including Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, in which he argues that the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394) did not actually grant corporate personhood, and that this doctrine derives from a mistaken interpretation of a Supreme Court clerk’s notes. Hartmann considers this a clear contradiction of the intent of the Founding Fathers of the United States.[4] He has also written on the separation of church and state, drawing upon the Federalist Papers to argue that the Founding Fathers warned against the notion of the United States being a Christian nation. He contends that the 2000 American election and 2004 American election were stolen through electronic tampering, denial of the voting franchise by rigged voting lists, and limiting availability of voting machines. He also accuses the Bush administration of eroding democracy and individual freedoms.

Hartmann is also a vocal critic of the effects of globalization on the U.S. economy, claiming that economic policies enacted during and since the presidency of Ronald Reagan have led, in large part, to many American industrial enterprises being acquired by multinational firms based in overseas countries, leading in many cases to manufacturing jobs – once considered a major foundation of the U.S. economy – being relocated to countries in Asia and other areas where the costs of labor are lower than in the U.S.; and the concurrent reversal of the United States’ traditional role of a leading exporter of finished manufactured goods to that of a primary importer of finished manufactured goods (exemplified by massive trade deficits with countries such as China); Hartmann argues that this phenomenon is leading to the erosion of the American middle class, whose survival Hartmann deems critical to the survival of American democracy. This argument is expressed in Hartmann’s 2006 book, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class and What We Can Do About It. One of the book’s main arguments is that media deregulation leads to corporate media shifting the American consensus towards the acceptance of privatization and massive corporate profits – which causes the shrinking of the middle class.

In his book Ultimate Sacrifice, he and the co-author argue that President John F. Kennedy’s assassination resulted from a conspiracy among three mafia “godfathers,” who took advantage of a proposed 1963 USA-sponsored coup (against Cuba’s Fidel Castro) to kill the President and then hide their tracks in the resulting cover-up of the coup plans. Gore Vidal, in his recent autobiography “Point To Point Navigation” devotes much of the final two chapters of his book to praising Hartmann’s and Waldron’s scholarship in “solving” the JFK case (JFK was a friend of Vidal’s).

Talk radio career

Hartmann started in radio as a DJ (country, rock, progressive overnight) in 1968 in Lansing, Michigan (on WITL, WVIC, WFMK) and program director (WNBY), and worked full or part-time in radio while also attending school and/or running businesses in Michigan for a decade. He returned to radio in February 2003 with a show on a local station in Vermont, then a month later picked up the noon-3 PM ET slot on the i.e. America Radio Network and Sirius Satellite Radio. In 2005, he moved from Vermont to Oregon and, in addition to continuing his national show, also hosted a local talk show in Portland, Oregon from 2005 until early 2007 on KPOJ, an affiliate of Air America Radio owned by Clear Channel Communications. The KPOJ local morning, 6 – 9 am PT is now hosted by Carl Wolfson and Christine Alexander with Hartmann as a daily participant only in the third (8-9 AM PT) hour before he begins his nationally syndicated program.

Hartmann’s national program, on the air since 2003 in the noon – 3 PM ET daypart live against Rush Limbaugh, was chosen by Air America to replace Al Franken on most Air America affiliates.[5] Some stations, such as The Quake in San Francisco, had already dropped or moved Franken for Hartmann, who now is, according to Talkers Magazine, America’s most important liberal talker. As of February 2009, the show is carried on 69 terrestrial radio stations nationwide, as well as Sirius and XM satellite radio.

He often debates members of the Ayn Rand Institute[6] and conservatives. Several of his debates, including one involving Bill Bennett at The Heritage Foundation, were carried on C-Span, although most of them occur on his own radio program. The two regular guests on the program are sympathetic to Hartmann’s political views. Sen. Bernie Sanders appears every Friday during the first hour of the show. Ellen Ratner of the Talk Radio News Service provides Washington commentary daily.

When callers to the show ask him how he is, he usually replies, “I’m great, but I’ll get better,” and he ends each show with the phrase, “Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you’re it!”

Business career

Hartmann founded International Wholesale Travel and its retail subsidiary Sprayberry Travel in Atlanta in 1983, a business which in the intervening years has generated over a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. He sold his share in the business in 1986 and retired with his family to Germany to work with the international relief organization Salem International[7]. In the late 1970s, he had been a trainer in advertising and marketing for The American Marketing Centers (now defunct), and in 1987 after returning from Germany founded the Atlanta advertising agency Chandler, MacDonald, Stout, Schneiderman & Poe, Inc., which did business as The Newsletter Factory[8]. In that capacity he did consulting work and training for over 400 of the Fortune 500 companies as well as the NSA, CIA, and other government agencies;[citation needed] he sold his interest in that company in 1996 and retired to Vermont. In the early 1970s, he co-founded The Woodley Herber Company, which sold herbal products, potpourris and teas, and closed operations in 1978 when he moved to New Hampshire to begin The New England Salem Children’s Village[9], which still operates in Rumney, New Hampshire. He was Executive Director of NESCT for five years, and on its board for over 25 years. NESCT’s child-care model was based on that of the German Salem International organization, and through his affiliation with that group he helped start international relief programs in Uganda, Colombia, Russia, Israel, India, Australia, and several other countries between 1979 and today.

Other areas of notability

Hartmann is a writer who has published more than twenty books on diverse topics. The title which won the most critical acclaim is The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. In 1999 he was invited by the Dalai Lama to spend a week in Dharamsala after reading it. Hartmann won the Project Censored Award in 2004 for Unequal Protection. As a result of a book on spirituality, The Prophet’s Way, he was invited in 1998 to meet Pope John Paul II.

Trained in the 1970s in Neuro-Linguistic Programming by Richard Bandler (Hartmann is licensed by Bandler’s Society of NLP as both an NLP Practitioner and an NLP Trainer, and Bandler wrote the foreword to his book “Healing ADD”), Hartmann popularized some of its concepts in Cracking the Code (2007), which argues that Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made use of them in the 1980s and 1990s for Republican Party causes and advocates using them to advance liberalism. His book “Healing ADD” also leans heavily on NLP techniques. His book on the JFK Assassination (written with Lamar Waldron) titled “Ultimate Sacrifice” is cited extensively in the last two chapters of Gore Vidal’s recent autobiography as having “finally solved” that case.

Leonardo DiCaprio made a web movie titled “Global Warning” that was inspired by The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Hartmann appears in DiCaprio’s 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, as well as the feature documentary film Dalai Lama Renaissance (with Harrison Ford) and Crude Impact.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Hartmann has authored in the area of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and adult attention-deficit disorder (AADD) and he is the creator (first proposed by him in 1978, first published nationally in 1992) of the now well-known hunter vs. farmer theory – that ADD is an expected evolutionary adaptation to hunting lifestyles. These individuals have the ability to rapidly shift their focus and external attention and to hold multiple trains of thought. This causes difficulties when they must live and work in cultures in which “farming” – well-planned, predictable, organized and repetitive behaviours – is typical. Hartmann has established specialized schools[quantify] for children with ADHD such as The Hunter School in Rumney, New Hampshire,[10] which he cofounded with his wife Louise.

Bibliography

• 2007: Cracking The Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision. Berrett-Koehler. ISBN 9781576754580
• 2006: Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class and What We Can Do About It. Berrett-Koehler. ISBN 1-57675-414-6.
• 2006: Walking Your Blues Away: Practical Bilateral Therapies for Healing the Mind and Optimizing Emotional Well-Being. Park Street Press. ISBN 1-59477-144-8.
• 2005: Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1441-7.  by Lamar Waldron, with Thom Hartmann
• 2004: What Would Jefferson Do?. Harmony Books. ISBN 1-8821-0938-4.
• 2004: We the People: A Call to Take Back America. Coreway Media, Inc.. ISBN 1-4000-5208-4.
• 2004 (revised ed.): Unequal Protection. Rodale Books. ISBN 1-57954-955-1.
• 2004 (revised ed. – first ed. 1998): The Prophet’s Way. Park Street Press. ISBN 0-89281-198-6.
• 2004 (revised ed. – first ed. 1997): Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Three Rivers Press. ISBN 1-4000-5157-6. 
• 2003: The Edison Gene. Park Street Press. ISBN 0-89281-128-5.
• 2000: Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADD. Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-52-0.
• 2000: The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century. Hampton Roads. ISBN 1-57174-166-6.
• 1996: Beyond ADD. Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-12-1.
• 1996: Think Fast!. Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-08-3.  by Thom Hartmann and Jane Bowman, with Susan Burgess
• 1995: ADD Success Stories. Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-03-2.
• 1994: Focus Your Energy: Hunting for Success in Business. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-51689-2.
• 1994: ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World. Select Books. ISBN 1-59079-017-0.
• 1992 (first edition): ADD: A Different Perception. Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-14-8.

Thank you Thom:

I’ve never met Thom, so I am sending my thanks to him now over the Internet for his amazing work, dedication and knowledge and for his radio show. Also, many thanks to his wife for all her contributions. Louise and Thom, you are my role models (and my role models list is short), Thank you.