Thomas Carl Hartmann (born May 7, 1951) is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator.

[9] Hartmann was expelled from high school during tenth grade for starting a newspaper that protested against the Vietnam War.

[10] Hartmann enrolled at Lansing Community College and transferred to Michigan State University, majoring in electrical engineering.

[11] In 1968, Hartmann opened his first business, a repair shop named "The Electronics Joint" located next to Michigan State University and became a part-time disc jockey at local country music station WITL-FM.

The Thom Hartmann Program is estimated by industry magazine Talkers to have 7 million unique listeners per week.

Many guests appear on the show expressing a variety of points of view on diverse social and political topics.

Victoria Jones who is the White House correspondent for Talk Radio News Service appears occasionally, as does Ravi Batra, an economics professor at SMU.

ET Monday to Friday, The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, which was editorially directed by his wife and was broadcast from the Washington, D.C., studios of the RT America news network.

Hartmann popularized some of NLP's concepts in Cracking the Code (2007), arguing Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made use of them in the 1980s and 1990s for Republican Party causes, while advocating using them to advance liberalism.

Co-authored with Lamar Waldron, Hartmann's Ultimate Sacrifice (2005) echoes the conspiracy theory that the Mafia ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent.

[34] Hartmann was one of several contributors to Air America, the Playbook, a collection of essays, transcripts, and interviews by liberal radio personalities.

[35] Leonardo DiCaprio made a web movie titled Before The Flood, inspired by The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

In 2010, Warner Brothers and Leonardo DiCaprio[36] announced they are making a motion picture based on the book Legacy of Secrecy, authored by Lamar Waldron and Hartmann.

[37] In September 2013, Hartmann was granted an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington.

[38] According to President Barbara Vacarr, "Thom's work as a journalist, author, and community activist is a living example of the very mission of Goddard College, and what our students are committed to—advancing cultures of rigorous inquiry, collaboration, and lifelong-learning, where individuals take imaginative and responsible action."

Hartmann served on the board of Voqal, a collaboration of EBS licensees working to advance social equity.

[40] His books include 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.

[citation needed] Hartmann is a vocal critic of the effects of neoliberal 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[citation needed]—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).

[citation needed] In a 2013 interview with Politico, Hartmann described his political philosophy as democratic socialism: I've lived in Europe.

[44] Hartmann has written about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and adult attention-deficit disorder (AADD), and has proposed (in 1978, published in 1992) the hunter vs. farmer hypothesis, suggesting that ADHD is an expected evolutionary adaptation to hunting lifestyles where individuals have the ability to rapidly shift focus and external attention, while holding multiple trains of thought.

This ability, Hartmann theorizes, causes difficulties for those who live and work in cultures in which "farming"—planned, predictable, organized, repetitive behaviors—is typical.