This is the Tom Hartman program.

Welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you.

We've been talking about how legalized bribery has affected pretty much everything in American politics.

Richard Nixon had only four Republicans dissent from saying yes, let's investigate him.

And then, that was in 1974, then two years later the Supreme Court in the Buckley decision says,

oh, it's just fine for billionaires to own politicians.

Two years after that, the first National Bank decision, they say it's just fine for corporations to own politicians that led to this

avalanche of money that led to the Reagan Revolution and here we are. And ever

since then it has seemed partisan but really what it is is about money. But speaking about money

professor Richard Wolf is with us the economist

co-founder democracy at work the author most recently he's the author of numerous

books his most recent understanding Marxism.

Democracy at Work. Info is his website plus R.D. Wolf with 2F.

and you can tweet him at Prof Wolf with 2F's.

Professor Wolf, welcome back to the program.

Thank you, Tom.

Glad to be here.

Thank you for joining us.

So I sent a note to you, or I think Sean did, last week, about this article that

I had read, about a, this guy is saying it's a massive scandal at the rating agencies that based on a Wall Street Journal investigation finding that there is all this corporate debt that is rated investment grade, but that if there's even a small increase in

interest rates it'll suddenly become junk status and it's such a large

pile that basically it could crash the economy.

...