Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Weisman Radio. I'm Susie Weisman.

Today we survey some of the political scene nationally and internationally

beginning with Tom Ferguson professor emeritus at UMass Boston who looks at the role of money and politics.

We'll talk to him about some surprising results from the 2016 election,

Trump's policies today and especially the Democratic Party's recent election defeats,

their ties to finance and their apparently failing political strategies which haven't led to an

embrace of Sanders' support in their base, but a resistance to the kind of politics Sanders

and much of their base represents. We then talked to Sebastian Budjun in Paris

for an analysis of the recent parliamentary elections

that gave Manuel Macron's new party and Marsh

a majority.

We'll get Sebastian's understanding of what this means

for both left and right in French politics and more. Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Weisman and I'm happy to have Tom Ferguson with us today.

He's a professor emeritus at U-mass Boston and probably no one else in this country has contributed

more to our understanding of money in politics

than Tom Ferguson and he's analyzed almost all of the elections and followed the

money in books like right turn the decline of Democrats in the future of

American politics and golden rule the investment theory of party

competition and logic of money driven political systems he's talking all

the time about what the impact of money is in politics.

Welcome to Jacobin Radio, Tom Ferguson.

I thank you. I'm glad to be here, even despite all of what we might call not the friendliest

...