From Alpha To Omega

This week we are joined by Charles Eisenstein. Charles is an author and public speaker, and self-described "degrowth activist". His book ‘Sacred Economics - Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition’, puts forward a radical alternative to our current monetary economy, based on degrowth, realigning money with ecology, changing the nature of work, and the return of the gift. Charles has a regular blog over at the ‘Reality Sandwich’, and occasionally contributes to the Guardian’s ‘Comment Is Free’ section.

We talk of money (of course!), our stories and ideologies, people power, exploitation, the occupy movement and revolution, and his optimism for the future. Enjoy!

http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/1736

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charles-esenstein

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transition/dp/1583943978/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375134757&sr=1-1

This week we are joined by Nicole Foss, of the ‘Automatic Earth’ blog. Before being a renowned blogger on energy and finance, Nicole was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level. Nicole has just finished a long speaking tour of the antipodes, and joins us from Holland to give us the lowdown on the worlds of energy and finance. We discuss the likely future role of fracking and tar-sands oil production, hyper-inflation and hyper-deflation, the coming economic difficulties we are all likely to face in the coming decades, and the prospect of a return to fascism in the west...

You can find her proflic blogging over here:

www.theautomaticearth.org

This week we are joined by Prof. Bill Black. Bill is Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is an expert in white collar crime and banking regulation, and developed the concept of ‘control fraud’, in which a business executive uses the business he or she controls as a weapon to commit fraud. He is also the author of the book: ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One’. Today, Bill tells us about a series of articles he has written over the last year on the economic achievements and political shenanigans of Rafael Correa, the President of Ecuador.

You can find Prof. Black blogging prolifically over at:

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/

This weeks guest is Professor Doyne Farmer. Doyne is a physicist, econo-physicist, and founder of the Prediction Company, which brought insights from physics to the world of finance and stock markets. He is a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, where he co-directs the Oxford Martin Programme on Complexity, and is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We ask him about econo-physics, how it ties in with complexity theory, and what this all means for the current economic orthodoxy. We also talk about some models he has built that try and replicate the housing crash experienced in the Washington DC area, and how leverage and market impact works to destabilise our economies. He also has recommendations for what we should use instead of mark-to-market accounting that might help quell some of the market instability and high leverage we see about us today. And on top of all that, we talk of his days as a professional roulette player....

After a brief holiday to bask in the cold and brutal wet weather of Ireland and England, the show is back on the road, fueled up, and raring to go. This weeks guest is Professor Alan Freeman, where we talk about the falling rate of profit, crises of capitalism, and our way out of the current economic mire.

The interview is loosely based about a paper of his just published in the Journal of Australian Political Economy called: The Profit Rate in the Presence of Financial Markets: A Necessary Correction.

(http://media.wix.com/ugd//b629ee_20b6bcc79e688bee2ab6f94f971f7b06.pdf)

You can see him talking about it at the recent Historical Materialism conference in New York:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TODNwYP1zYA


Alan is a retired but research-active cultural economist. He formerly worked for the Mayor of London's Economic Analysis Unit where he was responsible for the Living Wage, Innovation, and the Cultural and Creative Industries. He is co-editor, with Radhika Desai, of a new book series entitled 'the Future of World Capitalism', published by Pluto Books. He is one of a 'small club' of economists who predicted the crash of 2008, and in 2008 he also predicted that the economic crisis would not leave the industrialised countries until these countries undertook public investment on the scale associated with US government spending during World War II (about 55% of GDP). He is a visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University where he works on the Cities Cultural and Creative Evidence project, and currently lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

Enjoy!

This week we speak to Professor Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, at the University of Cambridge. Prof. Wadhams is an expert in Arctic sea-ice, and is a review editor for the physical sciences component of the upcoming 2014 IPCC (or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ) Fifth Assessment Report. We discuss the precarious nature of the Arctic Sea-Ice, the end of summer ice altogether, the problems with the IPCC reports, climate tipping points, the release of massive quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and likelihood of Southern Europe turning into desert in this century.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the 1st anniversary of the 'From Alpha To Omega' podcast.
This weeks guest is KMO, host of the C-Realm and Z-Realm podcasts, and the author of ‘Conversations on Collapse’. We talk at length about Zombies, Vampires and the Apocalyptic Collapse meme. We also discuss his experiences living on a former commune in Tennessee, his recent move to the sprawling metropolis that is New York City, and his thoughts on the Occupy movement.

A big thank you to everybody who took part in the shows, the listeners, and all of those who have donated money to the podcast to help keep it ticking over. Hopefully the next year will see the show grow it's audience and expand the topics covered.

You can find KMO's prolific podcasting output over at:

c-realm.com

Or on his podomatic feed here:

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/

Enjoy!

This weeks guest is the C Derick Varn, Poet, Lecturer, and resident of South Korea. Derick writes for ‘The (Dis)Loyal Opposition Blog’, and includes among his interests: alternative visions of the future, the failures of nationalist Marxism, early Leninism, and the relationship between anarchism and Marxism.
We discuss the Russian revolution, the Vanguard Party and it's problems, the profound failures of the cultural revolution, and the emergence of decentralised movements like occupy and the 5-Star Movement.

Derick has also just interviewed myself, for his Blog, where I get to expound a few of my own opinions for a change. If you are interested in reading these incoherent babbles, you can find them here:

http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/interview-with-tom-obrien-one-marxism-mmt-and-the-eurozone-crisis/

Here is the link to his blog:

http://skepoet.wordpress.com/

And you can also find him appearing regularly on the 'Pop The Left' Podcast
with Doug Lain over at:

http://douglaslain.com

Enjoy!

This weeks guest is the Jazz Pianist, Marxist, and YouTube Star Brendan Cooney, who has blazed a trail for himself on YouTube with his totally cool videos explaining Marx’s insights into the functioning of our capitalist economic system. He also is the man behind the Kapitalism101 blog. We discuss the success or failure of the Occupy movement, and critique it’s organisational structure. We also talk of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha program, a 19th century radical proposal of today's German Social Democratic Party, and the abject failures of the 20th century’s attempts to overturn capitalist forms of production.

You can find Brendans blog here:

kapitalism101.wordpress.com

And his large tranche of excellent Marx related videos over here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/brendanmcooney

Enjoy...

This week we welcome back Prof. Andrew Kliman to the show, where we discuss Marx’s value theory, his book ‘Reclaiming Marx’s Capital’ where he tries to dispel some of the myths surrounding Marx’s theories, and the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. I've recently just finished his book, and would recommend it to anyone wishing to get a deeper understanding of the issues we discuss in this show.

You can find the Professors books here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Andrew-Kliman/e/B001JSALNS/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

And here is his website:

http://akliman.squarespace.com/

Enjoy!