In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and helped me set it up. For a long time I harboured suspicions that it was just something for the early adopters out there and was never going to go mainstream. That was until BBC Radio 4 issued an edict that presenters had to say the word ‘podcast’ every thirty seconds. In the past 6 months I’ve become a true convert, particularly on a three week solo cycle-camping trip in France, where spoken-word podcasts were regular evening listening.
Just like blogs, there are a thousand awful and pointless podcasts out there for every one worth listening to. There’s also this thing called podfade, in which a podcast starts off really well then becomes less regular, less interesting before it runs silently into the sands of the presenter’s own guilt and self-loathing. In other words, not every podcast stays the course or lives up to its early promise. Then again, there are podcasts that get better with time, usually amateur productions in which the presenter(s) get more comfortable in the role and find their niche. In short, a lot of filtering, and scratching and sniffing is required. Beside the iTunes Music Store podcast area, a recommendation from a friend is probably the best way of finding out about what’s good.
It’s clear that not all of these are strictly speaking podcasts, rather radio broadcasts which are subsequently made available as podcasts. I don’t see that as a disqualification. So here goes, you can read the list after the jump. (more…)
Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really is, and where it came from and who’s to blame?
Fear not, for the brilliant radio series This American Life aired a superb hour-long documentary that tells the story of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble and bust as I’ve never heard it told before. From the people who were there, from the Wall Street bankers at the very top to the no income no asset borrowers at the very bottom. And all the middle-men in between. It’s a very human story of hope, greed, hubris and self-delusion.
The Giant Pool of Money show is highly recommended, not just as an explanation of the core cause of the seismic events of this week, but as an example of public service documentary radio at its very best. And it’s not just me that thinks so, according to the programme-makers it’s been listened to online by more than half a million people. It’s still available to listen again online. If you need any convincing, check out the first five mintes, on the link below:
Update: The success of The Giant Pool of Money has apparently led to National Public Radio launching a new podcast and blog about the global economy, called Planet Money. It’s presented by Adam Davidson from NPR (who worked with TAL’s Alex Blumberg on The Giant Pool of Money). Both men rank up there with Evan Davis of the BBC in terms of talent at explaining what the hell is going on out there in the miasma of global financial markets and relating it to real day-to-day economics. In just its first week the show has already featured some excellent guests and if they keep up this level of quality, Planet Money will find a regular spot on my weekly diet of podcasts.
Eight years – and a lifetime – ago, I was working as a political aide to the UK agriculture minister Nick Brown. It was a difficult time for British farming. Prices were down, the backwash of mad cow disease was impacting the livestock sector, the strong pound was hitting exporters and there was genuine discontent in many rural communities. At the same time, the member states of the European Union were negotiating a reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP), the collective name for all the support programmes that exist to give a helping hand to European farmers. At a time of crisis, farmers said, why tinker with the government support programmes that are our lifeline? (more…)
The past few days have seen new revelations about the cause of the current outbreak of bird flu at a Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk. It is being widely reported that the outbreak is most likely to have been caused by imports of part-processed turkey from Hungary, which has had several outbreaks of the same H5N1 strain of the disease. Had the government allowed us to exercise a Yuck Factor test on the food we buy, this outbreak, along with BSE and foot and mouth disease, might have been averted. (more…)
The Financial Times has reported on new figures from the French government statistical service showing that French farmers are “getting steadily worse off compared with their fellow citizens and their European peers”. Such figures are grist to the mill of those calling for a strong defense of EU farm support from the internal pressure of the EU budget and the external pressure of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. What such figures fail to show is the changing structure of farming in France as in other European countries and the likelihood that subsidies are actually accentuating inequalities. (more…)
It must be frustrating being the President of the European Commission: a whole lot of responsibility but very little power. When Jose Manuel Barroso meets George W Bush at the White House next week he may be able to offer some advice to a US President who has just lost control of Congress and is watching his Iraq strategy slip further into chaos.
On the agenda is climate change, international security and global trade. Bush is currently the world’s leading climate change denier and the chances of him recanting are as good as those of snowball in hell - or the polar ice caps, the way things are going. On international security, the EU lacks a standing army and even a foreign minister, so Barroso has very little to offer here. It is only trade policy that the two men can use this high level meeting to achieve something concrete: sealing a deal that has so far eluded their respective trade negotiators at the WTO in Geneva. Presidential ‘fast track’ Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) will expire in a matter of months, and so if there is to be a deal on Bush’s watch, it needs to be made now. (more…)
I was invited to speak at the World Trade Organisation Public Forum, held last month at the WTO’s headquarters on the shore of Lake Geneva. (More on the questionable wisdom of locating a pro-free trade institution in highly protectionist Switzerland will follow…) In the opening plenary session we were addressed by WTO Director General, the Prime Minister of Lesotho and the Chairman of Unilever, but one man stole the show: Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul turned philanthropist. He’s is a fascinating character. A straight-taking maverick good ol’ boy, once married to Jane Fonda, he sports a pencil-thin white moustache and looks as though he’s most at ease on the saddle of his favourite old Paint, roaming the half million acre Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico. Ted owns more land in the US than any other citizen. Ted’s pitch, as simple as it was unexpected, is that energy crops offer a double-barrelled fix to two of the most pressing challenges that beset the global community: the stalemate in the WTO’s ‘Doha Round’ of trade liberalisation talks and (more importantly) our dependency on fossil fuels that cause global warming. (more…)