Professor Richard Wolff comes to the Delhi Center Thursday to help us “Challenge Capitalism.”

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Our pals in the Green Party of Orange County invite us to hear famed Marxist professor Richard Wolff this Thursday evening at Santa Ana’s fabled Delhi Center.  Get there at 6:30 and hear the professor’s opening act, Ellen Brown, the Founder of the Public Banking Institute.  The Professor will be on at 8, and together they’re calling their presentation “Challenge Capitalism.”  You can pre-order tickets here.

So, who is this celebrated Richard Wolff?  Well, you HAVE heard him if you watch Bill Maher, even if you don’t remember his name – this was a great interview a few weeks ago – they won’t let me freakin’ embed it, but you should click and listen.

The event’s promoters provide further information about Professor Wolff and Ms. Brown:

Dr. Richard Wolff is professor emeritus at the University of Massachussetts at Amherst where he taught Economics from 1973 – 2008. He received his Bachelors Degree at Harvard University, his Masters Degree at Stanford University, and his Doctorate at Yale University. Although a poster child and product of elite education, he did not follow the same path as his classmates, such as current Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Janet Yellen, or aspire to follow in the foot steps of his Nobel Peace Prize winning and economist icon, teacher James Tobin…

He chose instead to put all his time and energy into the then suppressed field of economics pioneered by Karl Marx: the critical tradition of capitalism as an act of conscience. “America is a place that says it cherishes democracy and equality,”  Wolff would quote his parents, but when they got here to escape the catastrophe of WWII they didn’t exactly see those values put into practice.

Largely existing on the margins of the economics field during his tenure as a professor, primarily due to the Cold War’s vitriolic political atmosphere and its continued but diminishing residual effects, he has now risen out of the shadows of obscurity since the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown and into the national spot light to tell America that there is another side of the story that is not being told by the Mainstream Media or even in the classroom of our nation’s numerous Economics/Business Departments. He confronts the elephant in the room… Maybe it’s just Capitalism as a system that causes all this social harm?

He contends that the source of his sudden success is not due to anything he’s been saying – after all he’s been saying the same exact thing for 40 years – rather, the changing tides of American society’s political consciousness and our eagerness to truly understand what is going on has skyrocketed him to where he is at now. He has been featured on such television programs as the Thom Hartmann Program/The Big Picture, Bill Moyers and Company, PBS’s Charlie Rose alongside David Harvey, Democracy Now!, RT’s Breaking the Set and Real Time With Bill Maher.

In 2011, he founded a critically acclaimed radio program called Economic Update produced by WBAI radio in New York City which is now syndicated by 35+ radio stations worldwide(KPFK Sundays 9am) and the number is growing every year. He is one of only a minute number of intellectuals in his profession today who have been granted access to radio & television to showcase his particular genre of critical analysis and the economic alternatives to mainstream America that stem from them: an absolute social/political impossibility only six years ago in post-Cold War America. Before becoming a well known public intellectual he gained recognition in the field of economics for his work on Class Analysis, Economic Methodology, and his refinements and expansions in the field of Marxian Economics along with his academic partner, the late Stephen Resnick (1938-2013). He is a major proponent for Worker Cooperatives AKA Worker Self Directed Enterprises and Public Banking, and touches on the subject of Autogestion as another form of economic progression.

He believes these are the solutions to help control the extreme divide between rich and poor which is an undeniable problem in today’s society.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and writer best known for her advocacy of public banking. She is the Founder of the Public Banking Institute, a nation wide organization that is mobilizing different communities around the nation to form publicly-owned banks to initiate Main Street’s war against Wall Street. She has appeared on such television programs such as Fox Business Network, Thom Hartmann Program/The Big Picture, and has been published in the New York Times, Truth Out, Huffington Post.

The ideas she is pushing could be a life saver for Santa Ana and other cities in Southern California that have committed financial suicide with Capital Appreciation Bonds or by filing Bankruptcy (San Bernardino). Her inspiration has been the Bank of North Dakota. A public bank that has been in existence for 96 years and has contributed significantly to that state’s economic insulation from the global financial meltdown and the only state during the crash not to be in debt.

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If you’re still making up your mind whether to come to this great event, UCI lecturer Andrew Tonkovich has provided an enthusiastic but witty write-up at the Voice of OC, in which he even ties in the recent defeat of DINO kleptocrat Lou Correa to RINO kleptocrat Andrew Do in our First District Supervisor Race.  Tonkovich will be emceeing the proceedings – BE THERE!  [Hat-tip to Mudge.]