Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired: 06/16/13 How many of you agree that the War on Drugs is one of the most irrational, wasteful, counterproductive, and harmful things our federal government does in our name? Long after anyone can pretend that it might ever be won, this war lumbers on bloated and clumsy and obscenely unjust -- a monument to the corruption of money from the prison industrial complex, BIg Pharma and others, and...

Aired 06/10/13 GEORGE PACKER has written a remarkable book, THE UNWINDING: An Inner History of the New America. In it, he argues that seismic economic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. Packer sees America as a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams,...

Aired: 5/26/13 How difficult is it to be a government whistleblower these days? A dozen years after 9/11, with a former constitutional law professor in the White House, the sad news is that to expose government negligence or illegality is to jeopardize one's career and life savings. The newest documentary from producer and director ROBERT GREENWALD and Brave New Films, WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS: Free...

Aired: 5/12/13 Is there a revolution coming to your rooftop? While opponents claim solar is expensive, inefficient, and unreliable, in his book ROOFTOP REVOLUTION: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy And Our Planet From Dirty Energy, DANNY KENNEDY makes clear solar can save money, create jobs, and protect the environment if only politics and perception will get out of the way. During the recent P...

Aired: 05/05/13 In JEREMY SCAHILL'S new best-seller, DIRTY WARS, what begins as an investigation into a US night raid gone terribly wrong in a remote corner of Afghanistan quickly transforms into a high-stakes global investigation into the rise of Joint Special Operations Command, the most secret and elite fighting force in U.S. history. In military jargon, JSOC teams "find, fix and finish" their...

Aired: 04/28/13 Are human beings monogamous by nature? While granting our tendency to slip, most commentators and scientists seem to believe we are. According to the conventional wisdom, it is in the interests of a woman to keep a male as a protector/provider, and in the interests of a man to provide only for his own children. In the best-selling book, SEX AT DAWN, CHRISTOPHER RYAN and co-au...

Aired: 04/21/13 "If it doesn't spread, it's dead," is the simple consistent message of a new book, SPREADABLE MEDIA: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, that maps the changes taking place in our media environment. For all their consolidation, concentration, and money, corporations can no longer control media distribution. Millions are now directly involved in the creation and circul...

When someone approaches you to donate to a non-profit, how many of you want to know how much of of its money goes to salaries and fund-raising and how much goes to actual program services? If you're like most people, that question probably figures into your decision. I myself have factored that question of how much is spent on overhead into my charitable giving. But is it a valid or wise way to ma...

In the preface to an article entitled A National Strategic Narrative, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton says we need a narrative that confronts some of the following questions, "Where is the United States going in the world? How can we get there? What are the guiding stars that will illuminate the path along the way? We need a story with a beginning, middle, and projected happy ending that will tr...

Aired: 03/31/13 I do my best to question conventional wisdom, but I had heard and repeated the fact that the US had lost its manufacturing and it was never coming back so often that I assumed it must be true. But I pick up the December 2012 issue of the Atlantic magazine recently and two articles jump out at me - both declaring that manufacturing is re-emerging. James Fallows writes of US startups...

Aired: 03/24/13 This week I'm joined by RON SCHULTZ, editor of a new book, CREATING GOOD WORK, that brings together essays by social entrepreneurs that share their experiences as well as their insights and advice for others. Ron has invited a few of his book's contributors (PAUL HERMAN, founder/CEO, HIP Investor Inc; JIM FRUCHTERMAN, founder/CEO Benetech; CARRIE FREEMAN, Second Muse; formerly Inte...

Original Airdate: This week's guest, MICHAEL LIND, has written an economic history of the United States. In his new book, LAND OF PROMISE, he lays out a pattern in which the US has reinvented itself economically and politically a number of times based on the emergence of new technologies. From wind and water, to steam, to electricity and internal combustion, and finally the computer. Each new domi...

This week's guest is DAVE ZIRIN. Dave is the first sports editor for The Nation magazine. He has for years in books, columns, and commentaries examined both the politics of sports as well as the intersection of the two. Howard Cosell said "rule number one of the jockocracy" was that sports and politics don't mix. In his newest book, Game Over, Zirin asserts that modern professional athletes are br...

The Academy Awards will be given out in two weeks and we are lucky to have the co-directors of one of the nominated films with us today. 5 BROKEN CAMERAS, one of five nominees for best documentary, tells the story of a Palestinian farmer who lives with his wife and four small children in the village of Bil'in, in the central West Bank. EMAD BURNAT got his first camera in 2005, when his youngest so...

Aired: 02/03/13 This week, my guest is DAVID GOLDHILL. After the death of his father, Goldhill, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. His September 2009 Atlantic cover story rocked the health-care world, and Goldhill has written a book expanding on the topic, Catastrop...

We hear a lot these days about Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Rapture, End Times. More than a current cultural phenomenon, they appear to be a persuasive motivating force for millions of Americans. These words are now part of our vocabulary, and as metaphors, they show up all over the map -- Carmageddon as the nickname for the I-405's weekend closure in July 2011. But, where do they come from? As...

Aired: 1/20/13 HOWARD BLOOM has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein,[and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV , and “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine. His books include The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History; Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century; The Genius of t...

In her 18th book, ECOMIND: CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK, TO CREATE THE WORLD WE WANT, Frances Moore Lappé argues that much of what is wrong with the world, from eroding soil to eroding democracies, results from ways of thinking that are out of sync with human nature and nature's rhythms. Humans are doers, she says. But our capacity for doing is undermined by seven "thought traps" that leave us mired...

Aired: 1/13/13 My guest this week is JONAH SACHS, author of WINNING THE STORY WARS: Why Those Who Tell and Live the Best Stories Will Rule the Future. He is also Creative Director at Free Range Studios, who are responsible for many wonderful campaigns, two of which - The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff - are among the most successful videos ever in terms of viral circulation to millions. On their h...

Aired: 12/23/12 Recorded: 10/17/12 When gas prices were at or near record highs a few months ago in the US, that got people's attention. What about food prices? Have you noticed them rising? Are you making different choices in the supermarket? If not, it might be because of two things. One, in America so much of our food is processed, packaged and marketed, that raw commodity prices make up only a...

Aired 1/6/13 In the year 2000, Germany got 6% of its energy from renewables. That's about what we get in the US today. But today Germany gets 25% of its electricity from solar, wind and biomass. And Germany is not exactly the American Southwest. Perhaps just as impressive and important, 65% of the country's renewable power capacity is owned by individuals, cooperatives and communities. Clean and d...

Aired 01/06/13 - I'll be talking with longtime anti-nuke activist Harvey Wasserman. I'll ask Harvey Wasserman about where things stand today in terms of nuclear power. What's going on in the US -- are new plants being built, are old ones shutting down? We'll get an update on Fukushima. And finally, we'll address the temporary shutdown at San Onofre near San Diego, and the opportunity to shut it do...

Aired 12/16/12 We'll talk about her newest book, THE LAW OF DIVINE COMPENSATION: On Work, Money, and Miracles. Examines the power of thoughts to attract-or deflect-breakthroughs in the areas of work and money. Marianne Williamson is an internationally acclaimed spiritual author and lecturer. Six of her ten published books have been New York Times Best Sellers. Four of these have been #1 New York T...

Aired 12/02/12 Last July in an interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama said that "the mistake" of the early years of his presidency was his failure to be a better storyteller. "The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important, but the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives...

Aired 11/18/12 I'll be talking with RANDY HAYES, former head of Rainforest Action Network, currently ED of Foundation Earth, whose primary work these days is rethinking and "ecologizing" the economy. While Balog offers evidence of some symptoms of our way of life, the consequences of our actions, Hayes is attempting to develop radical approaches to economics that will enable us to deal with the un...