Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired 11/11/12 I will reflect on Tuesday's election with ROB JOHNSON of the INSTITUTE FOR NEW ECONOMIC THOUGHT and SHERLE SCHWENNINGER of NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION. Asking things like: Who does the campaign and the result say we are as a nation or a culture? Where are we likely to go from here? What does the election mean -- in the broadest sense: about money, politics, power, media, culture, parties...

Aired 10/28/12 I haven't done a lot about the election on this show. I've been talking more about the foundational issues that underlie the situation we find ourselves in -- an age of very imperfect politics, government, finance, and business. Our democracy and our governance are dominated by a handful of billionaires, and a number of multimillionaires and their corporations who do not share the i...

At 24, I worked for George McGovern’s 1972 Presidential effort, managing the campaign in what was then the 52nd Assembly District in Los Angeles County. This was the most conservative Democratic district in California and likely favored both Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace over the nominee. In 2005, I had the opportunity to interview him for an hour with the release of the documentary, One Brig...

Aired 10/14/12 I'll be talking with NADER about the critical ideas in his wonderful new book, THE 17 SOLUTIONS: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Learn more about RALPH NADER and SEVENTEEN SOLUTIONS at http://nader.org/ Some of the 17 solutions: * Reforming the tax system * Making our communities more self-reliant * Reclaiming science and technology for the people * Getting corporations off welf...

Aired 9/30/12 When Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth was published in 1991, Gloria Steinem hailed it as "a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom," recommendingm "Every woman should read it." The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century. Over the intervening two decades, Wolf continued to write about the role of women in our culture, but she als...

Aired 09/23/12 This radio show aims to offer "pieces of the puzzle of a world that just might work." I hope that if you listen a few times, you begin to imagine a future of revolutionary and evolutionary success. My hope is rooted in this vision: Reality is not dead, mechanical, or separate; in fact, it is alive, evolving, and composed of interdependent systems. I believe this worldview has been s...

Aired 09/16/12 Last week I interviewed longtime reporters Don Barlett and James Steele regarding their new book, THE BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, looking at the relentless economic, financial, and governmental process over the last 40 years to enrich the largest corporations and richest individuals at the expense of the middle class. This week I'll talk with another wise and experienced Pulitze...

Aired 09/09/12 Let's suppose, for a moment, there was a country where the people in charge charted a course that eliminated millions of good-paying jobs. Suppose they gave away several million more jobs to other nations. Finally, imagine that the people running this country implemented economic policies that enabled those at the very top to grow ever richer while most others grew poorer. You would...

Aired 09/02/12 When I first met TERRY TAMMINEN, he was living on a houseboat in the Marina and filling a position he'd founded as the first Santa Monica Baykeeper. No too long before that, he had been running a pool services company. And not too long after, he was Secretary of the California EPA. Tamminen has reinvented himself successfully in several very different worlds -- business, government,...

Aired 08/26/12 Humans are not alone in being creatures of habit, but can we do anything about it? Brain science has learned a lot about habits over the last few years. On the one hand, that gives corporations new power with which to manipulate us, but it also gives us greater power over our own behavior. What is a habit? Are habits positive - a sign of cultivation and industry, or negative, a sign...

Aired 08/05/12 ROB MANNING is the Chief Engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. MANNING has been designing, testing and operating robotic spacecraft and rovers for 30 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. In the 1990's Rob was chief engineer for Mars Pathfinder, the first to send a rover to Mars. He also led flight system engineering for the Rover Entry, Descent...

Aired 08/05/12 I am joined by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who offers a radical solution to the stresses and problems that face Americans today -- radical in its original meaning of having to do with roots of things. He has written a book, A MINDFUL NATION: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit. Ryan has a daily practice of meditation...

Aired 07/29/12 I'll be joined by DOUG FINE to talk about his new book,TOO HIGH TO FAIL: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution. As the economy continues to limp along for most Americans and California cities declare bankruptcy, one action -- the legalization of marijuana -- would save government billions per year while raising huge sums in taxes. According to TIME, the legal medicinal cann...

Aired 07/22/12 Did you know that LSD is being tested as a treatment for alcoholism? Or that psilocybin is being taken to ease the anxiety of late stage cancer patients? In government-sanctioned studies. Psychedelic substances have been used for ceremony and as medicine for millennia. Such properties were being cultivated and studied in the US in the 60s and early 70s until widespread and careless...

Aired 07/08/12 My guest will be NORA BATESON, and we'll talk about AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, the wonderful documentary she's made about her father, the late anthropologist GREGORY BATESON. He saw reality as made up of relationships and systems and had a big impact on a lot of people's worldview in the late 60s and early 70s, myself included. NORA BATESON is a media producer and educator. Her work includ...

Aired 07/08/12 I seldom interview writers of fiction, but the debut novel THE AGE OF MIRACLES got my attention. It's being heavily promoted as one of THE books of the summer. Enough so that I read the first couple of pages and I really like the writing. It's about how one family in Southern California responds to a global crisis, the slowing of the earth, and the lengthening of days and nights. Th...

Aired 06/24/12 JOHN FULLERTON has spent a career at the highest reaches of the financial world, including as chief investment officer of a division of JP Morgan. He is the founder and director of Capital Institute, which describes itself as "a non-partisan, transdisciplinary collaborative space, whose mission is to explore and effect economic transition to a more just, resilient, and sustainable w...

Aired 06/17/12 DAVID DeGRAW, who a year ago was among a handful who called for the 99% to rise up. On June 14th, Flag Day, last year, Anonymous and the 99% Movement launched a collaborative effort to announce the birth of a "decentralized non-violent resistance movement to end the system of political bribery and break up the big banks centered at the Federal Reserve." This morphed into Occupy Wall...

Aired 06/17/12 This week's show will deal with the Occupy/99% movement from two different perspectives. For most of the hour I'll be joined by renowned scholar and activist, NOAM CHOMSKY. His newest book, a collection of interviews and speeches on the movement, is entitled simply OCCUPY. NOAM CHOMSKY is Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where has taught for over...

Aired 06/10/12 PAUL GILDING says it's time to stop worrying about climate change. We need instead to brace for impact because global crisis is no longer avoidable. He believes this Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and melting ice caps. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. We have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world econom...

Aired 05/16/12 Crazy though it may be, I assume many have accepted the fact that the Republican party has a problem with science and ultimately with evidence facts -- reality. It is now a matter of politics for them to deny science. Among their presidential primary candidates, only Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney accept that warming is happening and humans are a contributing factor. CHRIS MOONEY has...

Aired 05/06/12 After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as we can from what works? Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works,...

Aired 04/29/12 Should we pay children to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants able to pay? Phenomenally popular Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, notes that in recent dec...

Aired 04/15/12 For over thirty years, you and I have lived through a radical redistribution of wealth -- upward, to a tiny fraction of the population -- as though we're part of a bizarre experiment to see how much inequality a democratic society can tolerate. Finally this past year, as a result of the Great Recession that burst the mortgage/refi/credit card bubble that had allowed too many of us t...

Aired 04/08/12 Do you consider yourself to be creative? Do you think of creativity as a gift, a talent, something you either have or you don't? Do you find creativity to be a bit mystical or magical, dependent on luck, the muses, or higher powers? Today's guest, JONAH LEHRER, has written a book in which he looks at the latest brain science and attempts, in his words, "to collapse the layers of des...