Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Originally Aired 09/09/12Let’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 wouldn’t want to live in such a place, would you? Too bad. You already do.Those are the words of this week’s guests, DON BARLETT and JIM STEELE.These are some of the consequences of failed U.S. government policies that have been building over the last three decades – the same policies that people in Washington today are intent on keeping or expanding…Most significant of all, the American dream of the last half-century has been revoked for millions of people – a dream rooted in a secure job, a home in the suburbs, the option for families to live on one income rather than two, a better life than your parents had and a still better life for your children.Barlett and Steele wrote these words in 1992. They are the first words of their Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which led to the #1 best-selling book, America: What Went Wrong. They put their finger on things and connected dots that really established a lens through which to view the next 20 years. The point of view of the 99% movement is basically the one Barlett and Steele described and predicted at the birth of the Clinton era.http://americawhatwentwrong.orghttp://barlettandsteele.com

Aired 01/17/10BRUCE LIPTON, Ph.D., a leading voice in new biology, bridges science and spirit. A cell biologist by training, he taught at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine, and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University. He's the author of The Biology of Belief, and his latest with Steve Bhaerman, SPONTANEOUS EVOLUTIONSTEVE BHAERMAN is an author, humorist, and political and cultural commentator who's been writing and performing enlightening comedy as Swami Beyondananda for over 20 years. He's the author of several books prior to his current collaboration with Lipton on SPONTANEOUS EVOLUTION.http://www.brucelipton.com/http://www.wakeuplaughing.com/

Aired 12/12/09 Attorney AMY BACH spent eight years investigating the chronic lapses in courts across America. Lawyers sleep through trials. False confessions and mistaken eye-witness identifications convict the innocent. The rich walk, the poor go to prison. ORDINARY INJUSTICE goes beyond one particular injustice, one specific court, or one aspect of the legal system. Bach rejects the easy explanations of bad apples and meager funding to show how in the name of expedience legal professionals routinely choose to collaborate rather than face off as adversaries. Her investigation -- from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi --reveals a culture of complicity among prosecutors, defenders, and judges that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. http://www.slate.com/id/2234594/ http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Sullivan_v._Florida

NYTimes review: “This book hums – with sorrow, outrage and compassion.”- #8 Best-sellerGEORGE 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, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer relevant. We’ve covered a lot of this ground before on Free Forum, but the power of THE UNWINDING is in how Packer tells his truth.He begins – “No one can say when the unwinding began – when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways – and at some moment the country, always the same coun­try, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different. If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding.”He follows the prologue with a series of newsreel headlines in the fateful year of 1978 and goes on to combine the intimate stories of several Americans–Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers in the rural South who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in Youngstown trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider bouncing between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire with a radical vision of the future–with biographical sketches of this era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics, Packer captures the flow of events and undercurrents that have set America in decline.

(Originally aired 10-03-2010) We hear about the trouble Europe is in. The debt crisis in Greece and other countries, the mistaken austerity moves that have slowed recovery from recession. But while the bad news of the Euro crisis makes headlines in the US, what does not made headlines is the good news of a quiet revolution that has been taking place in Europe.The European Union, 27 member nations with a half billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world's economy - nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US, China or Japan. European nations are rated by the World Health Organization as having the best health care systems in the world. Yet they spend far less than the United States for universal coverage, even as U.S. health care is ranked 37th. Europe leads in confronting global climate change with renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power, conservation and "green design," creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process. Europe is twice as energy efficient as the US and their ecological "footprint" (the amount of the earth's capacity that a population consumes) is about half that of the United States for the same standard of living.In his new book, WERE YOU BORN ON THE WRONG CONTINENT?, this week's guest, THOMAS GEOGHEGAN, makes a strong case that European social democracies - particularly Germany - have some lessons and models that might make life a lot more livable. Not only that, they could help us keep our jobs.In comparison to the U.S., the Germans have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. But you've heard the arguments for years about how those wussy Europeans can't compete in a global economy. You've heard that so many times, you might believe it. But like so many things, the media repeats endlessly, it's just not true.According to Geoghagen, "Since 2003, it's not China but Germany, that colossus of European socialism, that has either led the world in export sales or at least been tied for first. Even as we in the United States fall more deeply into the clutches of our foreign creditors-China foremost among them-Germany has somehow managed to create a high-wage, unionized economy without shipping all its jobs abroad or creating a massive trade deficit, or any trade deficit at all. And even as the Germans outsell the United States, they manage to take six weeks of vacation every year. They're beating us with one hand tied behind their back."

(Originally aired 11-25-2012) To rescue our country from corruption, complacency, and corporate domination, we need fresh ideas and bold solutions. RALPH NADER offers THE SEVENTEEN SOLUTIONS: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Confronting economic, social, political, and environmental challenges, his ambitious, common-sense proposals address our most pressing concerns, from corporate crime to tax reform, and health care to housing. I sometimes build an interview around three big questions about a particular issue: How is it broken? (What is the evidence?) How did it get broken? (What is the history?) How do we fix it? (What are the solutions?) NADER takes that approach with nearly twenty crucial issues. His solutions are not pie in the sky, but practical and pragmatic, and he talks about how we can actually make them happen. I was most struck by his optimism. It is 50 years since his first book, Unsafe at Any Speed, changed what Americans expected of their automobiles. Yet, at 78, after ups and downs, after being highly praised and passionately criticized by millions, NADER is full of energy for the plans and battles ahead. Referring to the recent attention paid to the abuses of the very wealthy 1%, NADER points out another 1% we ignore at our peril. He says to achieve real change in this country, it takes 1% of the population committing themselves to making change happen.

Aired 03/14/10 Though Atul Gawande is a best-selling author, a Harvard professor, and an innovator in best practices for the W.H.O., he still performs 250-plus surgeries a year. A framed copy of Sylvia Plath's poem "The Surgeon at 2 a.m." stands on the desk in his office." Her surgeon's words: "I worm and hack in a purple wilderness." Gawande likes the Plath poem because it casts the surgeon in an ambiguous light. "Most writing about people in medicine casts them as either heroes or villains," he says, "That poem captures the surgeon as a merely human, slightly bewildered and benighted person in a world that is ultimately beyond his control."Medicine is just one area of our world that is becoming so complex that even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. In his new book, The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande offers a disarmingly simple remedy: the checklist. Now being adopted in hospitals, the 90 second practice cuts fatalities In surgery by more than a third. NOTE: This interview was recorded when Gawande was recently in LA, prior to Obama's healthcare summit and the latest legislative negotiations. http://gawande.com/

Originally aired 08-04-2009As we celebrate the holidays - religious, cultural, and annual - we're paying more attention than usual to our relationship to God at the same time that winter and the new year call us to reflect and look forward. I want to share with you this interview I recorded June 5, 2009, with ROBERT WRIGHT. That week THE EVOLUTION OF GOD, no light read, was the #8 New York Times bestseller and he was all over the media, including a feature on Bill Moyers Journal. Robert Wright takes on big questions, and in THE EVOLUTION OF GOD, he follows the changing moods of God as reflected in ancient Scripture, to see what circumstances brought out the best and worst in religions.The question of how politics might influence our God stories is relevant - due, globally, to the West's confrontation with radical Islam, and in the U.S., to the political activism of evangelical Christians - both evident in the misadventures of the U.S. and George W. Bush from Bagdhad to Teri Schiavo.According to WRIGHT, "The moral of the story is simple: When people see their interests threatened by another group, this perception brings out the most belligerent parts of their religion. Such circumstances are good news for violent extremists and bad news for moderates."The condensed print version of this interview was the lead article at AlterNet.org the weekend of July 11-12, 2009, and the 3rd most discussed article of the week.

Originally aired 4-4-2010After a fight within the Democratic party, the House passed a spending bill this week that rolls back one of the most important provisions of Dodd-Frank. When it passesthe Senate, taxpayers will be back on the hook for the big banks' gambles on derivatives and other exotic financial instruments. I thought it was time to play this interview with MICHAL LEWIS about how Wall Street's corrupt casino culture led to the Crash of 07-08 - because we've just given them license to do it again.Both Ira Glass and Malcolm Gladwell say today's guest is their favorite storyteller. In his books and magazine articles, Lewis writes about sports, business, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, political campaigns, fatherhood. Stuff that matters to a lot of people. He's smart and he has a sense of humor. Lewis was a trader at Salomon Brothers before he wrote his first best-seller, LIAR'S POKER about the excesses of Wall Street during the 1980s. He continues to write about that world with his last two books, a column for Bloomberg, and articles in Vanity Fair. In this interview recorded four years ago,we talk about THE BIG SHORT. But Lewis is so good at making obscure financial information accessible to readers, that I asked him to spend much of the hour defining terms that laid out the path to the Crash - securitization, derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc. I highly recommend this guide to the dark side of finance.

originally aired 7-24-2011What's good enough for a child you love? What's good enough parenting? Good enough early education? Good enough healthcare? Good enough schools?DAVID KIRP, envisions a national effort to support and develop our children based on a simple "Golden Rule:" Every child deserves what's good enough for a child you love. David Kirp, Kids FirstIn KIDS FIRST, he offers on-the-ground accounts of initiatives that work - and that could affordably be implemented in communities everywhere - to achieve five key priorities: 1) strong support for new parents 2) high-quality early education 3) linking schools and communities to improve what both offer children 4) giving all kids access to a caring and stable adult mentor 5) providing kids a nest egg to help pay for college or kick-start a career.Where do you think the most important changes need to take place to turn things around in terms of big issues like the economy, the environment, and social justice?His latest book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, was named outstanding book of 2013 by the American Education Research Association. The book chronicles how an urban school district has brought poor Latino immigrant children, many of them undocumented, into the education mainstream.