Free Forum Q&A – GEORGE McGOVERN A Politician of Principle & ANDREW BACEVICH THE LIMITS OF POWER: The End of American Exceptionalism
Written on March 27th, 2015
GEORGE McGOVERN (originally aired November 2005)
ANDREW BACEVICH (0riginally aired September 2008)
As Congress debates a new budget this week, I read the following headline, “Defense hawks in U.S. Congress move to boost military budgets.” It’s worth noting that the US spends more on “defense” than the next 9 countries combined. So this week I offer you interviews with two men whose military service contributed to their cautious view of America’s armed adventures – longtime Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, who is now the first George McGovern Fellow at Columbia University.
At 24, I ran an Assembly District in LA County for McGovern’s Presidential campaign. In 2005, with the release of the documentary, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, I had the opportunity to record this interview.
in The Limits of Power, I believe Andrew Basevich pulls things together in ways that I hadn’t seen before. Things like our politics of personality, the rise of the imperial presidency, and our national culture of consumption and how all of those link to our military adventures. I say each week that I’m looking for pieces of the puzzle, and I believe today’s guest is pulling some of them together in ways that make our problems clearer and change more possible.
Free Forum Q&A – GANGA WHITE, YOGA BEYOOND BELIEF: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice & STEVEN PINKER, THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Written on March 20th, 2015
Ganga White (originally aired: July 2007)
Steven Pinker (originally aired: October 2007)
I’ve been practicing yoga since 1970, obviously long before it was a major cultural phenomenon. GANGA WHITE started a few years earlier. YOGA BEYOND BELIEF: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice speaks to the way I’ve thought about yoga. It’s about paying attention, lifelong learning, and discovering our own paths to growth, integration and presence. It talks about living life as a meditation – but not in the navel-gazing or guru-following way many may think about meditation. It also takes issue with many in the yoga world today who tend to make it a rigid strictly codified authoritarian practice. Why does the FCC get so riled up about salty language? How do lobbyists bribe politicians? Why do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? And why is bulk email called spam? These are some of the everyday questions STEVEN PINKER tackles in THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window into Human Nature. We know language helps us communicate, but what can words tell us about ourselves? Harvard professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, PINKER explores how language illuminates the mind.
Q&A: ROBERT COLES, Professor and Author
Written on March 12th, 2015Q&A: DANIEL ELLSBERG, Author – The most dangerous man in America
Written on March 5th, 2015Q&A: DON BARLETT & JIM STEELE – The BETRAYAL of the AMERICAN DREAM
Written on February 27th, 2015
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 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.org