Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Midterms are over, Sessions has been fired, Trump has two months till the new House arrives. I’m on vacation and can’t respond to any of that. This week you’ll hear my April 2010 conversation with Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries. We’re joined by Luiz Perez, one of the senior staff at Homeboy. My guests and their work run absolutely counter to the kinds of prejudice and ugliness indulged in by the President.

DAVID CORN wrote the Mother Jones cover story - The Most Important Election of Our Lives, declared that "The Russia scandal is the most important scandal in the history of the United States", and co-authored with Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. Who better to talk to at this moment...less than two weeks till the midterms.

JOHN NICHOLS, Nation magazine’s national affairs correspondent, reports from Texas on Beto O’Rourke’s insurgent campaign against Senator Ted Cruz. We place today’s political and societal crises in context - How are things broken? How did they get broken? How do we fix them? With a nod to new blood and new passion on the campaign trail.

MARSHALL GANZ dropped out of Harvard in ’64 to work on Freedom Summer, was a lead organizer for years with United Farm Workers, and led the grass-roots storytelling model for Obama ’08. He’s a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, having returned after 28 years to earn his BA and PhD. I participated recently in one of his public narrative trainings. For the mid-terms and beyond, we need to learn from him. Here’s our conversation, recorded in March 2012.

A friend emailed me JOAN WILLIAMS’ Harvard Business Review article, What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class. Read over 3.7 million times, it’s the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history, and I can see why. WILLIAMS is the author of WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. “If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, the consequences could turn dangerous.”

It’s 10 years since the financial crash, and books, articles and commentators are looking back. So let’s listen to my 2010 conversation with Michael Lewis, We talk about his #1 best-seller THE BIG SHORT, but more than that, I ask him to define terms - like securitization, derivatives, credit default swaps. It's one of my all time favorite interviews.

I read an interview by Dahr Jamail with today’s guest, cultural communication expert Milton Bennett, at Truthout.org. Titled Is There a Cult of Trump? It spells out the methods utilized – consciously or unconsciously - by Trump to turn his followers into a cult – impervious to outside or contrary influence and united in defense of their aims and their leader. It’s a story of tactics and behavior that transform the Trump phenomenon into something more dangerous than a simple political divide.

This weekend when folks in communities around the world take part in a Global Day of Climate Action, you'll hear my October 2017 conversation with PAUL HAWKEN (The Ecology of Commerce; Natural Capitalism; Blessed Unrest) about his research project and best-selling book: DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which ranks the 80 most impactful solutions - plus 20 others for which there isn't enough data yet to rank them.

California Natural Resources Agency predicts severe heat waves, wildfires, ocean rise will cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Trump administration decimates Obama emissions rules for cars and power plants. Rise Up for Climate global day of action Sat 9/8. MICHAEL BRUNE, Executive Director of Sierra Club, shares good news, bad news, and ways to get involved.

In light of the Cohen and Manafort verdicts and the overturning of Obama Clean Air policy of regulating power plant emissions, let’s listen to my 2005 conversation with JARED DIAMOND regarding his book COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED. In his earlier Pulitzer-prize winning bestseller GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. In COLLAPSE, he asks: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?