Free Forum with Terrence McNally

TIM RYAN - Originally aired August 2012WINIFRED GALLAGHER - Originally aired May 2009"My experience is what I agree to attend to." -- William JamesThis week we focus on mindful attention - hailed by ancient spiritual traditions and modern neuroscience alike as one of the keys to the quality of our lives. In the first half, I'll be 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 mindful meditation and now he's advocating that the spread of similar practices could help heal us, not just as individuals but as a nation. And his book is filled with examples of how mindfulness is already being successfully applied in education, healthcare, even the military.Then I'll speak with bestselling author, WINIFRED GALLAGHER about her book, RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life. In it, she argues that ""The skillful management of attention is the... key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships." Gallagher came to appreciate this while fighting a fairly advanced form of cancer. Determined not to let her illness "monopolize" her attention, she made a conscious choice to look "toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting." Her experience of the world was transformed, and she set out to learn more about the science of attention as well as what we can do to cultivate it.Here's one big tip based on neuroscience: GALLAGHER recommends starting your workday concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point, your brain may need a break But don't let yourself get distracted by anything else during that first hour and a half, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to reboot after an interruption.

(1) GEORGE McGOVERNA Politician of Principle (Originally aired November 2005) (2) ANDREW BACEVICHTHE LIMITS OF POWER:The End of American Exceptionalism (Originally 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.

Originally aired 11-25-2008 "Who and what is ROBERT COLES? Social scientist, humanist, political activist, psychiatrist, minstrel, wandering storyteller, mystic, wise man, poet, dissenter, and yes, I'll use the word, secular saint." -- Andrew Greeley, Chicago Tribune I invite anyone to google the books of ROBERT COLES. He has written on a broad range of topics, but consistently on subjects that matter.Much of his work is about story, much about children, some is about poverty, about art, about spirit, about meaning. COLES is one of our wise elders, and well worth paying attention to. We talk in this interview about the power of story and the stories of our times, as well as about his 2008 book, MINDING THE STORE: GREAT WRITING ABOUT BUSINESS, FROM TOLSTOY TO NOW, that has something to say to the current moment, when it appears business and finance have lost their way.

Aired 09/08/09Daniel Ellsberg is an American hero. September 23rd is the 40th anniversary of the first night of copying the Pentagon Papers, which he took from his safe at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica.America was embroiled in a dirty war based on lies. A president was abusing the power of his office, ignoring the will of the people, Congress and the courts. He promised peace while planning war without end. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, leaded the truth about the Vietnam war to the New York Times. He risked life in prison to end a war he helped plan. Henry Kissinger called Daniel Ellsberg, "the most dangerous man in America."He's still at it. This week Ellsberg begins the online publication of The American Doomsday Machine, his memoir of the nuclear era.INFO http://www.ellsberg.net/

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.