Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

When former Secretary of State George Shultz turned 100, he published a piece in the Washington Post on what he had learned over his long career. “Trust is the coin of the realm,” he wrote. “If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible.” Three U.S. presidents put their trust in Shultz’s abilities, including Ronald Reagan, who tasked him to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. Shultz, who died in 2021, also achieved success in the corporate world and in academia, serving as head of San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. and as a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. 

A new biography, In the Nation’s Service, offers an inside look at Shultz’s legacy, from his work on Middle East peace to later efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Author Philip Taubman, longtime New York Times editor and reporter in Washington and Moscow, draws on Shultz’s personal papers to shed new light on how he helped shape U.S. foreign policy, and how his style of conservatism has all but vanished from today’s Republican Party.

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Who cleans up and rebuilds our communities after floods, fires, and hurricanes? COVID redefined America's definition of “essential workers,” but many who help communities recover from climate disasters remain underpaid and overlooked. 

In 2006, labor organizer Saket Soni got an anonymous call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi who had scraped together $20,000 to apply for the “opportunity” to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina. The caller was only one of hundreds lured into Gulf Coast labor camps, surrounded by barbed wire, and watched by armed guards. Since then, the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters has only increased – and disaster recovery has become big business. How are the lives of people displaced by disasters intertwined with those helping to rebuild?

Guests:

Saket Soni, Founder and Director, Resilience Force

Daniel Castellanos, Director Of Workforce Engagement, Resilience Force

For show notes and related links, visit https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts

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Debbie Chinn's primary professional and volunteer career focus on philanthropic work—to heal our society and bridge our cultural differences—was seeded via a 13-generation saga across continents.

Dancing in Their Light: A Daughter's Unfinished Memoir is a biographical conversation program exploring the research that bought forth her family’s experiences assimilating in the United States. It is a specifically Chinese American immigration compilation that skillfully weaves together stories of the Chinn family restaurant, "The House of Mah Jong," and the distinct personality of a golden age of Polynesian floor shows ubiquitous in the 1960s on Long Island.

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The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the mass protests that followed opened many Americans’ eyes to cases of police brutality and misconduct. But two decades earlier, a civil rights lawsuit against Oakland police brought some of the same issues into focus. The suit alleged that a band of rogue veteran police officers known as "The Riders" beat, kidnapped and planted drugs on Oakland residents. A 2003 settlement led to federal monitoring of the Oakland Police Department, which continues to this day.

In their new book The Riders Come Out at Night, journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham explore the history of policing in Oakland, the fallout from the trial, and why some promised reforms have failed.

Join us to hear about their reporting and what it reveals about policing in the Bay Area and the United States.

SPEAKERS

Ali Winston

Independent Reporter; Co-author, The Riders Come Out at Night

Darwin BondGraham

Reporter; Co-author, The Riders Come Out at Night

Otis R. Taylor Jr

Managing Editor, KQED News

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 25th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Congresswoman Jackie Speier chose to close out her congressional career at the end of 2022 and did not seek another term. Her departure from Congress brings to an end a Bay Area political career that spans more than 40 years in elected office. She represented California's 14th District in the House of Representatives—which includes San Mateo County and a portion of San Francisco County—from 2008 through 2022. Before serving in Congress, Speier was a California State Assembly member and California state senator; she started her career on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.

Speier is returning to The Commonwealth Club to discuss her historic career, one that was launched after her near-death experience in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when she and her boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, were shot on the tarmac during the People's Temple mass murder suicide. Congressman Ryan did not survive, while Speier recovered and went on to devote her career to public service. In Congress, Speier was known as a fierce advocate for women's rights, including pressing for laws addressing reproductive rights and sexual harassment and assault, including in the military. She served on the Oversight and Reform as well as Intelligence and Armed Services committees during her time in Congress.

Please join us for a special event with a Bay Area political legend as she discusses her career as well as the changes she sees ahead for the institution she just departed and for the Democratic Party.

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Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Larson returns to The Commonwealth Club with a revealing look at how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding. New attention from historians and journalists has been raising pointed questions: Was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery? Was the Constitution a pact with slavery, or was it a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves, such as George Washington’s consistent refusal to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation.

Larson insightfully synthesizes these issues in his new history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved far too narrow — though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. But by the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.

Larson delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: We witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

SPEAKERS

Edward Larson

University Professor of History, and Darling Chair in Law, Pepperdine University; Author, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

In Conversation with George Hammond

Author, Conversations With Socrates

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 24th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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When most of us think about using nature to remove carbon dioxide from the air, we think of trees. Yet blue carbon, a new name for storing carbon dioxide in coastal and marine ecosystems where it can no longer trap heat in our atmosphere, may have even greater potential. Salt marshes and mangroves have carbon-capturing capacity that may surpass that of terrestrial forests. Seagrasses, for example, currently cover less than 0.2% of the ocean floor, but store about 10% of the carbon buried in the oceans each year. How can natural, ocean-based solutions benefit both the planet and the people who live in and depend on coastal ecosystems? 

Guests: 

Ralph Chami, Assistant Director, Western Hemisphere Division, Institute for Capacity Development, IMF

Emily Pidgeon, Vice President, Ocean Science And Innovation, Conservation International

Irina Fedorenko-Aula, Founder, Co-CEO, Vlinder

Isabella Masinde, CEO, Umita

For show notes and related links, visit ClimateOne.org

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On January 25, 2021, in one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden reversed the Trump administration’s widely condemned ban on transgender people in the military. In With Honor and Integrity, Máel Embser-Herbert and Bree Fram introduce us to the brave individuals who are on the front lines of this issue, assembling a powerful, accessible and heartfelt collection of first-hand accounts from transgender military personnel in the United States.

Their eye-opening accounts show us what it is like to serve in the military as a transgender person. From a religious affairs specialist in the Army National Guard, to a petty officer first class in the Navy, to a veteran of the Marine Corps who became “the real me” at age 49, these accounts are personal, engaging, and refreshingly honest. They describe their experiences from before and during President Trump’s ban―what barriers they face at work, why they do or don’t choose to serve openly, and how their colleagues have treated them. Fram, a lieutenant colonel who is serving openly as a transgender woman in the U.S. Space Force and has advocated for open-service policies, shares her experience in the aftermath of Trump’s announcement of the ban on Twitter.

At a time when LGBTQ rights are under siege, and the opportunity to serve continues to be challenged, join us for an online program with Embser-Herbert and Fram as they provide an inspiring look at the past, present and future of transgender military service. 

SPEAKERS

Máel Embser-Herbert

Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Hamline University; U.S. Army Veteran; Author, Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military and The U.S. Military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy: A Reference Handbook; Co-editor, With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words

Bree Fram

Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Space Force; President, SPART*A; Co-editor, With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 19th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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From Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Vivian Kleiman (Color Adjustment) comes an in-depth look at the evolution of queer comics, starting in the 1970s when LGBTQ+ stories were not a part of the popular culture. Through the careers of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis to “coming out” to same-sex marriage, Kleiman's new film No Straight Lines captures the beginnings of queer comics, from its origins as an underground art form to its progression into a social movement, culminating with its long-awaited mainstream acceptance into comic books, newspaper strips, and graphic novels.

No Straight Lines premieres on the PBS documentary series "Independent Lens" January 23, 2023, at 10 p.m. EST (check local listings). The film will also be available to stream on the PBS Video app.

Join us for a conversation with filmmaker Vivian Kleiman and cartoonists Jennifer Camper and Justin Hall.

Note: This is a discussion of the film; it is not a screening.

SPEAKERS

Jennifer Camper

Cartoonist, Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, SubGURLZ; Editor, Juicy Mother anthologies; Founding Director, Queers & Comics Conference

Justin Hall

Creator, True Travel Tales, Hard to Swallow, Theater of Terror: Revenge of the Queers, and No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics; Producer, No Straight Lines; Chair, MFA in Comics Program, California College of the Arts

Vivian Kleiman

Director and Producer, No Straight Lines

Michelle Meow

Producer and Host, "The Michelle Meow Show," KBCW TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Co-host

John Zipperer

Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club of California—Co-host

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on January 18th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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If you took the economic might of Amazon, and added the penetration of Facebook, the ubiquity of Google, and the cultural significance of YouTube, you might have something starting to resemble Alibaba.

Commonly mischaracterized as a kind of Chinese eBay for businesses, Alibaba and its interlinked network of products and services have exploded into global markets, disrupting conventional businesses, and creating previously unimaginable opportunities for millions of small businesses worldwide.

Brian Wong, a long-time executive and former special assistant to Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, details the company’s unique culture and “tai chi” management principles that has propelled its global success.

Hear more about the “secret sauce” behind the company’s distinctive business philosophy.

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