Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Brought to us by Fox News Chief Political Anchor Bret Baier, To Rescue the Republic is an epic history of Ulysses S. Grant—spanning from the battlefields of the Civil War to the violent turmoil of Reconstruction to the forgotten electoral crisis that nearly fractured a reunited nation.

Desperate for bold leadership in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln turned to Ulysses S. Grant, appointing him lieutenant general of the Union Army, precipitating their victory within a year. Four years later, as president of the United States, Grant rose to the challenge of Reconstruction by advancing its agenda and aggressively countering the Klu Klux Klan.

When the contested presidential election of 1876 produced no clear victory, it was Grant who forged the painful compromise that saved the fragile nation, but tragically pushed the Civil Rights movement even further down the road. In this book, Baier dramatically reveals Grant’s palpable and essential influence on the United States as it suffered through a severe period of internal division.

Join us as Bret Baier brings contemporary resonance and fresh detail to the life of one of America’s most legendary leaders.

NOTES

This program is part of The Commonwealth Club's Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

SPEAKERS

Bret Baier

Chief Political Anchor for Fox News Channel, Anchor and Executive Editor, "Special Report with Bret Baier"; Author, To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876

Melissa Caen

Attorney; Political Analyst—Moderator

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 October 20th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a Silicon Valley entrepreneur developed a tax break intended as a way to incentivize the rich to invest in underserved communities, the idea was pushed into law with little scrutiny or fine-tuning and few safeguards against abuse. With an unbeatable pair of high-profile sponsors and deft political marketing, the Opportunity Zone became an unnoticed part of the 2017 Trump tax bill.

In his new book Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age, bestselling author David Wessel follows the money—starting from this Opportunity Zone initiative—to see who profited from the plan that was supposed to spur development of blighted areas and help people out of poverty. His findings? The Las Vegas Strip, the Portland (Oregon) Ritz-Carlton, and the Mall of America. In other words, lucrative areas where the wealthy can place their money profitably and avoid capital gains taxes.

Wessel provides vivid portraits of the proselytizers, political influencers, consultants, real estate dealmakers and individual money-seekers looking to take advantage of this opportunity. He looks at the cities in which the Opportunity Zone initiatives have failed, as well as a few where they have succeeded, and offers a lesson on how a better-designed program might have helped more left-behind places.

Join us as David Wessel, offers an in-depth analysis of the bill he faults with keeping the rich richer—revealing the gritty reality of a system tilted in favor of a few while leaving many out in the cold.

SPEAKERS

David Wessel

Senior Fellow and Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, Brookings Institution; Author, Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age; Twitter @davidmwessel

In Conversation with Lenny Mendonca

Former Chief Economic and Business Advisor, State of California; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

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 October 19th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mildred Harnack, born and raised in Milwaukee, was a Ph.D. candidate studying in Berlin in 1932 when the Nazis began their rise to power. Donner describes how her great-great-aunt Mildred began holding secret meetings in her apartment. Her small band of political activists grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin by 1940. Harnack recruited working-class Germans, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated on leaflets that denounced Adolf Hitler and called for revolution. At night her co-conspirators would slip those leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms and phone booths.

When World War II began, Harnack became a spy, providing top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her planned escape to Sweden, she was arrested by the Gestapo. A Nazi military court sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler personally overruled that sentence and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, Mildred Harnack, the only known American member of the German resistance, was guillotined.

Donner draws on extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the United States, as well as on newly uncovered documents in her family's archive, to tell Harnack's story. She has woven those letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into an epic story of moral courage.

SPEAKERS

Rebecca Donner

Author, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

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 September 7th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—has seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests in the summer of 2020. “After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy,” Charles Blow writes, “ it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.”

A New York Times op-ed columnist, Blow felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans, one that involves a succinct, counterintuitive and impassioned correction to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. The Devil You Know is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country.

Join us as Charles Blow offers a road map to true and lasting freedom.

SPEAKERS

Charles Blow

Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times; Author, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto; Twitter @CharlesMBlow

In Conversation with Melissa Murray

Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; Co-host, "Strict Scrutiny" Podcast; Twitter @ProfMMurray

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 October 19th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the devastating effects and tragic loss of life from COVID-19 persist 18 months after the global pandemic began, the world is desperate to end this public health crisis.

As businesses across industries are rolling out varying degrees of vaccine, testing, and masking mandates, President Biden announced the requirement for federal workers, medium and large employers, and health-care staff to be vaccinated. Working together and partnering with government and community leaders, the private sector plays a role in helping to close the vaccination gap in our workforce and communities.

What can the business community do to stop this pandemic? What is the private sector’s role in helping keep our communities safe? How are organizations responding to local, state and federal mandates? What processes are working and not working? What will it take to return to a strong and stable economy? Join a panel of business leaders across industries discussing opportunities to address this public health crisis and how we can work together to end it.

NOTES

This program is generously supported by our partner Kaiser Permanente.

SPEAKERS

Greg A. Adams

Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Kaiser Permanente

Brett Hart

President, United Airlines

Molly Moon Neitzel

CEO, Molly Moon Homemade Ice Cream

Stephen Parodi

Executive Vice President, The Permanente Federation; National Infectious Disease Leader, Kaiser Permanente

Jim Wunderman

President and CEO, Bay Area Council

Raj Mathai

News Anchor, NBC Bay Area—Moderator

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 October 18th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a conversation with Joe Weisberg, who makes the case in his new book, Russia Upside Down, that America's foreign policy toward Russia is failing, and we'll never fix it unless we rethink our entire relationship. Weisberg came of age in America in the 1970s and '80s as a Cold Warrior. He studied Russian in Leningrad, and then joined the CIA—just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse.

Less than a decade later, though, a new Cold War broke out. Russia had changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might. It had become more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But U.S. sanctions crippled Russia's economy, and Russia's internet-based retaliations have exacerbated our own political problems. Weisberg says the old paradigm—America, the free capitalist good guys, fighting Russia, the repressive communist bad guys—simply doesn't apply anymore. But we've continued to act as if it does.

Weisberg asks hard questions about our foreign policy and attempts to understand what Russia truly wants. He concludes that we are fighting an enemy with whom we have few if any serious conflicts of interest, we are fighting this unnecessary war with ineffective and dangerous tools, and our approach is not working anyway. With our own political system in peril, and continually being buffeted by Russian attacks, he argues that we need a new framework. Urgently. Weisberg makes it clear what the stakes are and lays out the foundation for a new American foreign policy for dealing with Russia.

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

SPEAKERS

Joe Weisberg

Television Writer; Creator, "The Americans"; Former CIA Officer; Author, Russia Upside Down

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 October 21st, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's speakers, who are human rights activists as well as being business-oriented, will discuss why Bitcoin matters, especially in the Middle East region.

Alex Gladstein, vice president of strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum, has connected many dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, philanthropists, policymakers and artists, to promote free and open societies. He has shared his views at MIT, Stanford, BBC, the European Parliament, the U.S. State Department, and other venues. He is the singularity expert at Singularity University and advises Blockchain Capital.

Fadi Elsalameen, who was born in Hebron, is a critic of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and has received death threats for his pro-democracy and anti-corruption work. He is a graduate of Seeds of Peace, a successful businessperson, and has also shared his views at many leading institutions, including The Commonwealth Club of California.

SPEAKERS

Fadi Elsalameen

M.S., International Relations and Economics; Adjunct Senior Fellow, American Security Project

Alex Gladstein

Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation; Co-Author, The Little Bitcoin Book

Jonathan Curiel

Author—Moderator

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 October 18th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celebrated writer Susan Orlean visits The Commonwealth Club for the first time to discuss her new book, On Animals, a collection from her lifetime of musings, mediations and in-depth profiles about animals.

Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is fresh off her last best-selling book, The Library Book, about the Los Angeles Public Library, which won numerous awards. Her new collection focuses on a range of creatures—the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, and the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with that are central to human life. Since the age of six, Orlean has been fascinated by stories about animals, and her new book brings forward a lifetime of writing about cross-species connections.

How humans interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages. Come hear one of America's most gifted writers discuss why she is so passionate and curious about the subject.

SPEAKERS

Susan Orlean

Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, On Animals

Julia Flynn Siler

Journalist; Author, The White Devil's Daughters

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 October 14th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People around the world have been experiencing unprecedented extreme weather events – raging wildfires, killer heatwaves and catastrophic floods. In August, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new Assessment Report, which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called “code red for humanity,” adding that alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable. 

Against this backdrop, delegates from across the globe are set to convene for the international climate summit known as COP26, where they’re expected to hammer out commitments to reduce carbon emissions in hopes of avoiding the worst impacts of climate disruption. Six years on from the Paris agreement, is there finally enough urgency to turn ambition and promises into action? 

For transcripts and other information, visit: https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts 

Guests:

Kate Larsen, Director, International Energy & Climate, Rhodium Group

Albert Cheung, Head of Global Analysis, Bloomberg NEF

Mitzi Jonelle Tan, Climate Justice Activist, Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines

Carlon Zackhras, Marshall Islands youth climate activist

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is intentional misgendering a crime? Should it be? How does it affect the person who is the subject of the treatment? In July 2021, a California district court struck down a provision of the LGBTQ Long-term Care Facility Residents' Bill of Rights that banned nursing home staff from "willfully and repeatedly" misgendering or using the wrong name to refer to a resident when they've been clearly informed of the preferred name or pronoun.

That provision, known as the "pronoun provision," was ruled to be an infringement on free speech, with one of the judges writing that "misgendering may be disrespectful, discourteous and insulting, and used in an inartful way to express an ideological disagreement with another person's expressed gender identity," but the First Amendment "does not protect only speech that inoffensively and artfully articulates a person's point of view."

Advocates for LGBTQ seniors, and especially for transgender and gender nonconforming seniors, have called the decision alarming. Openhouse, a San Francisco-based LGBT senior housing, community and services organization, states "Misgendering can be harmful to a resident, particularly as it relates to feelings of safety, acceptance and isolation."

California State Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) said "It’s never OK to intentionally and repeatedly misgender a transgender person. This isn’t a matter of political opinion; it’s straight-up harassment."

Join us for a live-stream discussion among advocates and professionals working with transgender and nonconforming seniors about the impact of the ruling and proposals for what to do next.

SPEAKERS

Eric Carlson

Directing Attorney, Justice in Aging; Author, Long-Term Care Advocacy and 25 Common Nursing Home Problems — and How to Resolve Them

Richelle Slota

Author, Stray Son and Captive Market: Commercial Kidnapping Stories from Nigeria

Dr. Kathleen Sullivan

Ph.D.; Executive Director, Openhouse

Michelle Meow

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

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 October 14th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices