The Commonwealth June/July 2013

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE

DAVID STOCKMAN

CARLY FIORINA page 12

GLORIA DUFFY: CAMPUS ASSAULTS

Commonwealth page 49

page 8

page 54

The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

GROVER NORQUIST IS THIS THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN AMERICA?

$2.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

JUNE/JULY 2013

Inside The Commonwealth Vo lu m e 1 0 8 , N O . 0 4 | J UN E / J ULY 2 0 1 3

Features 8 DAVID STOCKMAN: THE GREAT DEFORMATION

Reagan’s budget chief says the system is rigged for the fat cats

Photo by Rikki Ward

On THE COVER

10 GROVER NORQUIST:

THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA

49 SIX DRIVERS OF THE FUTURE

The anti-tax leader who has been called the most powerful man in Washington talks about using taxes to force government reform

“I am encouraged and optimistic that the development and rise of importance of the Internet brings with it many new opportunities to empower individual citizens to once again play the role that our founders intended as part of a well-informed citizenry.” – Al Gore

12 CARLY FIORINA:

HOW ARE WE DOING?

Photo by Ed Ritger

Departments

Events

5 editor’s DESK

23 Program

Betwixt and Betwittered: Getting involved in the Commonwealth Club

6 The commons Design Thinking with Yves Behar and Tim Brown, North Korea: A Town Hall with David Straub, Ambassador Kenneth Taylor on Argo, & more

54 insight Dr. Gloria C. Duffy President and CEO Campus assaults

HP’s former chief grades the economy and offers her suggestions for improving it

information

24 eight weeks calendar Events from May 31 to August 6, 2013

Photo by Rikki Ward

46 IMPROVING THE ETHICS OF MEDICINE

31 program listings

Our expert panel looks at the right ways to make sure our health-care system does the right things

34 Language classes

49 Al gore About Our Cover: Grover Norquist is credited or blamed for the anti-tax roadblock in Congress.

He explained to The Commonwealth Club why he thinks it’s necessary. Photo by Ed Ritger.

The former vice president discusses Current TV’s sale, the media and the future

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Exploring Tibetan Paths Yunnan and Tibet September 14–28, 2013

Witness the human kaleidoscope of ethnic minorities in China’s rugged far west Yunnan province, before our journey to legendary Tibet. As with all Club trips, hear from guest speakers and take part in discussions about issues of the day that matter to the people we visit.

• Meet with a shaman, a language •

expert, and a writer and explorer in Yunnan.

Speak with a professor and hear from contemporary artists in Lhasa.

at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and wander across the bridges and canals in Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

• Marvel

sacred spiritual sites of Buddhism: Ralung Monastery en route to Gyantse, the Jokhang temple and the Potala Palace, and watch the debates at Sera Monastery.

• Experience

• • • •

Discover dramatic landscapes: Tiger Leaping Gorge, the Tibetan plateau, and the lakes of the Himalayas.

Learn about the nomadic way of life and try yak butter tea during a home visit.

Visit a school near Lashi Lake and learn about the revered black-necked crane at Napa Lake.

Explore the world-class Shanghai Museum; take the high-speed Maglev train; and enjoy a tour of the Bund with an architecture expert.

Cost: $6,795, per person, based on double occupancy CST: 2096889-40 Photos: (top to bottom) CW Ye; Pet_r Dennis Jarvis; Jowo Sakyamuni; RobertF/Flickr

For Information & Reservations: visit commonwealthclub.org/travel call (415) 597-6720 email travel@commonwealthclub.org

Editor’s DESK J o h n Z i p pe r e r V P, M e d ia & E d i to rial

Betwixt and Betwittered

Y

ou can imagine my pleasure, as a longtime Monty Python fan, at seeing the tweet (by @festofasianlit) that read, “There are only a hand full of seats left for Michael Palin on 7 May at the Commonwealth Club – book now!”

Well, Mr. or Ms. Festofasianlit, the great Mr. Palin was not coming to The Commonwealth Club of California we all know and love; he was actually scheduled to speak at some organization in London that sort of shares our name, called The Commonwealth Club.

And then there was the time some visitors were looking at our auditorium and one of them remarked to another that “The Commonwealth Club – I wonder what this place has to do with the British empire.”

That thought came to mind during a recent program of our Week to Week political roundtable series. Early in the program, our panel and I had discussed the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. As I was reading through the question cards from the audience, I saw one written by someone who said he had been Baroness Thatcher’s bodyguard a few years ago. We got the man to stand up and tell us a little about it – he certainly had the British accent such a job would require.

We were pleased to have him in the audience and glad he shared his connection to the controversial prime minister with us; but I couldn’t help hoping he hadn’t come to The Commonwealth Club because he got it confused with the British Commonwealth.

For the record, we’re not related to the Commonwealth of Nations – or the British Commonwealth of Nations, as it was known when it was founded in 1917 or 1921 (accounts vary).

The Commonwealth Club of California was founded in 1903.

Nor for that matter are we connected with the Commonwealth of Independent States, the successor to the Soviet empire. There are other organizations called The Commonwealth Club, and none of them are related to us. The Commonwealth Club in Richmond, follow us online

facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub

Virginia, is a private club, as is the Commonwealth Club located near Canberra, Australia.

In fact, though we are called The Commonwealth Club, we are not a closed-off, private club like some of those other places. We are open to all, and you’ll see them all at our events – if not at every event, then if you attend a number of them, you’ll see a large crosssection of our members and guests. They are young, middle-aged and senior; representing politics across the spectrum; multiracial; talkative and shy; religious believers, agnostics and atheists; and rich and middle class and poor.

The reason they all have a home at The Commonwealth Club is because our name is literal: We are about the common (shared) wealth (good). That name is also why we spread our programs as widely as possible via the Internet, radio, television and print.

Here at the Club, you can not only attend programs – you can help organize them, volunteer to help with attendees, greeting and more. You will see this August, when we present our special annual series of programs organized by our Member-Led Forums, just what can be accomplished by a dedicated group of volunteers working for the common good (see page 26).

And if you can’t spare the time to volunteer, you can help out by writing about us on your Facebook and Google+ pages or by tweeting (don’t forget to include our Twitter handle, @cwclub, so we can retweet your message). The best way to attract more people to this unique organization is by recommendations from people who already know it – people like you.

If you’re reading this, Michael Palin, please know that you are welcome on our stage any time you make it out to the Bay Area. The language is roughly the same, and our weather’s better than London’s.

twitter.com/cwclub

commonwealthclub.org/blog

commonwealthclub.org

Business offices The Commonwealth, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 | feedback@commonwealthclub.org VP, MEDIA & EDITORIAL John Zipperer | SENIOR Editor Sonya Abrams | DESIGNER Tyler R. Swofford Editorial Interns Amelia Cass, Ellen Cohan | CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Ed Ritger, Rikki Ward ADVERtising information: Oona Marti, Vice President of Development, (415) 597-6714, omarti@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-2805. | PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. | POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-2805. | Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink. Copyright © 2013 The Commonwealth Club of California. Tel: (415) 597-6700 Fax: (415) 597-6729 E-mail: feedback@commonwealthclub.org | EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY: The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question and answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub.org/archive or contact Club offices to order a compact disc.

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Commons THE

Talk of the Club THE TICKER

Updates and check-ins

B Tapping the YouTube video stars

Photo by jdlasica/Flickr

arney Frank, the outspoken former U.S. representative from Massachusetts, began his May 13 program at the Club by noting how happy he was to be with peo-

Climate One takes questions for Google’s Eric Schmidt via YouTube videos

G

oogle Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt returns to The Commonwealth Club’s Climate One series on June 4, and in preparation the Club drew from part of his online empire for questions.

Climate One put out the call for people to ask Schmidt questions – via YouTube, which was purchased

by Google in 2006. People were invited during the month of May to post short videos with them asking Schmidt questions, with a selection of the best videos to be used during the program itself. But getting a question asked on stage is only one of the benefits: People whose videos are chosen also will receive a complimentary ticket to the event and a copy of The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.

This isn’t the first time that the Club has tied in its programs with social media. Recently, Inforum reached out to the audience of photo-sharing network Instagram to get people to share their experiences with the Facebookowned service. Inforum staff sought out some of the top users of the service in the Bay Area to have them spread a campaign to win tickets to a May 30 program featuring founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. People were asked to create Instagram posts tagged with #sflovestagram and their stories of why they love it. Best of all, Inforum got Systrom and Krieger’s attention in the first place by taking photos of themselves on Instagram with a plea for the co-founders to appear on Inforum’s stage.

So, in short : The Internet works.

The New Neighbors, Part III The Jewish Community Federation

W

hen one moves into a new neighborhood, it sometimes helps to learn the local lingo. So here are some words to help for our eventual move to 110 The Embarcadero: kehilla, tzedakah and tikkun olam. Those words represent the Jewish ideas of community, giving with just intention, and repairing the world, respectively.

Those words will come in handy, along with “Howdy, neighbor.” That’s because next door to the Club’s new offices is another San Francisco institution: The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund.

In each issue, as we prepare to move into our new headquarters, The Commonwealth is introducing one of our new neighbors. With roots stretching back more

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Photo by sporst/Flickr

than a century, when it was founded as a benevolent fund to aid Jewish settlers in the Bay Area, the Federation grew into a broader social services agency helping Jewish and non-Jewish populations alike through shelter, clothing, food, medicine and job-training efforts.

Its grant-making support goes out to student organizations, Jewish community groups, senior living organizations and more.

ple whose attention span is greater than 140 characters — the length of a tweet. The Commonwealth magazine learned of this comment when an attendee tweeted it.

Record: Thanks to the support of many people, companies and others, our anniversary dinner was the Club’s most successful fundraiser ever, bringing in $1 million.

Everybody loves a winner: Keeping with the social media theme, we note that our most-viewed Facebook post and the most popular Club-related tweets were about our announcements of the winners of the 82nd Annual California Book Awards. See page 53.

Shared Ideas Design Thinking

Photo by Ed Ritger

Yves Béhar, CEO/Founder, fuseproject; COO, Jawbone; March 21, 2013: Change ... is a fundamental notion of design. I would go a little further; it’s not just change, it’s really breaking what was there before. All of us have experienced going to a hospital or a clinic, and that experience probably needs to be broken and rebuilt into something entirely different.

A lot of designers today don’t just design, they actually create new companies that break the old model. Use Airbnb, for example; two industrial designers created Airbnb. They created something that is breaking the old model of the hotel, where you actually go and you stay with somebody who may give you better information than a concierge at a hotel about the neighborhood and what to do in the city.

So design is for me about radical change.

And we live in an era where change is accelerating and we have technologies ... but we also have ... the way people are thinking is evolving very, very quickly, so there is an openmindedness toward moving to completely different business models. Designers are not afraid of breaking things. But they know how to rebuild them, they know how to put them back into something that will become the kind of experience that we are looking for in this day and age.

Tim Brown, President and CEO, IDEO: It’s this idea of being able to grapple with the design of the whole system, whether it’s a business, a venture, or whether it’s some other kind of system, like a health system. If you can pick the right scope – and you can certainly try and go too big and it gets too complicated, too hard to resolve – and a new

business is often a really great scope to pick; you can affect everything, right? You’re not just affecting the product; you’re affecting the brand, the business model, you’re affecting the organization, and you are bringing design to all of those. It allows you to get to places you would not have been able to get to if you were only working with an existing company and a new product.

and they feel quite desperate. The way they respond is not by negotiating from their existing stands of weakness, but to puff up and exaggerate their power and their determination to get their way.

Argo and Beyond

North Korea: A Town Hall

Photo by Ed Ritger

Photo by Ed Ritger

David Straub, associate director of the Korean Studies Program at Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; April 8, 2013: We really don’t have a very good understanding of who is in charge and who does what in North Korea. We do have a lot more knowledge about North Korea than we used to, because we have been dealing with them diplomatically for 20 years, so we can infer a lot. But it’s very difficult to be certain about what the North Koreans are thinking, concretely and in detail, in real time.

That’s the real challenge that we have today.

I believe that much of North Korean behavior can be explained in terms of their reaction to a kind of desperate situation. Fundamentally, the Korean Peninsula is divided into two Korean states, each of which regards itself as the only legitimate state, and they’re both competing for the hearts and minds of the Korean people over the long term.

They wouldn’t necessarily be doing that if they had two similar systems ideologically and economically, and if both systems were fairly successful. Then they could negotiate equally. But North Korea has failed miserably,

Kenneth Taylor, Canadian ambassador to Iran, 1977-80; April 17, 2013: The sanctions [on Iran] are beginning to bite. You probably read about the [international nuclear meetings] in Kazakhstan over the last three weeks; Iran seems to be softening its position a bit.

The rial, their currency, is down 50 percent.

Oil shipments are down. Banking avenues throughout the world are being thwarted.

Inflation is twice as high as the government admits it is.

Then you look at the surroundings, what’s happening there.

Their one close ally and associate state, Syria; is in, if not civil war at the moment, then coming close to civil war. The Hezbollah without Iranian financing is becoming more distant in terms of Iranian interests.

And then comes the big play. We’re sitting back here in North America, when really the play is between Shiite and Sunni. It’s really the Gulf states Qatar and Saudi Arabia versus Iran. If Iran happens to lose Syria, if Hezbollah becomes detached – they’re facing pretty formidable odds, with Saudi and Qatar having endless finances; consolidating a position in Syria; if Egypt restores itself to what the Muslim Brotherhood would like it to do – another Sunni commitment.

So Iran is caught in a box not only with respect to negotiating with the [international community], but its own basic Middle East truths.

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David Stockman

Reagan’s budget chief on the great deformation.

April 11, 2013.

David A. Stockman

Former U.S. Congressman; Author, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

D

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Original Photos by Rikki Ward (David Stockman); zoonabar/Flickr (Wall St.); JSquish/wikicommons (Pennsylvania Ave.)

o not believe Washington or Wall Street. By that I mean that we have a vast disconnect between the reality that’s going on in the real economy – let’s call it the Main Street of America, from coast to coast – and the dialogue that goes on inside the Beltway and on the other end of I-95, on Wall Street. What has happened over the last several decades [is that] we have had the rise of something I call crony capitalism, which unfortunately is the worst of both worlds. It really undermines the notion of a free-market economy that can generate tremendous growth and investment and productivity and rising living standards and more wealth, and a political democracy that we have always cherished in this country and believed for a long time that we had still functioning.

But [all of ] that has been really deformed as a result of things we have been doing for several decades now that violate my principles: fiscal rectitude – you can’t borrow forever like we’re doing now and lay it all off onto the next generation, leave them with the bills and huge tax payments to cover the interest on all of this debt. I don’t think you can have a Federal Reserve that prints as much money as it’s doing now, showers it onto Wall Street – most of it stays in the canyons of Wall Street, helps the speculators and gamblers, but doesn’t really get into productive investment in our private economy.

We have a fundamental breakdown or failure in all three of the important components of our system; the political parties have really failed, and if you look at what’s happening now – and political parties used to be important in democracy – but if you look at what’s happening now in Washington, I would say that (continued on page 16)

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GROVER NORQUIST

The Modern Republican Party and the Future of America Original Photos by Ed Ritger (Grover Norquist); Endless Forms Most Beautiful/Flickr (Constitution)

Does taxation hold the key to reforming the government?

The famous anti-tax crusader makes his case. April 4, 2013 grover norquist Founder, Americans for Tax Reform

I

n Washington, D.C., we have a meeting every Wednesday at ATR [Americans for Tax Reform] in a room about this size, 150 people, big circle. Thirty people present for three minutes each about what they’re doing and what they’re up to. The point is you want to make sure the broad center-

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right knows what everybody else is doing.

It’s nonpartisan, but most of the people are Republicans, conservatives, libertarians – the Reagan Republican conservative movement.

The modern Republican Party, if you’re trying to figure out what the Republicans will and won’t do.

Taxpayers: Don’t raise my taxes. Property owners: Don’t violate my property rights.

Everybody is there because on the issue that moves their vote – not necessarily all issues, but the issue that moves their vote – what they want from the government is to be left alone. Businessmen and -women: Don’t tax or regulate my professional life out of existence. Second Amendment community – I serve on the board of the National

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Rifle Association – you don’t see gun owners knocking on your door on Saturday arguing that you should become a hunter or insisting that every fourth grade child read books in public school that has two hunters. They just wish to be left alone with their Second Amendment rights.

Around the table all the various communities of faith – people for whom the most important thing in their life is practicing faith, transmitting it to their kids – they simply wish to be left alone to do that. Evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Mormons – they don’t agree on who gets to heaven or why, but they do agree that they should be left alone and all those other guys around the table

who completely misunderstand scripture can go straight to Hades on their own, but that’s the cost of me being able to get it right.

The homeschooler movement, the people concerned about school choice, want more control over their own education for their own children.

Around the table everybody is in on their vote-moving issue. What’s important to understand if you’re trying to manage the Republican Party or argue with it or inform it, understand why they’re there in the first place, all the various groups. You can get people talking about any number of issues.

We saw this with Pat Buchanan. He said polling data shows that 70 percent of Republican voters think there is too much free trade with China, 70 percent of Republican voters think there are too many immigrants – and he got 1 percent of the vote. Now, he forgot to ask the second question: “Having told me politely what your position was on those issues because I asked, I forgot to ask – do you care? Do you care enough to vote on that issue? You may talk about it – talk radio shows talked at great length about some of these issues – but do you vote on that issue?”

This is where politicians get in trouble all the time. They hear people talk about an issue, they look at polling data, and they say, “See? Everybody agrees on that issue. I will take that position and therefore I will win.”

There are a couple of issues. One is, do you believe that if I run for mayor I have any say on the subject you just brought up? Or if I run for president? Two, is that the issue you vote on, or do you vote on a different issue?

It also allows you to work with your coalition. The modern Republican Party’s coalition, if you polled the religious right, evangelical Protestants, they would tell you they were for prayer in school. So the Republicans for several years [said], “Let’s have a prayer-inschool constitutional amendment,” because the court had said you can’t have it without an amendment, and 90 percent of the people in the country would say they were for it; And you’d lose votes on it because 3 to 5 percent of religious minorities were very strongly against it and worried about what the prayer would look like, and all the guys who told you they were for it didn’t vote on the subject. How do you lose when, “My pollster tells me it’s a 90 percent issue”? Ninety percent of the people go, “It looks fine,” and 5 percent of the people say “nah-ah.” The only guys who remember

Moderator Jonathan Weber (left) and Grover Norquist

Photo by Ed Ritger

on Election Day what you said are the five.

What happened? That impetus became the school choice movement. You went to the same people and said, “How would you like the ability to decide where to send your kid to school, for academic reasons or for questions of religious schools?” All of a sudden religious dissenters go, “I’m in. I’d like that because I’m a religious minority and that would protect me and give me more control over helping my kids’ education.” Instead of dividing folks against you, it actually was part of outreach and the people who said they wanted prayer in school were actually sort of commenting [that] they’d like more values in their school, but school choice would give you that, too.

You can take an issue that appears to divide your coalition or divide you from others and turn it into a more unifying [issue].

It also explains why, in the modern Republican Party, we keep on having these predictions of coming splits. I remember the 1980 campaign; Reagan was running for president and The New York Times said, “Some of the people voting for him have jobs.

Some go to church. They’ll be at each other’s throats any moment.” I remember thinking, “Why would they be at each other’s throats?”

Because as we manage the meeting in D.C. – and 47 states have similar meetings in and around the conservative movement in the Republican Party – the guy who wants to make money all day looks across the table at the guy who wants to go to church all day and says, “That’s not how I spend my time, but that doesn’t get in my way.” They both look over at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day and say, “Well, that’s not how

we spend our time, but OK.” So they’re not in conflict on a vote-moving issue. That’s not to say they all have tea together. They don’t have to agree on some 20-point plan. You just need the candidates to stand in the middle of the room and say, “I’m going to leave your kids alone, your faith alone, your money alone, your business alone, your property alone, and then let’s go do stuff.” That’s what has allowed the center-right coalition, the Reagan Republican coalition, to hold together.

Can a candidate misunderstand why somebody is in the room and speak to them on secondary and tertiary issues which they understand but which frighten, irritate and chase away others? Yes, and we’ve seen people do that. That’s why it’s important that the candidates understand why everyone’s in the room. I got a call when Hillary Clinton was running for Senate in 2000 from a New York reporter. The New York reporter said, “Hillary Clinton was just up in New York and she said what progressives need is one of those meetings like Grover has where we get everybody together. What do you think of that?” says the reporter.

I walked through how our coalition worked and I said, “I think Hillary’s coalition, the left-progressive coalition, would have more challenges.” Every once in a while they announce in D.C. that they’re going to put one of these meetings together and the challenge is, who is around the table? The modern Democratic Party: Trial lawyers, labor union leaders, big city political machines, two wings of the dependency movement, people locked (continued on page 19)

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CARLY FIORINA HOW ARE WE DOING? T he business leader and former senatorial candidate says the system currently works for big business and big government, but it’s not helping everyone else.

Fiorina identifies fixes for our country. carly fiorina Former CEO, HP; Chair, Good360; Contributor, CNBC

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Photo by Rikki Ward

I

f we think about the state of California, if we think about the state of our nation, if we think about the state of the world, we need to think about all of those things in the context of individuals who are increasingly powerful and institutions that are increasingly incompetent – not because the people are bad, but because the decision-making process itself is increasingly challenged.

What’s going on in our economy? We have the stock market at record highs; we have very good signs in some ways. Certainly there are areas of California that are coming back; Silicon Valley is back. You see home prices coming back, and you see unemployment levels basically falling, so there are some good signs. On the other hand, everyone agrees the economy is underperforming its potential. When you have growth rates of somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, we’re not performing at the level we should be.

It’s important to remember that we have still in this country 12.3 million Americans who are unemployed, 48 million Americans on food stamps. We have lost 6.4 million full-time jobs in the last five to six years. We have 8 million Americans working part time who want to be working full time. We have 10 million Americans who have dropped out of the workforce altogether. We have one in six Americans living in poverty.

Even here in the Bay Area, one of the wealthiest, most blessed regions in the world, 20 percent of Bay Area residents live at subsistence level or lower. Subsistence level is $22,000 a year for a family of four. Imagine trying to live on that in this area.

By any measure, our economy is underperforming. So the question is why. The facts are that we have four structural problems in our economy today and, frankly, somewhat radical reform is necessary to deal with them, all in the context of institutions that are increasingly unable to deal with the problems before us. I share most Americans’ frustration with our political processes’ inability to come to closure on many of these issues.

There was a survey done by The Washington Post recently that asked small businesses where they thought things were. Seventy percent said that they felt government was hostile to them. Why does that matter? Because small business is the engine of growth in our economy. It always has been. I graduated from Stanford University with a degree in medieval history and philosophy, in the

middle of a recession. I went to law school, hated it, dropped out. Where did I go to get employed? Where most people go. I went to a small business. I went to a little nine-person firm close to El Camino.

Small and new businesses employ over half the people in this country. Small and new businesses create over two-thirds of the new jobs in this country. If you look at where immigrants and minorities get their start, it is in small businesses; wave after wave of immigrants have started out in small businesses.

Women frequently end up employed in small businesses, [as do] African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans.

It is the first handhold on the rung of the American Dream. How do you build a better life for yourself and your family? You start at a small business. I’m not [just] talking about the businesses like Hewlett and Packard that started in a garage, or Google; those are exciting businesses, they create a lot of jobs and they’re incredibly important; but I’m also talking about the deli on the corner, the dry cleaner, the taqueria, just basic businesses that are the foundation of any community.

Small business and entrepreneurs are also the engine of innovation. Small and new businesses generate patents at the rate of 11 times large businesses. When I was at Hewlett-Packard, we were very proud to be generating 11 patents a day at the end of my tenure. That was fantastic; but imagine: Small businesses are generating at 11 times that rate. Little businesses, wherever they are, are how people get their start in this country; they are the job creators in this country, they are the innovation engine in this country. So when small businesses think the environment is hostile to them, we have a problem.

Here’s another problem we have: more small businesses are failing and fewer are starting than at any time in the last 40 years.

Why is that? If you talk to small-business owners, what you’ll hear is it’s just too hard and there isn’t enough encouraging me to take a risk. Imagine you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, and you’re thinking about starting a business. You have to deal with a 27,000-page tax code. Forget whether you think rates are too high or too low; we have a 27,000-page federal tax code. The federal tax code was designed by a lot of politicians, lobbied by a lot of big companies. The tax code is designed to help big companies [because] big companies know

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how to lobby to get certain things in the tax code – loopholes and certain extra measures.

That level of complexity a big company like Hewlett-Packard can deal with. You hire lawyers and accountants and lobbyists. A small business can’t deal with it.

Regardless of party, regardless of political persuasion, the reality is also that bureaucrats in Washington write regulations. The reality is that every year, regardless of party, hundreds of new regulations hit the books and none are ever repealed. So think about the thicket of complexity that an entrepreneur has to deal with. I fear that we are literally over time choking the life out of the engine of growth in our economy. And you can say that every single provision in the tax code makes sense individually, but when you get all of this piled on top you have a thicket of complexity that is becoming harder and harder to navigate, so people stop trying.

So I believe, while we are now maybe beginning to engage in a debate about tax reform, we need to be thinking about radically simple tax reform. My personal view is that we should lower every rate and close every loophole. But forget whatever your personal views are about what tax rates should be. I think a fundamental goal now

needs to be, if we care about encouraging entrepreneurship, about making it easier for small-business owners to start and stay in business, about convincing small-business owners and entrepreneurs the government isn’t hostile to you; the government is there to help you get started, to encourage you to put your money at risk and build something for yourself and your family and for others.

We need a tax code and a regulatory structure that is vastly simpler.

Big government works for big labor and big business. Big government works for people who are big enough with enough resources to navigate big government, but if you’re a little entrepreneur somewhere, you don’t have the resources to navigate it. We need a wholesale mindset shift in Washington that says, “What is it that the government is here to do?” The government is not here to make every decision; we can’t; technology renders us incompetent to make every decision. What we’re here to do is create an environment in which entrepreneurs can thrive because they represent the engine of growth and innovation in this country. For entrepreneurs and small-business owners to thrive, we need to vastly simplify the morass.

So that’s one structural issue that we need Photo by Rikki Ward

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to deal with. I’m somewhat pessimistic that in all of the debate over what we should do with sequester and debt and deficit, that somewhere in that debate, we will actually have a real conversation about a radical simplification of our tax code and a re-look at our regulatory regime. I believe every single regulation should be looked at and we should actually get rid of a lot that don’t make sense.

The second structural thing that we need in this country is very fundamental education reform. Education is a popular topic; obviously we’ve been talking about it a long time and we’ve been spending a lot of money on it. It’s interesting to note that as a nation we spend more per pupil than every other nation in the world but one, and yet the quality of our output continues to deteriorate. California as a state continues to spend more money per pupil than 49 out of 50 states, yet our results are at the very bottom of the pile. So it’s actually not all about how much money you spend. It’s about what are you spending it on? Where are you spending it? How are you spending it? The budget of the Department of Education has increased virtually every year for 40 years, and the quality of our education continues to deteriorate.

Clearly there isn’t a direct link between the amount of money we spend and the quality of the result that we get.

What is the thing that makes the most difference to students? Everyone agrees: the quality of our teachers. My own view is that the most important thing we can do now is make sure that every parent and every child has a real chance. I don’t know how many of you watched the teacher strike that went on in Chicago. But in the middle of that strike, the head of the Teachers Union said, We can’t really be held accountable for results because so many of our children come from poor or distressed family situations. That should never be our point of view in this country.

This is a country where we truly believe that every person has potential, that it doesn’t matter how you start; it doesn’t matter where you come from; it doesn’t matter how much money you have; what matters is that you have potential. Education is the single most powerful tool to help people to fulfill their potential, and we are failing our children.

We cannot be serious about growing our economy or competing in the 21st century unless we get serious about truly fundamental education reform that starts with the basic,

Moderator Alison van Diggelen (left) quizzes Carly Fiorina

which is every child must have a good teacher.

Clearly many children do not.

We need fundamental immigration reform. This country was built by immigrants.

We have to have comprehensive immigration reform, not just because we need more high-skilled workers, which is, of course, a thing that Silicon Valley companies are very focused on, but because you never know who is going to have the most potential; it could be the migrant farm worker’s daughter who turns out to make a huge difference to her community. I think we have a chance of getting comprehensive immigration reform passed this time around – I hope so very much, but I also think that if either party tries to push it too far that that very delicate compromise might fall apart. But we must have a legal immigration system that works; we must deal with, in an appropriate and respectful way, the people who are already here, and we must never forget that people come here for one reason – to build a better life for themselves and their family.

We [also] need fundamental “innovation reform.” This is a country that has always led in innovation, and that is why we have led economically. This is now the century of brainpower and innovation. The country with the best brainpower wins; the country with the best ideas wins. That is how this century will play out. There are four industries that are going to define this century, and we should be leading in innovation in every single one of them. Certainly, information technology, including social networking, and we’re doing really well there; energy; biotech and health tech; and aerospace and

Photo by Rikki Ward

space technology, because if you look at the kinds of innovations that have come from an aerospace program, they’re very fundamental and significant in our economy.

Now why do I [call it] “fundamental innovation reform”? Because, in truth, our government is not playing the right role right now, and it hasn’t been for some time. I believe government’s most productive role in

“The country with the

best brainpower wins; the country with the best ideas wins. That is how this century will play out.” innovation is to invest in basic research and platform innovation – things that only government has the resources to do, or perhaps government in conjunction with academia, as an example. You all know the story of how the Internet was invented: it came out of something called DARPA. Only the government had the resources to invest in that kind of platform capability. The space program, which only the government had the resources to invest in, has produced scores of technologies that have helped us lead and have made our lives better. What the government cannot do is play venture capitalist. We’ve got a lot of great venture capitalists around here. We don’t need more in Washington, D.C. Government is bad at determining winners and

losers. What government should be doing is investing in these basic platform capabilities and creating the environment in which innovators can prosper, in which people say, “Wow, I’m being encouraged to take a risk!”

This is a time in human history driven by technology, where the pace of change is accelerating, where institutions with centralized, hierarchical decision-making are increasingly unable to keep pace, where individuals are empowered, and where brainpower and ideas are going to define winners. That is why we have to look at the structural issues we have in our economy now and rethink in fairly fundamental ways. That’s very difficult to do.

I particularly recognize that it’s very difficult for our current political institutions and our current political processes to wrestle with big issues that are complicated; yet it is what’s required. Without some of these fundamental reforms, our economy is going to continue to perform at way under its potential and we’re going to continue to have too many people in this country who are not getting a shot at the American Dream. I remain, always, optimistic, because I think this is the most incredible era in human history. More things are more possible for more people in more places than ever before in history. But people, companies and nations stay ahead by recognizing that sometimes we have to fundamentally re-look at not our core values, not the things that have made us great, but what we need to do to continue to compete in a world that will always continue to change.

This program was made possible by the generous support of PG&E.

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Photo by Rikki Ward

(continued from page 8) political parties have become glorified concierges, and basically their job is to introduce politicians to money and to PACs and to K Street to help them get re-elected. Both parties do it. Both parties profess various kinds of platforms and ideological goals and so forth, but really, when push comes to shove, they don’t stand for anything.

Now, I come from the conservative side, the Republican side, but I am really mortified to say, the Republicans don’t stand any more when they make decisions – not when they make speeches. We have our Lincoln Day dinners and so forth, and you can hear all the grand rhetoric you want about how we can’t live beyond our means, the government’s too big, we’ve got to shrink the beast and all of this – but what they’ve done when they’ve been in power in the last two decades has been nearly the opposite. After all, who bailed out Wall Street? Who bailed out AIG? Who started the bailout of the auto industry and GM? It was a Republican White House.

It violated all the rules of the free market. It violated the principle that if you make errors, if you make mistakes, if you have failure, then the consequences have to unfold or you can’t have a private economy that’s productive and healthy; you will get moral hazard – you will

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get everyone thinking: You can swing for the fences, you can leverage yourself, you can take big risks, and if somehow things don’t work out and you run into failure, they’re going to come and put a safety net under you – particularly this happened on Wall Street. So here’s the Republican Party doing that. Here is the Republican Party running huge deficits in peacetime during the Bush era – and I’m not particularly trying to pick on him; I could find other administrations to talk about – unfinanced wars, two of them that we never should have had, two huge tax cuts. Tax cuts are fine if you cut spending by the same amount and are willing to pay your bills; none of that happened.

Now, you’re going to say, “Why are you being so hard on the Republicans?” I don’t have to be hard on the Democrats; they’re hard on themselves in terms of some of the things they tell you. If you look at my heroes and villains – and I don’t say this in a personal sense but in a policy sense – it’s pretty much a mix of Republicans and Democrats. For instance, my heroes start with Calvin Coolidge, and of course this drives the Keynesians nuts – all the people who think that we’re on the right track with this constant stimulus to the economy and deficit spending and a Fed that’s really out of control.

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But I also go through the middle period of the century and talk about Eisenhower and what a fantastic president he really was, because he actually balanced the budget four times out of eight. Nobody [else] has come close. If you take his entire eight years, the average deficit was a half a percentage point of GDP; today if they get a half a percentage point of GDP deficit, they would say, “Hallelujah, salvation has come!” They can’t even get close to that. But more than that, Eisenhower was a war hero who said that the Defense Department is a danger if we let it get out of control, if we let the budget get too big, if we let the military-industrial complex have too much influence in the legislative process and in the policy equation. And unbelievably Eisenhower cut the defense budget by 30 percent by basically saying we’re going to cut back the war machine of the United States to only what we need to deal with the real Soviet nuclear threat, but we’re not going to have a big land force, we’re not going to have the capability to engage in wars of invasion and occupation, because that’s not where our national interest lies.

The reason I mention this is that [Eisenhower] was the last president who actually tamed the Pentagon; he was the last president who actually stood up to the military-

industrial complex, cut the defense budget to under $400 billion in today’s dollars. Now, they’re down there today having a big fight about whether the defense budget should be $650 billion or $620 billion, nearly 80 percent more than Eisenhower thought was necessary to deal with a real enemy, the Soviet Union, that still had an economy that functions. Today some people in the Beltway haven’t got the memo that the Cold War ended in 1990; Russia has become a kleptocracy that is far more interested in stealing from each other than they are in impinging on their neighbors. [Laughter.]

The only other industrial economy that could even mount a threat to us is the red capitalist miracle of China, and obviously they’re the biggest export machine in the world – they’re the Nike and Apple capital of the world.

They desperately need markets for all this stuff they’re making. Are they going to bomb 3,000 Wal-Marts in America? I think not.

[Laughter.] This is a bipartisan issue.

Way back in 1967 when I was in college, I cut my teeth politically protesting the war in Vietnam, marching on the Pentagon and wondering, what in the world are we doing in Southeast Asia in the jungles, dropping napalm from the sky against people who couldn’t possibly harm the United States?

They had the domino theory and all that, but we know today that that was nonsense. We know that in 1961-3 when this was escalated that the people of China were starving in their villages because Mao’s wonderful theory of collectivizing agriculture and turning everybody into a backyard steelmaker destroyed his economy. They lost 40 million people to starvation in China at the time we were invading Vietnam to stop the Chinese from coming across the border. They couldn’t get across the border; they were starving.

The reason I mentioned being an antiwar protester is that in my original political foray in life, I worked for the peace candidate in 1968: Bobby Kennedy didn’t make it through the campaign. Then there was Gene McCarthy and he was shoved aside. Finally in 2008 the peace candidate finally won.

Obama won the election and he had a huge mandate: enough of these wars. What they were telling you about Iraq – we’re going to win the hearts and minds of the people – is the same thing I heard when I was a kid in 1965 that all we were going to do was win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese

people by destroying their villages and other things. We knew that that didn’t make any sense, and here we are doing it again, same thing in Afghanistan. The peace candidate finally wins in [2008], and what does he do?

He ends up increasing the defense budget even beyond this huge level that it was left at

by George Bush and setting it at 80 percent higher than what Eisenhower, the real general, said was necessary. This is the power of the military-industrial complex, that Obama had a mandate and he beat his ploughshare into a mightier sword.

[This] is an illustration of the power of crony capitalism. We are running this massive military budget today because it’s a jobs program, because the defense contractors have to have another brand-new modern fighter when we have no one to use it on anywhere in the world. They have to continue to have an 11-carrier battle group navy when no one else in the world even has a navy with two-carrier battle groups. Some of you may be interested to know that China has

“This is ... crony capitalism.

We are running this

massive military budget today because it’s a jobs program.” one aircraft carrier battle group. Where did they get that aircraft carrier? They bought it used from the Ukraine. So this is why we’re maintaining at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year 11 aircraft carrier groups? It is really kind of a madness.

I think it’s easy sometimes for people to see that if they’re this far off base on the defense issues, on national security, if they’re this subservient to the military-industrial complex, then what do we say about the tax code? I say it’s the same thing. For the last 20 years or so the tax code had been written by the K Street lobbyists, and the reason it’s a loophole-ridden embarrassment disgrace is that it’s controlled lock, stock and barrel by one interest group after another.

Unfortunately my Republican colleagues – and I’m a lapsed Republican by now – got hooked on the idea that fiscal rectitude is

no longer important. [Dick] Cheney said deficits don’t matter, and those were some of the worst words ever spoken in the Beltway by a Republican. But they got so hooked on the idea – “let’s not worry about the deficit; let’s cut taxes” – that they basically turned K Street into the tax cutting department of the United States, and they just chiseled away and riddled the thing with loopholes, unfairness and things that make no sense.

The one great thing that Ronald Reagan did before he left office was the tax reform of 1986. That leveled the playing field, and it said all kinds of income will be taxed the same: capital gains, carried interest, dividends, interest, wage and salary. The bus driver and the Wall Street speculator were all going to pay 28 percent uniform rate at the top. Where we got after the 1990s and then the Republican tax cutting department taking control of things during the Bush era is that we got the ordinary rate up to 39 percent and the capital gains rate all the way down to 15 [percent]. That created such an unlevel playing field, such a huge gap that the tax lawyers and the accountants and the whole financial system became oriented toward loading up companies with debt in order to use the cash flow to pay debt – that was tax deductible – and after a couple of years, sell the thing, take a capital gain, pay only 15 percent and move on to the next levered deal.

So our whole tax code is now deformed.

It doesn’t generate very much revenue.

But worse, it channels activity into ways and means and nooks and crannies of the economy that are determined not by the free market and by supply and demand and risk and all the other things that they give speeches about, but by the tax code and what the K Street lobbyists have been able to get in.

I have an example, and I call it the “granny trade” versus the “Goldman Sachs trade.”

The granny trade works like this: If you were a prudent American family in the ’50s ’60s and ’70s and you spent a lifetime trying to be prudent, frugal, and you were able to save $100,000 over a working lifetime and you’re now retired on that $100,000, you know how much Ben Bernanke’s decided you’re entitled to earn as interest because he’s doing it for the greater good of the economy? You are making, if you put it in a CD, a half a percent, and that means you’re making $400 a year on a lifetime of savings. This policy is not from the free market; it’s not from the

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supply and demand for short-term money.

It is a rate set by the Fed through its massive operations in the market day in and day out in its huge bond buying. Now, if we had to put that proposition to Congress – “Do you think that we ought to be crushing the savers of America? Do you think we ought to be telling Granny that she can only make $400 on a lifetime of savings?” – it would be laughed out of court; it would never get a vote. But we have the Fed doing it, because the Fed is basically functioning as the monetary politburo of the United States. It runs everything. There are no interest rates that are real left in the market. The stock market trades because they think that the Fed is going to keep injecting liquidity, or what I [call] monetary cocaine [laugher] into the system.

Now, compare the granny trade with the Goldman Sachs trade: Today Goldman Sachs could go down and buy $1 billion worth of Treasury bonds that yield 1.8 percent and immediately put them up as collateral, borrow in the repo market – which is the overnight, short-term market that you can get on Wall Street – $980 million and pay one tenth of 1 percent of interest on the borrowed money.

So if you’re earning [1.8] and you’re paying nothing, the spread’s huge – it’s $50,000 a day for doing nothing.

The bailout of Wall Street in September 2008 was utterly unnecessary; it set precedents that are going to live for time immemorial and it undermined any sense of financial discipline and responsibility that we have in our society. This wasn’t going to be the Great Depression 2.0. This wasn’t going to spread to the rest of the economy. AIG, when they bailed it out with $185 billion, was not a contagious financial disease that was going to spread around the country. They could have put it in bankruptcy. All of the paper that AIG had issued was at the holding company. The holding company could have been bankrupted, all the insurance subsidiaries, whether they were life insurance, or property and casualty, all of those were regulated by state insurance commissioners; no one could have raided them for cash or money and so no insurance policy holder was ever at risk.

The panic basically occurred on the third floor of the Treasury building, which was occupied by Goldman Sachs – that is Hank Paulson and all the Goldmanites that he had running around in there. I call it the Blackberry panic of 2008. They were all

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running around seeing the price of [trades] dropping by the hour and concluded the world was ending and therefore anything and everything that could be done to stop it cold right now should be done, even though if you look at it carefully, there would have been no negative effect. If Goldman had gone under, they could have been reorganized.

There’s a lot of talent there. There would be five sons of Goldman today, but they would be a lot more prudent if they went through the proper course of bankruptcy and had lost money because they were gambling houses and the behavior never changed.

If those banks were too big to fail – which they weren’t; that’s all propaganda that came from the Goldman Sachs occupation of the Treasury building; I call it a financial coup d’état. If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to exist. Break them up and make our financial system a little safer.

Question and answer session with Evalyn S. Dilsaver, member of The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors EVALYN Dilsaver: Two lawmakers today introduced a proposal to break up the big banks. The Treasury has 90 days to do it after they’ve determined which ones are too big to fail. Is it a step in the right direction?

DAVID STOCKMAN: Yes, I think it is.

Now, it sounds draconian, but our financial system is so much at risk, it’s so fragile; we’ve gone through two or three of these busts over the last 15 years, starting back in 1998 when they bailed out long-term capital, that you have to take extreme action. Part of the reason is the bank lobbying forces, the Wall Street lobbying forces, are so powerful that instead of doing that they passed Dodd-Frank [financial services industry regulation], which is hundreds of pages of rubbery language that means nothing, an enabling act. It has now been in rulemaking for two or three years, and it’s still not clear what half of it means.

The system festers, nothing is done and they fight in this puzzle palace of Dodd/Frank when we should be doing something drastic because it’s the only solution.

So what I [propose] in my book is that for the next 10 years the big banks are under economic house arrest. They cannot use the earnings that they’re making today to buy in their stock and boost the stock price, making the stock options worth more and get

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back the same old party. Until we get this system really healthy and until we’re in the clear, if you’re building up earnings they stay sequestered on your balance sheet, build up a reserve, build up a cushion, so the next time we have a big spill or some kind of bubble implosion in the financial markets, you don’t come running to the taxpayers because you’re on the ragged edge; you’ve got a big cushion. I further suggest that banks that are bigger than 1 percent of GDP – that’s $150 billion – are too big to exist, and we ought to put a cap on the size of banks at $150 billion.

Dilsaver: What will it take to pass a true balanced budget amendment?

STOCKMAN: A miracle. [Laughter.] If you look at what they’re saying today and you compare that to the size of the gap that we face, it’s a non-viable equation. Something will break. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they’re using rosy scenarios to project an economy that gets better and better and grows at rates that we haven’t seen for several decades and creates jobs at rates that haven’t happened since the 1990s, and we’re in a world where there’s all kinds of headwinds. Our economy is going to struggle to move forward and, therefore, the projections they’re making for the deficit coming down are not real.

Dilsaver: Do you see anything positive?

STOCKMAN: I see a positive that this society of ours has a longer tradition of self-government and freedom and liberty and people who are educated and responsible and want to take care of themselves, and people who are willing to sacrifice if they were only told the truth. But we’re not liberating that great asset that we have that is spread throughout Main Street America, coast to coast, because we have in Washington and on Wall Street a rigged game that benefits a very small slice of our society and leaves the rest of us floundering. That is the dilemma. So I could be positive if I thought mainstream America could take back control of its government and could take back control of its financial life, but I don’t see that happening. Therefore, I’m kind of stuck in the middle, in a dilemma, and I’m trying to point out what some of the truths are that are being kept away from the public day in and day out.

This program was made possible by the generous support of the Koret Foundation and the Taube Family Foundation.

(grover norquist, cont. from page 11) into welfare dependency, guys who make $90,000 a year managing the dependency of others, making sure they don’t get jobs and become Republicans. Then you have all the coercive utopians, people who get government grants to enlighten their moral inferiors on how they should structure their lives. These are the people who mandate that cars are too small to put your entire family into, who come up and mandate that toilets don’t flush completely, and on the Sabbath you have to separate the green glass from the brown glass from the white glass for the recycling priests. They have a list of things that you have to do or you’re not allowed to do that’s slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus. It goes on and on and on and on.

Now, the left’s coalition can work together as long as we keep putting more money in the center of the table. Then everyone can get along cheerfully like they do in the movie shortly after the bank robbery: One for you, one for you, one for you. Everybody around the table’s happy and cheerful, but if the pile of money in the center of the table begins to dwindle, then all the guys around the table begin to look at each other a little bit more like the second to the last scene in the lifeboat

movies. Now we’re trying to decide who we eat or who we throw overboard, which explains, how does the Republican Party act?

How does the Democratic Party act?

First thing the modern Republican Party says is, “Stop throwing money in the center

“Until

you say no

to tax increases, you never reform government. We’re not raising taxes; end of conversation.” of the table. Stop hiring more Democratic precinct workers.” So [number] one, no tax increases. There’s a political reason. Don’t do tax increases, the other team hires Democratic precinct workers with it. Two, the other is, until you say no to tax increases, you never reform government. This is always the second half. A lot of people focus on don’t raise taxes. Fine, good, if you get that one right it’s a very helpful step. There is a second

step: Reform government so that it’s more effective and costs less. You cannot and will not ever have the second conversation until the first conversation is closed. We’re not raising taxes; end of conversation. Now we’re going to reform government.

If the door is open to tax increases, whatever you start to do – reform of government, asking whether something you’ve been doing for 50 or 20 or 100 years still makes sense – well, we’ll just raise taxes, keep doing everything we’ve been doing. You had that new idea, Fred; we’ll just get more money and do your new idea, too. We’ll put new barnacles right on top of the old barnacles and we’ll just keep going.

I would argue we just lived through the third big fight on this subject. In 1982, the Democrats went to Ronald Reagan and said, “If you raise taxes one dollar, for each dollar of taxes you raise, we will cut spending three dollars.” Since Democrats had the House and Republicans who thought like Democrats were running the Senate, and Reagan was kind of outnumbered, he agreed to this three-to-one deal and evidently believed it was going to happen. Taxes went up and spending didn’t go down; it went up. He didn’t get three dollars in cuts, he didn’t get Photo by Ed Ritger

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two dollars in cuts, he didn’t get one dollar in cuts – he didn’t get any cuts. Spending went up because they took all the money and spent more.

Eight years later they went to George Herbert Walker Bush, who had not been paying attention, and said, “You give us one dollar in tax increase, we’ll give you two dollars of spending cuts.” Now, I thought that that was just insulting. It seems to me if you’re going to cheat somebody, you give them $10 in imaginary spending cuts. Instead they said, “You are a cheaper date than the last guy and you get two dollars of imaginary spending cuts.” He took the deal. Taxes went up.

Spending went up more than was planned. It didn’t go down less than we were promised.

Taxes went up, not down.

Having lived through those two things, and watching George Herbert Walker Bush – who managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, kicked Iraq out of Kuwait without getting stuck occupying the place for a decade, who had a fairly successful presidency

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– there was one problem, the tax increase, and he threw away a perfectly good presidency.

That’s [why] from ’94 on, we started to get Ivory Soap percentages [“99 and 44/100 percent pure”] of the modern Republican Party making a commitment not to raise taxes. They said, “I’ve seen this Lucy-Charlie Brown football thing with tax increases and spending cuts. I’m not doing that again.”

Life of the party eople say, oh the Republican Party disappeared off the map in November of 2012. Thirty Republican governors, 20 Democratic governors, 25 states with complete Republican control, good for about a decade because of redistricting, not a one-off thing, and 13 states run by Democrats; twice as many Americans, the majority of Americans, live in states run by Republicans and at the national level, thanks to the marvels of redistricting, the House of Representatives, which is Republican now, will probably stay Republican for the decade, the Senate’s up in

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two and four years, the presidency is up in four years, so I think the Republican Party is poised to do well electorally.

But that also does depend, I think, on some reforms as we move forward in the future. To set the stage as to where we are, I think some of the guys who announced that the Republican Party disappeared in November missed something, and we can get into why I think Obama’s first term lasted two years, up until the Republicans took the House and started to say no, and his second term ended on the second of January when he signed the fiscal cliff deal and made all of the Bush tax cuts, which had been temporary, and the AMT [Alternative Minimum Tax] Patch, which had been temporary, he made 85 percent of them permanent.

He had a sword, which was that every two years these tax cuts disappear. If he’d let them lapse every two years, or let them lapse every year, whenever he negotiated with the Republicans on spending, like the sequester, he would say, “If you insist on a budget cut,

I will insist on not letting you keep as much of next year’s lapsing tax increase.”

How big was the sword he once held and holds no longer? It was a $500 billion tax increase on January 1st. Lasted a whole day?

On January 1st taxes went up $500 billion.

Bush 2001 tax cut went away, 2003 tax cut went away, and the AMT Patch, which was a huge piece of that, went away. Eighty five percent of it was restored for 98 percent of Americans. Now we go forward.

The president took his leverage and threw it away. He just walked away from it.

Now when he goes into the sequester and says, “How about not having the automatic sequester? Not having the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts?” The Republicans looked at him and said, “Thank you, no.” He had no argument. He had no clout, no ability to force the Republicans to stop the spending cuts. He could have had it. He did have it.

He threw it away. He set it to the side. Now there isn’t anything that the Republicans need him to do that he’s willing to do, so

we’ll just manage the sequester, manage the reduction in spending, wait for a different Senate, wait for a different president and pass [Rep. Paul Ryan’s legislation].

There aren’t going to be any massive new spending programs, massive new taxes.

There’s what you could do through the executive orders, but not legislative progress for his agenda.

To this day I have interesting conversations with really smart Democrats who tell me I’m right. They see that they had this leverage, they threw it away and they don’t know what they do now.

Question and answer session with Jonathan Weber, West Coast Bureau Chief for Thomson Reuters JONATHAN WEBER: In your remarks you did a good job of sort of parodying the Democratic position on things in general, but the difficulty it seems is that those are majority positions, for the most part. People like

their Social Security, they like their Medicare, they like their public schools, and if you look at the election results, if you look at all the polling, the sort of no new taxes/all taxes are bad [approach] – that’s not really a majority view. How do you manage with a position which is essentially a minority position?

GROVER NORQUIST: For starters, I’d point out that the polling that Gallup and others do – “Would you like a larger government that did more things and cost more in taxes, or a smaller government that provided fewer services?” – they even use that phrase, which I think tilts things in their direction, you get 2-to-1, 3-to-2 majorities for less government that costs less and does less for you. You could have a government that could cost less and we could pass on farm subsidies, and we could pass on occupying countries we can’t pronounce, and I’m not sure we’d notice the lack of service that we lost.

WEBER: [You’ve said] that the red states will stay red for 10 years because of redistricting, and I think a lot of people feel that the kind Photo by Ed Ritger

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Photo by Ed Ritger

of partisan redistricting is fundamentally anti-democratic and that is in fact why the House is the way it is. In California there is now nonpartisan redistricting. How do you respond to that view that this kind of gerrymandering is really not the way we should run our government?

NORQUIST: For about 200 years we had gerrymandering, and up until the last 15 years the Democrats controlled the process in most states and never whined about it.

WEBER: That’s not the question, though.

NORQUIST: It is the question, though. You can’t change your position on this stuff and go, “Now there’s a problem.”

WEBER: I know. I’m just asking the question, today do you think that gerrymandered redistricting is good public policy?

NORQUIST: You have to take that question apart because the Voting Rights Act requires gerrymandering on racial grounds.

This was a liberal’s idea. We’re living with it.

They extended the law 25 years. Why did the liberals do that and why does it damage the electoral process? Talk to liberal Democrats, why they wrote that bill, why they did it, why they like it? Don’t stick the Republicans with the Democratic legislation which in fact hurts the Democrats, but they did it. I would argue, you take a look at these states.

I was talking about over the next decade that it stays like this, partly that people won elections and also, the Democrats in Illinois gerrymandered it. I don’t know who you

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think was running the California one, but it was run by Democrats and Democrat consultants, which is why they gave themselves the two-thirds majority that you have in California. You had to work at those districts to get it. I realize it was called nonpartisan, they called it that in New Jersey, too, and I think that’s clever, but it was a clear partisan redistricting. Talk to any Republicans.

WEBER: Yeah, well Republicans would say that. I don’t think most people think the redistricting was partisan in California.

NORQUIST: OK. Do you think your pension is fully funded? [Laughter.]

WEBER: Would it be fair to say that you kind of reject the Christian right agenda, which says that governments should enforce a set of religious based views around contraception, abortion and gay marriage in particular?

NORQUIST: Well, on contraception I think there’s an easy question there. You say the federal government ought not to be taking money from people and spending it on that issue. People should handle their own situations. If somebody finds it morally problematic as Roman Catholics can, you shouldn’t tax them and fund something that is problematic. Nobody has told you you can’t do anything. But we’re not going to force you to fund it.

WEBER: How about gay marriage?

NORQUIST: Gay marriage is the interesting one. Europeans screwed this up a long time ago when they got the state involved in

JU NE/JU LY 2013

marriage. Before that, it wasn’t. How do you disentangle the state’s interference in what people of faith see as a sacrament? Then the state stepped in and grabbed a hold of it and has been redescribing it for some time.

I tend to think that you’re going to see gay marriage, gun control, a number of issues be ones that the 10th Amendment and federalism help to answer. Do you need a one-size fits all, top-down effort, or do you have different states doing different things?

Fears people have on gay marriage may evaporate when they look at New York do it for a while and they go, “Oh, that didn’t do what I thought it would do.”

You’re seeing the same conversation now on marijuana prohibition. Some states for some time have been having a little lighter hand on that. I actually much prefer 50 states taking 50 different approaches on difficult questions, because then you can look around and see what’s worked and see what doesn’t work, and if there’s a fear that’s real, and if you liberalize the marijuana laws in Colorado and everybody falls to pieces, then you back up. If you liberalize and that’s not what happens and it’s no worse or better than alcohol, which has its problems, you go, “OK, that’s not what we feared.”

This program was made possible by the generous support of the Travers Family Foundation.

Programs

For up-to-date information on programs, and to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, go to commonwealthclub.org

OVERVIEW

TICKETs

The Commonwealth Club organizes more than 450 events every year – on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports.

Programs are held throughout the Bay Area.

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all Club programs – including “Members Free” events – require tickets.

Programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Tickets are available at will call. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. If a program is sold out and your tickets are not claimed at our box office by the program start time, they will be released to our stand-by list. Select events include premium seating; premium refers to the first several rows of seating.

STANDARD PROGRAMS Typically one hour long, these speeches cover a variety of topics and are followed by a question and answer session. Most evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

PROGRAM SERIES CLIMATE ONE programs are a conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. To understand any of them, it helps to understand them all.

GOOD LIT features both established literary luminaries and upand-coming writers in conversation. Includes Food Lit. INFORUM is for and by people in their 20s to mid-30s, though events are open to people of all ages.

MEMBER–LED FORUMS (MLF) Volunteer-driven programs focus on particular fields. Most evening programs include a wine networking reception.

Member-Led Forums Chair Dr. Carol Fleming carol.fleming@speechtraining com FORUM CHAIRS ARTS Anne W. Smith asmith@ggu.edu Lynn Curtis lynnwcurtis@comcast.net ASIA–PACIFIC AFFAIRS Cynthia Miyashita cmiyashita@hotmail.com BAY GOURMET Cathy Curtis ccurtis873@gmail SF BOOK DISCUSSION Barbara Massey b4massey@yahoo.com BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Kevin O’Malley kevin@techtalkstudio.com ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Ann Clark cbofcb@sbcglobal.net GROWNUPS John Milford Johnwmilford@gmail.com

Health & Medicine William B. Grant wbgrant@infionline.net Patty James patty@pattyjames.com HUMANITIES George C. Hammond george@pythpress.com INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Norma Walden norwalden@aol.com LGBT Stephen Seewer stephenseewer@gmail.com Julian Chang julianclchang@gmail.com MIDDLE EAST Celia Menczel celiamenczel@sbcglobal.net PSYCHOLOGY Patrick O’Reilly oreillyphd@hotmail.com science & technology Chisako Ress chisakoress@gmail.com

RADIO, Video and podcasts Hear Club programs on about 200 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States. For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to: KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs on select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

KOIT (96.5 FM and 1260 AM) Sundays at 6 a.m.

KLIV (1590 AM) Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

Watch Club programs on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast & DirecTV the last Sunday of each month at 11 a.m. Select Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley programs air on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30).

View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at fora.tv and youtube.com/commonwealthclub

Subscribe to our free podcasting service to automatically download a new program recording to your personal computer each week: commonwealthclub.org/podcast.

HARD OF HEARING? To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Ricardo Esway at resway@commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 869-5911 seven working days before the event.

J U N E/J U LY 2013

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

23

Eight Weeks Calendar June 03 – July 28 M on

Tue

Wed

05

June 03

04

5:30 p.m. Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzberg FM 6:00 p.m. David Kennedy: The Modern American Military FM 6:00 p.m. Living Healthy in a Toxic World

5:15 p.m. Encore Career Handbook 6:30 p.m. George Packer: The New America 6:30 p.m. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen 7:00 p.m. Temple Grandin

10

11

12

12:00 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social 6:00 p.m. Start-ups, Entrepreneurs and Ninja Innovation FM 6:00 p.m. North Indian Classical Music FM

6:00 p.m. Thinking Moms’ Revolution 7:00 p.m. An Evening Affair with Dan Savage and Daniel Handler

12:00 p.m. Vitamin D: Its Role in Risk Reduction for Autism and Breast Cancer 12:00 p.m. U.S.-Cuba Relations 6:00 p.m. Birds of Paradise Lost

17

18

19

12:00 p.m. Latinas in Business: Inspirational Strategies for Success FM

12:00 p.m. Sea Surge 6:00 p.m. Jonathan Alter: The Obama Presidency

12:00 p.m. Governors Ritter and Whitman: Risk and Resilience 6:00 p.m. Sir Ken Robinson: Revolutionizing Education 6:30 p.m. Your Network is your Net Worth

24

25

26

5:30 p.m. Middle East Discussion Group FE 6:00 p.m. The Billionaire’s Apprentice FM 6:00 p.m. Brian Michael Jenkins FM

5:15 p.m. How to Self-Insure for Long-Term Care 6:00 p.m. The Future of Presidential Debates in the American Electoral Process 7:00 p.m. Nolan Bushnell

5:15 p.m. SF Pride Presents: San Francisco Supervisors David Campos and Scott Wiener

July 01

02

03

08

09

10

5:30 p.m. Explore the World from The Commonwealth Club FE 6:00 p.m. The Alchemy of Humor FM

6:00 p.m. Chef Hubert Keller

2:00 p.m. Nob Hill Walking Tour 5:15 p.m. How to Recover Your Childhood Brilliance: The Special Genius of Those over 50

15

16

17 6:00 p.m. Why Austerity Kills 7:00 p.m. Dale Schenk: The Road to Conquering Diseases of the Brain

22

23

5:15 p.m. The Elephant in the Room: Difficult Talks We All Should Have FM

6:00 p.m. Sky-High Rents, Disappearing Nonprofits 6:30 p.m. Reza Aslan: Zealot

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June/July 2013

24

Legend Thu

San Francisco

FM

Free program for members

East Bay

FE

Free program for everyone

Silicon Valley

MO

Members–only program

Fri

S at

08

Sun

09

06

07

2:00 p.m. San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour 6:00 p.m. 82nd Annual California Book Awards

12:00 p.m. Afghanistan FM

13

14

15

16

20

21

22

23

2:00 p.m. North Beach Walking Tour

9:00 a.m. Transportation Finance: Catching up with the Rest of the World FE

27

28

29

30

05

06

07

12

13

14

19

20

21

26

27

28

1:30 p.m. Rebels with a Cause: Film Screening and Discussion (North Bay)

6:00 p.m. From Closet to Corner Office

6:00 p.m. Walking the Way 6:30 p.m. Clay Shirky: The Internet. Powered

by Love.

6:30 p.m. Overheated

04

Independence Day Club offices closed

11 6:00 p.m. Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior 6:00 p.m. Joseph Ellis: The Birth of American Independence

18 6:00 p.m. Trade in Your Rights: Russia’s Circuitous March to Democracy 7:00 p.m. Y Combinator Grads: Founders’ Stories

25 2:00 p.m. Russian Hill Walking Tour

june/july 2013

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25

AUGUST 2013 PROTECTING BIODIVERSITY

NATURAL CAPITAL

+ CITIZENS + SCIENCE

When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it. – Paul Newman The time to act is now! Our Member-Led Forums present a month-long series of programs empowering everyday citizens to get involved, be inspired, get closer to nature, and learn the latest in technological advances that will save our planet. Hear from leading thought pioneers in the fields of technology, psychology, conservation, and the arts. Come join the movement this August! For even more programs in this series, visit: commonwealthclub.org Citizen Science celebration at the California Academy of Sciences NightLife Thu, Aug 1 • start time TBA Bernie Krause, author of The Great Animal Orchestra Mon, Aug 5 • 12 p.m.

The Snake, the Seeker and the Smartphone: Can Tech Save Biodiversity?

Tue, Aug 6 • 6 p.m.

A Psychological Approach to Environmental Consciousness Tue, Aug 6 • 5:15 p.m.

Farallon Islands Excursion with Michael Ellis Fri, Aug 9 • 7:30 a.m.

Making Art with Living Systems: The Exploratorium, Behind the Scenes Sat, Aug 10 • 10 a.m.

Water and Conflict: Is Water More Important Than Oil? Mon, Aug 12 • 12 p.m.

How I Came to the Ends of the Earth and What I Found There Tue, Aug 13 • 6 p.m.

Investing in Natural Capital Thu, Aug 15 • 6 p.m.

Tipping Point for Planet Earth Mon, Aug 19 • 6 p.m.

BioMimicry Tue, Aug 20 • start time TBA California’s Offshore Revolution Thu, Aug 22 • 6 p.m.

Exploratorium Global Studios in the Middle East Fri, Aug 23 • 12 p.m.

Backyards, Beaches, Birds and Bees: Citizen Science Mon, Aug 26 • 6 p.m.

Richard Louv on the Nature-Deficit Disorder August 27 • 6 p.m.

Oceans: Open for Business Wed, Aug 28 • start time TBA The Spine of the Continent in conversation with Mary Ellen Hannibal Thu, Aug 29 • 6 p.m.

Join award-winning author and gastronomy expert Gerry Dawes as you sample regional food and wine, and meet with chefs, winemakers, and restaurant owners for a true insider’s perspective on the culinary delights of Southern Spain.

• Savor wine and tapas and Spanish delicacies throughout our journey.

• Wander through the Moorish city of Granada

• Visit the gypsy caves of Sacromonte to watch a

zambra performance and learn tips from a chef in Granada.

and visit the Alhambra.

• Sample Andalucian olive oils and tour a sherry

relax in the Plaza Mayor of Chinchón.

• Visit Madrid’s world-famous Prado Museum.

• Experience Almagro’s Golden Age Theater.

• Visit the legendary Mezquita in Córdoba and • Tour Cadiz’s colorful market and explore the Jewish quarter in Seville.

bodega.

“My first introduction to Spanish cuisine was a fabulous two-week trip I took all around Spain with Gerry Dawes in 1990.”

– Thomas Keller, chef/owner, The French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon, Bouchon Bakery

To enjoy this program, travelers must be in overall good health and able to walk reasonable distances often on uneven or cobblestone streets. We move locations and hotels several times in order to experience the charms of several towns. Drive times are 1½–3 hours on average. Dinners in Spain are served late and are lively affairs.

Hotels are mostly good 4-star, but not luxury. They are chosen for quality in the range and location, so you have the freedom to explore on your own!

Dates: October 8–20, 2013 (13 days) Group Size:

Minimum 12, Maximum 24

Cost:

18–24 participants: $4,995 per person 12–17 participants: $5,395 per person Based on double occupancy; $800 single room supplement

Included: Tour leader and food and wine expert Gerry Dawes; activities as specified; airport transfers on designated group dates and time; transportation throughout; accommodations as specified (or similar); meals (B=breakfast, L=lunch, D=dinner, T=tapas meal) per itinerary; wine at lunches and dinners; special guest speakers; local guides; Commonwealth Club rep with 15 or more participants; gratuities to local guides, driver, and for included group activities; pre-departure materials.

Not included: International air to Madrid; meals not specified as included; optional outings and gratuities for those outings; alcoholic beverages beyond wine at lunches and dinner; travel insurance (recommended, information will be sent upon registration); items of a purely personal nature.

Tuesday, October 8 Depart the U.S. for independent flights to Madrid.

Wednesday, October 9 MADRID Transfer to our hotel. Early this evening take a tour of the world famous Prado Museum with works by Velasquez, Goya, El Greco, as well as the Flemish masters. Continue to an old Madrid taberna for a tour orientation, followed by a walk through the Old Quarter and the Plaza Mayor. Dinner is at a Castilian tavern where we savor local specialties, such as jamón Ibérico de bellota, grilled mushrooms, roast suckling pig, and Spanish wine.

NH Hotel Paseo (D) Thursday, October 10 MADRID Marvel at Picasso’s immortal Guernica at the Reina Sofia museum. Follow in the footsteps of Cervantes and Lope de Vega during a walking tour of Madrid’s literary quarter. The afternoon is free for exploring museums, shops, and tabernas on your own. Enjoy a flamenco performance followed by dinner at one of Madrid’s great restaurants.

NH Hotel Paseo (B,D) Friday, October 11 LA MANCHA / CÓRDOBA Travel to Córdoba, home of a magnificent Roman bridge, the legendary Mezquita (Moorish mosque), and the evocative ancient Jewish and Moorish quarters. En route pass through Don Quixote country, stopping to see the windmills above the saffron-producing town of Consuegra. Enjoy a tapas lunch at one of the greatest tabernas of

southern Spain. Tonight sample Montilla (the sherry-like wine of Córdoba) in an ancient house with a Roman wine cellar, followed by a traditional dinner.

NH Hotel Amistad (B,T,D) Saturday, October 12 CÓRDOBA / SEVILLA Journey to the quintessential Andalucian city of Carmen. Take an expertly guided tour of Sevilla, including the Gothic Cathedral and the Moorish Alcázar fortress, and stroll in this exceptionally charming and evocative city. Enjoy lunch on your own and a free afternoon. Gather tonight for a dinner of Andalucian specialties.

Hotel Inglaterra (B,D) Sunday, October 13 SEVILLA Explore Sevilla on a walking tour of the Old Jewish quarter with our leader Gerry Dawes who lived here for nearly four years. After lunch in the old quarter, the rest of the day is free for independent explorations. Take part in the tradition of the paseo, or evening stroll.

Hotel Inglaterra (B,L) Monday, October 14 SANLÚCAR DE BARRAMEDA Journey to the historic sherry town and fishing port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Visit the Plaza de Cabildo and the openair food market. Meet Javier Hidalgo, the owner of one of the greatest Sherry bodegas, and producer of La Gitana Manzanilla. Javier will show us his winery (founded in 1792) and let us sample his sherries. Enjoy lunch here accompanied by a range of Javier’s top-of-the-line wines. Dinner is on your own, offering an opportunity to try one of the many colorful seafood restaurants that line the Guadalquivir River.

Hotel Macia Doñana (B,L)

CST: 2096889-40 Photos: (cover) alreza; Waqas Ahmed; Festival de Almagro; Andrew Griffith; RonjaNilsson; Festival de Almagro/Flickr; (inside) dudek25; villen/stock.xchng; Meisam; Punxsutawneyphil/Flickr; (back) eschu1952/Flickr

For additional information or to make a reservation, contact Commonwealth Club Travel Online: commonwealthclub.org/travel

Telephone: (415) 597-6720

Email: Travel@commonwealthclub.org

Tuesday, October 15 CÁDIZ/SANLÚCAR DE BARRAMEDA From El Puerto de Santa María, take a ferry across the bay to Cádiz. Visit the provincial museum, the colorful market, and the cathedral where famous Spanish composer Manuel de Falla is entombed. Enjoy a casual seafood lunch complete with El Puerto’s fino sherry and Spanish beer. Return to Sanlúcar and learn some secrets of preparing fish from a well-known chef.

Tonight members of a prominent sherry family join us for dinner at one of Spain’s greatest traditional restaurants.

Hotel Macia Doñana (B,L,D) Wednesday, October 16 LOS PUEBLOS BLANCOS/RONDA En route to Ronda visit the unique Los Pueblos Blancos (white mountain villages) with stops in Arcos de la Frontera, Zahara e la Sierra, and Grazalema. Arrive in Ronda a former mountain bandit stronghold and Hemingway favorite. It is home to one of the oldest, most beautiful bullrings in Spain. Ronda also sits astride a 300-foot deep gorge and was where Carmen was filmed. After lunch in a colorful restaurant, take a walking tour which includes the bull ring and the Bandoleros Museum.

Hotel Catalonia Reina Victoria (B,L) Thursday, October 17 RONDA / GRANADA Travel to Granada for lunch prepared by a local chef trained at Restaurant Daniel in New York. Take an expert-led tour of the Cathedral, the tombs of Isabella and Ferdinand, and the exquisite collection of Flemish miniatures. Stroll through the labyrinthine streets of the Albaícin, the ancient Moorish quar-

ter. Tonight try Granada specialties, including the hams of Trévelez, cured in caves high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. For those who enjoy a late night, experience the gypsy caves of Sacromonte to watch a zambra performance.

Hotel Alhambra Palace (B,L,T) Friday, October 18 GRANADA / ALMAGRO Take a privately guided tour of the magical Moorish fortress, palaces and gardens of the world famous Alhambra. After a tapas lunch, we drive through the spectacular pass of Dispeñaperros with views of olive orchards. Visit an olive oil producer and sample excellent Andalucian oils. In Almagro, tour the 16th century Golden Age Theater. Enjoy Manchego specialties at our dinner, including some dishes mentioned in Don Quixote.

La Casa Del Rector (B,T,D) Saturday, October 19 LA MANCHA / TOLEDO / CHINCHÓN Travel to Toledo for lunch prepared by the town’s top chef at a site overlooking the town. Continue to the charming 16th century village of Chinchón, one of the most evocative towns in Spain.

Enjoy time on your own to sample the town’s original pastries with a snifter of their famous anis Chinchón liqueur. Our farewell dinner includes classic Castilian dishes in a restaurant overlooking Chinchón’s Plaza.

Hotel Condesa de Chinchón (B,L,D) Sunday,October 20 CHINCHÓN / MADRID / USA Transfer to the Madrid airport for flights home, or stay on in Madrid on your own.

(B)

Gerry Dawes was awarded Spain’s

prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy. He has spoken at The Smithsonian Institution, The Culinary Institute of America - Napa Valley, The James Beard Foundation, and the Instituto Cervantes (New York), to name a few. Dawes was a finalist for the 2001 James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine; won The Cava Institute’s First Prize for Journalism for his article on cava in 2004; and received the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Second Prize for Best Food Feature in a Magazine.

Photo by John Sconzo © 2009

“In his nearly thirty years of wandering the back roads of Spain, Gerry Dawes has built up a much stronger bank of experiences than I had to rely on when I started writing Iberia...His adventures far exceeded mine in both width and depth...” – James A. Michener, author of Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections

Commonwealth Club Travel

Reservation ForM

Phone: (415) 597-6720 Fax: (415) 597-6729

October 8–20, 2013

NAME 1 NAME 2 ADDRESS

CITY/STATE/ZIP

HOME PHONE

CELL

E-MAIL ADDRESS

SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY: If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate:

___ I plan to share accommodations with _____________________________________ OR ___ I wish to have single accommodations.

OR ___ I’d like to know about possible roommates. I am a ___ smoker / ___ nonsmoker.

PAYMENT: Here is my deposit of $______ ($1,000 per person) for ___ place(s). ___ Enclosed is my check (make payable to Commonwealth Club). OR ___ Charge my deposit to my ___ Visa ___ MasterCard CARD#

EXPIRES

SECURITY CODE

AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE DATE

Mail completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105, or fax to (415) 597-6729.

For questions or to reserve by phone call (415) 597-6720. ___ I/We have read the Terms and Conditions for this program and agree to them.

Signature

Terms and Conditions: The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted with Gerry Dawes (GD) to organize this tour.

Reservations: A $1,000 per person deposit, along with a completed and signed Reservation Form, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.

Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply: • 91 days or more prior to departure: $250 per person • 90-60 days to departure: $1,000 deposit • 59-1 days prior to departure: 100% fare Tour can also be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor GD accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour.

Trip Cancellation and Interruption Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered un-

foreseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.

Medical Information: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure.

Itinerary Changes & Trip Delay: Itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant.

If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or GD or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included.

Limitations of Liability: CWC and GD its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective services. CWC and GD shall not be held liable for (A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury

to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, terrorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, epidemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The participant waives any claim against CWC/GD for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/GD shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers.

May 06 – June 04 M ay 0 6 – J uly 2 5

F ri 3 1 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

M on 0 3 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Service Unquestioned: The Soldiers and Their Families.

Susan Weiss, Photography

The Emerging Prehistory of the Next American Revolution

Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzberg

Gar Alperovitz, Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland; Cofounder, The Democracy Collaborative; Author, What Then Must We Do?

Russians have written many justly famous memoirs, and this one is among the best. Ginzberg provides an account of her suffering and survival during a sentence to prison and labor camps. We will discuss this woman’s story of her arrest in 1937, charged with being a Trotskyist terrorist and counterrevolutionary at the commencement of the Stalinist purges, the great terror and the gulag.

Susan Weiss’ photographs present candid portraits of soldiers and their families from Ft. Stewart, GA, as they prepared, deployed and managed their lives during 14 months of deployment. The soldiers departed in October 2009 to Iraq and Afghanistan while the families remained at the Army base. The series of photographs and essays by participants tells the story of events and emotions that took place during that time period.

Is there an America beyond capitalism?

Something is brewing amidst the social and economic distress – thousands of workerowned companies, co-ops with millions of members, states taking up public banking, and new forms of single-payer health care.

Endorsed by Ralph Nader and Van Jones, Alperovitz presents a case for a cooperative and community-based economy.

MLF: The Arts Location: SF Club Office Time: Regular Club business hours Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Lynn Curtis

MLF: Business & Leadership Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

M on 0 3 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

M on 0 3 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

T ue 0 4 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

David Kennedy: The Modern American Military

Living Healthy in a Toxic World

Encore Career Handbook: How to Make a Living and a Difference in the Second Half of Life

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University; Editor, The Modern American Military

The advent of an all-volunteer force and the evolving nature of modern warfare have transformed our military, changing it in serious if subtle ways that few Americans are aware of, says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kennedy. He looks at issues such as who serves and why and the impact of non-uniformed “contractors” in war zone.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID)

Beth Greer, aka Super Natural Mom, Journalist; Environmental Health Advocate; Holistic Wellness Educator; Healthy Home Specialist; Author, Super Natural Home

Inside our homes we’re exposed to hundreds of untested chemicals, from additives in food to endocrine disrupters in soap and shampoo. These can exacerbate allergies, asthma, fatigue, coughs, headaches and more serious health conditions.

Greer will provide a greater awareness of what goes in you, on you and surrounds you, so that you might be able to radically improve your health and vitality.

MLF: Health & Medicine Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Patty James

MLF: SF Book Discussion Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizers: Barbara Massey and Howard Crane

Marci Alboher, Author, The Encore Career Handbook

Alboher presents a guide to finding passion, purpose and a paycheck in the second half of life. She will discuss how to plan the transition, how much you need to make, going back to school, volunteering versus interning, how to network and harness the power of social media, and an Encore Hot List of 35 viable careers.

MLF: Grownups Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In association with San Francisco Village, Coming of Age, the Transition Network and Encore.org.

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June 04 – 10 T ue 0 4 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

T ue 0 4 | S i l i c o n V a l l e y

T ue 0 4 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

George Packer: The New America

Temple Grandin

Google’s Eric Schmidt and Joel Cohen

Professor of Animal Science, Colorado State University; Co-author, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Packer 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. He will present the story of this America over the past three decades, which he sees as a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer relevant.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

T hu 0 6 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

The number of children and adults diagnosed with autism has skyrocketed over the past 10 years. Grandin will share her own experiences and discuss how we can better understand and diagnose autism.

Find out what unique and revolutionary treatments might soon be available.

Location: Schultz Cultural Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students. Premium: $40 non-members, $40 members (priority seating and book) Also know: Underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation

Location: Nikko Ballroom, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: General: $45 non-members, $30 members, $15 students. General with book: $60 non-members, $45 members. Premium (priority seating/ book): $85 non-members, $60 members.

82nd Annual California Book Awards

Explore San Francisco’s Financial District with historian Rick Evans. Hear about the famous architects who influenced the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Discover hard-to-find rooftop gardens, Art Deco lobbies, unique open spaces and historic landmarks. This is a tour for locals, with hidden gems you can only find on foot! For those interested in socializing afterward, we will conclude the tour at a local watering hole.

Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored literary excellence among authors in the Golden State. At our special awards ceremony, we will bestow gold and silver medals in several categories, including: fiction, nonfiction, first fiction, poetry, young adult, juvenile, Californiana and contribution to publishing. Hear from some literary giants and amazing writers. See you at the ceremony!

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in/pre-program reception, 6 p.m. awards ceremony, 7:15 p.m. book signing and reception Cost: $20 non-members, $15 members Also know: Part of the Good Lit Series, underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Special thanks to Dr. Martha Cox and the late Ambassador Bill Lane for their generous endowment, allowing the California Book Awards to take place. Sponsored by Bank of the West.

Location: Lobby of Galleria Park Hotel, 191 Sutter St. Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $40 non-members, $30 members Also know: Tour operates rain or shine. Limited to 20 people. Participants must pre-register.

The tour covers less than one mile of walking in the Financial District. Involves stairs

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In 2008 Eric Schmidt introduced the Google 2030 Energy Plan at Climate One. While this 2013 conversation will focus primarily on digital issues, it will touch on the intersection of energy and technology. Don’t miss a fascinating glimpse into our future with a person helping define it, Google’s Eric Schmidt.

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San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour

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Executive Chairman, Google (Schmidt); Director of Google Ideas (Cohen); Co-authors, The New Digital Age

June/July 2013

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S un 0 9 | N o r t h B a y

Afghanistan

Rebels with a Cause: Film Screening and Discussion

Tamim Ansary, Director, SF Writers Workshop Atta Arghandiwal, Banking Consultant Robert Rosenthal, Executive Director, Center for Investigative Reporting – Moderator

Nancy Dobbs, President and CEO, KRCB Will Rogers, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Trust for Public Land Nancy Kelly, Director, Rebels with a Cause Attorney from Earthjustice TBA

Ansary, author of Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan, and Arghandiwal, author of Lost Decency: The Untold Afghan Story, moved to the West from Afghanistan as young men. Arghandiwal was born into a military family and Ansary into an academic family. They will discuss the past, present and future of their troubled homeland.

MLF: Middle East Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

M on 1 0 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Member Social Panelists TBA

Join our panelists for informative and fun commentary on political and other major news, audience discussion of the week’s events, and our news quiz!

Stay after the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals, and discuss the news over snacks at the member social. The Club attracts the Bay Area’s brightest and most connected to its stage and audience. Meet them.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1-2 p.m. social with snacks Cost: $15 non-members, $5 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

The documentary Rebels with a Cause follows “ordinary citizens who did extraordinary things” in the second half of the 20th century to preserve the natural landscape of Point Reyes from urbanization. Focusing a lens on conservation, ecology and activism, the post-screening conversation will take a look at where these causes are today. How does conservation of green space reduce greenhouse gas in the atmosphere? What issues have the next generation of “rebels” taken up? Join Climate One for a film screening followed by a conversation on public lands, activism and creating a greener future.

Location: Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth Street, San Rafael Time: 1:30 p.m. movie, discussion to follow Cost: $8 non-members, $8 members, $6.50 California Film Institute members. Tickets will be handled through Film Center box office. See box office website at cafilm.org to purchase.

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB COMMONWEALTH CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Anna W.M. Mok Secretary William F. Adams Treasurer Lee J. Dutra President and CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OFGOVERNORS Dan Ashley Massey J. Bambara Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman** Hon. Shirley Temple Black* John L. Boland J. Dennis Bonney* Michael R. Bracco Helen A. Burt John Busterud* Michael Carr Maryles Casto** Hon. Ming Chin* Dennis A. Collins Mary B. Cranston** Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dr. Jaleh Daie Ms. Alecia DeCoudreaux Evelyn S. Dilsaver Joseph I. Epstein*

Jeffrey A. Farber John R. Farmer Dr. Joseph R. Fink* Carol A. Fleming, Ph.D. Leslie Saul Garvin William German* Dr. Charles Geschke Rose Guilbault** Jacquelyn Hadley Edie G. Heilman Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Claude B. Hutchison Jr.* Dr. Julius Krevans* John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Don J. McGrath Frank C. Meerkamp Richard Otter* Joseph Perrelli* Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Rev. Stephen A. Privett, S.J. Dr. Mohammad H. Qayoumi Toni Rembe* Victor A. Revenko* Skip Rhodes* Dr. Condoleezza Rice Brian D. Riley Richard A. Rubin Renée Rubin*

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Robert Saldich** George M. Scalise Lata Krishnan Shah Connie Shapiro* Charlotte Mailliard Shultz George D. Smith, Jr. James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Charles Travers Daniel J. Warmenhoven Nelson Weller* Judith Wilbur* Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Dennis Wu* Russell M. Yarrow Jed York * Past President ** Past Chair ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Rolando Esteverena Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Heather M. Kitchen Amy McCombs Hon. William J. Perry Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

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June 10 – 12 M on 1 0 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

M on 1 0 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Start-ups, Entrepreneurs and Ninja Innovation

The Story of North Indian Classical Music

Steve Blank, Serial Entrepreneur; Founder, E.piphany; Professor, UC Berkeley and Stanford Engineering; Author, The Startup Owners Manual Gary Shapiro, CEO, Consumer Electronics Association; Author, The Comeback and Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses Kevin O’Malley, President, TechTalk / Studio – Moderator

How can you become a Ninja Innovator – and follow Steve Blank’s advice to “get out of the building” to create and launch your own successful startup? This program will introduce and integrate best practices, strategies and tips that have swept the startup world, combined with lessons learned from the front lines of “ninja innovation” in consumer electronics and related fields – and where they meet in the amazing growth and focus on startups at the world’s largest annual innovation event, the International CES. MLF: Business & Leadership Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

T ue 1 1 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Thinking Moms’ Revolution: Taking Back Power in Healing Our Kids Alison MacNeil, Co-founder and Author, Thinking Moms’ Revolution Kim Spencer, Co-founder and Author, Thinking Moms’ Revolution Megan Davenhall, Co-founder and Author, Thinking Moms’ Revolution Christie Dames, CEO, TechTalk / Studio – Moderator

How can social media, self-empowered parents, DIY health research and new collaborations with doctors and researchers combine to help special-needs kids – and use these lessons to heal all our children? Twenty-three moms and one dad, all parenting children with disabilities – who found and continue to connect with each other on Facebook – have joined together to find real answers. Co-founders share stories of tragedy, illness, hope and recovery, and their vision for the future health of America’s children.

MLF: Business & Leadership Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, students free (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Kevin O’Malley

Mahesh Kale, Vocal Performer

Monday Night Philosophy takes another look at the connections between ideas and music, by analyzing the classical music traditions of India. Classical vocalist Kale also sings semi-classical forms like Thumri, Dadra, Tappa, Bhajans, Bhavgeet and Natyasangeet. He will take us through the journey of Indian classical music, elucidating the nuances and peculiarities of the forms of classical music from the Vedic period to the current classical, semiclassical and collaborative forms.

MLF: Humanities Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond Also know: In association with Humanities West

Foreign Language Groups Free for members Location: SF Club Office FRENCH, Intermediate Class Thursdays, noon Pierrette Spetz, Graziella Danieli, danieli@sfsu.edu FRENCH, Advanced Conversation Tuesdays, noon Gary Lawrence, (925) 932-2458 GERMAN, Int./Adv. Conversation Wednesdays, noon Sara Shahin, (415) 314-6482 ITALIAN, Intermediate Class Mondays, noon Ebe Fiori Sapone, (415) 564-6789 SPANISH, Advanced Conversation (fluent only) Fridays, noon Luis Salvago-Toledo, lsalvago@comcast.net

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June/July 2013

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W ed 1 2 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

An Evening Affair with Dan Savage and Daniel Handler

U.S.-Cuba Relations

Dan Savage, Author, American Savage; Sex Advice Columnist, “Savage Love” In conversation with Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, Author; Screenwriter; Accordionist

Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s Former Ambassador to the European Union; Former Director, Institute of Foreign Relations

After decades of braving dirty fantasies, obscure sex questions and all things taboo in his bawdy advice column “Savage Love,” Dan Savage has become America’s go-to sweetheart for everything from parenting transgender children to legitimizing polyamorous relationships. Now, fresh off the success of his Emmy-winning It Gets Better Campaign, aimed at the prevention of LGBT youth suicide, Savage is at it again in long form with his newest book, American Savage. Join us for a night of straight talk, scandalous insights and political banter – infused with some trademark Savage love.

This event is the first of a series of interviews hosted by Daniel Handler.

Location: The Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St. Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: General admission: $25 non-members, $15 members.

Priority seating with book: $50 non-members, $40 members (includes copy of book and priority seating).

Premium: $80 non-members, $60 members (includes book, priority seating, pre-reception with appearance by Dan Savage and Savage-approved gift bag).

Group Ticket*: $10 tickets for $100. *Note: The Group Ticket only applies to groups of 10 and is for a limited time only.

Since Fidel Castro turned over power to his brother in 2006, Raul Castro has increasingly emphasized transforming the Cuban bureaucracy and economy in an effort to make the country more competitive in the international market.

While European, Asian and Latin American investors are increasingly exploring opportunities in Cuba, U.S.-Cuba economic and political relations stagnate.

What are the key issues? What’s next for the Cuban economy and U.S.-Cuba relations?

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

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Vitamin D: Its Role in Risk Reduction for Autism and Breast Cancer

Birds of Paradise Lost: Andrew Lam on Literature, Immigration and SF

Program 1: John J. Cannell, M.D., Director, Vitamin D Council

Researchers are scrambling to further their understanding of autism and what causes it. In 2001, Dr. John McGrath suggested that vitamin D plays a role in neural development. Six years later, Dr. Cannell theorized that vitamin D plays a role specifically in autism. Come learn about his theory and what the research to date shows on the link between vitamin D and autism.

Program 2: Cedric Garland, DPH, Adjunct Professor, Family & Preventive Medicine, Moores Cancer Center, UC San Diego

Garland is a pioneering researcher on the role of solar ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation and vitamin D in reducing risk of several types of cancers, including breast, colon and ovarian cancers, as well as adult leukemia. He will review findings by his group and others that UVB and vitamin D are very effective in reducing the risk of breast cancer and increasing survival for those diagnosed with breast cancer. Though there are many risk-modifying factors for breast cancer, raising vitamin D levels appears to be the most efficient way to reduce risk, Garland says, and it has many other health benefits.

MLF: Health & Medicine Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon autism program, 1:30 p.m. breast cancer program Cost: $30 non-members, $12 members, $10.50 students (with valid ID). Price includes both events.

Program Organizer: Bill Grant

Andrew Lam, Web Editor, New American Media; Author, Birds of Paradise Lost

Lam, author of a new book of short stories about Vietnamese refugees in the Bay Area, explores the Vietnamese diaspora in the U.S. and will read from his new work. Of Lam’s latest book, Maxine Hong Kingston says, “bask in his love of language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those from far away.”

MLF: Asia Pacific Affairs Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizers: Lillian Nakagawa and Cynthia Miyashita

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June 13 – 20 T hu 1 3 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

From Closet to Corner Office Selise Berry, Founding Executive Director, Out & Equal Workplace Advocates Tom Johnson, Vice President of Finance of Global Business Services, The Clorox Company Mike Feldman, Vice President and General Manager, Managed Enterprise Solutions, IPG Americas, a Hewlett-Packard Company Cynthia Martin, Former President of Global Consumer Services, Kodak

Hear from a power-packed panel as successful executives who happen to be gay or lesbian share their stories about coming out at work and the empowerment that can result from being open and honest and building a true culture of diversity and inclusion in corporations.

Write Us Pleased at what you see in these pages? Outraged?

Send a letter to the editor!

We welcome your thoughts and suggestions.

Letters The Commonwealth Club 595 Market Street, 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

MLF: LGBT Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Julian Chang Also know: In association with Out & Equal Workplace Advocates

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T ue 1 8 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Latinas in Business: Inspirational Strategies for Success

Sea Surge

Sandra Hernandez, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, The San Francisco Foundation Aida Alvarez, Former Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration; Member of President Clinton’s Cabinet Noni Allwood, Vice President and Senior Fellow, Center for Talent Innovation Rose Castillo Guilbault, President, Community Safety Foundation; Author, The Latina’s Guide to Success in the Workplace Lyanne Melendez, Reporter, ABC 7 Television, San Francisco – Moderator

Brian Fagan, Author, The Attacking Ocean

It is projected that by 2050, one in four American workers will be Latina. Yet members of this group are currently among the lowest-paid employees with some of the fewest opportunities in the workplace. Several of our speakers say that Hispanic women need to challenge the inequities in their cultural ideology that hamper workplace success.

Come hear inspirational strategies for achievement that apply to Latinas and all women.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:15 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Also know: Sponsored by Wells Fargo

The impacts of climate change and human exploitation on the world’s oceans are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Sea levels are rising and endangering important infrastructure and homes. Coral and shellfish are struggling to survive as the waters undergo acidification. Increasingly efficient fishing techniques have left the oceans’ natural biodiversity severely depleted. What role do oceans play in the world’s economy? How will the changes be felt and how will we react to them? Join us for a conversation on the impact of a changing climate on the Earth’s oceans.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. networking reception Cost: $20 non-member, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

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June/July 2013

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Jonathan Alter: The Obama Presidency

Governors Ritter and Whitman: Risk and Resilience

Columnist, Bloomberg View; Author, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

Alter reveals the twists, turns and highstake political decisions of the Obama presidency. He also examines Obama’s adversaries, providing fresh details about the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist, Roger Ailes and the online haters who suffer from what Alter calls “Obama derangement syndrome.” The famed journalist deepens our understanding of Obama’s presidency, the 2012 election stakes and the future of his second term.

Bill Ritter Jr., Former Governor of Colorado Christine Todd Whitman, Former Governor of New Jersey; Former Administrator, U.S. EPA

Hurricane Sandy and the Colorado fires of 2012 underscore the widespread belief that climate disruption is amplifying natural disasters, if not causing them. Sandy and other disasters last year caused more than $100 billion in damage. Politicians are grappling with who bears those costs and whether and how areas such as the Jersey Shore should be rebuilt. Join a conversation with two former state chief executives about learning from recent disasters and marshaling political will to confront the climate reality.

Location: Montgomery Room, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St. Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. networking reception Cost: $25 non-members, $15 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. networking reception Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

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Sir Ken Robinson: Revolutionizing You

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

North Beach Walking Tour

Speaker; Advisor on Education in the Arts; Author, The Element and Finding Your Element

Porter Gale, Author, Your Network Is Your Net Worth In conversation with Guy Kawasaki, Founder, Alltop.com; Author; Former Chief Evangelist, Apple

TED Talks rock star Robinson’s 2006 speech on revolutionizing education by having it nurture rather than undermine creativity is the most viewed in TED’s history. He is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources in education and business.

Location: Fairmont Hotel, Terrace Room, 950 Mason St. Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: General admission: $25 non-members, $15 members, $7 students (with valid ID).

Premium (priority seating and copy of Finding Your Element): $55 non-members, $40 members.

Technology is transforming the game of networking. Gale lays out a guide for increasing your net worth by strengthening your relationships and connections.

Learn the art of cultivating valuable relationships and how networking can help you meet your goals and more.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. reception and book signing Cost: General: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students; Premium (reserved seating and premium reception with speakers. Limited to 65 guests): $45 non-members, $30 members

Join another Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure! Explore vibrant North Beach with Rick Evans during a two-hour walk through this neighborhood with a colorful past, where food, culture, history and unexpected views all intersect in an Italian “urban village.” In addition to learning about Beat generation hangouts, you’ll discover authentic Italian cathedrals and coffee shops.

Location: Meeting spot is Washington Square Park at Saints Peter and Paul Church (Filbert & Powell). Transportation to Washington Square Park is either the 30 bus or the 41/45, all of which stop right in front of the park.

Our guide will be on the steps of the church.

Please meet at 1:45, depart by 2.

Time: 2-4 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Limited to 20 people. Must preregister. Operates rain or shine.

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June 21 –27 F ri 2 1 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

M on 2 4 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

Transportation Finance: Catching up with the Rest of the World

Middle East Discussion Group

Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Ph.D., Director, Mineta Transportation Institute National Transportation Finance Center Flora Castillo, Chair, American Public Transportation Association Malcolm Dougherty, Director, Caltrans Mortimer Downey, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta, Retired U.S. Secretary of Transportation and U.S. Congressman – Moderator Additional panelists TBA

Make your voice heard in an enriching, provocative and fun discussion with fellow Club members as you weigh in on events shaping the face of the Middle East. Each month, the Middle East Member-Led Forum hosts an informal roundtable discussion on a topic frequently suggested by recent headlines.

After a brief introduction, the floor will be open for discussion. All interested members are encouraged to attend. There will also be a brief planning session.

This year’s Mineta Transportation Institute policy summit will feature experts representing viewpoints from both the national and state level discussing the challenges facing the U.S. transportation infrastructure. These leaders will also examine the results from the latest national survey polling Americans about transportation taxes and fees.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 8:15 a.m. check-in and continental breakfast, 9-11 a.m. program Cost: FREE Also know: Underwritten by the Mineta Transportation Institute

MLF: Middle East Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

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T ue 2 5 | S i l i c o n V a l l e y

The Billionaire’s Apprentice

Brian Michael Jenkins: How Safe Is America Today?

Nolan Bushnell

Anita Raghavan, Former Reporter, Wall Street Journal; Contributor, New York Times Dealbook and Forbes

Raghavan reveals the story of Rajat Gupta’s meteoric rise, from Delhi’s hypercompetitive Indian Institute of Technology to the inner sanctum of corporate America as head of McKinsey & Co., to his tragic downfall in 2012, when he was convicted on insider trading charges connected with an investigation of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, The Galleon Group. Raghavan peels back the curtain on the recent rise of Indian emigres up through U.S. corporate ranks.

MLF: Asia-Pacific Affairs Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: D. Lai

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Director, Mineta Transportation Institute’s Transportation Safety and Security Center; Author, When Armies Divide: The Security of Nuclear Arsenals During Revolts, Coups, and Civil Wars

One of the world’s foremost authorities on terrorism offers his take on current domestic challenges and on the latest developments in international terrorism, in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. What could and should the U.S. do to prevent further tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing? How active are terrorist groups within the United States? What can both the government and citizens do to keep our country safe?

Location: Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program Prices: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID)

June/July 2013

Founder, Atari, Co-author, Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep, and Nurture Creative Talent

What are companies looking for in today’s workforce? From startups to the Fortune 500, Bushnell explains what companies should be searching for in employees. He shares some of his own experiences and highlights how companies can recognize potential, identify talent and nurture creativity.

Location: SV Bank, 3005 Tasman Drive, Santa Clara Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Cost: $15 non-members, $10 members, $5 students (with valid ID)

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T ue 2 5 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

How to Self-Insure for LongTerm Care

The Future of Presidential Debates in the American Electoral Process

Denise Michaud, Independent Insurance Broker Gene Pastula, Certified Financial Planner; President, Westland Financial Services, Inc.

Michael D. McCurry, Former Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton; Co-chair, Commission on Presidential Debates Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., Chair, Republican Party under President Ronald Reagan; Co-chair, Commission on Presidential Debates Mary Marcy, Ph.D., President, Dominican University of California; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors – Moderator

With the cost of long-term care in the Bay Area among the highest in the country and rapidly increasing, planning ahead is critical. How can people reject long-term care insurance and choose to self-insure? Learn how trends in legislation have resulted in creative options to leverage assets three to six times when they are needed most.

MLF: Grownups Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In association with San Francisco Village and San Francisco Senior Center

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has sponsored and produced all the general election presidential and vice presidential debates since 1987. Don’t miss this chance to pose your questions to two top Washington insiders and chairmen of the Commission. How well did the new formats of 2012 work? Were they useful to the electorate, and how can they remain relevant?

CPD co-chairmen Fahrenkopf and McCurry will discuss the process by which the debates are formulated and explain the significance of U.S. debates to other countries, many of which seek to start their own debate traditions after watching the CPD’s forums. They will also discuss their views on the role of the debates in the general election process, including campaigns, conventions and the overall level of discourse.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: FREE Also know: Part of The Series on Ethics and Accountability, underwritten by the Charles Travers Family

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T hu 2 7 | E a s t B a y

SF Pride Presents: San Francisco Supervisors David Campos and Scott Wiener

Overheated

David Campos, Supervisor, District 9 Scott Wiener, Supervisor, District 8 Earl Plante, Executive Director, SF Pride

The city’s Pride month celebration continues with addresses from San Francisco’s two gay supervisors, David Campos and Scott Wiener. Learn what is being done to address the needs of the LGBT community throughout the city from the legislators themselves, and bring your tough questions.

MLF: LGBT Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Julian Chang Also know: In association with SF Pride

Andrew Guzman, Professor, UC Berkeley Law School; Author, Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change Richard Joseph Jackson, Professor, UCLA School of Public Health; Host of the four-part public TV program, “Designing Healthy Communities” In conversation with Greg Dalton, Founder and Director, Climate One

With the Earth running a fever, people in the United States and around the world are vulnerable to climate-driven disease, famine, war and migration. Many scientists warn that a temperature rise of two degrees Celsius – which many scientists warn is highly likely – would result in catastrophe, and four degrees would be incompatible with organized society as we know it. Many costs of carbon pollution are showing up now in the form of extreme weather, water and resource scarcity, and other stresses.

Most scientists argue that transitioning to a clean-energy economy will reduce the risks resulting from fossil fuel combustion.

Join a doctor and a lawyer for a sobering conversation about building healthier and more resilient communities in California and beyond.

Location: Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program Cost: $22 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

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June 27 – July 17 T hu 2 7 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

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Walking the Way

Clay Shirky: The Internet.

Powered by Love.

Explore the World from The Commonwealth Club

Robert Rosenbaum, Ph.D., Neuropsychologist; Psychotherapist; Zen teacher; Credentialed mountaineer; Dayan QiGong instructor; Author, Walking the Way

Social Media Theorist; Author, Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus

Rosenbaum combines his experience in neuropsychology, psychotherapy and Zen teaching with the Tao’s ancient guidance to suggest that rather than always “pouring more and more into a vessel,” we all need to stop and cultivate stillness in order to recover, revive and endure. Come hear a refreshing new interpretation of the Tao te Ching and glean his insights into how to create a life well-lived.

With decentralizing technologies, the Internet is facilitating new global cooperation via peer-to-peer sharing, wireless capability and open-source development.

Shirky, a leader among the digerati, delves into how the production capacity of the Internet, plus the willingness of humans to share with one another, is allowing ordinary citizens to reshape our culture.

MLF: Psychology Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Anne W. Smith

Location: SF Club Office Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception Cost: General admission: $20 non-members, $12 members; Premium (reserved seating and premium reception with speakers): $35 non-members, $25 members.

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The Alchemy of Humor

Chef Hubert Keller Chef/Owner, Fleur de Lys and Burger Bar; Former Competitor, “Top Chef”; Author, Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs

Steve Bhaerman, Author; Performer (as Swami Beyondanda)

Monday Night Philosophy laughs along with the enlightening philosophy of humor elucidated by Bhaerman (the man behind Swami Beyondananda). His hilarious and insightful talk will inspire you to use the magic of humor to gain wisdom, perspective and, of course, joy.

You’ll laugh while you learn and learn while you laugh!

MLF: Humanities Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: George Hammond

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Master chef Keller’s roots in a food-focused French family led him on an inspiring journey to the top of his profession as a James Beard winner. From apprenticing in a Michelin three-star restaurant at age 16 to cooking in South America and the U.S., Keller has charted his own path to the newest frontiers of the restaurant business.

Hear his stories and pick up recipe ideas.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $25 non-members, $15 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Also know: Underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation

June/July 2013

All interested Club members are welcome to attend bimonthly one-hour planning meetings of the International Relations Member-Led Forum. We focus on Europe, Latin America, Africa and worldwide topics. Join us to discuss current international issues and plan programs for the rest of 2013 and beyond.

MLF: International Relations Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. planning meeting Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Norma Walden

Join The Club Membership is open to all. Support for The Club’s work is derived principally from membership dues.

For more information, visit commonwealthclub.org/join

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Nob Hill Walking Tour

How to Recover Your Childhood Brilliance: The Special Genius of Those over 50

Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior

Pat McHenry Sullivan, Founder, Visionary Resources in Oakland; Author, Your Natural Genius

Lt Cdr Rorke Denver, U.S. Navy SEAL

Nob Hill became an exclusive enclave of rich and famous West Coasters who built large mansions in the neighborhood. Residents included prominent tycoons such as Leland Stanford and other members of the Big Four. Tour highlights include the history of four landmark hotels: The Fairmont, Mark Hopkins, Stanford Court and the Huntington. Visit the city’s largest house of worship, Grace Cathedral, and discover architectural tidbits and anecdotes about railroad barons and silver kings. Enjoy a true San Francisco experience of elegance, urbanity, scandals and fabulous views.

Sullivan will discuss the top three things we can do to recover our lost five-yearold genius: Explore the true meaning of genius; contend with impending death or helplessness as we age; then, develop a practice of listening to ourselves so we become fluent in the language of our own heart and know what we are called to do with our lives.

Denver has run every phase of training for the U.S. Navy SEALs and led special-forces missions worldwide. He starred in the 2012 film Act of Valor, based on true SEAL adventures. Go inside the personal story and the fascinating, demanding SEAL training program of a veteran of the front lines. Denver will share lessons learned from both the theater of war and his time directing SEAL instruction.

Location: In front of the Fairmont Hotel’s Caffe Centro. 801 Powell St. (at California St.) Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. tour Cost: $45 non-members, $35 members Also know: Limited to 20. Must preregister.

Tour operates rain or shine.

MLF: Grownups Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In assn. with San Francisco Village

MLF: International Relations Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Norma Walden

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Joseph Ellis: The Birth of American Independence

Why Austerity Kills

Dale Schenk: The Road to Conquering Diseases of the Brain

Author, Founding Brothers, American Sphinx and Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

From a pre-eminent American historian comes a revelatory portrait of a crescendo moment in American history. Pulitzer Prize winner Ellis presents a gripping account of the most important summer in our nation’s history: 1776. Ellis weaves together the political and military experiences as two sides of a single story and shows how events on one front influenced outcomes on the other.

Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Sanjay Basu, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiologist, Prevention Research Center, Stanford University; Co-author, The Body Economy: Why Austerity Kills

Can public health be upheld during years of financial crisis? Through his international research, Dr. Basu posits that austerity and government policy become a matter of life and death during these historic times. He will discuss his research regarding sugar and diet in relation to the economy and recession.

MLF: Health & Medicine Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Bill Grant

Ph.D., CEO, Prothena

Despite major advances in medicine, diseases of the brain continue to plague our society. Fortunately, because of the work of many dedicated scientists, a threedecades-long effort to conquer diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease is beginning to pay off. Schenk will explore what we know about the brain – often called “the last frontier of medicine” – and describe the journey from an idea to the patient’s bedside for innovative treatments.

Location: Schultz Cultural Hall, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program Cost: $15 non-members, $10 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

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July 18 – 29 T hu 1 8 | S i l i c o n V a l l e y

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Y Combinator Grads: Founders’ Stories

Trade in Your Rights: Russia’s Circuitous March to Democracy

Michael Seibel, CEO, Socialcam Jude Gomila, Co-founder, Heyzap.com Bill Clerico, Founder and CEO, WePay Justin Khan, Co-founder, Justin.tv

Pavel Khodorkovsky, President, Institute of Modern Russia

Companies like Social Cam, Heyzap and WePay are all very different, but they have one mighty factor in common: they received their initial green and insider know-how from Y Combinator. Heralded by Wired as the “most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs,” YC utilizes an expert formula of seed funding, peer networking and a three-month do-or-die boot camp to whip its mentees into startup shape. But how do the incubator’s graduates fare when the training comes to an end? What is it about this program that turns out such a wide range of wildly successful companies?

Join us as some of Y Combinator’s illustrious graduates share stories of how to succeed and fail in the startup community and the lessons they’ve learned from the most celebrated incubator in the Valley.

Khodorkovsky will discuss the current human rights and political situation in Russia and the importance of supporting civil society there as it develops.

Though he cannot return to Russia for fear of endangering his father, famed political prisoner, businessman and author Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Pavel maintains close relationships with many Russian opposition leaders and will relay his thoughts on the current political and socioeconomic situation.

Location: Silicon Valley Bank, 3005 Tasman Dr., Santa Clara Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

MLF: International Relations Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Norma Walden

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The Elephant in the Room: Difficult Talks We All Should Have

Sky-High Rents, Disappearing Nonprofits

Linda Fodrini-Johnson, MFT, Eldercare Services Founder

Eldercare expert Fodrini-Johnson will discuss how to have the “difficult” conversations with ourselves, our children and our spouses regarding real and imagined challenges we may encounter in later years. She will tackle tough topics, including keeping or selling the family home, future health considerations, and when it’s time to stop driving.

MLF: Grownups Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: John Milford Also know: In association with San Francisco Village

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Mark Cloutier, SF Foundation Masen Davis, Transgender Law Center

Rents across San Francisco are ballooning at a frightening pace, giving New York City a run for its money as the nation’s most expensive rental market. How is this situation affecting different populations and organizations within the city? Don’t miss this panel exploring the impact on the LGBT community as some nonprofit organizations that serve this population are forced to leave the city due to unaffordable rent increases. Panelists will also explore possible creative solutions to retain vital services in the city.

MLF: LGBT Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20-non-members, $8 months, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Julian Chang Also know: In association with the SF Foundation, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and the Transgender Law Center

June/July 2013

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Reza Aslan: Zealot

Russian Hill Walking Tour

Middle East Discussion Group

Author, Zealot and How to Win a Cosmic War; Editor, Tablet and Pen

Join a more active Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure! Russian Hill is a magical area with secret gardens and amazing views. Join Rick Evans for a twohour hike up hills and staircases and learn about the history of this neighborhood. See where great artists and architects lived and worked, and walk down residential streets where some of the most historically significant houses in the Bay Area are located.

Make your voice heard in an enriching, provocative and fun discussion with fellow Club members as you weigh in on events shaping the face of the Middle East. Each month, the Middle East Member-Led Forum hosts an informal roundtable discussion on a topic frequently suggested by recent headlines.

After a brief introduction, the floor will be open for discussion. All interested members are encouraged to attend. There will also be a brief planning session.

Think you know about the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth? Internationally acclaimed scholar Aslan presents a bold, new perspective on Jesus as a man and historical figure, a radical political revolutionary invested in the nationalist struggle for freedom from Roman occupation. Aslan balances the Jesus of the Gospels against historical sources in this vivid account.

Location: Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing Cost: General: $22 non-members, $12 members, $7 students. Premium (book and priority seating): $45 non-members, $35 members.

Location: Meet in front of Swensen’s Ice Cream Store located at 1999 Hyde Street at Union. Tour ends about six blocks from the Swensen’s Ice Cream Shop, at the corner of Vallejo and Jones.

Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2– 4 p.m. tour Cost: $45 standard, $35 members Also know: Steep hills and staircases, parking difficult. Limited to 20. Must pre-register. Tour operates rain or shine.

MLF: Middle East Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

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The Influences of Art (Past, Present, Future)

Science & Technology Planning Meeting

Thomas R. Simpson, Founder and Director, Afro Solo Festival Peter Callender, Artistic Director, African-American Shakespeare Company Karen Carraway, Visual Artist Susheel Bibbs, Opera Singer

Come listen to a lively multi-disciplined panel discussion in association with AfroSolo Arts Festival 20. From the evolution of negro spirituals to hip-hop music, the Negro Theater Ensemble to the African-American Shakespeare Company, the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance to the works of Kehinde Wiley, this discussion will explore how the arts of the past have influenced art of today and how its impact will be felt tomorrow.

MLF: The Arts Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Anne W. Smith Also know: In association with AfroSolo Festival 20

Join fellow Club members with similar interests to brainstorm upcoming Science & Technology programs. All Commonwealth Club members are welcome. We explore visions for the future through science and technology. Discuss current issues and share your insights with fellow Club members to shape and plan programs for the months ahead.

MLF: Science & Technology Location: SF Club Office Time: 6:15 p.m. planning meeting Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Chisako Ress

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July 30 – August 06 T ue 3 0 | S a n F r a n c i s c o

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Podcasting

Spirit of the Samurai: Martial Arts and Spiritual Training David A. Hall, Ph.D., Author; Professor; Ordained Buddhist Priest

The Japanese samurai were a class of warriors who dominated Japan’s military, political and social culture for almost a thousand years. Hall, author of the Encyclopedia of Japanese Martial Arts, will discuss the training methods used by the samurai, which taught both martial skills and spiritual/psychological armoring.

These methods have been preserved in a number of classical martial arts schools in Japan today.

Subscribe to our podcasts! Receive a new program recording each week. It’s free!

For more information, visit commonwealthclub.org/podcast

Kickoff Party: Citizen Science at Nightlife Let’s launch the Club’s Platforum Citizen Science series in true science style with Cal Academy’s Nightlife. Bringing you the best in live science, booze and local DJs, join us to learn how every San Francisco local can be a part of scientific discovery and innovation. Stay tuned for more information on featured projects, presenters and interactive opportunities.

Location: California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park See Club website for timing and price

MLF: Asia-Pacific Affairs Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizers: Lillian Nakagawa and Sylvie Grillet-Rivera

A ugust – S eptember

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Melting Away: Images of Our Polar Regions As We Breach the Tipping Point, by Camille Seaman

A Soundscape by Bernie Krause

A Psychological Approach to Environmental Consciousness

With her series Melting Away, Seaman, a 2013 Senior TED Fellow, chronicles over a decade of changing polar landscapes that are visually beautiful yet mysterious. Her poignant photographs of icebergs often in the final stages of existence, in their isolation remind us of the ecological changes happening in the world today.

Her photographs will be on display at the Club office in August and September.

Listen through the ears of Dr. Krause to an unforgettable soundscape presentation of the voice of the natural world. Krause has traveled the world to record, archive, research and express increasingly rare sound environments. His personal narrative is also recently described in The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places.

MLF: The Arts Location: SF Club Office Time: Regular Club business hours Cost: FREE Program Organizer: Lynn Curtis

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Bernie Krause, Ph.D., Musician; Naturalist; Director, Wild Sanctuary

MLF: The Arts Location: SF Club Office Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing Cost: $20 non-members, MEMBERS FREE, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Anne W. Smith

June/July 2013

Thomas Knoblauch, Licensed Clinical Psychologist; Co-author, Elders on Love

Knoblauch explores the barriers to developing and maintaining an intellectual and moral perspective on engaging and protecting the world around us. He will discuss the role language plays in shaping our thinking about ecological problems and our pursuit of environmental activism. He will also offer up recommendations for promoting new approaches to increasing our environmental consciousness.

MLF: Psychology Location: SF Club Office Time: 4:45 p.m. networking, 5:15 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Patrick O’Reilly

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Mark Tercek

The Snake, the Seeker and the Smartphone: Can Tech Save Biodiversity?

CEO, The Nature Conservancy; Co-author, Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

Can protecting nature really be a good investment? Tercek argues that conservation is the new way to do business. He offers an essential guide of sustainable opportunities and green infrastructure developments from across the country.

Learn why nature protection is the smartest business and investment decision we can make.

Location: Cubberley Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing Price: $20 non-members, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID)

Scott Loarie, Co-director, iNaturalist.org, California Academy of Sciences Ken-ichi Ueda, Co-founder and Co-director, iNaturalist.org, California Academy of Sciences Tanya Birch, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach Mary Ellen Hannibal, Journalist – Moderator

How are bold new technologies helping in the fight to retain global biodiversity? Google’s Birch will talk about the life-and-death consequences of empowering indigenous peoples in Brazil and Africa to monitor their biodiversity. Loarie and Ueda will share the goals of iNaturalist, an online social network for naturalists, and discuss ways social media and mobile technology can bring the power of crowds to the problems of biodiversity.

MLF: International Relations/science & technology Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) Program Organizer: Norma Walden Also know: In association with iNaturalist.org

JUST ADDED! Mon Jul 01

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy When journalist Daniel Quinn meets Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba, in 1957, he has no idea that his own affinity for simple, declarative sentences will change his life radically overnight. So begins William Kennedy’s novel, a tale of revolutionary intrigue, heroic journalism, crooked politicians, drug-running gangsters, Albany race riots, and the improbable rise of Fidel Castro. Come discuss this book with fellow lit lovers. As a reminder, the author will not be present.

Members-Only Events …one more reason to join The Commonwealth Club

Enjoy exclusive opportunities to hear from and meet some of the world’s most interesting people. Members-only events have included Willie Brown, Gary Hart, Robert Reich and Tony La Russa.

Speeches on CDs Did you miss a speech you really wanted to hear? Visit commonwealthclub.org/purchase or call (415) 597-6700 to order an audio CD for only $15!

MLF: SF Book Discussion Location: SF Club Office Time: 5:30 p.m. program Cost: $5 non-members, MEMBERS FREE Program Organizers: Barbara Massey and Howard Crane

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Improving the

Ethics

of Medicine

Excerpt from the program on Thursday, March 28, 2013 ROBERT M. PEARL, M.D.

Executive Director and CEO, The Permanente Medical Group

VICTORIA SWEET, M.D.

Laguna Honda Hospital; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCSF; Author, God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

JOSH ADLER, M.D.

Chief Medical Officer, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital

LISA ALIFERIS

KQED Health Editor – Moderator LISA ALIFERIS: We’ve arrived at a singular juncture in American medicine with the biggest expansion in health care in this country in 50 years speeding toward us courtesy of the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, American medicine is rife with challenges. At the most basic level, when compared against other developed countries, America is at or near the bottom for lifespan, infant mortality and deaths from non-communicable diseases.

Explain what you think is meant by ethics in medicine, and name one or two of the most pressing challenges you see in medical ethics.

JOSH ADLER: I’d like to begin by framing [my response] around some age-old medical-ethical principles and the fact that the current state challenges some of those and broadens them. The first is the principle of

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“do no harm,” which is an age-old principle in the care of patients and really refers to not proceeding with a treatment unless it’s likely to help, because if it’s not likely to help we certainly wouldn’t want to do anything wrong. But since 1999, when the Institute of Medicine published its seminal work on patient safety, we know that in fact a large amount of harm can come to patients in the conduct of care that is actually supposed to be beneficial. So the challenge to us ethically is being able to, [first], minimize harm, which I think American medicine is proceeding on – we have a very long way to go, but we’ve certainly made progress. But assuming we can’t eliminate all harm, we have to consider the potential harm and benefit that will accrue with any particular intervention a patient may undergo. That’s really a new wrinkle to this age-old principle.

The second is a principle of justice, which originally had at its core being fair, that all patients should be treated fairly and in many ways this had to do with equity, that people would be treated the same no matter where they come from, whether they could pay, or what their social makeup. But in the state we’re in in the United States and in the world around the cost of health care, there’s a new wrinkle to justice and it has to do with the appropriate stewardship of a limited resource to a population and how that intersects with the care of an individual patient. This is a critically important principle because we don’t have unlimited resources, and whether

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those are dollars or doctors or nurses or technicians or hospital beds, we have to come up with the best possible distribution of those resources so we do the greatest good for the greatest number.

VICTORIA SWEET: Since I’m a historian as well as a doctor, I had to look up the etymology of ethics, which is Greek ethika and originally comes from the word ethos, which in Greek means character or disposition. I take that to mean that we get ethics from our innate character – what’s easiest for us to do, what feels right. Ethics come out of what feels right to do. So it implies a natural human goodness, a kind of altruism, an innate inclination to be ethical, to do the right thing. In medicine a lot of work has gone into classifying ethical principles. For instance, there’s the principle of beneficence, of providing benefit to the patient, doing good. Then there’s the principle of autonomy, that is, the patients’ right to decide. One of the things for me that is so difficult about ethics in medicine is that, in so many places – end-of-life care, confidentiality and privacy, even diagnoses and treatment – these ethical principles are in conflict. So it’s not usually a clear situation of evil versus good, but of good versus good.

This leads me to the second part of this question, which is what I think is the most pressing challenge today, not only for me as a doctor but for everyone involved in the health care system, though I can only talk here as a doctor. [The challenge is] the conflict implicit in these suddenly new roles that I as a doctor

have, which is to not only be a doctor to my patient, but to be this thing called a “steward” of the nation’s health-care resources, as one recent economist put it in a New England Journal [of Medicine] article and, in addition, to be a loyal health-care employee of my employer. I can’t begin to tell you how stressful these three, often opposing, ethical imperatives often are for a doctor.

My fundamental Hippocratic duty is to enter the house of the sick only for the benefit of the sick; it’s a person-to-person contract.

For instance, if I determine that my patient is best served by having an expensive test or medication, that is what I’m ethically supposed too provide, but these days I’m also expected to be a careful steward of society’s health-care resources, which should mean that before I order that expensive test, I take into account not just what is best for my patient, but what is best for the healthcare system as a whole, the nation’s budget, our public health. So what do I do if my patient is old or disabled or one of the “bad boys” or “bad girls” I had so many of at Laguna Honda [Hospital] – not a gainfully employed, contributing member of society, and not ever likely to be one? Should I order that expensive test? Wouldn’t that money be better spent on public health measures to raise America’s standing against the measures of lifespan, infant mortality and death from non-communicable diseases?

In addition, there’s my new ethical duty toward my employer, a hospital or health-care company, who if it’s one of the new accountable care organizations in the Obamacare Act, stands to lose quite a bit of money if I order that expensive test. I have the obligation of helping it continue as a going concern. What do I, as an ethical doctor, do?

ROBERT PEARL: As I think about ethics, my perspective is that it’s a set of rules that allows us to do the right thing and that they’re built upon a moral framework, but they serve best as a compass, particularly, as Victoria [Sweet] said, when there are competing points of view and not a single right answer.

Ethics are essential in times of change, and that’s what’s happening today.

You asked about two potentially crucial issues, not just for physicians, but also for the entire society. The first one that comes to my mind is, how are we as a nation, how are we as care deliverers going to respond to the forces out of Washington, D.C., out of business and

individuals to lower the cost of health care?

There are some who believe that the solutions must involve two-tier systems, rationing or cutbacks; it is my belief that ethically those aren’t the right answers. The right solutions from an ethical perspective will require that we restructure American health care, that we move from a system of rewarding volume to one that focuses on outcomes; that we start to value prevention as the best means, not only of making patients healthy, but of being able to reduce the cost; that we focus on patients’ safety, make sure we get it right the first time.

These changes will fundamentally alter how physicians practice and how patients receive

“You have to separate ethics and legal.” – Pearl care, but I think, from an ethical perspective, they’re the right answer to a very complex question that faces us today.

The second area is that of the pernicious relationship between the for-profit drug and device companies and doctors. We at Kaiser Permanente have come down very strong on it from the ethical perspective that it’s simply inappropriate and wrong. It violates the fundamental principles any time a physician does it or even has the perception that he or she might be putting his or her personal finances ahead of the greater good of the particular patient. I think that’s an ethical stand that we have to take as an entire nation.

ALIFERIS: I’d like to go directly into the Affordable Care Act and some of the conflicts that have come up. [There’s] the debate we’ve seen around requirements that contraceptives be covered, the morning after pill, and especially about abortion. [What are] the ethics around doctors and health-care providers of all kinds bumping into a patient request that is outside of their own personal ethics?

SWEET: The example would be a patient who asks me to give them something that they can kill themselves with. Now, I’m not particularly against euthanasia, as long as somebody else does it. I’m not against passing a law [allowing] it, but I wouldn’t do it. So I

would just say no. In that case it’s illegal, but even if it were legal I would still say no. I believe that my patients need to know that I’m an ethical person from the inside out and that I start with myself and doing what’s ethical for me and mine and you are part of me and therefore I wouldn’t do something I consider not ethical. So even though I’m personally in favor of a woman’s right to abortion, I have no problem with that, if somebody else feels as strongly as I do about other things, then I think they have [the right to refuse to do it.]

ADLER: My view is that coverage decisions should be based on science, so not covering contraceptives goes against scientific evidence that proves that this is a valuable medical therapy. I think to your point about should an individual doctor be required to provide a service that they personally believe is unethical, the answer is no. You can’t ask individuals to do something that they think is unethical.

But I do think that we have a responsibility to then help that patient find someone who will. That is our own internal policy [at the UCSF Medical Center].

PEARL: Thirty-four million uninsured is unethical, and we have to start with that.

From my personal belief, it’s a basic right.

We know it defines not only health, but happiness, life, a lot of other positive aspects that are fundamental to who we are both as people and as American citizens. So I want to start with the fact that the bill solved an ethical problem, which is providing coverage to 34 million more people.

There’s still a second ethical issue, which is that it didn’t address the issue of affordability which is going to become the next problem that we’re going to take on. As individual physicians we shouldn’t be violating our ethics, and yet at the same time we have to make sure that we don’t abandon our patients. So part of our job is to make sure we’re able to provide for them those things that may go against our individual [beliefs]. You have to separate, though, ethics and legal, and that’s where the challenge often is. It’s complex.

Patients deserve to be able to get those things they want that will be able to increase their health and we as a society, as individual physicians, have a moral and ethical obligation to do the best we can.

This program was made possible by the generous support of the Travers Family Foundation.

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AL GORE THE FUTURE The former vice president discusses the factors he says will influence our future. He also tackles the controversial sale of his cable channel, Current TV, as well as the hot-button issue of gun control.

AL GORE Former U.S. Vice President; Author, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change in conversation with

Gloria duffy President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California – Moderator

Original Photos by O’Dea/Wikimedia Commons (Earth at Night); Dave Young/Flickr (Milky Way); devilmaycryub/Deviantart (Black Clouds)

GLORIA DUFFY: [In your book] you outline the six drivers of global change: economic globalization, global electronic communications, a new balance of global political and military power, life sciences revolutions, and a disruption between human civilization and the earth’s ecosystem.

Could you tell us a little bit about why you took on writing this subject? And who are you addressing?

AL GORE: Everybody. That’s the target audience. [Laughter.] [The book] is coming out in countries around the world, but it is directed especially at Americans. One of the underlying themes in this book is that our democracy has been hacked. The operating system of our representative democracy has

been taken over and it now functions in ways that our founders did not intend. One of the only remedies for this is for people in the country at large who care about the future and who are concerned that our government is now so dysfunctional to help take back control of it.

I am encouraged and optimistic that the development and rise of importance of the Internet brings with it many new opportunities to empower individual citizens to once again play the role that our founders intended as part of a well-informed citizenry and once again make ideas and logic and reason the coin of the realm to displace the dominance of money and power that is now controlling our politics. It is of deep concern to me that

virtually no reform can now pass the Congress unless permission is first of all given by the special interests that have the most at stake with the particular measure involved.

DUFFY: You use some interesting terms in walking through your analysis of the drivers of global change. I’m going to call out three of them and ask you to define what you mean: “Earth, Inc.,” “robo-sourcing” and “the world brain.”

GORE: “Earth, Inc.” is intended to convey the emergent reality that the globalized economy has now crossed a threshold of connectivity that gives it an integral, holistic presence of its own as a global economy with a new relationship to national governance, to the classic factors of production – labor,

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capital, natural resources – and it operates now in ways that are fundamentally different from the way national economies, linked together, operated in the past.

Not only do we have outsourcing, where jobs can easily be moved across borders, and the globalization of capital movements with these increasingly exotic derivative instruments – some of which are indistinguishable from gambling – traded in volumes that completely dwarf the global trade and production of real goods and services, but in addition we now have “robo-sourcing,” by which I mean a new level of advanced automation that challenges some of the core assumptions that we have worked with since the days of the Luddites about new technology creating more new jobs than it displaces.

Essentially, the difference with robosourcing is that we are not only seeing the extension and magnification of our physical capacities, but also our cognitive capacities.

Moore’s Law is still doubling the power of computers for the same dollar every 18 to 24 months, and a supercomputer won the International Chess Championship some time ago and just won “Jeopardy” last year, and beyond these specialized niche applica-

tions there are now computers and robots and algorithms that are taking over a number of occupations that we used to think would remain the unique province of our species.

One example: there’s an algorithm some law firms are now beginning to use that empowers a single first-year lawyer to do the same legal research that used to require 500 first-year lawyers. And the error rate is, characteristically, far, far less. You can say, OK, those first-year lawyers will find work elsewhere. Yes. I’m sure. But maybe some of them will end up at McDonald’s. I certainly hope that’s not the case.

But we are seeing the hollowing out of the middle class; it began some time back, but it is evidently accelerating. Since the early part of the 20th century, we have had essentially a consumer demand-driven economy. Henry Ford doubled his employees’ pay, he said, so that they could buy the cars they made. In a similar fashion, the good, healthy wages and salaries paid the middle class have fueled demand for consumer goods and services.

But as the middle class incomes stagnate and begin to decline, that then creates the need for replacing that income lest the demand essential to the continued health

of the economy withers and declines; that is happening.

Many economists are now using the phrase “technology capital”; they mean capital investments that result in the replacement of labor with technology at levels that bring about these changes I’ve just described. But a second consequence is that the returns from the productive process – the profits and the income streams – go more to those who provide the capital and relatively less to those who provide the labor. This in turn is one of several factors contributing to rising inequality, not only in the U.S. economy, but in Europe and Japan and China and in India and in virtually every national economy, with a few exceptions in South America. As a consequence, we are now seeing a dramatic challenge to the basic structure of national economic policies.

Chapter two [of my book] is called “The Global Mind,” and it starts with this phrase, “the world brain” that was coined by H.G. Wells in the 1930s. [It] sounds like a simple description of today’s Internet. Essentially, we have now with the Internet – and associated networks and the so-called X-Internet, or the Internet of things – flows of inforPhoto by Ed Ritger

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mation around the planet that are truly mind-boggling. Where we as human beings are concerned, our thoughts and feelings are now connected to those of billions of people around the world instantaneously, and increasingly [these thoughts and feelings are also recorded by] intelligent devices and machines and sensors and vast databases to the point where they are now beginning to change the way we think.

These interconnections are transforming the way business and industry and society and NGOs and the economy and culture operate. If you look back through history to 500 years ago and map the sweeping, revolutionary changes that were triggered by the introduction of the printing press [which] played out over centuries, [you’ll notice that] the transformation of our civilization now is at least on that scale – I would say much larger – but is occurring much more quickly.

It’s a classic case of creative destruction.

Look at what’s happening to so many newspapers around the world, and yet Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and Pinterest [are thriving and] bringing with them political and economic and cultural and psychic changes that are incredibly profound. We need to understand them. It’s a very positive set of benefits overall, but it brings challenges; the fraternal twins of peril and opportunity are always brought by such sweeping changes.

DUFFY: Is this all a negative picture in your mind? Where are the elements of hope? And how do we cope, how do we adapt?

GORE: Oh no. It’s not all negative, by any means, and a number of reviewers have wondered whether I’m not overly optimistic. I am an optimist, and I’m even more optimistic after researching and writing this book than I was beforehand. But my optimism is based on the assumption that we as human beings have the capacity to transcend our oft-outlined limitations and rise to great challenges when we have to.

To take some of the positive trends, when I talk about democracy being hacked I link it to the dominance of television in carrying the conversation of democracy in a one-way medium that people can’t really talk back to – you can talk back to your TV, but it doesn’t hear you.

Eighty percent of the campaign contributions raised by Democrats and Republicans goes to purchase 30-second TV ads. In the era

of the printing press, during which America was founded, individuals could have a huge impact.

Access is not open to individuals at all. It is restricted to corporations, special interests and others who have huge sums of money. In order for politicians to become candidates, to compile those huge sums of money, they have to spend the majority of every day begging rich people and special interests for money.

There are quid pro quos that are asked for with increasing brazenness.

[Politicians] have to spend five to six hours a day raising money – these newly elected ones this year, they go in for their orientation and to meet with their political

“Access [to politicians] is not

open to individuals. It is restricted to corporations [and] special interests.” caucus and here’s what the newly elected Congress members are told: “We’ve done the math for you. When you go up for reelection, you have to have x-million dollars.

There are this many days between now and that election. So what that means is you have to raise $12, $15, $20 thousand per day every day between now and your re-election two years or six years from now.” They miss the committee meetings; there are no floor debates to speak of anymore; they come in on Tuesday night and spend a little time on Wednesday voting on commemorative resolutions and checking in on the many filibusters that are going on silently, simultaneously; then on Thursday they go back to raising money again. So when they do go to vote or to speak, human nature being what it is, they are thinking more about what the impact on their telephone calls begging for money will be, on what the reaction’s going to be when they go to the cocktail parties that are held constantly with lobbyists and special interests. And the news media doesn’t really do the job it should, and often used to, in informing people about what’s going on.

Think about this: one of the six drivers of

global change is the climate crisis. Last year, 2012, was the hottest year ever recorded in the history of North America; we had 61 percent of the country in deep drought; we had the raging fires in the West again; we had the worst outbreak of West Nile Virus in the history of the country; we had $110 billion worth of climate-related disaster damage, completely blowing away the previous record; half the north polar ice cap melted last year; and superstorm Sandy devastated Manhattan and New Jersey. All the while we had a presidential campaign with more debates than ever in history, and not one single reporter asked a single question in any of the debates to any of the candidates about the climate crisis. That is pathetic! [Applause.]

DUFFY: You developed a really good way to present information to the public through Current TV, and then you sold it to Al Jazeera. A lot of people want to know why did you make that choice? Is Al Jazeera simply going to sunset Current TV and use the distribution network for their own network here in the United States?

GORE: Al Jazeera English is going to be the model for Al Jazeera America. They’re hiring hundreds of American journalists.

I’m happy that they say they’re going to try to keep most of the Current TV employees.

They were the only potential buyer who would do that.

First of all, let me tell you the story of Current TV. My partner Joel Hyatt and I cofounded Current TV almost a decade ago, and the vision was based on this theory that I’ve been outlining: Is there a way to make television accessible to individuals – not just to send the programing to them but to get the programing from people? The idea was that the digital video technology is getting ever cheaper, ever higher in quality. There are a lot of people out there who know how to use the Apple video software and others and can make videos. We created a model for trying to get viewer-created content, and it didn’t work. It worked for ads; we have viewer-created ads that have transformed the advertising industry. That was one of our innovations. But we found that it was much easier to get short-form video content from viewers than it was to get high-quality half-hour programing. This will change. We started several years before YouTube came along, and YouTube, they lost a lot of money for a long time. They had a great business

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model though: Get bought by Google – that works.

But my point is we had to shift from that original vision. We always had investigative television journalism. Our vanguard unit was the primary reason why we won so many of the major awards in television journalism: two Emmys, a Peabody, a duPont, Best Journalist under 35. We did great work, but we shifted the bulk of the content toward progressive news and talk and commentary, and we were profitable every year, and I’m proud of what we did. We were the only independent news and information network in the entire U.S. industry. When you’re competing with conglomerates in a consumerfacing industry, it has certain consequences.

You take any of the networks that are part of the NBC-Universal-Comcast family; they get free advertising for their shows on their sister networks all across the dial and the other conglomerates do the same thing. For us to advertise, we had to pay top dollar for every ad and we did not have deep corporate pockets, so we got to the point where we really had no choice.

We served notice late last year that we were looking at a sale and we got a lot of people to look at it. Now up comes Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera started with a loan from the government of Qatar. Qatar continues to provide some support. Qatar gets its revenue from natural gas and oil, so I knew full well that I would have to answer a lot of questions about selling Current TV to Al Jazeera. It would have been nice to not worry about that, but I did extensive diligence and what I found was what a lot of people who watch Al Jazeera English on the Internet already know. It’s outstanding. Al Jazeera English was named television network of the year last year in the United Kingdom. In Israel one of the major cable and satellite systems there kicked CNN off its system and replaced it with Al Jazeera English. It has won major awards all over the world and its business plan is to be a global newsgathering utility. It is staking everything on maintaining its hardwon reputation as an outstanding, objective newsgathering network.

Take the issue of climate change – I said a minute ago how frustrating it was for me that the American networks just won’t cover it. That changed a little bit after superstorm Sandy, but not much. It’s almost like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage

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at the mention of alcohol or his problems, and so everybody in the family learns to keep quiet and not mention the elephant in the room. These climate deniers – a lot of them getting money from the carbon polluters – fly into a rage if any of the networks even mention the word “climate” and all the news and commentary are sponsored by the coal and oil companies anyway. Al Jazeera, by contrast, has extensive coverage of the climate crisis all the time, in depth, high quality. So I had a responsibility as a businessman, with my partner Joel, to our shareholders. But, more important to me, I had a responsibility as a businessman to do business in a way that makes this country and the world better. And I truly believe that the addition of more diversity, the addition of a high-quality, objective network that covers news and international news, and climate news 24 hours a day, seven days a week improves the television slate of offerings available to the American people.

I’m proud of what we did.

DUFFY: Will you comment on gun control? What should be done?

GORE: We should have gun control. I get it, and I support the Second Amendment.

It’s hard to read it without understanding that the founders intended it to be in there.

It is couched with that phrase, “a well regulated militia being necessary to…,” so you know they weren’t thinking about machine guns and missile launchers and these weapons that have no purpose other than mass killing. There ought to be a ban on assault rifles; there ought to be a ban on these large

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magazines that allow somebody to fire 100 bullets before reloading; there ought to be regulation of the gun show loophole; and if you have to get a license to drive a car and demonstrate some ability to do it safely, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be registration of guns. I am in favor of that. I came out in favor of that in my presidential campaign in 2000. Some people said, “That’s why you lost.” I don’t think it’s why I lost. I think it was a factor in some states for sure, but I said during that campaign, “No more Columbines.” But we’ve had 14 school shootings this year already, and it’s still February. Look, these are military weapons; we’re going to spread them around? There have been 65 million guns sold since President Obama was elected, and people do have the right.

But assault weapons? It’s crazy.

There is a group now actively pushing the 3D printing of guns. A few days ago there was an offering on the Internet for the 3D printing of these large magazines that they’re trying to ban. It is an example of how some of these drivers of change will force us to take a hard look at what we used to think would work to protect against certain dangers. If you regulate at the gun dealers and the gun shows, and then something can be sent in a digital file over the Internet to a home 3D printer and [an individual can] print out an assault weapon with large magazines, then where are we going with this? The answer is we need to check in and make sure that there are intelligent decisions being made about these trends.

THURSDAY JUNE, 6 2013

THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB PRESENTS

Winners of the 82nd annual California Book Awards Silver Medals

Gold Medals Fiction: Adam Johnson The Orphan Master’s Son Random House First Fiction: Jennifer duBois A Partial History of Lost Causes Random House Juvenile: Katherine Applegate The One and Only Ivan Harper Collins Children’s Books Poetry: Etel Adnan Sea and Fog Nightboat Books

Nonfiction: Victoria Sweet God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine Riverhead Books Contribution to Publishing: Ken and Melanie Light Valley of Shadows and Dreams Heyday Press Californiana: John Laslett Sunshine Was Never Enough University of California Press

Nonfiction: Anne-Marie O’Connor The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer Alfred A. Knopf First Fiction: Mariah K. Young Masha’allah and Other Stories Heyday Press Young Adult: Marissa Moss A Soldier’s Secret: The Incredible True Story of Sarah Edmonds, a Civil War Hero Amulet Books

M O N T H 200#

Awards Ceremony: Thursday June 6, 2013 5:00 p.m. reception 6:00 p.m. awards ceremony 7:15 p.m. book signing & reception $15 members $20 non-members The Commonwealth Club 595 Market Street, San Francisco (415) 597-6705 | commonwealthclub.org

Sponsored by:

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Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy

InSight with

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy

President & CEO, The Commonwealth Club

Colleges in the Real World

O

n college campuses across the United States, controversies are brewing about sexual assault and harassment. At Amherst, the University of North Carolina, and most recently at Swarthmore and my alma mater Occidental College, students and former students are alleging that college administrators are not proactive enough in discouraging, investigating or punishing those who commit sexual abuse. Students and their faculty supporters at these institutions are filing lawsuits and federal actions with the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, under Title IX of the U.S. Education Act of 1972. Title IX guarantees freedom from discrimination and harassment, in any arena, as well as the sports realm for which it is best known.

The recent sexual misconduct cases on campuses run the gamut from the gross kind of abuse revealed at Penn State University in the Jerry Sandusky case to date rape and unauthorized filming and distribution of sexual activities online or through texting. At the core of the controversy is the responsibility of colleges to prevent and handle sexual misconduct cases.

Title IX requires colleges themselves to handle complaints of sexual misconduct, if a victim prefers to go that route rather than to the police or other outside authorities. In 2011, a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education detailed and strengthened the responsibilities of college administrations to investigate complaints and undertake sanctions for those found to have engaged in sexual abuse.

Many colleges have Title IX administrators, special deans or other staff, “honor courts” or similar internal mechanisms to investigate and adjudicate cases of sexual abuse. Students, usually women, often decide to go through this internal campus process because they do not want the public record, stress, cost or embarrassment they expect if they were to go through outside law enforcement and the court system.

The current accusations of mishandling by colleges often center on how the internal processes have dealt with reported cases. Unfortunately, even when colleges train their personnel and hire specialists to handle sexual abuse cases, an “honor court” or other internal methods of handling sexual abuse complaints are inadequate ways of addressing what may be criminal activity. College personnel – administrators, faculty, students – responsible for dealing with sexual misconduct are not professionals, and are subject to multiple, cross-cutting pressures from colleagues, donors, alumni, students, the faculty and other

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constituencies that may inappropriately influence the outcomes.

For example, students who have allegedly been victims of sexual assault point out that the students accused of committing such acts may be the children of donors to the college, and the administration may be hesitant to act against them. Or if the alleged perpetrators are not subject to the outside legal process where they have been found guilty of a crime, their parents may threaten to sue the college if they are expelled or sanctioned simply on the basis of an intra-college, non-criminal process. This may tie the hands of the administrators in taking action against the alleged abuser.

It seems mistaken for the Department of Education to assign colleges so much responsibility for dealing with an issue that is such a challenge for them to handle. Assigning this responsibility to colleges seems dated, harkening back to the time when colleges truly acted “in loco parentis” for their students; that is, in the place of their parents.

Colleges today are part of society, not removed from the social and legal environment. Rape and other violent sexual behavior are crimes. Our society has endeavored to put in place a system for handling sexual crimes in a responsible manner, including police and medical approaches to interviewing victims and taking evidence, social systems providing support and counseling to victims and other measures. Rather than encouraging colleges to handle these cases on their own, it seems as though the Department of Education should be urging colleges to refer cases of suspected sexual abuse to the police and other authorities. Victims should go to a hospital or the police, not to their campus officials.

At a minimum, colleges need to draw on recognized expertise in handling suspected sexual crimes. Outsourcing the adjudication process to some kind of organization professionally equipped to handle it might be a good alternative.

Finally, many of the instances of reported sexual abuse involve alcohol. Frequently the perpetrators have been drinking; or the victims have been drinking, and often both. It would be helpful if students took more personal responsibility for their own safety. Recognition of the role of alcohol and avoiding it would be helpful in preventing sexual abuse. Students need to recognize that drinking before the legal age of twenty-one is not only bad for their brains and bodies, but makes them vulnerable to sexual misconduct. A good rule of thumb for students is not to drink until they are out of college, and to stay away from people or locations where there is heavy drinking.

Journey to Cuba

Explore Cuba with a small group of fun and inquisitive Commonwealth Club travelers. Meet experts, writers, artists and musicians and witness the vibrant intellectual and artistic talent for which Cuba is known around the world.

Cuba East to West: Havana, Viñales, Santiago & Baracoa November 4–15, 2013 7 nights Havana, 2 nights Santiago, 2 nights Baracoa

Journey to Cuba: Havana and the Viñales December 7–14, 2013 7 nights Havana

$5,890 per person, based on double occupancy (includes charter flight from Miami to Havana and flights within Cuba)

$4,685 per person, based on double occupancy (includes charter flight from Miami to Havana)

• Havana: Take an architect-led tour; visit a print-making workshop; enjoy a private flamenco performance and meet some of Cuba’s best dancers; discuss U.S. foreign policy during a visit to the U.S. Interests Section and a lecture with Cuba’s former ambassador to the E.U.; learn about the history of Cuban music in a private session with musicians; and discuss ongoing economic reforms.

• Viñales: Meet with tobacco farmers during a day trip to Viñales, and have lunch at their home as we take in views of the dramatic limestone mogotes.

• Santiago: Experience the artistic African and Caribbean influences in the east, such as the Tumba Francesa dance style; wander through the Moncada Barracks, where the first assault of the Revolution took place; and meet with the city historian of Santiago.

• Baracoa: Take an Afro-Cuban dance lesson; speak with members of a children’s choir; learn about cocoa farming and the natural history of the area; and get a feel for small towns in Cuba.

“You completely undersold our recent trip to Cuba. I was completely blown away by all the things we were able to do and see in a short time.” –Nikki Young “You provided an authentic cultural and historic experience. The current situation in Cuba was presented well and provided a rich experience.” –Robert MacDonald “We came home with a much more nuanced understanding of the history of the region and, in particular, U.S.-Cuban relations.” –Susan Milstein “The speakers were all great.” –Larry Friedman “Don’t change a thing.” – Joyce Turley Nicholas CST: 2096889-40

For Information & Reservations: visit commonwealthclub.org/travel call (415) 597-6720 email travel@commonwealthclub.org

The Commonwealth Club of California 595 Market Street, 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94105

Purchase event tickets at commonwealthclub.org

PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

or call (415) 597-6705 or (800) 847-7730 To subscribe to our free weekly events email newsletter, go to commonwealthclub.org and click on “MY CLUB ACCOUNT” in the menu at the bottom of the page.

PROGRAMS YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS June 4

Temple Grandin

June 6

Professor of Animal Science, Colorado State University; Co-author, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum The number of children and adults diagnosed with autism has skyrocketed over the past 10 years. Grandin will share her own experiences and discuss how we can better understand and diagnose autism. From advances in neuroimaging to cutting-edge genetic research, find out what unique and revolutionary treatments might soon be available.

THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB PRESENTS

for event details, see page 32

Sir Ken Robinson Speaker; Advisor on Education in the Arts; Author, The Element and Finding Your Element TED Talks rock star Robinson’s 2006 talk about revolutionizing education by having it nurture rather than undermine creativity is the most viewed in TED’s history. Robinson works with governments and educational systems in Europe, Asia and the United States, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations.

for event details, see page 37

Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored literary excellence among authors in the Golden State. At our special awards ceremony, we will bestow gold and silver medals in several categories, including fiction, nonfiction, first fiction, poetry, young adult, juvenile, Californiana and contribution to publishing. Hear from some literary giants and amazing writers. See you at the ceremony!

Part of the Good Lit Series. Underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation. Special thanks to Dr. Martha Cox and the late Ambassador Bill Lane.

Sponsored by Bank of the West.

Part of the Good Lit Series Underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation

June 19

The 82nd Annual California Book Awards

for event details, see page 32

June 11

Dan Savage Author, American Savage; Sex Advice Columnist, “Savage Love” After decades of braving obscure sex questions and all things taboo in his advice column “Savage Love,” Dan Savage has become America’s go-to sweetheart for everything from parenting trans children to legitimizing poly relationships. Now, fresh off the success of his Emmy-winning It Gets Better Campaign, provocateur Savage is at it again in with his newest book, American Savage. Join us for a night of straight talk, scandalous insights and political banter. for event details, see page 35