Cwc dec15:jan16 full mag

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA DEC 2015/JAN 2016CommonwealthThe

DR. BEN CARSONLeading the Republican field for 2016 page 29

SENATORBERNIE SANDERS

page 6

GLORIADUFFY

page 34

ANNE-MARIESLAUGHTER

page 26

$5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

• In the arctic region of Fairbanks, learn about native cultures and the state’s oil production during a visit to the Alaska Pipeline.

• Travel by scenic rail to Denali National Park and encounter Alaska’s most famed wildlife — grizzlies, wolves, caribou and moose.

• Hike, bike and enjoy the valleys and views of the Alaska Range.

• Discover the turquoise rivers, native salmon and bald eagles of Kenai Peninsula. Cruise through Kenai Fjords National Park and spot whales, sea lions, and puffins.

• Enjoy exclusive and remote eco-lodges, expert guides and guest speakers.

• Kayak, hike, beach comb by day; gather around the bonfire by night.

CST: 2096889-40 Photos: provided by MIR Corporation

Detailed brochure available at: commonwealthclub.org/travel Contact: (415) 597-6720 • [email protected]

CST: 2096889-40

Commonwealth Club Travel

From the Tundra to the Sea

Limited to 16 people maximum$5,995 per person, double occupancy

Alaska’s Wild LandsJuly 18–26, 2016

VOLUME 110, NO. 01

On the CoverConservative Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson faced a sold-out crowd at his Commonwealth Club program in famously liberal San Francisco. Photo by Ed Ritger

Inside

Photo by Ed Ritger

Photo by Ed Ritger

Photo by Ed Ritger

T H E CO M M O N W E A LT H D E C E M B E R 2015/ J A N UA R Y 2016

6SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS The Fight for Economic Justice He’s currently number two in the Democratic race for the party’s presidential nomination, but when he spoke to The Commonwealth Club, the Vermont senator was road-testing his economic message. He shares his message of democratic peril caused by dramatic economic inequality.

4EDITOR’S DESK Let the Parade of Candidates Begin

5THE COMMONS Dr. Martha Healey Cox’s philanthropic love of literature; plus Thompson’s quips and Inforum voter guide.

26ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER Women Can’t Have It AllThe New America president & CEO stirred up a debate on professional women and their families when she declared “you can’t have it all.” Now she expands and clarifies her throughts on the matter.

29DR. BEN CARSON The novice politician has taken his party by surprise, rising to the top of GOP voter preferences and challenging the Republican establishment with his focus on faith, independence and economics. Will he still be strong when his party selects a nominee at its national convention?

34INSIGHTDr. Gloria C. DuffyPresident and CEO

EVENTS

Program Information 11

Language Classes 11

Two Month Calendar 12

Program Listings 14

The real point of the article was to say, ‘Here are all the changes we have to make to really get there.’ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER

THE COMMO N WE AL TH4 DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016

these candidates have to say. That underlines what I have said before: Commonwealth Club people like exposing themselves to ideas and people, and they take their democratic roles seriously.

on a different note, I want to announce some changes. This issue we say goodbye to several Commonwealth magazine staffers.

Staff editors Amelia Cass and Ellen Cohan have moved on, and I will miss their hard work, talents and humor. Amelia and Ellen both started here as Editorial Department interns years ago, then they filled in for a staffer on maternity leave, and later they became Club staffers. I know them well enough to be confident that their next moves will be interesting and worth watching.

Our art director, Tyler Swofford, has also headed on to bigger and better things. After two years of designing this magazine and a whole host of other projects here at The Commonwealth Club, he accepted a new position much closer to home.

During my nine years here, I have had the pleasure of working with a great many talented young staffers, and I hate to see them leave even while I’m proud of them.

That means I’m also happy to see new people come aboard and become a part of this magazine’s decades-long history. This issue we welcome aboard Mackenzie Crist as our new designer. Welcome, Mackenzie! We look forward to you adding your talents to our little magazine.

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson is on the cover of this issue of The Commonwealth, but he’s not the only White House aspirant to be found inside. Vermont Senator

Bernie Sanders visited the Club last spring, and we’re including his impassioned plea to target income inequality in the same issue in which Carson discusses his upbringing, faith and economic plans.

At a time when candidates and voters alike complain about the rush-to-judgment nature of sound bites, attack commercials, and political hit jobs, The Commonwealth Club offers a unique opportunity for an extended conversation. During our hour-long programs, voters get to know candidates beyond the slogans. We try to ask them about themselves and their proposed policies; we want to give them a chance to talk about what they want to do but also address controversies in a civil atmosphere.

Carson and Sanders both did a great job letting us get a view of what they consider the important things the next president should address. We’re an oasis from the craziness of the campaign trail, and we then let voters locally and across the country (internationally, really, through our internet distribution) get to know these candidates, too.

As of this writing, Republican Carson and Democrat Sanders are each polling at or near the top of their respective parties. But we know that they didn’t just attract their own supporters to their programs at the Club; supporters of other other candidates also show up, as do undecided voters, because they want to hear for themselves what

ADVERTISING INFORMATION: Maria Damp, Vice President, Development (415) 597-6714, [email protected] Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 555 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94102. | 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, 555 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94102. | Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink. Copyright © 2015 The Commonwealth Club of California. Tel: (415) 597-6700 Fax: (415) 597-6729 E-mail: [email protected] | 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/media, podcasts on Apple iTunes, or contact Club offices to buy a compact disc.

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub commonwealthclub.org/blog commonwealthclub.org

BUSINESS OFFICES The Commonwealth, 555 Post Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 | [email protected]

VP, MEDIA & EDITORIAL John Zipperer | DESIGNERS Tyler R. Swofford, Mackenzie Crist | STAFF EDITORS Amelia Cass, Ellen Cohan

INTERNS Zoë Byrne, Laura Nguyen | PHOTOGRAPHERS Sonya Abrams, Ed Ritger, Rikki Ward

Let the Parade of Candidates Begin

Editor’s Desk J O H N Z I P P E R E R V P, M E D I A & E D I TO R I A L

THE COMMO N WE AL TH 5DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016

In 1994, the U.S. Senate seat from Tennessee for-merly held by Vice President Al Gore was won by prominent attorney and actor Fred Thompson.

The conservative Republican held the seat until 2003. Throughout his career, he was known as a reli-

able source for good quips. Thompson, who died in early November, was eulogized in The Daily Signal, Newsweek and elsewhere by sharing some of his most

popular quotes. For example. he told National Review, “A man who lives a full life and at the end of the day thinks exactly the way he thought about things much earlier on is pretty much a hapless guy.” But our favor-ite is this one: “After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.” The source? Thompson delivered that during a speech to The Commonwealth Club in the mid-1990s.

She was a university teacher who became a philan-thropist, spreading her love for books and good literature near and far, including as an under-

writer of The Commonwealth Club’s annual California Book Awards. Dr. Martha Healey Cox passed away in Septmeber, leaving a hole in the local literary scene.

“Martha’s life was dedicated to literature and to sup-porting projects that brought insight and prominence to great writers and fine literature,” said Dr. Gloria Duffy, the Club’s president and CEO. “Martha both donated funds to the Club’s California Book Awards for cash prizes to the winners and was a hands-on jury member who read hundreds of books and contributed her knowledge of literature to the selection process. She was a unique and wonderful woman whom we will always remember at the Club.”

Cox taught at San Jose State University for 34 years, where she founded the Steinbeck Center, an academic institute for Steinbeck studies. A successful investor, she endowed fellowships at the Steinbeck Center, a lecture series at SJSU, an academic chair and literary prize at her alma mater in Arkansas, and the “Raw Play Series”

Remembering Dr. Martha Healey Cox A literary mission

The Whole World’s a Stage Sen. Fred Thompson’s wit

“Professor Zhang Wei-wei recently visited San Francisco at the invita-tion of the Committee of 100 to speak at ... The Commonwealth Club. The topic of the forum was how China and the U.S. can avoid conflict. Zhang said to the audience that bi-lateral trade between China and the U.S. is nine-fold larger than China with [the] U.K. Surely the potential benefits of bilateral collaboration would be that much greater....

“‘If China and U.K. can collaborate, why not the U.S.’ was more or less his rhetorical posit.... Zhang is a high-ly respected thinker in China and the leaders in Beijing follow closely his books analyzing China’s place in the world.

“Indeed, a number of highly regarded observers ... have sug-gested that the U.S. take a page or two from Britain’s book of diplomacy in dealing with China. After all, the U.K. has been play-ing the Great Game for a long time.... The U.S. has assumed the role of a world power rela-tively recently, since after WWII, and has much to learn that nu-anced diplomacy is not a blunt instrument.”

Asia Times

IN THE NEWS

at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, in addition to the Club’s Book Awards program.

“I remember being bowled over by this woman-of-advanced-years’ judicious appreciation of such writers as Michelle Tea and William Vollman,” said Mary Ellen Hannibal, the chair of the California Book Awards jury. “She met every book on its own ground, and Martha read every single book submission in the fiction categories from cover to cover. What I will not forget about Martha is that for her, a good life was one full of books and in support of creativity.”

The Commonwealth Club made a stealth ap-pearance in the early stages of the 2016 race for the White House. During the third Republican

presidential debate, former businesswoman Carly Fio-rina was asked about her controversial tenure as chief executive of Hewlett Packard, which ended with her being fired. She replied that one of the people who led efforts to oust her was venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who now speaks in support of her.

CNBC panelist Becky Quick asked about Fiorina’s ties to Perkins. The journalist noted that Perkins had once offered a provocative tax idea that would tie voting to one’s wealth. She didn’t cite where that idea

was aired, but we know: It was here at The Common-wealth Club in a sold-out 2014 Inforum program at which Perkins explained earlier incendiary statements he’d made tying populism on the left with the Nazis’ Kristalllnacht pogrom.

What he proposed was “The Tom Perkins system,” in which “You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes. But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. If you pay a million dollars in taxes, you should get a million votes.”

For the record, in the debate, Fiorina responded, “Well, this is one of the reasons why Tom Perkins and I had had disagreements in the board room, Becky.”

Photo by Ellen Cohan

The Commons TA L K O F T H E C LU B

Buying votes Inforum taxation idea resurfaces in Election 2016

THE COMMO N WE AL TH6 DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016Photo by Ed Ritger

BERNIESANDERSThe Fight for Economic Justice


T he American middle class, for the last 40 years, has been disap-pearing. That’s the simple reality. Real unemployment today is

not the official 5.5 percent you read in the papers. If you count those people who have given up looking for work or working part-time when they want to work full-time, real unemployment is 11 percent. Anyone hear any discussion about youth unemployment? Seventeen percent. African-American youth unemployment, much higher than that.

So we have a major unemployment crisis in this country. Millions of American work-ers are today working longer hours for lower wages. Forty-five million Americans are now living in poverty, almost more than in any time in the modern history of our country. The United States of America [has] by far the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth—the number is somewhere around 18 percent. Today, de-spite the modest successes of the Affordable Care Act, we still have 35 million Americans without any health insurance, and we have many others who are underinsured with high premiums and high deductibles. The United States shamefully remains the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee people health care as a right, something which we should end. That is why I support a Medicare-for-all single-payer program.

When you look out all over America, you see a lot of very angry people. Let me very briefly tell you why they are angry. Everybody in this room knows that there has been an explosion in technology and a huge increase in worker productivity, correct? Everybody

knows that. One would think that in any type of rational economy, if I gave you a tool which made you 50 percent more produc-tive, one of two things happens. Either your income goes up significantly, or you work fewer hours. But obviously in the economy today, despite the huge increase in produc-tivity, neither of those realities is happening. The truth is many people are working longer hours for lower wages. When I was in college, they used to give a course when robotics was really beginning, they talked about automa-tion and factories. They gave a course about what Americans would do with all of the leisure time they would have. Remember that? They don’t teach that course anymore. The course they now teach is how couples can stay together and raise healthy kids with all of the stress that they are dealing with.

I was outside a grocery store in Burling-ton, Vermont, and a woman came up to me. She said, “You know, Bernie, we have one kid. We’d like to have more kids, but I’m work-ing 50 hours a week. I’m doing three jobs. My husband is doing two jobs, and we don’t think we can be the parents we want to be.” That’s the story all over this country. Do you remember at the beginning of the century those pictures in those textbooks we used to read in school where workers were holding up signs that said, ‘We want a 40-hour week!’ Remember that? We still don’t have a 40-hour week. In my state, Vermont, you have a whole lot of people who are trying to cobble together an income working not one job but two jobs, three jobs, trying to get some health insurance and trying to pay the bills.

When you talk about why people are angry, the reason is they know they are more productive and yet they can’t understand why they are forced to work longer hours and make lower wages. Since 1999, the median middle-class family, the family right in the middle of our economy, ... earned almost $500 less last year than it did 26 years ago. You got a great global economy, which is going to create all kinds of wonderful jobs. You have all of this technology, computers, robotics, and that median family is making $500 less in inflation[-adjusted dollars] than it made in 1989.

You want to know why all these tea party guys on TV are really angry? Today, male workers made $783 less last year than they did 42 years ago. Female workers, women workers, earned $1,300 less last year than

The democrat ic cost of inequality. Excerpted from “Senator Bernie Sanders: The Fight for Economic Justice,” March 30, 2015.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERSUnited States Senator (I-VT); Democratic Presidential Candidate DAVID CAMPOS Supervisor (District 9), San Francisco—Moderator

BERNIESANDERSThe Fight for Economic Justice


they did in 2007. So we’ve got to throw that issue right on the table.

What happened? Has a natural catastro-phe occurred in America that our productive capabilities were destroyed? Why is it that with all of that technology out there, life is not getting better for the vast majority of the people, but in fact is becoming harder? Since 2005, the median family income has seen its wealth go down by more than 36 percent.

Truth is, you go all over this country and you’re seeing people living under incredible stress. Half the people in this country have less than $10,000 in savings. You know what that means? That means they’re an automo-bile accident, a divorce, a serious illness away from financial disaster. That’s why people are nervous. That’s why people are stressed out. Because they are scared to death not only for their own lives, not only for what happens to them when they get old; they’re worried about what kind of life their kids will have. Today, 5.5 million young people have either dropped out of high school or graduated high school; you know what they are doing? They’re doing nothing. They’re hanging out on street corners in Burlington, Vermont, and in San Francisco, California, and too many of them getting into self-destructive activities, getting into drugs and ending up in jail. Maybe, just maybe, we as a nation might want to invest in education for these kids, in job training, rather than in jails for these kids.

When we talk about the decline of the middle class, what we’ve got to understand is that since 2001, this country has lost

60,000 factories. For the young people in the audience, let me tell you something you don’t know: There was once a time when you could actually go into a department store and buy products made in the United States of America. I’m not lying. It’s true. Not just China or Vietnam, but the United States of America.

Why have we lost that manufacturing capability? There are a number of reasons, but one of the key reasons is disastrous trade policies like NAFTA, CAFTA, permeable national relations with China. Corporate America pushed that onto Congress, on Democratic presidents, on Republican presidents, so that they can say to American workers, “If you don’t take cuts in your pay, take cuts in your health care, we’re moving to China.” Many of them have moved to China and other countries, not because they were losing money in America, simply because they can make even more money in low-wage countries. We have got to rethink our trade policies, we have got to start demanding to corporate America, “Invest in the United States of America. Create jobs here rather than in China, Vietnam and other countries.”

My wife says I throw out too many facts. She’s probably right, but I am going to bore you for a moment, [because] it’s important that you understand the degree of what is going on in America today. The tragedy is that while people are so financially stressed, ordinary people, they look around and they’re seeing the richest people in this country and the largest corporations becoming much

wealthier and more profitable. So it’s not just that the middle class is disappearing; it is that we are living in a country with a grotesque and obscene level of income and wealth inequality. Today, the top one percent owns 41.8 percent of the financial wealth of America. The bottom 60 percent owns less than two percent. Got it? In fact, listen to this: the top one-tenth of one percent owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Today one family, the Walton family of Walmart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. There was a fact that just came out a couple of weeks ago from the Communist publication called Forbes. We all know Steven Forbes, the raving Commie type. In the last two years, between 2013 and 2015, the wealthiest 14 people, not 1,400, not 14,000, 14 people—that is Gates and that is Buffett and the Koch brothers, those guys—14 people saw their wealth increase by $157 billion in two years. Now $157 billion, that’s their increase in wealth. That is more wealth than is owned by the bottom 40 percent of the American people. That’s 130 million people.

We are moving toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have unbelievable power and unbelievable wealth within the context of the American economy. What is doubly dangerous about that situation is not only the morality of the issue. Are we comfortable as a people when we have the highest level of childhood poverty of any major country at the same time as we are seeing a proliferation of mil-

Photo by Ed Ritger


lionaires and billionaires? It is also a political issue, because as a result of the disaster of the Citizens United decision, what do you think these billionaires are doing? They’re not putting their money under the mattress. The Koch family now, arguably, has or soon will have more political power than either the Democratic or Republican parties. We believe that they will spend more money in this election cycle than either the Democratic or Republican parties. And for them and for the political leadership in this country right now, and they’re pretty open about it, Citizens United—which allows billionaires to spend as much money as they want on the political process through individual expenditures—did not go far enough. They want to eliminate now all campaign finance limitations, so you know what that means? It means that one family will sit in a room like this and it will say to you, “You want to run for governor of California, here’s a check for $300 million. There is your speechwriter. There is your media consultant. There is your campaign manager. Here is your check and we are going to be watching you, because you work for me. No more independent expenditures. You are on my payroll.”

If we don’t get our act together with cam-paign finance reform, if we don’t overturn Citizens United, if we don’t pass a disclosure law, if we don’t move to public funding of elections, a handful of billionaires will in fact own the United States Congress, and the de-mocracy that this country has so much touted and has so much loved will be gone forever.

Question-and-answer session with David Campos, member, San Fran-cisco Board of SupervisorsDAVID CAMPOS: As I hear your inspir-ing speech, the first question that came to mind is actually a question that someone asked from the audience: What do you

think would actually make Congress more effective? What’s the one thing that you think we can do to actually change Congress?BERNIE SANDERS: Good question. The answer is not what people think. People go, “Oh, my god, why can’t people in Congress get along?”

That ain’t the issue. The issue is right now virtually every major piece of legisla-tion coming before Congress is sponsored by corporate America or the wealthiest people in this country. The American people want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. That bill will not get to the floor under the Republicans. The American people think the rich should be paying more in taxes. What will get to

the floor from the Republican Congress are more tax breaks for billionaires. The American people think we should make college education more affordable. What we get from the Republicans are major cuts in Pell grants. So to answer your ques-tion, the issue is not what can happen in

Washington, the issue is what happens in grassroots America. If you want change in this country, ordinary people from Maine to California are going to have to stand up in a way they never have before and tell the United States Congress, “We’ve got a lot of problems in this country. You’re going to have to start listening to the working families and the middle class and not just your billionaire campaign contributors.” That is the way you change Congress.CAMPOS: San Francisco by most accounts is one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Why should people in San Francisco care so much about this [wealth] inequality?SANDERS: I visit every once in a while. We were driving around the city today and yeah, I suppose this is a wealthy city, but if you see

Photo by Ed Ritger

We are moving toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of bi l l ionaire s [has] unbel ievable power and unbelievable wealth.


the people out on the streets, you don’t get quite the feeling that it’s all that wealthy. But it’s not just San Francisco. We are, the United States right now, in terms of total wealth, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and we are wealthier today than we have ever been before. But the problem is that when the top one-tenth percent of one percent owns more of that wealth than the bottom 90 per-cent, for the vast majority of the people, they are not seeing that wealth. Quite the contrary, they’re seeing a decline in their standard of living. That is why, at the end of the day, if we are serious about transforming America, we have got to address this issue of wealth and income inequality. We have got to demand that the richest people in this country and the largest corporations started paying their fair share of taxes. We can no longer sustain a situation where we’re losing a hundred billion a year because corporate America is stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. CAMPOS: In terms of addressing long-term this inequality, making education ac-cessible to more people is the key. Do you think that your idea of free tuition for public

institutions [has] a chance in Congress?SANDERS: The answer is yes or no. Left alone, it will just be a bill with a few co-sponsors. But if we can galvanize young people on campuses to stand up to say, “Stop spending the money on the military. Start spending the money on higher education,” yes, we can win that fight.CAMPOS: I know, as an elected official, the budget is the most important policy docu-ment that you can pass. It shows what your priorities are. Any idea of when and how the people’s treasury will be used to benefit the middle class?SANDERS: That requires a political revo-lution. What a serious budget would do is look at the problems facing America. What would they say? We are going to invest in rebuilding our infrastructure and create mil-lions of jobs. How do we get the money? We are going to say to the billionaire class and large corporations, “You are going to have to start paying your fair share of taxes.” A serious budget would say that we invest in our young people, child care and making college affordable, and one way that we raise the money to do that is not end up spending

more money on the military than the next 10 countries combined. And by the way, maybe not getting into another war in the Middle East. CAMPOS: Let’s say you get elected, but you still have the kind of political representation with Republicans in Congress. Someone wants to know what would you do, how would you as president [handle it]?SANDERS: No president, not the smartest and best president imaginable, can take on Wall Street and the lobbyists and the Koch brothers alone. The big mistake that Barack Obama made is that after his brilliant, almost unprecedented 2008 campaign, when he went to Washington, because he’s a nice guy and a trusting guy, he actually thought that he could negotiate with the Republicans. He kind of left those people who supported him, who worked day and night for him, behind....

The only way it can be done is for a president to be in direct relationship with the people of this country, to make sure that if these guys are voting against legislation that is important to the people of America, they will pay a political price.

Often imitated but never duplicated, The Commonwealth Club’s acclaimed Annual Economic Forecast is the Bay Area’s premier economic event, an unparalleled opportunity to learn what’s on the economic horizon in the New Year. Now in its 86th year, the 2016 event will feature the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco John Williams in conversation with John B. Taylor about economic trends on the local and national stage. Gold or Platinum level tables also have access to the exclusive, off-the-record private panel.

John B. TaylorMary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics and George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution

FEATURING

John WilliamsPresident and Chief Executive Officer at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Platinum $3,500 ($4,000 after 12/31/15) • Premium seating for 10 at

private panel• Premier table for 10 at

luncheon & public program• Logo recognition on event

collateral (program, table signage, web)

• Inclusion in event press release

Gold $2,500 ($3,000 after 12/31/15)• Seating for 10 at private panel• Table for 10 at luncheon &

public program• Logo recognition on event

collateral (program, table signage, web)

Silver $800 ($1,000 after 12/31/15)• Table for 10 at luncheon &

public program• Name recognition on event

collateral (program)

TABLE SPONSOR LEVELS(limited availability, tables sell out every year!)

The

Walter E. Hoadley

Presented by Bank of America

The Commonwealth Clubputting you face-to-face with today’s thought leaders

DATE Friday, January 29th, 2016

TIME10:30 a.m. private program • 11:45 a.m. luncheon • 12:30 p.m. program

LOCATIONHotel Nikko, 222 Mason St., San Francisco

Tara Crain415.869.5919 [email protected]

Maria [email protected]

TO PURCHASE TABLES, PLEASE CONTACT:


ww

w.co

mm

onw

ealthclu

b.org

/events

OVERVIEW

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.

STANDARD PROGRAMSTypically 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 SERIESCLIMATE 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 up-and-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 [email protected]

ARTS

Anne W. Smith [email protected]

Lynn Curtis [email protected]

ASIA–PACIFIC AFFAIRS Cynthia Miyashita [email protected]

BAY GOURMET Cathy Curtis ccurtis873@gmail

SF BOOK DISCUSSION Richard Ingalls [email protected]

BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP Kevin O’Malley [email protected]

ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES Ann Clark [email protected]

GROWNUPS John Milford [email protected]

HEALTH & MEDICINEWilliam B. Grant [email protected]

Patty [email protected]

HUMANITIES

George C. Hammond [email protected]

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Norma Walden [email protected]

LGBT James Westly McGaughey [email protected]

MIDDLE EASTCelia Menczel [email protected]

PERSONAL GROWTH:Stephanie Kriebel [email protected]

PSYCHOLOGY Patrick O’Reilly [email protected]

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Gerald Harris [email protected]

Beau Fernald [email protected]

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all Commonwealth Club events—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. Pricing is subject to change.

Subscribe to our free podcast service to automatically download new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast.

Watch Club programs on the California Channel Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and 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

To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Valerie Castro at: [email protected] seven working days before the event.

HARD OF HEARING?

Hear Club programs on more than 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 (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m.KALW (91.7 FM) Inforum programs on select Tuesdays at 7 p.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.TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

FORUM CHAIRS

TICKETS

RADIO, VIDEO AND PODCASTS

Free for members Contact group leaders below for information

FRENCH, Intermediate Class Pierrette Spetz, Graziella Danieli [email protected], [email protected]

FRENCH, Advanced Conversation Gary Lawrence [email protected]

GERMAN, Int./Adv. Conversation Sara Shahin [email protected]

SPANISH, Advanced Conversation (fluent only) Luis Salvago-Toledo, [email protected]

FOREIGN LANGUAGE GROUPS

Programs

DECEMBER


Two Month Calendar

MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SAT/SUN

Legend

ww

w.co

mm

onw

ealthclu

b.org

/events

1 2 3 4 5/62:00 p.m. Nob Hill Walking Tour6:00 p.m. Pope Fran-cis: Climate Change and the Poor

5:15 p.m. What You Need to Know Before You’re 65: A Medi-care Primer7:45 p.m. The Art of Being Brave: Women in Film

6:30 p.m. Chef Joanne Weir in Conversa-tion with Chef Gary Danko6:30 p.m. P.J. O’Rourke

12:00 p.m. Sisters in Law FM

7 8 9 10 11 12/135:30 p.m. Book Discussion: Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics FM

6:30 p.m. Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s Great Great Grandson: TR’s Vision and How It Shaped America FM

6:00 p.m. Percep-tion and Deception: Understanding Misunderstandings Across Cultures6:30 p.m. David Gregory

14 15 16 17 18 19/2012:00 p.m. Women’s Iden-tity and Rethinking the Hadith FM

6:00 p.m. Mark Twain’s Chronicle of a Young Satan FM

6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Holiday Social

6:30 p.m. Longevity Ex-plorers Discussion Group: Better Aging. You. Your parents.

2:00 p.m. San Fran-cisco Architecture Walking Tour6:30 p.m. Dr. Chris Field: The Stephen Schneider Award

6:00 p.m. CorpsAf-rica: Peace Corps for Africans

21 22 23 24 25 26/276:30 p.m. Socrates Café

28 29 30 31

Holiday Break Offices Closed


JANUARY


ww

w.co

mm

onw

ealthclu

b.org

/events

MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SAT/SUN

Legend FM

FE

MO

San Francisco

East Bay/North Bay

Silicon Valley

Free program for members

Free program for everyone

Members–only program

ww

w.co

mm

onw

ealthclu

b.org

/events

1 2/3

4 5 6 7 8 9/105:30 p.m. Book Discussion: The Mersault Investi-gation FM

6:00 p.m. Poets, Painters and Spies: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

2:00 p.m. Russian Hill Walking Tour

11 12 13 14 15 16/176:00 p.m. Values that Guide Health-care Decisions FM

6:30 p.m. Longev-ity Explorers Discussion Group: Better Aging. You. Your Parents.

6:00 p.m. STEM to STEAM Movement

6:30 p.m. Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry: A Personal Journey to Reduce the Nuclear Threat

18 19 20 21 22 23/245:15 p.m. At Home with Growing Old: Activism Starts in Your Own Home

6:00 p.m. Ronald Reagan7:00 p.m. Gretchen Rubin: Happiness and Habits

12:00 p.m. 10 Ways to Heal Health Care: How Con-sumers Can Revo-lutionize Their Care Experience2:00 p.m. China-town Walking Tour7:00 p.m. Sanjay’s Super Team

12:00 Israel and European Union Relations FM

25 26 27 28 29 30/31TBD Socrates Café FM

6:30 p.m. Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour

6:00 p.m. Health and Hope from the Ocean Depths to the Moun-tain Tops

6:30 p.m. Ellie Krieger: Fabulous Healthy Meals

7:30 p.m. SV Reads 2016: Chance of Rain? The Impact of Climate Change on Our Lives FE

6:00 p.m. Come, Let Me Guide You: A Life Shared with a Guide Dog6:30 p.m. Remak-ing the Planet

12:30 p.m. John Williams and John Taylor: Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Walter E. Hoadley Annual Economic Forecast MO+1


THE COMMO N WE AL TH14 DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

TUESDAY, DEC 1Nob Hill Walking Tour

Explore one of San Francisco’s 44 hills, and one of its origi-nal “Seven Hills.” Highlights include the history of four landmark hotels: The Fair-mont, Mark Hopkins, Stanford Court, and Huntington Hotel. Visit the city’s largest house of worship, Grace Cathedral, and discover architectural tidbits and anecdotes about the rail-road barons and silver kings. A true San Francisco experience of elegance, urbanity, scandals and fabulous views. SF • Location: Meet in front of Caffe Cento, 801 Powell Street, San Francis-co • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Tour operates rain or shine. Limited to 20 participants. Tickets must be purchased in ad-vance.

Pope Francis: Climate Change and the Poor

Kenneth Weare, Ph.D, Ad-junct Professor of Social Ethics, University of San Francisco; Board Member, San Francisco Archdiocesan Board of Education; Board Member, Catholic Charities CYO Board of Directors; Pas-tor, St. Rita Catholic ChurchDr. Weare will discuss Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, which offers a moral ar-gument on climate change that also includes a profound con-cern for the poor as a teaching on both global warming and global poverty. He describes Pope Francis’ focus on the

moral dimensions of climate change in addition to the con-tributions from scientific re-searchers and environmental experts worldwide over the years.

Weare’s lecture will high-light the key elements of his moral analysis and evaluation, including creation theology, integral ecology and the so-cio-political and economic re-alities constituent to the chal-lenge of climate change.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students • MLF: Science & Technolo-gy • Program Organizer: Gerald Harris • Notes: In association with the Catho-lic Archdiocese of San Francisco

WEDNESDAY, DEC 2What You Need to Know Before You’re 65: A Medi-care Primer

Esther Koch, MBA, Gerontol-ogist; Founder, Encore Man-agement; Aging Network Partner, Centers for Medicare and MedicaidIf you are approaching the Medicare qualifying age of 65 and Medicare seems like one big alphabetical maze to you, you are not alone. Come hear what every boomer needs to know before they turn 65 to successfully navigate Medi-care. Learn the ABCD’s of Medicare, the realities of what you can expect (and what not to expect) and what options might be best for you.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. network-ing reception, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Program Orga-nizer: John Milford

The Art of Being Brave: Women in FilmBrenda Chapman, Academy Award-winning Director,

Brave; Director, The Prince of EgyptZoë Elton, Director of Pro-gramming, Mill Valley Film FestivalBrenda Chapman and Zoë Elton are leaders in the film industry. Brenda was the di-rector of animated films The Prince of Egypt and Brave, a film she conceived of to in-spire young women to lead. Zoe is the director of pro-gramming at the amazing Mill Valley Film Festival. Brenda and Zoë will talk about film, animation, women’s leader-ship and how cartoons display essential aspects of our world and our roles within it.NB • MARIN CONVERSATIONS PROGRAM • Location: Outdoor Art Center, One West Blithdale, Mill Val-ley • Time: 7 p.m. check-in and re-ception, 7:45–9 p.m. program • Cost: $55 non-members, $35 members; Premium: $70 non-members, $50 members

THURSDAY, DEC 3 Chef Joanne Weir in Conver-sation with Chef Gary Danko

Joanne Weir, Chef and Own-er, Copita Tequileria y Comi-da; Host, “Joanne Weir’s Cook-ing Confidence”; James Beard Award Winner for Best Cook-book, 2005; Author, Kitchen Gypsy: Recipes and Stories from a Lifelong Romance with FoodIn conversation with Gary Danko, Chef and Princi-pal, Restaurant Gary Danko; James Beard Award Winner for Best Chef-California, 1995

and Best New Restaurant, 2000Chef, cooking instructor, and television host Joanne Weir has inspired legions of home cooks across the globe with her California-Mediterranean cuisine. In Kitchen Gypsy, the James Beard Award-win-ning author offers the recipes and lessons that have shaped her culinary career, includ-ing the 140-year-old lighting cake recipe handed down from her great-grandmother. The author of more than 20 cookbooks and the host of two popular PBS series, Chef Weir is the recipient of nu-merous awards, including the very first IACP Julia Child Cooking Teacher Award of Excellence and the 2005 James Beard Best Cookbook award for Weir Cooking in the City.Join these two powerhouse chefs as Weir takes a trip down culinary memory lane, sharing stories from her days cooking with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, traveling and teaching throughout Europe and becoming the California chef she is today.EB • Location: Lafayette Library, 3491 Mt Diablo Blvd, Lafayette • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. pro-gram • Notes: This program is spon-sored by Wells Fargo and is part of the Good Lit Series underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

P.J. O’Rourke

P.J. O’Rourke, H.L. Mencken Research Fellow, Cato Insti-tute; Author, Thrown Under the OmnibusP. J. O’Rourke has had a prolific career as one of America’s most celebrated humorists. From his early pieces for the National Lampoon, through his classic reporting as Rolling Stone’s in-ternational affairs editor in the ’80s and ’90s, and his witty po-

DE

CE

MB

ER

1-3

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

THE COMMO N WE AL TH 15DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016SF: San Francisco SV: Silicon Valley EB: East Bay NB: North Bay

DE

CE

MB

ER

4-8

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

litical satire, P.J. has been enter-taining and provoking readers for years.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

FRIDAY, DEC 4Sisters in Law

Linda Hirshman, Lawyer; Cultural Historian; Author, Sis-ters In LawHirshman tells the fascinating story of the intertwined lives of Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women to serve as Supreme Court justices. Their relationship—between Republican and Democrat, Christian and Jew, western rancher’s daughter and Brook-lyn girl—transcends party, religion, region and culture. Learn revealing stories about how these trailblazers fought for their own recognition in a male-dominated profession and then reshaped the legal framework of modern femi-nism, including employment discrimination, abortion, af-firmative action and sexual ha-rassment. Personal anecdotes bring these two very different personalities into focus, re-vealing a moving story of a re-markable friendship. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmembers, FREE FOR MEMBERS, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Humanities • Program Or-ganizer: George Hammond • Notes: Part of the Good Lit series underwrit-ten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

MONDAY, DEC 7Kermit Roosevelt, The-odore Roosevelt’s Great Great Grandson: TR’s Vi-sion and How It Shaped America

Kermit Roosevelt III, Pro-fessor of Constitutional law, University of Pennsylvania; Great Great Grandson of President Theodore Roos-evelt; Author, Allegiance, the Award-winning Novel In the Shadow of the Law, and The Myth of Judicial ActivismKermit Roosevelt will present a dynamic account of Pres-ident Theodore Roosevelt’s distinctive constitutional vi-sion and the way it has shaped modern America. We owe much of our modern Con-stitution to Theodore Roos-evelt—and his cousin Frank-lin Delano Roosevelt, who saw the final victory of Theodore’s vision. Kermit does say that both Roosevelts overlooked one significant point, the need for strong judicial protection of minorities. SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in; 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Cost: $22 nonmembers, FREE FOR MEMBERS; Premium seat-ing (includes book and seating in first rows): $50 nonmembers, $40 members • Notes: Part of the Club’s Good Lit Series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

Book Discussion: Keynes Hayek: The Clash that De-fined Modern EconomicsNicholas Wapshott is a jour-nalist who writes insightful and entertaining books on a variety of subjects ranging from the life of Peter O’Toole to politi-cal economy. As John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker, “I defy anybody — Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.” Cas-sidy went on to describe the battle between the Keynesian economic theory of the need for government spending in times of economic turn down, vs. Hayekian philosophy that government attempts to in-tervene are both pointless and potentially dangerous. This conflict plays directly into the free-market arguments of to-day over the virtues of the use of government intervention to stabilize markets.

The book ads ideas for the continuing discussion between those who would privatize So-cial Security and those who would expand it, or for those who are against raising tax-es for any reason compared to those who believe that in-creased taxes allow people to live a more fulfilling life.This is a book discussion; the author will not be present for the discussion.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5 p.m. check-in, 5:30 p.m. program • Cost: $5 nonmem-bers, FREE FOR MEMBERS • MLF: Asia Pacific Affairs • Program Organizer: Richard Ingalls

TUESDAY, DEC 8Perception and Deception: Understanding Misunder-standings Across Cultures

Joe Lurie, Executive Direc-tor Emeritus, International

House, UC BerkeleyInspired by a West Afri-can proverb that says, “The stranger sees only what he knows,” Lurie shares a feast of cross-cultural stories and misadventures, exploring the deeper cultural messages that escape people who hear large-ly what they’re used to hearing and see mostly what they’re used to seeing. Gleaned from his years of research, trav-el and managing Berkeley’s International House, Lurie’s cross-cultural experiences re-veal how perceptions and cul-tural filters affect the way peo-ple understand others. One reviewer of Lurie’s book ob-served, “Already I can hear the reader calling out to a friend across the room, ‘Wait, you’ve got to hear this!’”SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-

cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. reception, 6

p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing

• MLF: International Relations • Pro-

gram Organizer: Karen Keefer •

Notes: In association with NorCal

Peace Corps Association, UC Berke-

ley’s International House and Osher

Institute for Life-Long Learning

David Gregory

David Gregory, Former Mod-erator, NBC’s “Meet the Press”; Author, How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual JourneyIn conversation with Rev. Alan Jones, Dean Emeritus, Grace CathedralJoin Gregory as he probes various religious traditions to better understand his own faith and answer some of life’s important questions: Who do we want to be and what do we believe? David’s journey has taken him inside Chris-tian mega-churches and into the heart of Orthodox Ju-daism. He’s gone deep into

Online Election: Commonwealth Club Board of Governors The election of members and officers of The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors for the 2016 term will be conducted online. The ballot will be available on the Club’s website from November 26, 2015, through December 2, 2015, during which time Club members may submit their votes. They are also being notified by email.

Following the voting period, the votes will be tabulated, and a meeting of the membership will be held at 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, December 3, 2015, preceding the program that evening. At that time the elec-tion results will be ratified by the members present.

Members, please visit commonwealthclub.org/boardvote between November 26 and December 2 to submit your vote for the 2016 term of the Board of Governors.


DE

CE

MB

ER

14

-16

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

Bible study and asked tough questions of America’s most thoughtful religious leaders. David approaches his faith with the curiosity and dedi-cation you would expect from a journalist accustomed to holding politicians and presi-dents accountable.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

MONDAY, DEC 14Women’s Identity and Rethinking the Hadith

Nimat Hafez Barazangi,Visiting Fellow, Cornell UniversityBarazangi will discuss her work in Muslim and Arab women’s education, identity development and belief studies as well as feminist and gender issues. She will sign her newest book, Woman’s Identity and Rethinking the Hadith. She de-scribes this book as a first step in a comprehensive attempt to contrast Hadith with the Qur’an to uncover unjust prac-tices concerning women and gender issues.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book sign-ing • Cost: $20 nonmembers, FREE FOR MEMBERS, students free • MLF: Middle East • Program Organizer: Celia Menczel • Notes: Photo by POA(Phot) Sean Clee

Mark Twain’s Chronicle of Young Satan

Benjamin Griffin, Editor, Mark Twain Project, UC Berkeley

Monday Night Philosophy plays its iconoclast card. Mark Twain’s Chronicle of Young Satan—a late work that he left unfinished—has a passage in which the “angel” Satan forms people out of clay, and gives them life, only to kill them. Twain’s literary source was the Apocryphal New Testament published by William Hone in 1821, by way of an 1867 article by—Mark Twain.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, FREE FOR MEMBERS, $7 stu-dents (with valid ID) • MLF: Human-ities • Program Organizer: George Hammond

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Holiday Social

Melissa Caen, Contributor, CBS SF (“Mornings with Me-lissa”); Attorney Additional Panelists TBAJoin us for a year-end round-up. It’s our annual holiday special social hour followed by a year-end edition of our popular Week to Week polit-ical roundtable.

We’ll discuss the most im-portant and the biggest (and some of the oddest) political news of the day with intelli-gence and wit, and you’ll get to meet other interested and interesting people.SF • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post Street, San Fran-cisco • Cost: $20 nonmembers, FREE FOR MEMBERS • Time: 5:30–6:30 so-cial hour with wine and snacks, 6:30 program

Longevity Explorers Dis-cussion Group: Better Ag-ing. You. Your parents.This regular discussion group will be exploring new and emerging solutions to the

challenges of growing older. Not only will we be uncover-ing interesting new products at the intersection of aging and technology, we will also be conducting a series of on-going deep dive discussions into topics like brain health, apps for seniors, hearing and wearables for seniors.

The results of our discus-sions will be shared with a larg-er community of older adults interested in improving their quality of life through our part-ner in this initiative, Tech-en-hanced Life, PBC. The discus-sions will be facilitated by Dr. Richard Caro, whom many of you have heard speak at prior grownups forum events.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 7 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • Cost: $10 nonmembers, $5 members • MLF: Grownups • Program Organizer: John Milford

TUESDAY, DEC 15San Francisco Architecture Walking Tour

Explore San Francisco’s Fi-nancial District with histori-an Rick Evans and learn the history and stories behind some of our city’s remark-able structures, streets, and public squares. Hear about the famous architects who influenced the building of San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake. Discover hard-to-find rooftop gardens, Art Deco lobbies, unique open spaces, and historic land-marks. This is a tour for lo-cals, with hidden gems you can only find on foot!SF • Location: Meet in the Lobby of the Galleria Park Hotel, 191 Sutter Street, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: The tour involves walking up and down stairs. Tour operates rain or shine. Tickets must be purchased in advance.

Dr. Chris Field: The Stephen Schneider Award

Chris Field, Director, Depart-ment of Global Ecology, Carn-egie Institution for ScienceJane Lubchenco, University Distinguished Professor and Advisor in Marine Studies, Or-egon State UniversityClimate One at The Common-wealth Club will award Dr. Chris Field the fifth annual Ste-phen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. Dr. Field is director of the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institu-tion for Science. The $15,000 award is given to a natural or social scientist who has made extraordinary scientific con-tributions and communicat-ed that knowledge to a broad public in a clear and compel-ling fashion. The award was es-tablished in honor of Stephen Henry Schneider, one of the founding fathers of climatolo-gy, who died in 2010.SF • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 6 p.m. check in, 6:30 p.m. program part 1, 7:30 pm net-working reception, 8 p.m. program part 2 • Cost: $35 nonmembers, $25 members, $20 students; Premium: $65 nonmembers, $45 members • Notes: The award is underwritten by Tom R. Burns, Nora Machado, and Michael Haas.

WEDNESDAY, DEC 16CorpsAfrica: Peace Corps for Africans

Liz Fanning, Founder and Ex-ecutive Director, CorpsAfrica

Witness the contrasts of culture, food and wine on a sumptuous journey across northern Spain, from the Basque Country to Catalonia, during the beautiful fall harvest season.

SpainNORTHERN

FOOD AND WINE


SEPTEMBER9-18, 2016

SPA

INITINERARYFriday, September 9Depart the U.S. on flights to Spain. (A group transfer is provided from Bilbao airport).

Saturday, September 10 SAN SEBASTIAN (BASQUE COUNTRY) Arrive in San Sebastian today. Gather this evening for a guided orientation walk around the main sights of the city, including the old town. Enjoy a welcome dinner at the magnificent Rekondo, named by Wine Enthusiast as one of the world’s top five restaurant wine cellars. Savor classic Basque cuisine as an accompaniment to some legendary younger and older vintage Spanish wines. Astoria Hotel (D)

Sunday, September 11 SAN SEBASTIAN (BASQUE COUNTRY) Today marks the end of the ‘Euskal Jaiak’ fiesta week of Basque sports activities. The city vibrates towards the rowing finals across the bay, and we hope to watch a race. Learn about Basque cuisine during an interactive cooking class. Enjoy the pintxos (Basque tapas) we create along with main courses and fine wines. After some free time, meet for a guided tapas tour and enjoy the Gros district behind Zurriola beach, as well as the revelry of the local fiesta. Astoria Hotel (B,L,D)

Monday, September 12 BILBAO/ VILLABUENA DE ALAVA (RIOJA)Depart for Bilbao to visit the famed Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry, and emblematic of the cultural dynamism of the Basque country. Continue to the picturesque Rioja Alavesan village of Labastida for a lunch of traditional dishes such as chorizo, lamb, potatoes, and peppers. Then visit Remelluri, an icon in Rioja, where Telmo Rodriguez, and his sister Amaia run the family winery. Telmo

Rodriguez is the most influential flying winemaker in Spain. This evening enjoy a presentation on the wines of Rioja with light tapas. You are then free to enjoy the rooftop terrace or some Riojan specialties at a local restaurant. Viura (B,L,T)

Tuesday, September 13 VILLABUENA DE ALAVA (RIOJA)Visit Lopez de Heredia, a winery which is more like a museum, with its underground cellars that stretch several miles. After a tour and tasting, continue to Luis Cañas, a family winery in Villabuena de Alava since 1928. Five of Spain’s seven three-star Michelin restaurants carry their wines, a testament to their quality. Explore the vineyards and feel the harvest season in the air during lunch here. Tonight visit the Marques de Riscal Hotel (designed by Frank Gehry), one of the great names in Spanish wines but now also synonymous with the architectural wonders of Rioja. Continue to Daroca de Rioja, the smallest village in the world to possess a Michelin restaurant. Enjoy a full tasting menu dinner with eclectic wine pairings at Ventamoncalvillo. Viura (B,T,D)

Wednesday, September 14 ALQUEZAR (NAVARRA & SOMONTANO)Head south to Navarra, the cradle of many of Spain’s best vegetables and culinary delicacies, clustered around the town of Tudela. Visit one of Spain’s best olive oil producers, Hacienda Queiles, followed by a lunch that showcases the oils, local produce, and Navarran wines. Travel further east to Aragon and the foothills of the Pyrenees, to Alquezar in the Sierra Guara National Park. Alquezar is a well-kept secret, a postcard-perfect town built around an 11th century Arab fortress. Enjoy a free evening. Santa Maria de Alquezar (B,L)

WHAT TO EXPECTTo enjoy this program travelers must be in overall good health and able to walk 1-3 miles a day (on average) and be able to stand for several hours during touring. Our hike in the Sierra de Guara is 3-4 miles over uneven terrain. Participants should be comfortable walking on uneven surfaces such as cobble stone streets, and getting on and off tour buses without assistance. Drive times are 1-½ to 3 hours on days we move hotels. Dinners in Spain are served late and are lively affairs. Hotels on this program are 3 to 4 star boutique hotels chosen for their locations.

DETAILSDATES: September 9-18, 2016

GROUP SIZE: Minimum 12, Maximum 25

COST: $5,195 per person, double occupancy$800 single room supplement

INCLUDED: Tour leader and food and wine expert Jeremy Shaw; 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) per itinerary; wine at lunches and dinners; bottled water on buses and during tours; special guest speakers; local guides; gratuities to local guides, driver, and for included group activities; pre-departure materials.

NOT INCLUDED: International air; 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.

Thursday, September 15 ALQUEZAR (NAVARRA & SOMONTANO)Visit the Colegiata de Santa Maria, a church that was formerly an Arab fortress. The Colegiata holds many treasures from its rich and varied history, as well as affording lovely views of the Vero Valley. We then leave town for a hike in the Sierra de Guara, a hidden world of canyons and waterfalls, lost villages and shepherds’ trails. We stop for a picnic lunch during the hike. In the early evening explore Somontano, a small wine region that has grown in stature over recent years, with the influence of the Pyrenees giving the wines a freshness that makes them very food-friendly. Tonight we enjoy a well-earned Michelin dinner at Blecua Winery, catered by Las Torres de Huesca restaurant. Santa Maria de Alquezar (B,L,D)

Friday, September 16 BARCELONA (CATALONIA) Head south to Catalonia, and stop at the majestic Milmanda Castle in the Conca de Barbera wine region. The Milmanda Castle is home to the Torres chardonnay and the Grans Muralles red wine. The Torres family led the Spanish wine revolution after Franco’s death in 1975 and their single estate wines (like Mas La Plana and Muralles) broke new ground in gaining international acceptance of the potential of modern Spanish wines. Enjoy a tour, tasting and brunch. En route to Barcelona we stop to visit one of Catalonia’s best family cava producers. Check into our hotel, well-located for visits to the Ramblas, the port, the old town and the Boqueria Market. Tonight we set off along the Ramblas to a dinner of Catalan specialities. H10 Montcada (or similar) (B,L,D)

Saturday, September 17 BARCELONA (CATALONIA)Explore the wonders of Gaudi’s creations, starting with a visit to his La Pedrera house (Casa Mila), followed by his masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia. Enjoy an independent lunch and free afternoon. Tonight we go to Tibidabo Hill to conclude our trip at the 2-star Michelin restaurant Abac, Jordi Cruz’s beautiful creation on the edge of the city. Toast to the adventures of our journey from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. H10 Montcada (B,D)

Sunday, September 18BARCELONA (CATALONIA)Depart on flights home or extend your stay in Barcelona on your own. (B)

TRIP LEADERJEREMY SHAW, the managing director of Iberian Wine Tours, splits his year between a family dairy farm in the hills near Saintfield in County Down, Northern Ireland and a home in the Spanish student city of Salamanca. He studied at the Sorbonne, put up by his aunt and French uncle from Bordeaux, which provoked an interest in good wine. This was stimulated further when Jeremy worked as a stagiaire at Steven Spurrier’s much renowned Academie du Vin in Paris followed by several jobs in the wine industry. He received a distinction in the WSET Advanced Certificate in Wines and Spirits, achieving the highest score in Northern Ireland in 2005. Today he leads wine tours all over the world, with a particular focus on Spain and Portugal.

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 ___ American Express

CARD# EXPIRES SECURITY CODE

AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE DATE

Mail completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102, 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

RESERVATION FORM September 9-18, 2016

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

TERMS AND CONDITIONS The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted with Iberian Wine Tours (IWT) 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 cancel-lation 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 IWT accepts liability for cancellation penalties re-lated 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 re-quires 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 con-tingency for which CWC or IWT or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included. Limitations of Liability: CWC and IWT its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any trans-portation 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 provid-ing their respective services. CWC and IWT 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 interpo-sitions 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/IWT for any such loss, damage, inju-ry, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other con-dition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/IWT 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.

SpainNORTHERN

FOOD AND WINE



DE

CE

MB

ER

21

-JAN

UA

RY

12

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

CorpsAfrica was started by former Peace Corps volun-teers to provide educated young Africans the chance to serve in their own countries. Young Africans are living in faraway regions of their own country, developing the kind of understanding of poverty that only comes from living it, and benefitting personally and professionally from the transformative experience of achieving successful develop-ment efforts. CorpsAfrica vol-unteers ask local people what they want, connect them to resources of local, regional and international NGOs, and build the villagers’ capacity to help themselves.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • Cost: $20 nonmember, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: In-ternational Relations • Program Organizer: Karen Keefer • Notes: In association with NorCal Peace Corps Association

MONDAY, DECEMBER 21Socrates CaféOn one Monday evening of every month the Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who pro-posed the most popular topic is asked to briefly explain why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a sum-mary of the various perspec-tives participants expressed. Everyone is welcome to attend.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program Orga-nizer: George Hammond

MONDAY, JANUARY 4Book Discussion: The Mer-sault Investigation, by Ka-mel DaoudIn this book, the young brother of “the Arab” killed in Camus’ book The Stranger meditates

about the story 70 years after the killing. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5 p.m. check-in, 5:30 p.m. program • Cost: $5 nonmem-bers, FREE FOR MEMBERS • MLF: Book Discussion • Program Orga-nizer: Richard Ingalls

TUESDAY, JANUARY 5Poets, Painters and Spies: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

Patrick Iber, Assistant Profes-sor of History, University of Texas, El Paso; Author, Neither Peace Nor FreedomDuring the Cold War, left-wing Latin American artists, writers and scholars worked as diplo-mats, advised rulers, opposed dictators and even led nations. Their competing visions of so-cial democracy and their pur-suit of justice, peace and free-dom led them to organizations sponsored by the governments of the Cold War powers: the Soviet-backed World Peace Council, the U.S.-supported Congress for Cultural Free-dom and, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the homegrown Casa de las Américas. Neither Peace Nor Freedom delves into the entwined histories of these organizations and the aspira-tions and dilemmas of intellec-tuals who participated in them, from Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda to Gabriel Garcia Mar-quez and Jorge Luis Borges.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Ham-mond

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7Russian Hill Walking TourJoin a more active Neighbor-hood Adventure! Russian Hill is a magical area with secret

gardens and amazing views. Join Rick Evans for a hike up hills and staircases and learn about the history of this neigh-borhood. See where great art-ists and architects lived and worked, and walk down resi-dential streets where some of the most historically signifi-cant houses in the Bay Area are located.SF • Location: Meet in front of Sw-ensen’s Ice Cream, 1999 Hyde Street, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Steep hills and staircases, recom-mended for good walkers. Tickets must be purchased in advance.

MONDAY, JANUARY 11Values that Guide Health-care Decisions

Mileva Saulo Lewis, Ed.D., RN, Associate Professor, Samuel Merritt University; Vice President, The Center for Medical Ethics and MediationThe values that guide our medical treatment decisions become increasingly import-ant when we face the sudden onset of a stroke or heart attack and become even more criti-cal when we cannot speak for ourselves after serious trauma from a car accident or fall. Dr. Lewis’ presentation draws on a values history approach devel-oped at The Center for Medical Ethics and Mediation in San Diego, which examines the decision-making process and quality-of-life factors. It pro-vides a way to shape and share health-care decisions with family and health-care pro-viders, and to review or revise

them as your health changes. It is a critical component of end-of-life choices.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Hammond • Notes: Free for members

Longevity Explorers Dis-cussion Group: Better Ag-ing. You. Your Parents.This regular discussion group will be exploring new and emerging solutions to the chal-lenges of growing older. Not only will we be uncovering interesting new products at the intersection of aging and technology, we also will be conducting a series of ongo-ing deep-dive discussions into topics such as brain health, apps for seniors, hearing and wearables for seniors. The re-sults of our discussions will be shared with a larger commu-nity of older adults interested in improving their quality of life through our partner in this initiative, Tech-enhanced Life, PBC. The discussions will be facilitated by Dr. Richard Caro, whom many of you have heard speak at prior Grownups fo-rum events. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • Cost: $10 nonmem-bers, $5 members • MLF: Grownups • Program Organizer: John Milford

TUESDAY, JANUARY 12STEM to STEAM MovementDonn K. Harris, Executive and Artistic Director, Oakland School for the Arts; Chairman, California Arts CouncilAdditional Speakers TBAThe STEM to STEAM move-ment takes the benefits of STEM and integrates access principles in and through the arts, connecting learning in these critical areas together with arts practices, elements, design principles and stan-dards. Donn Harris, executive and artistic director of Oak-land School for the Arts and the chairman of the California Arts Council, is joined by sci-ence and technology leaders in talking about the future


JAN

UA

RY

14

-21

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

of STEAM at the center of transforming the 21st-centu-ry economy through research policy, education and work-place innovation. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program • Cost: $20 nonmembers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: The Arts • Program Organizer: Anne W. Smith

THURSDAY, JANUARY 14Former U.S. Defense Sec-retary William Perry: A Per-sonal Journey to Reduce the Nuclear Threat

William Perry, Ph.D., U.S. Sec-retary of Defense 1994-97;Se-nior Fellow, Stanford Universi-ty’s Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution; Au-thor, My Journey at the Nucle-ar BrinkGloria Duffy, Ph.D., President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club; Deputy Assistant Secre-tary of Defense during the Clinton Administration—ModeratorMeet a remarkable statesman whose career has spanned academia, industry, entrepre-neurship, government and di-plomacy. Dr. Perry has dealt first-hand with the changing nuclear threat and worked to mitigate it. He was one of the Silicon Valley’s early entrepre-neurs, founding a company that pioneered digital tech-nologies in the race to under-stand the Soviet nuclear mis-sile arsenal. His expertise led to advising the government on national security, including an urgent summons in October 1962 asking him to serve on the secret team analyzing U-2 photos exposing the Soviet installation of nuclear armed missiles in Cuba.

Perry’s appointment as un-dersecretary of defense for re-search and engineering in the

late 1970s put him at the helm of crafting a defense strategy that would usher in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and sophisticated technologies and weaponry that changed the face of modern warfare. As secretary of defense, Dr. Perry galvanized efforts to secure nu-clear stockpiles of former Sovi-et states and dismantle more than 8,000 nuclear weapons. Since then he has practiced a unique form of diplomacy that blends his warm personal rela-tionships with officials in many countries with diplomatic ini-tiatives focusing on the world’s most critical security hotspots, including North Korea, Iran, Russia and China.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Cost: $22 nonmembers, $12 members; Premium seating (includes book and seating in first rows) $50 nonmembers, $40 mem-bers • Notes: Part of the Club’s Good Lit Series underwritten by the Ber-nard Osher Foundation

TUESDAY, JANUARY 19At Home with Growing Old: Activism Starts in Your Own HomeSusanne Stadler, MBA, MArch, Architect, Social En-trepreneurOur homes are a resource for us as we age. Though age-friendly design is often about grab bars and ramps for supporting mo-bility and preventing accidents, it is most of all about living well in our homes. Architect and social entrepreneur Susi Stadler will help the audience discover the potential of our homes to adapt to our chang-ing needs.She will teach us how, by de-manding practical, creative and elegant solutions, to ar-rive at a different way of liv-ing in our homes by seeing age-friendly design as a way to enhance overall quality of life. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. networking reception, 5:15 p.m. program • Cost: $20 nonmembers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Grownups • Program Organizer: John Milford

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20Gretchen Rubin: Happiness and Habits

Gretchen Rubin, Best-selling Author, The Happiness Project and Better Than Before: Mas-tering the Habits of Our Every-day LivesIn conversation with Jenny Dearborn, Chief Learning Of-ficer, SAPWe repeat about 40 percent of our behaviors every day. Whether they are good or bad, Rubin believes that when we change our habits, we change our lives.

So how do we change? Through research and exper-imentation, Rubin offers a framework of different strate-gies to fit our individual per-sonalities. Rubin is the best-selling author of The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, with more than two million copies sold worldwide.SV • Location: Cubberley Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in; 7 p.m. program; 8 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 non-members, $12 members, $8 students (with valid ID)

Ronald Reagan

Jacob Weisberg, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, The Slate Group; Former Editor, Slate Magazine; Author, Ronald ReaganSince Ronald Reagan left of-fice, he has been cast in mar-ble by Republicans and dis-missed by Democrats. The years 1981 to 1989 were a time of economic crisis and recov-

ery, American assertiveness abroad, and an engagement with the Soviet Union that moved in surprising direc-tions, laying the groundwork for the end of the Cold War. Weisberg provides a bracing portrait of Reagan and the ideas that animated his polit-ical career, including his belief that nuclear weapons were im-moral and ought to be elimi-nated, helping us understand why his presidency turned out to be so consequential. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Ham-mond • Notes: This program is part of the Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.Photo by Kathleen Kincaid.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 2110 Ways to Heal Health Care: How Consumers Can Revolutionize Their Care Experience

Bridget Duffy, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Vocera Com-munications; Recognized by Various Media as 2015 Wom-an of the YearWhy do customers often rate their experience at the DMV as better, more timely and less painful than their experience at the hospital? Despite enor-mous sums spent on health care and extensive training of professionals, patients are largely dissatisfied with the service they receive. A grow-ing body of evidence points to the human experience as a key driver for improved patient satisfaction, health outcomes and loyalty. How can we turn this around? What role can patients, with unprecedented access to health-care infor-mation, play in a system that


JAN

UA

RY

21

-26

com

mo

nw

ea

lthclu

b.o

rg/e

ve

nts

historically has disempowered them? What is a realistic vision of a patient-centric system?SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • Cost: $20 non-members, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Health & Med-icine • Program Organizer: Mark Zitter

Chinatown Walking Tour

Enjoy a Commonwealth Club Neighborhood Adventure.

Join Rick Evans for a memorable midday walk and discover the history and mysteries of Chinatown. Ex-plore colorful alleys and side streets. Visit a Taoist temple, an herbal store, the site of the first public school in the state, and the famous Fortune Cookie Factory.SF • Location: Meet in front of Star-bucks, 359 Grant Avenue, San Fran-cisco (corner of Grant & Bush near Chinatown Gate) • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Temple visit requires walking up three flights of stairs. Tour operates rain or shine. Limited to 12 partici-pants. Tickets must be purchased in advance. Photo by H Sanchez/Flickr.

Sanjay’s Super TeamSanjay Patel, Animator; Short Film Director; Author, Sanjay’s Super TeamIn the new short film from Pixar Animation Studios, Sanjay’s Super Team, accom-plished artist Sanjay Patel uses his own experience to tell the story of a young, first gener-ation Indian boy whose love for western pop culture comes into conflict with his family’s traditions.SF • Location: TBA • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in; 7 p.m. program; 8 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, $12 members, $5 students (with valid ID) • Notes: In associa-tion with the American India Foun-dation; part of the Club’s Good Lit Series underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

FRIDAY, JANUARY 22Israel and European Union RelationsRavit Baer, Deputy Consul General for Israel for the Pacific NorthwestB aer, w ho was b or n in Jerusalem and received her law degrees at Hebrew University, served as legal advisor to the Israeli prime minister’s office until she became a career diplomat in 2004. Her first posts were to the Ivory Coast and to Cyprus. Before coming to San Francisco this August as the deputy consul general for the Pacific Northwest, Baer served as desk officer for Israel’s Department of Multilateral Institutions coordinating Israel’s cooperation with the European Union, NATO, etc. She will discuss her experiences and comment on the European situation with regards to Israel.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, FREE FOR MEMBERS, students free • MLF: Middle East • Program Organizer: Celia Menczel

MONDAY, JANUARY 25Socrates CaféOn one Monday evening of every month the Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is devoted to the discussion of a philosoph-ical topic chosen at that meet-ing. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites partici-pants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popu-lar topic is asked to briefly ex-plain why she or he considers that topic interesting and im-portant. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a summary of the various perspectives participants ex-pressed. Everyone is welcome to attend. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Cost: $5 nonmembers, FREE FOR MEMBERS, students free (with valid ID) • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Ham-mond

Week to Week Political Roundtable and Social Hour

Panelists TBAOur first political roundta-ble of the 2016 election sea-son will examine recent and upcoming political develop-ments, all with our trademark intelligence and wit. Come early for our social hour, and you’ll get to meet other inter-ested and interesting people.SF • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post Street, San Fran-cisco • Cost: $20 nonmembers, $7 members • Time: 5:30–6:30 social hour with wine and snacks, 6:30 pro-gram

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26Health and Hope from the Ocean Depths to the Moun-tain TopsArlene Blum, Executive Di-rector, Green Science Policy InstituteLiz Cunningham, Author; En-vironmental ActivistFrom the depths of the ocean to the highest mountain sum-mits, our planet is under as-sault as never before. From very different perspectives, two female adventurers share their extraordinary worldwide experiences to inspire action to meet urgent environmental challenges that face us now and in the future. Their message is one of inspiration and hope that all of us working together can save and preserve the wild and wonderful environments on our planet. Learn about their work, adventures and in-spiration, now and for the fu-ture of planet earth. SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Environment & Natu-ral Resources • Program Organizer: Ann Clark

Ellie Krieger: Fabulous Healthy Meals

Ellie Krieger, Author, You Have It Made: Delicious, Healthy, Do-Ahead Meals; Twitter @Ellie_KriegerEllie Krieger, New York Times best-selling and award-win-ning author, has written a cookbook devoted to the kind of recipes that her fans have been waiting for—”make-ahead meals.” For those who are always short on time when it comes to cooking, her rec-ipes—which include breakfast bakes, soups, salads, casse-roles, and more—can all be prepared ahead of time, mak-ing putting food on the table that much easier.SF • Location: 555 Post Street, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in; 6:30 p.m. program; 7:30 p.m. book signing • Cost: $22 non-mem-bers, $12 members; Premium: $55 non-members, $45 members (in-cludes priority seating and copy of the cookbook); $7 students (with valid I.D.) • Notes: This event is part of our Food lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

SV Reads 2016: Chance of Rain? The Impact of Cli-mate Change on Our LivesEmmi Itaranta, Author, Mem-ory of WaterBenjamin Parzybok, Author, Sherwood NationSal Pizzaro, Columnist, San Jose Mercury News—Moder-atorToo little rain … too much rain. Either case can dramat-ically impact everyday life. Itaranta and Parzybok explore how extreme weather con-ditions and resource scarcity can affect climate change.SV • Location: 1 Campbell Ave, Campbell • Time: 7:30 p.m. program, 8:30 p.m. book signing • Cost: FREE • Notes: Co-presented by The Santa Clara Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and San Jose Public Library Foundation


JAN

UA

RY

28

-FE

BR

UA

RY

2co

mm

on

we

alth

club

.org

/ev

en

ts

THURSDAY, JANUARY 28Come, Let Me Guide You: A Life Shared with a Guide Dog

Susan Krieger, Sociologist, Stanford University; Author, Come, Let Me Guide YouCome, Let Me Guide You is an invaluable contribution to the literature on human-ani-mal communication and on the guide-dog-human expe-rience, as well as to disability and feminist ethnographic studies. It shows how a rela-tionship with a guide dog is unique among bonds, for it rests upon highly regulated connections yet touches deep emotional chords. For Krieg-er, those chords have resulted in these memorable stories, often humorous and playful, always instructive, and gen-erative of broader insight.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. networking reception, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • Cost: $20 nonmem-bers, $8 members, $7 students (with valid ID) • MLF: Humanities • Program Organizer: George Ham-mond

Remaking the PlanetOliver Morton, Briefings Edi-tor, The EconomistIncreasing droughts, floods and other severe cli-mate-driven events are rais-ing questions about building a planetary panic button. One possible solution is hacking the sky and oceans on a scale unprecedented in human history. Options for geoengineering include a stratospheric veil against the sun, the cultivation of photo-synthetic plankton, and fleets of unmanned ships seeding the clouds. That sounds like science fiction, but a small group of scientists and tech-nologists are advocating for funding and testing such far-

fetched scenarios in case peo-ple can’t kick their addiction to fossil fuels in time to stabi-lize the climate that supports our economy and lifestyles. Oliver Morton’s new book, The Planet Remade, explores the promise and peril of tin-kering in technologies with profound moral and political implications.Join us for a conversation about the technological, mor-al and governance concerns rising from geoengineering and what it means to our rela-tionship to nature.SF • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: 555 Post St., San Francis-co • Time: 6:00 pm check in, 6:30 pm program, 7:30 pm networking reception • Cost: $20 nonmembers, $12 members, $7 students (with val-id I.D.)

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29John Williams and John Taylor: Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Walter E. Hoadley Annual Economic Forecast

John Williams, Ph.D., Pres-ident and Chief Executive Officer, San Francisco Federal ReserveJohn Taylor, Ph.D., Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics and George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Eco-nomics, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; Former Economic Advisor to Pres-idents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and George W. BushEdward Wasserman, Ph.D., Dean, U.C. Berkeley Journal-ism School; Former Executive Business Editor, Miami Herald; Ph.D., London School of Eco-nomics—ModeratorWith an unpredictable pres-idential election on the hori-zon and likely continued con-gressional gridlock, as well as

external threats to the United States from terrorism, will the U.S. economy continue to improve? Don’t miss a lively discussion featuring a rare appearance by one of the U.S. government’s top economists and a veteran presidential ad-visor, who will give their takes on where the U.S. and global economies are headed and what should be done to keep them on track.

Dr. Williams’ research fo-cuses include monetary policy under conditions of uncer-tainty, business cycles, inno-vation, and productivity. Dr. Taylor’s fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics. SF • MEMBERS-ONLY +1 paying guest • Location: Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason Street, San Francisco • Time: 11:45 a.m. luncheon, 12:30 p.m. program • Cost: $95 standard, $85 members; to purchase tables, please contact Maria Damp for pricing at [email protected] or 415-597-6714 • Notes: This event is underwritten by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch; must register by Tues-day, January 26th at Noon

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2Joseph Henrich: The Secret of Our SuccessJoseph Henrich, Co-Direc-tor of the Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture Center, Department of Human Evo-lutionary Biology, Harvard University, Author, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Do-mesticating Our Species, and Making Us SmarterHumans are a puzzling spe-cies. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild. On the other hand, humans have produced innovative technologies, so-phisticated languages, and complex institutions.

Henrich explores how our cultural and social develop-ment produces a collective intelligence that explains both our success and our unique-ness.SV • Location: TBA • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. book signing • Cost: $15 nonmem-bers, $10 members, $8 students (with valid ID)

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIPPublication title: The Common-wealth. ISSN: 0010-3349. Filing date: October 9, 2015. Issue Fre-quency: Bimonthly. Number of issues published annually: 6. Annual subscription price: $34. Location of office of publication: 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Location of office of gen-eral business office: 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Name and address of Publisher: The Com-monwealth Club of California, 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Editor: John Zipperer, Common-wealth Club, 555 Post St., San Fran-cisco, CA 94102. Managing Editor: Amelia Cass, Commonwealth Club, 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Owner: The Commonwealth Club of California, 555 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94102. Known bond-holders, mortgages and other security holders: None.

EXTENT AND NATUREOF CIRCULATIONAvg. No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: Total number of copies (net press run): 12,235. Paid/Requested Out-side County Subscriptions: 11,568. Paid In-County Subscriptions: None. Sales Through Dealers & Carriers: None. Other Classes Mailed Through USPS: None. Total Paid Distribution: 11,568. Free Distribution by Mail: None. Free or Nominal Rate Distribu-tion Outside the Mail: 617. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distri-bution: 617. Total Distribution: 12,185. Copies not Distributed: 50. Total: 12,235. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.94 percent. No. Copies Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date (October/November 2015): Total number of copies (net press run): 11,919. Paid/Requested Outside County Subscriptions: 11,139. Paid In-County Subscriptions: None. Sales Through Dealers and Carriers: None. Other Classes Mailed Through USPS: None. Total Paid Distribution: 11,139. Free Distribution by Mail: None Free or Nominal Rate Distribu-tion Outside the Mail: 750. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distri-bution: 750. Total Distribution: 11,869. Copies not Distributed: 50. Total: 11,919. Percent paid and/or requested circulation: 94.10 percent. I certify that the statements above are correct and complete. John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, October 9, 2015.


UC President Janet Napol-itano Interviews Professor Geoffrey Cowan on Presi-dential Politics

Janet Napolitano, President, University of California; For-mer U.S. Secretary of Home-land Security; Former Gover-nor, ArizonaGeoffrey Cowan, Dean Emer-itus, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California; Former Director, Voice of America; Au-thor, Let the People Rule: Theo-dore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential PrimaryAt the start of the presidential election year, come hear a fas-cinating discussion about the birth of the presidential pri-mary, the involvement of Ted-dy Roosevelt in the process, and the influence of all of this on modern politics. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to challenge his close friend and handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican Par-ty nomination. To overcome the power of the incumbent, TR seized on the idea of presi-dential primaries, telling party bosses everywhere to “Let the people rule,” the title of Geof-frey Cowan’s new book

For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Cowan has been an important force in almost ev-ery facet of the communica-tion world, as a public interest lawyer, academic administra-tor, best-selling author and award-winning teacher, play-wright, television producer and government official.SF • Location: 555 Post St., San Francisco • Time: 5:45 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Cost: $22 nonmem-bers, $12 members, $7 students (with valid ID); premium seating (includes book and seating in first few rows): $45 nonmembers, $40 members

FE

BR

UA

RY

2co

mm

on

we

alth

club

.org

/ev

en

ts

As a Leadership Circle member, you will get white-glove treatment and a back-stage pass.

Join today with your annual gift of $1,000.

Meet high profile speakers at private receptions and events.

Free admission to events for you and a guest*

Join or upgrade by December 30th and receive a Commonwealth Club travel mug.

Join the Leadership Circle.

Get ready to rub some elbows.

For more information contact:Kimberly Maas, Senior Philanthropy Officer, Individual and Major Gifts

415.597.6726 | [email protected]

*some exclusions apply


WOMENCAN’THAVE

IT ALL

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER


CLARA JEFFERY: Your article about two and a half years ago in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” really touched on a pent-up demand for someone to lay out the structural difficulties facing working women no matter her advantages or achieve-ments. Why do you think you struck a chord?ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: I sure didn’t expect to strike that chord. I was in Scotland on a family vacation the Wednesday that it went up, and we flew back on Friday and when we landed, I was on the front page of The New York Times; 400,000 people had read the article already and my mother called up and said “What have you done?”

I really wondered about that. My ex-planation for why it really took off was not that I said anything that had not been said before, but I think I caught an inner-gener-ational discussion. Daughters were saying to their mothers, “Look, this is really hard and I’m not sure I want to do it the way you did it.” In other cases, mothers were saying to daughters, “This was hard, you know, harder

than it looked. You need to plan for it.” So I really think mothers send it to daughters and daughters send it to mothers and fathers too, but I think it was mostly women, at least, initially. I had women saying to me, “My daughter showed up at Thanksgiving with underlined portions of your article.” JEFFERY: You did face a bit of a backlash. Some people felt that you were only address-ing the complaints of affluent high-achievers, but you also got blowback from older femi-nists. What was their worry? What were you exposing or what were you talking about that they didn’t want talked about?SLAUGHTER: Well, on the being privileged and affluent, I knew that; I was writing in The Atlantic. [Laughter.] I get this completely and one of the big differences between the article and the book is that I have definitely expanded my frame.

I think I anticipated this from older fem-inists, but I have to say, not as harshly as it hit, which was [that] I was betraying the faith. The faith was: you can have it all; you can do it. “Have it all” [is] a frame I now absolutely reject for lots of reasons; it immediately sounds selfish, it just gets the whole debate off on the wrong footing. But the mantra had been, “You can do it.” I had been part of that mantra. I had been telling people for 20 years—as a professor, young women would say to me, “How do you do it?” I would say, “You can do it. You just have to want it hard enough,” and then I would say, “Yes, my husband and I are tenured professors at a fancy university, and that helps.”

What I was then realizing was that doesn’t help, that makes it possible, and that’s a very small slice of people. But I think many older women and many close friends and mentors of mine really felt like, “we’re not far enough along for you to say this, because you are going to fuel the enemies of women’s advancement. You are going to lead to the narrative where women can’t have it all and so you shouldn’t try.” Really, that conversation should be had among women, not publicly. My response was, “Young women already know this; they already see this,” and if we don’t talk about it, we’re never going to ad-dress what the real point of the article was, which was to say, “Here are all the changes we have to make to really get there.”

It wasn’t to say women can’t have it all. It was to say, “If we’re really going to have a family and a career,” we’re stuck. We need

to make all these changes. JEFFERY: You have an amazing partner; he’s taking on more than an equal share of child-rearing and household duties a lot of the time. But what’s the second-shift reality for most women?SLAUGHTER: Well, it’s still the second shift. Right? Men are doing much more housework than they used to, but women are still doing the majority of it. So I would say that it is less of a burden, and perhaps the best evidence for that is 56 percent of women say it’s somewhat or very difficult to balance work and family; 50 percent of men say the same. So men are clearly feeling the stress, but it is true that by and large, the ma-jority of American caregivers—lead parents, primary caregivers, whatever term you want to use—are still women. I do think there are more and more men taking that role, and the reason my husband just wrote an article was to basically stand up in the same way and say, “I put my wife’s career first. That was good for our marriage, that was good for our children and it was good for me.” To try to say to men, you know this is actually a role you can take and it is a tremendously rewarding role. But we still got a lot of change there.JEFFERY: Do you see a generational [shift] afoot there? Is there a big swing between folks of your and my generation and folks in their 20s?SLAUGHTER: Yeah, I think it’s been pretty steady for generation on generation. My father never changed a diaper, something he’s quite happy about. My husband and my brother—I have a brother who’s Gen. X, who’s 10 years younger—progressively more and moreso, millennial men have the highest rate of sort of rejecting traditional gender roles of any generation. But what we are seeing is that they are often forced into those traditional roles by workplace policy, because if they don’t get a paternity leave and she gets a maternity leave, well then she stays home with the baby. Three months later, she’s the expert, he then has been in the workplace, he often then will work more if she goes part time and so the next thing you know, regard-less of where they wanted to start, they’ve ended up in a more traditional role.JEFFERY: When it comes to maternity leave, the U.S. is one of three countries—the other two being Oman and Papua New Guinea —that don’t mandate paid maternity leave.SLAUGHTER: Yes.

Workplace gender balance and imbalance. Excerpted from Inforum’s “Anne-Marie Slaughter,” October 7, 2015.

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTERPresident & CEO, New America

In conversation with CLARA JEFFERY Editor-in-Chief, Mother Jones


JEFFERY: So that’s a Gulf state monarchy and a country where 60 percent of men have admitted to committing rape. How did we get to be in such dubious company?SLAUGHTER: This one really is astounding. Part of it is we don’t like the state telling us what to do, and part of it is, I think 60 per-cent of women are in the workplace; over 70 percent of mothers are in the workplace, but that has happened since 1970 roughly. At the same time, you’ve had major pushback, really from the right, about, “wait a minute, you are destroying traditional roles, and this is a bad idea.” So in 1971, both houses of Congress with a bipartisan majority passed universal daycare, and Richard Nixon vetoed it, in part because of the pushback at that point from the Christian right, and we’ve been fighting that war ever since. So it’s gotten tangled up in [the idea that] women should be in the home when obviously that is just not the reality for the vast majority of American families. Over 70 percent of mothers are in the workforce and 40 percent of women are the primary breadwinners for their families. A lot of those women are single mothers; there’s no one home, but the workplace has not adapted and the government has not adapted.JEFFERY: I’m sure you’ve read about [tech-nology companies’] giant gender problem, in part because of their family policies and certainly their crazy hours. But many of them have been rolling out what sound like some sweet-sounding benefits. One of those is unlimited leave. Now, I’ve heard that peo-ple at companies will say, “Well yeah, my

company has unlimited leave, but nobody takes much.” It’s just frowned upon, so it’s this sort of Potemkin benefit.SLAUGHTER: “Potemkin benefit,” I’ve never heard that; that’s great! Yes, and I have to say, in that absolutely fabulous video that made me feel like “Wow, look at that company of fabulous speakers here at The Commonwealth

Club at Inforum,” I did notice the technology panels; there was one woman on one of them, otherwise it was all guys.

You know, part of this is just age. I’ve been at Yahoo and I’ve been at Google, and as one woman said, “I’m 25. I’m not thinking about children. I’m thinking about my career.” And lots of the guys are young men and they’re on campuses that sort of [are] a continuation of college.” [Laughter.]

So it’s partly that, it partly is the crazy hours, but you really are going to need what at least one very high official at Facebook has done, which is to take paternity leave and argue for how good it is and argue that, look, if we’re in this for the long haul, you can be [at] companies that just take people who work from 25 to 32 [hours] and off they go, or you can have them stay with you, in

which case, you need to advertise that top people are doing it. I’d rather hire people who have caregiving experience. It’s extremely good for you in all sorts of ways; you learn how to invest in other people, which is what management is all about. Building a team and raising a child, [there are] lots of overlap.

What you’re doing is investing in some-

body else, you need to guide them, support them, be there when there’s trouble, but you also need to let them make their own mistakes and grow on their own. That’s what good parenting is about, and the hardest thing is letting them fall down and make mistakes and you have to do that. That is exactly, at least what I try to do as a manager. It’s all about empowering your people. I’ve looked at management manuals and parent-ing manuals side by side. They use different terms, like you don’t “empower” your kids and you empower your team, but essentially, you are investing in your child and letting him or her grow in the same way.

But the last thing I think you’d need to do is, because tech firms have these campus-es: Why on earth don’t they all have really high-quality available daycare?

I’d rather hire people who have caregiving experience. Building a team and raising a child, lots of overlap.

Photo by Ed Ritger


The Republican presidential candidate discusses his formative years, his religious faith and his plans for the United States.

Excerpted from “Dr. Ben Carson,” September 23, 2015.

Dr. Ben Carson


DAN ASHLEY: Dr. Carson, [winner of ] the Spingarn Award, the Medal of Freedom, [and named one of the] 10 most admired men in the world—what is a nice guy like you doing in a race like this? BENJAMIN CARSON: [Laughter.] That’s a very good question. It certainly was not one of the things on my bucket list. My wife Candy and I were really looking forward to a nice relaxing retirement after a very ardu-ous career. Then in 2013, along came the National Prayer Breakfast, and that kind of changed the dynamic. After that, there were so many people clamoring for me to run for president, which I thought was kind of a ridiculous idea, but I kept running into particularly elderly Americans who would tell me they had given up on America and they were just waiting to die. I heard that so many times; it really started to bother me. Hundreds and thousands of people clamor-ing and saying “You need to do this,” and I started thinking, “Could I really relax?” You know, we bought a beautiful home on a golf course in Florida, I bought an organ, because

I always wanted to learn how to play the or-gan. All those books you saved up the last few years before you retire, you know, I was going to read them. And all the movies you never saw—you know, people are shocked when I tell them I never saw Rocky. [Laughter.]ASHLEY: That is shocking!CARSON: I was gonna do all this stuff. But I think the Lord had a different plan, so we will just continue down this road. I don’t deny the fact that I’m a person of faith. I just said “Lord, you know it’s not something that I particularly wish to do, but if you really want me to do it, you’ll have to open the doors, because all the pundits and the experts say it’s impossible for someone like me to put together a national organization, to be able to raise adequate funds and do all the things that are necessary,” which kind of comforted me hearing that. But I said “If you really want me to do it, you’ll have to open the doors. And if you open the doors, I’ll walk through them. And if you close the doors, I’ll gladly sit down.” ASHLEY: And watch Rocky.CARSON: [Laughter.] And watch Rocky. But fortunately or unfortunately, depend-ing on your point of view, he keeps opening the doors. So we’ll keep walking through because, you know, America is a terrific place and it’s worth saving as far as I’m concerned.ASHLEY: Let’s start the conversation with a little bit about you as a person. In so many respects, it’s an American success story, because there’re so many people that come from difficult circumstances. Something

that I find really interesting is that you said reading changed your life. Tell me a little bit more about how and why that happened. CARSON: My mother always had a dream of education. She grew up in rural Tennessee in a very dilapidated, horrendous situation. [She] shuffled from home to home, able to cobble together no more than a third-grade education by the time she was 13 when she got married. [She] tried to escape that environment, moved to Detroit years later, discovered my father was a bigamist. So there she was, trying to raise us by herself, and it was very difficult. She worked extraordinarily hard [with] two, three jobs at a time, leaving at five in the morning, getting back after midnight because she didn’t want to be on welfare. People were telling her, “You’ve got two boys, you can be on this program or that program.” But she just didn’t like the idea of being dependent on anybody else. But she also very much felt that education was the key. When I wasn’t doing well and my brother wasn’t doing well, she prayed for wisdom and came up with this idea of turning off the TV. [Laughter.]

As far as my brother and I were concerned, it was child abuse, but to add insult to injury, then we had to read two books a piece from the Detroit public libraries every week and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn’t read, but we didn’t know that.ASHLEY: Is that true?CARSON: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. She put little check marks and highlights, under-lines and we would think she was reading

Photo by Ed Ritger

DR. BEN CARSON, M.D.Republican Presidential Candidate

In conversation with DAN ASHLEY News Anchor, ABC 7 Television News, San Francisco; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors


them, but she wasn’t. But as I started reading about people, it had a real transformative effect, because one of the first books I read was a book called Up from Slavery, the auto-biography of Booker T. Washington. It was illegal for slaves to read, but he taught himself to read. [He] read everything he could get his hands on, became an advisor to two presi-dents. I read about all kinds of people, and I began to understand that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you. It’s not somebody else, it’s not the environment. That was incredibly liberating to me, because I used to hate poverty. That is until I started reading all those books, and then I didn’t mind it anymore—ASHLEY: Explain that.CARSON: Well, because then I knew that it was only temporary. That I had the ability to change it. That I had the ability to create the lifestyle that I wanted depending on how hard I was willing to work to get it. And I was willing to work very hard to get it. ASHLEY: Is it fair to say that your life could have gone in a very different direction from whence you came? Was there a real risk of that at some point?CARSON: There was a tremendous risk of that. You know, I had a horrible temper. I was one of those people who thought they had a lot of rights. If you know anybody like that, those are people who are always angry, because somebody is always infringing on their rights. I remember once, a fellow hit me with a pebble, it didn’t hurt, but I was [upset] in [the] sense that he would dare hit me with

a pebble, and I picked up a large rock, hurled it at his face, broke his glasses [and] almost put his eye out. Another time, a fellow was trying to close my locker at school. I didn’t

want it closed, I struck him in the forehead with my fist, unfortunately I still had the lock in my hand, put a three inch gash in his forehead. My mother was trying to get me to wear something I didn’t want to wear, I picked up a hammer, went to hit her in the head with it, fortunately, my brother caught it from behind. Other than that, I was a pretty good kid [laughter], but you can see how that temper can really create a problem for you. When I was 14, another youngster angered me, and I had a large camping knife and I tried to stab him in the abdomen with it.ASHLEY: I feel I should move my chair. [Laughter.] The questions are going to get tougher.CARSON: Fortunately he had a large metal belt buckle under his clothing and the knife plate struck with such force that it broke and he fled in terror, but I was more horrified than he was. I realized that I was trying to kill somebody. I locked myself in the bathroom

and started contemplating my life and real-izing that I would never realize my dream of becoming a physician with a temper like that. I just fell on my knees and I prayed.

There was a Bible there, and I picked it up and opened to the Book of Proverbs.ASHLEY: Were you born again at that time or no?CARSON: Theoretically, but not in actual-ity. As I started reading from the Book of Proverbs, there were all these verses in there about fools. It seemed like they were all writ-ten about me. And there were all these verses about anger, like Proverbs 19:19, there’s no point getting an angry man out of trouble, he’s just going to get right back into it.

Also verses like [Proverbs] 16:32, mightier is the man who can control his temper than the man who can conquer a city. For three hours I stayed in there, reading, contemplat-ing, praying, and I came to an understanding during those three hours that to react, to punch somebody in the face, to kick down a door was not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness; it meant that you could be easily manipulated by other people. I also

Photo by Ed Ritger

I kept running into elderly Americans who would tell me they had given up on America and they were just waiting to die.


realized that it was a sign of selfishness to always be angry, because it’s always about me, my and I: Somebody did this to me, they’re in my space, you know, all this kind of stuff. When I came out of that bathroom after three hours, I was a different person. I’ve never had an angry outburst since that day.

ASHLEY: What are the most important things facing the country?CARSON: I want to get our fiscal house in order. Thomas Jefferson said it’s immoral to pass debt to the next generation. If we could somehow transport him to our time, he would probably immediately stroke out if he saw what we were doing. I mean $18-plus trillion of national debt? If you’d try to pay that back at a rate of $10 million a day [for] 365 days a year, it would take you more than 5,000 years. This is what we’re passing on to our children. But that’s the good news,

because it’s the fiscal gap that concerns me. This is essential that we all know about

this. That’s the unfunded liabilities that we all as a government—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, governmental programs—owe going forward versus what we expect to collect from taxes and other revenue sources.

Those two numbers should be pretty close together if you’re fiscally responsible. If you’re not, a gap develops there. Bring it up into today’s dollars and you got the fiscal gap, which sits at over $200 trillion. The only reason we can sustain a debt of that level is because we can print money. ASHLEY: We’ve heard for years it’s unsus-tainable and yet it had been sustained. Is it unsustainable now?CARSON: It’s sustainable until the house of cards collapses, then it’s not sustainable.ASHLEY: What collapses the house of cards?

CARSON: You can only tolerate so much debt. What if we can’t print money and we still have that level of debt? Now we are the reserve currency, but that’s a title that gener-ally goes with the number-one economy in the world, which we have been since the 1870s until last year when China took over. Would they like to be the reserve currency? Would they like to be able to print money? Yeah! It would help them quite a bit with the situation there. But their system won’t sustain it right now, fortunately for us, so we still get to be. But it’s just a warning. It’s a blessing that we have this warning and we have this time that if we act intelligently we can fix it.ASHLEY: Tell us about acting intelligently. What would you do to fix it?CARSON: First, we need to balance the budget. It’s ridiculous what we’re doing, and if we simply refuse to increase the federal budget by one penny for three or four years, that would balance the budget. I would do a lot more than that, quite frankly. I would call in all departmental heads and say, “I want you to reduce your budget by 3 to 4 percent, and if you can’t do it, turn in your resignation now, ‘cause you’re gonna be fired.” Anybody who tells you that there’s not 3 or 4 percent of fat in all of our departments is lying through their teeth.ASHLEY: Give us an example of the fat. Say

Photo by Ed Ritger

We have an unreasonable taxation system. We need a system that encourages entrepreneurial risk taking and capital investment, not one that depresses it.


in defense; say in health care, just—CARSON: OK, I’ll give you an example. The federal government owns 900,000 buildings. We also own 2.4 billion acres and all the mineral rights, but let’s just stick with the buildings for now; 77,000 of those build-ings are either not utilized or severely under-utilized, and yet, with taxpayer money, we are leasing or renting 500 million square feet of office space. That just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. There’s plenty of fat that can be cut down. That’s one thing.

The other thing is we have to understand that from 1850 until 2000, our average growth rate for our economy was 3.3 percent. From 2001 to 2014 there’s a 1.8 percent [average growth]; that’s a marked change. If you extrapolate that out over 20 years at 1.8 percent, you’re talking about a $26 trillion economy. At 3.3 [percent] you’re talking about a $35 trillion economy. That’s a big difference when you’ve got all these unfunded mandates, unfunded liabilities to deal with. So you have to ask the question, “How do we get that economy rolling again?”

We have the most powerful economic engine the world had ever known, but what have we done? We have put all these fetters of regulation around it, and what people don’t realize is that every single federal regu-lation—in addition to complicating people’s

lives—costs money. Every regulation costs in terms of goods and services. Who gets dispro-portionately hit by that? Poor people and the middle-class. Doesn’t bother the upper-class, but it hits those people disproportionately. Those are the kinds of things that are driv-ing these income gaps that you never hear the Bernie Sanders or the Hillary Clintons talking about. We need to get the unneces-sary regulations out, not the necessary ones.

The other thing is we have an unreason-able taxation system. We need a system that encourages entrepreneurial risk taking and capital investment, not one that depresses it. We have the highest corporate tax in the developed world, and it is driving business out of our country; that’s a no-brainer. What I would suggest that we do is have a six-month hiatus on the corporate taxes so that we could re-patriate the over $2 tril-lion of American money overseas and that wouldn’t cost the taxpayers one penny, and 10 percent of it, I think, should be utilized to create jobs for people on welfare and people who are unemployed.ASHLEY: Dr. Carson, there are many people, and certainly Democratic presiden-tial contenders, who believe that American corporations in many instances are not pay-ing their fair share. What do you say to that?CARSON: You might be shocked to hear

that to some degree I agree, in a sense that we have all these loopholes and deductions and things that allow people to escape pay-ing. I know a lot of people who make a lot more money than I do and pay considerably less taxes than I do because they have very slick corporate lawyers and they know how to manipulate the system. I think it should be fair across the board.

That’s why I have advocated a flat tax. It’s based on proportionality, and I make no secret of the fact that God’s a pretty fair person and he advocated a tithing system. He didn’t say, “If your crops fail, you don’t owe any tithe.” He didn’t say, “If you have a bumper crop, you owe me triple tithe.”

So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one and you get the same rights and privileges, and you get rid of all the deduc-tions and all the loopholes so that nobody gets any special favors. ASHLEY: Last question so we can make a little news here today. [If you are] on track to win the nomination, will you name Donald Trump as your vice president? CARSON: [Laughter.] All things are possible.ASHLEY: Will you serve as his vice presi-dent?CARSON: All things are possible.

Photo by Ed Ritger

THE COMMO N WE AL TH34 OC TOBER/NOVEMBER 2015

It’s a new world out there, with the advent of social me-dia. Opinions can be magni-

fied and easily go viral. And people or groups with certain opinions can try to enforce their views on organizations by leveraging social media.

The Commonwealth Club has always hosted proponents of a wide range of views, and that neutral role has been generally accepted as a legitimate and positive one for

society. The Club does not advocate for any position, but gives voice to others who do.

Over the past year, three groups of people have made their objections known to the Club hosting certain speakers or points of view. They have complained through social media and in some cases tried to leverage the Club toward or away from hosting in-dividuals or program topics either in line with or opposing their own values and views.

Perhaps the loudest of these controversies was over the decision by the Club’s Inforum division to host Kim Kardashian earlier this year. Inforum’s thinking was that, whatever people may think of Kardashian, she is a force on television, in social media, in busi-ness and in popular culture. The outcry about the Club hosting Kardashian rippled from NPR supporters on the KQED website who believed the Club was degrading its standards, to local Bay Area community members who vowed to cancel (or in most cases never to join since they were not Club members) their member-ships in the Club.

In the end, the Club’s program with Ms. Kardashian, a conver-sation with respected Santa Clara County retired judge LaDoris Cordell, was substantive, with the pop culture star, for example, announcing her support for gun control. And it was attended by many young people, who were for the first time discovering the opportunity the Club provides to participate in civic affairs. All in all, this was a positive event for the Club and for the community.

The second instance has been demands, from those who oppose mandatory vaccinations, for more airtime at the Club to discuss the dangers of vaccines. The Club had already presented programs reflecting this view, including with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But the Club has also presented programs with public health officials who stress dangers to society if children, in particular, are not immunized against infectious diseases.

In this case, the vaccine skeptics posted, on a public autism web-site, an email from a volunteer program organizer at the Club who

had postponed an additional program on this topic, and encouraged people to protest this decision. This created angry mail and email to the Club from the autism community about our decision to reflect a more balanced approach on this topic.

The third case was a little bit different. Each year, the Club holds its annual gala dinner, and in the spring of 2014 we honored the chairman of a large Bay Area company. This company has been engaged with the Club for over 100 years, and it is the second largest philanthropic donor in the Bay Area.

An environmental organization objected to the Club honoring the company, and a few days before the dinner, posted an online petition asking that the Club rescind its award to its chairman. I received thousands of emails making this demand. The organiza-tion also tried to pressure the Club’s Climate One project through contacting its speakers and advisory board members and attempting to drive them away.

In past years, there was a steady but minor pattern of complaints from all sides about various speakers at the Club. What is new is the attitude that not only do some people disagree with the speaker or honoree choices the Club makes, but they are determined to embarrass the Club or try to force their own views on the Club through pressure.

The spirit in which the Club was founded and continues to oper-ate today is that respectful dialogue between people with differing views is essential to the healthy functioning of our democratic

society. We solve our societal problems better if we are able to be open-minded, and if both our citizens and our leaders are able to listen to those with whom they differ and learn about different possible approaches. Many of the greatest problem solvers in our history have crossed ideological boundaries to solve problems, such as Republican Teddy Roosevelt, who embraced conservation and established national parks, and cold warrior Richard Nixon, who opened relations with China.

Some people or organizations may garner advantage for their val-ues and views in the short term by using social media or leveraging tactics to inhibit the Club’s presentation of divergent voices. But in the long run, any restriction in the range of dialogue harms both our democracy and our ability to solve problems. In this age of social media and online pressure, the Club will continue to vigorously exercise its mission to present a wide diversity of views.

Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy

Feedback—with a Punch!

Any restriction in the range of dialogue harms both our democracy and our ability to solve problems.

InSight D R . G LO R I A C . D U F F Y P R E S I D E N T & C E O

CST: 2096889-40 Photos: provided by MIR Corporation

Detailed brochure available at: commonwealthclub.org/travel Contact: (415) 597-6720 • [email protected]

CST: 2096889-40


From $6,995 per person, double occupancy(Includes all excursions, open bar and all gratuities)

Greece Under SailCorfu to Athens

Aboard the 18-cabin Running on WavesKnown as the “Cradle of Western Civilization,” Greece delivers an enticing blend of history, diverse cultural influences, stunning natural beauty and archaeological treasures.

May 12–21, 2016

The founders of The Commonwealth Club fashioned our mission on the ideals of the Greek Agora, a place for discussion and learning. Join us next spring for a rich and exclusive journey in the Greek Isles!

• After one night in Athens, sail seven nights aboard the luxurious and intimate 18-cabin yacht Running on Waves, with state-of-the-art facilities and the sophistication of a truly classic sailing experience.

• Travel with an expert educational team, our local Greek site guide and our study leader, archeologist Dr. David Price Williams.

• Explore the sunny Ionian isle of Corfu and visit the Achilleion Palace. Wander the streets of Nafpaktos and enjoy the flavors of Greece in this charming village.

• Discover the island of Ithaca, the birthplace of Homer’s hero. Visit the town of Stavros, or take a swim in the blue waters off the stern of our ship.

• Experience the World Heritage sites of Nemea and Mycenae and visit the location of the Battle of Actium. Listen to the perfect acoustics at the 4th century B.C. theater at Epidaurus.

• Learn the mysteries of mystical Oracle of Delphi, and explore the archeological site considered by the ancients to be the center of the world.

• Sail through the dramatic Corinth Canal, the narrow passageway with 300-feet-high limestone walls, from the Gulf of Corinth to the Aegean Sea.

• Extend your stay in Athens on an optional post-cruise extension.

Ellie Krieger, New York Times best-selling and award-winning author, has writ-ten a cookbook devoted to the kind of recipes that her fans have been waiting for—“make-ahead meals.” For those who are always short on time when it comes to cooking, her recipes—which include breakfast bakes, soups, salads, casseroles, and more—can all be prepared ahead of time, making putting food on the table that much easier.

Tuesday, December 8 Thursday, January 14

Ellie Krieger

William Perry

Meet a remarkable statesman whose career has spanned academia, industry, entrepreneurship, government and diplomacy.

William Perry, Ph.D., U.S. Secretary of Defense 1994-97;Senior Fellow, Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution; Author, My Journey at the Nuclear BrinkGloria Duffy , Ph.D., President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration

PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID IN

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

The Commonwealth Club of California555 Post StreetSan Francisco, CA 94102

for event details, see page 24

for event details, see page 15 for event details, see page 22

Purchase event tickets at

commonwealthclub.org

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.

for event details, see page 23

Bank of America/Merill Lynch Walter E. Hoadly Annual Economic ForecastJohn Taylor, Ph.D., Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Eco-nomics and George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics, Stanford Uni-versity’s Hoover Institution; Former Economic Advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and George W. BushJohn Williams, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer, San Francisco Federal Reserve

PROGRAMS YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS

David Gregory

Join Gregory as he probes various religious traditions to better understand his own faith and answer some of life’s important questions: Who do we want to be and what do we believe? David approaches his faith with the curiosity and dedication you would expect from a journalist accustomed to holding politicians and presidents accountable.

David Gregory, Former Moderator, NBC’s “Meet the Press”; Author, How’s Your Faith?: An Unlikely Spiritual JourneyAlan Jones, Dean Emeritus, Grace Cathedral

Author, You Have It Made: Delicious, Healthy, Do-Ahead Meals

Tueday, January 26 Friday, January 29

Date post:	24-Jul-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	the-commonwealth-club-of-california
View:	228 times
Download:	0 times

Cwc dec15:jan16 full mag

Documents