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Mar 18, 2010 0

Seattle, WA – 03/18/10 – Town Hall – Steven Hill

Who
Steven Hill
When
Thursday, March 18, 2010
7:30pm - $5 - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Town Hall (map)
1119 Eighth Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98101

Town Hall is Seattle's community culture center located in the historic First Hill neighborhood, on the edge of downtown. Town Hall showcases the community's cultural energy with diverse music, arts and humanities, civic discourse, and world culture programming. Housed in an historic Roman-revival-style building on the corner of 8th and Seneca, Town Hall opened in March 1999. Local, national and international programs and performances are scheduled year-round in the Great Hall and Downstairs at Town Hall. Please visit our calendar of events for a current listing of public events. Town Hall's name recalls town-meeting democracy and is emphasized by the intimate, curved, amphitheater-style seating of the Great Hall. Town Hall is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and relies on rentals, membership, volunteers, and fundraising to sustain its many activities. Town Hall is fully accessible. Assisted listening devices are available for events in the Great Hall upon request.

Other Info
Political analyst, New America Foundation program director, and author Steven Hill returns to Seattle to discuss his newest book, Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (University of California Press). In this book, the author – who has largely been chronicling matters here within the U.S. with such books as 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy, Fixing Elections, and Whose Vote Counts – looks at Europe’s course since World War II as a touchstone for how this country might proceed. “Like a reverse Alexis de Tocqueville, Steven Hill dauntlessly explores a society largely unknown to his compatriots back home. Sweeping away the ideological posturing, he shows us exactly how the modern European Way works and the promise it holds for an America which has slipped to become, in terms of social, economic, and energy policy, the Old World.” – Hendrik Hertzberg.

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Mar 8, 2010 0

Seattle, WA – 03/08/10 – Town Hall – Charles Kupchan

Who
Charles Kupchan
When
Monday, March 8, 2010
7:30pm - $5 - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Town Hall (map)
1119 Eighth Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98101

Town Hall is Seattle's community culture center located in the historic First Hill neighborhood, on the edge of downtown. Town Hall showcases the community's cultural energy with diverse music, arts and humanities, civic discourse, and world culture programming. Housed in an historic Roman-revival-style building on the corner of 8th and Seneca, Town Hall opened in March 1999. Local, national and international programs and performances are scheduled year-round in the Great Hall and Downstairs at Town Hall. Please visit our calendar of events for a current listing of public events. Town Hall's name recalls town-meeting democracy and is emphasized by the intimate, curved, amphitheater-style seating of the Great Hall. Town Hall is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and relies on rentals, membership, volunteers, and fundraising to sustain its many activities. Town Hall is fully accessible. Assisted listening devices are available for events in the Great Hall upon request.

Other Info
A National Security Council member during the Clinton administration who is now a professor of international relations at Georgetown, Charles Kupchan visits Town Hall with his new book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton University Press).”This is a work of admirable breadth and unusual interest. Combining an engaging theoretical framework with an extraordinarily diverse set of case studies, Kupchan has produced a lucid work that should be valued by both the academic and policymaking worlds in sorting out the relationships among classic diplomacy, democracy, and peace.” – Anthony Lake. Charles Kupchan is also the author of The End of the American Era.

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Mar 6, 2010 0

Seattle, WA – 03/06/10 – Elliott Bay Book Company – William L. Marcy

Who
William L. Marcy
When
Saturday, March 6, 2010
7:00pm - All Ages
Where
Elliott Bay Book Company (map)
101 South Main Street
Seattle, WA, USA 98104

Located in the heart of the historic Pioneer Square District, Seattle's original business neighborhood, The Elliott Bay Book Company is home to over 150,000 titles, set on cedar shelves in a series of inviting, exposed-brick walled rooms.
Other Info
William L. Marcy, assistant professor of history at St. Martin’s University, makes the case that the U.S. has, starting with the joining of the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist initiatives with the “War on Drugs,” played a large role in actually establishing the drug trade as a central economic base in Central and South America. He talks tonight about this and more, as chronicled in his book, The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America (Lawrence Hill Books). “Marcy investigates why South American drug trafficking has remained so hardy and lucrative even as the U.S. has spent billions – usually on wrongheaded measures, as he sees is – to combat both production and export. Costly raids and drug seizures have had minimal impact on production and no impact on U.S. consumption, argues Marcy … Marcy’s connections and conclusions richly reveal how intricately the legitimate and illegal economies are entangled across two continents.” – Publishers Weekly.

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Mar 3, 2010 0

Seattle, WA – 03/03/10 – Town Hall – Shane Harris

Who
Shane Harris
When
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
7:30pm - $5 - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Town Hall (map)
1119 Eighth Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98101

Town Hall is Seattle's community culture center located in the historic First Hill neighborhood, on the edge of downtown. Town Hall showcases the community's cultural energy with diverse music, arts and humanities, civic discourse, and world culture programming. Housed in an historic Roman-revival-style building on the corner of 8th and Seneca, Town Hall opened in March 1999. Local, national and international programs and performances are scheduled year-round in the Great Hall and Downstairs at Town Hall. Please visit our calendar of events for a current listing of public events. Town Hall's name recalls town-meeting democracy and is emphasized by the intimate, curved, amphitheater-style seating of the Great Hall. Town Hall is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and relies on rentals, membership, volunteers, and fundraising to sustain its many activities. Town Hall is fully accessible. Assisted listening devices are available for events in the Great Hall upon request.

Other Info
Using exclusive access to key government insiders, Shane Harris chronicles the rise of America's surveillance state over the past 25 years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us.



In 1983, Admiral John Poindexter, President Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the U.S. might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut, if intelligence agencies could have analyzed in real time the data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured technical know-how and government funds into his dream--a system that would sift reams of information for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After 9/11, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it has evolved into a secretly funded operation that can gather a trove of personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide.



Despite billions of dollars spent on this quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern furture threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has moved from the province of right-wing technocrats into the mainstream, becoming a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror.



Harris puts us behind the scenes where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an Army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow National Security Agency Director Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. And we see Poindexter return to government with a seemingly implausible idea: that the authorities can collect data about citizens and at the same time protect their privacy. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it secretly becomes a "black program" at the NASA, then engagaed in a massive surveillance of Americans' phone calls and e-mails.

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Dec 17, 2009 0

Seattle, WA – 12/17/09 – Town Hall – Michael Medved

Who
Michael Medved
When
Thursday, December 17, 2009
7:30pm - $5 - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Town Hall (map)
1119 Eighth Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98101

Town Hall is Seattle's community culture center located in the historic First Hill neighborhood, on the edge of downtown. Town Hall showcases the community's cultural energy with diverse music, arts and humanities, civic discourse, and world culture programming. Housed in an historic Roman-revival-style building on the corner of 8th and Seneca, Town Hall opened in March 1999. Local, national and international programs and performances are scheduled year-round in the Great Hall and Downstairs at Town Hall. Please visit our calendar of events for a current listing of public events. Town Hall's name recalls town-meeting democracy and is emphasized by the intimate, curved, amphitheater-style seating of the Great Hall. Town Hall is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and relies on rentals, membership, volunteers, and fundraising to sustain its many activities. Town Hall is fully accessible. Assisted listening devices are available for events in the Great Hall upon request.

Other Info
Nationally-broadcast radio host, onetime movie and media critic, and bestselling author Michael Medved is at Town Hall for his newest. The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free Market Economy (Crown Forum) comes as a follow-up to his bestselling previous book, The 10 Big Lies About America.

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Dec 3, 2009 0

Seattle, WA – 12/03/09 – Town Hall – Nomi Prins

Who
Nomi Prins
When
Thursday, December 3, 2009
7:30pm - $5 - All Ages Buy Tickets
Where
Town Hall (map)
1119 Eighth Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98101

Town Hall is Seattle's community culture center located in the historic First Hill neighborhood, on the edge of downtown. Town Hall showcases the community's cultural energy with diverse music, arts and humanities, civic discourse, and world culture programming. Housed in an historic Roman-revival-style building on the corner of 8th and Seneca, Town Hall opened in March 1999. Local, national and international programs and performances are scheduled year-round in the Great Hall and Downstairs at Town Hall. Please visit our calendar of events for a current listing of public events. Town Hall's name recalls town-meeting democracy and is emphasized by the intimate, curved, amphitheater-style seating of the Great Hall. Town Hall is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and relies on rentals, membership, volunteers, and fundraising to sustain its many activities. Town Hall is fully accessible. Assisted listening devices are available for events in the Great Hall upon request.

Other Info
Once a managing partner at Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins writes of a world she knows and knows well—in her work with Demos, her writing for Mother Jones, Fortune, AlterNet, The Nation, and other publications, and now in her revealing book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley). "If you want to understand why the Geithner—Summers plan won't solve the financial crisis, and why Wall Street is disgraced but still calling the shots, you can't do better than the brilliantly written and documented It Takes a Pillage, by former investment banker and financial critic Nomi Prins." - Robert Kuttner.

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