Crimes Against Nature: Chevron and the Fisherwomen of Nigeria

You must read this front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to understand what we're up against, as we try to fight for human survival against the forces of greed and destruction. The fisherwomen of the Niger Delta in Nigeria were finally forced to occupy a Chevron facility after the Big Oil company refused to fix a leaking pipe that was spewing oil into their waters, killing fish and the entire food chain that kept alive their families and communities. Since the 1950s, when Big Oil giants like Chevron, Shell and Eni began drilling in the region -- once booming with aquatic life -- millions of gallons of oil have been spilled into its water, quadruple the volume of oil spilled in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Now that they've made billions of dollars off the Niger Delta, Chevron and the other Big Oil despoilers want to cut and run. The fisherwomen and their villages did not share in the oil bounty, but now they're being left with cleaning up one of the most polluted areas on the globe. "Chevron's a very rich company," says a village elder quoted in the article, "but they're very wicked to us." Chevron has promised a formal investigation of the leaking oil pipe, but so far (of course ) the investigation hasn't started -- and nobody expects it to produce any real results.

We need to build an international coalition against despoilers of the planet like Chevron, which is headquartered right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, whom I've written about before, is a true corporate villain. While Chevron is contributing heavily to the climate crisis that is wreaking havoc in California -- including drought and wildfires -- Wirth had the nerve to complain about the PG&E blackouts that have been made necessary by the environmental destruction. If that's not enough to make you gag, he's also been a major financial supporter of Donald Trump.

Clearly all of us have a common enemy in men like this. We need to treat them like the criminal outlaws that they are.

Women protest the despoiling of the Niger Delta by Big Oil giants like Chevron

We All Live in Paradise (California) Now

We all live in Paradise now. Paradise, California. With over 80 wildfires currently raging in California and the West, the plumes of smoke have blown over 2,000 miles to the Eastern seaboard, blanketing NYC and other cities in a toxic haze. New York authorities are warning people to stay indoors and avoid outdoor activity -- public health restrictions which residents of California and the Pacific Northwest have been forced to live under for several fire seasons in a row.

This is the new abnormal now for people all over planet Earth. And it did not have to come to this dire place. As I've been banging on about for a LONG time, the climate crisis -- which is now displacing and killing millions of people around the world -- must be criminalized. The executives and politicians who knowingly lied about the growing climate emergency for decades must be prosecuted for their crimes against nature and humanity. And the energy industry must be brought under public control. The energy industry is too essential -- and too dangerous to public health -- to be allowed to operate solely on the profit motive in the private sector. Fortunately, led by Covering Climate Now and the Guardian, an international consortium of media organizations is now covering the climate crisis like crime beat, naming the corporations and power players who are responsible for this global disaster.

Now we need to take the next step and bring legal action against these criminals, to prevent further damage to our suffering environment.

The conversion to clean energy is now an existential imperative for the human race. At current rates of global warming, a significant percentage of the world's population will be exterminated. There is no way to sugarcoat this mass die-off, which has been set in motion by Exxon, Chevron and other energy giants, even though their top executives were warned long ago by their own scientists of the dire consequences of increasing the carbon load in the environment.

Even now, with the world on fire, and plagued by drought and and poisonous smoke, our leaders continue to dither and take half measures because of the continued sway of the energy sector. Enough. For the sake of our own lives -- and those of our children and grandchildren -- we need to take emergency action today.

Julian Assange and the Silence of the Lambs

The Biden administration is making a big show of supporting "independent journalists" around the globe -- particularly in hostile countries like Iran. But that magnanimous sentiment does not apply to journalists like Julian Assange, who had the temerity to publish corrosive information about the U.S. war machine. Because of U.S. pressure, Assange has remained in a maximum security prison in England for over two years, after lengthy house arrest in London's Ecuador embassy. The Western press -- including the New York Times, which used the services of Assange's Wikileaks and then dumped him -- has largely ignored Assange's plight. The recent retraction by a key witness in the Assange case has received no corporate media attention.

Washington's continuing, cruel vendetta against Assange -- with the complicity of the U.S. media establishment -- is an outrage. And it demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of those Biden officials and Fourth Estate spokespeople who are now crusading for press freedom. Actions speak louder than words. Free Julian Assange NOW.

The Truth vs. Anti-Kennedy Propaganda

The history wars in America don’t just relate to race. They’re also heating up about President Kennedy — including his legacy as well as his assassination. The ideological attacks on Kennedy — as a “lightweight” who did nothing about civil rights, stumbled into a near nuclear apocalypse over Cuba, and paved the way to the Vietnam debacle — predictably escalate whenever someone like Oliver Stone revisits this fraught history. Well, Oliver is back — and so are the inevitable attacks on Kennedy. These attacks serve the interests of the national security establishment. Because if he was an insignificant president, JFK’s violent death has little meaning.

Fortunately for historical accuracy, we have aggressive truth-tellers like James DiEugenio, who has used his blog Kennedys and King recently to rigorously dissect deeply uninformed broadsides against JFK from historian Michael Kazin in The New York Review of Books and, more recently, by journalist Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. I won’t repeat DiEugenio’s lengthy correction of the record about President Kennedy — you should read his critiques yourself. But let me add one vital piece about Kennedy’s bold civil rights stand — a stand, by the way, that he knew was alienating white Southern Democrats and would result in a more difficult reelection battle in 1964.

In late September 1962, when Air Force veteran James Meredith became the first African-American to integrate the University of Mississippi student body, all hell broke loose on the campus. And President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, first dispatched federal agents to protect Meredith from being lynched, and when they too were threatened with being overrun by armed rioters, the Kennedys ordered U.S. Army troops to secure the Ole Miss campus.

But, as I relate in my book Brothers, those Army units were so slow to move to Oxford, Mississippi that the Kennedys and their White House aides wondered aloud if military leaders were being insubordinate. The White House tapes that recorded the increasingly worried comments of President Kennedy and his top deputies are still chilling to hear. Finally, Army troops did reach the campus — and the show of force was enough to quell the violent protests (led, in part, by the far-right, recently discharged General Edwin Walker, who would later play a strange role in the creation of the Lee Harvey Oswald legend).

The liberal commentators who’ve declared an open season on President Kennedy have usually read a couple of critical books about JFK. (One such popular book — Seymour Hersh’s hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot — was largely based on interviews with professional Kennedy haters like CIA mouthpiece Sam Halpern.) But the truth about the Kennedy presidency, and why JFK was killed, is out there — in other books.

In addition to my own Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard, you can find the real story in books such as:

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglass

The JFK Assassination, by James DiEugenio and Oliver Stone

Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, by Gerald McKnight

The Last Investigation (about the House Assassinations Committee probe in the 1970s), by Gaeton Fonzi

James Meredith had to be rescued by the Kennedy administration when he integrated Ole Miss in 1962.

Getting Away with Murder: How the Sacklers Did It

Patrick Radden Keefe, a journalist I greatly admire, lays it out in a Sunday Review essay in today’s New York Times. The billionaire Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, hooked millions of people on their killer opioid OxyContin — laying waste to entire swaths of America — and are about to go scot-free, thanks to a pliant bankruptcy judge with the Dickensian name Robert Drain. That’s how the justice system works in America, as Keefe reminds us — street drug dealers do hard prison time, while the biggest pushers in the country escape justice. Thanks to U.S. Justice Department officials, the Sacklers evaded criminal prosecution. And now, thanks to Judge Drain, the family soon will be granted “a sweeping grant of immunity from all litigation relating to their role in precipitating the opioid crisis.”

David Sackler — worried that one of the countless lawsuits against Purdue Pharma might “get through to the family” — began draining the company of its wealth with other family members and securing it in their private accounts years ago. That’s how the looted opioid manufacturer ended up in Judge Drain’s White Plains, NY bankruptcy court even though its dangerous painkiller reaped a staggering $35 billion in revenue. Now, thanks to Drain, the bulk of the Sacklers’ wealth will be protected from the families and communities devastated by OxyContin.

This is a primary reason that revolutionary rage is growing in America. “No justice, no peace” goes the street chant of Black Lives Matter after killer cops claim another victim. But it must apply to corporate criminals as well.

Corporate profiteers have hooked us on their deadly drugs. They’ve trashed the environment and triggered a climate crisis that’s now taking a heavy toll in every region of the earth. They’ve flooded countries with military weaponry and grown rich off the blood of war. They’ve looted newspapers and other essential businesses of their value, turning them into shells of their former selves.

These profiteers are deadly criminals. The justice system must begin to act against them — or people will take justice into their own hands. And that’s revolutionary anarchy that will spell the end of U.S. civil society. “No justice, no peace.”

The Widening Crack in the Kennedy Case

There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in (cont.)… Oliver Stone, whose new documentary on the JFK assassination premiered to standing-ovation audiences at Cannes this week, has again opened wide the crack on the long-shut Kennedy case. The U.S. intelligence establishment, trying desperately to uphold the mythology that sustains the rapidly declining American empire, is again distraught about Stone. But the filmmaker, whose 1991 dramatic film JFK began the process of national awakening about the violent overthrow of President Kennedy, is again capturing the media and public’s attention. Stone deserves a national medal.

The new zeitgeist of Kennedy truth-telling has also resulted in a sudden spike in sales for my book The Devil’s Chessboard. I must thank Joe Rogan and other podcasters for this renewal of interest in my book, which places the principal blame for the Kennedy assassination and coverup on Allen Dulles, the hardline CIA director whom Kennedy forced out of office. My book became a New York Times bestseller — despite a media blackout led by the Times. I take great satisfaction in that.

Here are some other books that I am reading this summer, to learn more about the dark side of U.S. power:

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O’Neill

A Drop of Treason: Philip Agee and His Exposure of the CIA, by Jonathan Stevenson

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business and the Corruption of American Democracy, by Jonathan Marshall

John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles

Priscilla McMillan and the JFK Disinformation Campaign (cont.)

The death of Pricilla McMillan — one of the chief architects of the Lee Harvey Oswald legend as a deranged lone assassin — has given the willfully ignorant U.S. media another excuse to parrot its lies about the John F. Kennedy assassination. The McMillan obituary in the New York Times — by a useful idiot named Sam Roberts — is a classic example of this continuing coverup. Oswald, who was never prosecuted and insisted on his innocence to the moment he was gunned down by a Mafia thug, is referred to in the Times’s lead as the “assassin” of President Kennedy. Not “alleged assassin” — or, more accurately, the young man with the “fingerprints of intelligence” all over him (according to Senator Richard Schweiker, who investigated the Kennedy murder in the 1970s) who was set up to be a fall guy — or “patsy,” in Oswald’s own word. The New York Times, like the rest of America’s head-in-the-sand corporate media, has convicted Oswald on its own, without a trial and without ever actually investigating the crime of the 20th century.

Nowhere in the Times’s obit is there any mention of the cozy relationship between McMillan and the CIA. (Just like you will never see any honest introspection in its pages about the newspaper’s own long relationship with the intelligence establishment.) McMillan, who kept traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1950s as a journalist, was described by the CIA as a “witting source.” Try as they might, members of the Warren Commission — under the sway of former CIA director Allen Dulles and other fixtures of the power elite — could find no convincing motive for Oswald’s alleged murderous act. In fact, he was said to be fond of the president, as McMillan who interviewed the so-called defector (but likely a U.S. spy) discovered. But later, in her book Marina and Lee — lavishly praised by another intelligence-friendly journalist, Thomas Powers, in the Times — McMillan framed Oswald as a deeply aggrieved, violence-prone man “with a desperate desire to transcend the obscurity and impotence to which fate was inexorably confining him.”

McMillan’s dark portrait of Oswald bore no relation to the real young man, who was an idealistic and liberal patriot from a humble background — and in way over his head in the labyrinth of U.S. Cold War espionage, as his widow Marina later described him.

Fortunately, for those who want the truth, and can handle the truth about the Kennedy assassination — that milestone event that has warped the rest of American history — there is still courageous filmmaker Oliver Stone, whose new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, just premiered at the Cannes festival. Watch this rapturous reception of Stone at Cannes and his opening remarks before a screening of the film. And reflect on why you as Americans are still being kept in the dark by the newspaper of record and the other bastions of truth.

And Now It’s Ken Starr’s Turn To Be Exposed

When I was running Salon back in the 1990s, our little media startup decided to turn our investigative guns, such as they were, on the special prosecution apparatus of Kenneth Starr, who was trying to bring down the Clinton presidency over a consensual, if sleazy, affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The editors of Salon, including me, had no great affection for Bill Clinton, whom we regarded as too centrist and too slick. But we knew that Starr’s endless inquisition was deeply politicized and that the Republican alternatives to Clinton — Newt Gingrich (!) — would’ve been far worse for the country.

Ever since then, I’ve loosely followed Ken Starr’s professional trajectory. I was not surprised when he got fired as president of Baylor University for protecting sexual predators on the football team. Nor was I shocked when Starr popped again as a character witness for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination battle. (As a young aide to Starr during the Clinton investigation, Kavanaugh had devised some of the most sexually humiliating questions for the president.) Then there was Starr’s legal work on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious rapist and trafficker of underage girls. I always suspected that Starr was a moral hypocrite and Republican attack dog… and the creepy details just kept piling up as the years went by.

And now there’s this. I must admit that this latest expose of Starr by former deputy and mistress Judi Hershman made even my eyes pop. “Judge” Starr — the man who set himself up as the moral arbiter of the immoral Clinton presidency — turns out to to be an even bigger scumbag than I thought.

It took Hershman much too long to figure this out. But now, as Starr maneuvers to put his man — Mike Pence — in the White House, she is at last telling all. Can the pillars of the Republican Party get any more debased? Or, as President Biden just put it, have they “no shame?”

Clearly not.

Kennet Starr and Judi Hershman in happier days

“The Last Black Man’s” Ongoing Legacy

It's been over two years since the premiere of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the independent movie that was the creative love child of two San Francisco native sons -- director/screenwriter Joe Talbot and co-star Jimmie Fails. But the film continues to have ripple effects. I stopped clicking on the Google Alerts about the film that continue to pop up on my screen each week. But this week -- maybe because my son Joe just celebrated his 31st birthday -- I did click on two stories related to the film.

My neighborhood news outlet, Mission Local, tells the sad story of local muralist Sirron Norris, who has been so harassed by gentrifiers that he made a poster inspired by the film.

Meanwhile, an entertainment magazine calls TLBMISF one of the top 15 saddest movies on Amazon Prime. As I told Joe, he's in good company -- with directors like Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard), John Cassavetes (Husbands) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight). Here's what the magazine says about Joe and Jimmie's film: "'The Last Black Man in San Francisco is sad as hell, and also proof that originality in filmmaking is not quite as dead as some claim. If you haven’t seen this, make it a point to change that."

Meanwhile, this beautiful and, yes, sad film has launched several careers. Composer Emile Mosseri went on to write the music for Minari, winning an Academy Award nomination and getting invited to join the Academy. Co-star Jonathan Majors has blasted to the Hollywood heights, with leading roles in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and other releases, while Jimmie's acting career is also taking off. And Joe has just written an entirely different movie with his partner Olivia Gatwood -- one not quite so sad but equally beautiful and even magical. He will direct the feature next year in Europe.

Here’s to the next wave of independent filmmakers. May they hold onto the artistic values that ignited them from the beginning.

Sirron Norris’s protest poster (right) and the original

The Whole World Is Watching: Who Makes History?

Finally… a smart critique of By the Light of Burning Dreams from the left. Jonah Raskin’s review of the new book about the radical upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s by my sister Margaret and me is well worth reading — even if I strongly disagree with its major thrust. Raskin — a fellow veteran of the New Left — insists on calling the book’s focus on radical leaders a “celebrity” fixation. He would rather focus on the street soldiers who made the “second American Revolution,” as Margaret and I call it. Raskin does concede that we also tell the stories of relative unknowns like Heather Booth, Bill Zimmerman, Craig Rodwell and Madonna Thunder Hawk. But it’s true that we mostly focused on the celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Black Panthers, United Farm Workers, American Indian Movement and other radical organizations. Because, as we write in the book, while Margaret and I don’t subscribe to the “great man” theory of history, we do believe in the essential role of visionary, brave leadership.

Yes, the leaders we write about could not have made history without the countless foot soldiers who followed them. But the political and social advances of the ‘60s and ‘70s would also never have been possible without the galvanizing effect of courageous leaders. Yes, they were flawed human beings — and we don’t ignore their manifold imperfections and mistakes. And yet, as we write, the “legacy” of leaders like Bobby Seale, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Dennis Banks, Russell Means etc. is “immense.” To make deep and lasting change, we need the intricate interplay between mass movements and brilliant, accountable leaders. Today’s activists ignore this lesson at their own peril.

Rep. Katie Porter 1, Trumpies 0

Democracy -- it's not for the faint of heart. It's a district-by-district fight for the soul of America. Progressive Congress member Katie Porter found that out this weekend when her town hall meeting in her Southern California district was invaded by Trump stormtroopers led by a Republican challenger. Porter did the right thing -- wading into the melee to protect an elderly constituent and then vowing to keep holding public meetings. Porter is just the kind of gutsy, smart progressive we need in Congress. I donated money for her first Congressional run in 2020. when she flipped her Republican district. And I'm definitely going to give her more money for her 2022 reelection battle.

Everyone Loves Bernie… Even the New York Times

When Senator Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Democratic establishment, and actually looked like he could win the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, leading voices of corporate liberalism like the New York Times were apoplectic. During last year’s primary season, the Times sometimes ran two or three news stories and opinion pieces a day against Bernie. That’s right — even the Times’s supposedly “objective” news pages became a platform for anti- Bernie animus. But now that he’s become a Joe Biden loyalist — working hard to advance the president’s progressive legislative agenda — Bernie has become lovable again. Henry Louis Gates recently sat down with him for his Roots program on PBS, And now Maureen Dowd gives him a big wet kiss in her Sunday Times column.

To his credit, Senator Sanders wouldn’t allow himself to be diverted from his talking points about the national renewal program that America desperately needs. As Dowd noted, she wanted to talk to Bernie about Britney and “the absurd price of a Birkin bag.” But the senator — who, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee and an old comrade of Biden’s, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Washington action — stayed studiously on message during his interview with Dowd in a Burlington diner. Sanders did offer opinions about the suspension of Olympic track star Sha’Carri Richardson for using marijuana, whom he saw as a victim of America’s warped war on drugs, and the grotesque space race of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

“You have the richest guys in the world who are not particularly worried about earth anymore," Sanders observed. “They’re off in outer space” while people are sleeping on the streets. That’s why we need President Biden’s tax-the-rich legislation, the senator stated, steering the conversation back to his serious talking points.

Berne is now surrounded by a younger generation of democratic socialists and militant progressives on Capitol Hill, whom he has inspired and who have inspired him. But they sometimes part company with Sanders over his legislative alliance with the White House. But at age 79, Sanders has every right to use his political influence to win as much as possible for the American people. If Biden’s infrastructure legislation gets passed at close to the levels that he and Sanders want, it will be the biggest federal infusion in social spending since FDR’s New Deal.

If the Democrats fail to use their slight margin to deliver relief for the American people, Sanders is sharp enough to see the dark consequences — a further descent into Republican “delusion,” “authoritarianism” and even “violence.”

At the end of Dowd’s column, Senator Sanders offers a lesson on the difference between liberals and progressives — and it can be read as blunt message to the Times editorial board that helped block his “ascension” to the White House. “Liberals want to do nice things,” Bernie remarked. “And progressives understand that you have to take on powerful special interests to make it happen.”

Right on.

Bernie and his talking points

Turning Out the Lights on the U.S. Empire

A big cheer for Joe Biden, who strongly defended his decision to pull out U.S. troops from Afghanistan after our 20-year war there. Could this be the beginning of long-delayed national reckoning about the U.S. Empire? Here's what President Biden said yesterday: "Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more? How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk? And how long would you have them stay... Just one more year of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution, but a recipe for being there indefinitely... No nation has ever unified Afghanistan, no nation. Empires have gone there and not done it." And now to the long line of failures in the graveyard of empires, we must add the United States.

I deeply sympathize with those many Afghan men and women -- perhaps a majority of the country -- who deeply fear a Taliban takeover, with its hardline Islamist and misogynistic beliefs. But it's up the people of Afghanistan to forcefully resist a Taliban victory. In some provinces, women have reportedly taken up arms to show that they are willing to fight and die to prevent a Taliban victory -- even if the men in the Afghan Army are not willing to do so.

Empires can't impose solutions on foreign countries -- that's been the bloody, tragic lesson that America refuses to learn, from Vietnam to Central America to the Middle East. But now, hopefully, President Biden has begun this much-needed process of national introspection. Of course, the president is still authorizing drone strikes all over the world and flooding client states with military hardware. So the process of demilitarizing America will be a long one.

“There’s a memory hole about Kennedy”

Oliver Stone speaks out in the Hollywood Reporter about the Cannes premiere of JFK Revisited, his new Kennedy assassination documentary. Stone deserves a medal for compelling Congress to pass the JFK Records Act after the premiere of his explosive feature "JFK" in 1991. As he points out, despite the flood of government documents following passage of this law, 30 years after "JFK," "There's a memory hole about Kennedy." Mainstream historians STILL studiously ignore the government documents released under the JFK Act. (I was one of the independent historians who heavily used them, for my books "Brothers" and "The Devil's Chessboard.") President Trump was set to release more JFK documents in 2017, including thousands of pages still locked away by the CIA, but he wimped out at the last minute. Here's Oliver on why he needed to make a new documentary about the Kennedy assassination -- a documentary that scandalously STILL can't find U.S. distribution:

"There was a motive to kill Kennedy. He was changing things too much. He was a reformer. He was going to break up the CIA into a thousand pieces. Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam and was looking for detente with Russia, making peace with Cuba. These things were denied by many historians. Not all the serious historians are really looking [now] at the documentation. And there’s plenty of it. We don’t have time to go into everything. But we’re going to release a four-hour version of [the documentary] as well."

The Next American Revolution — Will It Come from the Left or Right?

My sister and coauthor Margaret Talbot — who worked with me on the new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams — and I call the upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s “the Second American Revolution.” And we narrate the tragedies and heroic achievements of this second revolution with unflinching candor. Because if we don’t learn from this history, we’re doomed to repeat it. But as we’re being interviewed about the book, a question always arises: Who will make the next American revolution? (Btw, here’s a good recent interview with us, by historian Jon Wiener, on his podcast for The Nation magazine. We come on the show about 13:30 into it.)

At this point, it seems like far-right militants — who are pumped up, well-organized and fully armed — have the momentum to revolutionize America. They were not only able to violently storm the Capitol in January, but also block an independent investigation of the insurrection. They wield power at the grassroots level and in Washington D.C. And their white nationalist vision of America is deeply chilling.

Activists on the left have shown glimmers of political passion — particularly in the occupation of Wall Street and other urban centers in 2011 and the wave of George Floyd uprisings in 2020. But we’ve not been able to sustain our protest movements over time, nor elect enough progressives to Congress to redirect national policy. Currently we must concede that it’s the far right that has more momentum in America.

That’s why the stories and lessons in By the Light of Burning Dreams are so important. Yes, as a coauthor of the book, I’m not simply an objective observer. But Margaret and I are talented journalists, and the history we’ve compiled here is incendiary and illuminating. And as a popular historian — and a former foot soldier in these in the struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s — I know how important this book is. As in the past, we need to build a Movement again. We need to forge bonds of solidarity across class, race and gender lines. We need to fight for our vision of America — and this time we need to win.

Footnote: Before his assassination in April 1968, the increasingly radical Martin Luther King Jr. was building a remarkably diverse coalition — including the Black Panthers, as Bobby Seale himself told me — to not just march on Washington, but to occupy the capital until Congress agreed to divert spending from the Vietnam War to urgent domestic needs. That’s why King was viewed as “the most dangerous Negro” in America by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. And that’s why he was killed.

We Will Survive — Creating a Post-Pandemic San Francisco

As the Covid shock and awe begins to wear off cities like San Francisco, we are predictably being caught up in an ideological war over the city's future. Right-wing media outlets, like Legal Insurrection, fret and fume about crime and homelessness and blame progressive city officials like District Attorney Chesa Boudin for an exodus of solid, tax-paying citizens from SF. According to a recent Chamber of Commerce poll cited in this conservative article, over 40% of San Franciscans are now considering leaving the city because of its increasing squalor. (Of course, these conservative pundits never blame officials like Mayor London Breed, the corporate-backed official who's actually responsible for the decline in San Francisco's quality of life, not to mention the spike in City Hall corruption.)

Now I've been advocating a deep, post-Covid soul-searching by San Francisco for months. SF, like many cities coming out of the pandemic, doesn't know what the hell it is anymore. In fact, San Francisco began losing its identity long before the plague hit -- with the sudden influx of tech wealth, and the massive dislocation of longtime residents and the surge of homelessness triggered by this corporate tsunami. The shuttering of the city during the pandemic, with scores of stores and restaurants boarded up, many forever, completed the city's loss of identity.

Now, as work-at-home mandates have become the new norms for many corporations, and tech towers once stuffed with employees become empty or half-filled echo chambers, I feel that SF has a chance to throw off the tech domination of the past decade and reinvent itself. I don't freak out about the exodus of some of our newer residents -- especially those techies who never sunk roots in SF and never contributed anything to the life of the city.

But I do think that San Francisco's progressive leaders -- not just elected officials, but activists, commentators and all engaged citizens -- need to step up now and begin the process of urban self-renewal. We must not leave this process to the billionaires and right-wing grievance crowd. These moneyed elites are predictably targeting public leaders like Chesa Boudin now, throwing a fortune into a recall campaign against him.

Instead, WE need to take charge of the debate about SF's future. Nobody likes urban squalor. But we need to advance our own agenda for how to clean up SF. And beyond that, we need to hash out a new economic plan for the city -- one that seeks to restore San Francisco's diversity and affordability. I'm calling on visionary leaders like Supervisors Hillary Ronen​ and Dean Preston​ and Matt Haney​ and many other longtime city activists to start this process of urban introspection and revival.

And if we lose some techie taxpayers and "disruptors" in the process of reinventing our city, that's not the end of the world. In fact, it's probably for the good of San Francisco. As the tech industry is always telling us, you can't have progress without disrupting the status quo.

Song of the Week: “Have a Little Faith”

Questlove saves the best for last, with Sly and the Family Stone’s electric performance at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival closing his wonderful, uplifting documentary Summer of Soul. But equally powerful to me was a song I never heard before that Questlove picked for the final credits — the Chambers Brothers’ “Have a Little Faith.” I adore the Chambers band, four brothers from Mississippi (and a white dude on drums) who pioneered the psychedelic soul movement — along with with Sly, Arthur Lee and Love, and Jimi Hendrix. Rooted in the gospel music of Mississippi, the brothers took their mixed-race audiences even higher with their unique blend of church harmonies and kick-ass rock. They’re best known for their hit “Time Has Come Today.” But I love the righteous funk of “Have a Little Faith.” Give it a listen — and then go see Summer of Soul. It will make you feel again.

Oliver Stone vs. the Gatekeepers

There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in... Very interesting that Oliver Stone scores a European distributor and a prestigious Cannes premiere this month for his new documentary about the JFK assassination -- but still no U.S distribution deal. I admire Oliver's fortitude, and the way he corralled an army of historians and investigators to make his case that JFK "conspiracy theory" has become "conspiracy fact." I sat for an interview with Oliver's film team back in 2018 -- and I'm honored to be included in the film.

Will the political and media gatekeepers in the U.S. ever decide that enough time has elapsed for the truth about Dallas to be fully revealed? Probably not. But fortunately we have bold truth-tellers like Oliver Stone.

Donald Rumsfeld, R.I.H.

One of American democracy’s greatest enemies, Donald Rumsfeld, has shuffled off this mortal coil at age 88. He died peacefully in his home in Taos, New Mexico — which was once a sanctuary for bohemian artists and Native tribespeople. Now what the hell is it? Speaking of hell, Rumsfeld should roast in it. Along with his evil twin, Dick Cheney, he mired the U.S. in a Middle East nightmare that continues to claim lives and rock the region. In my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I called Rumsfeld “George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands.” But he and Cheney had an even more devious plan to sabotage American democracy — a “change of government” plot, exploiting the 9/11 shock and awe impact on U.S. society, to replace our Constitutional freedoms with authoritarian rule. Rumsfeld and Cheney partly succeeded — and much of their secretive, anti-democratic infrastructure is still in place, two decades after 9/11.

I referenced The Devil’s Chessboard — my dark biography of Cold War spymaster Allen Dulles — because Rumsfeld was a young acolyte of America’s most evil conspirator in the 20th century. As a fresh-faced Illinois congressman, Rumsfeld helped rehabilitate Dulles — who had been forced out of the CIA in disgrace by President Kennedy after the spy agency’s Bay of Pigs debacle. As I write in my book, in March 1963, Rep. Rumsfeld invited Dulles to address a congressional group he led — on Cuba, of all topics.

Dulles was Rumsfeld’s kind of guy — conniving, power-hungry, contemptuous of democratic institutions and customs. Like other Dulles proteges — including Reagan spymaster William Casey — Rumsfeld kept the “Old Man’s” spirit alive long after his death in 1969.

Somewhere in the swamps of Washington — or Florida — there is an evil successor to Donald Rumsfeld, who will keep his dark force alive in American politics.

“Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.”

That’s the arresting opening line of the article by my friend, environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard, in today’s Guardian. Mark and I have been talking for some time about how the climate crisis should be covered by the media as a crime story — and now thanks to Mark’s group, Covering Climate Now, a consortium of media companies led by the Guardian, that’s what is finally happening.

You don’t need to tell the people evicted from their homes by the wildfire blazing around Mount Shasta — the latest inferno to ravage California. Or the people suffering in freakish triple-digit weather under the heat dome suffocating the Pacific Northwest. Or the people who lost family members and neighbors in the wintry blast that stormed through Texas. Climate change is a murder story. And it’s an arson story. And it’s a home invasion story. And it’s a vandalism story. It’s a crime against nature. And it’s a crime against humanity.

And there are powerful men who are responsible for these massive crimes — men who should be held criminally accountable. Energy executives — like those at Exxon — who knew the dire environmental truth and covered it up for decades. Politicians and scientific “experts”who took cash from the Koch brothers and became leading climate deniers. Fossil fuel investors who put their profits ahead of the lives of their own children and grandchildren.

Led by the Guardian and other members of the Covering Climate Now consortium, the press is finally treating this global crisis like the epic crime story it is. When enough climate profiteers and propagandists are dragged into courts because of this reporting, maybe they’ll finally get the message. Their day is over.