The Innocence of Power
I was thinking (again) about how nobody at the top in America is ever held accountable. For anything. CIA chief Allen Dulles got away with overthrowing democratic governments around the world and organizing (and covering up) the Kennedy assassination. The architects of the Vietnam War were never put on trial -- were never even forced to defend their fateful decisions which cost the lives of over one million Vietnamese people and over 60,000 U.S. soldiers. The trio of men who lied about WMD and went on a spree of war crimes during their "war on terror" were also allowed to peacefully retire. And many of the men and women who propagandized for the disastrous invasion of Iraq are back as TV talking heads and even Washington policymakers.
Those murderous U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan that claimed the innocent lives of entire families? The New York Times -- when not busy whipping up war hysteria -- exposed the secret military unit responsible for the latest atrocities. But don't hold your breath -- the Pentagon won't punish anyone.
This is the hubris of the powerful. The arrogance of Empire.
As the Egyptian-Canadian novelist Omar El Akkad recently remarked, "The real engine at the heart of broken systems -- the most insidious, burrowing thing -- is not their cruelty: It's the way power obliterates consequences, the certainty that those responsible, by virtue of how deeply the game is rigged in their favor, will always get away with it."
Of course El Akkad, who was writing in the New York Times, was not talking about U.S. power. Tie Times -- like the rest of our mainstream media -- seldom if ever shines the same spotlight on our own imperial crimes. At least not strongly enough for anyone to be actually held responsible.
But our media -- and President Biden -- have been quick to label Putin's atrocities in Ukraine what they are -- war crimes. And they've suggested that the Russian leader be dragged before an international tribunal for his crimes.
The problem, as Putin himself has pointed out, is that the United States has no moral standing to level these charges. Because we ourselves have committed the same crimes -- in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Central America, the Middle East... and on and on.
The United States is primarily responsible for creating the moral and legal vacuum in the world that Putin is now exploiting.
The U.S. has committed these crimes with total impunity. That's what those in power do. As El Akkad observed, it's the cruelest aspect of power -- complete unaccountability.
That Kevin Costner Moment
My friend Karen (who wishes to be social media anonymous) writes the following:
I can't summarize the recent Oscars night any better than Mr. Talbot's headline: “The Evil of Banality.” But one moment did stand out for me as an antidote to the trauma I felt after two hours of bad jokes, bad behavior and the general devolution of any semblance of culture in this country. It came in the form of actor Kevin Costner's introduction to the Best Director award.
Mr. Costner stood up, after the audience had been stunned by the Will Smith incident, and talked about how as a child he was awed by the magic of movies. He talked about the importance of directors to the art form. And he did it in a way that was beautifully written. What he said was thoughtful, wise and inspiring (not "dramatic," as Jane Campion quipped). Watching the audience as the camera panned to them, one could see the calming effect of his confidence and the poetry in his words. There was a grown-up in the room.
I don't know if Mr. Costner has his own version of Theodore Sorensen or if he wrote it himself, but he reminded me of when I was 8-years-old, watching President Kennedy's press conferences. Kennedy exuded deep wisdom and strength -- seasoned with wit -- that even a child could feel had come from hard-won experience. His courage gave me courage, even during times that were extraordinarily frightening. He gave me hope.
We need not only politicians but artists who can do that for us now.
The Crackpot Realism that Might Kill Us All
I was thrilled to read a long essay by Jerry Brown (!) on the books by Washington's "crackpot realists" (he uses C. Wright Mill's old term for Cold War nuclear war planners) -- the think tank intellectuals (including Rush Doshi, President Biden's Sino-point man) who are pushing for a confrontation with rising global power China. Such a confrontation could quickly go nuclear -- but hey, we'll meet again some sunny day!
(Btw, I was glad to see Biden walk back -- sort of -- his incendiary language about Putin. Yes, the Russian leader is a war criminal and a cruel despot -- but we don't need to go nuclear with Russia either.)
After serving four terms as California's governor, the 83-year-old Brown has not gone gently into the good night. As executive chairman of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and creator of a climate change initiative at UC-Berkeley, Brown remains very active in the two most urgent, existential issues of our day -- the threat of nuclear war and the onrushing climate apocalypse.
Brown remains remarkably sanguine about humanity's chances for survival. Perhaps it's his Jesuit training -- or the bucolic ranch that he and his wife now live on 60 miles northwest of Sacramento.
But Brown wields his pen as an avenging sword in this essay, which was published in the New York Review of Books. Here's the blazing opening lines:
The twenty years of war since the September 11, 2001, attacks have killed more than 900,000 people, displaced at least 38 million, and cost the United States an estimated $8 trillion. During these two decades of intense fighting and killing, the US has been responsible for a quantity of suffering that would have been unthinkable when President George W. Bush, with the near-unanimous backing of Congress, launched his assault on Afghanistan. It is clear now that America’s leaders deluded themselves and failed to ask basic questions about the ultimate goal of the war before invading: its human and financial costs, its benefits, or how it would end.
One might assume that such disastrous results, and the ignominious end of the war in Afghanistan last year, would lead to a period of reflection and soul-searching. Yet no such inquiry has occurred—at least not one that fully grapples with the shocking self-deception, pervasive misreading of events, and powerful groupthink that drove the longest war in American history.
Instead, without missing a beat, Washington power brokers and pundits, in and out of government, have fixed their gaze on a new foe: China. Think tank specialists and defense insiders are churning out books and articles on how to contain China and engage in what they have called a “great power conflict,” a vague description encompassing all manner of hostile interactions—ideological, economic, political, and military. Last year, Admiral Philip Davidson, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that China is accelerating its ambitions to supplant America’s leadership in the world, and that it could invade Taiwan within “the next six years.”
The Oscars: The Evil of Banality
Enough has been said about Will Smith and "toxic masculinity." So I'm going to talk about what truly ruined last night and the Academy Awards in general. Oscar banality. Even the winning Brits were dull last night. Like Kenneth Branagh, who could've -- should've -- tied Ukraine to the Troubles in Northern Ireland (which his film "Belfast" sugarcoated.) When the celebrities did try to get topical on Ukraine etc., it was embarrassing. Like co-host Amy Schumer's head-scratcher: "There's a genocide going on in Ukraine and women are losing all their rights ... and trans people." Huh?
The Hollywood winners were typically, predictably stupid and dull in their victory speeches. The winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Award for "Coda" burbled on inanely, thanking a laundry list of people (can winners be limited to three thank-yous?) and gushing about how "amazing" the award was. And she's a writer?
Acceptance speeches should be witty and well-crafted. After all, these people work in the fucking ENTERTAINMENT business. But we were neither entertained nor amused nor moved by ANY of the victory speeches last night.
Even the rehearsed moments of the Oscar ceremony last night were lame. Take the "In Memoriam" segment -- please. A faceless choir sang generic gospel-type music while a screen in the remote distance showed the small faces of those Hollywood luminaries who passed away in the past year. What is usually a moving requiem was simply annoying and distracting -- and undecipherable.
In short, the show is a mess. Yes, as Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times on Sunday, the movies themselves have gotten smaller. (Or more pumped up on superhero testosterone.) But the ceremony has also been badly produced for years.
Instead of modernized and energized for the new era, the Oscars have become performative and politically correct -- and even more dull and empty.
Not even the slap heard 'round the world could save the evening from its own torpor.
Atlanta, America
Atlanta... America.... The other night I watched the hotly anticipated season premiere of "Atlanta," a TV show that has managed to advance our understanding of the young African American experience, while getting stuck in some of the old racial tropes that have long bedeviled our country. It's a stimulating -- and frustrating -- show. But that's not what I'm focusing on today. It's the relentless flood of TV commercials that FX rained down on viewers throughout the show. I'm not used to basic cable and network TV 's insane commercialism so FX's ad frenzy stunned me -- and broke any appreciation that I could develop in the much more quietly disturbing season opener.
The ads on FX came fast and furious: for hamburgers and other fast food, gas-guzzling SUVs, Big Pharma drugs and lots of super-violent superhero movies. This is what middle America regularly consumes, was my depressing thought, as the fusillade of loud commercials kept slamming me. America is buzzed on junk food, legal (and illegal) drugs, cheap fossil fuels and bloodlust.
For relief, you could turn over to the TV news channels' Ukrainian war porn -- or the spectacle of the Republican roasting of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, where one GOP lion of the Senate after the other clowned and jackassed for the cameras. (As if the "Supreme" Court weren't steeped enough in toxic politics, Ginni Thomas -- the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas -- was revealed to be a Trump "stolen vote" strategist during his coup attempt in January 2021.)
Throughout all this national mess, I've been working with a group of other concerned men and women to get a mutual friend who's suffering from Alzheimer's and alcoholism (and poverty) into long-term care. There are stopgap options -- all expensive and/or hard to access. But longterm solutions seem out of reach -- and this for a group of seasoned professionals, including a number who've worked in social services. Government offices are closed (due to Covid or whatever); phones go unanswered; help for those in crisis -- even for lifelong, dutiful taxpayers -- is nonexistent.
America is doomed, America is fucked, America is broken. That's the only conclusion I can reach this week.
RT (R.I.P.) and Me
The RT channel has been forced off the air in the U.S. -- which the New York Times applauded on Sunday. But I'm not sure that was a victory for free expression in America. Yes, some of RT's programming was Putin-slanted. But many of its news and interview shows were simply critical of the U.S. empire and the deep flaws in American society -- shows that could not be seen anywhere else because of the censorship in our own "state media."
I'll give you a couple examples. Chris Hedges -- a journalist and commentator whom I deeply respect -- was forced out of the New York Times, where he was a fearless war correspondent, because he spoke out against the disastrous (and illegal) U.S. invasion of Iraq -- at a time when it was compulsory to be "patriotic" in newsrooms like the Times. Banned by the Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Hedges couldn't get a job anywhere in U.S. mainstream media and was on the verge of taking a job as a high school teacher, when he was offered his own public affairs show on RT. As the host of the show "On Contact" -- which was nominated for an Emmy Award -- Hedges showcased critics of U.S. policy like Cornel West -- and me. But he snorts at the idea he was a tool of the Russian government.
That brings up example number two -- me. Like I said, I was twice a guest on Hedges's show. And back in 2015, when my book "The Devil's Chessboard" -- about the rise of America's lethal and anti-democratic national security state -- was published, I was interviewed on two other RT shows. I talked only about my book. No questions were raised about Putin's policies -- and if they had been, I would've stated my strong opposition to his regime and its war against dissidents, as I've stated here on multiple occasions.
I went on RT because, like Hedges, I was banned by corporate media after my book was published. The New York Times pointedly ignored my book -- which documented, among other things, how deeply complicit that the Times and other media institutions have been with the CIA. A Washington Post book editor told my astonished (and naive) book publicist that the Post "will not touch Talbot's book with a ten-foot pole." During the abbreviated book tour for "The Devil's Chessboard," I was riding in a New York City cab to the TV studio of Al-Jazeera America when the producer called my publicist and abruptly canceled the interview. "Why?" asked my publicist, who was beginning to get the message by now. "Politics," replied the TV producer.
So I was banned even by Al-Jazeera. Along with "Democracy Now," RT was the ONLY TV news channel that was willing to put me on the air. So yes, RT was Russia's "state media" in some ways -- but on the flip side, so is CBS and CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times, especially when it comes to wars and other national security matters.
Personally, I would never host a RT show -- that is too close for comfort to a network run by a man who poisons critics and who is now a flagrant war criminal. But, yes, I was glad to air my views on RT shows -- views that were banned elsewhere in America's
"free" press. Is that splitting moral hairs? Maybe.
If you don't think life is full of contradictions for independent journalists who try to operate ethically in the U.S., here's another conundrum. "The Devil's Chessboard" (which became a New York Times bestseller despite the Times blackout) was published by HarperCollins -- which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the most evil mogul in the media universe. Another irony that has marked my career, and those of countless other independent journalists and authors.
Putin on the Ritz
Putin on the Ritz... The Western media is falling all over themselves to demonize Putin -- which they should, since he showed his true fangs by savagely invading Ukraine. On the news networks, it's D-Day every day, as excited war correspondents and even more excited armchair generals jostle for airtime. They LIVE for this shit -- it makes (or breaks) careers.
But -- no surprise here -- it's the war-fevered liberal elite newspapers that truly drive me mad. Take the Damien Cave "analysis" piece in today's New York Times. (Full disclosure: Cave was once upon a time an earnest young reporter for my Salon -- has ANY of the journalists who started out there before going on to illustrious careers in the mainstream media carried with them the radical seeds of Salon? Maybe Michelle Goldberg, a little.) Cave bemoans the decline of the neoliberal world order as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism around the globe, quoting a who's-who parade of neoliberal and neoconservative militarists like Robert Kagan. Cave does mention that the neocon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were kind of, um, debacles. And their new world order brought with it grotesque levels of wealth disparity. But that doesn't stop Cave from loading his article with the "wisdom" of these deep thinkers.
Cave cites President Franklin Roosevelt as one of the visionary leaders who wanted an aggressive international strategy after World War II, lumping FDR with Cold Warrior Harry Truman. This is bad history -- something the Times commits on a regular basis in its rush to prop up U.S. exceptionalism. Before his untimely death in 1945, FDR (and his top economic advisor Harry Dexter White) were trying to build a new world order that would INCLUDE the Soviet Union (even under Stalin), as a way to prevent future catastrophic wars.
Instead, after FDR, Washington visionaries were blacklisted and driven out of power (or to early graves like White) by anti-Red crusaders like the Dulles brothers, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. (You can read all about this in my book, "The Devil's Chessboard," which was a NYT bestseller, despite being banned by the Times.)
Fast-forward to the 1990s, when the Russian economy again lay in ruins. Who helped revive it with their neoliberal "shock therapy" -- which paved the way for Putin's strongman oligarchy? None other than President Clinton's financial brain trust -- Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs.
The Putin regime is in some deep way a creation of the Wall Street elite. But you won't read this in the New York Times. To go beyond the hysteria of the moment, you need to seek out other news sources. The best article I've read about the Wall Street roots of the Putin dictatorship was in Air Mail, of all places, the slick online magazine co-created by Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair fame and Alessandra Stanley, who once ran the NYT's Moscow bureau. The Putin analysis by Stanley is an eye-opener. Here are the key grafs:
Before we pour any more vodka down the drain—and, by the way, Stoli is not Russian; it’s made in Latvia—this may be a good time for Americans to take a look in the mirror. Putin didn’t create his oligarchy on his own. The wealth that this circle of men was awarded (control of assets such as oil, gas, and aluminum after the collapse of the Soviet Union) was partly made possible by the well-meaning arrogance of economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers, as well as Robert Rubin, who was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
In the Clinton administration, they were in an Ivy League clown car of advisers who prodded Boris Yeltsin to apply “shock therapy” to the post-Soviet economy and turbocharge it into a free-market system.
I was in Moscow for The New York Times back then, and I had a close look at the bold, blinkered confidence of American experts, both from Washington and from the private sector. They seemed to be enacting their own version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Like Mark Twain’s engineer who time-traveled back to medieval England and used modern technology to bedazzle Camelot, those can-do technocrats and consultants seemed so sure that their mastery of markets would give them the upper hand. Using Wall Street know-how and neoliberal theories of deregulation, they were going to help the backward Russians build a Western-style economy.
Instead, smart, ruthless Russian buccaneers took advantage of weaknesses in the new system to plunder gas and other state assets and build vast fortunes. Meanwhile, the collapse of the managed economy impoverished millions of ordinary Russians in a full economic free fall known as katastroika. When I arrived in Moscow in 1994, newly pauperized army officers, nurses, and professors lined up on the sidewalks trying to sell military medals, teapots, boots, icons, and toys—anything they had—for cash.
Sachs, now at Columbia University, has moved onto bigger issues; notably, a plan to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2025 (ticktock). He still gets tetchy when people ask about Russia. He crossly told a biographer, Nina Munk, that he took a “ridiculous” amount of blame for Russia’s economic malfunction. He says there was nothing wrong with the policy, but notes that others, including Larry Summers, who was a high-level Treasury Department official under Rubin, were far more at fault than he.
An Ivy League clown car of advisers prodded Boris Yeltsin to apply “shock therapy” to the post-Soviet economy and turbocharge it into a free-market system.
It’s important to remember that Putin wasn’t elected; he was appointed acting president by Yeltsin a year after the ruble collapse of 1998, at a moment of deep disillusionment and fear. For years, even some of my most liberal Russian friends felt that democratic freedom was a fantasy, and that putting up with Putin was a small price to pay for economic stability.
Meanwhile, Putin reorganized the oligarchy he’d inherited in his own image, putting loyalists in the place of cocky troublemakers like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had grabbed hold of Yukos Oil under Yeltsin. Khodorkovsky thought he could speak his mind under Putin and was rewarded with nine years in prison. Other business tycoons and government officials in Putin’s inner circle got the message, fell in line, and were richly rewarded for it.
But let’s not forget that their overseas holdings, secret bank accounts, and tax havens would not have been as accessible without the unfettered, unregulated financial system that Wall Street, the White House, and Congress have stoked—and, as we’ve seen recently, sometimes used for personal financial gain—for decades.
At the moment, it’s tempting to paint Putin as a raving, isolated madman, though it wasn’t entirely crazy of him to look at Donald Trump’s lunacy and conclude the United States was no threat.
And belatedly pointing a finger at the Russian oligarchs who took the money and looked the other way may be unsatisfying; so much of their ill-gotten gains are by now too artfully hidden and out of reach. But it’s never too late to acknowledge the possibility that other Western miscalculations fed his aggression.
As they did with the Russian economy, American policymakers in both parties (including, by the way, Joe Biden, when he led the Foreign Relations Committee) pushed the pedal hard on NATO’s eastward expansion, without fully understanding how Russia would react. George W. Bush made it worse by insisting in 2008 that the North Atlantic military alliance could even absorb Ukraine and Georgia. The invasion of Ukraine may look like a folie à un, but as my friend Andrew Gould, a banker and longtime Russia-watcher, put it: “Putin kept warning the West that if something wasn’t done to restrain NATO expansion, he would do it himself. And now he has. ”
The world has to stand up to Putin and try to save Ukraine from war and destruction. It’s a shame Biden didn’t admit to Americans that they may have to endure some discomfort to do so. Then again, we fought two wars across almost 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet no president called for sacrifices on the home front. Instead, like Graham Greene’s antihero in The Quiet American, our leaders keep pushing bromides that look great on paper, sound simple on television, and are doomed to fall apart on the ground.
America and Russia are back to a Cold War standoff, but it is the people of Ukraine who are paying the unthinkable cost.
We Shall Live Again… A new song for our dark times
We Shall Live Again... We all know we're on the brink of extinction. My friend Peter Dale Scott, who's an eternal optimist (he's Canadian), thinks the Coming Cataclysm can and must be nonviolent. We're awash in dystopia these days. Novels and TV shows like "Station Eleven" darkly predict the end of civilization as we know it. It seems that shock and ennui are embedded in the psyches of young people. That's why when I come across any prophets -- or musicians -- who predict a resurrection from the ashes of our ruins, I take notice. So allow me to present the new song "We Shall Live Again" by the Felice Brothers. It's mordantly funny and deeply moving at the same time. And it's strangely hopeful . If you're down about the coming apocalypse (and what sentient being isn't?), you need to listen.
You shall live again
You shall live again
This world is ours and all the stars
It's like the icing on the cake of death
And the only word that rhymes is breath
We shall live again
By the way, the Felice Brothers was actually started by three brothers, who played their music in the subways of New York. There are still two left.
Trouble Sleeping? Try Aaron Sorkin’s New Biopic!
The Best Story Wins... I confess. I watched the Lucile Ball-Desi Arnaz biopic last night, "Being the Ricardos." Yes, it's come to that in this bleak, barren January. I won't discuss what Nicole Kidman has done to her face and body in the name of Hollywood stardom. Let's just say that she has turned herself into a mannequin. (I would've loved to see the REAL Nicole Kidman at age whatever. Where is the #MeToo backlash against the surgical assault on womanhood?) Back to "The Ricardos." Overall, it's a corny and slow resurrection of 1950s TV land -- so dull in spots that it put me temporarily to sleep. At its best (and there are few of these moments), it achieves the entertainment level of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," a superior (if often also soporific) recreation of a show biz past that never existed. But that's also not my main point here.
What roused me from slumber last night is when I heard that "Being the Ricardos" was written and directed by (ewww) Aaron Sorkin. The relationship between America's recent history and Sorkin is that, as they say, between a throat and a knife. Just ask those who were actually in the courtroom during the trial of the CHICAGO 8 (not 7). Sorkin -- one of the leading lights of Hollywood liberalism -- has taken it upon himself to repackage America's tumultuous past and make it all palatable and patriotic and SAFE.
The scene in "Being the Ricardos" that really made me retch was when Desi Arnaz (played by the great Javier Bardem) heroically saves his wife Lucy's career by denying before a studio audience that she was ever a Communist (she was briefly, in her radical youth) and then by getting FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover on the speaker phone, who tells the world that Lucy is a red-white-and-blue American. We're supposed to cheer this scene, along with the "I Love Lucy" TV audience and cast. But for anybody who knows something about U.S. history, it's another Sorkian cringe moment.
Here's the awful truth... Hoover was an American monster, the country's top secret policeman. He used his secret files -- and his unsavory relationships with Capitol Hill and the press -- to force numerous public figures (including Ball) to fall into his fascistic line. The fact that Hoover was a deeply closeted gay man made his crusades against American dissidents (including homosexuals) even more noxious. For "Hollywood liberal" Sorkin to trot out Hoover as a good guy is truly nauseating -- and another Sorkian whitewash of history.
If you're hankering for a good, entertaining Hollywood take on history, watch "The Last Duel" instead. Set in Medieval France, this Ridley Scott epic is overlong, dark and grimy. But, hey, it held my attention. The sexual politics in "The Last Duel" -- between stars Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer -- are a LOT more interesting than the adulterous tension cooked up in "The Ricardos."
A word to the wise: if you see Aaron Sorkin's name attached to anything, you're in for a good, long nap. We must demand more from our Hollywood historians. Like I always say, the best story wins.
Elizabeth Holmes — Big Tech’s Latest Sacrificial Lamb
Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink... Here in drenched Northern California, where recent rain and snowstorms have fallen heavily in recent weeks, our long drought worries are finally over. Right? I mean, the snowpack in the Sierra Mountains, which we count on for our water supply in the late spring and summer months, is currently at 160% of normal -- and that's before a new wave of wetness washes over the state this week. So no more drought, right?
Nope. According to the experts, California will remain in drought mode unless the rains this year turn to biblical proportions.
So here's what I don't understand. We on the West Coast live in the very center of technological innovation, from Silicon Valley to Seattle. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can shoot rockets to the stars. Google wizards can reinvent transportation with driverless cars. And those brilliant folks at Peter Thiel's Palantir can track "bad guys" halfway around the globe so our CIA and Pentagon can zap them. (Oops, sometimes they make mistakes while playing Old Testament God, but you get the point.) But Big Tech can't find ways to store and transport excessive amounts of water and snow runoff for dry seasons and states plagued by drought?
What good are these tech divinities? I mean, I'm really asking. When it comes to the most grievous problems facing humanity -- i.e., climate change, unequal distribution of wealth, the militarization of life -- Big Tech is utterly useless. In fact, tech corporations, which represent the highest stage of capitalism, have only made our problems worse. Thanks to tech capitalism -- and its noxious libertarian philosophy -- we live in a world that is significantly more robotic and violent.
Left to their own devices, megabillionaires like Bezos will spend their obscene fortune on rocket ships and other boy toys. I've met Bezos and other tech masters of the universe. I've looked into their eyes. There's nothing there. Nothing in their souls. They had one brilliant idea -- and then monetized it with terrifying efficiency. The only social solution to the wealth gap that they have driven is to tax the hell out of them, and spend the loot on the most pressing problems that bedevil the human race.
Bezos et al PLAY at philanthropy. But they will never invest the billions -- trillions -- that are necessary to solve chronic drought, end poverty, or ramp up global health.
Which brings us to Elizabeth Holmes, Silicon Valley's latest sacrificial lamb. The corporate media now wants us to believe that because this smalltime hustler is facing 20 years in prison, Big Tech has cleaned up its act. Right. And who did Holmes defraud with her innovative blood-testing scheme? Not patients, according to the jury -- who desperately want low-cost, do-it-yourself medical testing. But big investors like Trump-financing Oracle mogul Larry Ellison and the Walmart family. (I've had dinner with Ellison -- he was probably dazzled by Holmes's youthful, blond good looks.) THESE are the zillionaire investors in Holmes's startup for whom we're supposed to feel sorry?
Big Tech. Whatever Time magazine and the rest of the propaganda machine tell you -- these people are not "Man of the Year." They're greedy, corrupt, soulless boys with far, far, far too much money.
Elizabeth Holmes, fall girl.
The Mysterious Greatness of “For No One”
"For No One"... it's one of the greatest pop songs ever written. And according to Paul McCartney's new book, Lyrics, it came to him (though it's also credited, per their songwriting deal, to John Lennon), "out of the blue. It's not so much that I compose them; they arrive.
"It's something magical," Paul continues in the book, "and sometimes there's more meaning in it than even you thought there was, but the cosmos wants you to put these words down because they will explain something to someone. Starting with yourself."
As Paul writes, after a five-year relationship he thought would result in marriage, he was breaking up at the time he wrote the song with model-actress Jane Asher. (Before you dismiss Asher as a beautiful lightweight, you should see her in the stunning indie movie from back then called "Deep End.")
The song's lyrics are coldly crystalline -- they have the simple, awful clarity you get when you're losing someone you deeply loved.
Your day breaks
Your mind aches
You feel that all her words of kindness linger on
When she no longer needs you
She wakes up
She makes up
She takes her time and doesn't feel
she has to hurry
She no longer needs you
And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years
It's not just love that evaporates... it's creative genius. Even though he wrote songs as a Beatle (but primarily on his own) like "For No One,," "Eleanor Rigby" and "Here, There and Everywhere," McCartney -- who is now nearly 80 -- wrote no songs that come close to their ineffable beauty as a solo artist or as Wings frontman. Not one in over 50 years. Sure, there have been some good tunes (as a Beatle completist, I think I've listened to every Paul McCartney recording, and have downloaded quite a few.) Trust me, not one song he's released in the past half century approaches the magical artistry of "For No One."
The McCarney Syndrome, as I call it, fascinates me. Why do some artists (most?) have a limited run -- while others produce great work late into their lives? Even though he wrote many of the Beatles masterpieces largely on his own, McCartney apparently needed the creative fusion, mostly with Lennon -- but with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and "fifth Beatle" producer George Martin, too. This odd but wonderful chemistry is on display in Peter Jackson's fascinating, epic documentary, "Let It Be."
Btw, I received the massive, two-volume McCartney book from my wife, Camille, as a Christmas present. At age 67, she's finishing a page-turning biography of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, two of the original bohemian hipsters. (And RLS was adored by John Lennon too.) And I'm writing (at age 70) a screenplay -- one that wells up from somewhere deep and mysterious every day. So maybe in old age we'll defy the McCartney Syndrome.
A final note... Paul -- being upbeat Paul -- illustrates his pages on "For No One" not with a photo of him and Asher, but of him with the woman who would become his first wife, Linda Eastman, whom he met shortly after breaking up with Asher.
But here's a fun fact -- as Paul alludes to in the book, he remained on close terms with Asher and the illustrator she ended up marrying, Gerald Scarfe. Their charming son Rory, who went into book publishing, escorted me around London to bookstores when his British imprint published my book on JFK and RFK, "Brothers."
McCartney and Asher
The Streets of San Francisco Have Become a Political War Zone
Reason vs. hysteria. In San Francisco, that public battle comes down to District Attorney Chesa Boudin vs. Mayor London Breed. Playing to the law and order bleachers, Breed recently announced a police crackdown (including the mass hiring of more cops) on the Tenderloin, the poverty-plagued district that borders the Civic Center. While Breed was appeasing her corporate patrons -- and Fox News -- by announcing her kick-ass approach to deep-seated social problems, Boudin boldly led a press conference yesterday assailing the mayor's Tenderloin crackdown.
"We can't arrest and prosecute our way out of problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin," Boudin stated, pointing out that drug addicts and mentally ill people desperately need more treatment, not incarceration. "Right now in San Francisco it's easier to get high than it is to get help. That has to change. I will do everything in my power to make the Tenderloin safe for all San Francisco."
This is the voice of true leadership. And that's why Boudin is the target of a billionaire-funded recall campaign. The elites love to knock off visionary leaders like Boudin. And they love crooked hacks like Breed, who dangle at the end of their puppet strings.
Speaking of SF empty suits, the Tenderloin's supervisor -- Matt Weenie, I mean Haney -- was nowhere near the Boudin press conference yesterday. Haney kind of supports Boudin's call for more treatment services and less policing. But he also supports Breed's police state plan. Huh? He's a real nowhere man.
If you support strong, visionary leadership, support Chesa Boudin in his battle against the right-wing recall campaign. While others are spouting police-baton nonsense, Boudin is speaking the tough truth. We need more leaders like him, not less.
“Sirhan Didn’t Kill My Father”
That's a powerful essay on today's opinion page of the San Francisco Chronicle -- making a strong argument why California Governor Gavin Newsom should uphold the ruling of the state parole board and finally release the man who was wrongfully convicted of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. "The pain that we all feel from my father's death should not prevent us from pursuit of the truth," the article concludes. "I firmly believe the idea that Sirhan murdered my father is a fiction that is impeding justice. If Newsom overrules Sirhan's parole, he will become just one more California official who claims to love my father but persists in denying him justice."
Yes, the essay was written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental lawyer who has widely lost respect because of the public health concerns he's raised about some vaccines. (For the record, I know Bobby and respect him for his courage, but disagree with him about his Covid vaccine stand.) But the fact that he has been marginalized on the vaccine issue should do nothing to detract from his outspoken position on his father's assassination.
My own research led me to similar conclusions about the RFK assassination at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel in June 1968. Like RFK Jr., I believe that the actual assassin of his father was a shooter posing as a security guard. The private security at the hotel that evening was under the control of CIA contractor Robert Maheu -- a Kennedy hater who was hired by the CIA to arrange for the Mafia assassination of Fidel Castro. The now deceased Maheu, whom I interviewed for my 2007 book "Brothers," must be considered a central figure in the RFK assassination -- along with Thane Eugene Cesar, the security guard who escorted RFK into the hotel pantry kill zone. (RFK Jr. was in negotiations to speak with Cesar, whom he believes was his father's assassin. But Cesar was seeking a big pay day for the interview, and he reportedly died in the Philippines in 2019.)
RFK Jr. is not the only Kennedy who believes Sirhan was framed for the assassination -- two of Bobby's living nine siblings have also called for his release.
Even more important, independent investigators who have deeply researched the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy have come to the same conclusion as Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi did over a half century ago -- Sirhan is not the killer of Senator Kennedy.
Sirhan should finally be released. And Robert F. Kennedy should finally get the justice he deserves, with an official investigation devoid of political skulduggery.
A final note: This photo of RFK by Fred McDarrah hangs above my writing desk. I was a teenage volunteer in Bobby's 1968 presidential race -- which would've resulted in his election, and a reopening of the JFK case. (Bobby, the nation's top lawman at the time of his brother's murder, believed the official Warren Report was a fairy tale.) But he was murdered before he could become president. America took a very tragic path because of the assassinations of the 1960s. The bad guys won -- and their kind still runs the country. We need to take it back.
The Slow Hustle — The Long Battle for Justice in America
The Slow Hustle -- that's what my friend, author D. Watkins, calls the long, arduous process of social change. D should know -- after surviving a youth of hard knocks on the streets of Baltimore, he's become a leading critic of the endemic corruption in that city's notoriously dirty police department. The Slow Hustle, featuring D. Watkins, is the title of a new HBO documentary, focusing on the suspicious 2017 shooting death of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter.
Was Suiter shot by a fellow cop, Serpico style, on the eve of his testimony to the feds about police corruption? Or was he a suicide, knowing that the feds were closing in on him too? The Slow Hustle is not only a fascinating who-dunnit -- it's a dissection of the rotting criminal justice system in urban America. Baltimore might have its own unique problems, but as D makes clear, policing in America is deeply fucked up.
(Full disclosure and all that -- I proudly edited D's collection of essays , The Beast Side, and he writes a column for Salon, the publication I founded in 1995 but am no longer connected to.)
Here's the trailer.
D. Watkins in The Slow Hustle
‘Tis the Season to be Viewing… and Reading
This holiday weekend, I spent a lot of time viewing and reading. Probably like you. I’ll share my favorites if you share yours. First the viewing.
Succession. The HBO drama, in its third and finest season, is the best serial on TV these days. Period. Yes, it’s a relentlessly bleak inspection of power and family dynamics. But it’s closely observed, often mordantly funny, expertly written, and powerfully acted. Just when you were ready to click off HBO as hopelessly enthralled by the 25-to-35 year old demographic, along come a tentpole series nearly as good as the old Sopranos.
The Humans. And you thought your Thanksgiving dinner was a family disaster? Like Succession, The Humans, Stephen Karam’s darkly intense screen adaptation of his Tony Award-winning play (available on Showtime) seems to be unwatchable. But it’s relentlessly, oddly compelling. In the course of moving a young couple into a dilapidated building in New York’s Chinatown, a family reveals its raw fissures as well as its surprising resilience. Another stunning ensemble, featuring performances by the great Richard Jenkins and by Amy Schumer and Stephen Yeun (among others).
Get Back. Hours and hours of The Beatles’s breakup? This long and winding, three-part documentary on Disney Plus can’t be that interesting. But for this hardcore Beatles fan it is so far — although I’ve only watched the two-hour Part One. I’m fascinated to see the Beatles develop the songs that were later featured on their last two albums — as well as on John, Paul and George’s solo debuts. The main insights for me so far have focused on Paul’s leadership of the band by this point, in early 1969 (for good and ill); John’s growing disengagement from the band (which nonetheless still sparked his genius); and George’s increasing dissatisfaction with playing the role of overlooked kid brother.
The primary relationship, even as it’s coming apart, is between Paul and John. They communicate in their own shorthand language. Paul only has eyes for John, even as Yoko is joined at the hip to her new husband. You have to feel sorry for Paul, trying to play band leader, pushing and prodding his bandmates back into creative mode. But when George walks out, after taking enough from Paul, the writing is on the wall. And we’re still in episode one! I can’t wait to watch the rest. We’ve never seen the dissolution of creative chemistry on film like this before. Thanks to director Peter Jackson for cutting 150 hours of footage down to three episodes.
The Great British Bake-Off. The show, once one of my great pleasures, has fallen off a cliff with the loss of judge Mary Berry and witty hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins — who’ve been replaced by the deeply, cringingly unfunny Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas. But the formula still works, if groaningly at times. This season’s contestants were particularly strong — good bakers, colorful personalities. Don’t tell me who won — I’m going to watch the final episode tonight. God help me.
And now for my favorite new books. I don’t have any stellar recommendations lately. But I liked three recent novels: Colm Toibin’s The Magician (because I’m fascinated by its fictional subject, Thomas Mann); Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, because I found her account of an interpreter’s life inside and outside the court in The Hague where war criminals are put on trial to be strange and haunting; and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, about an ex-con turned bookseller, who’s literally haunted by a former customer.
I also have high hopes for two nonfiction books:
The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, a biography of the English novelist who has intrigued me ever since I watched Ken Russell’s screen adaptation of Women in Love (and yes, ever since reading Kate Millett’s scathing Sexual Politics in college).
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli. I’m told by friends who’ve watched The Godfather (the greatest Hollywood film ever made) even more than I have that this is the best, most definitive inside account of the making of Francis Coppola’s masterpiece.
Novelist Katie Kitamura
“The Fingerprints of Intelligence:” An Academic Breakthrough?
In advance of the eye-opening new Oliver Stone documentary, which premieres on Showtime on Monday November 22, you can hear my interview "Fingerprints of Intelligence: Allen Dulles and the JFK Assassination," on a podcast series hosted by the astute Matthew Berkman for the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy.
The interview represents an academic breakthrough of sorts, because as I point out, American scholars by and large have been just as timid as their media counterparts when it comes to this dark chapter in U.S. history. But this podcast series is being offered under the banner of the University of Pennsylvania. I'd like to think that it represents the beginning of a new era of academic freedom and curiosity relating to the killing of President Kennedy and its long coverup. You seldom hear information like this aired in academia. As CIA spymaster Dulles himself liked to (ironically) say, "The truth shall set you free."
The Killing of Malcolm X — Gimme Some Truth
A very, very belated two cheers to New York City DA Cyrus Vance Jr. and the civil rights proponents who finally cleared two men -- Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam -- in the 1965 assassination of African American leader Malcolm X. Vance apologized for the miscarriage of justice, which resulted in decades-long incarceration for the two innocent men. But, no surprise -- the prominent prosecutor stopped short of naming the real culprits in the political murder, which took place in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom, in front of Malcolm's horrified wife -- pregnant at the time -- and young daughters. This front-page report in the New York Times also stops far short of the full truth. Like criminal investigators, the Times has covered up the real story behind Malcolm's assassination for over five decades.
In a sidebar to its report, the Times does raise questions about the actual shooters and their organizational connections, citing the investigative work of historians Manning Marable and Les and Tamara Payne. But again, the newspaper of record dodges the most provocative aspect of these historians' research, which suggested that the FBI and the New York Police Department played key roles in the assassination and the railroading of Aziz and Islam.
But drip by drip, the truth is coming out about the assassinations of the 1960s and how political rule in America was enforced at the barrel of a gun.
Why is it still important to reveal the truth about the killings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy? Because history matters -- and we are condemned to repeat it if we don't learn its lessons.
Political violence still looms in our land. Just asks Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's been subjected to countless death threats -- including by a fellow member of Congress, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who gleefully distributed an animated video showing him severing the head of AOC with a sword and then threatening to kill President Biden. Congress finally mustered the nerve to censure Gosar yesterday, but only two Republicans joined the largely party-line vote.
Still, Gosar's censure was important. As his own sister, Jennifer Gosar, told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell last night, this is the way you stop the spread of political violence and fascism in our country -- by standing strongly against it. Ms. Gosar also called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to criminally prosecute her brother for his role in the January 6 attempted putsch.
Will our legal -- and media -- institutions undertake the investigations vital to restoring our democracy? Not unless we demand it.
Malcolm X
What I’m Listening To
Six Easy Pieces... Here are six pieces of music that I've been listening to lately. Because, when all else fails, music will save your soul.
1. "Dig a Pony." Take 14 from the newly released version of the "Let It Be" LP. Because I miss John’s voice
2. "Shaky Ground" by Malcolm Holcombe. Country music the way I like it — rough around the edges.
3. "Like a River." The duo known as Ocie Elliott proves once again that soulful roots music can also be Canadian.
4. The great Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique performs Handel with Concerto Koln. Angels do exist. Here’s a teaser.
5. “You Was Born to Die.” Adie Victoria — with (of course) T. Bone Burnett’s help. New blues like it was meant to be sung and played.
6. Brahms’s String Sextet No. 1 . Because I just saw Louis Malle’s wacky, dreamy "The Lovers," which used the music very effectively. Brahms like you never heard him.
The angelic Jeanine De Bique
American Karma
The Sunday New York Times reveals that a Trump-era U.S. air strike in a small town in Syria killed at least 70 women and children. The Pentagon covered up the air strike for over two years, though a military lawyer immediately recognized it as a war crime. Will the U.S. military now be forced to bring those responsible to trial? Of course not. As I've written before, no major felonies against humanity -- or powerful plots against democracy -- are ever punished in America. And so, never learning from history, the U.S. is doomed to keep repeating its worst tragedies.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government (aided by the corporate media, a tool of the national security state), punishes the wrong people. Like Julian Assange. Why has Assange been in captivity for over a decade -- while fighting extradition to the U.S., where he could spend the rest of his life in some super-max dungeon? Because the WikiLeaks founder had the temerity to expose U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
Yes, the New York Times exposed the criminal air strike in Baghuz, Syria. The newspaper also revealed a disastrous drone strike on innocent civilians in the waning days of the Afghanistan War. And it relied on WikiLeaks to report on war crimes in Iraq. But the Times has long since abandoned Julian Assange to the tender mercies of the U.S. criminal justice system.
This is also the same newspaper that published false reports on Saddam Hussein's WMD -- bogus journalism that paved the way for the calamitous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq. This is also the same newspaper that continues to rattle sabers, particularly in the Middle East, where the national security complex still draws battle lines.
While we're on the subject of the Times, is Pamela Paul -- its longtime Book Review editor -- simply stupid or is she a witting tool of the national security establishment? (My guess is she's a bit of both.) Paul's Sunday supplement studiously ignores or derides books that take a deeply critical view of the U.S. empire and its attachment to endless war. Meanwhile, neocons and other warmongers (like Robert D. Kaplan, to name one recent contributor) are routinely asked to review books on foreign policy.
To be fair, the myopia about imperial mayhem extends to the American Left. Progressives have finely tuned radar about racial discrimination at home, as they should. But where is the outrage when non-white innocents abroad are slaughtered by the U.S. war machine? The United States routinely murders civilians in its endless "War on Terror," and there's not a peep from the U.S. Left.
If you're an American, if you pay taxes, there's blood on your hands. But don't worry -- there will be no accounting for our collective crimes. Not in this life, anyway.
Julian Assange, the man in the iron mask
“Can Humanity Get Its Act Together?”
"Can humanity get its act together before it's too late?" as former President Obama put it at the Glasgow Climate Summit. Or will the summit be more just "blah, blah, blah," in the grim estimation of activist Greta Thunberg? Here are the searing facts: To stave off a climate apocalypse, nations must limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. (The world has already heated 1.1 degrees Celsius.) To limit the warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the United Nations, global emissions from fossil fuels need to be cut in half between 2010 and 2030. But instead, emissions are set to RISE over that period.
That's why young people are in the streets. Their future is extremely bleak. Meanwhile, the average age of the officials dithering in Glasgow is 60, so they won't be around for the worst dystopia to come.
President Biden, U.S. climate diplomat John Kerry and Obama himself all want to focus on the silver linings in the clouds -- like the huge amounts of money promised by wealthy polluters to poor nations that are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. But only a small fraction of the $100 billion a year promised to frontline nations has actually been delivered in useful ways. And the bold pledge by 40 nations to phase out coal from their energy systems? The pledge wasn't signed by the two biggest polluters -- the United States and China.
So yes, we must continue to hold global summits like the one in Glasgow, and as Obama advised young people yesterday, they must engage with "messy" politics. What choice do we have? But as the world continues to melt down, the actions in the streets -- which so far have been relatively peaceful in Glasgow -- will grow much more heated too. What other choice will the human race have?
