A President Who Rocked

One of the major pieces I published in Rolling Stone was also one of my first in-depth efforts to document the global trade in banned drugs and chemicals.

Not exactly what you’d expect from a Rock ‘n Roll magazine, perhaps.

It was called “For Export Only” and it was summarized like this: “What do the multimillion-dollar U.S. pesticide and drug industries do when government agencies ban the use of their products? They find new markets in underdeveloped countries.”

The article appeared in the magazine’s February 10, 1977 issue, which had Peter Frampton featured on the cover as “The Rock Star of the Year” in a profile written by 19-year-old Cameron Crowe.

In those years, long before email, laptops or cellphones, the way we got feedback on our articles was through the mail. And usually there was a lot — we got hundreds of letters, for example, in response to our Patty Hearst stories.

By contrast, I only got one letter in response to “For Export Only.’ Yet it had an intriguing return address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.

It was from a staff member to President Jimmy Carter indicating that my article had been included in his weekly briefing on new policy issues.

More significantly, Carter had decided to form an interagency task force to study the banned exports issue. Eventually he issued an executive order that for the first time in U.S. history restricted the trade in banned and restricted goods overseas.

This was a major policy victory on what until then had been an obscure issue few knew or cared about. Soon after the article appeared, I left Rolling Stone and co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, where one of our big early projects was the book I co-authored with Mark Schapiro on the same topic, “Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World.”

That book helped launch a global movement to stem the tide of restricted hazards flowing around the globe — a movement that continues in many forms and many places to this day.

But Jimmy Carter was the first political leader to denounce the immorality of rich countries dumping dangerous goods in poor countries where regulatory structures are weak, causing heavy damage to human health and the environment.

Jimmy Carter was many things — a peanut farmer, politician, humanitarian, policy wonk, avid reader, big-time fan of rock music, but I’ll always remember him as the only person in power who recognized the ground-breaking potential of that seminal piece I published in Rolling Stone — and tried to fix it.

The Snowflake and the Witness

One distinct memory from my childhood is from the days leading up to Christmas. It was snowing outside, the flurries rushing this way and that, riding the wind.

It was cold out there, but I was inside and warm. I had my nose pressed up against the window. 

Someone had told me that every snowflake was unique — all million billion trillion of them.

As I was thinking about that, wondering how it could possibly be true, or even how anyone could be sure about it, one tiny snowflake crashed into the other side of the window, and melted away right before my eyes.

As I watched its watery trail side away, I thought that if that snowflake was truly one of a kind, I had just witnessed its last moment.

But it turned out the snowflake wasn’t really gone. When I looked a little while later, it had joined together with the other snowflakes hitting my window to form an icicle.

HEADLINES:

• Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level (NYT)

• Zelensky moves towards demilitarised zones in latest peace plan for Ukraine (BBC)

• New Epstein files mention Trump (NPR)

• Trump’s Vanity Fleet (Atlantic)

• Controversial pulled CBS segment featured work from Berkeley research students (SFGate)

• Supreme Court Refuses to Allow National Guard Deployment in Chicago (NYT)

• ACA subsidies are expiring. Here’s who the lapse will hit hardest (CNBC)

• Why restricting graduate loans will bankrupt America’s talent supply chain (Fortune)

• Student Loan Borrowers in Default Could See Wages Garnished in Early 2026 (NYT)

• America’s hidden economic crisis (Business Insider)

• Attys Say ICE Won’t Let Them Talk To Detained US Citizen (Law360)

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported, can spend Christmas with family (AP)

• Student Loan Borrowers in Default Could See Wages Garnished in Early 2026 (NYT)

• TPUSA Turns Charlie Kirk’s Death Tent Into Selfie Station at AmericaFest (Daily Kos)

• J. D. Vance Cozies Up to Anti-Semitism (Atlantic)

• The Trump administration has a new target as part of its broader attack on government policies aimed at boosting underrepresented groups in the country’s workforce — blind workers. [HuffPost] 

• Poll: Major allies see US as unreliable and destabilizing (Politico)

• FCC blacklists foreign-made drones over security, spying concerns (The Hill)

• Oil Futures Slip With Venezuela, Russia-Ukraine in Focus (WSJ)

• US strikes another alleged drug-smuggling boat in eastern Pacific (AP)

• The U.S. economy grew robustly as Americans continued to spend (NPR)

• She thought a predator was grooming her daughter. It was an AI chatbot. (WP)

• Trump, 79, Rants Incoherently About Robots and AI (Daily Beast)

• America’s risky bet on hydrocarbons might hurt it in the AI race (Financial Times)

• A godfather of AI shares the career advice he’d give to his 4-year-old grandson as AI displaces jobs (Business Insider)

• Why the A.I. Rally (and the Bubble Talk) Could Continue Next Year (NYT)

• Report Finds More Americans Using GoFundMe For Basic Necessities (Onion)

 

Letter to Young Journalists

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

In the 1960s, like many of other young men, I was terrified at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war I didn’t believe in. And that prospect also made me very angry.

When I was a freshman in college, a small but insistent minority of students protested against the war and organized to convince more of us to join their ranks. At the same time, other students were joining in civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King and wanted to do something about racism in our society.

Our the four years I was in school, the ranks of students willing to join the antiwar and civil rights demonstrations grew considerably until it felt like we were in the majority, though mathematically that was never the case. We were, however, in the words of the writer Jack Newfield, “A Prophetic Minority.”

Other movements emerged, led by feminist, LBGTQ and environmental activists. Since we were young, we underestimated how difficult it would be to achieve the fundamental changes we sought. We met plenty of resistance, which made some of us angrier and more determined to fight for change.

During those years, I read everything I could find about all of these issues and participated in protests for a while, though as I was finding my way as a journalist, increasingly I began covering the demonstrations rather than take part in them.

Our generation didn’t necessarily see a conflict between activism and journalism at first, although as we grew older and more experienced our attitudes evolved. By twenty years after my graduation, many media executives were actively prohibiting student journalists and young reporters from even attending demonstrations —to avoid any appearance of bias or conflict on contentious issues.

Those with my type of history were not happy about this but we gradually adapted and recommended that our interns and students and new hires make a difficult ethical choice. We told them if they wanted to be successful journalists they had to guard their credibility by not participating in demonstrations. Otherwise they would be seen as partisans, which might end up hurting their careers.

Fast forward to today. We have a President who tries to intimidate and silence journalists at every turn. Major media institutions like CBS appear to be caving in to his threats to take away their broadcast licenses and worse. Therefore, this would not appear to be an ideal time for young people to be entering the field.

But I disagree. This is a good moment to become a journalist. Our society needs you — urgently. So what is to be done about remaining impartial under these circumstances?

There is no reason to be open-minded or neutral about something as critical as witnessing our democracy slip into an autocracy. This beyond any challenge to journalistic ethics my generation ever faced. If it comes to that, you’ll have to know where you stand. It will be critical to build close connections with other journalists, young and old, as we all work our way through the difficult period ahead.

But our role as journalists is clear.

To tell the truth no matter who tries to silence us.

HEADLINES:

• The Economy Avoided a Recession in 2025, but Many Americans Are Reeling (NYT)

• Trump halts wind projects, including Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CNBC)

• CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulls 60 Minutes piece on Trump deportation policy hours before air (PBS)

• ICE agents in Twin Cities open fire after being hit by SUV (CNN)

• Trump’s Tariffs and the Secondary Global Damage (Asia Sentinel)

• Russian general killed by bomb under his car in Moscow (AP)

• Trump Appointment of Greenland Envoy Draws Angry Response From Denmark (WSJ)

• Denmark ‘deeply upset’ by Trump’s appointment of Greenland envoy who wants island to be part of US (CNN)

• Trump’s Venezuelan-Tanker Gamble (Atlantic)

• Japan took the final step to allow the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world’s largest, to resume operations with a regional vote, a watershed moment in the country’s return to nuclear energy nearly 15 years after the Fukushima disaster. (Reuters)

• ‘I want that escape route’: once a sign of disloyalty, Americans seek dual citizenships under Trump (Guardian)

• Vance refuses to set red lines over bigotry as conservatives feud at Turning Point (AP)

• Heritage staffers walk out amid latest strife at MAGA institution (WP)

• How Kash Patel Ordered Himself a New Fleet of BMWs With FBI Money (TNR)

• Proposal to declassify nursing as ‘professional’ threatens ability to secure student loans (PBS)

• How Willie Nelson Sees America (New Yorker)

• AI Is Testing What Society Wants From Music (Atlantic)

• The Race to Build the World’s Best Friend (NYT)

• U.S. Battles China In AI Race But American Firms Quietly Embrace Cheap, Powerful Chinese Open-Source Models (EurAsian Times)

• Aldi CEO Chased Off From Whole Foods Dumpsters (Onion)

Cold Case (Part 10)

One piece of evidence that lay unexamined in the Betty Van Patter case for decades was Betty’s note to herself on or about November 1st, 1974. It read: “[415] 644-6743 Police.” 

When I asked Tamara about it, she said the way her mother had circled and made a mark next to the notation was typical of how she doodled when listening to someone on the phone.

So we concluded that she must have made or received a call from that particular number on that occasion.

Tamara then located on the Internet a copy of an old police directory and was able to connect that number to a Berkeley Police Department Officer named Dave Frederick. Tamara then pulled out her own notes from December 19th, 1974, when she first contacted the Berkeley Police, and sure enough, Frederick’s name and extension showed up on that list as well.

In fact, Frederick had signed all the early “supplemental reports” during the extensive police hunt for Betty when she was missing. His notes indicated that the department had had only one contact with Betty in the past, during an arrest of a former boyfriend, when she was charged with disturbing the peace. But he did not mention the phone call from a few weeks before she went missing.

One of Tamara’s brothers, Greg Baltar, searched and found that Frederick had retired after 29 years at the BPD in 2002 and had died in 2004, at the age of 54. 

It was also clear from the files in 1974 that the Berkeley Police were in touch with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which was looking into the Panthers’ financial irregularities. (Back in 1969, the IRS had begun targeting the Panthers for intelligence purposes and for uncovering evidence of violations of any tax regulations.)

On December 26, 1974, two weeks after Betty had gone missing, an entry in the police file noted that at least two agents from the IRS were investigating the relevant financial issues — a “Ronald C. Williams S/A (IRS) 273-7255 ‘has the case on the Lamp Post.’ And on March 3rd, 1975: “Fred Walter, IRS, said he was investigating the Lamp Post’s books and Jimmie Ward told him the 4th quarter payroll records were missing because they were in the possession of Betty Van Patter.” (The police noted this could not be true because Betty had disappeared before the fourth quarter books would have been closed.) 

So that brings us back to Betty’s mysterious notation. Is it possible that Dave Frederick had called Betty to see whether she knew anything about the Panthers’ financial irregularities and/or whether she might be willing to cooperate with the IRS in its investigation? 

Or could she have called him? Everyone who knew Betty says she would never have cooperated with any law enforcement agency against the Panthers so it seems unlikely that she called him. But it seems credible that the police would have called her, hoping to get help in probing the Panther finances. That would explain the note.

We know from multiple sources that Betty was increasingly upset in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and that she was trying to find someone she could talk over her “situation” with. We know she tried to find Tom Silk and that she did talk with Fred Hiestand, who were at the time two of the party’s attorneys. 

We also know that Hiestand told Elaine Brown just two days before Betty disappeared of her concerns about what she’d seen at the Lamp Post, with money taken out of the till and not accounted for.

Then there is the matter of Brown allegedly firing Betty. That Brown lied to the police about the date – claiming it was a week earlier – is obvious – but did she possibly also lie about firing her in the first place? According to Brown herself, Betty had left her a phone message threatening to quit.

It seems more than plausible that while she was sitting at the Berkeley Square on the night of December 13th, Betty thought she could still salvage her job and was waiting to meet someone connected with the Panthers in that effort. It could well have been Brown, or perhaps Jimmie Ward, the owner of the Lamp Post, whom she hoped to meet up with.

The identity of the man who came to the bar and spoke with her has never been established, although the police ran down several leads about who he might have been. Whoever he was, and whatever message he imparted, we know that Betty got up and left with him. Her next known location, from all the known evidence, was the Lamp Post, but that’s where the trail grows cold.

Tamara Baltar and I met with Alameda County D.A. Tom Orloff on October 22, 1991 to discuss his view of what happened. Orloff said he believed that Betty had gone from the Berkeley Square to the Lamp Post, where she was killed either as “a spontaneous event or it was planned from there.”

But Orloff said he did not have enough evidence to bring charges.

While considering the various scenarios, it occurred to me to be an odd circumstance that the Panthers had changed the lock on the door to the office where Betty had been working in the days after she went missing. Why would they do this if they already had her (and her keys) in their custody? It is noted in the police file that the Panthers knew that Betty had her office keys with her when she disappeared.

Yet the locks were changed anyway. 

So what if “they” (the Panthers) were not acting in concert? Consider another scenario, one that would explain this and some of the other inconsistencies. 

What if, as of the 17th, when Horowitz first contacted her, Elaine Brown did not yet know what had happened to Betty? Elaine Brown is very smart, smart enough to avoid incriminating herself on a phone call that might be (and in fact was) being taped. So her bitter comments about Betty, from one perspective so self-incriminating, might actually have indicated that she was out of the loop in this matter.

At the Lamp Post on the 13th, Betty would have been under the province of Jimmie Ward, a man well-known and feared by those who knew him. Especially women. There is evidence that among Ward’s businesses was a prostitution ring, no doubt generating much of the cash that to Betty’s dismay kept mysteriously finding its way into and out of the bar’s cash register.

Ward had plenty to hide, and Betty represented a potential loose cannon, given her expressed concerns about what she’d witnessed at the bar. What if he, and not Brown, had been the one to summon her that Friday night, possibly without Brown even being aware?

If that is what occurred, then it makes more sense that Brown would have had the locks to Betty’s office changed the following week. 

As she elaborated in her book, Brown believed that Betty knew too much and that she was raising her concerns with Hiestand and others. If she now was missing, she had with her the keys to the office where the party’s sensitive information was kept.

As for the forensic and anecdotal (via David Horowitz’s sources) evidence that Betty was held, and possibly tortured for as long as two weeks before being killed, this would rule out any personal motive and further tie the Panthers to her death. Only the Panthers had a known motive for holding and torturing her. A crime of passion (by her ex-boyfriend Ken Baptiste or someone like him) would have been spontaneous and would not have been carried out over an extended period..

As to who was calling the shots about her fate, Horowitz and reporters Ken Kelley and Kate Coleman, among others, came to the conclusion that it was Huey Newton from his base in Havana.

The chain of command could have been Newton to Ward, every bit as easily as it could have been Brown to a member of the ‘Squad,’ as the Panther security members like Flores Forbes were often referred to. That was what was suggested by the private investigator David Fechheimer to his mentor, Hal Lipset, and later to the family. In her book, Brown describes taking a phone call from Newton at the Lamp Post, just like the calls -- as she admitted to Coleman -- she received from him frequently at her home number.

Other sources have corroborated that Newton called the Lamp Post whenever he wanted to issue orders for “bad things” to be done. Ward was his cousin, the party funded the bar, Newton had killed one of Ward’s brothers in a dispute, and everyone feared the wrath of Huey P. Newton. Including Jimmie Ward, Flores Forbes and Elaine Brown.

But to this day, these various scenarios are just that — scenarios. The case has never been solved, and unless someone who knows the truth comes forward, it will remain a cold case mystery.

On the other hand, the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

HEADLINES:

• How Trump and DOGE broke the U.S. government (WP)

• US moves to intercept third vessel near Venezuela (CNN)

• Blanche Says Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files Won’t Be Removed (NYT)

• Telemedicine abortion is winning — and that terrifies the right (The Hill)

• Blackout in San Francisco Litters Streets with Traffic-Blocking, Deactivated Waymos (Gizmodo)

• White House threatens Smithsonian funds in sweeping content review (WP)

• How the Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Could Affect Voters (NYT)

• The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore (Atlantic)

• Too Early, Too Alone: France Prepares for Russia as US Withdraws (Politico Mag)

• US tech enabled China’s surveillance empire. Now Tibetan refugees in Nepal are paying the price (AP)

• How China Became a Superpower and What Comes Next for Its Economy (ForexFactory)

• Banned in 70 countries, pesticide remains legal in U.S. despite Parkinson’s concerns (MLive)

• Betty Reid Soskin, oldest National Park Service ranger, dies at 104 (NBC)

• China’s open AI models are in a dead heat with the West - here’s what happens next (ZDNet)

• Shadi Holiday Display lives on thanks to volunteers in El Cerrito (CCSpin)

• Study Finds Most Americans Can’t Find Where They Are Being Deported On Map (Onion)

 

Cold Case (Part 9)

Fourteen years after Elaine Brown’s book came Flores Forbes’ revealing memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” in 2006. While in prison serving time for second-degree murder for the Richmond incident, Forbes had started his college education, which eventually led him into urban planning and a job with the city of New York, as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law position at Colombia University.

Though he has done well in New York, Flores Forbes has not always been able to contain himself as he attempted to deal with his feelings about some of his past actions. Sometime around the 25th anniversary of Betty’s disappearance, in 1999, a New York-based freelance writer, Scott Sherman, overheard Forbes bragging at a party about his past life as a Panther gunman.

That fed into Sherman’s work on an article for The Nation in 2000 about the Panthers’ role in David Horowitz’s conversion from a reliable friend of the left into an outspoken enemy.

In “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes provided an elaborate description of how he staged and executed the botched Richmond incident. That is the only criminal action he admitted to, although he stated there were others. In the book he indicated that he had come to genuinely regret the things he did as a security officer in the Black Panther Party.

“Shit, if there was a witness who had the courage to testify against us, we would bribe them. Or, as we’d tried to do in Richmond, take stern steps to ensure they didn’t show or testify.”

“There was still the shadow that my past casts over my life.”

“Upon close reflection, I realized that the passing of Huey P. Newton…meant that one less person was alive who actually knew what my past deeds were, and with each passing, that number would get smaller.”

These sound like the words of a man hoping to avoid paying any further price for his crimes beyond the time he had already served in California prisons.

Could the murder of Betty Van Patter have been one of those deeds? After all, he was the party’s head of security at that time, and therefore in charge of doing any dirty work required. Furthermore, legal investigator David Fechheimer told his mentor, Hal Lipset, that Forbes was responsible for Betty’s death.

As he toured the country promoting his book, Forbes visited Oakland, where he was politely received at a reading in a bookstore at Jack London Square.

During the question and answer period after his talk, Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, raised her hand:

“Mr. Forbes, “You talked about the Lamp Post extensively in your book. My mother, Betty Van Patter, was the Panther bookkeeper who was last seen at the Lamp Post on December 13th, 1974, and then found murdered. Given your position in the Party, would you please comment on this?”

Forbes, clearly taken aback, could only mumble a denial/non-denial answer:

“I did not know who Betty Van Patter was.”

After the reading, as he was walking with his family nearby and saw Tamara approaching from another direction, Forbes steered his party aside to avoid encountering her a second time.

***

Over the half-century since Betty Van Patter was killed, her murder has been mentioned in news articles and books, as well as in academic writings that mainly focus on the historical significance of the Black Panther Party.

Driving much of the coverage during all those years has been David Horowitz, who used Betty’s case to argue that the Panthers were not a source of progressive change at all but essentially a gang of thugs. As more and more evidence has surfaced about the street brutality promoted by Huey Newton, Horowitz’s perspective gained a measure of credibility.

Even Elaine Brown, in her memoir, acknowledged the dark side of the Panthers: “Huey and his entourage of restless gunmen were prowling the after-hours clubs with no purpose other than to intimidate.”

Of course, Brown and others (particularly academics) who continue to defend the party’s legacy, argue that they were “armed revolutionaries” fighting repressive institutions, including police agencies that were targeting black people all over the country.

To a great extent, the Betty Van Patter case has been politicized by all sides, and rarely assessed simply as an unsolved murder, which is finally what the family asked me to do. It’s impossible to shed all personal bias, of course, but I’ve spent every bit as much energy looking for evidence of a counter-theory as for corroboration that the Panthers were at fault.

The family has pretty much given up hope there will ever be charges or a trial in the case, particularly since, as Forbes noted in his book, fewer and fewer people are still alive who know the actual details of this or any of the Panther-related crimes.

That the Panthers killed Betty is the only scenario that fits the known facts, but without definitive proof, it remains possible that someone else could have been involved.

An obvious suspect would have been an ex-boyfriend, like Ken Baptiste, the married man who was still emotionally entwined with Betty when she disappeared. The anguished entries to her private journal indicate that he was the source of some of what seemed to be troubling her in her final days. But he also appears to have cooperated with the police extensively, and to have made serious efforts to locate her when she was missing.

The police appear to have never really considered any theory other than that the Panthers were at fault. But they could not build a plausible case based on solid evidence – -everything was circumstantial. Elaine Brown’s statements over the years have done little to exonerate her and the Panthers from suspicion, however.

If anything, Brown has dug herself into a rhetorical hole around the case by strongly suggesting a motive – that Betty raised suspicions by asking too many questions at a time when the IRS was already actively probing the group’s finances.

In this context, it is not known whether Betty was even aware of law enforcement interest in the Panthers’ financial practices. The types of questions she was raising were simply the obvious ones any accountant or bookkeeper has to ask. Where was the money coming from and where was it going? Bookkeeping is all about keeping track – money in and money out.

Part of the confusion inside the organization may have been that Brown and others apparently knew very little about financial accounting themselves, so the straight-forward questions any scrupulous bookkeeper would have asked probably struck them as much more suspicious than they actually were.

Another factor here is the substantial and unrelenting pressure generated by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies on the Panthers. Could this have been a factor — directly or indirectly — in her murder?

(Part 10, which concludes the series, will appear tomorrow.)

HEADLINES:

• U.S. Coast Guard Boards Tanker Carrying Venezuelan Oil (NYT)

• In rare public comments, career DOJ officials offer chilling warnings about online network 764 (ABC)

• 9 killed, 10 wounded in South African pub shooting (NPR)

• Four people die in ICE custody (Reuters)

• Sister of Epstein victim reported him in 1996, but FBI failed to investigate, files reveal (Guardian)

• What’s inside the Epstein files released by the Justice Department (CNN)

• 3 police officers injured after being shot ‘at close range’ (USA Today)

• Hegseth reverses land mine policy to allow use of controversial weapon (WP)

• Jordan says air force took part in US-led strikes on ISIS in Syria that killed at least 5 (Times of Israel)

• What does Putin really want? (Reuters)

• Food becoming more calorific but less nutritious due to rising carbon dioxide (Guardian)

• Why Trump Deemed Basic Sanitation Illegal DEI (Reveal)

• Gen Z feels weird talking about alcohol (Business Insider)

• Section 230 fight is back (The Hill)

• Are these AI prompts damaging your thinking skills? (BBC)

• This Is What the World’s Smartest Minds Really Think About AI (WSJ)

• What If Readers Like A.I. Fiction? (New Yorker)

• Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’? (NYT)

• Blue Drew Barrymore Could’ve Sworn She Saw James Cameron On Schedule (Onion)