Chris Hedges's Blog, page 477

Trump Officials Secretly Discussed Possible Coup With Venezuelan Rebel Officers

Trump officials held a series of covert meetings with Venezuelan military officers over the last year to discuss plans to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, according to a report by The New York Times published Saturday.

Participants in the talks, including anonymous U.S. officials and a former Venezuelan military commander who is on the U.S. sanctions list of corrupt officials in Venezuela, told the Times about several meetings that focused on Maduro’s failings.

“We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary,” Trump said last year.

“Many in the region still deeply resent the United States for backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War,” the Times’ Ernesto Londoño and Nicholas Casey wrote. In 2002, a failed coup attempt in Venezuela, later linked to officials in the George W. Bush administration, ousted Hugo Chávez from office for several years.

“This [information] is going to land like a bomb,” said Mari Carmen Aponte, a diplomat for Latin American affairs during the Obama administration.

Successful Latin American coups that included U.S. covert involvement were Guatemala in 1954 against Jacobo Árbenz, the Dominican Republic in 1961 against Rafael Trujillo, Brazil in 1964 against Joao Goulart, and Chile in 1973 against Salvador Allende. The CIA also attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba multiple times.

Why Gig Companies Want to Call Their Workers Independent Contractors

Some employers don’t want to call their workers employees anymore.

At least 11 states have considered laws enabling most online platforms for goods and services to turn many workers into independent contractors. And the fight isn’t over. Gig economy companies are seeking to suspend or overturn a California Supreme Court ruling that would make it much more difficult to classify employees as independent contractors.

Deeming workers independent contractors allows gig economy companies to avoid paying payroll taxes and health benefits and means they don’t have to comply with certain labor laws. Independent contractors are not protected by state and federal laws that provide employees with minimum wage, discrimination and sexual harassment protections, for example. But gig economy companies argue the new legislation clarifies their role. The sharing economy has spawned a string of lawsuits over worker classification.

Behind the legislative push in many of these states is the online platform Handy, which connects users with home service providers such as cleaners and someone to mount your TV, said Rebecca Smith, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. This effort was the focus of a Quartz article in March.

“These companies are trying to shift the cost of doing business onto taxpayers and low-wage workers,” Smith said. “And that will engender a race to the bottom in service industries.”

A spokesperson for Handy did not respond to an email requesting comment.

A 2016 study by two leading economists, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, found that workers in “alternative work arrangements” jumped by more than 50 percent in 2015 from a decade earlier, to 23.6 million. A separate report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that about 10 percent of American workers in 2017 fell into this category, which included Uber drivers and temp workers.

Bills allowing companies to claim most employees are independent contractors have been introduced — but not passed — in Alabama, California, Colorado, Georgia and North Carolina. Florida, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Utah have signed similar bills into law.

Handy is also among a group of gig economy companies seeking to thwart a California Supreme Court ruling. That decision, issued in April, would make it more difficult for companies to say their independent contractors are not employees under state wage laws.

At the center of that case were two delivery drivers hired by Dynamex Operations West. The company deemed them independent contractors while the drivers believed they should have been classified as employees. The California Supreme Court ruled in the workers’ favor.

Other companies that signed the letter opposing the ruling are DoorDash, Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, Square/Caviar, TaskRabbit, Total Systems Services and Uber. In their letter dated July 23 to the governor’s labor secretary and cabinet secretary, the companies warned the ruling would have far-reaching implications and urged legislation or executive action by the governor to suspend or override the ruling.

“The sweeping impacts of this decision already are being felt across the state, and these impacts will only become more acute in the months ahead,” the companies wrote. “The magnitude of this issue requires urgent leadership.”

Efforts to change the California Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dynamex case “would certainly be intended to salvage systems now deemed illegal, and continue to exclude individuals from basic workplace protections,” Tim Williams, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, wrote in an email to Reveal. “We hope efforts to undermine or overrule Dynamex will be rejected in favor of more common sense approaches to solving business’s profitability issues.”

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Win or Lose, Supreme Court Confirmation Fight Defines Democrats

WASHINGTON—Democrats don’t have the votes to block Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But that didn’t stop them from putting up a rowdy, leave-nothing-on-the-table fight during four days of Senate confirmation hearings that marked a new stage in the party’s resistance to President Donald Trump.

From the moment that the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman gaveled in the first session, the proceedings were tumultuous, disrupted first by Democratic senators objecting to the rules and then by protesters shouting “Sham president, sham vote” and other chants.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, an 84-year-old Iowa Republican, later said it was like nothing he had ever experienced during 15 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The bedlam is unlikely to change any votes in the Senate. The mathematic march toward Kavanaugh’s confirmation at month’s end remains the same in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-49 edge. Still, the battle may have changed the Democrats, who are being transformed by a new generation of politicians spoiling for a fight with Trump, even if it creates political challenges for some Democratic candidates in the November election.

“Sometimes you just have to make a stand,” said Brian Fallon, a former top adviser to Hillary Clinton and the Senate’s top Democrat, New York’s Chuck Schumer. Fallon’s organization, Demand Justice, is leading the opposition to Kavanaugh.

Fallon compared the decision on the court nominee to big votes of the past such as the Iraq War authorization that end up defining lawmakers’ careers.

“This vote is not going to age well,” Fallon said. He is holding out hope that not only will Democrats reject Kavanaugh, but that two pivotal Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, will join in to help stop the confirmation.

“Democrats should fight like hell,” he said, “even if it’s not going to sway Susan Collins.”

Republicans have been eager to capitalize on the political “circus,” as they called the hearing, particularly as potential 2020 presidential hopefuls Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey took turns aggressively questioning Kavanaugh in what many saw as a prelude to presidential primary campaigns.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., portrayed the Democratic Party as dominated by “unhinged” protesters and aligned with liberals calling to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The second-ranking Republican, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, bemoaned the “mob rule” at the hearings.

Trump took on his potential 2020 rivals directly. During campaign stops for GOP candidates challenging Senate Democrats this fall in Montana and North Dakota, states where Trump remains popular, he ridiculed Democrats as “making fools out of themselves.”

“The way they’re screaming and shouting, it’s a disgrace to our country actually,” Trump said Friday during a fundraiser in Fargo, North Dakota, for the GOP opponent to Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. “I’ll be running against them and I look so forward to it.”

With the midterms less than two months away, Kavanaugh’s nomination carries political risks for both parties as they potentially alienate the large swath of independent voters who have big say in elections.

“Independents are looking for things to work,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster. But he said the showy, disruptive display at the Kavanaugh hearing “reinforces their concerns of people not focusing on the challenges the country faces.”

Democratic senators running for re-election in states where Trump is popular have the most to lose from the party’s Supreme Court fight.

Sens. Joe Donnelly in Indiana or Claire McCaskill in Missouri may benefit from a court battle that energizes the Democratic base. They need heavy voter turnout in metro Indianapolis and Kansas City, Democratic strongholds, if they have any hope of carrying otherwise red states that Trump won in 2016.

Yet the court fight might be unhelpful as some Democrats, including Heitkamp in North Dakota and Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia, try to appeal to the moderate Republicans and independents they need to win over.

“It’s probably the last thing that Democrats running for re-election in red states want to be talking about,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former top aide to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Before the hearings began, Schumer gathered Democrats for a weekend conference call to plot strategy. They debated options, Schumer said, but decided on a strategy of staying in the room for questions, protest and disruption.

At a time when Democrats are churning as a party, they’re also awakening to the political potency of judicial nominees, a longtime GOP priority.

Gone are the niceties and overtures of an earlier era, when senators deferred to a president’s prerogative to put in place a qualified nominee of the commander in chief’s choosing.

Trump is a different kind of president, they say, and the Senate a changed institution after President Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, was denied a hearing or vote.

Schumer, on Friday, seemed pleased with the result of the hard-edged approach. He said in a statement that Democrats “were able to shine a bright light — for the American people and Republican Senators to see — on Judge Kavanaugh’s troubling views on women’s rights, presidential power, and protections for people with pre-existing conditions.”

“This was a good week.”

Massive Floating Boom Will Corral Pacific Ocean’s Plastic Trash

SAN FRANCISCO—Engineers will deploy a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world’s largest garbage patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.

The 2,000-foot (600-meter) long floating boom will be towed Saturday from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas.

The system was created by The Ocean Cleanup, an organization founded by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands who first became passionate about cleaning the oceans when he went scuba diving at age 16 in the Mediterranean Sea and saw more plastic bags than fish.

“The plastic is really persistent and it doesn’t go away by itself and the time to act is now,” Slat said, adding that researchers with his organization found plastic going back to the 1960s and 1970s bobbing in the patch.

The buoyant, a U-shaped barrier made of plastic and with a tapered 10-foot (3-meter) deep screen, is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in that gyre but allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Fitted with solar power lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the cleanup system will communicate its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land where it will be recycled, said Slat.

Shipping containers filled with the fishing nets, plastic bottles, laundry baskets and other plastic refuse scooped up by the system being deployed Saturday are expected to be back on land within a year, he said.

The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised $35 million in donations to fund the project, including from Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, will deploy 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020.

“One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years,” Slat said.

The free-floating barriers are made to withstand harsh weather conditions and constant wear and tear. They will stay in the water for two decades and in that time collect 90 percent of the trash in the patch, he added.

George Leonard, chief scientist of the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, said he’s skeptical Slat can achieve that goal because even if plastic trash can be taken out of the ocean, a lot more is pouring in each year.

“We at the Ocean Conservancy are highly skeptical but we hope it works,” he said. “The ocean needs all the help it can get.”

Leonard said 9 million tons (8 metric tons) of plastic waste enter the ocean annually and that a solution must include a multi-pronged approach, including stopping plastic from reaching the ocean and more education so people reduce consumption of single-use plastic containers and bottles.

“If you don’t stop plastics from flowing into the ocean, it will be a Sisyphean task,” Leonard said, adding that on September 15 about 1 million volunteers around the world will collect trash from beaches and waterways as part of the Ocean Conservancy’s annual International Coastal Cleanup. Volunteers last year collected about 10,000 tons of plastics worldwide over two hours, he said.

Leonard also raised concerns that marine and wildlife could be entangled by the net that will hang below the surface. He said he hopes Slat’s group is transparent with its data and shares information with the public about what happens with the first deployment.

“He has set a very large and lofty goal and we certainly hope it works but we really are not going to know until it is deployed,” Leonard said. “We have to wait and see.”

The system will act as a “big boat that stands still in the water” and will have a screen and not a net so that there is nothing marine life can get entangled in. As an extra precautionary measure, a boat carrying experienced marine biologists will be deployed to make sure the device is not harming wildlife, Slat said.

“I’m the first to acknowledge this has never done before and that it is important to collect plastic on land and close the taps on plastic entering into the ocean, but I also think humanity can do more than one thing at a time to tackle this problem,” Slat said.

Catholic Faithful Demand Change After Sex Abuse Scandals

MINNEAPOLIS—The day after a grand jury report revealed that Roman Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania molested more than 1,000 children over decades, Adrienne Alexander went to Mass at a Chicago church and waited for the priest to say something about the situation.

He didn’t. And that left Alexander fuming. So she went on Facebook to vent — then organized a prayer vigil in Chicago that became the catalyst for similar laity-led vigils in Boston, Philadelphia and other cities nationwide.

Alexander is among countless Catholics in the U.S. who are raising their voices in prayer and protest to demand change amid new revelations of sex abuse by priests and allegations of widespread cover-ups. They are doing letter-writing campaigns and holding prayer vigils and listening sessions in an effort to bring about change from the pews, realizing it’s up to them to confront the problem and save the church they love after years of empty promises from leadership.

“I think it’s important that the large body hears from us,” Alexander said. “We actually make up the church.”

Their grassroots efforts are gaining momentum. In the last week more than 39,000 people have signed their names to a letter demanding answers from Pope Francis himself.

Another effort, sponsored by reform groups, has seized upon the “Time’s Up” and #MeToo movements and is organizing events across the country this weekend under the CatholicToo hashtag.

Some of the efforts are calling for specific reforms, such as laity-led investigations and transparency, while others are still brainstorming solutions. One woman in Michigan founded a website to make it easy for anyone to speak up and write to church officials.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Marjorie Murphy Campbell, a civil and canon lawyer in Park City, Utah, said of the laity’s engagement. She said many Catholics feel they have no choice.

“You either have to get involved now, because you cannot trust the bishops to solve this themselves, or you leave. … It’s our job to help the mother church get through this.”

The actions come as the church is facing a global crisis over clergy abuse following the scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report and the pope’s removal of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from public ministry amid allegations McCarrick sexually abused a teenage altar boy and preyed upon adult seminarians decades ago.

Francis wrote a letter to Catholics in August, saying the laity must help end the clerical culture that has placed priests above reproach. He then found himself immersed in the scandal amid claims that he knew about allegations against McCarrick in 2013 but rehabilitated him anyway.

A collective of individual Catholic women last week wrote a letter urging Francis to deliver answers. The letter, which had more than 39,000 signatures by Friday, declared “we are not second-class Catholics to be brushed off while bishops and cardinals handle matters privately.”

“In short, we are the Church, every bit as much as the cardinals and bishops around you,” the letter said.

Robert Shine, a Catholic in Boston and vice president of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said he believes Catholics are now ready to confront what’s been happening in the church and talk about how they can be involved in reform, reflecting a broader trend in the U.S. with people getting more active in protests. Other denominations have been struggling with the issue as well.

“People are less willing to look the other way. … This new consciousness and new honesty about politics is sort of being transferred to the Catholic Church as well.”

Miriel Thomas Reneau of Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded a website to make letter-writing easy. Her site lists the names and addresses of local dioceses and includes templates for people to write letters to church leaders.

Others are withholding donations in protest. Legatus, an association of Catholic businessmen, announced it would put its annual tithe to the Holy See in escrow. Thousands of people have also signed a statement that calls on Catholic bishops in the U.S. to consider resigning as a public act of repentance.

There are examples of laity forcing change in other countries. In the city of Osorno, Chile, a group of lay members organized themselves to raise attention to the sex abuse crisis, and their movement helped throw out a bishop. It took more than three years, but they decided it was necessary to try to change their church from within.

Lori Carter of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and two other women started a “Wear Gray” campaign in which they are urging “prayer warriors” like themselves to wear gray to Mass and fast as a symbol of repentance. They are also asking people to write letters to the pope and local bishops.

“I’m assuming it’s going to have to go back to sort of how it was — a church of the people and prayer and holiness,” she said.

In Minneapolis, Chris Damian believes having more nuanced conversations can bring about change. Damian, 27, organized a group of Catholic young adults to respond to the church crisis. The group has held a public prayer session, which St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop Bernard Hebda attended, as well as a discussion session where more than 100 people gathered to learn about the issue and brainstorm solutions.

The group is sending a letter to Hebda that urges pastors to listen to lay people, instead of telling them what to do. The letter also lists concrete recommendations, such as waiving confidentiality agreements for all past settlements and reopening the investigation into a former St. Paul-Minneapolis archbishop who resigned in 2015 after prosecutors filed criminal charges against the archdiocese for failing to protect children from an abusive priest.

“We’re all really frustrated because things continue to pop up and that’s just not acceptable,” Damian said. “I think we can spend all this time complaining about how churches aren’t being more proactive … but there’s no reason why we can’t take this issue and make the solution our own responsibility.”

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Associated Press writer Eva Vergara contributed to this report from Santiago, Chile.

Contentious Kavanaugh Hearings Wrap Up

WASHINGTON—After two marathon days questioning Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, senators concluded his confirmation hearing Friday by listening to others talk about him — friends stressing his fairness and warmth but opponents warning he’d roll back abortion rights and shield President Donald Trump.

One of the Democrats’ star witnesses was John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel who cooperated with prosecutors during the Watergate investigation. He told lawmakers that the high court with Kavanaugh on it would be “the most presidential powers-friendly court in the modern era.”

Senators on the Judiciary Committee are likely to vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Sept. 20 with a vote by the full Senate the following week. Republicans hope to confirm the judge, who would nudge the high court further to the right, in time for the first day of court’s new term, Oct. 1.

With special counsel Robert Mueller deep into his investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, committee Democrats expressed concerns throughout the weeklong hearing that Kavanaugh would side with Trump on questions such as whether a president can be forced to testify. Kavanaugh, like previous nominees, declined to answer hypothetical questions that might come before him as a justice.

Trump, campaigning in Fargo, North Dakota, said the Democrats had made fools of themselves and crowed that he was looking forward to running against “one of those people” in 2020. Committee members Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California are among the Democrats considered possible candidates in the next presidential campaign.

Abortion was another main focus throughout the hearing, with Democrats portraying Kavanaugh as a judge who might vote to undercut or overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. Senate Democrats, in the minority 51-49, hope to appeal to two Republican senators who support abortion rights to break from their party and vote against Kavanaugh.

On Friday, New York University law professor Melissa Murray told lawmakers that Kavanaugh would provide the “necessary fifth vote that would utterly eviscerate” Roe v. Wade.

On the Republican side, witnesses testifying in support of Kavanaugh included longtime friends and former law clerks. They talked about his intelligence and open-mindedness, calling him “thoughtful,” ”humble,” ”wonderfully warm” and a “fair-minded and independent jurist.” A number praised his concerted efforts to hire as law clerks both minorities and women.

Senate Democrats had worked into the night Thursday on Kavanaugh’s final day of questioning in a last, ferocious attempt to paint him as a foe of abortion rights and a likely defender of President Donald Trump.

But the 53-year-old appellate judge stuck to a well-rehearsed script throughout his testimony, providing only glimpses of his judicial stances while avoiding any serious mistakes that might jeopardize his confirmation.

On Friday, Democratic witnesses expressed concern about Kavanaugh’s record on a range of issues including affirmative action, the rights of people with disabilities, access to birth control and abortion. Democratic witnesses also included a student who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and Rochelle Garza, the legal guardian for a pregnant immigrant teenager whose quest for an abortion Kavanaugh would have delayed last year.

Yale law school professor Akhil Reed Amar, a liberal testifying in support of Kavanaugh, had a message for Democratic senators: “Don’t be mad. He’s smart. Be careful what you wish for. Our party controls neither the White House nor the Senate. If you torpedo Kavanaugh you’ll likely end up with someone worse.”

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AP writers Darlene Superville in Fargo, North Dakota, and Mark Sherman, Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.

Ex-Trump Campaign Adviser Sentenced for Lying to FBI

WASHINGTON—George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign adviser who triggered the Russia investigation, was sentenced to 14 days in prison Friday by a judge who said he had placed his own interests above those of the country.

Papadopoulos, the first campaign aide sentenced in special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, said he was “deeply embarrassed and ashamed” for having lied to FBI agents during an interview last year and acknowledged that his actions could have hindered their work.

“I made a dreadful mistake, but I am a good man who is eager for redemption,” Papadopoulos said.

The punishment was far less than the maximum six-month sentence sought by the government but also more than the probation that Papadopoulos and his lawyers had asked for.

Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign, has been a central figure in the Russia investigation dating back before Mueller’s May 2017 appointment. He was the first to plead guilty in Mueller’s probe and is now the first Trump campaign adviser to be sentenced. His case was also the first to detail a member of the Trump campaign having knowledge of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election while it was ongoing.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said that Papadopoulos’ deception was “not a noble lie” and that he had lied because he wanted a job in the Trump administration and didn’t want to jeopardize that possibility by being tied to the Russia investigation.

“In some ways it constitutes a calculated exercise of self interest over the national interest,” the judge said.

Memos authored by House Republicans and Democrats, now declassified, also show that information about Papadopoulos’ contacts with Russian intermediaries triggered the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. That probe was later taken over by Mueller.

According to a sweeping indictment handed up this summer, Russian intelligence had stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other Democratic groups by April 2016, the same month Papadopoulos was told by a professor that Russian officials had told him they had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

Papadopoulos later used his connections with the Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, and other Russian nationals in an attempt to broker a meeting between then-candidate Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He admitted last year to lying to the FBI about those contacts. In court papers filed ahead of the sentencing, prosecutors say those lies caused irreparable harm to the investigation during its early months.

Prosecutors wrote that those false statements, made during a January 2017 interview with federal investigators, caused the FBI to miss an opportunity to interview Mifsud while he was in the United States.

“The defendant’s lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States,” they wrote, noting that Mifsud left the U.S. in February 2017 and hasn’t returned.

In court Friday, prosecutor Andrew Goldstein said Papadopoulos’s cooperation “didn’t come close to the standard of substantial assistance.”

“It was at best begrudging efforts to cooperate and we don’t think they were substantial or significant in any regard,” he said.

He said Papadopoulos’s deception required investigators to scour more than 100,000 emails and gigabytes of data to reconstruct the timeline of his contacts with Russians and Russian intermediaries.

Defense lawyer Thomas Breen said his client was affected by Trump’s cries of “fake news” ahead of the interview and was torn between wanting to cooperate with investigators and wanting to remain loyal to the president.

“The president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” Breen said.

Even after his arrest and plea agreement last year, prosecutors say Papadopoulos continued to be difficult with investigators, only providing information after being confronted with documents such as emails and text messages.

In response, Papadopoulos’ attorneys have acknowledged his offense was “unquestionably serious,” but they downplayed any damage he caused. His attorneys, Breen and Robert Stanley, said their client lied to save his career and to “preserve a perhaps misguided loyalty to his master,” a reference that is not fully explained in court papers.

Stanley and Breen also argued that their client “cooperated fully.” He participated in four proffer sessions, they said, and “was willing to answer any questions posed.”

“His arrest and prosecution served as notice to all involved that this was a serious investigation,” the attorneys wrote. “He was the first domino, and many have fallen in behind.”

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman

Disregarded during her most productive years in the New York art scene of the 1960s, Yayoi Kusama finds herself the subject of an engaging new documentary, “Kusama: Infinity,” which explores how her masterwork, “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” became an Instagram sensation, vaulting her to fame and fortune. Today, Kusama is among the world’s top-selling female artists.

Director Heather Lenz, who cut her teeth in television, conjures an evocative but ultimately two-dimensional portrait of a fascinating character, splicing stirring archival footage with interviews with professionals and curators from the world’s most recognizable institutions, as well as the artist herself. Now 89 and living in Tokyo, Kusama brings us no closer to understanding her work or her process.

Born in 1929, Kusama grew up on a farm in rural Matsumoto City, Japan. Even at an early age, she exhibited strange behavior, which Lenz attributes to her mother employing her to spy on her adulterous father (although this seems a convenient Freudian explanation based on conjecture). An episode in a field of flowers, in which she imagined herself to be assaulted by a universe of color, seems to be a seminal occurrence, partially explaining a life-long obsession with color dots and irregular forms.

Kusama eventually struck a deal with her mother, agreeing to take etiquette classes if she could also go to art school, a pursuit frowned upon in the family. Secretly, Kusama attended only the latter, but found postwar Matsumoto no place for a budding female artist. So she wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking her advice. (O’Keeffe’s encouraging response plays over glorious archival footage of the painter at work in her Abiquiu, N.M., studio.) Kusama moved to New York City in 1958, made the Empire State Building her first visit and vowed to “create a new history of art in America.”

Her showings at the legendary Brata Gallery in Manhattan put her in the company of such artists as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, garnering rave reviews from the likes of Donald Judd. Frank Stella purchased one of her net paintings for $75, which we later learn is currently valued at $750,000. During that time, she also formed a close friendship with Joseph Cornell, who all but fetishized the dour sprite, frequently seen in a red leotard.

The film credits Kusama’s soft sculptures coated in countless tubers—phallic symbols—as the inspiration behind Claes Oldenburg’s more famous works of that era. A visit to another of her exhibits inspired Andy Warhol to employ repetitive wallpaper backdrops. And when she premiered her first “Infinity Mirror,” titled “Endless Love Show,” at Castellane Gallery in 1966, Lucas Samaras’ “Mirror Room” soon followed.

This kind of appropriation, common in the art world, could have been taken as a compliment, but Kusama fell into deep despair. “If it weren’t for art,” she is frequently quoted as saying, “I would have killed myself a long time ago.” But perhaps her true savior was the bicycle she landed on after hurling herself through the window of her apartment. Fittingly, it was a failed act of self-obliteration, a theme that has run through her work almost from the beginning.

To say that a female artist was confronted with sexism may seem obvious, but Lenz stresses the point as Kusama began staging nude happenings, painting dots on the bodies of her friends. Nudity defined a Museum of Modern Art event in the sculpture garden, which featured slogans like “While the dead show dead artists, modern artists die” and “What’s modern here?” Such happenings were reported in the tabloids in Japan, where she brought profound shame upon her family.

Kusama returned to Matsumoto City in 1973 and eventually checked herself into a mental hospital, where she remains to this day. In the years that followed, she was virtually erased from art history until 1989, when her work was unearthed at New York’s Center for International Contemporary Art, and then again in 1993 at the Venice Biennale, where she is filmed looking haunted, divorced from reality.

In recent years, her palette has grown more vibrant, perhaps reflecting her mood. She is aware of her fame but remains committed to producing as much as she can in her remaining years, eschewing all but the company of her brushes, markers and canvas. A diminutive woman in bright polka dots under a glaring magenta wig with bangs, she cuts a conspicuous profile. On anyone else it would appear an affectation; on Kusama, the look seems de rigueur.

A troubled and gifted artist, she remains impenetrable throughout Lenz’s movie, which nonetheless ends on a hopeful note, in the form of a quote: “Among waves of people, I have managed to survive this long life. How many times did I think about putting a knife to my neck, seeking death? I collected my thoughts and got up again. I wish for life’s bright sunshine. I want to live forever.”

Obama Rips Into Trump

URBANA, Ill.—Former President Barack Obama issued a scorching critique of his successor Friday, blasting President Donald Trump’s pattern of pressuring the Justice Department, his policies and reminding voters that the economic recovery — one of Trump’s favorite talking points — began on his watch.

Obama’s speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was delivered less than two months before midterm elections that could determine the course of Trump’s presidency. The remarks amounted to a stinging indictment of political life in the Trump era.

“It did not start with Donald Trump,” Obama said. “He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”

Noting the history of former presidents avoiding the rough and tumble of politics, Obama acknowledged his sharp critique of Trump was something of a departure from tradition. But he said the political moment required a pushback and called for better discourse.

“Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do — that’s an old playbook,” he said. “It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in and people of good will from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fear-mongers and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature.”

But, Obama added, when there is a vacuum in democracy, “other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold.”

Obama called Trump “the symptom, not the cause” of division and polarization in the U.S.

Trump, meanwhile, claims he fell asleep watching Obama’s speech.

“I’m sorry, I watched it, but I fell asleep,” Trump said at a campaign appearance in Fargo, North Dakota. “I found he’s very good for sleeping.”

Trump said Obama was trying to take credit for this “incredible thing that’s happening to our country.”

Even as he has largely remained out of the spotlight, Obama made clear he’s paid close attention to the steady stream of headlines chronicling the Trump administration and said the news is a reminder of what’s at stake in the November midterm elections.

“Just a glance at recent headlines should tell you this moment really is different,” Obama said. “The stakes really are higher. The consequences of any of us sitting on the sidelines are more dire.”

He later added: “This is not normal.”

He was especially stern in his condemnation of Trump’s pattern of pressuring law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The president has repeatedly called on Sessions to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and earlier this week blamed the Justice Department for indicting two incumbent Republican members of Congress, arguing the moves could jeopardize their seats.

“It should not be a partisan issue to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the FBI to use the criminal justice system as a cudgel to punish our political opponents,” Obama said. “Or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution because an election happens to be coming up. I’m not making that up. that’s not hypothetical.

As Obama spoke, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he believed Sessions should investigate the identity of the author of an anonymous New York Times opinion piece that was sharply critical of his leadership, saying the essay a “national security issue.”

Obama, reacting to the op-ed account, said “that’s not how our democracy is supposed to work.”

“The claim that everything will turn out OK because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check,” Obama said. “I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work. These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable.”

Obama also jabbed Trump on the issue the current president frequently heralds as one of his greatest achievements: The strong economy. Obama reminded the audience that the economic recovery began during his administration and defended his handling of the 2008 economic collapse.

“When you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started,” he said.

He also criticized Trump’s response to the violence last year at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of one person.

“We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination,” Obama said. “And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”

The speech was a preview of the argument that Obama is likely to make throughout the fall. On Saturday, the former president will stump for House Democratic candidates from California at an event in Orange County, a conservative-leaning part of California where Republicans are at risk of losing several congressional seats.

Next week, Obama plans to campaign in Ohio for Richard Cordray, the Democratic nominee for governor, and Ohio Democrats.

Obama’s campaign activity will continue through October and will include fundraising appearances, according to an Obama adviser. The adviser was not authorized to discuss Obama’s thinking publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. While the former president will be visible throughout the general election, the adviser said that Obama will not be a daily presence on the campaign trail.

Republicans said voters won’t find Obama’s argument appealing.

“In 2016, voters rejected President Obama’s policies and his dismissiveness towards half the country,” Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens said in response to the Friday speech. “Doubling down on that strategy won’t work in 2018 either.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is also stepping up her political involvement ahead of the November midterm election. She will headline voter registration rallies in Las Vegas and Miami later in September as part of a week of action by When We All Vote, the new nonpartisan organization that she co-chairs.

___

Summers wrote from Washington. Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

What Is Going On Inside David Lynch’s Head?

In what is surely as weird as anything in his films or TV shows, David Lynch is now best known for his recent remarks about Donald Trump. On June 25, the three-time Academy Award nominated director of “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and the creator of “Twin Peaks” made headlines, surely in many publications where he’d never had them before, when Trump bragged about his support among Hollywood types, quoting Lynch in The Guardian that Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.”

In his own oblique manner, Lynch was saying that Trump has the opportunity to rebuild American politics in a positive way if only because he has destroyed so much of the old edifice. As he later said in an open letter to the president on Facebook, Lynch politely suggested that Trump had taken his words “a bit out of context and would need some explaining.” He was clear that he thinks Trump is “causing suffering and division” but “it’s not too late to turn the ship around.”

“I wish you and I could sit down and have a talk,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president. This would be very sad it seems for you—and for the country.”

All Trump needs to do, Lynch concluded, “is treat all the people as you would like to be treated.” I don’t think Lynch meant that we all want to be spanked with copies of Forbes magazine, but rather something akin to the lessons of transcendental meditation as propounded by the David Lynch Foundation.

So the man who has shocked audiences with some of the most disturbing and enigmatic images ever recorded turns out to be just a sweet, tousle-haired cosmic muffin. What would David Lynch and Donald Trump talk about? Perhaps Lynch would read Trump this passage from his new memoir and biography, “Room to Dream”: “You can go into the future. It’s not easy, and you can’t do it when you want to, but it can happen.” Oh, to be a fly in the Red Room, hearing Lynch say that to Trump.

The biography portion of “Room to Dream” is by journalist Kristine McKenna; the memoir by Lynch. The authors describe the book as “a chronicle of things that happened. Not an explanation of what those things mean.” So if you pick up this book hoping to discover what the ending of “Twin Peaks” means or what the blue box and blue key in “Mulholland Drive” signify, you’re out of luck. On the other hand, if you’re interested in the thought process of the man responsible for the most fascinating film and television works of the last 40 years, you’ll go through this book like Trump through a Quarter Pounder.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Room to Dream” at Google Books.

In a snotty piece for Premiere in 1997, David Foster Wallace, the guy I would most not want to sit next to on a long flight or be next to in line at the DMV, wrote “… David Lynch is the sort of person you really hope you don’t get stuck next to on a long flight or in line at the DMV or something. In other words, a creepy person.” In fact, the David Lynch presented in “Room to Dream” seems not so much the guy Time magazine called in 1990 “The Czar of Bizarre” as someone you went to school with.

David Keith Lynch was born in 1946 in Boise, Idaho, to a proper Presbyterian family. As a boy he rode bikes, read Mad magazine and was a dedicated Boy Scout. Though his father worked for the Forestry Department, “I never shot a deer, and I’m glad I didn’t.” He once told an interviewer, “When I picture Boise in my mind, I see euphoric 1950s chrome optimism.” If you were wondering where the Eisenhower-era tinge in “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” comes from, “The 1950s,” writes McKenna, “have never really gone away for Lynch.”

The family moved to Alexandria, Va., where David finished the eighth grade, learned the trumpet, played first base in Little League, and, while an Eagle Scout, seated VIPs at JFK’s inauguration. Lynch says simply, “My childhood was very happy, and I think that set me up in life. I really did have a great family to give me a good foundation, and that’s super important.”

A childhood friend says, “The darkness in his work surprises me, and I don’t know where it came from.”

The darkness dissipated when, in the summer of 1973, he discovered transcendental meditation. Another friend recalls, “David was a lot darker before he started meditating. It made him calmer, less frustrated, and it lightened him. It was as if a burden had been lifted from him.’ ” A crew member described Lynch as “inquisitive, low-key, very polite, and calm as a Hindu cow.”

TM didn’t dispel Lynch’s dark side; it helped him master it, seeing in the ordinary what others do not see, or perhaps seeing those things in different shades. A dark road is one of Lynch’s most evocative and recurring images, inspiring the opening scene of “Lost Highway” and often used in “Twin Peaks,” and especially in the finale. Lynch recalls driving on an unlit two-lane highway out of Boise: “The only light is from the headlights of the car and it’s pitch-black. It’s hard for people today to imagine this, because there are no roads that are pitch-black, hardly ever.” Flickering headlights skimming the white lines of a road receding into darkness to the ominous aural accompaniment of music from Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch’s favorite composer—it’s a Lynch signature.

Lynch’s career is an object lesson on forging artistic temperament outside trends. “We didn’t have a TV until I was in the third grade, and I watched some TV as a child but not very much.” The man who revolutionized television and is routinely referred as the most avant-garde of American filmmakers wasn’t influenced much by movies: “Movies didn’t mean anything to me when I was a teenager. The only time I went to movies was when I’d go to the drive-in, and there I’d go for making out … why go to the theater? It’s cold and dark and the day is going by outside.”

Lynch spent his days and most of his nights painting and working in other art mediums. McKenna writes, “Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were developing new strategies for bridging the gap between art and life, and conceptualism and minimalism were on the march.” But Lynch and his good friend and fellow artist Jack Fisk worked outside the boundaries of what was covered in Artforum. “For them,” McKenna writes, “art was a noble calling that demanded discipline, solitude, and a fierce single-mindedness; the cool sarcasm of pop and cocktail-party networking of the New York art world had no place in their art-making practices.”

The counterculture passed him by. The man whose films would later be described as phantasmagorical never did drugs, according to a friend: “He didn’t need them.”

Lynch’s parents deserved some kind of medal. They didn’t understand their son, but steadfastly supported his ambitions. When Lynch arrived at the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts, the country’s oldest art school, it was a backwater, “but it was exactly the launching pad he needed.”

Film, which began to interest him in his 20s, became another canvas for his ideas. In 1970, Lynch received an unexpected grant from the American Film Institute and, with his wife Peggy and baby daughter Jennifer, left for Los Angeles. Among his classmates were future filmmakers Terrence Malick and Tim Hunter, who would later direct episodes of “Twin Peaks.” After several experimental films, Lynch completed “Eraserhead” (1977), which became a cult favorite and one of the first mainstays of the midnight movie circuit.

A summation of “Eraserhead’s” plot serves no purpose; suffice to say a man with incredibly frizzy hair (Jack Nance) lives in a blighted postindustrial (post-apocalyptic?) city and, to the accompaniment of Fats Waller organ music, tries to deal with the horror of his newborn deformed mutant baby. The film, McKenna writes—correctly I think—is “a magisterial film that operates without filters of any sort, ‘Eraserhead’ is pure id.”

Perhaps the most amazing fact of Lynch’s career is that his big break came from Mel Brooks. After seeing a screening of “Eraserhead,” Lynch recalls, “The doors burst open … and Mel comes charging toward me, embraces me, and says, ‘You’re a mad man. I love you!’ ” Brooks, as a producer, chose Lynch to direct “The Elephant Man,” the story of John (actual name Joseph) Merrick, the deformed sideshow freak who was rescued by a doctor, Sir Frederick Treves.

Brooks stuck with Lynch despite near-violent resistance from Anthony Hopkins (who played Treves to John Hurt’s Merrick). One of the best photos in “Room to Dream” is a double-page spread of “The Elephant Man” crew with the most unlikely film collaborators of our time, David Lynch and Mel Brooks, grinning into the camera.

The film was given a boost by a rave review from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael: ” ‘The Elephant Man’ has the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film…”—perhaps the first time the phrase dream logic was used in connection with Lynch. (Kael had praised the screenplay while working for Paramount.)

The big budget misfire of the sci-fi epic “Dune” (1984), the only film taken away from him during the editing process, was followed by the dark starburst of “Blue Velvet” (1986), which Kael called “the work of a genius naïf. … When you come out of the theater after seeing David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet,’ you certainly know that you’ve seen something. You wouldn’t mistake frames from ‘Blue Velvet’ for frames from any other movie.” Especially at the beginning where a college student (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed human ear in an empty lot. From there, every plot turn reveals something more unsettling.

In the most famous scene, emblematic of the film as a whole, Dean Stockwell, in white face makeup holding a flashlight on his face, lip-syncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” (Lynch, who loves Orbison, would use another of his classics to great effect in “Mulholland Drive.”)

“Blue Velvet” is a mystery solved but not resolved. Lynch shocked audiences by mining the dark from the mundane of American life, the evil of banality.

Lynch’s other features—“Wild at Heart” (1990); “Fire Walk With Me” (1992), a prequel to “Twin Peaks”; “Lost Highway” (1997), which has perhaps the most disquieting scene in a Lynch film where Bill Pullman encounters a corpse-like Robert Blake at a party; the lovely but little-seen “The Straight Story” (1999), “Mulholland Drive” (2001), and “Inland Empire” (2006)—all found support with the college/art house moviegoers. In this century, as the art house scene has faded, the internet has picked up much of its audience.

At a party, Lynch said to Steven Spielberg, “You’re so lucky because the things you love millions of people love, and the things I love thousands of people love.” Spielberg replied, “David, we’re getting to the point where just as many people will have seen ‘Eraserhead’ as have seen ‘Jaws.’ ”

That’s an exaggeration, but the point survives it: The internet and streaming services have given Lynch a global audience not only for his films and “Twin Peaks” but many short films on a myriad of topics, for rock videos (Chris Isaak and Michael Jackson), and numerous commercials, including “Lady Blue Shanghai,” a killer 16-minute internet promotion for Dior starring Marion Cotillard.

If you’re intrigued by David Lynch but have found his work to be other dimensional, “Room to Dream” might be your portal.