Chris Hedges's Blog, page 490

Pope in Ireland Vows to End Cover-Up of Clergy Sex Abuse

DUBLIN—Pope Francis declared Saturday as he arrived in Ireland that he shares the outrage of rank-and-file Catholics over the cover-up of the “repugnant crimes” of priests who raped and molested children, and vowed that he was committed to ending the “scourge.”

Seeking to respond to a global outcry over sex abuse by priests, Francis cited measures taken by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to respond to the crisis. But Benedict never acknowledged the Vatican’s role in fueling a culture of cover-up, and Francis provided no new details of any measures he would take to sanction bishops who fail to protect their flocks from predator priests.

“The failure of ecclesial authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share these sentiments,” the pope said in a speech to government officials and civil authorities at Dublin Castle.

Francis said he was committed to ridding the church of this “scourge” no matter the moral cost or amount of suffering.

Francis’ trip to Ireland, the first by a pope in 39 years, has been overshadowed by renewed outrage over the Catholic Church’s systemic failures to protect children, following revelations of sexual misconduct and cover-up in the U.S. church hierarchy, a growing crisis in Chile and the prosecutions of top clerics in Australia and France.

Francis was expected to meet with abuse victims during his 36-hour visit to Ireland. But neither his words at the start of his visit nor a new meeting with victims is likely to assuage demands for heads to roll over the sex abuse scandal.

“Disappointing, nothing new,” was the reaction from Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins, a former member of Francis’ sex abuse advisory panel who quit last year in frustration.

Perhaps in an indication of similar sentiments, the reception Francis received in Dublin contrasted sharply with the raucous, rock star welcome that greeted St. John Paul II in 1979. No one from the public was at the airport or the roads nearby, though by late afternoon crowds had started to grow outside Dublin’s cathedral, basking in gloriously sunny weekend weather.

Deeply Catholic Ireland has had one of the world’s worst records of clergy sex abuse, crimes that were revealed to its 4.8 million people over the past decade by a series of government-mandated inquiries. The reviews concluded that thousands of children were raped and molested by priests or physically abused in church-run schools and bishops worked for years to hide those crimes.

After the Irish church atoned for its past and enacted tough new norms to fight abuse, it had been looking to the first visit by a pope in 40 years to show a different, more caring church that understands the problems of ordinary Catholic families.

More than 37,000 people — most of them young Catholics — signed up to attend a Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Families that ends Sunday in Dublin, more than twice the number as a previous family rally in Philadelphia three years ago.

And many faithful did remain hopeful that Francis’ appearance would bring healing.

“I see a lot of new life amongst young people who have a deep committed faith, Catholic faith,” said Sean Ascogh, a churchgoer in Blessington southwest of Dublin. “Obviously, they are very disappointed by what has been happening in the church in the last few years, particularly the whole abuse scandals, but I think people can see beyond that.”

Francis urged the Irish to do just that, to recognize that for all its failings, the Catholic Church has educated and cared for generations of Irish children in times of famine and great poverty, when no one else would.

“The church in Ireland, past and present, has played a role in the welfare of children that cannot be obscured,” the pope said. “It is my hope that the gravity of the abuse scandals, which have cast light on the failings of so many, will serve to emphasize the importance of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults on the part of society as a whole.”

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar concurred, saying the church stepped in to care for Irish children when the state did not. But in his speech to the pope at Dublin Castle, he said both church and state had a history of “sorrow and shame,” and he urged the pope to ensure that victims of sex abuse find “justice and truth and healing.”

Varadkar cited the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report, which found 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses, in urging Francis “ensure that from words flow actions.”

“In recent weeks, we have all listened to heart-breaking stories from Pennsylvania of brutal crimes perpetrated by people within the Catholic Church, and then obscured to protect the institution at the expense of innocent victims,” Varadkar said. “It’s a story all too tragically familiar here in Ireland.”

Indeed, Ireland’s tortured history of abuse has left its mark.

In a country where Catholic bishops held such sway that they advised the drafters of the republic’s constitution in the 1930s, voters in recent years have turned their backs on core Catholic teachings. They have overturned a constitutional ban on abortion and legalized divorce, contraception, previously banned homosexual acts and same-sex marriage.

Irish abuse victims and their supporters were to hold a solidarity rally Sunday in Dublin at the same time Francis is celebrating his final Mass to close out the rally.

Separately, survivors of Ireland’s wretched “mother and baby homes” — where children were exiled for the shame of having been born to unwed mothers — are holding their own demonstration Sunday. The location is Tuam, site of a mass grave of hundreds of babies who died over the years at a church-run home.

Francis will be nearby, visiting the Marian shrine at Knock, but has no plans to visit the grave site.

In his inaugural speech, Francis referred euphemistically to the plight of Irish women who were forced for generations to work in laundries or other workhouses because they got pregnant outside of marriage. But he said only that they and their children, who were sent to orphanages, “endured particularly difficult situations.”

When John Paul visited Ireland in 1979, in the first-ever papal visit, some 1.25 million people turned out for his inaugural Mass in Phoenix Park, a third of the country’s population and the largest gathering in Irish history at the time. About half as many are expected Sunday for Francis.

___

AP video journalist Luigi Navarra contributed.

Judy Chicago on Making Art Her Way and Remaking the Art World

For her landmark 1979 installation, “The Dinner Party,” honoring 39 influential historical and mythical women, artist Judy Chicago added to writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s place setting a crocheted depiction of the proto-feminist author giving birth to her daughter, Mary, whom she died delivering. The image of Wollstonecraft’s final scene became the seed for Chicago’s next collaboration. The end result, “Birth Project,” was woven by 150 female needleworkers and included roughly 84 textile artworks thematically connected to childbearing. Sixteen selections from that joint production are currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Oct. 7.

“Most of my projects I start with research. Before I make any images, I educate myself on the subject,” Chicago said of her process in an interview with Truthdig. “I was living in Northern California when I was doing the ‘Birth Project,’ which happened to be, in the early ’80s, the center of the alternative birth movement. It was really easy to see birth videos.”

One of a collection of pieces from Judy Chicago’s “Birth Project” collaborative series. (Jordan Riefe)

With titles like “Birth Tear/Tear,” “The Crowning” and “Mother India,” various forms of textile work capture variations on the theme of childbirth. As with “The Dinner Party,” Chicago embarked on a sprawling collaboration, painting or otherwise rendering her images, then distributing them to women around the country to embroider over per her specifications.

Employing needlework as a medium, Chicago sought to elevate craft to art, instilling it with universal meaning. “It depends upon the intention, not upon the medium,” curator Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder explained. “The fact that this is crochet doesn’t make it a craftwork. What would make it a craftwork for [Chicago] is simply to demonstrate skill and not to imbue meaning. And certainly there is meaning here—and thus the medium, crochet, does not affect its designation as art.”

To monitor progress, Chicago would often travel to a spot convenient to a number of needleworkers where she might review their work. For other pieces, she would visit private homes, or some might send her completed portions in the mail. Ironically, her aim to elevate crochet to something other than the product of hobbyists in living rooms relied upon women in living rooms, working on “Birth Project.”

Judy Chicago’s “Mother India” depicts images from Hindu narratives and features replicated panels with the image of the Taj Mahal on each corner. (Jordan Riefe)

“Mother India,” based on controversial historian Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book of the same name, places a figure of Shiva at the center, though his gender is changed to a very pregnant female. Surrounding her are panels depicting arranged marriage, female infanticide, child marriage, childbirth and subsequent shunning of the mother.

Another panel shows a woman being forced to join her husband on his funeral pyre in the ritual of sati. The four corners each feature images of the Taj Mahal. That might seem a kitschy touch, but instead it turns bitterly ironic considering Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the mausoleum was built, died at the age of 37 while giving birth to her 14th child.

“Mother India” was meant to have a counterpart, “Father Africa,” but issues of cultural appropriation and controversial practices kept Chicago from pursuing the project. “It would have made me have to deal with images of genital mutilation. And for some, whose vaginas have been sewed up, birth is a traumatic and horrifying experience,” Chicago explained. “I’m not going there.”

After her experience with “The Dinner Party,” Chicago was taking no chances with “Birth Project.” The former was greeted coolly by the male-dominated art world but still managed to draw 100,000 visitors in three months during its first show, although critics had the final say and a planned exhibition tour collapsed. But a grassroots-fueled tour took its place, with the installation visiting 16 destinations in six countries on three continents after its initial run in San Francisco.

“Birth Project” toured for 10 years, with portions showing in venues ranging from birthing centers to major museums, after which works were permanently placed in various institutions around the world. In recent years, Chicago reconnected with some of those institutions and was pleased to find enthusiastic and grateful curators who prized the works; a stark contrast to her customary experience as a pioneer feminist artist.

Born in Chicago, the daughter of a Marxist labor organizer and a medical secretary, Judy Cohen was dubbed Judy Chicago when gallerist Rolf Nelson heard her thick Second City accent and nicknamed her. She studied at UCLA in the 1960s at a time when Ferus Gallery was the center of modern art in Los Angeles, and the highest compliment was to be told she painted like a man. Gallerist Walter Hopps once visited the studio space she shared with two male artists in Pasadena and refused to look at her work, later lamely explaining that he was too embarrassed to address her because her work was so much better than that of the others.

Such instances led her to conclude she ought to stop trying to be one of the guys and embrace feminism, not just in thought but in practice. In 1970, she established the first feminist art program, at California State University, Fresno, where female artists had a space of their own. Two years later, she established Womanspace with artist Miriam Schapiro, the first gallery dedicated to exhibiting female artists.

Following the success of “The Dinner Party” and “Birth Project,” Chicago embarked on “Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light,” a mixed-media series using painting, stained glass, photography and tapestries that explores the horror of the final solution and the inspiration of survivors. For that series, Chicago was informed by filmmaker epic documentary on the subject, “Shoah.” “I came out of Holocaust Project $55,000 in debt on credit cards, no verifiable income,” she said, smiling and slowly shaking her head. But she got a husband in the process: her photographer, Donald Woodman. “At age 60, I had my first mortgage, which we just paid off,” she said.

Financial worries are long past as the 79-year-old artist prepares for her first major career retrospective, “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” at Miami ICA in December, timed to coincide with Art Basel. At Villa Arson in Nice, France, she has a mini-retrospective through Nov. 4 that includes paintings, sculptures and installations. Early next year, La Scala will publish a major monograph of her work.

“The End,” a new series of 37 paintings on black glass and porcelain, along with two bronze reliefs, goes on display in June at Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, followed by a museum-size show of early works in September 2019 at Jeffrey Deitch’s new space in Hollywood.

“I’m a student of history, and ‘The Dinner Party’ taught me about the long history of pushing forward and pushing backwards. I was fortunate to live through the thrill of pushing forward, and now I’m living through the nightmare of pushing backwards,” she sighs, citing the current level of misogyny in the national discourse.

But there’s hope in the fact that a figure like herself, whose work was derided as “very bad art” by New York Times critic Hilton Kramer, is now being celebrated. “I destroyed a lot of my early work,” she says. “People didn’t even know about some of my installations and early work. It’s all being brought back. It’s fantastic.”

Judy Chicago on Making Art Her Way and Changing the Art World

For her landmark 1979 installation, “The Dinner Party,” honoring 39 influential historical and mythical women, artist Judy Chicago added to writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s place setting a crocheted depiction of the proto-feminist author giving birth to her daughter, Mary, whom she died delivering. The image of Wollstonecraft’s final scene became the seed for Chicago’s next collaboration. The end result, “Birth Project,” was woven by 150 female needleworkers and included roughly 84 textile artworks thematically connected to childbearing. Sixteen selections from that joint production are currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art through Oct. 7.

“Most of my projects I start with research. Before I make any images, I educate myself on the subject,” Chicago said of her process in an interview with Truthdig. “I was living in Northern California when I was doing the ‘Birth Project,’ which happened to be, in the early ’80s, the center of the alternative birth movement. It was really easy to see birth videos.”

One of a collection of pieces from Judy Chicago’s “Birth Project” collaborative series. (Jordan Riefe)

With titles like “Birth Tear/Tear,” “The Crowning” and “Mother India,” various forms of textile work capture variations on the theme of childbirth. As with “The Dinner Party,” Chicago embarked on a sprawling collaboration, painting or otherwise rendering her images, then distributing them to women around the country to embroider over per her specifications.

Employing needlework as a medium, Chicago sought to elevate craft to art, instilling it with universal meaning. “It depends upon the intention, not upon the medium,” curator Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder explained. “The fact that this is crochet doesn’t make it a craftwork. What would make it a craftwork for [Chicago] is simply to demonstrate skill and not to imbue meaning. And certainly there is meaning here—and thus the medium, crochet, does not affect its designation as art.”

To monitor progress, Chicago would often travel to a spot convenient to a number of needleworkers where she might review their work. For other pieces, she would visit private homes, or some might send her completed portions in the mail. Ironically, her aim to elevate crochet to something other than the product of hobbyists in living rooms relied upon women in living rooms, working on “Birth Project.”

Judy Chicago’s “Mother India” depicts images from Hindu narratives and features replicated panels with the image of the Taj Mahal on each corner. (Jordan Riefe)

“Mother India,” based on controversial historian Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book of the same name, places a figure of Shiva at the center, though his gender is changed to a very pregnant female. Surrounding her are panels depicting arranged marriage, female infanticide, child marriage, childbirth and subsequent shunning of the mother.

Another panel shows a woman being forced to join her husband on his funeral pyre in the ritual of sati. The four corners each feature images of the Taj Mahal. That might seem a kitschy touch, but instead it turns bitterly ironic considering Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the mausoleum was built, died at the age of 37 while giving birth to her 14th child.

“Mother India” was meant to have a counterpart, “Father Africa,” but issues of cultural appropriation and controversial practices kept Chicago from pursuing the project. “It would have made me have to deal with images of genital mutilation. And for some, whose vaginas have been sewed up, birth is a traumatic and horrifying experience,” Chicago explained. “I’m not going there.”

After her experience with “The Dinner Party,” Chicago was taking no chances with “Birth Project.” The former was greeted coolly by the male-dominated art world but still managed to draw 100,000 visitors in three months during its first show, although critics had the final say and a planned exhibition tour collapsed. But a grassroots-fueled tour took its place, with the installation visiting 16 destinations in six countries on three continents after its initial run in San Francisco.

“Birth Project” toured for 10 years, with portions showing in venues ranging from birthing centers to major museums, after which works were permanently placed in various institutions around the world. In recent years, Chicago reconnected with some of those institutions and was pleased to find enthusiastic and grateful curators who prized the works; a stark contrast to her customary experience as a pioneer feminist artist.

Born in Chicago, the daughter of a Marxist labor organizer and a medical secretary, Judy Cohen was dubbed Judy Chicago when gallerist Rolf Nelson heard her thick Second City accent and nicknamed her. She studied at UCLA in the 1960s at a time when Ferus Gallery was the center of modern art in Los Angeles, and the highest compliment was to be told she painted like a man. Gallerist Walter Hopps once visited the studio space she shared with two male artists in Pasadena and refused to look at her work, later lamely explaining that he was too embarrassed to address her because her work was so much better than that of the others.

Such instances led her to conclude she ought to stop trying to be one of the guys and embrace feminism, not just in thought but in practice. In 1970, she established the first feminist art program, at California State University, Fresno, where female artists had a space of their own. Two years later, she established Womanspace with artist Miriam Schapiro, the first gallery dedicated to exhibiting female artists.

Following the success of “The Dinner Party” and “Birth Project,” Chicago embarked on “Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light,” a mixed-media series using painting, stained glass, photography and tapestries that explores the horror of the final solution and the inspiration of survivors. For that series, Chicago was informed by filmmaker epic documentary on the subject, “Shoah.” “I came out of Holocaust Project $55,000 in debt on credit cards, no verifiable income,” she said, smiling and slowly shaking her head. But she got a husband in the process: her photographer, Donald Woodman. “At age 60, I had my first mortgage, which we just paid off,” she said.

Financial worries are long past as the 79-year-old artist prepares for her first major career retrospective, “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” at Miami ICA in December, timed to coincide with Art Basel. At Villa Arson in Nice, France, she has a mini-retrospective through Nov. 4 that includes paintings, sculptures and installations. Early next year, La Scala will publish a major monograph of her work.

“The End,” a new series of 37 paintings on black glass and porcelain, along with two bronze reliefs, goes on display in June at Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, followed by a museum-size show of early works in September 2019 at Jeffrey Deitch’s new space in Hollywood.

“I’m a student of history, and ‘The Dinner Party’ taught me about the long history of pushing forward and pushing backwards. I was fortunate to live through the thrill of pushing forward, and now I’m living through the nightmare of pushing backwards,” she sighs, citing the current level of misogyny in the national discourse.

But there’s hope in the fact that a figure like herself, whose work was derided as “very bad art” by New York Times critic Hilton Kramer, is now being celebrated. “I destroyed a lot of my early work,” she says. “People didn’t even know about some of my installations and early work. It’s all being brought back. It’s fantastic.”

A Convicted Bank Robber Becomes a Must-Read Author With ‘Cherry’

You won’t hear Nico Walker on book tour anytime soon because he’s serving two more years in prison for bank robbery. But don’t wait to pick up his lacerating new novel about the horrors of war and addiction. “Cherry” is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph born of gore and suffering that reads like it’s been scratched out with a dirty needle across the tender skin of a man’s forearm.

The story of how this autobiographical novel evolved is almost as remarkable as the story of how its debut author survived. In 2005 and 2006, Walker served as an Army medic in Iraq, where he was commended for valor and saw many of his buddies blown to pieces. Returning to civilian life depressed and traumatized, he became addicted to heroin, a habit he funded with extravagant success by robbing 10 banks in four months.

In 2013, when Walker was behind bars in the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Ky., his journey from hero to thief became the subject of a harrowing profile in BuzzFeed. One of many people struck by that story was Matthew Johnson, a publisher at the independent press Tyrant Books. Fascinated by the historical tradition of war vets taking up bank robbery, Johnson sent Walker books and encouraged him to write about his life. Eventually, through one of those wildly circuitous trajectories that make up the map of literary history, Walker’s disheveled manuscript ended up at Alfred A. Knopf, the nation’s most prestigious publishing house.

In a gracious and unusually detailed acknowledgment at the end of “Cherry,” Walker credits Tim O’Connell, his editor at Knopf, with transforming those typewritten pages into this tour de force. But when I contacted O’Connell, he claimed he did nothing but edit Walker’s manuscript as usual. “It is the fruit of his hard work and remarkable natural talents,” O’Connell said, “especially his voice, which is unlike any other. Nico simply poured everything he had into it.”

That sounds right – and true to the searing authenticity of this novel, which tries to answer the question, “How do you get to be a scumbag?” But in the process of laying out the road to perdition, Walker demonstrates the depths of his humanity and challenges us to bridge the distance that we imagine separates us from the damned.

We meet the unnamed narrator in 2003 when he’s a listless college student raised by a nice middle-class family. From the start, his tone is one of mournful candor with a trace of straight-faced wit. “I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything,” he says. “I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure.”

With the same rueful smirk, he enlists in the Army “because I’d been saying I would.” The inane tests, the screaming sergeants, the empty slogans – none of it impresses him. “You just had to remember it was all make-believe,” he says. “We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.”

But there’s nothing make-believe about the blood that’s soon gushing across these pages. As an Army medic, he goes on missions that are vaguely explained, often impromptu, frequently disastrous. His fellow soldiers are regularly called upon to brutalize the local people. The Iraqis, for their part, are experts at planting IEDs in the roads. “I was supposed to pretend to be some kind of great healer,” the narrator says, but his medical expertise rarely involves more than scraping up bits of his friends and zipping them in bags. “I was not a hero,” he says.

Of course, we’ve heard these stories before, in superb fiction and nonfiction by other soldiers. But Walker, 33, brings a raw and casual brutality to the narrative of battle. His rambling collection of chaotic anecdotes involve drugs and porn, acts of cruelty and kindness, unending boredom pierced by spikes of terror. These juxtapositions convey the fundamental disorder of the American mission and its deleterious effect on the young people forced to implement it. His language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War: “I’m glad I missed the battle because it was probably bulls— and the Army just murdered your dog anyway.”

But Walker also channels an even older novelist who saw the carnage of war. His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect like this: “By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing.”

Ironically, that sense of sliding into the abyss accelerates when the narrator leaves the carnage of Iraq and returns to Ohio. Suicidally depressed, suffering flashbacks, blackouts and chronic insomnia, he grows so addicted that his entire life revolves around dope. “I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life,” he says, “that I wouldn’t be able to get heroin.” Under the pressure of that insatiable desire, the narrative becomes a swirl of buys, highs and crashes, punctuated by increasingly risky negotiations that leave him ripped off or in debt. “Life was just slow death,” he says, “regrets and forgetting everything you ever had believed in.”

Even as I hyperventilate about this novel, I’m wary of the tendency to romanticize criminals, to treat their descriptions of degradation as unconscious art, to feel aroused by the vicarious thrill of illegality. There is, I know, the danger of re-enacting some kind of ridiculous literary version of the hysteria over Jeremy Meeks, whose mug shot turned him into an internet sensation.

But I honestly don’t think I’ve been hypnotized just by this novel’s relentless horrors. No – it’s that unflappable voice. “Cherry” is written without an ounce of self-pity by an author allergic to the meretricious poetry of despair. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us right into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. In the end, his only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.

(c) 2018, The Washington Post

University of Arizona Accepted $458K From Eugenics Fund

The University of Arizona has accepted years of funding from a foundation infamous for promoting research linking race and intelligence — even after other universities and organizations, including white nationalist groups, stopped receiving support from the group, records show.

A University of Arizona psychology professor used some of the Pioneer Fund’s grant money to pay for recent travel to a conference in London that has included eugenics-themed presentations, according to documents The Associated Press obtained through a public records request. The eugenics movement has included theories about the controlled breeding of humans to “improve” the gene pool.

The Pioneer Fund was created by textile heir Wickliffe Draper in 1937 to — in the words of its original charter — advocate for “race betterment.” The organization has promoted eugenics and financially supported “race scientists” who maintain that blacks are intellectually and genetically inferior to whites.

The private, tax-exempt foundation in Maryland gave nearly $7.8 million to 48 organizations or individuals from 1998 to 2016, including nearly $3 million to at least 22 universities in the U.S. and abroad. But the University of Arizona was the only U.S. university getting any money from the group from 2011 to 2016, tax records show.

The University of Arizona received a total of $458,000 from the Pioneer Fund from 2003 to 2016. The foundation reported a contribution to the school in every year but 2013 over that span. Specifically, the funds were applied for and received by Professor Jose Aurelio Figueredo, who directs a graduate program for the study of human behavior and evolutionary psychology. More recent tax filings aren’t publicly available, but Figueredo’s curriculum vitae says he received a $30,000 grant from the fund for the 2017-2018 academic year as well.

Faculty members are generally responsible for selecting the sources of their funding, and the university can’t engage in “viewpoint discrimination” in accepting grant money, university spokesman Chris Sigurdson said Friday.

“Professors seek research funds from a variety of sources,” he said. “The university does not typically restrict the source of outside funds, but focuses on protecting open, free, and competent academic inquiry.”

Figueredo said the Pioneer Fund’s history wasn’t a factor in his decision to apply for its funding. He has disavowed eugenics in one of his papers and says he doesn’t believe in the concept of racial inferiority.

“The stuff that I’ve written and the stuff that I’ve researched does not lend itself to that kind of use,” he said. “I have done perfectly legitimate research that, by the way, has nothing whatsoever to do with race differences.”

Figueredo said “a whole bunch of people” at the university have approved his receipt of the grant money.

“People have been signing off on this for years, and nobody has indicated that there is a problem,” he said.

Andrew Winston, a psychology professor who teaches a class on scientific racism at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, said he believes it’s morally unacceptable for the University of Arizona to accept the foundation’s money. While the school must uphold academic freedom, it also has an obligation to promote “human rights, equality and diversity,” he said.

“The scientific racism supported by the Pioneer Fund is used by racial extremists around the world,” he said in an email.

Figueredo has used Pioneer Fund money for travel to the London Conference on Intelligence, a gathering that has included eugenics-themed presentations. Recent conferences were held at the University College London, which said in January that it didn’t endorse the gatherings and would investigate the content of presentations.

Figueredo said the London conference “is not about eugenics,” included plenty of peer-reviewed published research and can’t be characterized “by a few presentations.”

Figueredo also has served on the editorial advisory board of Mankind Quarterly. The journal has often published material arguing that blacks are genetically inferior and expressing support for “racial hierarchy,” said Bill Tucker, a retired Rutgers University psychology professor and author of a book titled “The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.”

“It promotes a scientific justification for racial separation,” he said.

Figueredo said he has reviewed papers for Mankind Quarterly but nothing on racially charged topics.

In 2009, Figueredo co-authored a paper with the Pioneer Fund’s president at the time, J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton died in 2012, but in a paper 10 years earlier, he rejected claims that the foundation promoted a racist political agenda.

Other educational institutions that have benefited from the Pioneer Fund included the University of Delaware, the University of Texas in Austin, Florida State University, Drexel University, Baylor University, the University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Missouri, the University of Illinois and the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Non-academic groups receiving funds include nonprofits operated by white nationalists, such as Jared Taylor’s Virginia-based New Century Foundation. Those groups were awarded more than $300,000 in foundation grants over the past two decades. But in recent years, Figueredo appeared to be the only researcher still accepting the money: His grants accounted for all $90,000 in contributions listed on the foundation’s IRS filings from 2014 and 2016. Pioneer Fund president Richard Lynn and treasurer Edward Miller didn’t respond to emailed interview requests this week.

Georgia State University law professor Paul Lombardo, author of a 2002 paper titled “‘The American Breed’: Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund,” said most of the scientists who have received support from the foundation are either retired or dead.

“I would have thought they had been out of business by now,” Lombardo said. “I would have expected the money to run out.”

Figueredo said he hasn’t decided whether he will reapply for more Pioneer Fund money at the end of this year.

“If I thought I was doing harm, I would stop instantly,” he said. “But I sincerely do not believe that I have done anyone any harm.”

Progressive Democrats on the Verge of Trimming DNC Superdelegates

The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party appears headed toward a victory at the Democratic National Committee summer meeting in Chicago, despite last-ditch efforts by some DNC members to modify a party proposal limiting superdelegates’ role in nominating the 2020 presidential nominee.

On Saturday, the DNC’s members will vote on a slate of rule changes, including only allowing delegates elected in state caucuses and primaries to have a first-round vote at the 2020 national convention when nominating the Democrats’ next presidential candidate.

“My hunch is we will get that vote,” Maryland Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Matthews told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I think that’s where it’s heading. … We have more than 30 state party chairs who have signed a letter saying we support this reform. And it’s because we believe it will restore trust in the party. It’s the right thing to do—to be a Democratic Party, not only with a capital ‘D,’ but with a small ‘d.’”

In 2016, Sanders won 45 percent of the elected national convention delegates but could not make inroads into superdelegates, who made up 30 percent of the national convention vote and are automatic unpledged delegates—elected officeholders, state party officials, leaders of key constituencies and activists. They largely supported Hillary Clinton.

Had Sanders won a majority of elected delegates in 2016, his team was planning to challenge the vote of superdelegates on the opening gavel and walk out if they did not prevail. But that never happened.

Instead, the DNC created a Unity Commission that crafted a slate of rule changes for 2020, including stripping the unpledged delegates of their first-round vote. The commission also proposed changes to make primaries and caucuses more accessible, from Election Day registration to voting by mail. All of these proposals went through the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, which slightly modified them before this weekend’s DNC membership vote.

The DNC’s Heavy Hands

But longtime DNC members who have been superdelegates are not going quietly into the night. On Thursday, they brought a series of last-minute proposals to the Rules Committee that would still chasten superdelegates without stripping them of their first-round nominating vote.

“Rules and Bylaws shot down every alternative compromise proposal,” Debra Kozikowski of Massachusetts, a longtime grassroots organizer and elected DNC member, texted. “[California Congresswoman] Maxine Waters has arrived thinking she will have an opportunity to address the RBC, who blew through to adjourn and will not be continuing to meet tomorrow though it is on the schedule. I think there will be some interesting conversations before Saturday’s vote.”

Earlier on Thursday, Kozikowski, a superdelegate, was critical of the post-2016 reforms and described her “compromise” proposal—one she hoped would go before the full DNC.

She started with some history. Unpledged delegates were created by amending the DNC charter in 1984 with the goal of bringing grassroots voices into the process. Rules changes come and go over the years and are not substantial reform as many Berniecrats believe, she said.

Moreover, the superdelegates have never chosen a presidential nominee who did not win the primaries and caucuses, she said. The problem with superdelegates was they should not show or disclose any support for candidates until the nominating primaries and caucuses are over, she said.

Kozikowski’s compromise, which the Rules Committee rejected, would let superdelegates—unpledged delegates—keep their first-round vote unless they have endorsed a candidate.

“If they publicly endorse, support, give money to, whatever, any presidential candidate prior to the first vote of convention or the end of the primary, they get sanctioned,” she said. “America votes first. That’s my premise. If these unpledged delegates pledge themselves out there, they forfeit their first ballot vote. … As you have probably heard me say before, superdelegates really ought to keep their super mouths shut.”

Kozikowski said she and others withdrew their proposals from the Rules Committee so they could try to take them to the full DNC on Saturday.

On the other side of this divide were Berniecrats, who are still wincing from their poor treatment at the hands of pro-Clinton party leaders in 2016. Since then, progressives have blanched as DNC Chairman Tom Perez has backed their superdelegate reforms, on one hand, but then supported centrists and corporate interests on the other—such as rejecting a ban on taking donations from the fossil fuel industry.

But the superdelegate issue has great importance for Berniecrats. It goes back to 2016, when the presence of pro-Clinton superdelegates hovered as a brick wall blocking the nomination. Since then, superdelegate reform has become their foremost measure of whether the DNC is recognizing the activist progressive wing of the party.

“Many voters interpreted this [the existence of superdelegates] as indicating that party elites had already put their thumbs on the scales,” said Norman Solomon, who in 2016 organized a Sanders delegate network and was in Chicago lobbying on behalf of a half-dozen progressive groups. “Passage of this proposal from the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee would give a big lift to Democratic Party outreach and enthusiasm nationwide—indicating that the party is opening toward grassroots democracy.”

Solomon was cautiously optimistic that the superdelegate rule change would pass, but he said the progressives still have a testy relationship with the party:

“My feeling is there are various tradeoffs. It reminds me what (California Gov.) Jerry Brown said very proudly, ‘I’m in a canoe. I paddle on the left. I paddle on the right.’ And I think, for better and worse, mostly worse—but in some cases better—that is what’s happening with Tom Perez. He endorses (New York Gov. Andrew) Cuomo (over progressive Cynthia Nixon). He reverses this ban on fossil fuel money. But on the other hand, he’s fighting publicly very hard to pass this good reform on superdelegates.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Trump Asks Mike Pompeo to Delay Visit to North Korea

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday he has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delay a planned trip to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on denuclearization.

Trump put some blame on Beijing, saying he does not believe China is helping “because of our much tougher Trading stance.”

The surprise announcement appeared to mark a concession by the president to domestic and international concerns that his prior claims of world-altering progress on the peninsula had been strikingly premature.

“I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Trump tweeted Friday, barely two months after his June meeting with the North’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

Trump’s comment followed a report issued Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency outlining “grave concern” about the North’s nuclear program. It came a day after Pompeo appointed Stephen Biegun, a senior executive with the Ford Motor Co., to be his special envoy for North Korea and said he and Biegun would visit next week.

The State Department never confirmed details of the trip, but it had been expected that Pompeo would be in Pyongyang for at least several hours Monday, according to several diplomatic sources familiar with the plan.

White House officials declined to specify what prompted Trump to call off Pompeo’s trip or what had changed since the president’s rose-colored-glasses assessments of the nuclear situation just days ago.

A senior White House official said Trump made the decision to cancel the visit Friday morning during a meeting with Pompeo, Biegun, chief of staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser John Bolton, who joined by phone. Intelligence and defense officials were not in the meeting, the official said, seeming to indicate that the breakdown was diplomatic in nature. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the matter and referred questions to the White House.

Trump laid unspecified blame on China, North Korea’s leading trade partner, which is widely believed to hold the greatest sway over Kim’s government.

The U.S. and China have been locked in a trade dispute for months, with each side ratcheting up tariffs on imports from the other country in what may be the opening salvos of a trade war.

Trump tweeted that “Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved.” He added: “In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”

After more a year of escalating tensions defined by nuclear and missile tests, new sanctions and “fire and fury” rhetoric, Trump made history meeting Kim earlier this year. In the run-up to the summit both nations engaged in hard-nosed negotiation, with Trump publically calling off the meeting in an effort to push Kim to agree to nuclear concessions. During the summit, the pair signed a vague joint statement in which the North agreed to denuclearize, but which left nearly all details undefined.

“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” Trump declared on Twitter after the meeting.

“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem,” he added. “No longer – sleep well tonight!”

Pompeo would have been hard pressed to return from Pyongyang with anything resembling progress on the denuclearization front.

Although it has halted nuclear and missile testing and taken some unrelated steps — dismantling portions of a missile engine facility and returning the suspected remains of American servicemen killed during the Korean War — its nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile development remain intact, according the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and intelligence agencies.

In addition, recent statements from North Korean officials have ruled out any new concessions until it sees a reciprocal gesture from the U.S. beyond suspending military exercises with South Korea. North Korea has been demanding that the U.S. ease or lift crippling sanctions — something Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton have flatly ruled out until the its nuclear program is fully and verifiably dismantled.

Other than sanctions relief, the North, backed by South Korea, has been seeking a declaration of the end of the Korean War. The conflict stopped with the signing of an armistice rather than a peace treaty, meaning the war is not technically over. Both the North and South have vowed to end the open state of hostilities, and Seoul had been hoping to persuade the Trump administration to sign off on a non-binding end-of-war declaration as a goodwill gesture that would give Kim Jong Un domestic cover to proceed with denuclearization moves.

Pompeo and other administration officials have suggested some concessions short of easing or lifting sanctions are possible before verified denuclearization, but have refused to be specific about what they could be. And they have been skeptical about an end-of-war declaration in the absence of any progress on the nuclear matter.

At the same time, lawmakers from both parties, including GOP hawks who generally support Trump, have expressed concerns about such a move, as it could be used by the North to demand the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea and potentially Japan without anything in return.

Trump had kept up the positive tone as recently as Tuesday at a campaign rally in West Virginia. There Trump maintained “we’re doing well with North Korea.”

“There’s been no missile launches. There’s been no rocket launches,” he added.

At the same rally, Trump seemed to take a different tone too on China, saying he had withheld some criticism of China because “I wanted them to help us with North Korea and they have.”

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Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Why Manafort and Cohen Thought They Could Get Away With It

This article was co-published with The New York Times.

Oh, the audacity of dopes. The crimes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are notable not just for how blatant they were but also for their lack of sophistication. The two men did little to hide their lying to banks and the Internal Revenue Service. One can almost sympathize with them: If it wasn’t for their decision to attach themselves to the most unlikely president in modern history, there’s every reason to think they might be still working their frauds today.

But how anomalous are Mssrs. Manafort and Cohen? Are there legions of K Street big shots working for foreign despots and parking their riches in Cypriot bank accounts to avoid the IRS? Are many political campaigns walking felonies waiting to be exposed? What about the world of luxury residential building in which Cohen plied his trade with the Trump Organization?

The answer is more disturbing than the questions: We don’t know. We don’t know because the cops aren’t on the beat. Resources have been stripped from white-collar enforcement. The FBI shifted agents to work on international terror in the wake of 9/11. White-collar cases made up about one-tenth of the Justice Department’s cases in recent years, compared with one-fifth in the early 1990s. The IRS’ criminal enforcement capabilities have been decimated by years of budget cuts and attrition. The Federal Election Commission is a toothless organization that is widely flouted.

No wonder Cohen and Manafort were so brazen. They must have felt they had impunity.

How could they not? Any person in any bar in America can tell you who was held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which peaked 10 years ago next month: No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.

But the problem goes beyond big banks. The Department of Justice — in both Democratic and Republican administrations — has lost the will and ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America, at large industrial firms, tech giants, retailers, drug makers and so on. Instead the Department of Justice reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers and directors.

Beginning with a charge to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has fallen upon a rash of other crimes. In doing so, he has exposed how widespread and serious our white-collar fraud problem really is, and how lax enforcement has been for years.

At least he is also showing a way out of the problem. He and his team are demonstrating that the proper attention, resources, technique and experience can go a long way to rectify the white-collar prosecution crisis.

What’s Mueller’s secret? For one thing, he has a focus. He and his team have sufficient resources to go after a discrete set of investigations. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department had similar success setting up the Enron Task Force, a special SWAT team of government lawyers that prosecuted top executives of the failed Texas energy trader. That contrasts with the financial crisis, when the Justice Department never created a similar task force. No single department official was responsible for the prosecutions of bankers after the global meltdown.

The investigation’s techniques are also instructive. The Southern District of New York, which was referred the Cohen case by Mueller, raided President Trump’s former attorney’s offices and fought for access to the materials, even as Cohen asserted attorney-client privilege. When federal prosecutors investigate large companies, out of custom and deference they rarely use such aggressive tactics. They place few wiretaps, conduct almost no undercover operations and do almost no raids. Instead government attorneys reach carefully negotiated agreements about which documents they can review, the product of many hours of discussion with high-powered law firms on behalf of their clients. All the battles over privileged materials happen behind closed doors and without the benefit of a disinterested special master, as the Cohen case had.

Indeed it’s worse than that. The government has essentially privatized corporate law enforcement. The government effectively outsources the investigations to the companies themselves. The companies, typically trying to appear cooperative or to forestall government action, hire law firms to do internal investigations. Imagine if Mueller relied on Trump to investigate whether he colluded with the Russians or violated any other laws, and Trump hired Rudy Giuliani’s firm to do the probe.

The aggressive Mueller techniques have yielded the most crucial element for white-collar cases: flippers; i.e., wrongdoers who agree to testify against their co-conspirators. Rick Gates, the Manafort protégé, helped tighten his mentor’s noose. We are going to see in the next few months how many people flip and what they will say. No wonder President Trump mused that flipping “almost ought to be illegal.”

Mueller’s experience has given him the courage to take cases to trial, where juries are mercurial and the federal bench has turned hostile. Mueller’s prosecutors tried a “thin case” against Manafort, as the expression goes, boiling their evidence down to a few elements that the jury could absorb easily. They even managed to overcome the open hostility of U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis. Good prosecutors are used to that in white-collar cases. Judges and justices have not looked favorably upon white-collar prosecutions for more than a decade now, overturning verdicts and narrowing statutes. But with well-marshaled evidence and clear presentation, prosecutors can surmount the difficulties.

Moreover, Mueller isn’t looking to go soft in order to preserve his professional viability. I’m assuming that at age 74, he’s not going to go through the revolving door after this. That hasn’t been true for most top Justice Department officials in recent years. Many of them come from the defense bar and when they leave government they go back to defending large corporations. The same goes with the younger prosecutors who negotiate those corporate settlements. Almost all go on to become corporate defense attorneys. In those negotiations, they are auditioning for their next jobs, wanting to display their dazzling smarts but also eventually needing to appear like reasonable people and avoid being depicted by the white-collar bar as cowboys unworthy of a prestigious partnership.

Of course, we don’t know whether Mueller can go all the way to the top. The big issue in white-collar crime is whether the Justice Department can prosecute CEOs. Sure, it occasionally brings charges against lower-level executives of major corporations, but hasn’t held the chief of a Fortune 500 company accountable in more than a decade. While most observers believe Mueller will adhere to policy and not indict the president, will his report to Congress implicate the chief executive of the United States, if the evidence warrants it?

One man cannot fix the large problem on his own, however. “For these individual episodic financial crimes, the government can muster the capacity and courage to investigate and prosecute,” says Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who recently ran for Congress in a Democratic primary. “The real question is whether, in the context of a national economic crisis, the Department of Justice has sufficient experience, resources and leadership to effectively tackle it. I’d argue that it’s pretty obvious it does not.”

For that, the Justice Department requires more resources and bodies than the government devotes to white-collar crime today, and probably some changes in the law.

Nevertheless, this should be a moment of reflection for white-collar prosecutors. It should not take a special counsel to uncover millions in bank fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. Using proper techniques, prioritizing crimes that can harm millions of people and stiffening their obsequious posture toward corporate executives will go a ways to remedying the situation.

Here’s the bad news, which will be the least surprising thing you’ll read today: the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction. Its law enforcement agencies are engaged in something of a regulatory strike, especially when it comes to white-collar enforcement. Regulators are not policing companies or industries and are not referring cases to the Justice Department. The number of white-collar cases filed against individuals is lower than at any time in more than 20 years, according to research done by Syracuse University. The Justice Department’s fines against companies fell 90 percent during Trump’s first year in office, compared with in Obama’s last year in office, according to Public Citizen.

That must be sweet music to not just to other Manaforts and Cohens but also any corporate malefactors out there.

Just How Dangerous Is Amazon’s Facial Recognition Program? (Audio)

In May, the Congressional Black Caucus penned a letter to Amazon expressing its concern about the potential unintended consequences of the company’s new facial recognition software, ReKognition. “It is quite clear that communities of color are more aggressively policed than white communities,” the letter read. “This status quo results in an oversampling of data which, once used as an input to an analytical framework leveraging artificial intelligence, could negatively impact outcomes in those oversampled communities.”

Just how much danger does the online behemoth’s new technology pose? To answer this question, Truthdig’s Robert Scheer sat down with American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jacob Snow to discuss the close partnership between private enterprise and the surveillance state, as well as Snow’s latest article, “Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots.”

“We’re in an environment where immigrants are being targeted and harmed, and where people of color are being targeted and are being persecuted,” says Snow in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “And the idea that facial recognition could become widespread as a tool of law enforcement is going to have disproportionate impacts on people of color, on political protesters and also on immigrants. And once that infrastructure is built, once face surveillance is widespread in society, the damage to those communities can’t be undone.”

What was once the military-industrial complex has rapidly transformed into a military-industrial information complex, with data flowing seamlessly between intelligence agencies and even local police departments. Yet despite our society’s slow descent into Orwellian dystopia, Snow remains cautiously optimistic.

“Companies are certainly powerful,” he says, “but the thing that I find is an antidote is the fact that our political process can work. … Elected representatives can impose meaningful restrictions on these companies; we’ve seen it happen in the past with some efficacy, and I believe that it can happen in the future.”

Listen to the full interview below:

John McCain Is Halting His Medical Treatment, Family Says

WASHINGTON—John McCain, the six-term Arizona senator and the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, has chosen to discontinue medical treatment for his brain cancer, his family said Friday.

In a statement, the family said McCain has surpassed expectations for survival, but “the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict.” The family added, “With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment.”

The senator, who would be 82 next week, has been away from the Capitol since December.

McCain, a former Navy pilot, was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years. He was elected to Congress in the early 1980s and was elected to the Senate in 1986, replacing Barry Goldwater, who retired. McCain gained a reputation as a lawmaker who was willing to stick to his convictions rather than go along with party leaders. It is a streak that draws a mix of respect and ire.

He has been a frequent target of criticism from President Donald Trump, especially for his vote against a Republican replacement for “Obamacare.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Twitter that he was “very sad to hear this morning’s update” from McCain’s family.

“We are so fortunate to call him our friend and colleague. John, Cindy, and the entire McCain family are in our prayers at this incredibly difficult hour,” McConnell said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey called McCain “an American hero” who always put his country before himself.

Ducey said a “spirt of service and civility” guided McCain’s life, standing as a model for Americans regardless of political affiliation.

McCain’s wife, Cindy, tweeted: “I love my husband with all of my heart. God bless everyone who has cared for my husband along this journey.”

McCain underwent surgery in July 2017 to remove a blood clot in his brain after being diagnosed with an aggressive tumor called a glioblastoma. It’s the same type of tumor that killed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy at age 77 in 2009.

McCain rebounded quickly, however, returning to Washington and entering the Senate in late July to a standing ovation from his colleagues. In a dramatic turn, he later cast a deciding vote against the Republican health care bill, earning the wrath of Trump, who frequently cites McCain’s vote at campaign events.

McCain’s condition worsened last fall and he has been in Arizona since December.