Chris Hedges's Blog, page 456

Migrant Children Transferred to Tent Camp in Dead of Night

With detention facilities overflowing due to President Donald Trump’s monstrous immigration policies—which have sent the number of children detained by the U.S. government soaring to a record 12,800—the Trump administration is reportedly carrying out dead-of-night “mass transfers” of children from foster homes and shelters to a crowded Texas tent camp, where they have no schooling and limited access to legal services.

According to the New York Times, more than 1,600 “migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.”

The Times continued:

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

While the Tornillo tent camp was originally opened for just a short period in June to accommodate the growing number of children the Trump administration was ripping from their parents’ arms and locking up, the “pop-up city” was expanded last month to be able to hold 3,800 children.

“A reminder that the Trump administration is diverting money away from Head Start, the National Cancer Institute, the HIV/AIDS programs, maternal and child health programs, and the CDC to pay for these human rights abuses,” Melissa Boteach of the Center for American Progress pointed out, citing a recent Yahoo News report that found the White House is taking hundreds of millions of dollars from key programs to fund its mass detention and deportation policies.

Citing shelter workers who requested anonymity for fear of being fired, the Times reported on Sunday that the transfers from shelters throughout the country to the Tornillo tent camp “are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.”

“Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need,” said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women’s Refugee Commission, told the Times in an interview. “This cannot be the right solution. We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody.”

On waking children up and whisking them away on “midnight voyages” to military tent camps:

“In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because the children will be less likely to try to run away.”

Haunting.https://t.co/KmN6tuZ3pO

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) September 30, 2018

Horrific. Migrant children being moved to *tent camps* in the middle of the night. No schooling. 2018 in the richest country on Earth. https://t.co/GNZI6xGUqn

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) September 30, 2018

While the Trump administration’s mass separation and detention of immigrant families has sparked outrage at home and throughout the world, the fact that hundreds of children remain separated from their families months after the White House’s “zero tolerance” policy supposedly ended has slipped from the headlines amid the day-to-day chaos of the Trump era.

“Please remember there are 13,000 migrant children in detention. We can’t forget about them,” immigrant rights activist Julissa Arce wrote in response to the Times report.

Robert Reich: America Has Become a Nation of Bullies

As a kid I was always a head shorter than other boys, which meant I was bullied—mocked, threatened, sometimes assaulted.

Childhood bullying has been going on forever. But in recent years America has become a culture of bullying—the wealthier over the poorer, CEOs over workers, those with privilege and pedigree over those without, the whiter over the browner and blacker, men over women.

Sometimes the bullying involves physical violence. More often it entails intimidation, displays of dominance, demands for submission, or arbitrary decisions over the lives of those who feel they have no choice but to accept them.

The Kavanaugh-Ford hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27 was a window into our bullying culture.

On one side: powerful men who harass or abuse women and get away with it, privileged white men intent on entrenching their power on the Supreme Court, men vested with the power to take away a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.

On the other: women with the courage to tell what has happened to them, to demand an end to white male privilege, and to preserve and enlarge their constitutional rights.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was poised, articulate, clear and convincing. More than that, she radiated self-assured power.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, by contrast, showed himself to be a vicious partisan—a Trump-like figure who feels entitled to do and say whatever he wants, who suspects left-wing plots against him, who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, and who uses emotional bullying and intimidation to get his way.

Whatever happens to Kavanaugh, a large portion of the American public will never trust him to be impartial. Many will never believe his denials of sexual harassment. Most will continue to see him as the privileged, arrogant, self-righteous person he revealed himself to be.

Which brings us to the coming midterm election.

It’s not really a contest between Democrats or Republicans, left or right. It’s a contest between the bullies and the bullied. It’s about the power of those who are rich, white, privileged, or male—or all of the above—to threaten and intimidate those who aren’t.

And it’s about the courage of the bullied to fight back.

Donald Trump is America’s bully-in-chief. He exemplifies those who use their wealth to gain power and celebrity, harass or abuse women and get away with it, lie and violate the law with impunity, and rage against anyone who calls them on their bullying.

Trump became president by exploiting the anger of millions of white, working-class Americans who for decades have been economically bullied by corporate executives, CEOs and Wall Street.

Even as profits have ballooned and executive pay has gone into the stratosphere, workers have been hammered. Their pay has gone nowhere, their benefits have shrunk, their jobs are less secure.

Trump used this anger to build his political base, channeling the frustrations and anxieties into racism and nativism. He encouraged Americans who have been bullied to feel more powerful by bullying people with even less power: poor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, families seeking asylum.

This bullying game has been played repeatedly in history, by self-described strongmen who pretend to be tribunes of the oppressed by scapegoating the truly powerless.

Trump is no tribune of the people. He and his enablers in the Republican Party are working for the moneyed interests— the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, other corporate and Wall Street chieftains—by cutting their taxes, eliminating regulations, slashing public services, and allowing them to profit off public lands, coastal waters and privatized services.

The moneyed interests are America’s hidden bullies. They have enlarged their net worth by repressing wages (or pushing the companies they invest in to do so), and enlarged their political power through gerrymandering and suppressing votes (or pushing their political lackeys to do so).

Their capacity to bully has grown as the nation’s wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands, as the economy has become more monopolized, and as American politics has become more engulfed by big money.

It is time to fight back against the bullies. It is time to join together to reclaim economic and political power.

It begins with the midterm elections, Nov. 6.

Yale Classmate Recalls Kavanaugh as Frequent, Heavy Drinker

FBI agents interviewed one of the three women who have accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct as Republicans and Democrats quarreled over whether the bureau would have enough time and freedom to conduct a thorough investigation before a high-stakes vote on his nomination to the nation’s highest court.

The White House insisted it was not “micromanaging” the new one-week review of Kavanaugh’s background but some Democratic lawmakers claimed the White House was keeping investigators from interviewing certain witnesses. President Donald Trump, for his part, tweeted that no matter how much time and discretion the FBI was given, “it will never be enough” for Democrats trying to keep Kavanaugh off the bench.

And even as the FBI explored the past allegations that have surfaced against Kavanaugh, another Yale classmate came forward to accuse the federal appellate judge of being untruthful in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the extent of his drinking in college.

In speaking to FBI agents, Deborah Ramirez detailed her allegation that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party in the early 1980s when they were students at Yale University, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of a confidential investigation.

Kavanaugh has denied Ramirez’s allegation.

The person familiar with Ramirez’s questioning, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said she also provided investigators with the names of others who she said could corroborate her account.

But Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, has not been contacted by the FBI since Trump on Friday ordered the agency to take another look at the nominee’s background, according to a member of Ford’s team.

Kavanaugh has denied assaulting Ford.

In a statement released Sunday, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s said he is “deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale.” Charles “Chad” Ludington, who now teaches at North Carolina State University, said he was a friend of Kavanaugh’s at Yale and that Kavanaugh was “a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker.”

“On many occasions, I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” Ludington said. While saying that youthful drinking should not condemn a person for life, Ludington said he was concerned about Kavanaugh’s statements under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Speaking to the issue of the scope of the FBI’s investigation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said White House counsel Don McGahn, who is managing Kavanaugh’s nomination, “has allowed the Senate to dictate what these terms look like, and what the scope of the investigation is.”

“The White House isn’t intervening. We’re not micromanaging this process. It’s a Senate process. It has been from the beginning, and we’re letting the Senate continue to dictate what the terms look like,” Sanders said.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said the investigation will be “limited in scope” and “will not be a fishing expedition. The FBI is not tasked to do that.”

Senate Judiciary Committee member Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., requested an investigation last Friday — after he and other Republicans on the panel voted along strict party lines in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation — as a condition for his own subsequent vote to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

Another committee member, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Sunday that testimony would be taken from Ramirez and Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge, who has been named by two of three women accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.

“I think that will be the scope of it. And that should be the scope of it,” Graham said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House and the FBI to provide the written directive regarding the investigation’s scope. In a letter Sunday, she also asked for updates on any expansion of the original directive.

Sen. Susan Collins said Sunday she is confident in the investigation and “that the FBI will follow up on any leads that result from the interviews.” The Maine Republican supports the new FBI investigation and is among a few Republican and Democratic senators who have not announced a position on Kavanaugh.

Republicans control 51 seats in the closely divided 100-member Senate and cannot afford to lose more than one vote on confirmation.

Collins and Flake spoke throughout the weekend.

Senate Republicans discussed the contours of the investigation with the White House late Friday, according to a person familiar with the call who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had gathered Judiciary Committee Republicans in his office earlier. At that time, the scope of the investigation was requested by Flake, Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said McConnell’s spokesman Don Stewart.

Murkowski is not on the committee but also has not announced how she will vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Republicans later called the White House to discuss the scope of the probe, the person said.

McConnell’s office declined to elaborate Sunday on which allegations would be investigated, reiterating only that it would focus on “current credible allegations.” Stewart said the investigation’s scope “was set” by the three GOP senators Friday and “has not changed.”

But Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, a Judiciary Committee member, doubted how credible the investigation will be, given the time limit.

“That’s bad enough, but then to limit the FBI as to the scope and who they’re going to question, that,  that really, I wanted to use the word farce, but that’s not the kind of investigation that all of us are expecting the FBI to conduct,” she said.

Trump initially opposed such an investigation as allegations began mounting but relented and ordered one on Friday. He later said the FBI has “free rein.”

“They’re going to do whatever they have to do, whatever it is they do. They’ll be doing things that we have never even thought of,” Trump said Saturday as he departed the White House for a trip to West Virginia. “And hopefully at the conclusion, everything will be fine.”

He revisited the “scope” question later Saturday on Twitter, writing in part, “I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.”

Sanders said Trump, who has vigorously defended Kavanaugh but also raised the slight possibility of withdrawing the nomination should damaging information be found, “will listen to the facts.”

At least three women have accused Kavanaugh of years-ago misconduct. He denies all the claims.

The third woman, Julie Swetnick, accused Kavanaugh and Judge of excessive drinking and inappropriate treatment of women in the early 1980s, among other accusations. Kavanaugh has called her accusations a “joke.” Judge has said he “categorically” denies the allegations.

Swetnick’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, said Saturday that his client had not been contacted by the FBI but was willing to cooperate with investigators.

Ford also has said Judge was in the room when a drunken Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. Judge has said he will cooperate with any law enforcement agency that will “confidentially investigate” sexual misconduct allegations against him and Kavanaugh. Judge has also denied misconduct allegations.

Sanders spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” Conway appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Graham and Hirono were interviewed on ABC’s “This Week.”

Lynching the Past

JONESBORO, Ga.—I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil War. The building now houses the Road to Tara Museum. It has displays of “Gone With the Wind” movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by Hattie McDaniel, and the pantalettes and green hat worn by Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara.

Rick, the bus driver, switched on the audio track, written and narrated by a local historian, Peter Bonner. We listened to the familiar story of the noble South and its “Lost Cause.” We heard about the courage of the Confederate soldiers in Jonesboro who fought gallantly on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, 1864, in a failed effort to block the Union Army from entering Atlanta. We were told of the gentility and charm of the Southern belles. We learned that the war was fought not to protect the institution of slavery but the sanctity of states’ rights. Finally, we were assured that the faithful slaves, the “mammies,” “aunties” and “uncles,” loved their white owners, were loved in return and did not welcome emancipation.

That this myth persists and perhaps has grown as the country polarizes, often along racial lines, means that whole segments of the American population can no longer communicate. Once myth replaces history there is no way to have a rational discussion rooted in verifiable fact. Myth allows people to deny who they are and the crimes they committed and continue to commit. It is only by confronting the past that we can end the perpetuation of these crimes in other forms.

When loyalty to the tribe is more important that truth, fact or justice—a tribalism on display in the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—an open society is extinguished. Reparations for African-Americans are not only just, they are the only way we as a nation, as with Germany’s reparations to the Jews, can build a shared history based on truth, atone for the crimes of the nation and reverse the legacies of white supremacy. The Southern cause, as Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his laconic memoirs, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

David Blight in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” documents that in the decades after the war whites in the South and the North furiously rewrote the history of the conflict. “As long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War memory,” Blight notes. The root cause of the war, the need to emancipate 4 million people held in slavery, was erased, he said, and replaced with the “denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative of what the war was about.” As W.E.B. Du Bois lamented in his book “Black Reconstruction,” which looked at the brief postwar period, from 1865 to 1877, when African-Americans were given some political space in the South to resurrect their lives, “little effort [was] made to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, action, work and wages, homes and families. Nearly all of this has gone down beneath a mass of ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement.”

The Civil War, as portrayed in novels and films such as “Gone With the Wind,” histories such as “The Civil War” by Shelby Foote and television programs such as Ken Burns’ documentary series on the conflict, is usually reduced to stories about the heroic self-sacrifice and courage exhibited by the soldiers from the North and the South who fought as brother against brother. The gruesome suffering, widespread looting and rape and senseless slaughter are romanticized. (For every three soldiers who died on a battlefield, five more died of disease, and, overall, 620,000 Americans, 2 percent of the country’s population, perished in the war.) Meanwhile, the far more important struggle, the struggle of black people to rise from bondage to be free, is effectively eclipsed in these narratives of white self-pity and self-exaltation.

“Gone With the Wind,” the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and, according to one survey, is the second favorite book among Americans, after the Bible. The 1939 film version of the book is the highest-grossing movie ever, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The book and film are unapologetic celebrations of historical myth, historical erasure and white supremacy.

The Lost Cause romance and veneration of Confederate military leaders have a powerful hold on white imaginations, especially among those for whom economic and political marginalization is becoming more pronounced. The myth of the Confederacy resembles the retreat into a fictional past I saw in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War, an ethnic conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. That retreat gave Yugoslavs—whether Serb, Muslim or Croat—who had been cast aside by economic collapse and a failed political system manufactured identities that were rooted in a mythologized past of glory, moral superiority and nobility. It allowed them to worship their own supposedly unique and innate virtues. These fantasies of an idealized past were accompanied by the demonization of opposing ethnicities, a demonization used by demagogues to fuel the hatred and violence that led to a savage war.

“He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country,” White House chief of staff and former Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly said last year of the Confederate military commander, Robert E. Lee, a slave owner. “It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today.” Kelly blamed the Civil War on “the lack of an ability to compromise,” adding that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

During my bus ride in Georgia, a woman on the audio guide impersonated Scarlett O’Hara as music from the 1939 movie played in the background: “Now y’all sit back and enjoy this journey back into a time of cavaliers, ladies fair, and cotton fields—called the Old South.”

The theme of the tour could be summed up as “ ’Gone With the Wind’ accurately portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War.” Over and over, incidents and characters in the novel and film were related to actual events and people. Nowhere was this more pernicious than in the portrayals of black men and women who were enslaved.

“I learned that a black servant 144 years ago so loved her ‘masters’ that she requested to be buried in their family plot. … And when I learned that her masters willingly allowed such a burial request, I had to conclude that there must have been a greater bond, perhaps a loving bond of slave for master, and master for slave,” Bonner writes in his thin book “Lost in Yesterday,” which is sold in the Road to Tara Museum. “The unique and often misunderstood relationship has been presented throughout fiction and the entertainment media, in my opinion, in a multitude of unfair portrayals.”

Bonner goes on to argue that the slaves in the book and the film—Mammy, Pork, Prissy and Big Sam—all supporters of the Confederacy and loyal to the O’Hara family, represent a true picture of many, maybe most, blacks in the antebellum South. He cites the small headstone at the feet of Philip and Eleanor Fitzgerald in the local cemetery that reads “Grace, Negro servant of the Fitzgeralds” and insists “that Grace was honored as a family member.”

That Grace was given no last name on the stone and was buried, like a pet, at the feet of those who owned her seems to escape Bonner. Did Grace have a family? A mother? A father? Brothers? Sisters? Grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? Cousins? A husband? Children of her own? Or had they been sold by her beloved owners?

We stopped outside the 1839 Stately Oaks plantation house, which originally sat on 404 acres before being moved into the city. It is now part of the Margaret Mitchell Memorial Park. The mansion hosts white re-enactors in period costumes, including Confederate uniforms, the equivalent of re-enactors dressed in SS uniforms giving cheery tours of Auschwitz.

In squalid, overcrowded shacks outside Stately Oaks, children were born, lived and died enslaved. They spent a lifetime engaged in hard labor, misery and poverty. They watched in agony as mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers were sold off, never to be seen again. They lived in constant fear and humiliation. They were beaten, chained, whipped, castrated and sometimes shot or hanged. The male slave masters routinely raped black girls and women, sometimes in front of their families, and often sold their mixed-race children.

“Like the patriarchs of old,” Mary Chesnut, a white South Carolinian, confided in her diary in March 1861, “our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

The Southern tradition, as James Baldwin pointed out, “is not a tradition at all.” It is “a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.”

The ability to disregard the horror of slavery, to physically erase its reality, and to build in its place a white fantasy of goodness, courage and virtue speaks to the deep sickness within American society. Most Confederate monuments were erected under the leadership of the Daughters of the Confederacy from 1890 to 1920, a time when the terror of lynching by the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. These statues were designed to romanticize white supremacy and divide blacks into good and bad “negros.” There are no statues to Reconstruction governors and senators or black political leaders, not to mention the leaders of slave revolts such as Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey. The few Confederate generals, such as James Longstreet, who supported black rights after the war are not memorialized, nor are the 186,000 black soldiers—134,111 conscripted from slave states—who served in the Union Army. The historian James Loewen calls the South “a landscape of denial.”

“Public monuments,” the historian Eric Foner writes, “are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed.”

One of the most outrageous public celebrations of white supremacy is Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Carved in the gray stone are massive figures of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The Confederate leaders, all mounted on horses, hold their hats over their hearts. The carving covers more than 1.5 acres of rock face and rises 400 feet. It is the largest bas-relief in the world. It is also the most visited site in Georgia.

William Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom,” his searing condemnation of slavery and the Old South the same year Mitchell published “Gone With the Wind.” The hate-filled slave owner and Confederate veteran Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s novel, unlike the characters in “Gone With the Wind,” is “demonic evil.” Sutpen, who engages in miscegenation, buys his slaves “with the same care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses and mules and cattle.” Faulkner understood “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” that it is subject to constant revision by those seeking to justify and hide their crimes. He warned that the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves lead to moral squalor and self-destruction.

The tour bus stopped at Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery, which holds the remains of some 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died in the Battle of Jonesboro. Most are unidentified. The walkway is laid out in the shape of a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag flies at the entrance.

“In 1872, the state of Georgia pays Stephen Cars, a local cabinetmaker, to rebury the Southern soldiers’ remains and place them in the Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery here,” the audio recording said. “Mr. Cars did not bury over a thousand soldiers by himself. Mr. Cars had a slave named Tom who left with a Yankee captain after the Battle of Jonesboro. When the war was over, Tom returned to Mr. Cars’ house asking for his job back. It was in 1872 that Tom and Mr. Stephen Cars reburied the Confederate soldiers in this cemetery. I told this story to the state of Georgia building authority years ago, they oversee the cemetery, and they remarked that Tom was very similar to the O’Hara slave Big Sam.”

The bus paused in front of a 10-room green house built in 1880 that once belonged to the president of Middle Georgia College.

“Under Reconstruction, five Southerners were not allowed to meet together without a federal marshal present,” Bonner said on the audio guide. “In ‘Gone With the Wind,’ meetings were held in secret. In Jonesboro, there were those secret meetings that dealt with the issues the town had to deal with, including the violence in shantytown. Shantytown was a real location in Jonesboro and many other cities that had a large population of former slaves who are without a job or a home. When this house was being restored in 1995, it was found to have a secret room in the attic, believed to have been used for those secret meetings. There was also a ladder in the wall leading to the cellar. In the cellar, people believed they had found a tunnel. However, upon further research, they found out it was not a tunnel but a bomb shelter where the city fathers planned to store the county records if and when they got back to war” (meaning if and when they resumed the fight against the Union).

It is a safe bet that this house was also a meeting place for the heavily armed goons of the Ku Klux Klan, who rode four abreast at night through the Jonesboro streets to terrorize the blacks in “shantytown.” Over 4,000 people were lynched between the end of the Civil War and World War II in the United States. Georgia had the second highest number of lynchings, with 589. Only Mississippi, with 654 murders, had more.

Lynching was a popular public spectacle in Georgia that could last for hours and included sadistic torture and mutilation. Children were let out of school and workers were given the day off to witness the events. When Sam Hose, who had thrown his ax at a white man and killed him after the man pulled a gun on him, was lynched on April 23, 1899, near Newman, Ga., 1,000 people attended. Many arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Hose was stripped and chained to a tree. His executioners stacked kerosene-soaked logs around him. They cut off Hose’s ears, fingers and genitals. They flayed his face. Members of the crowd thrust knives into him. The logs were lit.

“The only sounds that came from the victim’s lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire, were ‘Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,’ ” writes Leon Litwack in “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.” “Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs, and the ‘more fortunate possessors’ made some handsome profits on the sales. (Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents, a piece of liver ‘crisply cooked’ sold for 10 cents.) Shortly after the lynching, one of the participants reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver to the governor of Georgia a slice of Sam Hose’s heart.”

On the trunk of a tree near the lynching, a placard read: “We Must Protect Our Southern Women.”

In May of 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, publicly denounced the lynching of her husband, Hazel “Hayes” Turner, who had been murdered the day before. She threatened to take those who lynched him to court. A mob of several hundred in Valdosta, Ga., hunted her down. They tied the pregnant woman’s ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her clothes with gasoline and set her on fire. Someone used a hog-butchering knife to rip open her womb. Her baby fell the ground and cried briefly. A member of the mob crushed the infant’s head under the heel of his boot. Hundreds of rounds were shot into her body. The Associated Press reported that Mary Turner had made “unwise remarks” about the lynching of her husband “and the people, in their indignation, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude.”

In commenting in 1894 on lynchings, the crusading editor and activist Ida B. Wells said, “[O]ur American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”

James Baldwin, in the second half of the 20th century, repeatedly warned white Americans that their relentless refusal to honestly confront their past, and themselves, would lead to grotesque distortions of the sort that decades later we see embodied in Donald Trump. There is a severe cost, he wrote, for a life lived as a lie.

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” Baldwin wrote. “And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.”

The first recorded lynching in Georgia took place near Jonesboro in 1880. We have only the name of the victim, Milly Thompson. No one knows if Thompson was male or female. There is no record of Thompson committing a crime. But I suspect that, as in the cases of most lynching victims, the crime Thompson committed was the crime of freedom. If you were black, in this land of gallant cavaliers and Southern belles, and you objected to being human chattel and to enforced deference and submission to whites, they killed you.

U.S., Canada Reach Deal for North American Trade

TORONTO — Canada was back in a revamped North American free trade deal with the United States and Mexico late Sunday after weeks of bitter, high-pressure negotiations that brushed up against a midnight deadline.

In a joint statement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the agreement “will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home.”

The new deal, reached just before a midnight deadline imposed by the U.S., will be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It replaces the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which President Donald Trump had called a job-killing disaster.

The agreement reached Sunday gives U.S. farmers greater access to the Canadian dairy market. But it keeps a NAFTA dispute-resolution process that the U.S. wanted to jettison and offers Canada protection if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose tariffs on cars, trucks and auto parts imported into the United States.

“It’s a good day for Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said as he left his office. Trudeau said he would have more to say Monday.

“We celebrate a trilateral deal. The door closes on trade fragmentation in the region,” Jesus Seade, trade negotiator for Mexico’s incoming president, said via Twitter.

Representatives for the government of Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have called a press conference to discuss details of the trade deal on Monday.

Canada, the United States’ No. 2 trading partner, was left out when the U.S. and Mexico reached an agreement last month to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Trump administration officially notified Congress of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement on Aug. 31. That started a 90-day clock that would let outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto sign the new pact before he leaves office Dec. 1.

Trump threatened to go ahead with a revamped NAFTA — with or without Canada. It was unclear, however, whether Trump had authority from Congress to pursue a revamped NAFTA with only Mexico.

Some lawmakers immediately expressed relief that Canada had been reinstated in the regional trading bloc. “I am pleased that the Trump administration was able to strike a deal to modernize NAFTA with both Mexico and Canada,” said Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “NAFTA is a proven success.”

NAFTA tore down most trade barriers between the United States, Canada and Mexico, leading to a surge in trade between the three countries. But Trump and other critics said it encouraged manufacturers to move south of the border to take advantage of low-wage Mexican wages, costing American jobs.

Trump campaigned on a promise to rewrite NAFTA — or get rid of it. Talks on a rewrite began more than a year ago. To placate Trump, Mexico agreed in August to provisions that would require 40 percent to 45 percent of a car be built in countries where auto workers earn at least $16 an hour to qualify for NAFTA’s duty-free benefits.

It was surprising that the United States found it easier to cut a deal with Mexico than with Canada, a longtime ally with a high-wage economy similar to America’s. “When this got started, Canada was the teacher’s pet and Mexico was the problem child,” said Michael Camunez, president of Monarch Global Strategies and former U.S. Commerce Department official.

But relations between Ottawa and Washington soured. In the aftermath of a disastrous G-7 summit in Quebec in June, Trump called Trudeau “weak” and “dishonest.”

The two countries need each other economically. Canada is by far the No. 1 destination for U.S. exports, and the U.S. market accounts for 75 percent of what Canada sells abroad.

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Wiseman reported from Washington.

Indonesia Disaster Toll Passes 800; Mass Burials Starting

PALU, Indonesia — A mass burial of earthquake and tsunami victims was being prepared for hundreds of bodies in a hard-hit city Monday as the need for heavy equipment to dig for survivors of the disaster that struck a central Indonesian island grows increasingly desperate.

The toll of more than 800 dead is largely from the city of Palu and is expected to rise as areas cut off by the damage are reached. The magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck at dusk Friday and spawned a tsunami said to have been as high as 6 meters (20 feet) in places.

Local Army Commander Tiopan Aritonang said that 545 bodies would be brought from one hospital alone, but that only some would be buried Monday. The grave being dug in Palu will be 10 meters by 100 meters (33 feet by 330 feet) and can be enlarged if needed, said Willem Rampangilei, chief of Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency.

“This must be done as soon as possible for health and religious reasons,” he said. Indonesia is majority Muslim, and religious custom calls for burials soon after death, typically within one day.

Local military spokesman Mohammad Thorir said the area adjacent to a public cemetery on a hill can hold as many as 1,000 bodies. All of the victims, coming from local hospitals, have been photographed to help families locate where their relatives were buried.

Military and commercial aircraft were delivering some aid and supplies to the region. But there was a desperate need for heavy equipment to reach possible survivors buried in collapsed buildings, including an eight-story hotel in Palu where voices were heard in the rubble.

A 25-year-old woman was found alive Sunday evening in the ruins of the Roa-Roa Hotel, according to the National Search and Rescue Agency, which released photos of the her lying on a stretcher covered in a blanket. A number of other survivors were still being found and a few were being pulled from buildings in different locations.

At least 832 people were confirmed dead as of Sunday evening, Indonesia’s disaster agency said, with nearly all of those from Palu. The regencies of Donggala, Sigi and Parigi Moutong — with a combined population of 1.2 million — had yet to be fully assessed.

“The death toll is believed to be still increasing, since many bodies were still under the wreckage, while many have not been reached,” said disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

The cries from beneath the Roa-Roa Hotel, which appeared to have toppled over with its walls splintered like pickup sticks, went silent by Sunday afternoon. Officials had estimated about 50 people could be inside.

“We are trying our best. Time is so important here to save people,” said Muhammad Syaugi, head of the national search and rescue team. “Heavy equipment is on the way.”

Metro TV showed about a dozen rescuers in orange jumpsuits climbing over debris with a stretcher carrying the body of a victim from the modest business hotel.

Other rescuers worked to try to free a 15-year-old girl trapped under concrete in her house in Palu after it collapsed on her family during the earthquake. Unable to move her legs under the rubble, Nurul Istikharah was trapped beside her dead mother and niece. Rescuers also tried to control water from a leaking pipe, fearing she would drown.

Istikharah was unconscious during part of the effort to free her, but rescuers kept talking to her to try to keep her awake. Others offered her food and water.

Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo authorized for the country to accept international help for the disaster, Thomas Lembong, chair of Indonesia’s Investment Coordinating Board, tweeted Monday morning. It wasn’t immediately clear what type of help was being authorized, but the stricken areas needed medical supplies, fuel, fresh water and experts.

It was the latest natural disaster to hit Indonesia, which is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. In December 2004, a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra island in western Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries. More recently, a powerful quake on the island of Lombok killed 505 people in August.

In Donggala, the site closest to the earthquake’s epicenter, aerial footage on Metro TV showed the sugary blond sands of beaches swept out to sea, along with some buildings. Some buildings in the town were severely damaged, with plywood walls shredded and chunks of concrete scattered on the pavement. Much of the damage, however, appeared limited to the waterfront.

Palu, which has more than 380,000 people, was strewn with debris from the earthquake and tsunami. A heavily damaged mosque was half submerged and a shopping mall was reduced to a crumpled hulk. A large bridge with yellow arches had collapsed.

The city is built around a narrow bay that apparently magnified the force of the tsunami as the waves raced into the tight inlet. Nugroho, the disaster agency spokesman, said waves were reported as high as 6 meters (20 feet) in some places.

In one devastated area in Palu, residents said dozens of people could still be buried in their homes.

“The ground rose up like a spine and suddenly fell. Many people were trapped and buried under collapsed houses. I could do nothing to help,” resident Nur Indah said, crying. “In the evening, some of them turned on their cellphones just to give a sign that they were there. But the lights were off later and the next day.”

With hundreds injured, earthquake-damaged hospitals were overwhelmed.

Nugroho said 61 foreigners were in Palu at the time of the disaster. Most were accounted for, but one South Korean was believed to be trapped in the Roa-Roa Hotel, while three others from France and one from Malaysia were missing.

Indonesia is a vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands home to 260 million people. Roads and infrastructure are poor in many areas, making access difficult in the best of conditions.

The disaster agency has said that essential aircraft can land at Palu’s airport, though AirNav, which oversees aircraft navigation, said the runway was cracked and the control tower damaged.

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Associated Press writers Margie Mason in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Stephen Wright in Makassar, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

California’s Gov. Brown Signs 7 Bills Targeting Workplace Sexual Harassment

On Sunday, nearly a year after news reports first detailed multiple allegations of sexual abuse against film producer Harvey Weinstein, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed seven bills that address sexual harassment in the workplace. The legislation also encompasses issues such as victim intimidation and retaliation as well as gender disparity. California industry groups lobbied against several measures.

The bills that Brown signed are:

S.B. 1300 by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D) prohibits companies from using non-disparagement clauses, which companies add to contracts when an employee is hired or gets a promotion. It also broadens the definition of harassment as something that will “affect the victim’s ability to perform the job as usual, or otherwise interfere with and undermine the victim’s personal sense of well-being.”
S.B. 826 by Jackson and Toni Atkins (D) requires that publicly traded corporations include women on their boards or face fines.
S.B. 820 by Sen. Connie Leyva (D) bans the use of secret settlements and non-disclosure agreements to keep victims quiet.
S.B. 1343 by Sen. Holly Mitchell (D) requires that companies with five or more employees provide sexual harassment training.
A.B. 1619 by Assemblyman Marc Berman (D) gives victims ten years — extended from three — to seek damages after a sexual assault.
S.B. 419 by Sens. Anthony Portantino (D) and Leyva is framed as whistle-blower protection. It forbids the legislature from retaliating against a lobbyist or employee who files a harassment complaint.
S.B. 224 by Jackson specifies that elected officials, lobbyists, investors, directors and producers must follow state anti-harassment guidelines.

There are other related bills waiting in limbo on Brown’s desk as well:

A.B. 1870 by Assemblywoman Eloise Gomez Reyes (D) extends the time period from one to three years that a person has to file a discrimination or harassment complaint.
A.B. 2079 by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D) would require sexual harassment training for janitorial workers.
A.B. 3080 by Gonzalez Fletcher bans forced arbitration agreements for claims about wages, harassment, retaliation and discrimination.

Adama Iwu, who has worked to expose sexual harassment in California government, and actor Rosanna Arquette, who was one of the first people to speak publicly about having been sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein, wrote in support of S.B. 1300. “The bill corrects subtle but significant flaws in our state’s sexual harassment laws. One aspect in particular targets the heart of what this movement has been about: breaking the silence,” they wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle.

“Some workers find that they have signed a ‘release of claims’ agreement that effectively stripped them of any right to pursue sexual harassment claims. Faced with this reality, we ask: What purpose do our laws serve if they can simply be signed away?” Iwu and Arquette wrote.

“California is stating clearly that we believe and support victims,” Sen. Jackson said in a statement.

Still, California industry groups have tried to stop a handful of the bills, claiming that the legislation may hurt workers.

More than 50 industry groups signed a letter in opposition to S.B. 1300, writing that they take issue with the expanded definition of harassment. “These provisions will significantly increase litigation against California employers and limit their ability to invest in their workforce,” they wrote in the letter.

According to state lobbying filings, the California Chamber of Commerce lobbied on S.B. 1300 and S.B. 820. They also lobbied against assembly bills A.B. 1870, A.B. 2079 and A.B. 3080.

“As employers, you want to protect your workforce and the employees that you have working for you,” said Jennifer Barrera of the California chamber. She said new potential mandates and litigation “is what is concerning to employers, who are trying to do the right thing but nonetheless could wind up facing a lawsuit in court.”

The California Restaurant Association, which signed the letter against S.B. 1300, lobbied on S.B. 1300, S.B. 820, and S.B. 1343. They also lobbied against anti-sexual harassment bills A.B. 1870, A.B. 2079 and A.B. 3080.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses lobbied on S.B. 1300, as well as AB 1870, AB 2079, SB 1343 and AB 3080.

John Kabateck of the National Federation of Independent Businesses wrote his opposition to the proposed ban on forced arbitration agreements: “It not only creates massive confusion for employers attempting to comply with the law, but it also creates immense opportunity for trial lawyers to sue,”

Many California workers, however, are ready for concrete change that could hold cultures of workplace abuse accountable. Mira Sorvino, one of the first women to accuse Weinstein of sexual violence, urged Brown to sign A.B. 1870, S.B. 224, S.B. 1343, S.B. 1300 and A.B. 3080.

Sorvino wrote in The Los Angeles Times: “Every time a predator is held accountable, it shows the public’s hunger to stop the gross injustices of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. But when the dust settles, will corporate culture, the entertainment industry, the political arena and religious institutions go back to business as usual — protecting their bottom lines and reputations, silencing victims, keeping abusers in play.”

California Becomes First State to Require Women on Corporate Boards

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—California has become the first state to require publicly traded companies to include women on their boards of directors, one of a series of laws boosting or protecting women that Gov. Jerry Brown signed Sunday.

The measure requires at least one female director on the board of each California-based public corporation by the end of next year. Companies would need up to three female directors by the end of 2021, depending on the number of board seats.

The Democratic governor referenced the objections and legal concerns that the law has raised. The California Chamber of Commerce has said the policy will be difficult for companies to implement and violates constitutional prohibitions against discrimination.

“I don’t minimize the potential flaws that indeed may prove fatal to its ultimate implementation,” Brown wrote in a signing statement. “Nevertheless, recent events in Washington, D.C. — and beyond — make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message.”

It is one of several measures affecting women that Brown signed Sunday, his last opportunity to approve or veto laws before the term-limited governor leaves office. He also approved legislation requiring smaller employers to provide sexual harassment training and banning secret settlements related to sexual assault and harassment.

It comes as the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct led to a reckoning nationwide that has ousted men from power. The latest high-profile allegations are against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has denied decades-old claims of sexual misconduct from three women.

The author of the California measure, SB 826, said she believes having more women in power could help reduce sexual assault and harassment in the workplace.

Having more women on corporate boards also will make companies more successful, state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson said. Women tend to be more collaborative and are better at multitasking, the Santa Barbara Democrat said.

A fourth of publicly held corporations with headquarters in California don’t have any women on their boards of directors. These companies have not done enough to increase the number of women on their boards despite the Legislature’s urging, making government intervention necessary, Jackson said.

“This is one of the last bastions of total male domination,” she said. “We know that the public and business are not being well-served by this level of discrimination.”

The California Chamber of Commerce argued that the composition of corporate boards should be determined internally, not mandated by government. The chamber said the new law will prioritize gender over other aspects of diversity, such as race and ethnicity.

“It creates a challenge for a board on achieving broader diversity goals,” said Jennifer Barrera, senior vice president for policy at the chamber.

The law applies to companies that report having their principal executive offices in California. Companies can be fined $100,000 for a first violation and $300,000 for subsequent violations.

The law also requires companies to report their board composition to the California secretary of state and imposes a $100,000 fine if a company fails to do so.

Some European countries, including Norway and France, already mandate that corporate boards include women.

Trump on Kim Jong Un: Tough Talk, ‘and Then We Fell in Love’

WHEELING, W.Va.—President Donald Trump told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally that there was once tough talk “back and forth” between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “and then we fell in love.”

Trump said at the Saturday night rally in West Virginia: “He wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”

He joked about criticism he would get from the news media for making a comment some would consider “unpresidential” and for being so positive about the North Korean leader.

“Why has President Trump given up so much?” Trump said in his mock “news anchor” voice. “I didn’t give up anything.”

He noted that Kim is interested in a second meeting after their initial meeting in Singapore in June was hailed by Trump as a big step toward denuclearization of North Korea.

But denuclearization negotiations have stalled.

More than three months after the June summit in Singapore, North Korea’s top diplomat Ri Yong Ho told world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly Saturday that the North doesn’t see a “corresponding response” from the U.S. to North Korea’s early disarmament moves. Instead, he noted, the U.S. is continuing sanctions aimed at keeping up pressure.

Trump took a much more optimistic view in his rally speech.

“We’re doing great with North Korea,” he said. “We were going to war with North Korea. Millions of people would have been killed. Now we have this great relationship.”

He said his efforts to improve relations with Kim have brought positive results — ending rocket tests, helping free hostages and getting the remains of American servicemen returned home.

And he defended his unusual approach in talking about relations with Kim.

“It’s so easy to be presidential, but instead of having 10,000 people outside trying to get into this packed arena, we’d have about 200 people standing right there,” Trump said, pointing at the crowd directly in front of him.

Scandal Keeps Swedish Academy in Nobel Prize Limelight

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—There won’t be a Nobel Prize in Literature this year but the Swedish Academy that awards the prestigious prize is still in the limelight.

Jean-Claude Arnault, a French citizen who is a major cultural figure in Sweden, is at the center of a sex abuse and financial crimes scandal that has tarnished the academy and forced it to take a year off in its deliberations.

The 72-year-old is now on trial in Stockholm, facing two counts of rape of a woman seven years ago. He has denied the charges.

A verdict in his case is expected on Monday, the same day that the 2018 Nobel Prize announcements kick off with the Karolinska Institute announcing who wins the Nobel award in physiology or medicine. The prosecutor has urged the court to sentence Arnault to three years in prison.

Yet no matter what the verdict for Arnault, the Swedish Academy itself has no guarantee that it will be allowed to keep awarding the literature prize.

Lars Heikensten, the head of the Nobel Foundation, has warned that if the Swedish Academy does not resolve its tarnished image his agency could decide that another group would be a better host. He even suggested there could be no Nobel Literature Prize awarded in 2019 either — which is counter to the academy’s current plan to award both the 2018 and the 2019 literature Nobels next year.

He told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that it was the Swedish Academy — not the Nobel Foundation — that was going through a crisis.

“The ball essentially lies on the Swedish Academy’s court,” he said.

The allegations against Arnault, who ran a major cultural group in Sweden that was closely tied to the Swedish Academy, began in November 2017 when 18 women came forward in a Swedish newspaper with abuse accusations against him.

Arnault is married to a Swedish Academy member, poet Katarina Frostenson, who quit the body in April as tensions escalated.

That month the Swedish Academy said an internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations found that “unacceptable behavior in the form of unwanted intimacy” had taken place within the ranks of the prestigious institution.

But a fierce internal debate over how to face up to the academy’s flaws in responding to the misconduct divided its 18 members — who are appointed for life — into hostile camps. Several members either left or disassociated themselves from the secretive academy.

The first woman to lead the body, Sara Danius, also quit in April, leading observers to wonder why some of Sweden’s most accomplished women appeared to the taking the fall for a man’s alleged misconduct.

Many people in the Scandinavian nation, which is known for promoting gender equality, have expressed dismay over the scandal, which has led to accusations of patriarchal leanings among some academy members.

In May, the Swedish Academy postponed the 2018 prize with the intention of awarding it in 2019.

The academy’s internal probe eventually led to a police investigation and the trial of Arnault before the Stockholm District Court.

Arnault also has been suspected of violating century-old Nobel rules by leaking the names of award winners — allegedly seven times, starting in 1996. It remains unclear to whom the names were leaked and it’s not known whether that has been investigated.

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Jari Tanner contributed from Helsinki.