YCLOAK

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Thursday that Washington wants more trade and investment with Latin America, pushing back against perceptions in the region that the Trump administration has an isolationist agenda.

Speaking during a visit to the Panama Canal at the end of a Latin American tour, Pence said the United States was seeking to keep the spirit of the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the pact now being renegotiated in Washington.

Pence said he wanted a NAFTA deal that was a “win, win, win” for the United States, Mexico and Canada, taking a more conciliatory tone than U.S. negotiators who have warned the deal needed a major overhaul to favor U.S. workers.

Pence later reiterated the United States’ concerns about the tense political situation in Venezuela, but took a more measured approach than U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last week, Trump said the United States had “many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

Pence said on Thursday that Venezuela was becoming a dictatorship and that the United States would not stand by while it was destroyed.

He said he was sure the United States, with its allies in Latin America, would find a peaceful solution to the situation in Venezuela.

Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela voiced concern over Venezuela and said that Panama would in the coming days announce measures against it, including immigration actions, to pressure Caracas into restoring democratic order.
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At CareerLink, the state job agency in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, custodial worker and former welder Glenn Hendrickson was looking to change careers. Hendrickson was just beginning his search for a new line of work and he did not yet know what would pique his interest.

But he for sure wasn’t interested in farm work, except as a last resort.

“I’ve had a lot of friends who have had summer jobs, like when they were in high school, picking fruit but I doubt anyone would make a career out of it,” he said.

According to local farm sector employers, most workers are paid well above Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Crew chiefs and foremen on some orchards earn close to $19 per hour. Yet few native-born Americans are willing to do this work, even if unemployed says Alan Dudley, administrator of the Gettysburg CareerLink office.

“The work is difficult, especially in the fields, and it’s not necessarily unskilled work,” he said. “Orchard owners want skilled people to harvest apples so they get the best return on their crop.”

Adams County’s farms, orchards, and processing plants are where the jobs are. The so-called “fruit belt” of vast peach and apple orchards extends across the region’s rolling green hills, along with the packing and processing companies and other agricultural-related businesses.

Tourism, with the 3 million visitors drawn annually to the historic Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, is the other main economic generator.

Adams County’s $580-million fruit industry depends heavily on immigrant labor, which is why the country may be facing an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Businesses in the agricultural-based economy are experiencing labor shortages, and orchard owners are bracing for the possibility of not having enough workers for the fall harvest.

Fleeing workforce

Last month, six Hispanic employees of a county fruit-packing company, which does not want to be identified, were picked up by local police and turned over to immigration agents, who sent them to a detention facility. These and other detentions have had a chilling effect on the county’s Hispanic residents, who make up 6.5 percent of the population of some 100,000 people.

Yet because of the immigration crackdown, workers are not showing up or in some instances, have fled. The local plant of Hillandale Farms, a major national egg producer and distributor, was desperately seeking to fill vacant jobs this summer, according to a company official, because much of its Hispanic work force had disappeared.

As the autumn harvest approaches, the demand for labor is accelerating, Dudley says, not just in the orchards but also in the fruit processing and other agriculture-related industries.

“So they’re coming into their busy hiring season right now. For instance, Knouse Foods just last week posted about eight new positions on our job search website.”

‘No roving checkpoints’

Adams County voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election.

At the Latimore Valley fair in June, which attracted several thousand people to watch antique car races, trucking company secretary Kim Sanders expressed strong support for President Trump’s policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

But, echoing the views of others at the fair who were asked the same question, Sanders wants the law-abiding undocumented immigrants to be able to stay.

“I hate to say it but there are not enough American people to go out and work on a farm, or do planting and pick vegetables like they will,” she said.

Republican Congressman Scott Perry, whose district includes Adams County, has heard the concerns of orchard owners and other businesses in the fruit industry. Perry told VOA his message to them is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has assured him nothing has changed in its enforcement actions.

“There’s not like roving checkpoints,” he said. “They’re targeted enforcement.”

But ICE has changed its policies somewhat. Acting-ICE chief Tom Homan told reporters at the White House last month that “…no populations are off the table. So non-criminals, those who have got a court order from a judge that refuse to leave, we’re looking for.”

Under the last two years of the previous Obama administration, non-criminals were not a priority and were often let go if detained.

Growers such as Kay Hollabaugh are running out of patience. She met last month with Congressman Perry and local lawmakers to express her concerns about the future of the Adams County fruit belt if the immigrant labor force is driven out.

“Those people who are making the laws of our land, eat every day,” she said. “If we could simply stop producing food for a month – OK, no food, no food – I think perhaps that would make some bells go off.”

Ripening fruit

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has galvanized activists in Adams County to press for immigration reform and to lobby local lawmakers to vote against measures that would target immigrant communities.

Jenny Dumont, a Spanish professor at Gettysburg College who leads the immigration lobbying effort for a grassroots group called “Gettysburg Rising, blames the Trump administration’s rhetoric for creating unwarranted fears about the undocumented.

“It’s pretty well documented that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans,” Dumont said. “My sense is that people, if they’ve had contact with immigrants here, that they understand the contributions that they make, they’re able to see them as people not just the label immigrant, the other.”

But Congressman Perry said the border would have to be secured before Americans would agree to any immigration reform measure.

“If you just seal the border without doing some of these other reforms, we’re going to have problems from a business standpoint as well, and I think they get that but again there’s this mistrust,” he said. “They want to see action not words,” the congressman said referring to border security.

As the push and pull over immigration policy plays out, farmers may get some relief as the federal government issues more visas for temporary agricultural workers, mainly from Mexico. The U.S. Labor Department has issued 20 percent more H-2A visas in 2017, compared to last year. Those visas are for seasonal agricultural work, such as harvesting berries, fruit or other crops.

But the visas require require farmers to demonstrate that no Americans will take the jobs they offer. In the meantime, the apple crop is ripening on the trees in Adams County. With harvesting about to begin in less than a month, orchard owners are not sure if enough workers will show up.

Kay Hollabaugh repeated what a top executive of a major food processor told her recently: “’If fruit goes, the Adams County economy falls and we’re out of business.’”
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Here’s how much hope and expectation has been built into the stock market: Big companies are healthy and making fatter profits than Wall Street expected, yet it’s barely enough to keep the market from falling.

Consider Home Depot, which gave an earnings report on Tuesday that was seemingly fantastic. The retailer made more in profit from May through July than in any other quarter in its history, and its 14 percent rise in earnings per share was stronger than analysts expected. Home Depot at the same time raised its profit forecast for this year and reported higher revenue than Wall Street forecast, all of which should be kibble for investors ravenously looking for growth.

Even still, Home Depot’s stock slid 2.7 percent after the report.

That reaction hasn’t been too far off the norm recently, as companies have lined up to report how much they earned during the spring.

Very solid quarter

Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are on pace to report one of their strongest quarters in years. Earnings per share were likely up more than 10 percent from a year earlier, better than the 7 percent that analysts had penciled in when the quarter ended, according to FactSet.

Despite those gains, S&P 500 index funds are nearly exactly where they were before the heart of earnings reporting season began in mid-July.

“Equity markets have greeted positive earnings reports largely with indifference,” strategists at BlackRock wrote in a recent report. “Investor sentiment shows more signs of fatigue than euphoria, even as stock markets have repeatedly reached new heights this year.”

Usually, when a company reports better earnings than analysts expected, it sends the stock higher, at least for a day. Since 2006, such companies have typically done 1.14 percentage points better than the S&P 500 the day following a report’s release, according to Goldman Sachs. But through mid-August of this reporting season, the performance edge has been virtually nil at 0.03 percentage point. That’s the lowest level in at least a decade.

When a company has reported better-than-expected earnings but fallen short of forecasts for revenue, its stock has tended to do worse than the rest of the S&P 500, according to BlackRock. And when a company has missed on both measures? Much worse.

Surprising?

At first blush, such a reaction may be surprising. Stock prices can move up and down for many reasons in the short term: whatever the president is tweeting about, what central banks in far-flung corners of the world are doing or the latest change some hedge fund has made to its trading algorithm. But over the long term, stock prices tend to track closely with corporate profits. When companies are making more money, investors are willing to pay more for each of their shares.

This time may be different because stock prices had already climbed so much in anticipation of higher profits ahead. Even when profits were falling early last year, the S&P 500 index was still holding steady or rising.

One of the main ways analysts use to measure whether stocks are expensive is to compare their price to corporate profits. The S&P 500 is now trading at 20.7 times how much its companies have earned over the last 12 months, according to FactSet. That’s more expensive than its median price-earnings ratio of 15.6 over the last decade.

Now that strong profit growth has returned, it may be mere validation for the gains S&P 500 index funds have already made. And if corporate profits continue to rise faster than stock prices, they’ll look less expensive.

With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, many analysts expect the market’s price-earnings ratio to creep lower from its lofty heights. At the least, many are telling investors to expect the stock market to rise no faster than corporate earnings.

More growth seen

The good news is that Wall Street is expecting profit growth to continue in the second half of this year, though maybe at a slower rate.

Some of the biggest profit gains this year have been coming from companies that do lots of business overseas. That’s because, despite Washington’s push for “America first” policies, companies are seeing some of the strongest growth in markets like Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

In part, it’s because those markets are finally accelerating out of the doldrums they’ve been stuck in for years. The sinking value of the dollar is also helping, because it makes each euro or Mexican peso of sales worth more in dollars than before.

When Ecolab, a company that gets nearly half its revenue from abroad, reported its quarterly results on August 1, it told analysts that global economies in general looked “OK to good” and that it was anticipating a very solid 2017. The company, which provides water, hygiene and other services, reported both earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations for the quarter. Its stock fell 0.2 percent that day.
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Maribel Resendiz and her husband came to the U.S. from Mexico, sold cool drinks to workers in the tomato fields of South Florida and eventually opened a bustling shop in a strip mall offering fruit smoothies and tacos. Now she is preparing for the possibility she’ll have to leave it all behind.

Resendiz, who is not a legal U.S. resident, recently turned over control of the business in Florida City to her daughter, a citizen. The once-proud shop owner is so afraid of deportation these days that on a recent morning she was keeping out of sight of customers while her husband was not there at all.

“I am afraid the police will stop me, call immigration, and they will take me away to Mexico,” Resendiz said while cutting fruit for smoothies.

The couple, who came to the United States in 1992 and have not become legal residents, are among a growing number of business owners with the same status who are scrambling to get their affairs in order amid a crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump.

As many as 10 percent of the 11 million or so immigrants in the United States without legal residency own businesses in the country by some estimates, and many are selling their enterprises, transferring them to relatives or closing altogether to avoid a total loss if they are abruptly deported.

They include people like Mauro Hernandez, a native of Mexico who operates a small chicken takeout and delivery restaurant along immigrant-heavy Roosevelt Avenue in the borough of Queens in New York City. He is now trying to sell.

No hope left

There is Carmen and Jorge Tume, a couple from Peru, who have scaled back their mobile car wash business in Miami because they are so afraid of getting stopped by police and turned over to immigration.

“We don’t have any hope left,” said Carmen Tume, 50. “Everything we built is coming down.”

Hernandez, whose business was registered in the name of a friend who is a legal resident, said he is selling because he doesn’t want his partner to get stuck with it if he is deported.

“Since Trump won, I have been very nervous,” he said.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many are taking such measures, but Jorge Rivera, a lawyer who advises immigrant clients in California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, Texas and other states, sees a clear trend.

“Everyone is taking precautions,” Rivera said. “They don’t want their business to disappear overnight and be left with nothing.”

Several other business owners interviewed by The Associated Press shared similar stories on condition that their names and identifying details not be disclosed, not wanting to alert immigration authorities.

They included a 40-year-old from Mexico who runs a marketing firm in Los Angeles that he said employs 50 people and has annual revenues of about $5 million. He’s making plans to transfer it to relatives who are citizens and move with his family to Spain.

Those selling often see no choice but to take a loss. Under Trump, detentions of immigrants in the country illegally rose 37 percent over the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2016. The administration says it is focused on those with criminal records, but the number of detainees who do not have a criminal history has more than doubled.

Billions in taxes

The businesses in question range widely from one-person cleaning services to restaurants and other operations that employ dozens of people. While hard figures on this hidden part of the economy don’t exist, the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates immigrants in the country without permission contribute $11.7 billion annually in state, local and federal taxes.

People without legal residency can obtain an individual taxpayer identification number and an employer identification number, enabling them to open bank accounts and operate businesses among other things.

Despite the boon for government coffers, advocates for controlling illegal immigration argue that the costs outweigh any benefits and that U.S. law should be enforced.

“They are trying to keep their ill-gotten gains, and the U.S. government should not allow illegal immigrants to own properties or businesses nor transfer them,” said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said it’s incumbent on business owners without legal residency to prepare for the worst: “If they want their business to survive, they are going to have to put a plan in place.”

For Resendiz that meant handing over legal and financial control of the juice store in Florida City, which lies at the southernmost edge of Miami sprawl where strip malls fade into farms and nearby Everglades National Park produces a clientele of thirsty tourists. It has been thanks to that business the family gets by without government assistance, she said.

“I don’t receive food stamps or Medicaid. … I pay my taxes,” Resendiz said. “I don’t live off the government and don’t ask them for anything.”

She said she and her husband never tried to become citizens because they didn’t feel it was necessary — until Trump was elected president. She has since applied and is awaiting a response, nervous over the possibility of having to return to a homeland she left 25 years ago and now barely knows.

“My dreams became my reality because I had my own business,” she said. “Now, I have nothing in my name.”
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A rural county in Pennsylvania is facing the consequences of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, as businesses in the agricultural-based economy experience labor shortages. Some orchard owners and local pro-immigrant activists are lobbying state and federal lawmakers to raise awareness of the contributions by immigrants in a county that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in November. Bill Rodgers has this report on what is happening in Adams County, Pennsylvania.
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After many false starts, plans to resurrect a railway in Pakistan’s teeming metropolis of Karachi are moving ahead with the help of Chinese cash. Not everyone is happy.

The Chinese-funded $2 billion project to revive Karachi Circular Railways (KRC), nearly two decades since it was shut down, has been touted as a way to ease pollution and chronic congestion in the port city of 20 million people.

It is also viewed with suspicion by Pakistanis who have built homes and businesses along the 43-km route connecting Karachi’s sprawling suburbs with the industrial and commercial areas of the megacity.

In April, a push to remove shanty towns near the rubbish-strewn railway track was met with violence as residents clashed with police and set fire to machinery used for demolishing homes.

Officials say nearly 5,000 houses and 7,650 other encroaching structures have been erected along the route of the old KRC, which closed in 1999 after 29 years of shunting passengers across the sweltering city.

Three-wheel auto-rickshaws and mini-buses, often cramped and with no air conditioning, have filled the transport gap on Karachi’s streets despite grumbling from commuters.

Work on the new KRC is scheduled to begin later this year, with financing from the $57 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, part of Beijing’s wider Belt and Road initiative to build trade routes from Asia to Europe and Africa. Beijing’s cash is building motorways and power plants to alleviate Pakistan’s energy shortages, but Karachiites hope it could also modernize their city at a time when traffic appears to be spiraling out of control.

“Let’s hope under CPEC, KCR is revived and people will get an alternate to miserably public transport,” said Manzoor Ahmed Razi, chairman of the Railway Workers Union.
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Brazilian prosecutors plan to investigate last year’s controversial sale of the Argentine subsidiary of Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, a lawyer representing some Petrobras shareholders said on Wednesday.

Petrobras, formally known as Petroleo Brasileiro SA , sold its 67.2 percent stake in Petrobras Argentina SA for $892 million to Pampa Energia SA, Argentina’s largest power company.

The sale has already drawn scrutiny from Brazil’s Congress and a federal audit court, and lawyer Felipe Caldeira said prosecutors were now looking into it as part of Brazil’s sweeping “Car Wash” anti-corruption investigation.

Caldeira, representing a group of minority Petrobras shareholders, told Reuters he spoke on Tuesday to prosecutors on a task force in Curitiba leading the Car Wash probe and gave them information on the sale.

“They are very interested and will investigate this,” said Caldeira, who filed a civil case in a Rio de Janeiro court in May alleging that the sale fetched a below-market price and was harmful to the interests of minority shareholders.

Federal prosecutors in Curitiba said the task force had not met with Caldeira but said that any relevant information about the case would be studied.

Petrobras bought the Argentine unit from energy conglomerate Perez Companc in 2002 for $1 billion, plus $2 billion in debt.

The sale 14 years later for much less sparked controversy in Brazil and led lawmakers to call on Petrobras and Pampa executives, and lawyer Caldeira, to testify before a committee hearing on Wednesday.

The controversy has grown since, Aldemir Bendine, chief executive officer of Petrobras at the time of the sale, was jailed last month on suspicion he received bribes from construction conglomerate Odebrecht in a political graft scandal that has led to the arrest of dozens of executives and politicians.

Pampa’s executive vice president and legal director Diego Salaverri told the committee the sale was transparent and competitive and his company made the best offer that was a “fair” price in a depressed market.

Oil prices had dropped drastically from $100 to $30 and a climate of uncertainty prevailed in Argentina, which had currency controls and a ban on remittances, he said.

Petrobras’ legal manager for acquisitions and divestment, Claudia Zacour, told the committee the sale of Petrobras Argentina was part of the Brazilian oil company’s divestment plan to reduce debt and focus on core activities.

The net positive result for Petrobras of owning and selling the Argentine unit was $1.6 billion when taking into account intercompany loans, the sale of some of its assets and the distribution of dividends, Zacour said.

Brazil’s federal audit court has said it was investigating the sale of Petrobras Argentina at the request of a senator but has not concluded its findings.

In response to Caldeira’s lawsuit, a federal judge in Rio de Janeiro sent Argentine authorities a request that the chairman of Pampa Energia, Marcos Marcelo Mindlin, testify in the case.

With a majority stake, Pampa SA, Mindlin’s holding company, continued its takeover of Petrobras Argentina in November by acquiring 11.85 percent held by the Argentine state pension system ANSES.

The transaction is being investigated by Argentine judge Claudio Bonadio, who ordered the search and seizure of documents from government offices in May in a case brought by center-left lawmaker Victoria Donda.

“The fund’s shares were sold very cheap, and we want to know why, because thousands of pensioners lost money,” Donda told Reuters in Brasilia, where she traveled to attend Wednesday’s hearing.
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Scorched by a 10-month drought that has killed crops and reduced residents to buying trucked-in water, Adigama’s young people are voting with their feet.

At least 150 youth have left this agricultural village 170 kilometers northwest of Sri Lanka’s capital since the drought began, looking for jobs in the country’s cities, or overseas, village officials say.

Few are expected to come back, even when the rains end.

“If they get the lowest-paying job overseas, or in a garment factory, they will not return,” Sisira Kumara, the main government administrative officer in the village of 416 families, said as he walked through a dried and long-abandoned maize plot. “They will work at construction sites or as office helpers — anything they can get their hands on.”

W.M. Suranga, 23, who left his family’s withering rice paddy six months ago for Colombo, said working for low wages in the city is preferable to struggling with no rain at home.

“At least I am sure of a paycheck at the end of the month. This uncertainly of depending on the rains is too much of a risk,” he said.

As Sri Lanka struggles with its worst drought in 40 years, farmers in the hardest-hit areas are migrating for work — with some wondering whether farming remains a viable career as climate change brings more frequent extreme weather.

“There is no income here. All the crops have failed in the last four seasons,” Kumara said.

Little to harvest for a year

Paddy rice and vegetables are usually the main source of income in Adigama. But since the last big rains in July 2016, there has been little to no harvest.

Older villagers like Rajakaruna Amaradasa, 55, say that at their age they don’t have the option of looking outside the village for a new life.

After four decades of harvesting rice and herding cattle, he abandoned his paddy fields earlier this year when his harvest failed, and now spends his days moving his cattle around, looking for scarce water.

“It will take us another two to three harvests to recover our losses and pay off any debt. Even then it all depends on the rain,” Amaradasa said.

With average rains, Amaradasa said he used to make between 30,000 and 40,000 rupees a month ($200-$260). Now his income has fallen to a third of that, he said.

Sri Lanka’s drought, which by mid-August had affected 19 of the island’s 25 districts, has particularly devastated arid regions that lie outside the country’s wet western plains and mountains.

A joint report by the World Food Program and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, released in mid-June, classified the drought as worst in 40 years.

It predicted rice production this year in Sri Lanka would be almost 40 percent less than last year, and 35 percent lower than the five-year average. That amounts to the lowest harvest since 2004, it said.

Climate change

It also warned that Sri Lanka “is highly susceptible to climate change, and therefore the frequency of the weather hazards will likely increase as the earth warms.”

The impact on Sri Lanka’s economy is also likely to be substantial, with more than a quarter of the country’s labor force working in agriculture, a sector that contributes 8 percent of gross domestic product, the report said.

The situation is worst in villages like Adigama that rely almost entirely on rain to grow crops.

Suranga, the Adigama youth now working in Colombo, said he has no plans to return home. Instead he dreams of traveling to the Middle East as a construction worker.

“What is the guarantee there will be no more droughts or floods?” he asked. “When my father was my age, maybe the rains were much more predictable. Now only a fool will bet on the rains.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump continues to face a barrage of criticism for his contention that both white supremacists and counterprotesters were to blame for the deadly violence that erupted last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On Wednesday, the president announced that he had dissolved two business advisory committees made up of top American corporate executives, after at least seven CEOs announced they were resigning from the councils because of his remarks.

Trump said that “rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople … I am ending both. Thank you all!” A day ago, Trump had branded those quitting the panels as “grandstanders” and said they could be easily replaced with more corporate chieftains.

In announcing her resignation from Trump’s manufacturing jobs initiative before he disbanded it, Campbell’s Soup CEO Denise Morrison said, “Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottestville. I believe the president should have been — and still needs to be — unambiguous on that point.”

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters in Washington, D.C., that he condemns the “hate and violence” displayed on Saturday in Charlottesville, adding, “There is just simply no place for that in our public discourse.”

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking at an event in Miami, Florida, said, “In no way can we accept [or] apologize for racism, bigotry, hatred, violence, and those kind of things that too often arise in our country.”

Also Wednesday, two former U.S. presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, the last two Republicans elected to the White House before Trump, said in a joint statement, “America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms.”

The two former presidents added, “As we pray for Charlottesville, we are reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city’s most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights,” a reference to Thomas Jefferson, one of the country’s Founding Fathers. “We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country.”

President Trump’s remarks have been roundly criticized by a broad range of U.S. leaders, including top Republican party officials and business executives.  U.S. military commanders spoke out against racism following the death in Charlottesville.

As the violence unfolded last Saturday, Trump initially blamed it on “many sides.” By Monday, he condemned the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the racist Ku Klux Klan for their role in the unrest.

But on Tuesday, at a news conference in his Trump Tower skyscraper in New York, Trump reverted to his initial assessment of the violence that killed one woman and wounded 19 others when a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

“I think there’s blame on both sides,” Trump said. “You look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it.” He said there were “fine people” among the white nationalists and counterprotesters at the rally 160 kilometers southwest of Washington.

David Duke, the one-time Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, immediately praised Trump’s remarks, saying, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists.”

U.S., global reaction

But key Republicans took immediate offense at Trump’s contention there was equivalency in who was to blame for the hours of street violence, as demonstrators squared off with makeshift clubs, engaged in fist fights, and fired bursts of chemical irritants at each other.

The leader of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan, said, “We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

Senator Marco Rubio, defeated last year by Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said, “Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame.”

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who also lost to Trump in 2016, said, “The president of the United States needs to condemn these kind of hate groups. This is about the fact that now these folks are apparently going to go other places and they think that they had some sort of a victory.

“There is no moral equivalency between the KKK, the neo-Nazis, and anybody else,” Kasich said. “Anybody else is not the issue. These folks went there to disrupt.”

The Senate Democratic leader, Senator Charles Schumer, said, “When David Duke and white supremacists cheer your remarks, you’re doing it very, very wrong. Great and good American presidents seek to unite, not divide. Donald Trump’s remarks clearly show he is not one of them.”

Trump’s remarks also drew a rebuke from an ally, British Prime Minister Theresa May.

May said, “I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them. I think it is important for all those in positions of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them.”

Earlier this week, the German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the white nationalists at the rally. Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said “there was outrageous racism, anti-Semitism and hate in its most despicable form to be seen, and whenever it comes to such speech or such images it is repugnant.”

He said the rally was “completely contrary to what the chancellor and the German government works for politically, and we are in solidarity with those who stand peacefully against such aggressive extreme-right opinions.”
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