Rev. Raphael Warnock considers vote sacred as pastor and Senate candidate

Warnock is promoting his plans to address issues of the poor that he recalls from his days growing up as the 11th of 12 children of Pentecostal preachers in public housing in Savannah.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock has adopted a VOTE mask he uses when out talking with the community. Image courtesy of Rev. Warnock Flickr November 13, 2020

By Adelle M. Banks

(RNS) — Many clergy, having risen to occupy the pulpit once held by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, “Daddy King,” might consider their careers made and not look beyond the Kings’ historic, 6,000-member Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Many a politician, closing in on taking the top spot in a wide-open primary for a U.S. Senate seat, might take a few days before Election Day off from work to campaign.

Then there is the Rev. Raphael Warnock. In the days before Georgia voters gave Warnock, a Democrat, a seven-point victory and sent him into a runoff with GOP incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the pastor found time to participate in Ebenezer’s virtual worship services. In the prerecorded services, he immediately began cajoling viewers to get on social media to invite others to tune in.

“Maybe start a watch party,” he suggested, before making an announcement about free COVID-19 tests available on the church’s campus.

Warnock appeared online at his pulpit the following Sunday, looking crisp but relaxed behind “this sacred desk.” His runoff campaign was already underway, but he exuded the same ease he has shown over months of hard campaigning. (Inoculating himself against the kind of mudslinging Loeffler engaged in with her closest Republican rival, Doug Collins, in the primary, Warnock ran a parody negative ad against himself last week in which he admitted loving puppies.)

If the bald, bespectacled 51-year-old is conflicted about choosing between his prestigious pulpit or becoming Georgia’s first-ever African American senator, he doesn’t show it. Despite a direct question sent to his campaign by email, he hasn’t even made clear whether he will quit the job he has held since 2005 if he goes to Washington.

“It’s unusual for a pastor to get involved in something as messy as politics, but I see this as a continuation of a life of service: first as an agitator, then an advocate, and hopefully next as a legislator,” Warnock responded to Religion News Service on Wednesday through his campaign. “I say I’m stepping up to my next calling to serve, not stepping down from the pulpit.”

RELATED: Raphael Warnock, heir to MLK’s pulpit, heads for runoff for Georgia Senate seat

Indeed, it’s not always clear which role Warnock is inhabiting, pastor or politician. In church and on the campaign trail, he has compared voting to praying with stump-speech familiarity.

“We must vote because a vote is a kind of prayer about the kind of world that you want to live in,” he said at a Nov. 2 Democratic campaign rally in Atlanta before former President Obama took the stage.

Obama, who has spoken at Ebenezer, most recently at the funeral of U.S. Rep. John Lewis in July, praised Warnock at the rally for his 2014 arrest at a protest to expand Medicaid in Georgia.

Political and social engagement naturally comes with the pastor’s role at Ebenezer.

“King was deeply concerned about the issues facing everyday people,” said Marla Frederick, professor of religion and culture at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, recalling how the civil rights leader was assassinated as he made plans to march with sanitation workers seeking better wages.

“It’s the concerns about everyday people: living wages, access to health care, access to a good education, access to the democratic process, making sure that the democratic process is fair,” said Frederick. “Those are the types of things that King fought for. Those are the same types of things that Raphael Warnock wants to fight for in the Senate.”

These issues didn’t come to Warnock solely as part of King’s legacy but from his own experience as the 11th of 12 children of Pentecostal preachers, growing up in public housing in Savannah. He attended Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, starting on what Warnock called a “full faith scholarship” because he didn’t have sufficient funds. He then earned a master of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1994.

As he pursued a doctoral degree, he served 10 years as a youth pastor and assistant minister at Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of New York’s most prominent Black churches, under Abyssinian’s longtime outspoken pastor, Calvin Butts. In 2001 he was called to lead Douglas Memorial Community Church, a 700-member congregation in West Baltimore. At 32, he urged the area’s clergy to be tested for AIDS to help remove its stigma and set a social justice agenda that included advocating for education.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock. Image courtesy of Rev. Warnock Flickr

At Ebenezer he has continued to pursue the problems that plague Black communities. A past social justice chair for the Progressive National Baptist Convention, he has represented the denomination in supporting Black farmers, advocating for prison reform and opposing Trump administration efforts to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits explicit partisan activity by houses of worship.

On Juneteenth of 2019, Warnock and a group of interfaith partners launched the Multifaith Initiative to End Mass Incarceration in New York and Georgia. It is now expanding in other states.

“I believe that criminal justice is one of the unique areas where people on both sides of the aisle agree reform is desperately needed,” Warnock said.

Asked how he might help heal the country’s political and racial divisions, Warnock said his campaign was founded with a promise of “shared destiny” and unity.

“From day one, my campaign has been about representing all Georgians in the U.S. Senate, and that’s the kind of Senator I will be working with the Biden-Harris administration,” he told RNS. “We’re going to help our country live up to the highest meaning of its creed: equal protection under the law where everybody’s protected, where all of our children feel safe.”

An ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has tried to frame its goals as moral, not political. Since the pandemic closed his church, Warnock has opened the building to the public rarely, including for Lewis’ funeral and for that of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man fatally shot by a white Atlanta police officer. “Black Lives Matter is just a way of saying ‘see our humanity,'” he told those in attendance.

If he has gotten pushback for his progressive positions, said Justin Giboney, president of the AND Campaign, a nonpartisan think tank that promotes Christian civic engagement, it is from Georgia’s Black clergy. Some of his colleagues in the state, Giboney has heard, were disappointed that Warnock hasn’t challenged the Democrats’ broad support of abortion rights.

“I think if you talk to a lot of Black Christians there would be some distinction there,” Giboney said. “I think there would have been more pushback but for the Trump factor.”

Warnock, who has been endorsed by NARAL and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, pointed to his “lifelong work to protect and uplift human dignity,” including protecting women and families, and the racial divide in rates of maternal and infant mortality. “Black women are three times more likely to die as a result of childbirth,” he said. “People with any moral bearing should be deeply disturbed by that disparity.”

RELATED: Ebenezer pastor Raphael Warnock enters US Senate race

He also told RNS he wants to see the Senate pass the Equality Act, which features broad protections for the LGBTQ community with few exceptions for churches, charities and schools that object to same-sex marriage and homosexuality on religious grounds.

“Equality is a covenant that we share as Americans,” he said. “There is no such thing as equal rights for some.”

Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks to a crowd in Philadelphia after a Progressive National Baptist Convention march to the Liberty Bell. Warnock is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Image courtesy of Gandhi Pinder

The Rev. T. DeWitt Smith, a former Progressive National Baptist Convention president, said Warnock’s stances on living wages, decent housing and voting rights will ensure that he will unite fellow clergy and his base alike. “I don’t think he would fumble the ball,” said Smith.

With Republicans’ options reduced to one candidate, Warnock now faces a tough battle in a state that gave Joe Biden an initial victory so narrow it has gone to a recount. And the negative campaigning has begun — Loeffler has raised an incident from 2002 when authorities accused Warnock of obstructing a child abuse investigation at a church camp. (“Law enforcement officials later apologized and praised him for his help in this investigation,” Warnock’s campaign told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week.)

As he headed to the runoff at the end of Election Day, Warnock expressed confidence in brighter days ahead — for his campaign and his state.

“Let us stick together, push through this dark night into the daybreak of a brand-new season,” he said. “The Bible tells us that ‘the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.’”

‘Not All Pastors Do That’: How Rev. Raphael Warnock’s Used His Pulpit to Fight AIDS
Sam Brodey, Scott Bixby DAILY BEAST

“We don’t like to talk about these things in church,” the Rev. Raphael Warnock cautioned the congregation at Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in March 2010, but “I’m very convinced that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be focused on the issue of HIV/AIDS.”

© Provided by The Daily Beast Getty

He then stepped back from the pulpit, sat down at a nearby table, and in front of the church’s 1,700 congregants, swabbed his gums to take a rapid OraQuick HIV test.

As Warnock campaigns in a historic U.S. Senate runoff amid the dark winter of the coronavirus pandemic, he has made addressing the virus—and its disproportionate effect on Georgia’s Black communities—a centerpiece of his run. But the 43-year-old Democrat has dedicated much of his life as a pastor and social justice activist to combatting another epidemic that has uniquely harmed Black Americans: HIV/AIDS.

“Not all pastors do that,” said James Curran, a professor of epidemiology and an HIV/AIDS expert at Emory University in Atlanta. “Early on, it was a very controversial topic in churches—that’s true in Black churches, white churches, evangelical churches, Catholic churches.”

Many churches didn’t want to touch the topic, Curran told The Daily Beast—or if they did, “they wanted to accept the sinner but not forgive the sin.”

As the respected pastor of one of the nation’s most revered Black churches—whose pulpit King preached from—Warnock has been in a unique position to fight what he frequently calls “the unholy trinity” of silence, shame, and stigma surrounding the virus. And he has taken on that project in a city where HIV/AIDS infection remains dangerously higher than elsewhere in the U.S.

Warnock’s campaign did not make him available to The Daily Beast for an interview in time for this article’s publication. But half a dozen HIV/AIDS experts and advocates in Georgia said that the reverend-turned-candidate has indeed walked the walk on preventing the disease, from dramatic gestures aimed squarely at stigma, to behind the scenes work on the finer points of policy—work that informs Warnock’s thinking on broader health inequities and the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding now.

In many respects, there are clear connections between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. Like HIV, it has devastated Black communities in the state Warnock hopes to represent in the Senate—Black Georgians accounted for 80 percent of hospitalizations due to the virus when it first hit in March, researchers from Atlanta’s Morehouse College later found.

“We see in COVID the same sort of health inequities that we have seen for decades with HIV,” said Melanie Thompson, an Atlanta doctor who has worked on AIDS advocacy, research, and public policy for several decades. “If anything, COVID has magnified the existing disparities.”

But the pandemic has also cut across communities of every demographic in rural Georgia, where eight hospitals have been closed down due to lack of funding over the past 10 years, something Warnock has emphasized on the campaign trail.

“The virus has devastated the Black community in ways that are disproportionate,” Warnock told The American Prospect last month. “But as I move across disaffected, rural communities across Georgia, white sisters and brothers are suffering and wondering why the conversation in Washington is so disconnected from their actual lives.”

Warnock may soon get a chance to be one of 100 U.S. senators shaping policy on the COVID pandemic. But when it comes to the epidemic he’s already spent much of his life working on, few people in Georgia have had the unique kind of impact Warnock has, say those familiar with his work.

“My argument is that the symbolic precedes the structural,” said Charles Stephens, an HIV/AIDS activist in Atlanta and the founder of the Counter Narrative Project, an advocacy group for Black gay men. “I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss the value of symbolism… because of the number of people he can reach, because of what he represents.”

“That being said, that shouldn’t be the endpoint,” Stephens told The Daily Beast. “My hope for Rev. Warnock is that… he continues to use his platform to not only bring attention to HIV, and to inspire people to respond, but also to connect to HIV/AIDS as a racial justice issue, to look at institutional failures.”

Activists say that if Warnock is elected come Jan. 5, it may be the first time ever that a freshman senator arrives in Washington already steeped in the work of HIV/AIDS advocacy. And there are signs that Warnock, if elected, would make combating HIV/AIDS a key part of his portfolio as a lawmaker: his Senate campaign website, for instance, devotes a page to LGBTQ issues and touches on funding for PrEP, an HIV prevention drug.

Local HIV/AIDS advocates, like Jeff Graham, can’t remember the last time, if ever, that a U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia devoted prominent space on their platform to this issue in such a way. Graham, the director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Georgia, said he’d bring a unique perspective to the issue on Capitol Hill.

“Frankly, even though there’s been support from U.S. senators of both parties in the past, we haven't had that sort of strong personal connection and experience of what day to day life is for people with AIDS,” he said.

That connection began in Baltimore, two decades ago, when Warnock took the first head pastor job of his career, at Douglas Memorial Community Church. In the early 2000s, HIV/AIDS cases were on the rise, rising past the 10,000 mark in the city. Of all cases, nearly 90 percent were among Black men and women.

“Everything I do is theologically and biblically informed,” Warnock told the Baltimore Sun in 2001, weeks before he took the reins of one of the city’s largest and most influential churches.
And most influential churches. Quoting the Old Testament prophet Hosea—”My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”—Warnock warned that willful ignorance about HIV was hollowing out the communities that he was seeking to serve.

“That is literally the case with regard to HIV/AIDS,” Warnock said at the time. “People do not know what they need to know about the virus itself, and they do not know their HIV status. If the clergy went to get tested en masse, we could create a climate where you remove the stigma.”

Warnock’s passion for fighting the epidemic followed him to Atlanta, which has become a national hotspot for new infections, particularly among Black communities. Georgia ranks among the top five states for new HIV infections nationwide—it had the highest rate per capita of any state in 2018—and AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black men between the ages of 35 and 44 in the state. In 2018, Atlanta’s case rate reached such heights that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, likened the city’s rate of infection to those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Graham said that he served with Warnock on an HIV/AIDS advisory board in Atlanta, shortly after the young preacher first arrived there from Baltimore in 2005, at a time when focus centered on getting federal and state dollars toward prevention measures.

In sermons, public remarks and newspaper editorials, Warnock has frequently invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to push for greater national focus on the epidemic—particularly in light of the fact that, as he noted during a special interest session on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 2008, “as the epidemic has swung to people of color, the money has not followed.”

“One can almost hear Dr. King’s voice thundering from the crypt,” Warnock wrote in a 2003 opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun in the leadup to the Iraq War. “‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’”

Following in King’s example, Warnock would later take his work on combating the epidemic to those in power. In 2014, he was arrested outside the state capitol while protesting Republicans’ refusal to expand Medicaid. Three years later, he was again arrested in Washington, D.C. during a protest in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building against President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts.

The budget would have slashed funding for PEPFAR—the federal program aimed at combating HIV/AIDS in the world's poorest countries—by 17 percent, and totally eliminated federal funding for AIDS education and training centers.

#Atlanta @RaphaelWarnock arrested w/other ministers at U.S. Captiol while demanding fair healthcare #blackclergyvoices #BlackClergyUprising pic.twitter.com/ke8SC6DMjU— TenishaTaylorMade (@TeeTaylorMade) July 18, 2017

After his arrest, he told reporters that “the national budget is not just a fiscal document, but a moral document,” and that in light of those who would suffer from the cuts to social and health services, “my getting arrested is a small price to pay.”

Allies of Warnock’s also say that his focus on HIV/AIDS is inextricably linked with the issue he’s putting at the forefront of his campaign, health care. Nan Orrock, a Democratic state senator who is a friend and neighbor of Warnock’s, talked about his involvement in the years-long push to expand Medicaid in Georgia, something that he has pledged to do on the federal level if elected.

A string of GOP governors in Georgia have successfully blocked the option to expand Medicaid, which would be backed by federal dollars under the Affordable Care Act, while deep-red states like Idaho and Nebraska have chosen to do so.

Advocates view that as a serious obstacle to HIV/AIDS treatment in Georgia. Expanding Medicaid, said Orrock, would be “critically important in the battle to protect people from HIV infection, and to provide life-saving health services when you’re battling HIV.” Warnock’s commitment on the issue—evinced by his arrests, said Orrock—“speaks for itself.”

But Warnock has also sought to work within government to address the HIV/AIDS crisis within Black communities, putting his considerable influence behind the National Black Clergy for the Elimination of AIDS Act, landmark legislation that would create targeted grants for faith-based organizations to provide HIV testing, prevention services, and community outreach.

If elected, HIV/AIDS advocates hope that Warnock would become one of the Senate’s most forceful advocates for increasing funding for the disease’s prevention and treatment—particularly for the Ryan White program, a federal initiative that provides treatment for roughly half a million people with HIV, usually from the neediest populations. The program has in recent years been funded at somewhat stagnant levels, experts say, though those in Georgia note that the previous occupant of the seat Warnock is running for, former Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), was considered a reliable ally in increasing funding.

In response to an inquiry from The Daily Beast, Warnock’s campaign said that working to lower the cost of HIV/AIDS treatment and prescriptions will be among his priorities in expanding health care access more generally.

If he defeats Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) in the runoff, Warnock will be thrust into office as Congress and President-elect Joe Biden, in all likelihood, strive to put together a sweeping COVID-19 relief package after months of fruitless negotiations and gridlock.

Observers can’t help but note how Warnock’s work on HIV/AIDS positions him as an uncommon voice on COVID-19. While the coronavirus carries with it hardly any of the social stigma of HIV, there remains distrust within the broader public, and within the Black community in particular, about treatment measures, such as a forthcoming vaccine. A Gallup poll released on Oct. 17 found that six in ten Americans would agree to take an FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine. But less than half of nonwhite Americans said they would agree.

The legacy of the Tuskegee experiment, in which U.S. government public health officials studied Black men with syphilis while denying them treatment in the mid-20th century, is alive and well, said Thompson, and several Atlanta public health experts concurred that the lingering deficit of trust is very real.

“I think building back that trust is not a matter of words and platitudes, it’s a matter of action,” said Thompson. “Warnock is the kind of guy who will walk the walk, put actions there that will help to rebuild trust.”

Harry Heiman, a doctor and professor of public health at Georgia State University in Atlanta, agreed, saying, “if there aren't targeted strategies specific to those communities being disproportionately impacted, we’re going to fail, in the same way we're trying to overcome historical failures in HIV/AIDS.”

Asked if Warnock might reprise his famous HIV test from the pulpit by taking a COVID test in front of congregants, or constituents if elected, his campaign said he will take a COVID-19 vaccine when available and recommended by medical professionals, and “in following science and trusted scientists, he will encourage others to do the same.”

Still, many experts couldn’t help but imagine the visual of Warnock reprising the display that turned his HIV advocacy into headlines, and spoke to his skill as a communicator. “Think about the politics of a Senator Warnock getting a COVID vaccination on television,” said Heiman. “He understands, literally, the power of the pulpit.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock — and his dog — respond to smear ads

Catherine Garcia
Tue, November 24, 2020

In a clever new ad, Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock found a new way to drop the mic.

Warnock is running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) in the Jan. 5 runoff election. In a new ad he tweeted out Tuesday, Warnock is shown taking his dog on a walk. In an earlier campaign ad, Warnock predicted there would be lots of false claims leveled against him, and "that's exactly what happened," he said. "You would think that Kelly Loeffler might have something good to say about herself, if she really wants to represent Georgia."

Instead, Warnock continued, "she's trying to scare people by taking things I've said out of context from over 25 years of being a pastor." By this point, Warnock and his pup were at the end of their walk, and he was holding a bag of dog feces. As he dropped the bag in a trash can, Warnock said, "I think Georgians will see her ads for what they are — don't you?" His dog barked in agreement — and then approved the message. 

Watch the ad below.


I told you the smear ads were coming, but Georgians will see Sen. @Kloeffler’s ads for what they are. pic.twitter.com/0sgU8ndC63
— Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) November 24, 2020

Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock bet big on 'record-shattering turnout' in Georgia

Democratic Senate hopeful Jon Ossoff of Georgia holds drive-through event to ‘inspire people out to the polls’

Jon Ossoff, one of the two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, is looking to build off President-elect Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state. By holding various socially distanced events all over Georgia to connect with voters, Ossoff hopes the more engagement he has with residents will translate to historic voter turnout in the Jan. 5 runoff.



Marquise Francis
·National Reporter & Producer
Wed, November 25, 2020

ATLANTA — Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the two Democrats running for the Senate in Georgia’s January runoff races, are looking to build off President-elect Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state.

“Georgia voters recognize that our capacity to enact legislation ... depends upon winning these two Senate races,” Ossoff told Yahoo News on Tuesday, while hosting a drive-through yard-sign giveaway in downtown Atlanta.

As it stands, Republicans have 50 seats in the Senate, while Democrats control 48. If Warnock and Ossoff both win, Democrats will take control of the chamber in January because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be able to cast any tie-breaking votes.

But if either candidate loses, Republicans will retain their Senate majority — and their ability to block progressive legislation from becoming law.

Ossoff and Warnock face steep odds despite the fact that the state turned blue in the November election. For one thing, the party that wins the presidency tends to lose in hotly contested subsequent elections. Republican Chris Christie, for example, was elected governor of deep-blue New Jersey just months after President Barack Obama was inaugurated — a preview of the big Republican gains that occurred during the 2010 midterm elections.

But Democrats say they’ve figured out how to win in Georgia, a state that had voted Republican in six straight presidential elections between 1996 and 2016 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 20 years. And Republicans have won all but one of the statewide general election runoffs in Georgia since 1988.

Georgia Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Raphael Warnock, left, and Jon Ossoff at a rally in Marietta, Ga., on Nov. 15. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

“What we are focusing on when we go and talk to voters in these communities, something that we learned from Stacey Abrams, is we go and ask them what they need, and when they answer … we let them know Rev. Warnock is on the ballot,” Terrance Clark, the Warnock campaign’s communications director, told Yahoo News. “Let them know the first step to getting those things done is voting.”

Democrats are hoping that if they can keep their voters enthusiastic and mobilized after Biden’s win while at the same time registering new voters, they can get Warnock and Ossoff to Washington.

Ossoff held a socially distant event on Tuesday, which was one of the many moves by the campaign to keep Democratic voters engaged ahead of the runoff. In addition to concert-style drive-in rallies, the campaign plans an aggressive voter registration effort, including targeting more than 23,000 young Georgians who were not 18 at the time of the Nov. 3 election but will be by Jan. 5, the date of the runoff.

The campaign is also working closely with progressive grassroots organizations such as Georgia Stand Up and Fair Fight, which is led by Stacey Abrams. Abrams, a former state legislator and gubernatorial candidate, had been laying the groundwork to flip Georgia blue for years, and was widely praised for her efforts in the aftermath of Biden’s victory.

To date, more than 762,000 absentee ballots have been requested in Georgia, according to WSB-TV. This figure already triples the amount of ballots requested in all of the state’s elections in 2018.

“I’m hearing voters are invigorated by Joe Biden’s victory here, who recognize that Trump is leaving,” Ossoff said. “And now we have the opportunity to define the next year in our history, but we can’t do that unless we win these two Senate races. … This is about energizing, unprecedented, record-shattering turnout here in Georgia.”

Ossoff waves after giving a yard sign to a supporter during a drive-through event on Nov. 22. (Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire)

Ossoff feels Democratic enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been in Georgia. But, he adds, winning both Senate seats is critical to Biden’s administration getting anything meaningful done.

Voter turnout is directly attributable to political engagement and trust in candidates, something both Ossoff and Warnock hope to build as they campaign all over the state. However, voter turnout tends to decrease substantially outside of presidential elections, in particular when it comes to special elections and runoffs.

“Of 171 regularly scheduled primary runoffs for U.S. House and U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2012, all but six of them resulted in a turnout decrease between the initial primary and the runoff, meaning that 96.5% of federal runoff elections had fewer people voting in the second round than in the first,” according to FairVote, a group that advocates for various election reforms. “The average reduction in turnout was 35.3%.”

Democrats say they understand that Black voters are the voting bloc most important to their success at the polls — and that, in Ossoff’s words, they “cannot be taken for granted.”

“The strength of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot these last five years in Georgia has been driven by powerful, determined turnout among Black voters in Georgia,” Ossoff said. “Black voters are the heart and soul of the Democratic electorate here in Georgia, the focus of our turnout efforts, and cannot be taken for granted.”

As senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once pastored, Warnock is hopeful that his biography and charisma will take him across the finish line.

“It’s not all about reinventing the wheel, but putting the wheel on a new vehicle,” Clark, the Warnock communications director, said. “There is already a national enthusiasm, and you’re seeing it play out with the organic interest. … People see themselves in Warnock.”

Stacey Abrams, former candidate for Georgia governor, is trying to help Warnock win his Senate runoff. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Clark says his campaign is going back to knocking on doors — a strategy that many Democrats abandoned over the past year due to the pandemic but has long been understood as one of the most effective ways to recruit and mobilize voters. They’re also co-hosting events with small businesses, connecting with more rural communities in south Georgia and working to engage smaller but growing groups such as Asian Americans.

“Georgia is a diverse state, and many areas are changing,” Clark said. “It’s not the same Georgia of 2014, and Rev. Warnock is able to resonate with voters in such a way. … People see the electorate as just Black and white, [but it’s so much more].”

Warnock’s campaign has also emphasized social media, and his Twitter following has gained hundreds of thousands of followers since early November, surpassing the 400,000 mark in recent weeks. Print and digital ad buys on Hulu and YouTube have also been a focus of the campaign. You can’t turn on Hulu for too long in Georgia without seeing a commercial starring Warnock — with his small dog — criticizing his opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.

I told you the smear ads were coming, but Georgians will see Sen. @Kloeffler’s ads for what they are. pic.twitter.com/0sgU8ndC63
— Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) November 24, 2020

Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue, the other Republican in the race, did not return a request for comment for this article.

While many critics say Democrats operate at a disadvantage in runoff races, Clark said this year will prove to be different.

“The reality is, year over year Democrats have performed better in these runoffs,” he said. “You can see what happened in 2018 [with Abrams]. The base is there. The floor is there. … We have a coordinated effort rather than the fearmongering on the other side.”

Election experts believe the Senate races will go down to the wire. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told Yahoo News last week that he believes this is going to be a “tight, competitive race.”

“This election is going to be different,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. “Now that we know there are roughly equal numbers of Republican and Democratic voters in the state, we can expect that both parties are going to do everything they can to get those people who showed up to vote [on Election Day] and before [in early voting] out to vote in the runoff election.”

Rallygoers in Atlanta's Freedom Park deliver the "Count Every Vote" message in the wake of the presidential election results on Nov. 7. (Marcus Ingram/Getty Images for MoveOn)

It’s a picture that is becoming clearer by the day to candidates on both the Democratic and Republican sides that only a few points may separate the winner from the loser on Jan. 5.

“When we get down to this, it will be a 1 or 2 point race,” Clark said. “We are looking to push it over the top with these moves.”

Below are key dates for Georgians to remember ahead of the state’s Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021:


Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images, Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

A New Political Force Emerges in Georgia: 

Asian American Voters


Sabrina Tavernise
Wed, November 25, 2020

James Woo, a Korean outreach leader for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, in Norcross, Ga., on Nov. 13, 2020. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Four years ago, Maliha Javed, an immigrant from Pakistan, was not paying attention to politics. A community college student in suburban Atlanta, she was busy paying for books and studying for classes. She did not vote that year.

But the past four years changed her. The Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban affected some of her friends. The child separation policy reminded her of living apart from her parents for three years during her own move to the United States. Then, this summer, the discovery that she was pregnant made it final: On Election Day, she marched into the Amazing Grace Lutheran Church near her house and voted for the first time in her life. She chose Joe Biden.

“I want it to be a better country for him to grow up in,” said Javed, who is 24 and is having a boy.

Javed is part of a small but powerful new force in Georgia politics: Asian American voters. She lives in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s second-most populous county and the one with the largest Asian American population. Biden, who narrowly defeated President Donald Trump in Georgia, won Gwinnett County by 18 percentage points, a substantial increase over Hillary Clinton’s performance four years ago and only the second time the county went blue since the 1970s.

The county is also the heart of the only tightly contested House seat in the entire country that Democrats flipped this year — Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. A survey of Asian American early voters in that district found that 41% reported voting for the first time, said Taeku Lee, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped conduct it.

The emergence in Georgia of Asian American voters is a potential bright spot for a Democratic Party counting on demographic changes to bring political wins across the country. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing segment of eligible voters out of the major racial and ethnic groups in the country, according to the Pew Research Center; their numbers, nationally and in Gwinnett County, more than doubled between 2000 and 2020.

Families of Asian descent in the United States come from dozens of countries, but according to Pew, a vast majority of the voting population comes from just six. China, the Philippines and India account for more than half, followed by Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

But interviews with Asian Americans in Gwinnett County showed that their political preferences are fluid. While many voted for Biden, they are hardly a done deal for the Democratic Party. A large portion are socially conservative, often observant Christians and owners of small businesses.

Many new voters were drawn to the presidential race because it had loomed so large in American culture. But that also means they are no guarantee for Democrats in Georgia’s runoffs for two critical U.S. Senate seats in January, in which control of the upper chamber hangs in the balance.

“People are like, ‘What?’” said Cam Ashling, 40, a Democratic activist, referring to new voters’ responses when she raises the runoffs, which she referred to as “a giant uphill battle.”

She added: “We have to try very hard to keep Georgia blue. It is not solid.”

As a group nationally, Asian Americans tend to prefer Democrats, but that masks deep differences by ethnic origin and generation. AAPI Data, a data analytics firm that focuses on Asian Americans, has found that many Vietnamese immigrant voters lean Republican, for instance, while very few Bangladeshi voters do. And American-born Vietnamese voters lean less toward Republicans than do their foreign-born parents.

Two-thirds of all eligible Asian American voters in 2018 were naturalized citizens, according to Pew, the highest ratio of any major racial or ethnic group.

“I would love to be a Republican, but right now they’re just crazy,” said Jae Song, 50, an IT worker who was picking up lunch at Vietvana Pho Noodle House in Duluth, an upscale town in Gwinnett County that is 24% Asian American. Song, a Korean immigrant, said he loved Trump on the economy, but hated him on the coronavirus. His daughter in New York has had racist slurs flung at her. But he said he was also confused by Democrats’ priorities.

He had heard a lot of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” and he understood that. But this also led him to wonder, “What about us?”

Surveys suggest a substantial increase in Asian American votes this year, a jump that follows the expansion of the group’s population in the state. About 2.5% of Georgia’s voters were Asian American this year, up from 1.6% in 2016.

The Asian American population in Georgia is mixed economically. Some are doctors and upper-income professionals, but others are owners of beauty supply stores, restaurants, mobile phone franchises and laundromats.

James Woo, 35, who immigrated from Seoul to Meridian, Mississippi, in the late 1990s, said Korean immigrants had a saying that whatever the business of the person who picked you up at the airport would become yours, too. His father was picked up by his brother-in-law who owned a beauty supply store. Now Woo’s extended family owns more than two dozen beauty supply stores in Georgia and Louisiana.

In the early years, being Asian American was not easy, and Woo, who moved to Georgia in sixth grade and worked at his parents’ shop on the weekends up through college, had searing experiences of discrimination.

“I saw that growing up, the discrimination, and I don’t want that for my kids,” he said. “I want them to feel like we belong. Because we do. This is our home.”

He said he realized that the way to achieve that was to elect more Asian Americans to office in Georgia. He now works full time as the Korean outreach leader for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, an advocacy group. He said about half of the voters he helped this cycle were voting for the first time.

“For me it’s not about the state turning blue or belonging to one party or another,” he said. “It’s seeing people who look like me with similar backgrounds to mine get elected.”

For years, the few Asian Americans in elected office in Georgia were often Republicans, and organizing was more focused on raising money from economically established immigrant voters than registering working-class immigrants. Nationally, voter participation among Asian Americans has historically been low: In 2016, they had the second-lowest turnout after Hispanics of all major groups.

“Voter participation had always been an iffy question because those communities had not matured politically and the younger generation had not really become active,” said Baoky Vu, former commissioner to George W. Bush’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who lives in DeKalb County.

Today, Asian immigrants have reached a critical mass and their children, entering their 30s and 40s and many of them educated in the United States, are pushing for representation. In Gwinnett County, about 12% of people are of Asian heritage, according to William Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.

When Stephanie Cho moved to Georgia from California in 2013, “there were lots of Asians but they had very little power,” she said. Cho, who is now the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said she remembered walking the halls of the State Legislature and seeing just two Asian Americans: a Republican named Byung J. Pak and a member of his staff.

Now there will be six Asian Americans in the Statehouse, including Michelle Au, a Chinese American doctor who was elected to the state Senate as a Democrat this month, the result of aggressive voter registration and turnout efforts. In this election, Woo put ads in Korean-language newspapers, started chats with dozens of voters on KakaoTalk, an app popular among Korean immigrants, and made announcements at his church.

Bee Nguyen, a Democrat who was elected to Georgia’s House District 89 in 2017, said she only realized just how ignored Asian voters had been in 2016 when she was canvassing for Sam Park, the first openly gay Korean American to run for a State House seat.

“The pattern we saw when we were knocking on doors was that no one had ever talked to these people before,” said Nguyen, 39, who was born in Iowa to Vietnamese refugees.

An important turning point for Asian American voters came in 2018, several Democratic activists said, when Stacey Abrams in her race for governor had a staff member assigned to Asian immigrant communities. Exit polls later showed that 78% of Asian American voters cast their ballots for her.

But not all Asian Americans are Democrats. According to AAPI Data, about a fifth of Korean immigrants in the country voted for Trump in 2016, and a number in Gwinnett County this month said they trusted him more on the economy.

Kyung Baek, 58, a Korean immigrant who sells shoes and cloth flowers in the H Mart in Duluth, said she voted for Trump because she liked his tough talk against Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, whom she sees as a bully, and also because Trump looked past the “smaller issue” of the virus to the “bigger one” of the economy.

“Trump’s concern is big things, not small things,” she said. The economy, she said, is the top priority: “When America is rich, I can be rich.”

The generational divide is particularly pronounced among Vietnamese Americans. Many of the older generation came to the United States after the fall of Saigon, and a fear of communism runs deep.

“If you went to a Viets for Trump rally they spoke with broken English and if you went to a Viets for Biden rally they spoke broken Vietnamese,” said Ashling, 40, who came to Georgia in 1988 as a Vietnamese refugee.

This year has stood out, second-generation Vietnamese-Americans said in interviews, because of a flood of misinformation targeting older Vietnamese voters in the form of videos in Vietnamese that have cast Biden as a communist.

Ashling said she had found countering it nearly impossible.

She prefers to spend the weeks that remain before Georgia’s crucial Senate runoff elections on more persuadable voters. Javed, the community college student from Lawrenceville, was one. She said she had become increasingly furious about the cost of higher education, feelings she said she would channel into a vote for each of the Democrats.

She has already marked down Election Day for the runoff races, Jan. 5, in her calendar.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Coronavirus pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new data from UN suggests


Ben Farmer
Thu, November 26, 2020
  

Childcare employees protest in Piazza Castello city square in Turin, northern Italy - Shutterstock

Economic and domestic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new United Nations data suggests.

Lockdowns, job losses, school closures and dwindling income from the coronavirus have seen women take on significantly greater shares of housework and childcare.

Employment and education opportunities are likely to be lost and women may suffer from poorer mental and physical health.

"Everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year," the UN Women deputy executive director Anita Bhatia told the BBC.

Women's new burden of care posed a "real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes", she said.

Women already conducted most of the unpaid care and domestic chores in the world before the arrival of the pandemic, but that proportion has now risen further, research found.

The research found that women on average did three times as much of such work as men before the pandemic, though figures varied from 1.8 times as much in the UK, and 1.4 times as much in Canada, to 9.2 times as much in Egypt.

"If it was more than three times as much as men before the pandemic, I assure you that number has at least doubled," said Ms Bhatia.

"More alarming is the fact that many women are actually not going back to work," says Ms Bhatia.

"In the month of September alone, in the US, something like 865,000 women dropped out of the labour force compared to 200,000 men, and most of that can be explained by the fact that there was a care burden and there's nobody else around," she said.

Campaigners have warned that the effects of the pandemic are increasing existing inequalities and women and girls are bearing a disproportionate amount of the impact - the subject of the Telegraph's Equality Check campaign.

A survey released in September by the aid charity Care International found that 55 per cent of women respondents reported losing their job or income, and were 60 per cent more likely than men to report that this was one of Covid-19’s biggest impacts on their life.

Women were more likely to have jobs in service and informal sectors, which have been particularly hard hit by coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions. But even in the formal sector the virus seems to be widening inequality, the report found, with women in Bangladesh six times more likely to lose paid working hours than men.

Mnuchin 'making it up' on stripping Fed of emergency loan funds: former TARP inspector

Brian Cheung
·Reporter
Wed, November 25, 2020

A former government official in charge of overseeing 2008 bailout funds said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is defying the law in locking away excess funds from the Federal Reserve’s emergency loan programs.

Neil Barofsky, a former special inspector general of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said that parking $455 billion in leftover money in the Treasury’s General Fund violates the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

“[Mnuchin’s] making it up, this can’t be any more clear,” Barofsky told Yahoo Finance Live in an interview Wednesday.

Mnuchin last week ordered the Fed to close down nine of its 13 backstops to various financial markets and return about $429 billion in unused money appropriated by the CARES Act. The Treasury will also return about $26 billion in funds for it to directly loan to companies, for a total of $455 billion.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Treasury was going to move the money into the General Fund as opposed to the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), which means the money could not be redeployed under a Biden administration without Congressional action.

Mnuchin has argued that he is the interpreter of the CARES Act. But Barofsky counters that if that were the case, he would have no reason not to place the money in the ESF, where the Treasury would at least have the option to reuse the money for emergency purposes.

  

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin talks with reporters about negotiations on another coronavirus stimulus package, outside the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

“The only justification for taking what is a legally questionable act of moving these funds out of the reach of the Biden administration is to salt the Earth, to limit their options, and leave the country in a more dangerous place for political purposes,” said Barofsky, now a partner at the law firm of Jenner & Block. “Full stop. There is no legal justification for this.”
Flashbacks to TARP

Barofsky was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008 to oversee TARP funds used to save banks, insurance companies, and automakers during the Great Financial Crisis.

He told Yahoo Finance that there is precedent to reallocating emergency funds, pointing to the Obama administration’s efforts to redirect $225 billion in TARP into the Treasury’s General Fund. Barofsky said an act of Congress was needed to move that money.

For the CARES Act money, Barofsky points to Sec. 4027 of the bill, which notes that on January 1, 2026, any remaining funds are to be transferred into the Treasury’s General Fund for deficit reduction.

“The statute doesn’t allow him to do this until 2026,” said Barofsky.

Ultimately, Barofsky said the Biden administration could choose to ignore Mnuchin’s move and shift the funds back into the ESF once the White House changes hands. But he said he does not expect the Biden administration to take such aggressive action, adding that he also would not bet on the Fed launching a legal challenge.

As Mnuchin has clarified, the ESF still has under $80 billion for the Treasury and the Fed to restart its liquidity facilities if needed. But the scale of those facilities would be far smaller than under the $455 billion originally committed.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is moving $455 billion of unspent stimulus money into a fund the incoming Biden administration can't deploy without Congress

Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Tue, November 24, 2020, 3:03 PM MST·3 min read

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

It will leave Mnuchin's likely successor, Janet Yellen, with only $80 billion in relief funds at her discretion.

Experts say Mnuchin's move greatly limits the tools available to the Biden administration to manage the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

That amount includes money that Mnuchin is yanking from the Federal Reserve and unused loans for companies. The funds will be deposited into the Treasury's General Fund, which requires legislative approval to use the money elsewhere. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move, experts say, will likely undercut the ability of Mnuchin's likely successor, Janet Yellen, from restarting the Fed's lending programs at a similar scale early next year. Instead, she will have only $80 billion at her discretion.

Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI, called Mnuchin's decision "a dangerous move" as the US economy faces a perilous moment in the pandemic.

"It's one more enormous risk we are piling onto the winter in the US atop of other risks already there," Tedeschi told Business Insider. "We may need that backstop again as cases have now blown through their prior peaks, state and local governments are making cuts, and we're about to kick off millions of people from unemployment insurance."

Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of a congressional panel overseeing the funds, criticized the move.

"This is Treasury's latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden Administration," he wrote on Twitter. "The good news is that it's illegal and can be reversed next year."

The development came after Mnuchin recently announced he was not extending most of the Fed's emergency lending programs past December 31, including those supporting markets for corporate bonds and another providing loans to medium-size businesses and state governments.

The Treasury and central bank jointly operate the lending programs under the CARES Act, which Congress approved in March. The pandemic relief law doesn't mandate Mnuchin move the money into the Treasury's General Fund -- it could keep it within easy reach for President-elect Joe Biden in another pot of money until 2026.

Mnuchin also requested last week that Fed Chair Jerome Powell return unspent stimulus money. He objected and said the lending programs should continue, sparking a rare public clash between two figures that had collaborated closely to contain the economic devastation from the pandemic. The Fed later said in a letter it would return the funds.

Mnuchin then called on Congress to repurpose the unspent money, and he drew support from Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"We don't need this money to buy corporate bonds. We need this money to go help small businesses that are still closed or hurt, no fault of their own, or people who are going to be on unemployment that's running out," he told CNBC last week.

Congress has been fiercely divided on passing another coronavirus relief bill that most economists say is urgently needed. Nearly 12 million workers are at risk of losing all of their federal unemployment aid next month, according to an analysis from the progressive Century Foundation.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Fed will return unused funds after Treasury orders central bank to wind down emergency loan programs

Brian Cheung
·Reporter
Fri, November 20, 2020

The Federal Reserve says it will return the unused money allocated to it by the Treasury to set up its emergency support programs during the COVID-19 crisis.

On Friday, Fed Chairman Jay Powell said he “will work out arrangements... for returning the unused portions of the funds” appropriated to the central bank and the Treasury in March by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

The announcement comes a day after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ordered the Fed to allow nine of its 13 liquidity facilities to close on December 31. Those closures would end backstops to corporate bond markets (Primary, Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities), small- and medium-sized businesses (Main Street Lending Program), and state and local government bond issuers (Municipal Liquidity Facility).

The Fed responded with an unusually barbed response Thursday, protesting that the central bank “prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities...continue to serve their important role.” Powell’s letter on Friday softened in tone and acknowledged the Treasury Secretary’s “sole authority to make certain investments” in the Fed facilities.

For its part, the Treasury argued that the programs’ low uptake warrant a return of $429 billion in unused money.

The fallout between the Fed and the Treasury raised a number of questions, first about what will happen to the various liquidity facilities, but secondly about the political consequences of not having the backstops.
What’s closing down on December 31?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Fed opened up 13 liquidity facilities (details on each facility are detailed here), 12 of which were set up to expire on December 31. The Treasury letter from Thursday orders the Fed to allow nine of them to close:

-Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF)

-Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF)

-Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility (TALF)

-Main Street New Loan Facility (MSNLF)

-Main Street Priority Loan Facility (MSPLF)

-Main Street Expanded Loan Facility (MSELF)

-Nonprofit Organization New Loan Facility (NONLF)

-Nonprofit Organization Expanded Loan Facility (NOELF)

-Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF)

Mnuchin authorized a 90-day extension for the four remaining facilities:

-Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF)

-Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)

-Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF)

-Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility (PPPLF)
How much will the Fed have to return?

The CARES Act appropriated $454 billion to the Fed and the Treasury to set up these facilities. The Fed has used only $25 billion of that money through its emergency facilities.

Mnuchin’s letter asks the Fed to return the remainder: $429 billion. Powell’s letter on Friday did not clarify exactly how much it will return.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, left, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin leave after a House Financial Services Committee hearing about the government’s emergency aid to the economy in response to the coronavirus on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020. (Caroline Brehman/Pool via AP)

Both Mnuchin and Powell insist that the Fed and Treasury could re-open some of those facilities with money from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). Mnuchin told CNBC Friday that combined with the Fed’s existing loans, the ESF could support over $750 billion in loans to the economy (compared to $2 trillion of potential capacity using the CARES Act funds).

What does this all mean for the markets?

Markets traded down slightly on Friday as investors digested the news, with the Dow having fallen over 200 points at the closing bell.

Markets directly backstopped by the Fed’s facilities did not appear disrupted by the news. Bloomberg reported Friday that Carnival Corp. was able to drum up $11 billion in orders for corporate bonds despite the news that the Fed’s corporate credit facility would not be operating past December 31.

Still, some worry that with rising COVID-19 cases, the lack of fiscal support and now, Fed support to financial markets, may create trouble.

Evercore ISI wrote in a note November 19 that “US credit markets will have to get through the winter months in which the surging new wave of the virus and exhaustion of savings from prior fiscal stimulus threaten a loss of economic momentum.”
Does this increase the onus on Congress to pass fiscal stimulus?

Mnuchin argued in his letter that returning the unused money will allow the government to redirect funds toward a new Paycheck Protection Program “that won’t cost taxpayers any more money.”

But Isaac Boltansky, analyst at Compass Point, wrote Friday that the Fed and Treasury development doesn’t change the fact that the White House and Congress have not appeared close to a stimulus deal for weeks.

“There is no sign whatsoever that Congress is close to a stimulus deal and [Mnuchin’s] ‘hope’ for a legislative agreement is distinct from the decision to sunset existing Fed facilities,” Boltansky said.

On the claim of redirecting money at no cost to taxpayers, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office did not attribute any deficit to the Fed and Treasury funds because the lent money would have to be paid back at some point. That means that reallocating the money doesn’t save the government money from an accounting standpoint.
Does this increase the onus on the Fed to do more?

Evercore wrote that this could tilt the Federal Open Market Committee toward taking action in its final policy-setting meeting of 2020 on December 15 and 16. The Fed had already been teeing up the possibility of leaning more heavily on its asset purchases, or quantitative easing, in that meeting.

The concern: with the lack of backstops and COVID-19 cases rising, the Fed may have to do more than originally planned.

“One side effect is that it increases the likelihood that the FOMC will strengthen QE in December, with additional duration and guidance, and if things get bad enough, a faster pace of purchases too,” Evercore wrote. “However, QE is a very imperfect substitute for a credit market backstop.”

U.N. decries police use of racial profiling derived from Big Data

Stephanie Nebehay
Thu, November 26, 2020

GENEVA, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Police and border guards must combat racial profiling and ensure that their use of "big data" collected via artificial intelligence does not reinforce biases against minorities, United Nations experts said on Thursday.

Companies that sell algorithmic profiling systems to public entities and private companies, often used in screening job applicants, must be regulated to prevent misuse of personal data that perpetuates prejudices, they said.

"It's a rapidly developing technological means used by law enforcement to determine, using big data, who is likely to do what. And that's the danger of it," Verene Shepherd, a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, told Reuters.

"We've heard about companies using these algorithmic methods to discriminate on the basis of skin colour," she added, speaking from Jamaica.

Shepherd, a historian, led the 18 independent experts in drafting a "general recommendation" to the 182 countries that have ratified a binding international treaty prohibiting racial discrimination.

Minorities and activists have complained about the growing use of artificial intelligence, facial recognition and other new technologies, she said.

"It's widely used in the United States of America, and we've had complaints from black communities in the European Union as well. And Latin America where people of African descent and indigenous people complain about profiling," Shepherd said, citing Brazil and Colombia. "These are the hotspots where we hear about cases of profiling being more prevalent."

Protests against racism and police brutality erupted across the United States following the death in May of George Floyd, an African-American who died afer a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Many police use "predictive" profiling systems that lead to identity checks, traffic stops and searches, based on previous arrest data about a neighbourhood, Shepherd said.

The committee recommends that people who have been targeted deserve compensation, she said, adding: "If they live to tell the tale, by the way, because we know sometimes it ends up badly." 

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Congress Pays $850,000 to Muslim Aides Targeted in Inquiry Stoked by Trump


Noam Scheiber and Nicholas Fandos
Wed, November 25, 2020, 

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington on Thursday evening, Nov. 19, 2020. 

(Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)

The House of Representatives quietly paid $850,000 this year to settle wrongful termination claims by five Pakistani-American technology specialists, after a set of routine workplace allegations against them morphed into fodder for right-wing conspiracy theories amplified by President Donald Trump.

Together, the payments represent one of the largest known awards by the House to resolve discrimination or harassment claims, and are designed to shield Congress from potentially costly legal action.

But aides involved in the settlement, which has not previously been reported, said it was also an attempt to bring a close to a convoluted saga that led to one of the most durable — and misleading — story lines of the Trump era. The aides said its size reflected a bid to do right by a group of former employees who lost their jobs and endured harassment in part because of their Muslim faith and South Asian origins.

What started as a relatively ordinary House inquiry into procurement irregularities by Imran Awan, three members of his family and a friend, who had a bustling practice providing members of Congress with technology support, was twisted into lurid accusations of hacking government information.

In 2018, Trump stood next to President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a now-infamous news conference in Helsinki, and implied that one of the employees involved in the House case — a “Pakistani gentleman,” he said — could have been responsible for stealing emails of Democratic officials leaked during the 2016 campaign. His own intelligence agencies had concluded that the stolen emails were part of an election interference campaign ordered by Moscow.

“It is tragic and outrageous the way right-wing media and Republicans all the way up to President Trump attempted to destroy the lives of an immigrant Muslim-American family based on scurrilous allegations,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who had employed Awan and is chairman of the Ethics Committee.

“Their names were smeared on cable TV, their children were harassed at school, and they genuinely feared for their lives,” Deutch added. “The settlement is an acknowledgment of the wrong done to this family.”

The case originated in 2016, when officials in the House, then controlled by Republicans, began investigating claims that the specialists had improperly accounted for purchases of equipment and bent employment rules as they worked part-time for the offices of dozens of Democratic lawmakers.

In the hands of the chamber’s inspector general and later the Capitol Police, the investigation slowly expanded to include concerns that the workers had illicitly gained access to, transferred or removed government data and stolen equipment.

In early 2017, the House stripped their access to congressional servers, making it impossible for them to continue their work. One by one, the lawmakers terminated them.

But as the inspector general’s findings were shared with Republican lawmakers and trickled into conservative media in early 2017, they began to take on a life of their own. The Daily Caller, which led the way, published allegations that the workers had hacked into congressional computer networks, and other right-wing pundits speculated that the group were Pakistani spies.

Trump, in addition to his comments in Helsinki, repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories about the investigation on Twitter, where he referred to a “Pakistani mystery man.” At one point, he publicly urged the Justice Department not to let one of the workers “off the hook.”

But in the summer of 2018, the department did just that, taking the unusual step of publicly exonerating Awan. The department concluded in a court filing that after interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing a Democratic server and other electronic records, it had found “no evidence” that Awan illegally removed data, stole or destroyed House equipment, or improperly gained access to sensitive information.

The statement came during a sentencing hearing for an unrelated offense — that Awan had lied about his primary residence on an application for a home-equity loan, for which he was sentenced by judge to one day of time served and a three-month supervised release.

House officials and the Capitol Police revisited their investigation of Awan and his colleagues after the Justice Department’s findings became public. The review found that the original investigation had reached certain conclusions about misbehavior that were not necessarily supported by facts, but upheld the ban on their access to the House computer network, preventing their reinstatement, congressional aides said.

Awan’s lawyers approached the House after Democrats took control of the chamber in 2019 to discuss a possible settlement. Many of the lawmakers who had employed him pushed their leaders to strike a deal.

The resulting agreement was signed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, in January and paid out this summer. It resolved claims brought by Awan and the other four staffers under the Federal Tort Claims Act that House officials behaved negligently in their second inquiry after the Justice Department found no evidence of illegal conduct.

The settlement also resolved claims that House officials inflicted emotional distress on the group, and that the initial investigation was motivated by the employees’ religion, national origin, race, or political affiliation.

In a statement, Lofgren said that the employees had threatened to sue various House members, offices and other employees, “seeking millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages.” She said the House decided to settle “due to the likelihood of an unfavorable and costly litigation outcome,” although she asserted that based on the information it had at the time, the House had been right to revoke their network access.

Awan declined to comment on the settlement. Peter Romer-Friedman, one of the Awans' lawyers, said that they would “never forget the courage and kindness” of lawmakers who had stood by his clients.

Awan was born in Pakistan in 1980 and moved to Northern Virginia in 1997. While in college, he worked as an intern for a company that provided IT services to congressional offices. He was hired directly by the office of Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida after graduating and worked setting up email accounts and new equipment like phones and laptops for staff members.

Over the years, other Democratic members of Congress hired Awan to perform similar work under an arrangement that made him a “shared employee” and for which he was typically paid $20,000 each year per member of Congress. As the workload grew, Awan brought on two of his brothers, his wife and a friend to assist him, and they became shared employees as well. Together they eventually worked for more than 30 members of Congress.

Their employers included Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who was recently named by President-elect Joe Biden to a top White House position. The connection to Wasserman Schultz, who was the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time of the 2016 email hack, is what prompted the baseless theories seized on by Trump that Awan, not the Kremlin, was responsible.

House investigators found that Awan and his four co-workers violated certain administrative rules — for example, working as a team in which they would provide services to offices that didn’t technically employ them, and breaking up payments for equipment like iPads into increments that were below $500, the point at which a purchase would trigger a more cumbersome procurement process.

But Joshua Rogin, Deutch’s chief of staff, said in a declaration accompanying a separate defamation lawsuit brought by the Awans against the Daily Caller and others that he did not believe that the arrangements violated House rules and that he was unaware that the rules the five were accused of violating had been enforced against any other House employees.

“I understood this investigation to be both politically motivated and based on bias over their nationality, ethnicity and religion,” he said in the declaration.

Conservative outlets have continued to spin out unsupported theories about Awan.

In January of 2019, Luke Rosiak, a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation who had written more than two dozen stories about Awan, published a book in which he reported that one or more of the family members had hacked congressional servers, stolen cellphones and laptops and sent equipment to government officials in Pakistan. The book also refers to Imran Awan as a “mole.”

In an interview with the Epoch Times in July of that year, he referred to Awan as “basically an attempted murderer, an extortionist, a blackmail artist, a con man.”

Awan and the family members and friend who worked with him on Capitol Hill are suing Rosiak, The Daily Caller and Salem Media Group, the owner of Rosiak’s book publisher, Regnery, for defamation and unjust enrichment. The case is currently pending in court.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company