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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’ President gave sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and spoke about the need to protect democracy Joe Biden marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden said he was “humbled” to become the first sitting president to give the Sunday sermon at King’s church, also describing the experience as “intimidating”.“I believe Dr King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention,” Biden said. He later noted he was wearing rosary beads his son, Beau, wore as he died.“I doubt whether any of us would have thought during Dr King’s time that literally the institutional structures of this country might collapse, like we’re seeing in Brazil, we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Biden said.In a sermon that lasted around 25 minutes, the president spoke about the continued need to protect democracy. Unlike some of his other speeches on the topic, Biden did not mention Donald Trump or Republicans directly.The GOP has embraced new voting restrictions, including in Georgia, and defended the former president’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.“Nothing is guaranteed in our democracy,” Biden said. “We know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy.”He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted at a ceremony after she was confirmed it had taken just one generation in her family to go from segregation to the US supreme court.“Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy,” Biden said, quoting King.Biden preached in Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to pass sweeping voting reforms.“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.A Democratic voting rights bill named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, would have made election day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the justice department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference.But that effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster. Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Since then, there has been no federal action on voting rights. In March 2021, Biden issued an executive order telling federal agencies to do what they could do improve opportunities for voter registration.The speech also comes as the US supreme court considers a case that could significantly curtail Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that was one of the crowning achievements of King and other activists. A ruling is expected by June.Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments in office. The task is even steeper now Republicans control the House. In advance of Biden’s visit to Atlanta, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, also said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.This is a delicate moment for Biden. On Thursday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King was co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Like many battleground state Democrats in 2022, Warnock kept his distance from Biden as the the president’s approval rating lagged. But with Biden beginning to turn his attention to an expected 2024 re-election effort, Georgia can expect plenty of attention.Warnock told ABC’s This Week: “I’m honored to present the president of the United States there where he will deliver the message and where he will sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr, Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we are tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together.”In 2020, Biden won Georgia as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up much of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities, citing efforts to encourage states to take equity into account under the $1tn infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.The administration highlights Biden’s work to diversify the judiciary, including his appointment of Jackson as the first Black woman on the supreme court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts – more than under all previous presidents.King fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of his family attended Biden’s sermon. The president planned to be in Washington on Monday, to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast, held on the MLK holiday.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away?

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away? Georgia in focus: A fragile coalition around Atlanta helped shift the state’s politics, but as the midterms loom the cracks are showing“Very normal” is how Rupal Vaishnav describes his experience as an entrenched resident of Atlanta. He moved to the city at the age of nine, after immigrating to the US from India in the late 1970s. When his parents settled in Clayton county – a suburb south of downtown that’s now home to the world’s busiest airport – it was still largely populated by white families living in 60s-era bungalows; before that, it was the fictional setting for Gone With the Wind.Vaishnav was one of two Indian kids in school – the other was his brother – and a strict vegetarian who spoke Gujarati at home. But he joined the school’s air force junior reserves, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and earned his law degree from Georgia State. For the past five years, he’s worked in the local district attorney’s office and this year he ran to be a state judge in Forsyth county, once infamous for its lynchings. “The biggest thing I struggled with growing up and that I still see in my son are the identity conflicts,” Vaishnav says, now 50. “Are you American? Are you Indian? You have to get comfortable knowing the two cultures. It’s a balancing act that you get better at over time.”The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billRead moreImmigrants like Vaishnav have played an important role in what has been a remarkable shift in the demographics of Georgia, and politics with it. Georgia went blue in the 2020 election – and Asian American voters could well decide whether that was an accident or the new normal. Between 1970 and 1980 roughly 80,000 people immigrated here, many from Asia, where they settled in the suburbs of Atlanta – counties like Clayton, Fulton and Forsyth, which gained national infamy in the 1980s as a sundown town after a spate of Klan attacks against civil rights activists. As Atlanta’s Black population has gradually recovered population share, wealth and civil rights after decades of domestic terrorism and redlining policies, the city’s Asian American population has exploded, too.As of the most recent census, Asian Americans comprised nearly 5% of metro Atlanta’s 6 million residents, putting them nearly level with the city’s Latino population. Most hailed from India and Pakistan, enticed by the city’s booming academic, medical and tech industries. The city is more obviously international now than it has ever been: the Confederate banners and whites-only placards have long since been replaced by Ethiopian restaurants, West Indian markets and businesses touting Spanish proficiency. In a 2021 essay, author Sanjena Sathian, whose critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers follows an Indian-American teen in Atlanta, characterized her hometown as “a surprisingly Whitmanesque experiment in pluralism, in which unpoetic concrete strip malls substitute for lyrical spears of summer grass”. On television, Atlanta’s prosperous non-white coalition is reflected in programs such as Married to Medicine, in which an Indian-American plastic surgeon and his fashion blogger wife feature prominently within the show’s Black American ensemble.She’s Georgia’s great blue hope – but can Stacey Abrams win a crucial race?Read moreRecently, that non-white majority has played a pivotal role in overturning Georgia’s Republican control, registering to vote in the hundreds of thousands. After close defeats in the 2016 presidential election and Senate race, the Democrats finally squeaked to victory in 2020, winning Georgia for Joe Biden and wresting control of both Senate seats for the first time since the mid-1970s. The drama of election night came down to ballots being counted in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties – Atlanta suburbs that have all seen large population growth among people of color.That flip, from red to purple, doesn’t happen without Stacey Abrams, who avenged her narrow loss in the race for governor in 2018 by whipping together a coalition of voters of color, a long game that made her a national hero on the left. Another national figure to emerge is Raphael Warnock, who won the special US Senate election in 2020 against Kelly Loeffler, an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, after players on the Atlanta Dream basketball team she co-owned led an insurrection campaign against her.But Georgia’s diverse voting bloc is fragile. Two years on, Abrams and Warnock are struggling in their Senate and gubernatorial races. And Democrats are finding that even the South Asian label is a broad one. “Even just in India, there are so many varieties of people,” says Ketan Goswami of Hindus of Georgia Pac, a bipartisan group that aims to build coalitions through religion. “Lumping us all together in this South Asian identity is, in my mind, actually very criminal.”Even the Democrats’ big sell to the immigrant coalition, a smoother or at least shorter path to citizenship, seems a careless enticement. Many of the Indians in Georgia, reckons Vaishnav, are temporary visa holders in specialty occupations who would vote for immigration reform – but cannot. The residents who can vote, on the other hand, often have homes and families and six-figure incomes to protect – at which point tax cuts and more cops on streets become priorities. “Once you get here”, Vaishnav says, “I think you’re sensitive to the idea that what you have you should share with others.”Mobilizing this coalition has its challenges, too. “There’s embedded historical resistance toward electoral civic engagement,” says Berenice Rodriguez of the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The biggest gap is disinformation and language accessibility, which really affect the older generations.”Republicans won’t commit to honoring vote results this fall. That’s troubling | Robert ReichRead moreMeanwhile, Republicans are hitting back. Georgia’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed a sweeping voting law last April that cracks down on absentee balloting and voter identification, in part to short-circuit the Democrats’ hold on immigrant Atlanta. The White House also did its Georgia candidates few favors while entertaining the 2022 championship-winning Atlanta Braves, the last team with a Native-themed name in major pro sports besides hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks; press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre stopped short of calling for the team’s name to be changed, but said: “We should listen to Native Americans and Indigenous people who are the most impacted by this.” Robert Cahaly, a pollster and founder of the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group, found that more than 70% of locals wanted the Braves to remain the Braves, and noted the political risk of arguing otherwise, pointing out that the Democratic senators “Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff did not make a comment on whether the Braves should change their name – and two Republicans said they should not.”More broadly, the conservative positions of the Republicans resonate with immigrant groups who value family and generational wealth – which is why efforts to court their support have suddenly become so intense. “A lot of money has funneled into the state to allow us to expand the work we’ve been doing for a long time,” says Rodriguez. “But I do fear that once the spotlight is gone, if Georgia doesn’t become a swing state, that funding will stop.”Vaishnav’s parents borrowed money from friends to start a printing business; Mr Quik Copy has been a fixture of Dekalb county, a former civil war battleground, for almost four decades. “The county gave them a proclamation for having it in the same location since ’85,” Vaishnav said. A similar sense of permanence for Democrats, though, will be much harder won.“People like to say South Asians are either all Democrat or all Republican,” Vaishnav says. “But I can tell you, there’s so much variety.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS politicsAtlantafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams helped swing Georgia for the Democrats. So why is she trailing?

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      She’s Georgia’s great blue hope. Can Stacey Abrams win her crucial race? Georgia in focus: Despite being hailed as architect of Georgia’s political transformation, Abrams is still an underdog in her rematch with Governor Brian Kemp for reasons that make Democrats nervousStacey Abrams was a high school senior the first time she was invited to the Georgia governor’s mansion. It was for a ceremony honoring the state’s class valedictorians, and Abrams was her school’s top academic achiever. At the time, her family did not own a car, so Abrams and her parents rode the bus from their working-class suburb to the stately mansion in downtown Atlanta.When they arrived, Abrams recalls a guard emerging from the security booth. Eyeing the bus, he told them: “This is a private event. You don’t belong here.” Never mind that her invitation was tucked into her mother’s handbag or that her name was second on the list of invitees.Ginni Thomas still believes Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was stolenRead moreA terse exchange ensued between her father and the guard, who grudgingly checked the guest list and let them in.“The thing of it is,” Abrams said at a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, “I don’t remember meeting the governor of Georgia. I don’t remember meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts … All I remember is a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me, telling me I don’t belong.”But the story doesn’t have to end there, Abrams tells supporters as she campaigns to become the first Black female governor in American history. With their help this November, she promises, they will “open those gates wide” and “win the future for Georgia”.Four years ago, Abrams came within a hair of it. She lost the Georgia governorship to Republican Brian Kemp by fewer than 55,000 votes, in a race dominated by allegations of voter suppression, which Kemp, then the secretary of state overseeing the election, denied.In her near-miss, national Democrats saw a promising leader – and the potential to reclaim the southern state that had long ago slipped away. Successive Democratic wins in the years that followed validated her work expanding the electorate, a decade-long project aimed at mobilizing the disillusioned and the marginalized.Abrams was even considered a potential running mate for Joe Biden in 2020, a prospect she welcomed. But she always kept her sights on the governor’s mansion, declining pleas to run for the Senate. Now, her second chance has arrived.Yet Abrams, hailed by Democrats as the architect of Georgia’s political transformation, enters the final weeks of her rematch with Kemp an underdog.Polls consistently show the 48-year-old Democrat trailing Kemp, now a relatively popular governor with the advantage of incumbency. The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) poll found that the governor had significantly expanded his lead over Abrams, 50% to 42%. And while Abrams has stronger support among her base than Kemp, according to a Monmouth University survey, it concluded that her path to victory was “much narrower”.But Abrams is refusing to be counted out. A Yale-educated tax attorney, she says she trusts her math better than the polls. In the fast-growing and diversifying battleground state, she notes that as many as 1.6 million new voters have been added to the rolls since 2018, many times Kemp’s margin of victory that year.“Every success I’ve ever had in politics has been about building the electorate I need – building the electorate we should have, which is an electorate that’s much more reflective of the state,” Abrams said during an interview at a coffee shop in Atlanta.Georgia is nearly evenly divided between the parties, and in many ways, Abrams and Kemp embody the dueling factions of the state’s polarized electorate. Abrams, a former state house minority leader and prominent voting rights advocate, is working to mobilize Black, Latino and Asian American voters along with young people in Atlanta and its sprawling suburbs. While Kemp, a staunch conservative who easily defeated a Trump-backed primary challenge earlier this year, draws overwhelming support from white voters in the rural and exurban parts of the state.“This is 100% the battle of the bases,” said Nsé Ufot, leader of the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams to register and engage young people and voters of color. “And it’s 100% going to be determined by who shows up to vote and whose votes get counted.”Canvassers with the New Georgia Project are pounding the pavement to register and turn out voters this cycle. Their goal is to knock on at least 2m doors by election day. Though some Democrats have expressed doubts about Abrams’ expansion strategy, Ufot said it has already proven effective by paving the way for Biden’s victory in 2020 and the election of two Democratic senators in 2021, which delivered the party control of the chamber.“Now is the time to double down, not to second guess ourselves,” she said.Despite a deeply loyal base, surveys suggest Abrams has become a more polarizing figure since her last campaign. Supporters say it is not surprising, after four years of being vilified by conservatives as a far-left extremist who views the governorship only as a stepping stone to the presidency.But it may be making it harder for Abrams to attract the vanishingly thin slice of independent and moderate Republican voters whose discomfort with Trump pushed them toward Democrats in recent elections. A Marist Poll found that 11% of Georgians who voted for Biden in 2020 plan to back Kemp for governor, while just 5% of Trump voters favor Abrams.“If Abrams looks to be more than a contender and she wants to win,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, “she really is going to have to shake the tree and find a few more Democratic voters.”Meanwhile, Trump loyalists who were once wary of Kemp have largely aligned behind him, persuaded by his conservative record and their fear of an Abrams victory.“We definitely cannot have a Stacey Abrams governorship in Georgia,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chair of the Cobb County Republican party, which censured Kemp in 2021. “That’s a very scary proposition.”Kemp’s refusal to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia during the turbulent weeks after the 2020 election infuriated Trump. In the months that followed, he made Kemp the target of a vengeance campaign, even once musing that Abrams would make a better governor.But since Kemp’s strong primary showing, Trump has mostly stayed away from the governor’s race. And Republican allies say Kemp’s independence will probably help him win back disaffected suburban voters.Abrams is vocal in her view that Kemp deserves no credit for withstanding pressure to subvert a free and fair election.“While I’m glad that he didn’t commit treason, that is not a reason to lionize him,” she said in the interview. “He simply did not do one thing and he has used that to cloak every other bad behavior.”Kemp, Abrams argues, has been relatively silent on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, even as the former president’s stolen-election myth continues to resonate deeply with conservatives in the state. He also backed an overhaul of the state’s voting laws that critics said was rooted in Trump’s groundless claims of widespread fraud.“Kemp is a Maga Republican who has done everything in his power to align himself with not only Trump’s values but Trump’s behavior,” she added. “He has just done it in a more subtle way.”In Georgia, like elsewhere, Democrats face a challenging political environment. Voters have soured on the president amid widespread economic malaise and anxiety about the rising cost of living.With the economy top of mind for voters, Kemp has sought to tie Abrams to Biden and warned that her economic plans would deepen inflation. At the same time, he is campaigning as a steward of Georgia’s bustling economy, which includes record-low unemployment and a record $21.2bn in state-tracked business investments.According to the AJC poll, Georgians were significantly more pessimistic about the direction of the country than the direction of their state. On the campaign trail, Kemp attributes the rosier outlook to his decision to reopen businesses after they closed during the earliest months of the pandemic. He also approved of popular policies that boosted teacher pay, provided tax rebates to families and suspended the state’s gas tax.“The courage that we have seen from Governor Brian Kemp has been extraordinary,” said Nikki Haley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, during a campaign appearance with Kemp at a burger joint in Atlanta. “First state in the country to open up after Covid – he was vilified for it, and it turns out that he’s the one that saved the economy, saved our businesses … and allowed people to get back to work.”Abrams has sought to paint a starkly different picture of the economy under Kemp, one in which the wealthiest have profited while the poor have been left behind. At the center of her economic agenda is a plan to fully expand Medicaid, which she argues is critical to stopping a wave of hospital closures across the state, including a major trauma center in Atlanta that has become a flashpoint in the campaign.But it is a brewing national backlash to the supreme court decision overturning the federal right to an abortion that Abrams and Democrats believe could change the tide. In ads and on the campaign trail, Abrams has lashed Kemp for signing a 2019 law that bans abortion as early as six weeks in Georgia, before many women know they are pregnant. The law was allowed to take effect in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling.According to recent polling, most voters in Georgia disagree with the supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and more than half say the state’s abortion laws are too strict.“The No 1 issue that people talk about when I’m on the campaign trail is abortion rights,” said Nabilah Islam, the Democratic nominee for a competitive state senate seat in Gwinnett county.Islam, who has put abortion access at the center of her campaign, pointed to the rise in voter registration among women since the Dobbs decision. “There’s a feeling of helplessness,” she said, “but also hope because people are so angry that they’re organizing at levels unseen before.”Abrams is also working to shore up her base. Black voters are the cornerstone of the Democrats coalition in Georgia. While they still overwhelmingly prefer Democrats, there are some signs the party is struggling to motivate Black voters at the levels needed to win in Georgia.The trend is particularly pronounced among Black men, who have edged toward Republicans in recent years. In several polls, Kemp has notably improved his standing among Black voters from 2018.Ron DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aidRead moreAbrams says she is taking no vote for granted. As part of her campaign’s outreach to Black men, she has hosted a series of conversations called “Stacey and the Fellas” to discuss how her initiatives on issues like healthcare and housing will benefit their communities.At one such event over the summer, she was blunt: “If Black men vote for me, I will win Georgia.”Andrekay Askew is among the roughly one in 10 Black voters who remain undecided in the state. The 27-year-old said he is skeptical of Democrats’ economic policies but was open to learning more about Abrams’s platform.Ultimately, he said, his decision would be guided by: “Who is better with the money?”Listening from the porch, his mother shook her head in disagreement. Laqua Askew, who works in special education, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Abrams in 2018 and plans to do so again this year. She is worried about a lack of public school funding, as well as gun violence and crime, all of which she said takes a heavy toll on the low-income students she works with.“Kemp had the opportunity to make a change but he hasn’t,” she said. “We’ve got to try something else.”In a state as closely divided as Georgia, much could still change before election day. Kemp and Abrams will face off in a public debate that could help sway the critical few undecided voters. And if neither candidate wins a majority of the vote, the contest proceeds to a runoff election.Speaking at the AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic last month, Abrams asked supporters to spend the final weeks of the campaign focused on the “unfinished business” before them.“I can’t get this job if you all don’t show up,” she said. “I can get this job if you all do what you did in 2018.”
      Joan E Greve contributed to this report from Atlanta.
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022AtlantaGeorgiaStacey AbramsUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms surprises by not seeking second term

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      The mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was seen as a possible running mate for Joe Biden in last year’s presidential election, said late on Thursday she will not seek a second term in office.Bottoms, 51, who was elected mayor in 2017 and is just the second Black woman to lead the city, did not provide a specific reason for her decision and did not say what she would do next, when she announced the surprise news.“It is with deep emotions that I hold my head high, and choose not to seek another term as Mayor,” Bottoms wrote on Twitter.In a morning press conference on Friday, Bottoms, visibly tearful, cited challenges during her tenure including a March 2018 cyber-attack on the city during the early months of her term; social justice protests after the murder of George Floyd, where police aggressively clashed with demonstrators; and being mayor during the administration of Donald Trump, whom she described as “the madman in the White House”.Bottoms was clear that family reasons were not behind her decision to step down. She also said she would not be accepting a position at Walgreens after her term is finished, addressing rumors that she would be working with her close friend and Walgreens chief executive, Roz Brewer.Bottoms also said that her decision was not because of doubts that she could win a second term in office. As Bottoms stated, polling numbers show that if a mayoral election was held today, she would win the race without a runoff.“I don’t know what’s next for me personally and for my family. But what I do know is that this is a decision made from a position of strength, not weakness, said Bottoms.Bottoms had previously been fundraising money for her re-election efforts, including hosting a virtual fundraiser with Joe Biden, and now donations will be returned, she said.She said in her letter to social media that the decision came “as [my husband] Derek and I have given thoughtful prayer and consideration to the season now before us”.“Multiple credible polls have shown that if the race for Mayor were held today, I would be re-elected,” read the statement.It also listed a number of Bottoms’ achievements in office, including ending Atlanta’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that placed detainees in the Atlanta city jail; helping to elect Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice-president; and the Democratic victories of the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in Georgia.Bottoms’ sudden reversal on re-election is surprising, given her growing popularity in the Democratic party.Bottoms was an early endorser of Biden and played a crucial role in promoting his 2020 campaign.She was also offered a cabinet position under Biden, one she turned down last December, citing her mayoral responsibilities in Atlanta.Bottoms now said that if she had known of someone at the time who “could step up” and be the mayor of Atlanta, she “likely would have made another decision” when she was offered the cabinet position.“I wanted to finish what I started and I didn’t see who could step in and lead this city,” she said.Apart from the crises of Covid-19, a cyber-attack and police killings,Atlanta was scored with an increase in violence last year. In addition to a record number of homicides, the most since 1996, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, eight people, the majority of Asian descent, were killed in a mass shooting at two area spas.Bottoms had publicly stated that she believed race played a role in the shooting suspect’s motive.Bottoms had made national headlines after being sued by Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, for ordering a face mask mandate for Atlanta, publicly calling the governor’s leadership “irresponsible”.The mayor’s handling of Brooks’s death has been met with criticism, especially following the reinstatement of officer Garrett Rolfe this week, who shot Brooks, after a review board found the city had not followed its own disciplinary procedures.Now there will be fevered speculation about who will run the largest city in Georgia, including another go for two-term past mayor Kasim Reed. More

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      Republicans are in a messy divorce with big business. Democrats could benefit | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      One of the central facts of modern American politics has been the strong bond between the Republican party and the country’s business elite. Even Donald Trump, who briefly campaigned as an economic populist in 2016, governed like the plutocrat he was. Businesses could rely on Republicans for the regressive tax cuts and supply-side economics that helped their bottom lines – and the personal bank accounts of their executives. Democrats, meanwhile, have drifted to the left economically, embracing much higher taxes and a new era of trust-busting. If Republicans are the capitalists, then Democrats are the socialists.That, at least, is the conventional narrative. And it gets some things right. But it struggles to explain what happened in the past few weeks, as large companies such as Delta and Coca-Cola spoke out against Georgia’s new voter-suppression legislation. Republicans were blistering in response, with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, accusing the private sector of behaving like a “woke parallel government” and warning of “serious consequences” if they didn’t stop. This threat isn’t idle – efforts are under way to hit companies on their bottom line, with Georgia Republicans voting to strip Delta of a lucrative tax break and Trump calling for boycotts of companies like Coca-Cola. (Freedom Pepsi, anyone?)It’s easy to dismiss all of this as a public-relations stunt. Many of the companies coming out against the Georgia law did so only belatedly and under pressure, and many of the Republican politicians decrying “woke capitalism” are just hoping to score points with their base. But the very fact that these things are happening at all is due to important shifts in the American political landscape – ones which may eventually become seismic.It’s not difficult to see why tensions have risen as Republicans have increasingly embraced an angry, racist nationalism and an anti-democratic ethos. Doing so has put them at odds with the young and value-conscious Americans who fuel sales of America’s biggest brands. Companies that want to attract younger consumers and employees have flexed their power in response. When North Carolina passed a law in 2016 banning trans people from using the restroom consistent with their gender identity, boycotts and cancelled business expansions were set to cost the state about $4bn over 12 years. The state’s Republican governor subsequently lost to a Democratic challenger and the law was repealed.For their part, Republicans have turned away from their traditional pro-business stances on trade, immigration and globalization. This shift has been accompanied by a rearranging of intellectual priorities. While a previous generation of Republicans prioritized the economy above all else, the loudest voices on the right today agree with Senator Tom Cotton when he says that “we are not an economy with a country. We are a country with an economy.” Companies that speak out against the new nationalist agenda can find themselves in the crosshairs of the self-declared tribunes of the country, as Keurig did when it decided to stop advertising on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.It is premature to predict a wholesale collapse of the Republican party’s alliance with big business. But the events of recent years present an enormous opportunity for Democrats to make political inroads. In 2020, the counties won by Joe Biden produced a whopping 71% of US GDP, compared with only 29% in the counties which voted for Donald Trump – a gap which is 14 points higher than in 2016. Democrats also increasingly represent the more educated voters who corporate America covets as consumers and employees, and who have fled the Trumpified Republican party.Progressive Democrats are right to be wary of calls for the party to identify itself as pro-businessDemocrats also represent the values and competence which American businesses – and the workers who depend on them – need to thrive. Trump’s plutocratic tax cuts and shamelessness in gutting the regulatory state might have provided a sugar rush to many businesses, but his woeful handling of the pandemic and impulsive trade wars harmed them. The paranoid, reality-denying, cultish Republican party of today cannot be trusted to elevate competent figures into key political and policymaking positions. As Trump demonstrated, the costs of having a clown in charge can generally be tolerated while the economy is thundering along in normal times – but they become catastrophic when a serious challenge arises.Democrats, on the other hand, don’t just represent a steady hand in a crisis. They are also advancing plans for infrastructure, increased R&D spending and a green energy transition which are all necessary to the future competitiveness of the American economy. Such plans involve winners and losers, but overall they represent an enormous investment in the economy which can solidify the party’s appeal to corporations, employees and voters.Progressive Democrats are right to be wary of calls for the party to identify itself as pro-business. And it’s absolutely right that Democrats seek to reform capitalism at the same time that they embrace it. But Republican tensions with big business give Democrats exactly what they need to accomplish that – leverage. Faced with the alternative, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have proven more open to Democratic proposals like raising the minimum wage than under previous administrations. Their support makes such policies easier to pass and more likely to be enduring.Something even more important is at stake. For decades, corporate America has been a key pillar in the Republican coalition. That pillar is starting to crack, providing an opportunity for Democrats to weaken a dangerously extremist party which poses an existential threat to American democracy. As big business flees the wreckage of the Republican party, the best thing to do for the future of the country is welcome it into the Democratic coalition – with conditions. More

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      'We all know hate when we see it': Warnock rejects FBI chief's view of Atlanta shootings

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      Law enforcement officials including the director of the FBI have said the shootings in Atlanta in which eight people were killed do not appear to have been racially motivated, but the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday: “We all know hate when we see it.”Six women of Asian descent, another woman and a man were killed on Tuesday, in a shootings at spas in the Atlanta area.Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, was charged with the murders. He told police his actions were not racially motivated, and claimed to have a sex addiction.Speaking to NPR on Thursday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said: “While the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”But such conclusions are rejected by protesters who see a link to rising attacks on Asian Americans in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China, and racially charged rhetoric from former president Donald Trump and others.Warnock, a Democrat, took office in January as the first African American elected to the US Senate from Georgia. On Saturday he and his fellow Democratic senator Jon Ossoff spoke to protesters near the state capitol in Atlanta.“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, ‘We see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,’” Warnock said, to cheers.On Sunday, he told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think it’s important that we centre the humanity of the victims. I’m hearing a lot about the shooter, but these precious lives that have been lost, they are attached to families. They’re connected to people who love them. And so, we need to keep that in mind.“Law enforcement will go through the work that they need to do, but we all know hate when we see it. And it is tragic that we’ve been visited with this kind of violence yet again.”Warnock also cited a Georgia hate crimes law passed amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a young African American man, and which prosecutors may decide to use against Young.“I’ve long pushed for hate crimes laws here in the state of Georgia,” Warnock said. “It took entirely too long to get one on the books here. But thankfully, we do have that law on the books right now.”Calling for “reasonable gun reform”, Warnock also linked official responses to the Atlanta shootings to efforts by Republicans to restrict voting among minority groups.“This shooter was able to kill all of these folks the same day he purchased a firearm,” Warnock said. “But right now, what is our legislature doing? They’re busy under the gold dome here in Georgia, trying to prevent people from being able to vote the same day they register.“I think that suggests a distortion in values. When you can buy a gun and create this much carnage and violence on the same day, but if you want to exercise your right to vote as an American citizen, the same legislature that should be focused on this is busy erecting barriers to that constitutional right.”Young bought a 9mm handgun at Big Woods Goods. Matt Kilgo, a lawyer for the store, told the Associated Press it complies with federal background check laws and is cooperating with police, with “no indication there’s anything improper”.Democrats and campaigners for gun law reform said a mandatory waiting period might have stopped Young acting on impulse.“It’s really quick,” Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told the AP. “You walk in, fill out the paperwork, get your background check and walk out with a gun. If you’re in a state of crisis, personal crisis, you can do a lot of harm fairly quickly.”According to the Giffords Center, studies suggest purchase waiting periods may bring down firearm suicides by up to 11% and homicides by about 17%.David Wilkerson, the minority whip in the Georgia state House, said Democrats planned to introduce legislation that would require a five-day period between buying a gun and getting it. More

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      Atlanta spa shootings: Georgia hate crimes law could see first big test

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      A hate crimes law passed in Georgia amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery could get its first major test as part of the murder case against a white man charged with shooting and killing six women of Asian descent at Atlanta-area massage businesses this week.Prosecutors in Georgia who will decide whether to pursue a hate crimes enhancement have declined to comment. But one said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian American community”.Until last year, Georgia was one of four states without a hate crimes law. But lawmakers moved quickly to pass stalled legislation in June, during national protests over racial violence against Black Americans including the killing of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was pursued by several white men and fatally shot while out running in February 2020.The new law allows an additional penalty for certain crimes if they are motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or mental or physical disability.Governor Brian Kemp called the new legislation “a powerful step forward”, adding when signing it into law: “Georgians protested to demand action and state lawmakers … rose to the occasion.”The killings of eight people in Georgia this week have prompted national mourning and a reckoning with racism and violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. The attack also focused attention on the interplay of racism and misogyny, including hyper-sexualized portrayals of Asian women in US culture.Many times Asian people are too silent, but times changeRobert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with the murders of six women of Asian descent and two other people. He told police the attacks at two spas in Atlanta and a massage business near suburban Woodstock were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction.Asian American lawmakers, activists and scholars argued that the race and gender of the victims were central to the attack.“To think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women … and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd,” said Grace Pai, director of organizing at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Chicago.Elaine Kim, a professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think it’s likely that the killer not only had a sex addiction but also an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”Such sentiments were echoed on Saturday as a diverse, hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a park across from the Georgia state capitol to demand justice for the victims of the shootings.Speakers included the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the Georgia state representative Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American in the Georgia House.“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,” Warnock said to loud cheers. “We’re all in this thing together.”Bernard Dong, a 24-year-old student from China at Georgia Tech, said he had come to the protest to demand rights not just for Asians but for all minorities.“Many times Asian people are too silent, but times change,” he said, adding that he was “angry and disgusted” about the shootings and violence against Asians, minorities and women.Otis Wilson, a 38-year-old photographer, said people needed to pay attention to discrimination against those of Asian descent.“We went through this last year with the Black community, and we’re not the only ones who go through this,” he said.The Cherokee county district attorney, Shannon Wallace, and Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, will decide whether to pursue the hate crime enhancement.Wallace said she could not answer specific questions but said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community”. A representative for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.The US Department of Justice could bring federal hate crime charges independently of state prosecutions. Federal investigators have not uncovered evidence to prove Long targeted the victims because of their race, two unnamed officials told the Associated Press.A Georgia State University law professor, Tanya Washington, said it was important for the new hate crimes law to be used.“Unless we test it with cases like this one, we won’t have a body of law around how do you prove bias motivated the behavior,” she said.[embedded content]Given that someone convicted of multiple murders is unlikely to be released from prison, an argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, time and expense to pursue a hate crime designation that carries a relatively small additional penalty. But the Republican state representative Chuck Efstration, who sponsored the hate crimes bill, said it was not just about punishment.“It is important that the law calls things what they are,” he said. “It’s important for victims and it’s important for society.”The state senator Michelle Au, a Democrat, said the law needed to be used to give it teeth.Au believes there has been resistance nationwide to charge attacks against Asian Americans as hate crimes because they are seen as “model minorities”, a stereotype that they are hard-working, educated and free of societal problems. She said she had heard from many constituents in the last year that Asian Americans – and people of Chinese descent in particular – were suffering from bias because the coronavirus emerged in China and Donald Trump used racial terms to describe it.“People feel like they’re getting gaslighted because they see it happen every day,” she said. “They feel very clearly that it is racially motivated but it’s not pegged or labeled that way. And people feel frustrated by that lack of visibility and that aspect being ignored.” More