InternationalJan 05. 2021Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga speaks during a New Year’s press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Japan News-Yomiuri
By Syndication Washington Post, The Japan News-Yomiuri
Japan Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Monday the government will consider declaring a fresh state of emergency amid the spread of the novel coronavirus, covering Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa.
A meeting of experts will be held as early as Friday, and the state of emergency is expected to be declared this week. It is expected to last for about a month.
Speaking at a New Year’s press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office, Suga said: “The number of newly confirmed infections did not decline in the first three days of the New Year. Tokyo and the three prefectures accounted for half of the infections nationwide.
“I take this situation seriously and have come to think that a stronger message [by declaring a state of emergency] is needed,” he said.
The risk of infection is said to be high during eating and drinking, such as when eating dinner. Since the end of last year, the government has called on the public to refrain from dining out. However, the turnout in bustling areas in Tokyo has not decreased.
“Details to make [the declaration] effective will be worked out as soon as possible,” Suga said.
The stage of emergency would be declared under the special measures law to cope with new strains of influenza. It would be the first since then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency on April 7 last year for Tokyo and six prefectures.
A state of emergency can be issued for specific areas over a set period of time if a prime minister judges that the rapid expansion of infections nationwide would have a “huge impact on people’s livelihoods and their financial situation.”
Governors of prefectures that are subject to a state of emergency can ask residents to refrain from going out, as well as ask or order limits on, or the suspension of, the use of certain facilities.
Tokyo logged 1,337 newly confirmed infections on Dec. 31, topping the 1,000 mark for the first time for a single-day figure. As of Sunday, the number of seriously ill COVID-19 patients in Tokyo totaled 101, the highest since last year’s state of emergency was lifted. The current situation is weighing heavily on the medical system in the capital.
On Saturday, the governors of Tokyo and the three prefectures asked Yasutoshi Nishimura, the economic revitalization minister who is also tasked with handling the pandemic, to issue a fresh state of emergency, saying the increase in new infections showed no signs of abating.
The previous state of emergency was declared on April 7 for Tokyo and six prefectures, and was expanded to all 47 prefectures on April 16. The government initially planned to maintain the state of emergency through May 6, but it was ultimately lifted on May 25.
With regard to vaccinations against COVID-19, Suga said: “The entire government is preparing so that vaccinations can start by the end of February. I am willing to be vaccinated.”
Until vaccinations start, the prime minister said, “It’s important [for the people] to move in the same direction, to get the number of infections declining.”
Regarding the resumption of the Go To Travel program to support domestic tourism, Suga said, “It will probably be difficult if a state of emergency [is declared again].” Go To Travel has been suspended through Jan. 11 nationwide.
108 seriously ill in Tokyo
The Tokyo metropolitan government said Monday that there were 108 seriously ill patients infected with the novel coronavirus, up by seven from the previous day and the highest ever.
The previous high was 105, marked on April 28 and 29, when the country was under a state of emergency.
New cases of coronavirus infections in Tokyo numbered 884, the highest for a Monday.
China has begun a nationwide drive to vaccinate some 50 million front-line workers against the coronavirus before the Lunar New Year travel rush next month, in hopes of avoiding a repeat of last year’s grim holiday season.
Workers in a range of industries will receive their first of two vaccine shots by the middle of this month, with the next shot two to four weeks afterward, according to the national plan. The nine prioritized groups include health sector workers, delivery workers, people whose jobs require overseas travel, public servants and utilities employees.
China’s target of vaccinating 50 million people in a month is an ambitious goal, more than the populations of California and Michigan combined. In the United States, where the Trump administration has touted its “Operation Warp Speed” to fast-track delivery of vaccines, 4.2 million people have received a first dose since distribution began on Dec. 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid Data Tracker.
There’s urgency to complete these vaccinations before Lunar New Year – often called the world’s largest annual human migration – which takes place Feb. 11-17. Last year, some 1.5 billion trips were made over the holiday in China, half the normal number, as people sheltered in place against the growing coronavirus outbreak.
After scuttled reunion plans for many families last year, there is pressure on Chinese authorities to make the country safer for holiday travel this time around. For many in China who work far from home, Lunar New Year is the only time they can gather with their families for celebration and feasting.
“We can’t require people to stay at home and not go out during Lunar New Year,” prominent Shanghai infectious-disease expert Zhang Wenhong was quoted saying in the official People’s Daily on Saturday, even as he said controls may be necessary in higher-risk areas.
Millions in priority groups had already received shots as part of an earlier “urgent use” push, before regulators gave the green light to a vaccine from Sinopharm, a state-owned drugmaker, last week. Now, vaccines are being rolled out by municipal authorities to all prioritized workers willing to take them, and should begin to reach some other demographics by next month.
China’s approval of Sinopharm’s vaccine has given confidence to some other countries. Egypt said Saturday it had approved Sinopharm’s vaccine for emergency use, while a Pakistan minister said the country would purchase 1.2 million doses from Sinopharm.
However, Sinopharm has also come under criticism for lack of transparency, with scant detail released about its Phase 3 clinical trials. Wu Yonglin, the president of the Sinopharm unit that developed the vaccine, has said that the company will provide detailed data after more observation.
Within China, state media on Monday was awash with reports of the vaccination drive. In the capital city, Beijing, municipal officials reported that 73,537 people received their first dose of vaccine in the first two days of the new year.
State broadcaster CCTV showed footage of people standing in line over the weekend at pop-up vaccination sites in Beijing, and sitting in socially distanced seats afterward for monitoring for any adverse symptoms. The broadcaster said there were more than 200 vaccination sites in the capital.
Other cities across the country have also announced drives to vaccinate front-line workers over the past two weeks.
Health Times, a state-run newspaper, quoted vaccine expert Tao Lina last month as saying the government planned to vaccinate 50 million people by Lunar New Year, with the first shot by Jan. 15 and second shot by Feb. 5.
Front-line workers eligible for this round of vaccination include those aged 18 to 59 employed in ports, delivery companies, the transportation industry, health and sanitation, public servants, police and firefighters, utilities, elder care, telecommunications, and people whose work or studies takes them overseas.
Besides the vaccine push, officials have issued some restrictions for the Lunar New Year holiday to try to prevent another surge in coronavirus cases. Several cities limited the size of gatherings to 10 people. Chinese Communist Party members in Beijing have been ordered not to leave the city without permission.
These restrictions are still mild compared with last year’s Lunar New Year season, when authorities put swaths of China under lockdown to try to control the rapidly spreading virus. Wuhan, where the virus emerged in late 2019, was sealed off from the rest of the country for more than two months. In many other cities, residents were prevented from leaving their homes without an approved reason.
Brian Pinker receives the AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford Covid-19 vaccine in Oxford, on Jan. 4.Photographer: Steve Parsons/PA Wire/Bloomberg
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Eric Pfanner
Britain gave the first shots of a coronavirus vaccine from AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, in a race against a faster-spreading coronavirus variant that’s prompted new restrictions on movement across much of the country.
The first injection was administered Monday morning to an 82-year-old kidney dialysis patient at Oxford University Hospital.
Britain is stepping up its vaccine campaign as coronavirus infections surge across the country, putting the country on the brink of another national lockdown. It’s moved more rapidly on approvals and rollouts than the U.S. or the European Union, clearing the AstraZeneca-Oxford product despite clinical trials that involved a smaller number of participants and that were complicated by a dosing error. A regulatory decision to lengthen the interval between doses of the two-shot vaccines to as many as 12 weeks has prompted further questions.
A new strain that’s estimated to be as much as 70% more transmissible is fueling the pandemic’s resurgence in the U.K. Schools have been closed across much of the country, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that tougher restrictions may be on the way.
U.K. regulators cleared the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot last week, marking its first approval worldwide. It’s the second injection to be authorized for emergency use in Britain, after one from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE received the go-ahead in early December.
More than a million people in Britain have received injections of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.
The U.K. has raced ahead of France, where only about 500 people had got initial shots as of this weekend. President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire for the slow pace of that country’s rollout, which has been hampered by caution amid high levels of vaccine skepticism. France is behind not just European neighbors such as Britain and Germany, but also Israel, where more than 12% of the population has already received injections.
In the U.K., more than 500,000 AstraZeneca-Oxford doses will be available as of Monday, and they will be delivered at hospitals for the first few days. The U.K. aims to expand the number of vaccination sites to more than 1,000, with as many as 100 more hospitals and 180 general practitioner-led services coming online this week.
Although the newly approved vaccine has shown lower effectiveness than the Pfizer-BioNTech one in clinical trials, it has some key advantages: It’s cheaper and easier to transport and store, requiring only refrigerator temperatures rather than deep freezing. That makes it crucial for the broader global vaccination push.
David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for covid-19, called for caution amid the global rush to vaccinate populations.
“I really would like to appeal to every leader just to really slow down a bit on the rush to get the vaccine into as many arms as possible and put more time into systematic planning on what has to be a really effective global operation,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
The NHS is administering the first injections under a two-shot regime approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. The second can be given as many as 12 weeks later, as the U.K. seeks to maximize the number of vulnerable people who receive the first portion, which provides some protection from infection.
The U.K. has also taken a more flexible approach to the two-dose regimen, saying that in certain circumstances — such as when it’s not known which vaccine a patient received the first time around — the second shot can be administered with a different company’s product.
The U.K. regulator has yet to publish full data backing its decision to allow a greater time interval between shots, which has drawn opposition from the British Medical Association.
“It is grossly and patently unfair to tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to now try to reschedule their appointments,” said Richard Vautrey, chairman of the association’s General Practitioners Committee.
WASHINGTON – Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and other top Democrats swiftly denounced remarks that President Donald Trump made during an extraordinary hour-long phone call with Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which the president pressures Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes that will overturn the results of the presidential election in the state in his favor.
Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, said the conversation provides “irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, in which the president repeatedly states that there is “no way I lost Georgia.” He makes threats about vague criminal consequences and tells the secretary of state that he’s taking a “big risk.”
Bauer added: “It captures the whole disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy.”
Speaking in Georgia on Sunday, Harris called Trump’s conversation a “baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States.”
“It was certainly the voice of desperation, most certainly that,” she said.
Harris was there to campaign for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of Senate runoff elections on Tuesday in the state.
During the call, Trump urged Georgia’s election officials to act quickly, and suggested that not doing so could endanger the political fate of Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Georgia Republicans.
“You would be respected, really respected, if this thing could be straightened out before the election,” Trump said during the call. “You have a big election coming up on Tuesday.”
The two Democratic Senate candidates were among those who quickly condemned Trump for the call.
“When the president of the United States calls up Georgia’s election officials and tries to intimidate them to change the results of the election, to disenfranchise Georgia voters,” Ossoff said, speaking to supporters, “. . . that is a direct attack on our democracy.”
He added: “If David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spine, one piece of integrity, they would be out defending Georgia voters from that assault.”
In a statement, Warnock called on Loeffler to “speak out against the unsubstantiated claims of fraud, to defend Georgia’s elections, and to put Georgia ahead of herself. She has not and never will.”
Trump was joined on the call by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as longtime conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell and Georgia-based lawyer Kurt Hilbert. Ryan Germany, who is general counsel for Raffensperger’s office, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs were also on the call.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who will be the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee if his party does not take the chamber, said the call was “more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional rant.”
“His disgraceful effort to intimidate an elected official into deliberately changing and misrepresenting the legally confirmed vote totals in his state strikes at the heart of our democracy and merits nothing less than a criminal investigation,” Durbin said in a statement. “The President is unhinged and dangerous.”
Trump vaguely threatened Raffensperger and Germany, suggesting that they would be subject to criminal liability if they do not find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County were illegally destroyed to block investigators, a baseless allegation.
“You are going to find that they are – which is totally illegal – it is more illegal for you than it is for them, because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
Michael Bromwich, who served as the Justice Department inspector general from 1994 to 1999, suggested that Trump’s threats against Raffensperger and Germany could violate federal law that prohibits efforts to deprive voters of a fair election.
“His best defense would be insanity,” Bromwich tweeted, adding: “The entire call is astonishing. The bullying, the threats, the insults, the credulous embrace of discredited conspiracy theories. Like a crime boss, Trump occasionally says that all he wants is the truth. But he doesn’t – he wants the win.”
In a tweet, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., suggested to his fellow lawmakers that any “member of Congress considering objecting to the election results, you cannot – in light of this – do so with a clean conscience.”
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., appeared to jab at some of his Senate colleagues across the aisle who have said they will not certify Biden’s win without an investigation of voter fraud allegations, which have been unsubstantiated.
“I heard there’s a group of Senate Republicans eager to investigate election fraud,” he tweeted.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who has pledged to contest the electoral college vote certification, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s conversation; neither did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
InternationalJan 04. 2021Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., exits the Senate floor following a vote Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
By The Washington Post · Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS
WASHINGTON – A new Congress convened Sunday with Republicans in open warfare as several GOP senators unleashed salvos against at least a dozen Republican colleagues who are planning to challenge the results of the presidential election this week.
Vice President Mike Pence attends a ceremony at the Capitol on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
The bitter split among Republicans, virtually unprecedented during the tenure of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., came as the traditionally celebratory moment unfolded instead against the backdrop of a pandemic that is killing thousands of Americans each day.
The conflict played out in public as dissenting senators said they only wanted to “get the facts out” and critics said they were sabotaging democracy. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., called the challenge “a very, very, bad idea,” adding: “I’m concerned about the division in America – that’s the biggest issue – but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party, either.”
It was the starkest illustration of the conflict that could engulf the Republican Party in the post-Trump era as factions prepare to battle over whether the party will continue down the unorthodox, scorched-earth path forged by President Donald Trump or return to a more traditional brand of conservative politics. The back-and-forth came two days before a pair of special elections in Georgia that will determine whether the GOP retains control of the Senate.
Sunday’s clash was triggered by the plans of 12 senators to challenge as many as six states’ electoral vote tallies at Wednesday’s joint session of Congress, a usually routine procedure that this year is shaping up as the final opportunity of Trump loyalists to insist, without evidence, that President-elect Joe Biden’s win was somehow illegitimate.
In the House, a similar split developed: Several dozen GOP members have signaled that they will question the results, prompting a top Republican leader to call the idea “an exceptionally dangerous precedent.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was narrowly elected to a fourth term as speaker Sunday, was among those noting that the challenge was almost certain to fail. But she said lawmakers have a responsibility to counter the dissenters’ claims.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was elected speaker of the House on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
“Our choice is not to use the forum to debate the presidency of Donald Trump,” she wrote in a letter to colleagues. “While there is no doubt as to the outcome of the Biden-Harris presidency, our further success is to convince more of the American people to trust in our democratic system.”
While the chances of derailing Biden’s victory are virtually nonexistent – doing so would require the Democratic-controlled House, for instance, to reject electoral votes for Biden – the event provides a stage for Republican lawmakers seeking to court Trump loyalists, who may be influential in the GOP for years to come, by proclaiming their fealty to the president.
The conflict began Saturday evening, when a group of 11 Republican senators announced that they would join Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in challenging the electoral tally of one or more states, making it clear that the revolt would not be a minor affair but would involve more than one-fifth of Senate Republicans.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said in a statement that the effort “directly undermines” Americans’ right to choose their leaders, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called it an “egregious ploy.” Hawley shot back that Toomey and others were engaging in “shameless personal attacks.”
The contention spread through the party on Sunday as lawmakers returned to the Capitol for the swearing-in. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., among the challengers, argued that the effort was no different from Democratic objections to the 1969 and 2005 counts. In those instances, however, the losing candidate had long since conceded, and the dissent was marginal.
“Our democracy is strong enough to handle conversations about electoral integrity issues,” Lankford said.
Should the challenges be rejected Wednesday, Lankford said he would “absolutely” accept Biden as the rightful president. “Our goal is obviously to try to get the facts out, more than to be able to vote against the electors,” he added.
Lankford and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a former House member who was sworn in Sunday as a senator, said they were signing on to the challenge as a response to concerns from constituents worried about electoral improprieties.
“I think the people of Kansas feel disenfranchised,” Marshall said. “They want us to follow through on the many irregularities that they saw in this particular election.”
He brushed off the near-unanimous finding of courts and state officials, including Republicans, that the election was fair. “I don’t think that the courts have heard all the facts,” Marshall said. “And I think that my responsibility is to fulfill my duty to the Constitution, the oath that we just took.”
But many Republicans appeared distraught that the move would put party members on record as fighting the clear outcome of a democratic election.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said lawmakers had “a solemn responsibility to accept these electoral college votes that have been certified” by state officials. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., added, that “the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that Joe Biden defeated my candidate, Donald Trump, and I have to live with it.”
Late Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., issued a statement saying that he shares the “concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election,” but that the Founders “entrusted our elections chiefly to the states – not Congress,” and that he therefore will not oppose the counting of certified electoral votes.
The rare open conflict was an embarrassing spectacle for McConnell, who has for weeks urged Republicans to refrain from disputing the electoral tally. McConnell fears it will force his members into a politically difficult choice of either defying Trump or rejecting the electorate’s verdict.
While that is not expected to create an immediate problem for McConnell’s authority – he was reelected GOP leader by acclamation in November – it demonstrates that Trump’s departure from the White House will not diminish the intraparty tensions that made the past four years a high-wire act for many Republicans.
McConnell himself declined on Sunday to address the dissension in his ranks. “We’ll be dealing with all of that on Wednesday,” he said.
Democrats warned that the dissenters’ actions could damage the country for years to come.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Republicans are “hurting themselves and hurting the democracy . . . to try to please somebody who has no fidelity to elections or even the truth.”
Democrats have been particularly exasperated by Trump supporters’ tactic of groundlessly claiming the election was unfair, then citing the voter doubts fueled by those claims as a reason for further investigation. Dozens of judges, including several appointed by Trump, have summarily rejected allegations that any fraud capable of changing the outcome occurred.
“There’s a political invasion of the body-snatchers which is taking place,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “Donald Trump and his supporters are now actually able to create a situation this coming Wednesday where people who are senators and House members are going to vote for something that is absolutely and totally untrue.”
The GOP turmoil also reached into the House, where Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the third-ranking House Republican, circulated a 21-page memo rebutting the case made by the dissenting senators. She urged members not to go down the path of questioning states’ voting tallies.
“Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress,” Cheney wrote. “This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.”
Former House speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., weighed in as well, saying “it is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections.”
The turmoil reflected the rocky path that probably lies ahead for what will be the most closely divided Congress in memory. The Senate would be split 50-50 if Democrats prevail in both Georgia races Tuesday, while the Democrats’ advantage in the House has dwindled to several seats.
On Sunday, Pelosi became the second lawmaker in the past 34 years to win a fourth term as speaker, claiming 216 votes to the 209 that Republicans cast for their leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Five moderate Democrats either voted “present” or supported another Democrat.
Pelosi’s vote total fell below the usual 218-vote threshold for a House majority in part because three lawmakers missed the vote because of illness, including two who recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
Two House members voted even though they were still technically in quarantine, using a special, newly constructed alcove in the House gallery sealed off by plexiglass. Republicans accused Democrats of bending the quarantine rules to boost Pelosi’s vote total, but the change did not alter the outcome: Two Democrats and one Republican – Reps. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Frederica Wilson, D-Fla. – used that area to vote.
Scores of Democratic members have used new proxy voting procedures to weigh in from afar during the past seven months, but those procedures were not allowed for Sunday’s vote, so lawmakers had to appear in person.
The proceedings began on a somber note, with the announcement of an unexpected vacancy due to the death last week of Rep.-elect Luke Letlow, a 41-year-old Louisiana Republican who had been hospitalized with covid-19, the illness that the novel coronavirus can cause.
Veteran lawmakers, accustomed to the joyous pomp and packed House chamber for their swearing-in, found the restrictions jarring. Only first-time members were allowed to bring a guest, for example.
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., first elected in 1986, called the atmosphere “real different” after leaving the Capitol’s coronavirus testing site. “First time I’ve been without my family,” he said. “My wife’s always up in the gallery.”
The selection of the new speaker – historically made with all members on the floor and lawmakers rising one at a time in alphabetical order to shout their selection – was instead done in shifts, with 72 lawmakers called to the floor at a time.
Shortly before 5:30 p.m., Pelosi took the rostrum to speak before a chamber with fewer than 150 members as the other two-thirds of lawmakers watched on television.
She began by noting that a new Congress’s first day usually begins with a bipartisan service at a Capitol Hill church – but not this year.
“Until that is possible, let us pray personally.” Pelosi said. “Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with us.”
InternationalJan 04. 2021A bird view of Beijing’s central business district, which is home to the headquarters of a great number of companies on the Fortune Global 500. [Photo/VCG]
By China Daily
The World Bank projected that China’s GDP growth will return to its pre-pandemic level by 2021, to accelerate to 7.9 percent next year from 2 percent in 2020, in response to improved consumer and business confidence and better labor market conditions, according to a report published on Wednesday.
Although the growth rate remained unchanged from the bank’s projection in the summer, the new report suggested navigating near-term uncertainty, which will require an adaptive policy framework calibrated to the pace of the recovery both in China and the rest of the world, according to the report.
“A premature policy exit and excessive tightening could derail the recovery,” it said. “Along with a flexible and supportive monetary policy, China could use its fiscal space to hedge against downside risks to growth and ensure a smooth rotation from public to private demand.”
The special direct fiscal transfers to local governments, a new mechanism launched this year to ensure fiscal and bailout funds can be directly received by primary-level government departments and entities, could be extended through next year and explicitly targeted to increased social spending and/or green investment by local governments, the World Bank said.
“The global environment remains highly uncertain and this calls for an adaptive policy framework,” said Martin Raiser, World Bank Country Director for China.
“The withdrawal of fiscal support should proceed gradually, but the focus should shift from traditional infrastructure to more social spending and green investment.”
In terms of monetary policy, the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, should return to more conventional tools while phasing out window guidance, lending targets, and relending facilities adopted to provide targeted support in the context of the COVID-19 shock, it added.
Sebastian Eckardt, World Bank lead economist for China, said that China will need to embrace the growth potential of its most developed and innovative metropolitan areas and city clusters, to rebalance the economy from investment to more innovation- and services-driven growth.
“Such a shift will need to be accompanied by fiscal policies to ensure more equitable public service delivery and increased investment in human capital for people living outside urban areas and coastal provinces,” Eckardt said.
Two Biden aides will recuse on BlackRock issues as past ties pose questions
InternationalJan 04. 2021Adewale Adeyemo, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Deputy Treasury Secretary, is pictured at the Queen in Wilmington, Del., on Dec. 1, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman
By The Washington Post · Yeganeh Torbati · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, POLITICS
In 2013, the asset management firm BlackRock unleashed a lobbying blitz to carpet-bomb a new Treasury Department agency, pushing federal regulators away from tightening requirements on its massive business lines.
In 2019, the company won again when the Trump administration cemented an approach that would essentially exempt large companies such as BlackRock from more scrutiny.
Now, however, the New York firm – with $7.8 trillion in assets under management – could face its biggest threat yet, with Democratic control of the White House and influential figures on the left bent on breaking Wall Street apart.
But BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is entering this era in a unique position: Two of President-elect Joe Biden’s senior economic advisers worked there in the years after they left the Obama administration.
Brian Deese, who until Dec. 18 led sustainable investing at BlackRock, is Biden’s pick to lead the White House National Economic Council. And Wally Adeyemo, who worked at BlackRock for just over two years, including as an interim chief of staff to founder Larry Fink, is slated to be deputy treasury secretary, with a direct hand in shaping the Biden administration’s approach to financial regulation. Adeyemo left the firm in 2019 to lead the Obama Foundation.
A Biden transition official said the incoming administration expects Deese and Adeyemo to recuse themselves from matters pertaining specifically to BlackRock for an “appropriate period” determined by law and an ethics agreement that is still in development. Still, their prominence within the top tier of Biden’s economic team, and BlackRock’s heavy investment in Washington influence in recent years, puts the company in a unique position heading into a period when its business lines could be coming under close scrutiny.
The firm’s ability to emerge victorious during battles in the Obama administration offers clues about how it could seek to survive and thrive during Biden’s time in office, and it presents the incoming administration with thorny questions about how it will seek to regulate a powerful firm with direct connections to its team.
BlackRock has a lot at stake. Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee to run the Treasury Department, has been sharply critical of moves by the Trump administration to ease oversight of companies such as BlackRock. If Yellen tightens restrictions, the company could find itself in a much different regulatory environment, potentially forcing it to set aside more reserves and hire more compliance officials.
In 2019, the Trump administration went further, overhauling the process by which the FSOC could assess the risks presented by non-bank financial firms and making it unlikely, experts said, that any company would draw tighter regulation. ce across the global economy. It has made purchases on behalf of the Fed and holds 5% or more of the shares of nearly all the companies traded on the S&P 500, according to one analysis published in 2019.
Still, combining a deft touch and an unrelenting lobbying blitz, it has kept policymakers at bay and been allowed to continue growing.
“The way that we proceeded reflected what I think was a correct view that you have to ask the questions without knowing the answers,” said a former senior Obama administration official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations or preserve working relationships. “Candidly in some ways, the aggressive nature of the BlackRock advocacy made that harder, not easier.”
BlackRock said in a statement that as an asset manager, it is subject to regulation by a range of agencies, and that it supports regulatory reform that “increases transparency, protects investors and facilitates responsible growth.”
“We believe in the value of open dialogue and transparency on important policy issues, and over the last decade, as regulators around the world implemented new rules and regulations that have re-shaped the regulatory environment governing a wide range of asset management products and practices, we aimed to be a helpful contributor to this process,” the company said.
Former officials who worked with Adeyemo and Deese pointed out that neither worked at BlackRock or other finance firms for long portions of their careers and said they believe it unlikely that they would have adopted the firm’s views on financial regulation. Adeyemo previously worked for now-Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a frequent antagonist of Wall Street, at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When he announced Adeyemo’s nomination, Biden said he was “highly recommended” by Warren.
Neither Adeyemo nor Deese consulted with BlackRock executives about the firm’s engagement with the Treasury Department or regulators during their time with the company, said a person familiar with the matter.
But Washington observers said that even if BlackRock does not lobby Deese and Adeyemo directly, the perception of the firm being well connected within the Biden team will give it extra sway at a critical time. Finance experts and former officials said the Biden administration will need to strengthen the very government institutions and regulatory mechanisms that BlackRock has spent years aggressively lobbying against, and some worried that BlackRock could try to use its connections to undermine tougher enforcement.
“This is an area that the Biden administration really needs to take a close look at, and hopefully there aren’t going to be conflicts of interest affecting things,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a liberal nonprofit group that advocates for stricter regulation of Wall Street. “BlackRock’s policy positions are very relevant to choices that the Biden administration is going to have to make.”
Biden transition spokeswoman Rosemary Boeglin said in an emailed statement that the incoming administration “has committed to establishing the most ethically rigorous administration in American history.”
“All nominees and appointees will commit to following all appropriate ethics rules in their work, including by meeting financial disclosure requirements, stepping down from outside positions, divesting assets, and recusing themselves from matters as required by federal ethics rules, their agencies, and the White House,” Boeglin said.
BlackRock is a massive financial company, but it is not a bank. It does not take government-insured deposits. It is an asset manager, investing and holding money on behalf of clients.
The firm aggressively snapped up senior and mid-level Obama administration officials from the White House and Treasury Department, giving it connections that have now proved fortuitous with Biden’s victory. And its political action committee and employees have given millions of dollars in campaign donations to politicians over the past decade, with more funds going to Democrats than Republicans, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Shortly after Barack Obama took office in 2009, BlackRock executives began meeting with midlevel and senior White House economics officials, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and, later, Chief of Staff William Daley, according to White House visitor logs. In 2014, Fink met three times with Jeff Zients, then the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and now slated to take on the role of coronavirus czar in the Biden administration.
Because it is not an investment bank – risk-taking in the investment banking sector helped cause the 2008 financial crisis – BlackRock could present itself as a constructive voice with useful perspectives on a range of issues facing policymakers, former officials said. The Fed Bank of New York turned to BlackRock for help in 2008, asking it to oversee failing assets held by Bear Stearns and American International Group. During meetings at the White House and in Congress during the Obama era, Fink would offer his insights on the health-care industry, infrastructure and gig workers, said people who met with him. BlackRock has further honed this stance through its Investment Institute, a sort of internal think tank that publishes bulletins with commentary on geopolitics, and an entire section on its website devoted to commentary on financial stability.
But BlackRock’s engagement in Washington took on a different tenor when it came to the prospect of regulations it saw as a serious threat to the firm’s business model. Former Obama officials and congressional aides pointed to how BlackRock reacted to the possibility of being named a “systemically important” non-bank financial institution by regulators, another way of saying the company was “too big to fail.”
Such a designation, a power granted by Congress to a group of regulators called the Financial Stability Oversight Council, could have cut into BlackRock’s profits by requiring it to set aside more capital reserves or hire more compliance specialists, for instance, and it would have placed BlackRock under the direct supervision of the Fed. In late 2013, news leaked that the FSOC was reviewing BlackRock and Fidelity, another asset manager, as it studied the issue.
Former officials said the chances of BlackRock actually being designated were minimal, but the firm still unleashed what they saw as a disproportionate, aggressive lobbying effort, blanketing congressional aides and regulators directly and via industry trade groups with meeting requests, letters and white papers laying out their views.
BlackRock’s main position has been that instead of targeting individual firms, regulators ought to review potentially risky activities in a sector, such as exchange-traded funds. Opponents of the activities-based approach say such a method would not have prevented the 2008 financial collapse.
But former officials said much of their frustration with BlackRock stemmed not from any specific policy position but rather what they saw as the firm’s aggressiveness and its willingness to exaggerate regulators’ actions to members of Congress. They viewed its bare-knuckles approach in Washington as contrary to its public stance of praising regulators for their actions after the 2008 crisis.
“You cannot do financial regulatory policy without some measure of trust in regulators’ judgment,” said a former Obama-era Treasury Department official. “BlackRock’s efforts were not just focused on policy changes but were focused on undermining that trust.”
Other officials said they found BlackRock to be sincere in its effort to educate policymakers about complex lines of business.
“I did find them to be very knowledgeable,” said one former Obama-era regulator who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal meetings. “They did lots of research and published the findings of that research, thought about the issues and commented on the issues in a thoughtful way.”
Spurred by BlackRock’s push, members of the GOP-led Congress held public hearings in which they lacerated Obama administration officials and criticized their decision-making process as opaque.
In a related episode, BlackRock also led a charge to discredit the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), created by Congress in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The agency was designed to be an independent bureau empowered to demand data from Wall Street giants, shed light on opaque financial markets and hold its own against the same regulators who had missed the warning signs before the 2008 crash.
Four former officials said BlackRock’s lobbyists were by far the most vocal in pushing back against a 34-page September 2013 OFR report on the asset management industry that concluded those firms could pose a risk to financial stability. The report had been commissioned by the FSOC to help it figure out a framework for judging whether such firms were systemically important.
For its part, BlackRock felt the OFR report had not been prepared transparently, unhappy that it was granted just two meetings a year apart, to engage with the agency on the report, said a person familiar with the matter. The firm filed six letters with the Securities and Exchange Commission commenting on the OFR report between November 2013 and May 2014. By comparison, its three biggest competitors in the asset management industry – Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street – filed five letters total. The fallout over the report permanently damaged the OFR’s reputation, several former officials said, and eroded its support in Congress.
Former officials attributed BlackRock’s aggressive approach to vice chair and firm co-founder Barbara Novick, who has a reputation as a dogged, dedicated operator who makes it her job to get to know everyone, from 24-year-old entry-level agency staffers to senior White House advisers, Republicans and Democrats.
“We believe policy decisions should be data driven, and we have approached advocacy by publishing educational materials drawing on data and facts,” Novick said in a statement. “We are proud of our contributions to policy issues that impact investors globally.”
Novick and her staff made themselves ubiquitous, spreading their influence through industry groups such as the Managed Funds Association, the Investment Company Institute, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, officials said.
“There are some companies or trade associations who will wait until a particular issue gathers momentum before intervening, but BlackRock seems pretty determined to quash anything,” one former Democratic congressional aide said. “They don’t miss anything, and they intervene early and often.”
By 2014, BlackRock had notched a key victory when the FSOC announced it would focus on potentially risky activities rather than labeling individual firms as risks.
Last year, the Trump administration went further, overhauling the process by which the FSOC could assess the risks presented by non-bank financial firms and making it unlikely, experts said, that any company would draw tighter regulation. The new approach, which among other changes requires a cost-benefit analysis before a company is designated, was hailed in its draft form by BlackRock, in a 72-page submission complete with appendixes, as a “very significant improvement on the existing process.”
Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, an advocacy group that favors more robust Wall Street oversight, said the changes “created this Rube Goldberg set of procedures that make it almost impossible for the FSOC to ever designate any activity as systemically significant” and even harder to designate any entity, either.
“It is entirely consistent with everything the shadow banking system lobbyists all wanted,” including asset managers, private equity firms, hedge funds and others, said Kelleher, who is a volunteer with the Biden transition team.
The new approach drew rare public criticism from four former senior U.S. economic officials, including Yellen. She and her colleagues wrote in a letter that the changes “would make it impossible to prevent the buildup of risk in financial institutions whose failure would threaten the stability of the system as a whole.”
The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment on the 2019 guidance. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s former counselor at the agency, Craig Phillips, was a managing director at BlackRock before he joined the Trump administration.
In her new role, Yellen could try to rescind the guidance and push the FSOC to increase its scrutiny of non-bank financial firms. A Biden transition official said that there is “no daylight between Yellen and Adeyemo on financial regulation” and that Adeyemo agrees with Yellen’s stance in the 2019 letter.
Another major issue regulators were examining in the years after the financial crisis was what kinds of new rules to institute for money-market funds, which are not guaranteed by the federal government like regular bank accounts but which still typically serve as risk-free places for investors to store cash. They are run by asset managers such as BlackRock.
In 2008, when investors fled money-market funds, the Fed had to step in to prevent further mayhem. In response, the FSOC proposed three possible changes in November 2012 and questioned the wisdom of an approach BlackRock had advocated months earlier, for liquidity fees that would activate only in times of crisis. But the FSOC could only recommend rules, and it was then up to the SEC to debate and adopt them.
Novick filed a letter with the FSOC pushing back against its proposals. Then she and her team met with SEC officials around a week before Christmas in 2012, presenting their views in PowerPoint form. BlackRock was one of many Wall Street players that lobbied the SEC during this time period, including Vanguard, Fidelity and Federated. BlackRock also organized a 2013 letter that suggested a new definition for retail money-market funds, which the SEC ended up adopting.
The eventual changes adopted by the SEC in 2014 were weaker than what the FSOC had proposed. They incorporated liquidity fees and were greeted with cautious praise by industry players. Now, those who wanted stronger regulations feel they have been vindicated. In March, as investors rushed to pull money out of the market during the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fed was forced to intervene, announcing it would establish a special backstop for money-market funds, among several other emergency actions. The industry was effectively bailed out again.
BlackRock has already moved to shape the discussion around further measures, issuing a paper in July that deflected blame for the instability away from money-market funds.
The turmoil last spring revealed unstable practices in parts of the asset management industry, including in money-market funds, said Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“Everybody always knew this was a significant source of systemic risk that, because of the power of the asset management industry, we didn’t really tackle,” Bair said. “That was true of Obama as well as Trump. I hope they [members of the Biden team] have the courage to do it.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Max Zimmerman, Gregor Stuart Hunter · BUSINESS, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS
The New York Stock Exchange said it will delist three Chinese corporations to comply with a U.S. executive order that imposed restrictions on companies identified as affiliated with the Chinese military.
China Mobile Ltd., China Telecom Corp Ltd., China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. will be suspended from trading between Jan. 7 and Jan. 11, and proceedings to delist them have started, according to a statement by the exchange.
In response, China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Jan. 2 that the country will adopt necessary actions to protect the rights of Chinese companies and hopes the two countries can work together to create a fair, predicable environment for businesses and investors.
Quantitative hedge fund managers including Renaissance Technologies, Dimensional Fund Advisors and Two Sigma Investments were among the largest holders in these U.S. listings but the stakes they held at the end of September were small, 13F filings show.
The three Chinese companies have separate listings in Hong Kong. All generate the entirety of their revenue in China and have no meaningful presence in the U.S. except for their listings there. Their shares are also thinly traded on the New York Stock Exchange compared to their primary listings in Hong Kong, making this NYSE delisting more of a symbolic blow amid heightened geopolitical friction between the U.S. and China.
President Donald Trump signed an order in November barring American investments in Chinese firms owned or controlled by the military, in a bid to pressure Beijing over what it views as abusive business practices. The order prohibited U.S. investors from buying and selling shares in a list of Chinese companies designated by the Pentagon as having military ties.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry later accused the U.S. of “viciously slandering” its military-civilian integration policies and vowed to protect the country’s companies. Chinese officials have also threatened to respond to previous Trump administration actions with their own blacklist of U.S. companies.
The executive order has resulted in a series of companies being removed from indexes compiled by MSCI Inc., S&P Dow Jones Global Indices and FTSE Russell.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission in May barred China Mobile from operating in the U.S. In December, it ordered carriers to remove equipment made by Huawei Technologies Co., and begun looking into whether China Telecom should be allowed to operate in the country. China Telecom’s U.S. unit told the FCC in a June 8 filing that it’s an independent business based in the U.S. and not subject to Chinese government control.
Global exchanges, including NYSE and Nasdaq Inc., courted Chinese companies during the past decade as they attempted to expand their IPO business, particularly in the internet sector. In response, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. changed its rules in recent years to lure back listings, including allowing share sales by companies with weighted voting rights — strengthening the power of company founders at the expense of weaker protections for minority investors.
Companies including e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.Com, which already had listings in New York, conducted secondary listings in Hong Kong in the past two years as tensions between the U.S. and China intensified on a range of issues including trade and the novel coronavirus.
Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate vote in his favor
InternationalJan 04. 2021President Donald Trump walks to the Oval Office on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bill O’Leary
By The Washington Post · Amy Gardner
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that legal scholars described as a flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue Trump’s false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
Trump dismissed their arguments.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”
Raffensperger responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Several of his allies were on the line as he spoke, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a prominent GOP attorney whose involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.
In a statement, Mitchell said Raffensperger’s office “has made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same thing: Show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our numbers are wrong.”
The White House, the Trump campaign and Meadows did not respond to a request for comment.
Raffensperger’s office declined to comment.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters,’ dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”
Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”
The details of the call drew demands from congressional Democrats for criminal investigations. Biden’s top campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, said the recording “captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy.”
Republicans, however, were largely silent. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, when asked about the call while campaigning in Georgia on Sunday for the two GOP senators who face a run-off Tuesday, dodged the question completely.
Trump’s pressure campaign on Raffensperger is the latest example of his attempt to subvert the outcome of the Nov. 3 election through personal outreach to state Republican officials. He previously invited Michigan Republican state leaders to the White House, pressured Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a call to try to replace that state’s electors and asked the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to help reverse his loss in that state.
His call to Raffensperger came as scores of Republicans have pledged to challenge the electoral college’s vote for Biden when Congress convenes for a joint session on Wednesday. Republicans do not have the votes to successfully thwart Biden’s victory, but Trump has urged supporters to travel to Washington to protest the outcome, and state and federal officials are already bracing for clashes outside the Capitol.
During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators – an allegation for which there is no evidence – they would be subject to criminal liability.
“That’s a criminal offense,” he said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
Trump also told Raffensperger that failure to act by Tuesday would jeopardize the political fortunes of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Georgia’s two Republican senators whose fate in that day’s runoff elections will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
Trump said he plans to talk about the alleged fraud on Monday, when he is scheduled to lead an election eve rally in Dalton, Ga. – a message that could further muddle the efforts of Republicans to draw out their voters.
“You have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump said. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president. OK? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”
Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.
Trump’s apparent threat of criminal consequences if Raffensperger does not act could be seen as an attempt at extortion and a suggestion that he might deploy the Justice Department to launch an investigation, they said.
“The president is either knowingly attempting to coerce state officials into corrupting the integrity of the election or is so deluded that he believes what he’s saying,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, who noted that Trump’s actions may have violated several federal statutes.
But Pildes said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one, and he emphasized that focusing on whether he committed a crime could deflect attention from the “simple, stark, horrific fact that we have a president trying to use the powers of his office to pressure state officials into committing election fraud to keep him in office.”
Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that the legal questions are murky, and that it could be difficult to prove that Trump knew he was encouraging illegal behavior. But Foley also emphasized that the call was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt outrage.
“He was already tripping the emergency meter,” Foley said. “So we were at 12 on a scale of 1 to 10, and now we’re at 15.”
Throughout the call, Trump detailed an exhaustive list of disinformation and conspiracy theories to support his position. He claimed without evidence that he had won Georgia by at least a half-million votes. He floated a barrage of assertions that have been investigated and disproved: that thousands of dead people voted; that an Atlanta election worker scanned 18,000 forged ballots three times each and “100 percent” were for Biden; that thousands more voters living out of state came back to Georgia illegally just to vote in the election.
“So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to re-examine it, and you can re-examine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”
Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a “child” and said law enforcement officials “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta – and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.
“I can’t imagine he’s ever getting elected again, I’ll tell you that much right now,” he said.
He also took aim at Kemp’s 2018 opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, trying to shame Raffensperger with the idea that his refusal to embrace fraud has helped her and Democrats generally. “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you,” he said. “She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’ What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you.”
The secretary of state repeatedly sought to correct Trump, saying at one point, “Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they – people can say anything.”
“Oh, this isn’t social media,” Trump retorted. “This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not. It’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less.”
At another point, Trump claimed that votes were scanned three times: “Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.”
Raffensperger responded: “Mr. President, they did not. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”
Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”
His desperation was perhaps most pronounced during an exchange with Germany, Raffensperger’s general counsel, in which he openly begged for validation.
Trump: “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? ‘Cause that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”
Germany responded: “No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.”
Trump: “But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?”
Germany: “No.”
Trump: “Are you sure? Ryan?”
Germany: “I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.”
It was clear from the call that Trump has surrounded himself with aides who have fed his false perceptions that the election was stolen. When he claimed that more than 5,000 ballots were cast in Georgia in the name of dead people, Raffensperger responded forcefully: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”
But later, Meadows said, “I can promise you there are more than that.”
Another Trump lawyer on the call, Kurt Hilbert, accused Raffensperger’s office of refusing to turn over data to assess evidence of fraud, and also claimed awareness of at least 24,000 illegally cast ballots that would flip the result to Trump.
“It stands to reason that if the information is not forthcoming, there’s something to hide,” Hilbert said. “That’s the problem that we have.”
Reached by phone Sunday, Hilbert declined to comment.
Mitchell contradicted Trump on several occasions on the call, saying, “Well, I don’t know about that,” when the president alleged that a Fulton County election worker had triple-counted 18,000 ballots for Biden. She claimed that the extent of the fraud is unclear because Raffensperger’s office has not shared all the data Trump’s lawyers have sought.
“We never had the records that you have,” she said. Germany noted that the office is barred under law from sharing some voter information.
In the end, Trump asked Germany to sit down with one of his attorneys to go over the allegations. Germany agreed.
Yet Trump also recognized that he was failing to persuade Raffensperger or Germany of anything, saying toward the end, “I know this phone call is going nowhere.”
“Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan?” he asked of Germany. “What’s wrong with you? I heard your lawyer is very difficult, actually, but I’m sure you’re a good lawyer. You have a nice last name.”
But he continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after roughly an hour, Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Trump, for your time.”
OPEC+ emerges from 2020 chaos to face delicate balancing act
InternationalJan 04. 2021Oil pumping jacks operate in an oilfield near Neftekamsk, in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia, on Nov. 19, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrey Rudakov
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Grant Smith
As one of the most tumultuous years in oil’s history ends, a delicate task now confronts OPEC+.
The alliance of producers led by Saudi Arabia and Russia must decide whether it can continue to restore crude supplies without capsizing the price recovery they spent most of 2020 working to achieve.
Moscow believes that the group – which slashed output during the pandemic – can revive another 500,000 barrels a day of idle capacity in February, on top of an increase scheduled for this month. Riyadh, which has favored greater caution, is keeping its own views under wraps.
“It feels like OPEC+ is trying to steer a giant oil tanker through a narrow straight,” said Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS Group AG in Zurich.
Whatever they ultimately decide, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners are leaving nothing to chance.
With its Jan. 4 gathering, the coalition is switching to meeting every month – rather than just a few times a year – in order to fine-tune production levels more precisely.
After the brutal lessons delivered over the past 12 months, the impulse to micro-manage is understandable.
Last year’s challenges for OPEC+ began in February, when oil demand in China collapsed 20% as the world’s biggest importer locked down to beat the emerging coronavirus.
Riyadh and Moscow then clashed over how to respond to the demand shock, a dispute that shattered the 23-nation alliance and ushered in a vicious price war. By April, the world was so awash in crude that U.S. futures traded below zero for the first time in history.
Relations were only mended after the intervention of President Donald Trump. An unlikely mediator, having lambasted the cartel for years, Trump nonetheless brokered a peace deal that resulted in OPEC’s biggest-ever output cuts.
Phasing out those curbs is provoking new controversies.
Last month, OPEC+ talks ran into a five-day stalemate as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – for years stalwart allies in both political and energy spheres – disagreed over how quickly to revive the idled barrels.
While the kingdom wanted to delay any increases for three months, its neighbor – eager to monetize investments in capacity, and promote a new regional oil benchmark – pushed for a speedier timetable.
Though a compromise was reached, the brief rupture in their longstanding partnership – which at one point saw Abu Dhabi hint at eventually leaving OPEC – has left an ominous shadow.
The pace of restoring output will occupy the producers on Monday. Currently idling 7.2 million barrels a day, or about 7% of world supplies, the producers have resolved to return a further 1.5 million barrels a day in carefully calibrated installments.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has signaled his readiness to proceed, saying last month that prices are in an optimal range of $45 to $55 a barrel. If OPEC+ refrains from bolstering exports, its competitors will simply fill the gap, he said.
“The market needs the oil,” said Jan Stuart, a global energy economist at Cornerstone Macro LLC. “The prevailing view in OPEC+ seems to be that you have to go for market share. You cannot subsidize the return of U.S. shale.”
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman hasn’t publicly expressed a preference beyond his intention to keep speculators “on their toes.”
On Sunday, a panel of OPEC+ technical experts known as the Joint Technical Committee met to assess implementation of the output cuts on behalf of ministers. Its preliminary data showed members implemented 101% of promised curbs in December, according to a delegate who asked not to be identified.
OPEC+ nations “stand ready to adjust” production levels “depending on market conditions and developments,” OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo said at the opening of the JTC conference. “Crude oil demand will shift from reverse to forward gear” this year, he said.
There is a solid case for going ahead with the production increase.
Oil prices have stabilized above $50 barrel in London despite OPEC’s pledge of extra supply, bolstered by vaccine developments and robust fuel use in Asia. Supply and demand should remain broadly balanced in the first half of the year, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
“The market has underlying support and as such should shrug off a modest increase in OPEC+ supply,” said Doug King, chief investment officer of the Merchant Commodity Fund, which manages $170 million.
It’s a choice that might also come as a relief to OPEC+ members like Iraq. Baghdad is engulfed in a mounting economic crisis that is only exacerbated by limits on oil sales, and is struggling to get through a backlog of overdue output cuts from 2020. With its access to bond markets restricted, Iraq agreed on an oil-supply deal with a Chinese trader last month that will see the Arab nation get paid $2 billion upfront.
But there’s also an argument for holding back the extra barrels.
Oil refiners haven’t yet had a chance to absorb this month’s supply hike, and a more infectious virus strain is clouding the outlook for demand.
While the IEA anticipates no fresh surplus, it warned that the existing inventory overhang will linger to the end of the year if OPEC+ opens the taps. Despite the market’s rebound, crude prices remain far below the levels most OPEC members need to cover government spending.
Finally, OPEC+ must navigate the impact of incoming President Joe Biden, who has signaled readiness to revive a nuclear pact with Iran that could release more than 1 million barrels a day of oil exports currently under U.S. sanctions.
“OPEC+ can likely pull off another production increase in February,” said Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official. “But in terms of vanquishing last year’s covid glut, they’re far from out of the woods.”
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga speaks during a New Year’s press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Japan News-Yomiuri
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., exits the Senate floor following a vote Friday. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard
![A bird view of Beijing's central business district, which is home to the headquarters of a great number of companies on the Fortune Global 500. [Photo/VCG]](https://media.nationthailand.com/images/news/2021/01/04/30400650/800_aa5eb22030ed3fb.jpeg?v=1609733395)
A bird view of Beijing’s central business district, which is home to the headquarters of a great number of companies on the Fortune Global 500. [Photo/VCG]
Adewale Adeyemo, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Deputy Treasury Secretary, is pictured at the Queen in Wilmington, Del., on Dec. 1, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman
President Donald Trump walks to the Oval Office on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bill O’Leary
Oil pumping jacks operate in an oilfield near Neftekamsk, in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia, on Nov. 19, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrey Rudakov
SootinClaimon.Com 