ATLANTA – American manufacturers of solar panels would benefit from a new federal tax credit under legislation introduced by U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
“This legislation will bring more clean energy Jobs to Georgia while creating tens of thousands of clean energy jobs across the country,” Ossoff said Tuesday during a news conference. “It will help make America energy independent and allow American manufacturers to compete with Chinese solar manufacturers, and it will accelerate our transition to clean and renewable energy sources.”
Ossoff said he campaigned for the Senate last year on a pledge to make Georgia a national leader in solar manufacturing. The state already is home to Q Cells USA in Dalton, the largest solar panel manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere.
The proposed tax credit is aimed at boosting the production of solar panels at every stage of a supply chain currently dominated by Chinese manufacturers.
“We don’t want to rely upon Chinese monopolies to produce this technology,” Ossoff said.
Ossoff said he is working with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to include the tax credit as part of broader infrastructure legislation.
The bill could play a major role in transitioning the United States toward a clean-energy future, he said.
“We’ve got to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels,” he said. “American companies and American workers should produce the technology that will allow us to generate clean, renewable energy at scale.”
The bill’s cosponsors include Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.
Truist Park in Cobb County was to have hosted next month’s All-Star Game.
ATLANTA – A business advocacy group that sued Major League Baseball (MLB) for moving the All-Star Game out of Georgia dropped the case Monday, nearly two weeks after an adverse court ruling.
New York-based Job Creators Network, a group backed by The Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, filed a federal lawsuit after MLB announced it was pulling next month’s game out of Georgia in protest of the General Assembly’s passage of an election law adding new restrictions critics attacked as voter suppression.
The group sought a preliminary injunction ordering MLB to either bring the game back to Georgia or pay $100 million in damages, an estimate of the game’s potential economic impact.
After listening to the group’s lawyer during a hearing on the request, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni rejected the motion, declaring Job Creators Network had no legal standing to bring the suit because it failed to demonstrate it has suffered harm from MLB moving the All-Star Game to Colorado.
On Monday, Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of Job Creators, said although the group is withdrawing the lawsuit, it will continue to fight on behalf of small businesses to hold MLB accountable.
“MLB’s decision to punish these Atlanta small businesses and residents who bear no responsibility for their state’s political action was wrong — no matter what one judge says,” Ortiz said.
“While we are withdrawing our case from federal court here in New York, we will continue to evaluate our legal options and other out-of- court opportunities. We will have more information to announce in the coming days.”
The law that sparked the suit, which the Republican-controlled legislature passed in March along party lines, replaces the signature-match verification process for mail-in ballots with an ID requirement.
The measure also prohibits non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters standing in line. At the same time, it expands weekend early voting hours in most Georgia counties and authorizes the use of drop boxes in state law for the first time, although it restricts where they can be placed.
Several Atlanta-based companies have condemned the law with strongly worded statements, including Delta Air Lines Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.
ATLANTA – Vice President Kamala Harris brought the Biden administration’s “Month of Action” campaign for COVID-19 vaccinations to Atlanta Friday.
After dropping by a vaccination site at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., now occupies the pulpit, Harris spoke to students at Clark Atlanta University.
As of this week, 3.69 million Georgians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, 34.8% of the state’s population, a rate that lags the national average of 44.1%.
“We can do better,” Harris said Friday. “And we have to address the legitimate barriers that stand in the way of some folks getting the vaccines. … We need to meet people where they are.”
Harris noted some pharmacies are staying open late on Fridays to serve people who work late. In some cases, businesses are offering incentives to encourage their employees to get vaccinated, while rideshare companies are providing free rides, she said,
“There [are] resources available, but we need to do a better job of letting people know what’s out there,” the vice president told the students. “That’s why we need your help, so we can address all those barriers.”
Warnock; U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.; U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta; and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms appeared with Harris at Clark Atlanta.
“Tell everyone you know to get vaccinated,” Warnock said. “I’m grateful because of this vaccine I was able to visit my 83-year-old mother in Savannah without fear of getting sick.”
“We’ve come a long way, but we’ve got miles to go,” added Bottoms, who contracted COVID-19 last summer. “Do what you can to make sure progress continues. This really is about life and death.”
Georgia just passed the 900,000 mark in confirmed cases of the virus since the pandemic began, with 900,368 cases. COVID-19 has hospitalized 64,525 Georgians and killed 18,368, according to the state Department of Public Health.
Republicans used Harris’ visit to Georgia to echo criticism the vice president heard when she did not visit the U.S.-Mexican border during a trip to Guatemala and Mexico last week.
President Joe Biden has assigned Harris the task of working to resolve the problems of poverty and crime that have driven tens of thousands of Central Americans to flee their home countries for the United States.
“Biden and Harris have created a growing border crisis and today, day 86 as Biden’s crisis ‘manager,’ Harris is in Atlanta,” said Savannah Viar, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “Instead of grandstanding in Georgia, Harris needs to visit our southern border immediately.”
ATLANTA – Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger put 101,789 potential voters on notice Friday that they’re about to be purged from the state’s voter rolls.
Other than the regular monthly removals of voter files for felony convictions and death, this will be the first major cleaning up of the voter rolls since 2019. That purge sparked a legal challenge from Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy group founded by 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams.
Raffensperger, a Republican, described the upcoming purge as fulfilling his responsibility to update voter registration rolls periodically.
“Making sure Georgia’s voter rolls are up to date is key to ensuring the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said Friday. “That is why I fought and beat Stacey Abrams in court in 2019 to remove nearly 300,000 obsolete voter files before the November [2020] election and will do so again this year. Bottom line, there is no legitimate reason to keep ineligible voters on the rolls.”
The 2019 purge pales in comparison to the purge then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp – now Georgia’s governor – conducted in 2017. A record 534,000 names were removed from the voter rolls that year.
Federal law prohibits removing voters from the rolls during general election years due to federal mandates before federal elections. After the 2020 election cycle ended, Raffensperger said he made it a priority to resume the process.
The voter files the secretary identified as obsolete include 67,286 files associated with a National Change of Address form submitted to the U.S. Postal Service, 34,227 voter files that had election mail returned to sender, and 276 that have had no contact with elections officials for at least five years.
In each case, the individual has had no contact with Georgia election officials in any way – either directly or through the state Department of Driver Services – for two general elections.
Raffensperger’s office also removed 18,486 voter files of dead people based on information received from Georgia’s Office of Vital Records and the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate partnership of 30 states and the District of Columbia focused on maintaining accurate voter rolls.
Georgians targeted for removal from the voter rolls will have a chance to stay on the list. Election officials plan to mail notification letters to people on the list for removal, giving them 40 days to respond.
State lawmakers and labor advocates protest last month outside the Georgia Department of Labor office in Atlanta. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Georgia is about to join 25 other mostly Republican-led states in cutting off supplemental federal unemployment benefits before the Biden administration ends the program in September.
On June 26, the state Department of Labor will stop issuing weekly checks of $300 to an estimated 278,000 jobless Georgians under an initiative then-President Donald Trump launched last September.
Gov. Brian Kemp announced the change last month after business leaders complained the extra income is discouraging unemployed Georgians from returning to the workforce, making it hard for companies to fill jobs opening up as the coronavirus pandemic eases.
But Democrats and labor advocates argue the move will hurt low-income families, particularly Blacks and Latinos, by depriving them of the safety net they need to avoid falling into poverty.
A coalition of statewide business organizations stated its case for the benefits cutoff last month in an op-ed spearheaded by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.
“As we continue to recover from this pandemic-induced recession, we are hearing from a growing chorus of small business owners, agricultural leaders, managers in retail, manufacturing and nearly every industry sector across the country concerned about the lack of available workforce,” the article stated.
“Retailers cannot keep certain items in stock and factory orders are piling up. Because they cannot find labor, businesses are starting to turn down orders, raise prices and some are even considering closing permanently. Many restaurants are only offering drive-through, pick-up service not because of COVID, but because they cannot find enough workers to support full-scale operations.”
A report released this month backs up the business leaders’ argument. According to a nationwide survey of 3,789 small business owners conducted by Boston-based Alignable Inc., 55% of small employers say they can’t find the workers they need to succeed, up 5% from May.
“We need more people in the workforce to create more productivity,” Kemp said. “We’ve got really good companies with good pay and great benefits.”
While business owners say the weekly federal checks are acting as a disincentive for unemployed Georgians to go back to work, labor advocates say other factors are keeping otherwise willing workers from coming back.
Charlie Flemming, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, said many women are being forced to stay home because they can’t find child care workers.
Others aren’t going back to their jobs for fear of COVID-19, he said.
“We lag behind a lot of states in getting people vaccinated,” Flemming said. “Why would people want to go out and risk their lives?”
“The state is punishing 278,000 Georgians and rejecting tens of millions of federal dollars due to unfounded claims blaming workers rather than the ongoing pandemic, trouble accessing child care and low wages for difficulties in hiring,” added Ray Khalfani, a policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
Khalfani said turning away federal unemployment benefits not only rips away low-income Georgians’ safety net but removes dollars that otherwise would benefit the overall economy.
David Sjoquist, an economics professor at Georgia State University, said losing the federal checks will represent a little less than $2 billion in economic impact to the state.
While that’s not much in terms of a Georgia economy with $540 billion in personal income, Sjoquist said it’s expected to trim up to 10% off the state’s economic growth.
Assuming Georgia’s economy is growing at an annual rate of 5%, cutting off federal unemployment benefits will knock that growth rate down to 4.5%, he said.
“That’s not trivial, but it’s not huge,” Sjoquist said.
Flemming said the ultimate solution to the labor shortage is raising wages. Georgia’s minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is the lowest in the country, although the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour supersedes it for most workers.
President Joe Biden has issued an executive order that will increase the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour starting early next year. Some states have approved phasing in their minimum wages over several years to $15 per hour.
But even at $15 an hour, Georgia workers would be earning only about $31,000 a year, roughly the same they’ve been getting on unemployment.
In its op-ed, the business coalition recommended not only eliminating the $300 weekly federal checks but creating a “statewide job-signing bonus program or other back-to-work initiative that helps match jobs to job seekers.”
