{"id":32679,"date":"2023-10-26T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=32679"},"modified":"2023-10-27T06:40:39","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T06:40:39","slug":"point-sen-menendez-should-resign-and-take-his-extremist-foreign-policies-with-him-insidesources-com-bc-menendez-pointmct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=32679","title":{"rendered":"POINT: Sen. Menendez should resign and take his extremist foreign policies with him [InsideSources.com :: BC-MENENDEZ-POINT:MCT]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until last month, Sen. Bob Menendez was one of the most powerful members of Congress. He has been chair (or ranking Democrat) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 13 years. Then, the FBI found<\/a> $480,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of gold bars in his home. He was indicted<\/a> for accepting bribes in exchange for protecting and enriching several individuals and to benefit the Egyptian government. He allegedly traded his influence by working to remove holds on foreign military financing and to approve multimillion-dollar arms sales to the regime.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t his first indictment. In 2015, he was charged<\/a> with accepting bribes in exchange for using his office to help his friend Dr. Salomon Melgen. In 2018, his colleagues on the Senate Ethics Committee, after years of investigation, found<\/a> that he \u201crepeatedly accepted gifts of significant value\u201d and \u201cused (his) position\u201d to advance \u201cthe personal and business interests\u201d of Dr. Melgen, who had given him many gifts.<\/p>\n

Melgen had overbilled<\/a> Medicare by millions of dollars, and, according to the senators, Menendez intervened on his behalf with senior government officials. Melgen was sentenced<\/a> to 17 years in prison, although President Donald Trump commuted<\/a> his prison sentence before leaving office in January 2021.<\/p>\n

After spending<\/a> $5 million on his defense, Menendez escaped<\/a> with a hung jury.<\/p>\n

But Menendez\u2019s career has much bigger life-and-death consequences. The cash, gold bars and Medicare fraud are just one segment of our major forms of corruption: the illegal part. We also have legalized corruption in the form of billions of dollars of campaign contributions to elected officials. Menendez has steered the Senate toward extremism in foreign policy. He has donors for that; they put up<\/a> a lot of that $5 million for his defense in the 2017 trial.<\/p>\n

Exhibit A: In Latin America, 21 members of Congress wrote<\/a> a letter to President Biden calling for an end to U.S. economic sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. Menendez immediately pushed back<\/a> with a letter<\/a> debunked by more than 10 economists.<\/p>\n

The sanctions on Venezuela alone have killed<\/a> tens of thousands of people, at least. But that is how the sanctions \u201care supposed to work,\u201d as Congressman Jim McGovern, then chair of the powerful House Rules Committee, explained in a 2021 letter<\/a> to Biden, asking that the sanctions be removed. \u201cThe impact of sectoral and secondary sanctions is indiscriminate, and purposely so. \u2026 Economic pain is the means by which the sanctions are supposed to work. \u2026 It is not Venezuelan officials who suffer the costs. It is the Venezuelan people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extremist foreign policy is both a product of our corrupt political system and a powerful force in its perpetuation. We can see this in the current situation in the Middle East. Israel\u2019s extremist government is threatening more military action that could kill thousands more Palestinians in Gaza, half of whom are children<\/a>. And there is a major threat<\/a> of a wider war. But some of our most powerful foreign policy extremists seem to want a wider war.<\/p>\n

\u201cLevel the place,\u201d Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said last week, referring to Gaza.<\/p>\n

Addressing Iran, he threatened<\/a> to \u201cblow up your oil refineries and put you out of business.\u201d And a few days later<\/a>, \u201cI am poised to use military force to destroy the source of funding for Hamas and Hezbollah.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see how Graham\u2019s party might benefit from a wider war in the Middle East. Economic disruption<\/a>, rising gasoline prices and inflation<\/a> and all kinds of terrible unforeseen consequences are quite possible if the U.S. military were to follow Graham\u2019s wishes. Who will pay the political price for that? The question answers itself.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s perhaps the biggest price that we pay for the corruption of our foreign policy, primarily by extremists like Menendez and Graham. Nobel Laureate and economist Paul Krugman has argued<\/a> persuasively that the 2002 buildup to the Iraq war \u2014 which we now know was based on a complete lie about a fictional security threat to the United States \u2014 was motivated at least in part by Republican political needs in congressional elections that year. George W. Bush was the first president since the Great Depression to have no net job creation for an entire four-year term. But the war was the perfect distraction, and his party won the Congress in 2002 despite that record economic failure and major corruption scandals.<\/p>\n

Krugman notes that the Iraq War probably helped<\/a> Bush win re-election in 2004.<\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research<\/a>. He is the author of \u201cFailed: What the \u2018Experts\u2019 Got Wrong About the Global Economy\u201d (Oxford University Press). He wrote this for InsideSources.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

(This essay is available to Tribune News Service subscribers. TNS did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of TNS or its editors.)<\/p>\n

\u00a92023 Tribune Content Agency, LLC<\/p>\n

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Until last month, Sen. Bob Menendez was one of the most powerful members of Congress. He has been chair (or ranking Democrat) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 13 years. Then, the FBI found $480,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of gold bars in his home. He was indicted for accepting bribes in exchange […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32680,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32679\/revisions\/32680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}