{"id":1304258,"date":"2023-10-31T05:52:53","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T05:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=302326"},"modified":"2023-10-31T05:52:53","modified_gmt":"2023-10-31T05:52:53","slug":"menendez-should-resign-and-take-his-extremist-foreign-policies-with-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/31\/menendez-should-resign-and-take-his-extremist-foreign-policies-with-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Menendez Should Resign and Take His Extremist Foreign Policies with Him"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
\"\"

Photograph Source: U.S. Senate – Public Domain<\/p><\/div>\n

Until last month, Senator Bob Menendez was one of the most powerful members of the US Congress. He has been chair (or ranking Democrat) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 13 years. Then the FBI\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0$480,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of gold bars in his home. He was\u00a0indicted<\/a>\u00a0for 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\u00a0charged<\/a>\u00a0for 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,\u00a0found<\/a>that Menendez \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\u00a0overbilled<\/a>\u00a0Medicare by many millions of dollars, and according to the senators, Menendez intervened on his behalf with senior US government officials. Melgen was\u00a0sentenced<\/a>\u00a0to 17 years in prison, although President Trump\u00a0commuted<\/a>\u00a0his prison sentence before leaving office in January 2021.<\/p>\n

Menendez, after\u00a0spending<\/a>\u00a0$5 million on his own defense,\u00a0escaped<\/a>\u00a0with 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 aspect of the major forms of US 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\u00a0put up<\/a>\u00a0a lot of that $5 million for his defense in the 2017 trial.<\/p>\n

Exhibit A: In Latin America, 21 members of Congress\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0a letter to President Biden, calling for an end to US economic sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. Menendez immediately\u00a0pushed back<\/a>, with a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0that was debunked by more than 50 economists.<\/p>\n

The sanctions on Venezuela alone have\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0tens of thousands of\u00a0people<\/a>, at least.\u00a0\u00a0But 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\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0to President Biden, asking that the sanctions be removed. \u201c[T]he 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 many thousands more Palestinians in Gaza,\u00a0half of whom are children<\/a>. And there is a\u00a0major threat<\/a>\u00a0of a wider war. But some of our most powerful foreign policy extremists seem to want a wider war.<\/p>\n

\u201cLevel the place,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Senator Lindsey Graham last week, referring to Gaza. Addressing Iran, he\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0to \u201cblow up your oil refineries and put you out of business.\u201d And a few days\u00a0later<\/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.\u00a0Economic disruption<\/a>,\u00a0rising gasoline prices and inflation<\/a>, all kinds of terrible unforeseen consequences are quite possible if the US military were to follow Graham\u2019s wishes. Who will pay the political price for that in our elections next year? The question answers itself.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s perhaps the biggest price that we pay for the corruption of our foreign policy, mostly by extremists like Menendez and Graham. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0persuasively 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. 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 as well.<\/p>\n

Krugman notes that the Iraq War probably\u00a0helped<\/a>\u00a0Bush win reelection in 2004.<\/p>\n

This is how America\u2019s rotten foreign policy helps dismantle our democracy at home. Of course, Menendez should resign; we can only hope that some of his extremist and corrupt influence will be lost when he leaves.<\/p>\n

This first appeared in the\u00a0Albany Herald<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The post Menendez Should Resign and Take His Extremist Foreign Policies with Him<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until last month, Senator Bob Menendez was one of the most powerful members of the US Congress. He has been chair (or ranking Democrat) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 13 years. Then the FBI\u00a0found\u00a0$480,000 in cash and $100,000 worth of gold bars in his home. He was\u00a0indicted\u00a0for accepting bribes in exchange for protecting More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Menendez Should Resign and Take His Extremist Foreign Policies with Him<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":349,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/349"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304259,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304258\/revisions\/1304259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}