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      Bob Menendez says cash found in bribery raid was ‘personal savings’ – video

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      Saying he would not resign after being indicted on corruption charges, the embattled New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez told reporters that $480,000 in cash found in a safe, clothing and closets at his home was kept there for emergency personal use. ‘For 30 years,’ Menendez said, ‘I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings accounts, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.’ Under an indictment unsealed last week, Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, 56, were accused of using his seat in the Senate, as chair of the foreign relations committee, to benefit the government of Egypt More

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      Bob Menendez refuses to quit and says $480,000 in cash was for personal use

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      Insisting he would not resign after being indicted on corruption charges, the embattled New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez told reporters that $480,000 in cash found in a safe, clothing and closets at his home was kept there for emergency personal use.“For 30 years,” Menendez said, “I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings accounts, which I have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.”The senator’s parents are from Cuba though he was born in New York. Last week, he said: “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat.” In Union City, New Jersey, on Monday, Menendez spoke in English and in Spanish. A group of people he said were “everyday people and constituents who know me” stood behind him as he spoke.The senator continued: “Now this may seem old-fashioned, but these were monies drawn from my personal savings accounts based on the income that I have lawfully derived over those 30 years. I look forward to addressing other issues in trial.”Under an indictment unsealed last week, Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, 56, were accused of using his seat in the Senate, as chair of the foreign relations committee, to benefit the government of Egypt.Prosecutors described how the large sums of cash were found at Menendez’s New Jersey home, as well as actual gold bars. A Mercedes-Benz car is also at issue. Three businessmen have also been charged.In his remarks on Monday, Menendez did not mention the gold bars. Nor did he respond to reporters’ questions. His wife did not attend.Menendez beat a previous corruption investigation. Ending in 2018, a five-year examination of the senator’s relationship with a Florida eye doctor began with unsubstantiated allegations about consorting with prostitutes and resulted in a bribery indictment. Menendez denied wrongdoing. After a jury failed to reach a verdict, the investigation was dropped.Since the new indictment was unveiled, leading Democrats including the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, and the New York progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for Menendez to resign.But in the Senate, only John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had called for his colleague to quit by the time Menendez stepped out to face reporters on Monday.“Everything I’ve accomplished, I’ve worked for despite the naysayers and everyone who has underestimated me,” said Menendez, 69.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I recognise this will be the biggest fight yet, but as I have stated throughout this whole process, I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be New Jersey’s senior senator.”To those who have called for his resignation, he said: “The court of public opinion is no substitute for our revered justice system.“Those who rushed to judgment, you have done so based on a limited set of facts framed by the prosecution to be as salacious as possible. Remember, prosecutors get it wrong.”On social media, Fetterman seemed to dismiss Menendez’s claim to have kept so much cash for emergency use.“We have an extra flashlight for our home emergencies,” Fetterman said. More

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      Blame the US supreme court for the Bob Menendez scandal | David Sirota

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      Gold bars, guns, cash stuffed into a coat and favors for a foreign government – the new indictment of Bob Menendez, the Democratic US senator from New Jersey, reads like the plot of a cheap pulp novel satirizing political graft. But the allegations against the longtime lawmaker are all too real – and the purported scheme all too predictable – in a country whose judiciary has been effectively telling politicians that corruption is perfectly legal.Evoking memories of Abscam and the Keating Five scandals, the details of the Menendez indictment are certainly anomalous for their cartoonish color. Indeed, this affair goes way beyond the donation-for-legislation culture that has been normalized in Washington. Federal prosecutors allege an elaborate plot in which Menendez and his wife accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menendez’s power and influence as a senator to seek to protect and enrich” a trio of businessmen “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt”.In particular, Menendez and his wife stand accused of accepting “cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value”. The indictment alleges that in exchange, Menendez passed non-public US government information to Egyptian officials; used his position as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to facilitate and “sign off on” weapons sales to that country; plotted to disrupt a criminal investigation into one of the businessmen; and persuaded the Biden administration to install a new prosecutor whom he believed he could influence on behalf of another businessman.Menendez has denied the charges against him, depicting himself as a victim of a “smear campaign” by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a US senator and serve with honor and distinction”.But if the alleged facts in the indictment prove true, the big question is: why would any politician think he could get away with something so brazen?Perhaps it’s because Menendez knows that to secure a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove that it was illegal for him to accept the gifts in exchange for a “performance of an official act”. And like every US politician, Menendez almost certainly knows that while that may seem straightforward, the corruption-plagued supreme court has deliberately made it anything but.Less than a decade ago, justices reviewed a case that echoed today’s Menedez scandal. This one involved Bob McDonnell, a former Virginia governor and Republican, whom a federal jury found guilty on 11 counts of conspiracy for accepting lavish gifts from a businessman in exchange for gubernatorial favors. However, supreme court justices unanimously overturned McDonnell’s conviction in 2016 on the grounds that those favors were permissible.“Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes and ball gowns,” wrote chief justice John Roberts at the time. “It is instead with the broader legal implications of the government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute … Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act’.”The landmark decision tightened the legal definition of public corruption, increasing the difficulty for prosecutors to establish a bribery case against a political official.Menendez has already once tried to use that precedent to halt a previous corruption indictment in a similarly grotesque case that he successfully fought to a mistrial. Recent developments may make it even easier for the New Jersey lawmaker to once again avoid jail.In 2020, disgraced New York politicians convinced courts to use the McDonnell precedent to overturn parts of their high-profile corruption convictions.Two years later, the supreme court struck again, overturning two additional Albany corruption convictions. In one of the latter cases, the court declared that bribery charges cannot apply to government officials who – during brief hiatuses from their jobs – accept payments to elicit favors from their public-sector cronies just before they return to government employment.Then came all the news of supreme court justices and their family members secretly accepting luxury gifts from billionaires and payments from law firms and conservative groups with business before the court. Taken together, those revelations suggested a self-protection motive in the court’s ongoing crusade to complicate, reduce and ultimately halt the prosecution of corruption in every level of government.In this era of Super Pacs buying elections, lawmakers legislating for their biggest donors and judges ruling for their benefactors, the Menendez case could be a moment for the government to finally re-establish some basic, minimum commitment to the “law and order” notions that politicians love to tout. No doubt, that’s what federal prosecutors are trying to do here.The problem is that supreme court justices have for years been legalizing – and personally engaging in – similar kinds of corruption. At the same time, top Democrats are constantly assuring justices that no matter how repugnant their behavior, there will be no serious challenge to their power.Considering that, the high court may feel emboldened to use the Menendez case not to counter Americans’ perception that the government is hopelessly rotted through with corruption, but to instead make the rot even worse.Justices could use the case to further whittle down the definitions of terms such as “bribery” and “official act” to almost nothing – thereby making corruption not a crime, but the legal, court-approved ethos of American governance.
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of The Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      ‘It’s a liability’: New York Republicans face pressure – but will they lose 2024?

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      In Anthony D’Esposito’s New York congressional district, Democrats are licking their lips.The Republican won an unexpected election to the House of Representatives in 2022, styling himself as a moderate in a historically Democratic district that Joe Biden had easily won by 14 points two years earlier.But last week D’Esposito, along with other self-styled moderates, gave his tacit approval to the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, an inquiry championed by the far-right members of the Republican party.The inquiry, into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and unsubstantiated accusations of corruption by the president, has become a symbol of the vengeful, extremist politics of far-right Republican figures like Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Sensing a chance, Democrats in D’Esposito’s Long Island district, just east of New York City, are now planning to tie him to his more rabid colleagues and win back the seat.“We’re certainly going to make it an issue and it’s a liability for him here,” said Jay Jacobs, the chair of the local Democratic party in Nassau county, which makes up much of the fourth congressional district, which D’Esposito represents.“Most informed, thinking people don’t believe that Joe Biden is some kind of criminal or has done anything that would warrant an impeachment inquiry, so when someone does this, and is in favor of it, they put themselves on the line with voters.“We saw this after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial: the Republicans took a big hit. And we think the same will happen this time. People send their representatives to Washington to do a job and to run the country in a responsible way, and this is clearly irresponsible. So [D’Esposito] will suffer for it.”In the 2022 midterm elections 18 Republicans, including D’Esposito, won in congressional districts that had voted for Biden, as the Republican party secured a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.In Long Island, which experienced a curious swing to the Republicans in 2022, D’Esposito isn’t the only newly elected Republican at risk. Before those midterm elections three of the island’s four congressional districts were represented by Democrats. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden won convincingly in the same three districts.But in 2022, even as Democrats outperformed expectations around the country, this south-eastern part of New York state plumped for Republican candidates – including George Santos, who has since admitted inventing parts of his résumé and has been charged with fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.Democrats attributed the swing, in part, to a popular Republican candidate for that year’s governor’s race, and the test in next year’s elections will be whether Republicans can hold on to those seats.Even before the launch of the impeachment inquiry, the 18 Republicans in Biden-won districts were already under pressure from an “Unrepresentatives” campaign launched by the progressive movement Indivisible. That campaign has seen Indivisible highlight how the supposed moderates have voted in line with the hard-right wing of the party.The new inquiry – which comes after eight months of Republican investigation into the president has failed to yield any evidence of wrongdoing – could add to that backlash. But Michael Dawidziak, a Republican political consultant based in Long Island, said Democrats might be putting too much hope in an impeachment-related backlash.“[Voters] are not going to be that upset about a Biden impeachment as opposed to, you know, crime and economy and the things that affect your quality of life,” Dawidziak said.The self-proclaimed more moderate members of the Republican party have largely sought to justify their support for the impeachment inquiry by characterizing it as an example of Congress applying checks and balances on the president.Mike Garcia, a California representative who like D’Esposito and Santos won in 2022 a previously Biden-supporting district, told the Hill he wanted to “seek clarity”, while Congressman Marc Molinaro, a New Yorker, said: “We want to be sure that we’re getting answers.”D’Esposito has offered similarly considered support.“I’ve spent my career as an NYPD detective and know the value of seeking the truth through finding the facts, and I am eager to find out exactly what the truth is behind the allegations surrounding President Biden and his family,” he said in a statement.But in Long Island, some Democratic voters fear that the Republican tightrope-walking might be successful. Casey Shields, who lives in Lynbrook, said that despite Biden carrying the district convincingly in 2020, it leans to the right.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Nassau county is a secret Republican stronghold, hence [D’Esposito’s] and Santos’ magic rise to power,” Shields, an accountant, said. “I can’t imagine many people who voted him in will be turned off by his desire to impeach Biden. His district is begging to be a red state.”Mary Russell, 67, said people who decide to vote for any Republican know what they are getting from the Donald Trump-dominated party.“I am not sure there is such a thing as a ‘moderate’ Republican,” Russell, who voted for D’Esposito’s opponent in 2022, said.“[D’Esposito] supporting the retaliatory impeachment inquiry to appease the hard-right members, confirms his inability or desire to stand for the majority of Long Islanders who know the inquiry to be a waste of time and money.”Despite that, Russell said she doubted that D’Esposito’s support for the impeachment inquiry would be a defining issue.“I wish it would have an impact, but I fear it will not, based on where the district leans. It’d also depend on who his challenger is.”In Garden City, in the north of D’Esposito’s district, Republican voters were adamant that the impeachment inquiry was justified.“Biden should be in prison. They should put him in jail, and his son, the whole administration,” said Anthony DeAngelis, an equities trader.Maria Bicocchio, 71, who voted for Trump and D’Esposito in 2020, was slightly more nuanced on whether the impeachment inquiry could prove to be a problem among people who voted for Biden in 2022 before switching to the Republican party in 2022.“It could be but then again, maybe they have woken up and decided they’re not so sure about Biden,” she said.There are indications that impeachment might not be a huge vote loser for Republicans. A Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday found that 48% of voters support the impeachment inquiry, with 42% opposed. Among independent voters, 47% said they were in favor of the inquiry, with 36% opposed. (A further 17% had no opinion.)Still, Democrats will hope that the inquiry can at least tarnish enough Republicans to help them win back the House next year.“Campaigns are all about informing the voters about how their incumbent elected representatives have been performing,” said Jacobs, the Nassau county Democrats chair.“D’Esposito wants to come across as a moderate because he knows this is a moderate district. But when it comes right down to it on issues like this, he’s a Maga Republican, he’s exactly what Donald Trump wants to have in the Congress. I think voters need to know that.” More

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      AOC joins calls for Bob Menendez to resign from Senate over corruption charges

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined the calls for Bob Menendez to resign, after the Democratic US senator from New Jersey was charged with accepting gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and other gifts as bribes.Speaking on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez said the charges against Menendez were “extremely serious” and he should step down.A growing number of Democrats are calling for Menendez, who has represented New Jersey in the Senate since 2006, to resign.Menendez is accused of using his position to aid Egypt’s authoritarian government and pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.Over the weekend, John Fetterman became the first US Senate Democrat to suggest Menendez should quit, while a Democratic New Jersey congressman announced he would run against Menendez in next year’s primary election.Asked about Menendez on CBS’s Face the Nation, Ocasio-Cortez said:“The situation is quite unfortunate, but I do believe that it is in the best interest for Senator Menendez to resign in this moment.“Consistency matters. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. The details in this indictment are extremely serious. They involve the nature of not just his but all of our seats in Congress.”Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on Menendez come after she has previously called for a federal investigation into Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from wealthy rightwing donors.In August, ProPublica reported that Thomas had taken “at least 38” undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.Ocasio-Cortez had also previously called on Republican congressman George Santos to step down after he was indicted earlier this year for fraud, money laundering and other federal charges.Fetterman was another high-profile progressive who had called for Menendez’s resignation.“He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence under our system, but he is not entitled to continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations,” Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said in a statement on Saturday.“I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial.”Menendez denies the charges against him. In a statement on Friday he said: “I am not going anywhere.”But that has not stopped a burgeoning movement calling for his departure.Since then, Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, has joined the calls for Menendez to resign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMurphy would be in charge of appointing a replacement for Menendez if the senator leaves office. The replacement would be in office until a special election is held.Also on Sunday, Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic New Jersey congressman, repeated his previous call for Menendez to quit.“I called on him, given the gravity of the charges, to step aside,” Gottheimer told CNN.“Given how we’ve got elections coming up, there’s a lot of distractions; obviously giving the senator time to defend himself, I think what’s best is that he step aside and we focus on issues.”Menendez has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, in connection with alleged intervention on behalf of Egypt, and in allegedly pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.The indictment against Menendez alleged that he and his wife were paid a series of bribes by three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for corrupt acts. FBI agents investigating Menendez discovered “a lot of gold”, allegedly provided by businessman Fred Daibes, in the senator’s home, as well as about $500,000 in cash.Some of the money was “stuffed into envelopes and closets”, and some was “stuffed in the senator’s jacket pockets”, the FBI said.On Saturday, the Democratic New Jersey congressman Andy Kim said he would run against Menendez in the 2024 primary election.“After calls to resign, Senator Menendez said: ‘I am not going anywhere,’” Kim said in a statement.“As a result, I feel compelled to run against him. This is not something I expected to do, but I believe New Jersey deserves better. We cannot jeopardize the Senate or compromise our country’s integrity.“I believe it’s time we restore faith in our democracy, and that’s why I am stepping up and running for Senate.” More

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      US progressive groups facing ‘five-alarm fire’ ahead of 2024 as donations down

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      Progressive political fundraising in America is facing a crisis, according to a leading Democratic grassroots donor organization, which warned this month that donations to progressive groups are “way down in 2023 across the board”.According to the Movement Voter Project, progressives have “a five-alarm fire going into 2024”. The organization’s director, Bill Wimsatt, said he was “pressing the panic button” because donor inaction is creating a movement-wide crisis.Wimsatt said there had been a peak for progressive causes around the time of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and amid campaigning to get Donald Trump out of office. “The sense of urgency and existential necessity has dissipated in people’s minds,” he said, “though the situation going into 2024 isn’t any less existential.”A report published by Middle Seat Consulting in July found that while the overall trend in small-donation giving is up since 2015, it is “significantly lower” in the first six months of 2023 than in the same quarters in recent years – and slowing. Cycle over cycle, fundraising is down 48%, it said.It noted that 2015–2022 had been an extraordinary time of political upheaval and uncertainty and Donald Trump motivated donors on the Democratic side. But with Trump out of office, grassroots donors on the left feel a sense of stability and there is reduced motivation to give.In 2020 progressive Democrats “busted our ass to win by 43,000 votes across three states”, Wimsatt says, referring to 2020 Democrat margins in Wisconsin (20,608), Arizona (10,357) and Georgia (11,799). “But if we don’t bust our ass again we’ll lose by 43,000.”The report also identified threats to digital fundraising from an increase in spam email across the fundraising industry, Facebook’s decision to deprioritize political content and other social media innovations making it harder to target potential donors. Phone companies, too, have improved filters to limit political texting.Economically, it added, the inflation crisis “likely had a big impact on the fundraising recession”, noting that “political giving is a luxury expense for most”.Wimsatt reasons that political fundraising is also cyclical. In the years where it had been “exhausted” – including 2010, 2014, 2016 – there had been a resulting rightwing surge. An addition $100m-$300m deployed to grassroots organizations for the rest of 2023, he wrote in the memo, would put progressive organization in a “place of strength” going into the election year.Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families party, says that while there are natural ebbs and flows in progressive fundraising, an alert about a paucity of donor interest in such a critical election cycle was appropriate.“The slowdown in small-dollar donations is real,” he said. “We’re coming off a high-water mark in 2020, when a lot of forces got into the action around Donald Trump and where he was taking the country. At the same time, the response to the George Floyd murder sparked the largest social movement in our country’s history.“With Biden as president, a lot of people have shifted their interests. We have to challenge that by communicating , as the rightwing have done from activist to donor, that this is a long-term political project and a reason to make year-round investments.”Raising fears of a second Trump term does not so far appear to be enough. “People heard about a threat to democracy in 2020 and version of it in 2022, so there is a level of fatigue,” Mitchell said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBreathless emails flooding inboxes may be good at squeezing small-dollar donors but not good at educating the base, getting the base into the fight or winning its trust, Mitchells says, “but progressives need to articulate the ‘why’ outside of ensuring a second Biden term”, he added.Ringing the Trump alarm may not be enough. “We think that’s one-third, and people should understand what the stakes are in putting the government in Maga control. Another third, he says, “is telling the story of what was won during this administration – the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill and American Rescue Plan”.The last, and possibly most important, “is the positive piece of what’s left on the agenda to do. We can’t expect that a fear-based narrative [will work] to build the united front we need. So there’s work to be done inspiring the base,” Mitchell says.If progressive organizations are successful at that, “I think we’ll see a surge of interest and a surge of resources, but it’s up to us to make that case.”Wimsatt, too, says effective messaging is key.“I try to tell a positive story,” he said. “We’re 13 years past the Tea Party, seven years since Trump’s first election, and it’ll take another five to 10 years to defeat them. 2024 is the battle royal and then we have a marathon after that. If we can hold on through that, we can have a progressive decade and nice things.” More

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      Rust Belt Union Blues: how Trump wooed workers away from the Democrats

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      Consider the following social science experiment: go into a unionized steel mill parking lot in western Pennsylvania, look at the bumper stickers and track the political messages. Given the longstanding bond between unions and the Democratic party, you might predict widespread support for Democratic candidates. Yet when the then Harvard undergraduate Lainey Newman conducted such unconventional field research during the Covid pandemic, encouraged by her faculty mentor Theda Skocpol, results indicated otherwise. There was a QAnon sticker here, a Back the Blue flag there. But one name proliferated: Donald Trump.It all supported a surprising claim: industrial union members in the shrunken manufacturing hubs of the US are abandoning their historic loyalty to the Democrats for the Republican party.“The most interesting point, how telling it is, is that those stickers were out in the open,” Newman says. “Everyone in the community knew. It was not something people hide.“It would not have been something old-timers would have been OK with, frankly. They stood up against … voting for Republicans, that type of thing.”Newman documented this political shift and the complex reasons for it in her senior thesis, with Skocpol as her advisor. Now the recent graduate and the veteran professor have teamed up to turn the project into a book: Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party.The book comes out as organized labor is returning to the headlines, whether through the United Auto Workers strike at the big three US carmakers or through the battle to buy a former industrial powerhouse, US Steel. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump is again wooing union voters. On the 3 September edition of ABC’s This Week, the Manhattan Institute president, Reihan Salam, noted that Trump “was trying to appeal to UAW members to talk about, for example, this effort to transition away from combustion engine vehicles”.Newman reflects: “It is relatively well-known [that] union members aren’t voting for Democrats like they used to. What we say is that for a very long time, Democrats did take unions for granted. They didn’t reinvest in the relationship with labor that would have been necessary to maintain some of the alliances and trust between rank-and-file labor and the Democrats.”Once, the bond was as strong as the steel worked by union hands across western Pennsylvania, especially in Pittsburgh, known to some as “The City That Built America”. Retirees repeatedly mentioned this in interviews with Newman and Skocpol. An 81-year-old explained longtime hostility to the Republican party in unionized steel mills and coal mines: “They figure that there was not a Republican in the world who took care of a working guy.” A union newsletter, one of many the authors examined, urged readers to “Vote Straight ‘D’ This November”. Even in the 1980 presidential election, which Ronald Reagan won decisively, union-heavy counties in Pennsylvania were a good predictor of votes for the incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter.The subsequent sea change is summed up in one of Newman and Skocpol’s chapter titles, From Union Blue to Trump Red. In 2016, the connection between Pennsylvania union voters and Democratic support all but evaporated as Trump flipped the normally Democratic state en route to victory. His showing that year set a new bar for support for a GOP presidential candidate among rank-and-file union members, bettering Reagan’s standard, with such members often defying leadership to back Trump.“It’s a myth that it all happened suddenly with Reagan,” says Skocpol. “Not really – it took longer.”‘In Union There Is Strength’To understand these changes, Newman and Skocpol examined larger transformations at work across the Rust Belt, especially in western Pennsylvania. It helped that they have Rust Belt backgrounds: Newman grew up in Pittsburgh, where she returned to research the book, while Skocpol was raised in the former industrial city of Wyandotte, Michigan, located south of Detroit.Once, as they now relate, unions wove themselves into community life. Union halls hosted events from weddings to retirement parties. Members showcased their pride through union memorabilia, some of which is displayed in the book, including samples from Skocpol’s 3,000-item collection. Among her favorites: a glass worker’s badge featuring images of drinking vessels and the motto “In Union There Is Strength”.That strength eventually dissipated, including with the implosion of the steel industry in western Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 80s. (According to one interviewee, the resulting population shift explains why there are so many Pittsburgh Steelers fans across the US.) In formerly thriving communities, cinemas and shoe stores closed down, as did union halls. The cover of Skocpol and Newman’s book depicts a line of shuttered storefronts in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the steel town whose former mayor, the Democrat John Fetterman, is now a US senator.Not all union members left western Pennsylvania. As the book explains, those continuing in employment did so in changed conditions. Steelworkers battled each other for dwindling jobs, capital held ever more power and Pittsburgh itself changed. The Steel City sought to reinvent itself through healthcare and higher education, steelworkers wondering where they stood.Blue-collar workers found a more receptive climate among conservative social organizations that filled the vacuum left by retreating unions: gun clubs that benefited from a strong hunting tradition and megachurches that replaced closed local churches. The region even became a center of activity for the Tea Party movement, in opposition to Barack Obama, a phenomenon Skocpol has researched on the national level.In 2016, although Trump and Hillary Clinton made a nearly equal number of visits to western Pennsylvania, they differed in where they went and what they said. Clinton headed to Pittsburgh. Trump toured struggling factory towns, to the south and west. In one, Monessen, he pledged to make American steel great again – a campaign position, the authors note, unuttered for decades and in stark contrast with Clinton’s anti-coal stance. As president, Trump arguably followed through, with a 2018 tariff on aluminum and steel imports. The book cites experts who opposed the move for various reasons, from harm to the economy to worsened relations with China.The authors say their book is not meant to criticize unions or the Democratic party. Democrats, they say, are taking positive steps in response to union members’ rightward shift.“We didn’t have time to research at length all the new kinds of initiatives that have been taken in a state like Wisconsin, like Georgia,” says Skocpol. “They have learned some of the lessons, are trying to create year-round, socially-embedded presences.”In 2020, Joe Biden made multiple visits to western Pennsylvania and ended up narrowly winning Erie county, which had been trending red. As president, he has sought to have the federal government purchase more US-made products, while launching renewable energy initiatives through union labor. Skocpol says Trump’s more ambitious promises, including an across-the-board 10% tariff, propose an unrealistic bridge to a bygone era.“Will Trump promise to do all these things?” asks Skocpol. “Of course he will. Will he actually do them more effectively if he becomes president again? God help us all.”
      Rust Belt Union Blues is published in the US by Columbia University Press More

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      New Jersey senator Menendez rejects calls from fellow Democrats to resign

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      Several Democrats including his own state governor are calling on their fellow party member Robert Menendez to resign after federal authorities charged the New Jersey US senator and his wife with accepting bribes. However, the defiant senator has rejected those claims and is refusing to step down.Authorities on Friday revealed charges alleging that Robert and Nadine Menendez illegally accepted gold bars, cash, a luxurious Mercedes-Benz car and other gifts in exchange for favors benefiting three businessmen as well as influencing the Egyptian government.In response, the Democratic congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota told CNN he was deeply disappointed in Menendez and that the senator needed to resign. Phillips said that was his position despite his belief that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.“Yes, I am a Democrat and so is Senator Menendez, but based on what I have seen, I am disappointed and yes, I think he should resign,” Phillips said.He continued: “I’m appalled. Anybody who pays attention – I don’t care [about] your politics, Democrat or Republican, you should be appalled.“A member of Congress who appears to have broken the law is someone who I should believe should resign.”Phillips went on to invoke the case of George Santos, the Republican congressman who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.“I think George Santos should have resigned already,” he said. “Sadly, our House ethics process, and I would argue the Senate as well, is not as proficient as it needs to be so we have to rely on the judicial system, but I’m really disappointed.”Menendez rejected calls to resign and plans to refute the claims of bribery and corruption, according to NBC News. “Those who believe in justice believe in innocence until proven guilty. I intend to continue to fight for the people of New Jersey with the same success I’ve had for the past five decades,” Menendez said in the statement.“This is the same record of success these very same leaders have lauded all along. It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat. I am not going anywhere,” he added.In response to a question on whether Democratic leaders in Congress should lean on Menendez to resign and push him out, Phillips replied: “Look, I am trying to restore faith in government.“That’s one of my missions. It’s a lot of my colleagues’ missions, and sometimes we have to walk that talk, even if it’s uncomfortable. And I would argue that this time, yes, the answer is absolutely.”The New Jersey representative Andy Kim, a Democrat, also called on Menendez to resign. The New Jersey Globe quoted Kim as saying: “These allegations are serious and alarming. It doesn’t matter what your job title is or your politics – no one in America is above the law.“The people of New Jersey absolutely need to know the truth of what happened, and I hope the judicial system works thoroughly and quickly to bring this truth to light.”He added: “In the meantime, I don’t have confidence that the senator has the ability to properly focus on our state and its people while addressing such a significant legal matter. He should step down.”Unsurprisingly, New Jersey’s Republican state committee joined Phillips and Kim in calling for Menendez to step down. The statement said Menendez’s “legal woes [were] an embarrassing distraction”.“For the good of the people of this state, who deserve full and devoted representation, we call on … Robert Menendez to resign,” the statement added.In New Jersey, if there is a vacancy in the US Senate, that seat gets filled by a gubernatorial appointment before a special election is held to replace the appointee. Should Menendez leave office, his vacancy would be filled by the state’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, a reality that perhaps makes it less uncomfortable for Phillips and Kim to insist on their fellow party member’s resignation.Murphy himself also called for Menendez to resign in a statement issued on Friday.“The allegations in the indictment … are deeply disturbing,” the statement said. “These are serious charges that implicate national security and the integrity of our criminal justice system.”In recent months, Democrats have not only called on Santos to be removed from Congress – they have also demanded that Donald Trump not run for a second term as president as he grapples with more than 90 criminal charges across four separate indictments.House Democrats introduced a resolution to expel the indicted Santos from Congress in May, but Republicans successfully sidestepped the maneuver.Meanwhile, Virginia’s Democratic US senator Tim Kaine said earlier this month that he believed there was a “powerful argument” to be made that Trump could be disqualified from running in the 2024 presidential election under the 14th amendment of the constitution. That amendment bars anyone who has taken an oath to support the constitution and has “engaged in insurrection” against the US from holding any civil, military or elected office without approval from two-thirds of both the House and Senate.Trump’s charges include ones in connection with the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress staged by his supporters after he lost the previous year’s presidential election to Joe Biden.Other liberals as well as prominent legal scholars across the country have echoed that argument. More