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Tag: cory booker
Bob Menendez

Growing Chorus Of Democratic Senators Demands Menendez Resignation

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is losing support as more of his Senate Democratic colleagues formally call on him to resign after he was indicted again, this time on federal bribery charges that included allegations of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars.

As of Tuesday morning, at least ten Democratic U.S. Senators have now called on the twice-indicted senior Democratic Senator from New Jersey to resign, as they cite the gravity of the charges against him.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was the first to call on Menendez to resign, on Monday. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Peter Welch (D-VT) followed later that day.

On Tuesday morning, Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), John Tester (D-MT), and Bob Casey (D-PA) all called on Sen. Menendez to resign. By 11 AM, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also called for him to resign.

Minutes later, Sen. Cory Booker, Menendez’s Democratic New Jersey colleague, also called for him to resign. The New York Times reported Booker’s decision “to condemn Senator Robert Menendez underscores the deepening crisis Mr. Menendez faces after his indictment.”

According to the Department of Justice, Menendez, along with his wife Nadine Menendez, not only are alleged to have received bribes, he is charged with doing so in a scheme “to use his official position to protect and enrich” those he allegedly accepted funds from, and “to benefit the Government of Egypt.”

“Among other things,” the DOJ alleged, Senator Menendez “agreed and sought to pressure a senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an effort to protect a business monopoly granted to” a New Jersey businessman “by Egypt, disrupt a criminal case undertaken by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office related to associates of” another New Jersey businessman, “and disrupt a federal criminal prosecution brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey against” a third New Jersey businessman.

Former DOD Special Counsel Ryan Goodman on Sunday called Menendez “a walking national security threat.”

“Imagine US official charged with selling US secrets, embassy security, US defense policy – and showing up for work the next day,” he added.

“From a purely legal perspective, Menendez appears to be a dead man walking,” Goodman continued. “The kind of forensic and documentary evidence in the Indictment is exceptionally strong for these types of cases. It looks inevitable that he will be going to prison.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Despite Pandemic Pressures, Big Banks Screwed Consumers On Overdrafts

Despite Pandemic Pressures, Big Banks Screwed Consumers On Overdrafts

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Last year was a difficult one for millions of people in the United States.

It was not so difficult for big banks, and one of the ways the banks raked in revenue was by hitting struggling people with overdraft fees.

During the final quarter of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was battering the country, JPMorganChase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo each took in more than $300 million in overdraft fees alone. Those fees are slapped on people who are by definition struggling, and banks often use strategies to maximize the number of fees people pay, like ordering transactions so that the biggest amounts go through first, which lets them charge fees on more, smaller transactions. And it's no thanks to the banks that it wasn't much, much worse—COVID-19 relief from the government protected many people from the worst.

Around one in three checking accounts has at least one overdraft a year, and five percent of checking account holders have 20 or more overdrafts a year, accounting for more than 60 percent of overdraft fees. In 2020, the average overdraft fee was over $33. Many of these fees are triggered by debit card transactions for less than $25 that are repaid within three days.

This is an ongoing story—bank overdraft fee policies have been terrible for years. But it took on new dimensions during the pandemic, with sky-high unemployment creating a financial emergency for so many people.

"Banks could've capped overdraft fees for a certain number of months, or had no fees during the pandemic, but they didn't want to give up a dollar of overdraft revenue in any formal way," Rebecca Borné, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, told The American Prospect's Alexander Sammon. "So what we see now is a return to business as usual, where our largest banks each took over a billion dollars out of the checking accounts of people during one of the worst years in our history. It's a gobsmacking amount of money."

It would have been much worse without COVID-19 relief bills, from the CARES Act to the American Rescue Plan. Check out how Google trend data on searches for "overdraft" tracked the passage of those laws:

OverdraftandGoogleSearches1.png

After each round of relief payments, you see searches for "overdraft" drop. Because the banks weren't interested in going easy on people being hammered by a once-in-a-century pandemic and the accompanying economic devastation.

Consider it one more reminder that what we need are regulations and laws to protect consumers. There are two prime ways that could happen on this issue. Early in the pandemic, Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) proposed legislation to crack down on overdraft fees during the COVID-19 emergency, banning them altogether for the duration of the emergency and preventing banks from reporting overdrafts to credit reporting agencies—but that didn't get passed. Booker and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have other legislation on overdraft abuses more generally, but as always, there's that Senate filibuster problem blocking progress.

Under President Biden, though, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) could do a lot more protecting consumers than the agency did under Donald Trump. Biden's nominee to head the CFPB, Rohit Chopra, hasn't yet been confirmed, but he's known as a strong consumer advocate. He could regulate the practice, which is extraordinarily abusive even in non-pandemic times.

Sen. Booker Ends Presidential Bid ‘With Full Heart’

Sen. Booker Ends Presidential Bid ‘With Full Heart’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Sen. Cory Booker is leaving the 2020 presidential race. “It’s with a full heart that I share this news—I’m suspending my campaign for president,” he tweeted. “To my team, supporters, and everyone who gave me a shot—thank you. I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but faith in what we can accomplish together.”

His announcement video is as classy and upbeat as his campaign was. “It is my faith in us, my faith in us together as a nation, that we share common pain and common problems that can only be solved with a common purpose and a sense of common cause,” he said. “So I recommit myself to the work. I can’t wait to get back on the campaign trail and campaign as hard as I can for whoever is the eventual nominee and for candidates up and down the ballot.”

“But for now,” he concludes, “I want to say thank you.”

His departure leaves one person of color on the ballot, the one with independent wealth, Andrew Yang. It remains populated with random white men including Sen. Michael Bennet (yeah, him, he’s still there) and the two who can keep spending their way onto the stage, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. That’s an issue this party is going to have to reckon with. But for now, let’s thank Sen. Cory Booker for bringing his enthusiasm, his integrity, and his heart to this race.

UPDATE Monday, Jan 13, 2020 · 10:47:45 AM Central Standard Time

Forgot that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is still “in” the race. For whatever that’s worth.

Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and other Democratic presidential candidates believe that Joe Biden was wrong in helping to craft and pass the 1994 crime bill, which they blame for the damage it wrought among African Americans.

They have a point. What they fail to grasp is that if they had been senators then, they likely would have been wrong right along with him.

It’s easy in retrospect to see that the legislation was deeply flawed. In fact, it was not impossible to see it even then. I wrote columns at the time criticizing the bill for expanding death penalty crimes, mandating life sentences for repeat offenders (“three strikes and you’re out”) and locking up more criminals for longer periods.

The increase in incarceration that occurred in the 1990s did have a lopsided racial impact. But it was not the product of the crime bill, because the vast majority of felons are prosecuted and imprisoned under state laws. The federal crackdown played only a minor role.

“The proud architect of a failed system is not the right person to fix it,” declares Booker. Most of the provisions in the 1994 bill, however, have already been “fixed,” by expiration or repeal.

The people who opposed the bill had the better of the argument. But to understand the legislation and its broad support in Congress, you have to understand the frightening climate in which it was passed.

Between 1983 and 1992, the violent crime rate jumped by 41 percent. New York City had 2,245 murders in 1990, or more than six per day. Chicago had 943 murders in 1992. (By comparison, New York had 289 homicides last year, and Chicago had 572.) The crack epidemic was in full, terrifying swing.

Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer. There was “a fabulously intemperate and angry mood among Americans,” recalls Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Politicians had to respond.

The crime bill was one response to that mood. It was a big package, including not only the provisions I mentioned before but also money to add 100,000 police nationwide, a ban on “assault weapons,” and inducements for states to lengthen prison terms (“truth in sentencing”). It adopted many Republican policies while helping Democrats shed their soft-on-crime label.

At the time, the racial politics were not quite what you might assume. Prior to becoming mayor of Atlanta in 1990, Maynard Jackson offered a plan to confiscate the property of drug dealers called “Kick Their Assets.”

As for murderers, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry wanted police to “hunt them down like mad dogs.” Black leaders like these wanted stern action because it was African Americans who were most likely to be harmed by crime.

“At the height of the epidemic, black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered,” Yale Law professor James Forman Jr., who is black, wrote in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own. One NAACP official called it “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.”

In his 1997 book, Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, an African American, argued that “blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants.”

In many black neighborhoods, one thing scarier than having police around is not having them. The crime bill provided more of them.

Whites who favored punitive action may have been motivated partly by racial prejudice. But black sentiment also helped to produce these policies.

A 1994 Gallup survey found that 58 percent of African Americans supported the crime bill — compared with 49 percent of whites. The only black senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, supported it. Of the 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, just 12 voted against it.

It may seem plausible that black Americans would blame Biden for his role in bringing about the incarceration of so many of their brethren. But that assumes they actually object to this outcome. In a 2014 poll by the Sentencing Project, 64 percent of them said that courts were too lenient in punishing criminals.

A generation ago, Biden made his share of mistakes when it came to fighting crime. If they had been in his place, would Booker or Harris have done better? I wouldn’t bet on it.