Cory Booker For Vice President? God Forbid!

Imagine if they both ran for VP!

-by Dorothy Reik,
President, Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains

In my half sleep this morning I heard some pundit, probably on MSHRC, saying that Cory Booker's selection as running mate would bring the Bernie supporters running to back to the Hillary fold! Nothing could be further from the truth and it shows how out of touch the Democratic Party, the media and Hillary are with those of us who have had enough of neoliberals masquerading as progressives. The New Yorker explains how it began back when Booker was running for his first City Council seat. Booker was an investment as part of a longer story on Booker's educational experiment in Newark-- more on that later.

Booker raised more than a hundred and forty thousand dollars, an unheard-of sum for a Newark council race. A Democratic operative said of enthusiasts on Wall Street, "They let Cory into their boardrooms and offices, introduced him to people they worked with in hedge funds. As young finance people, they looked at a guy like Cory at this stage as if they were buying Google at seventy-five dollars a share."

  And their investment paid off. Soon Booker was running for Senate. Here's a quote from Alex Pareene from this article in Salon:

He will, in short, be the worst kind of senator. The kind that has no power and no real desire to exercise power on behalf of the people the senator ostensibly represents, but the kind that always expresses opinions on television about whatever national issues people on television care about that day. He will be on Morning Joe and Meet the Press constantly. He has even already said that he might consider might consider Rand Paul and Ted Cruz as models for how a freshman senator might make "big marks." Not "big marks" in the sense of any sort of lasting legislative legacy, because Ted Cruz does not care about legislation or policy, but "big marks" in terms of media attention and stunts designed to appeal to a core of supporters who prefer their senators brash and loud. Another one of those senators will not help anything.

Wall Street, satisfied with their investment, doubled down. While he talks the talk, like HRH HRC, his FEC filings tell the story his words try to hide, as CNBC reports: "Securities and investment firms have given Booker about $1.88 million of his total $17.6 million in contributions this election cycle, according to records from SNL Financial and OpenSecrets.org. The industry has been the biggest group to give to the former Newark mayor, with lawyers and real estate firms the two next-highest." The bankster money has continued to flow and, as of now, the New Jersey freshman has taken in a whopping $4,637,159 from the Finance Sector. They must like him (on the Commerce Committee). By way of comparison, Tim Kaine of Virginia, another "friend of Wall Street," is also a freshman but the banksters have only "invested" $2,365,957 into his career. And no one would argue that another freshman, Blue Dog Democrat Joe Donnelly, has been less than solicitous of Wall Street's every whim. All he's gotten was $1,620,318. Wall Street-friendly Republican Deb Fischer (NE) was also elected in 2012 and all she's seen from the Finance Sector is a miserly $762,098. Wonder what Booker does for them that these other Wall Street shills don't?

As for the Bernie backers, many will tell you that Booker hardly distinguished himself as Mayor of Newark, as the Daily Beast reported:

Months after he first entered the Senate, the New Jersey comptroller alleged that under Booker’s watch-- or, more likely, because he was not watching-- corruption ran rampant at a publicly funded water-treatment and reservoir-management agency, where Booker’s former law partner served as counsel. And speaking of his former law career: Despite having resigned from his law firm once entering the mayor’s office, Booker received annual payments until 2011, during which time the firm was profiting handsomely off of Brick City. That would be the Brick City that Booker professed to love with the fire of a thousand suns, but did little to fundamentally change. Murder, violent crime, unemployment, and taxes all rose dramatically under his stewardship.

And then there was the school boondoggle in which he suckered his pal Mark Zukerberg into donating $100 million to the Newark City Schools-- money that absolutely disappeared! Booker is a champion of charter schools and vouchers-- anathema to progressives. Of course the first move was to hire high priced consultants to justify the charters and the the substitution of test scores for seniority in determining teacher pay. In the wake of the turmoil of the budget and other reforms, Anderson and a consulting group that received $3 million over two years generated a new plan-- One Newark-- that basically eliminated neighborhood schools by assigning students among 55 district schools and 16 charter schools, part of Anderson’s strategy of reducing the selection bias inherent in charter school systems. However, there were no plans for transportation built into the plan, and it called for "more than a third of Newark’s schools…[to] be closed, renewed, relocated, phased out, repurposed, or redesigned."  For the whole ugly story from the seduction (not difficult) of Christie and Zuckerberg to ultimate failure, you can turn to Dale Roussaleff's exhaustive coverage in the New Yorker:

“We know what works,” Booker and other reformers often said. They blamed vested interests for using poverty as an excuse for failure, and dismissed competing approaches as incrementalism. Education needed "transformational change." Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six-year-old head of Facebook, agreed, and he pledged a hundred million dollars to Booker and Christie’s cause.

"Almost four years later, Newark has fifty new principals, four new public high schools, a new teachers’ contract that ties pay to performance, and an agreement by most charter schools to serve their share of the neediest students. But residents only recently learned that the overhaul would require thousands of students to move to other schools, and a thousand teachers and more than eight hundred support staff to be laid off within three years.

If you want even more you can check out The Prize, Dale Russakoff's award winning book that chronicles the whole sick episode.



Of course, our friend Howie Klein was on to him from the beginning, asking if there was any way to keep Booker out of the Senate: "Booker is a nightmare for progressives. He's a careerist corporate whore and a 100% tool of Wall Street. Outside of social issues, he might as well be a Republican."

Now we ask another question: Is there any way to keep Cory Booker out of the White House??? We don't need yet another Wall Street-sensitive corporate Democrat but if Booker makes it to VP that's exactly what we will get! What we need are more people like Newark new mayor, Ras Baraka!

As one of my New York friends used to say: "Comes the revolution...." He never finished that sentence-- he left it for us.

Come Back Woody Guthrie

- by Danny Goldberg

(Danny wrote this piece for Dissent. It's important for everyone in the DWT community to read it and he said it would be OK to republish it.)

I suspect that I was not the only teenager in the late 1960s engaging in sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Vietnam War protests to whom Woody’s body of work had an antique feeling. A perfunctory one-time listening to the Alan Lomax tapes of the man said to be one of Bob Dylan’s heroes was enough, I thought, to punch my hipness card. Arguments about unions and the venality of millionaires and the New Deal seemed like passé accounts of battles my parents’ generation had fought and won. Yet through the mysterious alchemy that the greatest works of art possess, and the bizarre devolution of American politics, many of Guthrie’s songs are paradoxically more relevant today that at the time of his passing in 1967.

Other than animus toward the Koch Brothers and their ilk, admiration for Woody Guthrie may be one of the very few things that the Obama administration and Occupy Wall Street agree about. “This Land Is Your Land” was performed by Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger at Obama’s inauguration in 2008, and by Tom Morello leading a “guitar army” at the OWS rally on May Day of this year in New York’s Union Square.

On the weekend in mid-July of Guthrie’s 100th birthday, President Obama told Charlie Rose that “the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times,” and admitted he had failed to do so. Around the same time several dozen of the activists who had helped launch OWS met in Washington Square Park, where Guthrie had sung on many an occasion, to discuss what to do in the fall on the impending one year anniversary of the occupation. Their moral compass was intact but it was clear that the explosion of attention and activism last fall had not been the product of any one person, group, philosophy, or strategy-- and that even the sharpest movement intellects weren’t sure about how to hit another home run. Should the focus be on college debt? Credit cards? Public financing of campaigns? Foreclosures? Should there be a campaign to have people wear red to symbolize how many Americans are “in the red?”

As both the liberal establishment and the various pieces of the Occupy movement searched for lost chords that could galvanize mass opinion around economic issues, the unique value of great art and great artists loomed large. It was not just Obama who has to figure out how to “tell a story”-- it was the entire Left.

As it happens, the fierce debate about the nature of community and government that is animating so much of modern American politics echoes one taking place just as vigorously more than seventy years ago, when Guthrie wrote his most influential songs, long before cellphones or television, before hip-hop or rock and roll, before hipsters or punks or hippies or beatniks, before Pearl Harbor, before McCarthyism, before gay rights or second-wave feminism, and before Jackie Robinson played his first major league ball game. And the reason Guthrie’s work is remembered, while that of his contemporaries is largely forgotten, is not only because of his genius for memorable phrases. Most of Guthrie’s political songs spoke not solely to transient issues of the day but to fundamental moral ideals about how people and societies should and should not behave.

In her new book, My Name Is New York: Ramblin’ Around Woody Guthrie’s Town (Powerhouse Books), Nora Guthrie, who like me was born in 1950, writes of her father’s journey to New York City in early 1940 at the age of twenty-seven. “During the month it took to hitchhike from Los Angeles to New York, ‘God Bless America’ was blaring out of every jukebox and radio across the country.” (The recording is still played during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.)

Woody felt that Irving Berlin’s patriotic anthem was incomplete. As Woody’s original hand-written lyrics reprinted in Nora’s book show, “This Land Was Made for You and Me” (now known as “This Land Is Your Land”) was first written as “God Blessed America,” and the original refrain was “God blessed America for me.” The song balances his admiration, shared with Berlin, for the natural beauty of the American continent (“the sparkling sands of the diamond deserts”) with an acknowledgement of the dark side of American capitalism (“One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office, I saw my people. As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.”) In the final version, Woody’s finely tuned artistic ear changed the last line to say that America “was made for you and me.” Pete Seeger’s 1967 obituary of Woody in Life pointed out that “any damn fool can get complicated. It takes a genius to attain simplicity.”

“This Land Was Made for You and Me” was written on February 23, 1940 at the Hanover Rooming House on West 43rd Street, which ironically is now the site of the world headquarters of Bank of America. In the months that followed Guthrie would write many other lyrics about the dignity and value of working people-- of those who would later be called “the 99 percent”-- including “Jesus Christ,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Tom Joad,” the latter inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. (John Ford would win the Academy Award for Best Director that year for the film version.)

At exactly the same time, Ayn Rand, seven years older than Woody, was finishing her benzedrine-fueled novel The Fountainhead, which artistically expressed a philosophy completely obverse to Woody’s. The Fountainhead, published in 1943, was followed by Rand’s nonfiction screed The Moral Basis Of Individualism, which advocated “rational and ethical egoism” and rejected “ethical altruism.”

In the ensuing decades the beneficiaries of Randian philosophy have made vast investments in changing American public opinion and politics, fanning the flames of McCarthyism, then Reaganism, and now the naked corporatism that some OWS members astutely call “mafia capitalism.” Longtime Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was an actual acolyte of Rand, and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, whose plan to dismantle most of America’s social safety net has been supported by virtually all of the conservative establishment, proudly described “growing up on Ayn Rand,” at least until her atheism began to threaten his public image.

There can be little question that Guthrie would be appalled by the corporatization of the Democratic Party. He was an unapologetic left-winger who wrote a column called “Woody Sez” for the Communist Daily Worker (though he pointedly never joined the Communist Party, and referred to himself as a “commonist.”) His very first column is eerily resonant today:

The national debit is one thing I caint figger out. I heard a senator on a radio a saying that we owed somebody 16 jillion dollars. Called it the national debit. If the nation is the government and the government is the people, then I guess the people owes the people, that means I owe me and you owe you, and I forget the regular fee, but if I owe myself something, I would be a willing just to call it off rather than have the senators argue about it, and I know you would do the same and then we wouldn’t have no national debit.

But though significantly to the left of the Democratic Party even in its New Deal phase, Guthrie had none of the contemporary anarchist propensity (shared by some others on the left) for treating all politicians as if they were the same. In the song “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” written after FDR died, Guthrie sang:

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt, don’t hang your head and cry;
His mortal clay is laid away, but his good work fills the sky;
This world was lucky to see him born…
I voted for him for lots o’ jobs, I’d vote his name again; He tried to find an honest job for every idle man;
This world was lucky to see him born...

Nor did Guthrie’s pre-psychedelic lefty morality have much to do with the libertarian political current, which owes much to Ayn Rand but also holds a lot of sway on parts of the Left. He may have wanted cops to leave deportees and hobos alone (in today’s parlance, to stop “stop and frisk”). But it is reasonable to assume he wanted FDR’s government to police the bankers he described in “Pretty Boy Floyd,” who “robbed you with a fountain pen” and “drove a family from their home.”

Although Woody was unblinking in the face of suffering and injustice, he had a persistent streak of optimism. He seemed really to believe that music could change the world for the better, confidently writing on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” He could describe the deprivations of migrant workers but still insist that “pastures of plenty must always be free.”

When right-wing demagogues ranted that President Obama was a socialist, the liberal response was to deny it. Many Woody fans assuredly wished that those in the political conversation, including in this magazine, would add the word “unfortunately.” Woody’s political songs, of course, were animated by clear ideas about what is right or wrong, not precise political arguments. Nothing in his canon would suggest that phrases appealing to focus groups of swing voters, or slogans that temporarily capture the imagination of general assemblies, should be at the heart of progressive politics.

During hard times, people who are struggling look for an emotionally accessible moral philosophy that can give them hope. If the Left does not provide it, the Right is always there to fill the vacuum. One need only to observe a forlorn thirty-something clutching a paperback copy of The Fountainhead to identify with the yearning of Steve Earle’s 1997 song “Christmas In Washington,” which like Woody’s own songs seems both timeless and of the moment:

Come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now.
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow

SO WHAT DO THE REPUBLICAN DEAD-ENDERS THINK OF THE NEW NEIL YOUNG ALBUM?

With Bush's job approval ratings in free fall and heading into the teens-- like Cheney's-- is this the time for Republican loyalists to start rockin' out in the free world? As you probably know by now, Neil Young's new album, LIVING WITH WAR, is filled with criticism for Bush and his policies. Vit Wagner, the pop critic for the TORONTO STAR, has noticed that American right-wingers aren't too happy with Neil or his new album.

Neil Young's new album, LIVING WITH WAR, might not trigger the downfall of U.S. president George W. Bush, but it has served to sort out any lingering confusion about the legendary singer's nationality.  A Canadian calling for the impeachment of a U.S. president will tend to do that.

Young, born in Toronto and raised in Winnipeg, is a Canadian.  This will not come as news to anyone on this side of the border, where the 60-year-old tunesmith is revered as one of Canada's greatest musical sons. But the distinction is sometimes lost down south, where — if you believe long-held conventional wisdom — it is assumed that Young, who has lived in the U.S. for 40 years without taking citizenship, is an American.

It's hard to gauge the extent of this misconception.  But it's a safe bet that it's less common now than it was before "Let's Impeach the President," the most controversial of the 10 tracks on /LIVING WITH WAR, started streaming for free on Young's Web site a week and a half ago.

The album, which arrives in stores today, has provoked a flood of commentary outside the usual music press circles, much of it focused on whether Young is even entitled to have an opinion about the commander-in-chief.

"Neil Young is not a U.S. citizen.  He's Canadian," protests the online edition of conservative weekly, THE NATIONAL REVIEW. "He can't even vote. He's been in America for 40 years, and has never bothered to take out citizenship. And this interloper from the land of moose and Mounties is telling us to impeach our president! For goodness' sake.  If it's not Mexican fence-jumpers trying to dictate legislation to us, it's fur trappers from the wilds of Ontario insulting our head of state."

On Fox News, host Mike Gallagher complained, "Neil Young is rich and famous because the country he's trashing made him so.  Wouldn't his words carry a little more clout if he bothered to become a citizen of the country that made him rich and famous?"

Another Fox commentator, John Gibson, accused Young of disrespecting the memory of 9/11.  Gibson suggested the singer take in a screening of United 93, not realizing, apparently, that Young paid tribute to the victims of that flight with his 2002 song, "Let's Roll."

The blogosphere is predictably awash with similar sentiments, replete with derisive remarks about back bacon and other Canadiana.  Young has had his defenders, too, including Illinois Senator Barak Obama, endorsed by Young on another of the disc's songs, "Lookin' for a Leader."

This is not the first time Young has disturbed the waters politically.  "Ohio," a response to the killing by National Guardsmen of four Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University in 1970, was a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young that has endured as an anti-war anthem.

A decade later, Young made waves by offering a positive assessment of then-president Ronald Reagan.  Disillusioned though many liberals were by this revelation, few, if any, suggested that Young's citizenship disqualified him from voicing an opinion.  Conservatives, for the most part, were delighted.

The irony is that while Young might not technically qualify as a U.S. citizen, LIVING WITH WAR is written from an entirely American perspective.  The album's criticisms of government policy are framed by the assumption that America is a fundamentally good, freedom-loving nation being led astray by corrupt, misguided leadership.  The concluding track, after all, is an irony-free rendition of "America the Beautiful."

Tracks from the disc will serve as a focal point for the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young trek that stops at the Air Canada Centre on July 10. Even the name of the tour, "Freedom of Speech '06," has a decidedly American ring.

In any case,LIVING WITH WAR isn't nearly as incendiary as Steve Earle's 2002 powder keg, JERUSALEM, flung directly into the teeth of 9/11's highly patriotic aftermath, or his 2004 follow-up, THE REVOLUTION STARTS HERE.

Many of the same pundits also slammed Earle, particularly for his sociologically empathetic portrait of Taliban conscript John Walker Lindh.  But there's a world of difference.  Earle, who has unabashedly identified himself as a Marxist, is calling for a revolution.  In "Looking for a Leader," by contrast, Young floats the less-than radical-assertion that maybe Colin Powell would be a better president than Bush.

The political climate is different now, too.  With Bush's approval ratings slithering, Young isn't the only U.S. resident contemplating impeachment. The thought has probably crossed the mind of the odd Republican. Judging by Bush's plummeting popularity even among conservatives, disenchantment with the administration runs deep. In that sense, the political views expressed on LIVING WITH WAR are more mainstream than right-wing commentators let on.

It's easier to dismiss the messenger as an unworthy interloper than deal with how widely the disillusionment is shared.

Besides, it isn't as if Young eagerly sought the mantle of national conscience.

"I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young told THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. "I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the Sixties generation."

Or maybe, in the spirit of free trade, the job just fell to a Canadian.