Corrupt Wall Street Hedge Fund Managers Electing An Ally To The U.S. Senate?

A week from today, we'll wake up knowing who won the Democratic nomination-- tantamount to election-- for the open New Jersey U.S. Senate seat. Will it be another progressive dedicated to representing working families? Or will it be a shameless careerist who takes his every move from his Wall Street benefactors. Last week, Blue America and Progressive Democrats of America made the case for Rush Holt against Cory Booker. We raised nearly $7,000 for Rush on our two ActBlue pages, here and here. And Rush was able to use that money to help build the ad above.

As he says, "Cory may be the frontrunner in this race but he's no progressive." No, progressives don't talk about "fixing" Social Security by adopting Republican plans to raise the retirement age for working families. Again, Rush: "We need to pass a carbon tax to stop climate change, break up the Wall Street banks, and stop the government spying on innocent Americans. Cory Booker doesn't support any of these ideas."

Booker is in bed with every corrupt New Jersey political crime boss and he's tight with Chris Cristie. The two of them practice the same kind of sleazy, ego-driven careerist politics. Booker isn't just the candidate of the Wall Street banksters. He's the candidate who has the hedge fund managers as excited as they were by Mitt Romney and Scott Brown. He's been a showy celebrity mayor of a city sinking into worse poverty and worse crime since he was first elected. "Carjackings-- the signature Newark crime; they used to call it "the carjack capital"-- have gone up for four years in a row," according to a comprehensive report in The Guiardian. "Violent crime, which had been declining in Booker's first years, has spiked again; in summer, things will get worse. Police have been laid off, firefighters too, as Booker has slashed city budgets. And when the mayor recently tried to get an ally of his on the city council, the meeting devolved into a ruckus, with police officers resorting to pepper spray."

The NY Times also did an extensive report about how unfit Booker is for high public office.

Cory Booker’s promise-- captured in two books, two documentaries and frequent television appearances-- was to save a city that had been hemorrhaging residents, industry and hope since the riots that ripped it apart 45 years ago. But a growing number of Newarkers complain that he has proved to be a better marketer than mayor, who shines in the spotlight but shows little interest in the less-glamorous work of what it takes to run a city.

...Business leaders say he dazzles at news conferences, but flags on the follow-through. Residents have wearied of the outside fascination for the mayor whom Oprah Winfrey called “a rock star” and Jon Stewart on Wednesday referred to as “the superhero mayor of Newark.”

Taxes have risen more than 20 percent over the past three years, even after the city laid off about 1,100 workers, including more than 160 police officers. Crime has risen, and unemployment is up. Schools remain under state control, and the city’s finances remain so troubled that it cannot borrow to fix its antiquated water system. While new restaurants have risen near the Prudential Center downtown, those in the outer wards were placed under a curfew this year because of shootings and drug dealing.

“There’s a lot of frustration and disappointment,” said Assemblyman Albert Coutinho, a Democrat representing Newark. “People feel that the mayor basically is out of the city too much and doesn’t focus much on the day-to-day.

...[Booker and Christie] have an unusually good relationship, even filming a video parody together, but the political benefits have not been enjoyed equally. Mr. Booker provided bipartisan backing for the governor’s plan for pension and benefit cuts to government workers. But when the state reached a landmark contract agreement with Newark teachers, Mr. Booker was not invited to stand with other officials to make the announcement.

While Mr. Christie has held scores of town-hall-style meetings in his strategy of “governing on the offensive,” Mr. Booker has been far less aggressive in selling his proposals, most critically a 2010 plan to create an authority to control the city’s water system, which would have helped close a $180 million budget gap.

When opponents of the plan packed churches and neighborhood meetings, Mr. Booker made almost no effort to counter them, said members of the Municipal Council who were elected on Mr. Booker’s platform. That failure forced 866 layoffs, a 16 percent property tax increase and the sale of 16 city buildings, including Symphony Hall and police and fire headquarters.

Similarly, one of his biggest education initiatives-- to allow charter schools to pay rent and about $50 million in maintenance to share buildings with schools where the student population had plummeted-- was voted down after strong opposition in 2011.

The school superintendent, appointed by Mr. Christie, overrode the vote by the school board. But proponents of the plan criticized the mayor for running to the state for cover, even as he has said he wants Newark schools to be controlled locally.

“How come you can’t persuade the people who elected you twice?” said one person who shares the mayor’s ideas on how to overhaul schools. “When’s the last time you did a town hall? Why do we have to go to Twitter to find out what you’re talking about?”

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation from the Booker administration.

And that Guardian piece was even more plain spoken about Booker's many shortcomings, although the two reports are in sync when it comes to Booker's bad attitude towards public education. "He is a long-time advocate of charter schools and, more quietly, of voucher programs: a favorite hobbyhorse of the men of high finance. George Will, the paleoconservative columnist of the Washington Post, is a big fan. Michelle Rhee, the fallen DC schools chancellor whose union-busting, corporatist education reforms resulted in a citywide cheating scandal, is someone Booker calls "a friend of mine"-- and we should add that Newark's charter schools were embroiled in a cheating scandal of their own last year."

And of course, Booker has the unwavering support of the big bad industry just across the river from Newark. Since his days as a city councilor, he has hoovered up cash from the financial services sector-- but unlike many other tri-state Democrats who seduce the Street in a marriage of a convenience, Booker legitimately thinks that big money knows best and the public sector should do its bidding. When, in May 2012, Booker confessed that he found it "nauseating" for the Obama campaign to impugn Mitt Romney's career in private equity, Democrats were shocked. They shouldn't have been. Booker's whole career has been a testament to a poisonous financial-corporatist consensus, which dresses up the interests of big money in post-ideological garb. (That helped him win the support this weekend of the most powerful man in New Jersey: George Norcross III, the feared political boss and owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who said he liked Booker because he was "a Democrat that's fiscally conservative yet socially progressive.")

Remember that $100m donation to the Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, promoted with its very own Oprah episode? The cash didn't go into the Newark school system; it's controlled by a non-governmental fund, with Booker on the board, and has been so unaccountable that the ACLU had to sue the city to learn what was going on. (Booker's office first denied that the emails the ACLU sought existed; when a judge ordered the emails to be made public, the Booker team released them on Christmas Eve.)

Add to this Booker's privatization of the Newark sanitation department, and his repeated attempts to do the same to the water supply, and the picture becomes clearer. In the world Booker and his cohort inhabit, there are no systemic problems and no class interests. There are only pesky inefficiencies, to be fixed with better data and more money from smart, happy, rich people who can spend their cash far more sensibly than the public sector.

...[I]t seems far more likely that the next senator from New Jersey will be the anti-Lautenberg: a neoliberal egomaniac who sees government as nothing more than a charity for billionaires and corporations to support as they please. There may be no stopping the rise and rise of Cory Booker. But let's at least recognize his impending triumph for what it is: another victory for the men in the glass towers, enabled by a nonstop publicity campaign waged 140 characters at a time.

New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in decades. Cory Booker conveniently identifies himself as a Democrat but, at this point, he'll be New Jersey's first Republican-- at least when it comes to economic justice-- in many years. Unless Rush Holt stops him. Please consider helping here... or here. Yesterday civil rights leader Edith Savage-Jennings endorsed Rush. She said, "Some people believe that my history should compel me to vote for a black candidate as New Jersey’s next U.S. senator. But if I learned anything from the civil rights movement, it is that we must look past the color of a person’s skin."