It’s easy to forget, but before the world met Barack Obama in 2004, many believed that the first black president would be Booker. Armed with Stanford, Yale and Oxford degrees and all of the invaluable personal connections he forged at those institutions, he set out in the mid-1990s to craft a uniquely appealing political biography, swearing off lucrative job offers to move to Newark’s Central Ward and take up residence in public housing. Within a few years, he won a seat on the City Council, where he showed an early and consistent knack for self-generated publicity, most notably with a ten-day hunger strike in the summer of 1999. But there were more connections than “college buddies.” Cory Booker’s political rise is intertwined with the constellation of Right-Wing foundations, some you have probably even heard of like the Bradley Foundation and the Manhattan Institute. For example, where did Booker get much of his public policy agenda? Let’s take a look at some of the investigative reporting done during Booker’s first, unsuccessful, run for Mayor of Newark, from Glen Ford: Cory Booker, Black mayoral candidate from the city’s Central Ward, a cynical pretender who attempts to position himself as the common people’s defender while locked in the deep embrace of institutes and foundations that bankroll virtually every assault on social and economic justice in America. His benefactors sponsor anti-affirmative action referendums, press for near-total disinvestment in the public sector, savage what’s left of the social safety net, and are attempting to turn public education over to private suppliers. Along the way, Booker’s soul mates are busy ravaging the environment and trampling civil liberties everywhere they find them. Booker’s anointment as a prince in the Hard Right pantheon is based on his support of public vouchers for private schools. This “movement,” the creation of right-wing paymasters like the Bradley Foundation, of Milwaukee, and the Walton Family Foundation, Bentonville, Arkansas, hopes to drive a wedge between urban Blacks and the teachers unions. Without amicable relations between these two Democratic pillars, the Party, as we know it, is finished. Booker’s pal Schundler knows his way around that kind of money. He used a big chunk of a $500,000 Walton Foundation gift to his Scholarships for Jersey City Children non-profit to pay for advertisements featuring himself, during an election campaign. Walton’s executives didn’t object. Apparently, what’s good for their candidate is good for the kids. After establishing their non-profit, the two Republicans and Booker went on a pilgrimage to Milwaukee, Mecca for school “choice” money, where the Bradley Foundation was concocting its newest invention: the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO). The Manhattan Institute, home of a repulsive roster of right-wing writers and speakers, and recipient of $250,000 in Bradley money in 2000, invited Booker to one of its power lunches, where he effortlessly dropped Right-speak code words. “The old paradigm,” he told the troglodytes, “was an entitlement program, in which large big city mayors controlled race-based machines. “What that was really about was capturing big entitlements from the state and federal government and divvying them up among their cronies or among the people within their organizations to protect and preserve their organizations. It was about distributing wealth.” In just two sentences, Booker managed to stimulate the Right’s erogenous zones by mentioning three of the phrases they most love to hate: “race-based,” “entitlements,” and “distributing wealth.” This guy is good, very good. He speaks two distinct languages – one to the people he wants to elect him mayor of Newark, the other to the financially endowed, whose mission in life is to resist redistribution of wealth to race-based groups that think the poor could use some entitlements The latest benediction of the Booker campaign comes from columnist George F. Will, the high priest of privatization. Will has been busy for over three decades planting land mines along every step of Black people’s march toward equality. His endorsement should represent the kiss of death to Booker’s candidacy. Indeed, Will, whose prescription for urban unemployment is that the jobless move somewhere else, came close to giving away the entire Booker game. “Booker’s plans for Newark’s renaissance,” Will’s March 17 column informs us, “are drawn from thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council and the Manhattan Institute think tank, and from the experiences of others such as Stephen Goldsmith, former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, a pioneer of privatization and faith-based delivery of some government services, and John Norquist, current Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, which has one of the nation’s most successful school-choice programs.” George F. Will gloats that the Booker campaign “has raised $1.5 million, partly through reform-minded supporters in New York financial circles.” The venerable word “reform” is among the many progressive terms that have been stolen by the Hard Right. The people Will is really referring to are the same ultra-conservatives who fund the Manhattan, Heritage, Hoover and American Enterprise Institutes, as has been vastly documented. Cory Booker is just another of their projects, albeit an important one. Booker is backed by Wall Street (private equity) and his policies are crafted by reactionary Right-Wing think tanks all masked by progressive rhetoric like “reform.” The real surprise is not that Booker attacked Obama for shining a light on private equity – it’s that a man like Booker would even be asked to surrogate for the campaign.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 11:13:47 +0000
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