I started this little series just after President Gag was inaugurated — every once in a while I’m posting info on potential candidates for the 2020 presidential election. Today it’s Cory Booker because he came to this sprawling megalopolis yesterday to flog for Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana).
Booker is Hillary Clinton Lite. He’s way progressive on almost all social issues but he’s a diehard capitalist. He digs hedge fund-ists and venture cap-sters. Plus, he’s in love with charter schools. For this vantage point, he doesn’t see as I do how “exuberant” capitalism is inherently violent and crushing to all but a lucky few. Still, would I vote for him over L’il Duce? You bet! Twenty times over.
If you — like I do — see our global economic system as the driver behind wealth inequality, environmental rape, the wage shortfall for women, persistent racism, and a hundred other cardinal sins, you — unlike me — may loathe each and every apologist for the moneyed class. So, why don’t I turn my nose up at candidates like H. Clinton and Booker? Simple: global capitalism is what we’ve got and it’s so ingrained in our species’ way of doing things today that only grass roots war — I’m talking guns and bombs and blood running in the streets — will displace it. If you’re willing to go that far, knock yourself out. But since I don’t want to see millions of people lose their lives, I can abide with candidates like H. Clinton and C. Booker as long as their hearts are otherwise oriented as mine is.
Booker
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In other words, I can accept incremental change that may improve the lot of the millions. Will Booker emerge as an honest-to-gosh contender? We’ll see. At the very least they can’t taint him with phony-assed charges of socialism. Then again, knowing how Steve Bannon and his ilk work, they may picture him as the second coming of Fidel Castro.
Cory Booker
- US Senator, New Jersey, 2013-Now
- Mayor, Newark, 2006-2013
- City Council, Newark, 1998-2002
- Staff att’y, Urban Justice Center (NYC) 1996-7?
- Program coordinator, Newark Youth Project 1996-7?
- B: 1969, Washington DC
- Stanford University BA
- Queen’s College, Oxford (Rhodes Scholarship), 1994
- Yale University JD
- Ran & lost for Newark mayor 2002
- Early political user of Twitter to communicate w/ electorate
- Ran Bridge Peer Counseling Center (student crisis hotline) while at Stanford
- Lived in tent and went on 10-day hunger strike to draw attention to street drug dealing & violence
- Was smeared in 2002 mayoral campaign as tool of KKK, Taliban, & Jews
- Plot to assassinate Booker by Bloods gang foiled by the New Jersey Bureau of Investigation
- As mayor, cracked down on street crime, increased police, expanded summer youth programs
- Member, Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition
- Honored by Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 2009
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Previous posts in this series:
Stand by for more in the coming months.
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Hiller Holler
A smashing turnout yesterday for Nancy Hiller’s appearance at the Book Corner. Click on over to the BC’s new site for pix and gossip.
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And we need to read the book, American Amnesia (I bought my copy at the Book Corner), to remember that capitalism combined with a strong Federal government (a mixed economy) is the driver that creates widespread prosperity. We need both the invisible hand of the free enterprise market in a healthy balance with the firm visible hand of government regulations to keep the economy cookin’ on all the burners. History shows this, we just have to remember it. We all need to get some FDR cajones in this holy land! While Booker and Clinton ain’t perfect human beings, they’ll get us there much faster than the current crop of Know Nothings in Congress and the White House!