Highlights from Dem Convention Day 1

Michelle Obama:



Bernie Sanders:



Elizabeth Warren:



Cory Booker:




Official YouTube site:

link

This Is Why D.C. Politics Is SO Effed Up

Two words: Cory Booker, the real Manchurian candidate.

This fraud is backing school vouchers despite that is obviously unconstitutional and will obviously revert the country back to pre-Brown v. Board of Education days.

Fucking unbelievable:

Cory Booker, the new U.S. Senator from New Jersey and the darling of corporate executives, everywhere, may have an early chance to show Capitol Hill his true colors on vouchers for private schools. Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, has introduced a bill to transfer about 41 percent of federal public school moneys to the states, which could then turn the funds into vouchers. Parents would be allowed to use the vouchers to pay for private schools, or charter schools, or a public school outside their district. It is a formula designed to hasten the already rapid dissolution of public education in America.

Cory Booker began his public career as an advocate of private school vouchers. Along with two prominent Republican soul mates, Booker founded a local New Jersey outfit called Educational Excellence for Everyone. That’s how he first became embedded in the universe of rightwing foundations and think tanks whose pet project at the turn of the 21st century was private school vouchers. They bankrolled Booker’s rise to mayor of Newark and used their media machine to make him a nationally known politician while still in his early 30s. If Booker had not narrowly lost his first bid for mayor, in 2002, he – not Barack Obama – might have had the inside track on becoming the first Black President. As it turned out, both Booker and Obama represent the most corporate elements of the Democratic Party – and the most hostile to public education.

Rotten to the core, just like Obama.

Just What This Country Needs

That title, of course, is sarcastic since I am referring to the New Jersey election Tuesday night that propelled the godawful Newark mayor Cory Booker to the October special election.

He's as blatant a fake as there has ever been in American politics, and he is backed by the usual suspects who don't give a shit about the 99.99 percent of Americans.

Booker’s actual policies place him on the right, even given that the official political spectrum that has moved steadily to the right in recent decades. The mayor boasts of his ties to Wall Street and went so far as to criticize the Obama campaign in 2012 for daring to make an issue—even if only for political purposes—of Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s role as the founder of a private equity firm that had destroyed thousands of jobs.

The Newark mayor has also championed charter schools and is known as a supporter of vouchers, the most extreme tactic used in the attack on public education. He has called Michelle Rhee, the former head of the Washington DC school system notorious for her demonization of teachers, “a friend of mine.”

Booker typifies a selfish and privileged layer of the middle class that has been encouraged by the decades-long utilization of affirmative action and identity politics. In the closing days of the primary campaign, some reports hinted at evidence of corruption in Booker’s career, something that would come as little surprise. The mayor has increased his net worth by about $1 million through his connection with an Internet startup, Waywire, a video aggregator that appears to have almost no current business. Booker has also been receiving equity payments from a law firm with which he was associated before he became mayor, although he has not disclosed the amounts of those payments.

Cory for President?

I hope to hell NOT, but I will bet this is going to be the narrative we are going to be stuck with for 2016.

Hillary Clinton, already way long in the tooth, will be pushed as a historic candidate, but Booker, an outright fraud, will be the darling of the media, the same media that pushed another fraud, Obama, for the presidency in 2008. Like Obama, Booker will get NO serious vetting even as his far right/Wall Street connections are well known.

Glen Ford knows all about "Cory":

Once he steps into the U.S. Senate, to serve out the remainder of the late Frank Lautenberg’s term, Booker will immediately start running for president, staking out a position to the right of the current occupant and of Obama’s likely successor, Hillary Clinton. In the last presidential race, Booker infuriated the Obama camp by coming to the defense of Bain Capital, the Wall Street investment firm where Mitt Romney made his fortune. Booker said it was “nauseating” to see all those good people in high finance held up to scorn in an election campaign.

“The filthy rich have cultivated a true-blue believer in Cory Booker.”

Nobody can say that Cory Booker doesn’t take care of his friends in the 1%. They certainly take care of him. They have bankrolled all of his electoral efforts, most recently allowing Booker to spend almost three times as much as his top Democratic senatorial opponents, combined. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerman’s $100 million gift to the Newark Public Schools made Booker look like an urban miracle worker – although the transaction was actually more like Booker presenting the schools as a gift to Zuckerman and his privatizing friends. Other Silicon Valley fat cats set Booker up as head of a start-up Internet company that made Booker a millionaire, at least on paper. Now that Booker is going to Washington, the start-up is going down the tubes. But, there are plenty more self-serving deals to be made on Capitol Hill.

He's a blight on American politics, and the real-life Manchurian (not that Obama wasn't one).

Like I said, if this man is anywhere on the presidential ticket in my lifetime, I am THROUGH with the Democratic Party.

If You Want to Destroy the Country, You Don't Have to Rig Voting Machines

Instead, you can simply promote fakers posing as "Democrats," and you can get even more points if you have minority candidates as insurance against criticism. Calling critics "racist" goes far even when the minority candidate doesn't do SHIT for minorities. It shuts people up even as these fakes wreck the country and tarnish the Democratic Party brand in order to help their billionaire and Wall Street backers.

We have seen this with Trojan horse Barry; we are now about to be treated to an even bigger fraud in Cory Booker.

Tonight the Newark mayor whose career was initially bankrolled by the far right Bradley Foundation and Manhattan Institute won the primary for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant when incumbent Frank Lautenberg, a real Democrat, unfortunately died. Booker is expected to be a shoo-in this November, and you know what this means.

We are going to get a 24/7 buildup of this piece of shit from the media in hopes this fraud gets on the national ticket in 2016. So help me God, I am done forever with the Democratic Party if this shitbag gets anyway near the White House.

He's a hundred times worse than Obama, and Obama has come a long way to becoming the worst president in American history.

Cory! Cory! Cory!

Cory Booker is as bad as anybody in American politics today, and that includes everybody in both wings of the same neoliberal political party.

He is rotten to the core, completely compromised by the far right and has been since the beginning of his dubious rise to prominence.

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.

Poor Frank Lautenberg. The so-called "swamp dog" was one of the great remaining liberals in the Senate, a quiet but committed defender of unions and the working class, and a constant advocate for progressive taxation. And New Jerseyans have a chance to vote for a successor in his mold. Two quite progressive House members, the long-serving Frank Pallone and the physicist-turned-politician Rush Holt, have both declared their candidacies.

But it 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.

Rise of the Next Manchurian Candidate

Getting Cory Booker, a fraud masquerading as a Democrat and a hundred times worse than that fake in the White House, out of American politics is an urgent action. It needs to be done as soon as possible before the media starts pushing him for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

What is key is to rake him over the coals as having started his political career is a flak for the right-wing Bradley Foundation. That alone should have killed any political ambitions on his part, but there are other things that should sink his career, too:

Rival candidates could also seize on Booker’s strained relationship with state teachers unions, as well as his support for charter schools, which are championed by the same hedge fund and Wall Street communities that have financed Booker for years.

“That’s what makes us least comfortable,” said Steve Phillips, a progressive fundraiser whose political action committee has vowed to raise $1 to $2 million for Booker. “I understand the complexities of trying to do something for lower-income kids in a political bureaucracy, but if I could wave my magic wand, I wouldn’t want him as close to the hedge fund folks as he is.”

If you know this guy's background, you'd know he is a puppet for those interests even more than Obama.

So help me God, if either Cory or Andrew Cuomo becomes the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 2016, I will officially change my voter registration to independent or a third party.

I Will Quit the Democratic Party

if Cory Booker (or for that matter, any faker including Andrew Cuomo) becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2016.

He is a true Manchurian candidate for the likes of Wall Street and the Bradley Foundation:

Booker may run against New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie in 2013. If so, it will be a contest among political friends. Booker appeared with Christie and Louisiana Republican governor Bobby Jindal earlier this year at a “summit” meeting for supporters of school privatization.

We had Cory Booker’s number when he first ran for mayor in 2002, his pockets crammed with cash. Back then, we wrotethat Booker’s “impressive education served only to teach him the quickest route to the houses of the wealthy. The Young Frankenstein is now plugged in to power, lacking only the national profile that Newark's City Hall would provide.”

Ten years later, Booker has both the national profile and access to hundreds of millions of Wall Street dollars. And he fully intends to become Obama the Second. You can’t say he hasn’t earned it. By the age of 30, Cory Booker had put together a rich white ruling class fan club of his own. This guy is a world class opportunist, and a rightwing ideologue, too: just the kind of Black man that Wall Street loves and needs.

Etc.

Racehorse Paynter continues to show improvement. He is currently suffering from a bout with laminitis, a frequently fatal hoof disease:

The Zayat family through Twitter said Paynter, who won the Haskell Invitational (gr. I) at Monmouth Park, "continues to gradually improve. He is passing manure and eating, and walks freely around his stall. His fever is under control and his protein levels have stabilized."

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If Cory Booker ever goes into the big leagues of national politics, this article from 2002 should set people straight on this politician.

Pretty devastating.

Dem Convention: It Helps to Be an Ivy League-Trainer Lawyer

or any kind of lawyer, and that's why Michelle Obama does so well in public speaking. She looked good and gave a good speech tonight trying to humanize her neoliberal husband. She almost persuaded me he was a Democrat.

I did NOT like her mentioning those teachers in Pennsylvania who "volunteered" to work for free in that one school district that was so underfunded it couldn't make payroll. That is NOT admirable on the part of the teachers but typical of the doormat personality of far too many educators. The Obamas, Rahm Emmanuel, and Cory Booker have NO credibility on the subject of education.

Aside from that, the speech was good:

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Speaking of Booker, I missed his speech, and that is a good thing. What is a bad thing is that the man is a complete and total fraud who got his start in politics being bankrolled by the Harry and Linde Bradley Foundation in its hopes he would divide blacks and unions, two of the strongest constituents of the Democratic Party, in peddling anti-public school propaganda. He's a real Manchurian, even more than Obama. Watch the media start peddling this faker as a candidate for 2016. I will end my registration with the Democratic Party if he gets the nomination if he decides to run. Maybe someday I will listen to his shit here:

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Julian Castro got lots of commentary tonight. I look for him to have a future on the national stage in 2016 or 2020, but I don't trust him any more than any of the others. He gave a good speech, but he was no Mario Cuomo.

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They are going to have to embrace REAL Democratic principles. I watched C-SPAN's rebroadcast of Democratic convention acceptance speeches, and watching Truman, for example, showed me how far the Democratic Party has strayed from its principles. You can thank the infiltration of neoliberalism into the party for this dismal state of affairs. More speeches are here. I finally came across Deval Patrick's speech. His was better than Castro's, but he has better oratory skills than Castro. He may be jockeying himself for a 2016 bid:

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I apologize for the lack of paragraph breaks. The NBC links are really quirky.

The Cory Booker Report

That would be a good name for a blog, and perhaps there is one with that name already. This guy is undergoing more and more scrutiny because of his longstanding ties with right-wing foundations. As noted by Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford in his recent speech about privatization of public education, Booker was the ideal person to infiltrate the black community to push policies that actually are not in the best interests of that community.

Here is another commentary about Booker:

On the first weekend in May, Newark mayor Corey Booker appeared alongside Fox News host Juan Williams and ultra-conservative Republican governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana to sing the praises of charters and school privatization, and the evils of organized teacher and parent power at the annual conference of the Alliance for School Choice.. It's not a big step for Corey Booker, it's the place he's been all along, since his first late 1990s gig as a founding board member of the Bradley Foundation's Black Alliance for Educational Options. What's new is that in 2012 black Democrats with national profiles like Booker can appear in public spouting pro-corporate right wing dogma alongside such creatures, and hardly anyone notices. What has happened to Democratic party politics, to black politics?

To hear mainstream pundits like Andra Gillespie tell it, black politics and the black politician have been re-invented. The poster boys for this new generation of elected black Democrats are people like Newark's Corey Booker, former DC mayor Adrian Fenty, and of course, President Barack Obama. Re-invention, the story goes, is a good thing because the re-inventors are “technocrats,” whatever that means, with access to funding, elite connections and crossover appeal that their predecessors lacked, all of which enabled them to get things done which previous generations of black politicians could not or would not.

What a great publication. BAR cuts through all of the b.s.

This is an earlier piece by Glen Ford exposing Booker for what he REALLY is. It makes me wonder what connections Obama has with these same foundations, if any.

It Takes One to Know One

Cory Booker and the president are exactly alike, especially on education policy (see the Glen Ford video below for details), so it is kind of funny Booker would get all kinds of flak over criticizing him.

Too bad both of them are still in the public limelight. The country would be better off without both of them.