So... any FOTs from Newark here?
Cory Booker: the inexorable rise of Newark's neoliberal egomaniac
Eyeing the Senate, the New Jersey mayor turns self-promotion into an art form. His corporate-friendly policies are not so pretty
He may be esteemed by Wall Street tycoons and Hollywood titans, and worshipped by an unserious internet brigade that prefers its politics in GIF form, but Booker has not had a good run of it lately in New Jersey's benighted largest city. Carjackings – the signature Newark crime; they used to call it "the carjack capital" – have gone up for four years in a row. 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.
[…]
He sleeps in tents. He shovels snow. He brings diapers to stranded mothers. He runs into a burning building, then holds a press conference to celebrate his own heroism. He tried to live on food stamps for a week, which I almost admired – but then he told his story to Face the Nation, and then the Today show, and then the Daily Show, and then Piers Morgan on CNN.
No one other than Vladimir Putin could pull off these bathetic, 360-degree political theatrics – though even Putin would have blanched at Booker's made-for-TV rescue one cold Newark night of a freezing mutt named Cha Cha, bearing the dog in his arms like the Lamb of God. "This dog is shaking really bad," he told an airhead local news reporter – who had earlier arranged the entire pseudo-rescue with him via Twitter. Had she really been concerned, she could have just called the cops or, you know, rescued the dog herself. Instead, she told Booker to meet her at the scene with her camera crew and, when it was all over, even got her picture taken with the man of the hour.
It'd be one thing if the Soviet-style personality cult and let's-come-together Twitter banalities – recent days have seen him post self-help quotations from Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama – were just marketing for a progressive political program. But Booker is a far more conservative figure than the Cult of Cory, which is too busy making Superman or Chuck Norris jokes, may actually realize. 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.
[…]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/cory-booker-newark-neoliberal-egomaniac?CMP=twt_gu
I'm not from Newark but grew up about three or so miles away. My grandfather grew up there. My dad started at Essex Catholic which was located there a few weeks after the riots.
This article is so pompous and ridiculous.
Newark was the absolute most frightening city in the world for a long, long time. You'd have to go down there sometimes because it's the county seat so things like public records or jury duty types of stuff were there. My dad also worked there for a long time so if he had some work emergency we'd have to hang out at his plant.
So much of that area was absolute chaos when in the 90s. East Orange, where the old WFMU station was located, was just as crazy as Newark. Irvington was (and still is) as awful an inner city area you'll find in the country. Orange, which I grew up about a 15 minute walk from, is and was also nuty.
You couldn't park at a red light in the inner city during the 90s. I know that's some common, ridiculous white fear whenever suburbanites have to drive through a black neighborhood but it was a legitimate thing because of the carjackings. The parents of a girl I went to middle school with were killed because of a carjacking.
Basic car thefts were even more prevalent. All those above listed towns led the league in car theft per capita figures. Someone on my block had their car stolen from their locked garage. The thing was, a large percentage of the stolen cars were recovered. It was just kids taking them to joyride around and then they'd dump them a few hours later. Sometimes they'd be wrecked or burned but they weren't chopped for parts. But kids taking them to joyride is even more dangerous, since they were usually 14 or 15 year-olds whipping around I-280.
Also, corruption in Newark city politics (and New Jersey as well) were so rampant and terrible.
Corey Booker is truly great. I mean, he got burned rescuing people from a fire. That stuff is not PR fluff. He legitimately shovels people out of driveways and things like that.
But Corey's good press goes a LONG way in getting people interested in Newark. I have friends who actually moved into Newark since Booker was mayor since they've been priced out of Jersey City. This is completely unthinkable to a lot of people. Rutgers-Newark and NJIT have created a city campus atmosphere.
There's still a lot of poverty and violence in the city but the good vibes of Newark have picked up.
As far as Corey's political ambitions -- he's a New Jersey politician with aspirations, which means he has to deal with the devil(s) in order to get different projects steered his way. He also has a few enemies in the state legislature who are also angling for higher office.
Corey also isn't afraid to walk across party lines. He and Chris Christie are fans of each other, even though they're completely on the opposite sides of the coin politically. But what they both have in common is that they're dripping with competence (re: Sandy) and are both outsiders from the New Jersey political machines who rose to the top of the food chain.
I'm not a fan of Wall Street money headed his way. That's a major strike. But I think the good far outweighs the bad.
