An Inspiring Interview With Booker, until…
- Nate Craig
I like Senator Cory Booker. He knows the issues deeply and he speaks about them them in a way that conveys genuine concern. He even got me -in all my progressive yearnings- to the point that I was starting to feel inspired by his message! If the Cory Booker in this interview with “Democracy Now!” was the candidate who came out of the gate months ago, rather than the “I’m a very safe Democratic choice,” guy that I saw in the beginning of his campaign, then I might have had to take a closer look at him earlier, as well as who has financed his political career.
Beyond that, if by Pennsylvania’s primary Warren and Sanders somehow aren’t at the top of the ticket (let’s make sure they are), and it is between Booker, Biden, Buttigeig, Bloomberg, I’d have to pick Booker. He’s on point on so many issues in the interview above that he would simply rise to the top of the second set of candidates. His clarity, his breadth of knowledge and experience in fighting racial injustice, his comprehension of the climate crisis, and his perspective on the many various harms caused by corporate agriculture, would all get him my second tier Democratic vote.
The four issues I take with Senator Booker, and they’re big, are why I can’t get behind his candidacy. They are why I was inspired by his message until I looked at where the money has come from that put him in power, and what money is going to keep him in power. The issues I take issue with:
- The money he’s taken from Wall Street — including for 2020
- All the money he’s taken from hard to track lobbyists — including for 2020
- Support for nuclear energy — I’ll explain
- Lack of support from small dollar donors in the 2020 election
Wall Street money
My initial and ongoing resistance to him as a candidate is that he’s taken millions and millions from Wall St throughout the years including during his presidential campaign. Now he didn’t take a former Goldman Sachs and Google executive in as his chief policy advisor, like Buttiegieg did, but the source of Booker’s funds tells us that he doesn’t have to, they’ve already got him. In his 2020 campaign alone he has accepted over $4 million in campaign contributions from PACs and individuals working in the finance, insurance, lobbyist, and legal industries.
These industry PACs have fought against Dodd-Frank, the regulations that were implemented to stem another financial crisis like the one that crashed the economy in 2007. Booker would probably have voted for Dodd-Frank, but he wasn’t a Senator yet.
The problem with Booker taking these funds, however, and the way these PACs work, is that the PAC does everything they can to undercut regulations like Dodd-Frank if they can’t get rid of the law altogether. In other words, if a PAC or lobbying firm is hired by a firm like Goldman Sachs because Goldman wants to be able to invest billions in bad mortgages again by 2022, they get congresspeople from both parties to chip away at the legislation. Usually they chip away in small, barely noticeable ways, one provision at a time, until they get the law to a place where Goldman Sachs can begin investing their investors’ money in bad mortgages again by 2022.
Another way lobbyists work is that they have staff that end up going to work for congresspeople as staffers. Staffers help the congressperson do research, write bills, schedule appointments with the congressperson and their constituents or with people wishing to get a congressperson to vote a certain way on a certain bill. Staffers are the gatekeepers to the person writing and voting on proposed laws.
So even though Booker would likely have been a good Democrat and supported Dodd-Frank, he’s also taken millions of financial industry dollars and allowed the industry to buy its way back into irresponsible investing practices. At another point I’ll look into the revolving door in Booker’s office, but let’s assume that the millions of dollars he’s gotten were dollars well spent, since they kept giving to him to keep him in office.
Lobbyists
Another issue is that -in this crucial cycle- he’s taken lots of money from the telecom industry. At least $900,000 have come from the telecom industry and in the past he has gotten even more than what he has in his 2020 campaign). In other words, they keep giving to him because they keep getting from him, exactly what they want. Industry lobbyists spend money wisely. The telecom industry spent $72 million, and the internet services industry spent $55 million on political lobbying this year.
This is a crucial year for the telecom industry because they don’t want an open internet, the kind net neutrality ensured. In his re-election bid for US Senate in 2014, Booker accepted $11,000 from a firm that is the worst, anti-regulation lobbying firm in the telecom industry, NCTA. Their stated position on 2015 net neutrality legislation is: “The FCC’s misguided 2015 decision to impose heavy government regulation of the internet networks … threatens the continued growth and expansion of internet networks throughout America.” They’ve given re-election money to Booker, that means that he played their game, and he proved to them that he was worth their investment.
Nuclear
Support for nuclear is a problem. In the interview, Senator Booker says that he supports nuclear because it currently provides 50% of American power. What he fails to mention is that they provide that power with billions of dollars in subsidies from the Federal and state governments that they operate in. His response to the enormous problem of what to do with nuclear waste is to state that at some point we might be able to re-use the spent uranium rods, which is a non-answer because that’s not what’s happening now, so the problem goes unaddressed.
While we certainly can’t have brown outs and black outs by suddenly shutting down our nuclear industry, we definitely can not keep letting these companies subsidize their costs while privatizing their profits. The nuclear industry should not be subsidized, as it has been, it should be nationalized. Once it has been nationalized, taken over by the federal government, then it should be run by the department of either Environmental Protection or by Department of Interior.
Even the progressive champion, Amy Goodman, when addressing the issue, didn’t bring up the environmental cost of uranium mining and the efforts that are underway by the nuclear industry to open up several national parks like the Grand Canyon to uranium mining.
The argument that it will probably be safer “at some point” is a bad argument. Even when that technology does exist, the question then will be how bad will the byproduct of that second use be, and what do we do with it? It will eventually get to a point that it is still radioactive (a health hazard), but not radioactive enough to be reused. Then we are still back to the same problem. All that said, that technology currently does not exist and until it does exist, how can we allow more nuclear plants to be built? Certainly, the technology he talks about is worth developing and exploring. If we can start using spent uranium rods, then we have something productive to do with our uranium, at least for a time.
Small dollar donors
Lastly, Booker lacks the support from small dollar donors. This is a big problem when we’re looking at 2020. A quick break-down of his donors is that he has had 11,228 individual donors. The majority of his money came from people who gave more than $2,800. Only 36% of his donations were from donors who gave between $200-$500, and only 23% of his donations came from people who donated under $200. How can a candidate win with such paltry grassroots support?!
As far as the small dollar donors go, he has 4,300,000 so if we divide that by 200, he has 21,500 donors. It could be higher, like if the average small donation was $50 it could be 57,000 donors, but it still only accounts for only 23% of his total funds.
I personally don’t want to see Booker become President right now. I want to see him become a Senator that Comcast can’t stand, and that NCTA would never even think to give another dollar to again. I want to see Senator Booker become the champion of the people that he sounds like in the interview above. That would mean losing some of his massive fundraising opportunities with Super PACs and industry giants. As he loses them, however, he may find that he wins popular support from millions of Americans as he becomes a candidate that we can believe in, and the congressman who hasn’t been playing the revolving door.
He’s not the last choice in the field right now, but for me, he is definitely not my first choice.
Here’s a link to his campaign contributions for this year: https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/industries?id=N00035267
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/industries?id=N00035267
Here are the demographics for his donors:
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/demographics?id=N00035267
