A cold and brutal class war has been waged against working people for 50 years

For every family in this state staring at a stack of bills thicker than a Trenton snow emergency, for every kid who graduated with honors and a mountain of debt, for every worker who has done everything right and still finds the floor dropping out—this one is for you.

There is a war on. Not the kind they send Marines to fight, but a class war, cold and brutal, and it has been waged against working people for 50 years. The other side won. They won so thoroughly that most folks don’t even know they were in a fight. They’ve been too busy blaming each other.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, older than the State House rotunda. When the robber barons of the first Gilded Age were grinding the faces of the poor, they pointed at the immigrants.

When the billionaires of this second Gilded Age hollowed out the middle class, they pointed at the people in the next town, or the next bathroom. “Look at them,” they say. “They’re the reason your paycheck doesn’t stretch.” And while the neighbors squabble, the billionaires raid the treasury.

Look at the numbers. They are not Democratic numbers or Republican numbers. They are just numbers, and they tell a story that cannot be spun. The Federal Reserve recently confirmed that the top 1% of Americans now hold nearly a third of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom half fights over the scraps—just 2.5%.

A “K-shaped” recovery, they call it. The rich shooting to the moon, the rest of us stuck here on Earth, treading water. The share of income going to workers is at a 75-year low. In plain English: you are working harder for less, and the guy at the top is using your labor to buy another yacht.

And who is the senior senator from New Jersey, the man who claims to carry our water in Washington? Cory Booker.

Now, Sen. Booker is a fine orator. He says all the right words about unity and healing. But you have to watch what a man does, not just what he says, especially when money is involved.

In his 2014 race, Sen. Booker raised more than $17 million. That’s a lot of chicken dinners. More than 80% of that money came from large individual contributors and PACs.

This wasn’t a one-time thing. He held fundraisers at Trump Tower, back when that was a controversial thing to do. He endorsed and raised money for Mike Bloomberg, a Republican billionaire, for mayor of New York City. He has taken checks from more than four dozen billionaires, whose very existence—hoarding wealth that could educate our children and heal our sick—is the primary cause of the economic war on New Jersey’s families.

You have to ask yourself: If a man is sitting down to dinner with four dozen billionaires, whose problems is he talking about? Is he discussing the $15 copay that broke your budget, or is he discussing capital gains loopholes that would buy his dinner companion another jet?

There is an alternative sitting right here in New Jersey. Her name is Lisa McCormick. She is running on a plan as old as the hills and as radical as the Declaration of Independence. It is a plan that says no person should be allowed to hoard billions of dollars—money they did not truly earn, but extracted from the labor of others—while children in Camden go to bed hungry and veterans in Newark sleep on the street.

McCormick’s “Share Our Wealth & Power” plan draws a line in the sand. It says: Cap the fortunes. One hundred million dollars. That is more money than any family could spend in 100 lifetimes. Take the rest and invest it in the things that build a nation—schools where teachers aren’t buying supplies with their own money, healthcare that doesn’t hinge on your job, and infrastructure that doesn’t crumble.

This isn’t about punishing success. It’s about a simple, moral question that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked before they killed him: Where is the line? At what point does wealth become a weapon against democracy?

They will call her radical. They called Huey Long radical for saying the same thing during the last Great Depression. They called every prophet radical until history proved them right.

The difference between Booker and McCormick is the difference between a patron and a prophet.

A patron doles out favors from the rich to the loyal. A prophet demands justice from the powerful for the oppressed.

The billionaires have the wealth. But we have the numbers.

The real question is whether we’re so caught up fighting each other that we don’t see we’re all stuck in the same leaky boat, while the ship’s owners are rowing away in the lifeboat, laughing.

New Jersey has a choice. We can keep sending a man to Washington who is very popular at billionaire fundraisers, or we can send a woman who is very popular with the idea of making this state work for the people who actually live in it.

It’s not complicated. It’s arithmetic. And it’s way past time we did the math.

Does New Jersey want Booker, who promises more of the same, or Lisa McCormick, leading the way with her Democrats for Change?