All the Love that money can buy

By James J. Devine

Cory Booker wants you to believe that love is what has carried him through his political journey. Love for the vulnerable. Love for the forgotten. Love that motivated a hunger strike, a mayoral campaign, and a Senate run. It is a beautiful story, but it is bullshit.

It is a fiction that makes a mockery of your life.

Love is not the reason Booker solicited and accepted money from Foster Freese and more than four dozen other billionaires during his career in politics. Love did not compel him to take campaign cash from the very billionaires whose business practices have hollowed out Main Street and crushed the working poor. That was not love. That was a transaction.

Love did not motivate Booker as mayor of Newark to unleash a wave of police brutality against the very communities he claimed to champion. Love did not compel him to sell off public school children to profiteers, turning education into a commodity and classrooms into cash cows for charter operators who do not answer to the parents they claim to serve.

Love is not what carried Booker to a fundraiser in the Park Avenue penthouse of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Let that sink in.

The senator who preaches unity and love crossed the river to Manhattan to break bread with the family of a president he claims to oppose, in a building that reeks of privilege and oligarchic excess. That was not love. That was access. That was ambition. That was the price of admission to the club he pretends to despise.

Booker says there is no such thing as too much love. Perhaps. But there is such a thing as too much money. The $20 million sitting in Booker’s campaign fund is not a testament to grassroots enthusiasm. It is a war chest built on the generosity of the wealthy. It is the product of a system that allows the rich to buy influence while the rest of us scramble for scraps.

The combined wealth of America’s 900 billionaires now stands at $9.2 trillion. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of policies that Booker has enabled—policies that have transferred wealth upward while telling the rest of us to be patient, to believe, to have faith in the process.

Booker represents forces inside and outside of politics that have divided us into the rich and the poor. He is not a solution to that divide. He is a product of it.

If Booker truly wanted to build a government of, by, and for the people, nothing is stopping him from returning every dollar he has taken from billionaires and corporate PACs. He could do it today.

Alternatively, he could spend that money making life better for impoverished New Jersey residents. He will not, because he knows that the machine requires fuel, and the fuel is money, and competitive elections usually go to the highest bidder.

Booker also knows that his Republican opponent has virtually no chance in November. That money is not needed for Booker’s re-election campaign; it is going to fund his next vanity campaign for the White House, so do not expect him to do his job for the next 12 to 24 months.

America is not a place where no one gets left behind. It is a place where 99 percent of us got left behind while Cory Booker went on his political journey.

The communities he claims to love are still desperate. The children he claimed to protect are still neglected. The police brutality he claims to oppose is still rampant. The only thing that has grown is his campaign account.

This is not love. This is a hustle. And we are the marks.