HAHAHAHAHA! And there it is... along with a LOT of other unknown and ignored by the media Sharpe James type shit:
He starred in Street Fight, a documentary about the campaign, which received high praise from critics and an Oscar nomination. When he returned to challenge James in 2006, he was a celebrity with a chip on his shoulder. James dropped out of the race, and Booker strutted into office at 920 Broad Street with 72 percent of the vote. James would go onto be indicted on 33 counts of fraud—including charging the city credit cards with $58,000 in personal expenses—just like every other Newark mayor had been in the previous 45 years. Booker—who got elected by promising to improve safety through investing in the police department and bring accountability back to the city which for so long was plagued by mismanagement—would be different. Booker would nurse Newark’s wheezing, decaying body back to health. On Election Night, he beamed: “This is the beginning of a new chapter in the life of our city.”
Booker was no stranger to heroics. At Stanford, so the story goes, he talked a suicidal student down from a roof. While on the Newark City Council, beginning in 1998, he started engaging in the sort of stunts that would ultimately lead to his self-mythologization: living in a motorhome on a drug-ravaged street corner, and embarking on a 10-day hunger strike to bring attention to the projects.
But a new chapter in the life of Newark? Because of this one dude who quotes Gandhi?
Newark had never fully recovered from the 1967 riots, precipitated by brutality handed down from white police officers to black residents, which left over two dozen dead, hundreds injured, and caused millions of dollars in damages. In the subsequent four decades, the place had been headed by just three separate mayors. When Booker assumed office, his half-a-million constituents were grappling with high unemployment and rampant poverty. Violent crime was such that keeping the number of annual murders below 100 was a
goal. Brick City was a sick place and it was creating the sort of sick people who would rape a pitbull puppy, like a man at a local housing project had, and brag about it around town.
It would have been unrealistic and unfair to expect Booker to improve everything—but he seemed to be asking to be held to such standards. “I’d gladly take a grenade,”
he’d say, “if it meant saving this city.” Booker was on a “mission” and he wanted everyone to know that not only did he think it was possible to fix Newark, but with him leading the charge, such turnaround was inevitable.
Booker made himself available to his constituents—through social media, by phone, on the street late at night—and when they sounded the Booker-signal, he would personally address their problems. Cat in the tree? He would get it down. Car stuck in the snow? He would shovel you out. Dog freezing to death outside somewhere? He would warm it up. Natural disaster ruined Halloween for your kids? He would give them candy. Dying in a fire? He would carry you to safety.
But much like how giving change to panhandlers will not solve poverty, Booker’s good deeds were not fundamentally changing Newark. Despite ushering in hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic donations to the city, and commissioning cosmetic surgery on public parks, Newark seemed
no better off under Booker than it had been under James.
Having vowed to strengthen the police department, he instead cut it by 13 percent to help balance the city’s budget. Homicides and violent crime spiked dramatically. Unemployment rose and child poverty increased 32 percent. And all of this came at a price of a 20 percent tax hike for the city’s residents.
Few outside of Newark noticed. Booker’s star was rising: Over a million Twitter followers, and half a million fans on Facebook. After saving his neighbor from a blaze (having shut down three of Newark’s fire companies, perhaps no one else was around to do it) Ellen Degeneres invited him on her show to gift him with a Superman costume. He frequently traveled outside of the state (in one year, he was gone about a quarter of the time) to give speeches—nearly 100 in total, including 10 commencement speeches, at Stanford, Brandeis, Williams College, Bard College, Pitzer College, Columbia University’s Teachers College, Suffolk University Law School, New York Law School, Washington University, and Ramapo College. For his oratory work he was paid over $1.3 million (a significant amount of which he donated to charity).
All the while,
from 2006 to 2011, Booker was still receiving annual payments, which totaled close to $700,000, from his former law firm—Trenk, DiPasquale, Webster—from which he had resigned once elected mayor to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.” Booker’s campaign spokeswoman, Silvia Alvarez, told me: “He was paid out by the firm as part of his separation agreement for work he performed before he became mayor.”
OK, sure, but while Booker was profiting from the firm, they were profiting from Newark: over $2 million in work for Newark’s Housing Authority, the Watershed Conservation Development Corporation, and a wastewater agency. “That’s almost like Sharpe James-type shit", one New Jersey Democratic operative offered.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-ugly-truth-about-cory-booker-new-jerseys-golden-boy
