Big Business Has A Friend-- Congress

Monday we looked at Jason Farago's definitive Cory Booker analysis in the Guardian. One conclusion that struck me was about his lackey-like relationship with Big Business in general and Wall Street in particular.

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.")

Because I used to be a corporate CEO, I still get corporate CEO magazines and communications. One came this week that I actually opened instead of deleting. It was celebrating the easy access corporate CEOs and their agents have to Members of Congress. They cited a study based on a survey by George Washington University that included 328 congressional staffers from both sides of the aisle. No telling how many of their bosses are as subservient to Big Business as Cory Booker, but the study found that "65 percent of Hill staffers have a positive opinion of corporations-- calling them very or somewhat trustworthy. Additionally, the poll finds that 71 percent of Hill staffers found meetings with CEOs and top executives to be helpful when learning more about the issues that affect business." Just under half the Capitol Hill staffers surveyed say the same positive predisposition towards organized labor. 64% of Hill staffers said that meeting with corporate lobbyists was a helpful activity in formulating policy, while only 45% reported that meeting with labor lobbyists was useful.

This is great news for the business community since many corporations and associations host congressional fly-ins for their employees and membership base. A face-to-face meeting with a legislator helps you connect with your legislator and his or her staff on a personal level and can be important in building relationships for you and your organization. As proven by the study, elected officials enjoy meeting with their constituents, but many people compete for their time. When meeting with your elected official or staffer, be sure to remember the following to ensure an effective meeting:

Be Flexible
When scheduling an appointment, provide as much advance notice as possible and try to be flexible about dates and times. If you have to schedule a meeting on your own, keep in mind that your legislator will be able to spend more time with you if you schedule the meeting at his or her district office when Congress is not in session.

Be Prompt and Professional
Once you have made the appointment, be sure to keep it. It is wise to confirm your appointment a day or two in advance and plan to arrive a few minutes early. Dress professionally and make sure you are prepared to deliver your message persuasively.

Respect the Legislator’s Schedule
Remember that your legislator’s time is limited, and you are there to discuss important issues. Know in advance how long the legislator can speak with you and make certain the meeting does not exceed the allotted time. Be sure to stick to your topic, keep your comments and questions brief, and allow time for your legislator to ask questions and provide you with feedback.

Be Organized for the Meeting
Know your issue and the facts behind it thoroughly before you reach the meeting. If several people will be attending, designate one individual to act as spokesperson for the group and make sure you are all agreed on the message you are there to deliver. When you arrive at the meeting, introduce all of the attendees and allow the spokesperson to explain why you have requested the meeting. Be as specific as possible to help your legislator better understand the big picture.

Clearly State Your Position and Seek Feedback
Explain specific reasons you support or oppose the issue, including the impact of the issue on your business, your community, colleagues and industry. Stick to the issue at hand; bringing up other topics will lessen the force of your message. Ask your legislator’s position on the issue, but don’t try to force him or her to commit to a position. Request that you be kept updated on the issue and be sure to provide your contact information.

Avoid Arguing
While you are entitled to disagree with your elected officials, remember that you are not just there to win: You are there to build a positive relationship. Becoming argumentative will not help. Even if you are unable to persuade your legislator to your point of view, it is always best to leave on friendly terms so that you will be welcome another time.

Provide Leave-Behind Information
Whenever possible, leave appropriate documentation that supports your position with the legislator. Such leave-behind information will help the legislator remember your views and allow him or her to refer back to them after the meeting is over.

Follow Up with a Personal Letter
Be sure to send a thank-you letter after the meeting, regardless of whether you were able to reach an agreement. A thank you letter demonstrates that you appreciate the value of your elected official’s time and allows you to reiterate your position and underscore your concerns.

I bet it didn't take many personal follow up letters from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple to members of Congress to curry favor with the government, not if you read a new report from the Associated Press about domestic spying the same way I do:

Apple says it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data for the six months ended in May.

The company, like some other businesses, had asked the U.S government to be able to share how many requests it received related to national security and how it handled them. Those requests were made as part of Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies.

Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

Prism was revealed this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers, and has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

Apple Inc. said that between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in data requests between Dec. 1, 2012, and May 31 from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.

...Facebook Inc. has said that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

I had dinner with an old friend over the weekend who designed-- and then ran-- a computer system for a sensitive division of one of Wall Street's biggest banks. He told me the feds asked them for access to between 30,000 and 50,000 individual accounts annually and claimed it was covered by "money laundering" statutes, although it was clear to the bank that very little of it involved a search for money launderers. The news didn't come as a surprise to me, just as the revelations in the press about Prism and other NSA domestic spying didn't come as a surprise to me. I have, after all, always taken President Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the power of the Military Industrial Complex to heart. He was certainly in a better position to understand it than any president who came after him.

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New Jersey Has A Senate Front-Runner Nearly As Sickening As It's Gubernatorial Front-Runner

You never know what's going to actually happen in a low turn out, late summer primary special election. Who will even show up at the polls? Polling shows a big preference among New Jersey Democrats for the much-hyped Newark Mayor, Cory Booker. Last week Monmouth University released a poll that confirms what all the other polls show-- Booker leads his opponents.

Among potential voters in the August Democratic primary – i.e. registered Democrats who regularly vote in general elections and say they may vote in the Senate primary – Booker holds a commanding lead over his challengers, garnering 63% support, compared to 10% for Holt, 8% for Pallone, and 6% for Oliver... Cory Booker’s name recognition far surpasses that of his rivals. Currently, 3-in-4 likely special election voters have an opinion of Newark’s mayor. And that opinion is overwhelmingly positive, with 61% holding a favorable view and just 15% an unfavorable view. Even Republicans are more likely to have a positive (39%) rather than negative (26%) opinion of Booker.

Only 4-in-10 likely voters have an opinion of the other three Democratic contenders, and those views tend to be divided. For Frank Pallone, 24% have a favorable opinion to 17% unfavorable. For Rush Holt, 22% have a favorable opinion to 18% unfavorable. For Sheila Oliver, 20% have a favorable opinion to 19% unfavorable.

The problems with Booker-- that he's a corporate whore and a shill for Wall Street banksters who is all talk and no action when it comes to working families-- have apparently been as overlooked by New Jersey voters as the (very similar, but much worse) problems with Chris Christie. Jason Farago took a good long look at Booker for The Guardian last week-- Cory Booker: the inexorable rise of Newark's neoliberal egomaniac-- and it makes you want to figure out who's the better alternative between the two progressives, Rush Holt and Frank Pallone.

Cory Booker, the hedge fund guys' favorite politician and the most self-regarding official in America, is more likely than not headed to the US Senate-- and I can't imagine he's dismayed at the accelerated schedule. 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.

Except for a stinging New York Times report last year, one doesn't hear much about the actual conditions of life in Newark-- a city that, to what I suppose is Booker's credit, has made conditions friendlier for companies such as Panasonic (enticed with a $100m tax break) and the Manischewitz kosher wine firm. But oh, one hears an awful lot about Booker. All politicians are to some degree wannabe celebrities, but it has been a while since we have met a showman as narcissistic as him: a man who makes Chuck Schumer look camera-shy, who makes Michele Bachmann seem like a subtle media operator.

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.

Poor Frank Lautenberg. The so-called "swamp dog" was one of the great remaining liberals in the Senate, a quiet but committed defender of unions and the working class, and a constant advocate for progressive taxation. And New Jerseyans have a chance to vote for a successor in his mold. Two quite progressive House members, the long-serving Frank Pallone and the physicist-turned-politician Rush Holt, have both declared their candidacies.

But it seems far more likely that the next senator from New Jersey will be the anti-Lautenberg: a neoliberal egomaniac who sees government as nothing more than a charity for billionaires and corporations to support as they please. There may be no stopping the rise and rise of Cory Booker. But let's at least recognize his impending triumph for what it is: another victory for the men in the glass towers, enabled by a nonstop publicity campaign waged 140 characters at a time.

New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in decades. Cory Booker conveniently identifies himself as a Democrat but, at this point, he'll be New Jersey's first Republican-- at least when it comes to economic justice-- in many years. Tragic.

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Is There Any Way To Keep Wall Street Shill Cory Booker Out Of The New Jersey Senate Seat?

2 NJ pols who play on the same team-- the Wall Street team

There are two excellent candidates running for what was Frank Lautenberg's New Jersey Senate seat: progressive congressman Frank Pallone and progressive congressman Rush Holt. Holt's career-long Progressive crucial vote score is the best of any New Jersey congressman: 91.88. For 2013 his score is 100, a distinction shared by only 15 Members. Pallone's career-long score is 86.10, not bad, and for 2013 it's a super 96.77, the second best score after 100 (and something he shares with liberal champions like Barbara Lee, Alan Grayson, John Conyers, Donna Edwards, Judy Chu, John Lewis, Matt Cartwright and Jan Schakowsky). Clearly, both these guys have been voting in the spirit of Lautenberg. I asked a dozen Members of Congress I trust-- imagine trusting that may of them!-- for advice about what Blue America should do. This e-mail sums up the responses pretty well:

They’re both liberal. Holt is more intelligent; Pallone has better people skills. Pallone is very disciplined, even though he doesn’t come across that way. Pallone has more legislative accomplishments. Either one would be good in the Senate, but Holt would add something interesting to the mix, whereas Pallone would simply fit in.

The problem, of course, is that there's a third Democrat in the race... the front runner: Cory Booker. [A fourth jumped in today as well-- Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver.] Booker is a nightmare for progressives. He's a careerist corporate whore and a 100% tool of Wall Street. Outside of social issues, he might as well be a Republican. Last week BuzzFeed outlined how Booker, who is enjoying a 40-point lead right now, could still be beaten-- in a low, low turnout August primary-- by Pallone or Holt.

New Jersey political insiders said Democratic competitors will seize on the narratives that have persisted around Booker for years-- that he spends too much time outside of New Jersey; that he is more popular outside the state than inside; that his record in Newark can’t hold up to scrutiny-- and that they play up their longstanding relationships with the state party apparatus, which Booker has been known to challenge.

Before Lautenberg’s death-- when the race to fill his seat was still slated for November 2014-- polling showed Booker led the two congressman in a potential Democratic primary by a hefty margin: with 50 percent of respondents voting for Booker; seven percent for Holt; and just four percent for Pallone.

Booker, poll numbers aside, is far from untouchable-- particularly in New Jersey, where, as one state operative observed, “nothing is inevitable.” Below are four of the central strategies in the campaign to take down Booker, as described to BuzzFeed by campaign strategists, political observers, party officials, and Democratic operatives in New Jersey.

Cast him as a party outsider

Booker first announced he would run for Lautenberg’s senate seat last December, two months before Lautenberg announced that he would retire at the end of his fifth term.

New Jersey Democrats didn’t like that math: Booker couldn’t have waited for Lautenberg to bow out before saying he wanted to run for senate? The move roiled Lautenberg loyalists, and Lautenberg himself, compounding Democrats’ frustration that Booker had not run for governor. He had been, it was widely felt, the only candidate who could have given Christie a run for his money in 2013.

“His announcement was viewed as stepping on Lautenberg’s toes without bringing the country and state party into the fold,” said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University, and a close observer of state politics.

“It was viewed as being a little politically expedient and premature, but I don’t know that the Lautenberg resentment is going to carry over,” Harrison said, adding that what was more worrisome for Booker is the “disappointment Democrats felt when he didn’t challenge Christie.”

In a state where county party “bosses” have far-reaching political sway, Booker is already behind in fostering relationships with state party leaders, and the New Jersey Democratic establishment. He’s viewed by many as the antithesis to a team player [although one of the state's most corrupt bosses just endorsed Booker].

...One New Jersey Democratic strategist involved in the special election race said that not many state leaders “are hearing directly from [Booker]; they’re hearing from his staff, but not him.”

“His biggest obstacle is that he has not developed the county-level political connections that are really important in New Jersey politics,” said Harrison. “Pallone has strong connections in the county organizations, and if he’s able to use his influence to get endorsed by the county chairs, that carries some measure of weight in a typical primary.”

Pallone has “consistently tried to keep a solid relationship with the powers that be within the state party,” Harrison added.

Doug Muzzio, a Baruch College political science professor and longtime observer of New Jersey politics, said those relationships could help Pallone quite a bit this fall. “It matters. Those organizations have some muscle to them,” he said, but added, “Does it mean that you win if you’ve got it? No.”

State intra-party politics haven’t held Booker back in the past, either: He built his political career on challenging incumbents, first in an improbable city council win against four-term incumbent George Branch in 1998; and again in 2002, when he tried and failed to unseat Sharpe James, a corrupt mayor who held Newark city hall for two decades, before Booker finally beat him four years later.

Play up the self-promoting “absentee mayor” caricature

Ahead of his senate run, Booker’s campaign office released a financial disclosure form, the filing required of candidates running for senate. But his office also sent reporters four other documents detailing Booker’s earnings from paid speeches at colleges, corporations, and non-profits across 32 states over the past five years. The speeches-- he has given 90 in total since 2008-- earned Booker $1.3 million, about three quarters of which he gave to charity, according to his office.

The document dump, not required by any campaign finance regulations, appeared to address the persistent line of attack on Booker: that he spends too much time outside of Newark engaging in activities that amount to nothing more than self-promotion. The paid speeches, the interviews on cable news shows, the technology conferences-- Booker’s level of national prominence can seem improbable for a city mayor.

Last summer, a Star-Ledger review of 18 months worth of public documents and news reporters found that Booker had spent over 21 percent of his time out of town. The article dubbed him the “absentee mayor.”

It’s a title that could hang over Booker this fall if a rival like Pallone or Holt tries to push the issue to the fore of the campaign.

“The big thing will be hitting him on the ‘absentee mayor’ stuff,” said a Democratic operative involved in the race. “He’s gotten a lot of business into the city by going around the country being a cheerleader for Newark, but there’s a way to make it a negative too.”

“Booker’s biggest thing is that he’s a rock star. People know him because he’s on Bill Maher’s show, and he tweets, but those people aren’t necessarily New Jersey Democratic voters who will come out in a primary in August,” the operative added, noting that 70 percent of Booker’s first-quarter senate contributions came from outside the state, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer review of Federal Election Committee reports.

If Pallone and Holt want to move the polls back in their direction, said Muzzio, they’ll have to go on the offensive, and fast. “Clearly, those attacks will be the test,” he said. “You can go positive, but you’ve got to go negative if you want to take Booker down. You’ve got to say, ‘This is a show-horse. Not a work-horse.’”

Earlier this year, when Lautenberg was waging cold war over the way Booker had laid claim to his senate seat, the show-horse critique was one he turned to on more than one occasion. In a speech at a New Jersey Chamber of Commerce dinner in Washington, Lautenberg noted that Booker had skipped the event. “I’m disappointed that Cory Booker couldn’t be here tonight. I’d think that spending time out of the city was one of his favorite activities,” he said. “Perhaps we were too close to Newark.”

Point to Booker’s failures in Newark

When the New York Times took a hard look at his seven-year record as mayor of Newark, Booker called the piece “just frustrating as heck.”

Although Booker suggested at the time that the article had misrepresented his management of Newark city hall-- he and his staff even crafted a rebuttal to send to another news outlet-- it certainly won’t be the last time Booker has to defend his performance as mayor.

The city, New Jersey’s largest, has shown marked improvement in areas over the last seven years: population has increased for the first time in six decades, and crime has decreased broadly, with a 17 percent decrease in the homicide rate since Booker took office in 2006.

But with a significant spike in violence from 2011 to 2012, Newark still ranks 20th, behind Nashville and Philadelphia, on last year’s Federal Bureau of Investigation list of America’s most dangerous cities. Earlier in his tenure, Booker also laid off more than 600 public workers, and 163 police officers, an unpopular decision which he still remembers as “painful.” (Booker, though, announced earlier this year that he would hire back 50 officers.)

According to a poll published in the Star-Ledger earlier this year, Booker is well liked within his city: Seventy percent of likely Newark voters have a favorable opinion of him, and 65 percent approve of his performance as mayor.

But one a strategist connected to an opposing campaign said one weak spot in Booker’s campaign would be “the fact that his record in Newark is even debatable,” the source said. “You look at Pallone and Holt and you see a proven record in Washington, not to mention a voting record.”

As mayor of a city, Booker has managerial experience that very well may appeal to voters, but Pallone and Holt have both voted on a range of economic, social, and foreign issues on the floor of the House, providing voters a clear sense of where both candidates stand on national policy.

Rival candidates could also seize on Booker’s strained relationship with state teachers unions, as well as his support for charter schools, which are championed by the same hedge fund and Wall Street communities that have financed Booker for years.

“That’s what makes us least comfortable,” said Steve Phillips, a progressive fundraiser whose political action committee has vowed to raise $1 to $2 million for Booker. “I understand the complexities of trying to do something for lower-income kids in a political bureaucracy, but if I could wave my magic wand, I wouldn’t want him as close to the hedge fund folks as he is.”

Take advantage of the shorter race

The other factor at play in this race is time, state operatives say. When the clock gets moved forward by more than a year-- the primary for the race that should have been held in 2014 is now just 66 days away-- even the presumed leaders of the pack find themselves scrambling.

“None of the candidates have established a real coherent message yet, because they didn’t expect to thrown into this,” said Muzzio. “There is no organization, and there are a lot of unknowns.”

...The mayor will also have to speed up his fundraising efforts. According to FEC filings, he has $1.6 million in cash on hand, as of March 31, compared to Pallone’s $3.7 million. Holt, meanwhile, has just $790,000. The most recent records available, though, do not include a fundraising swing Booker took through California, where he headlined a private Los Angeles reception, where major motion-picture producer Jerry Weintraub hosted and Democratic kingmaker Jeffrey Katzenberg was a big-name attendee.

But operatives inside the state say both Pallone and Holt can rake in the cash, too-- and may be able to compete with Booker now that time is more limited.

Holt, who has had to run much more competitive reelection races than Pallone, may better adapt to the competitive field of the special election. The former physicist’s first successful race in 1998 was not one many believed he could win-- he did, but by just under three percent of the vote. More recently, he held his seat in 2010 in a particularly tough race against Republican Scott Sipprelle, an independently wealth candidate who financed much of his own campaign.

“Holt is the only one who has won a race that no one said he could win,” said one state Democratic strategist. “Pallone has never had a tough race. There’s a difference between throwing elbows and kicking someone in the nuts, and Holt knows how to do that. We’ll see if Pallone does,” the source said.

With just weeks until the primary, elbows will be flying earlier, and candidates will be angling to get on the air in the expensive New York City and Philadelphia media markets-- New Jersey doesn’t have its own-- as soon as they can afford it. Whether Pallone or Holt can throw enough elbows to edge Booker out in just under 70 days remains an open question.

But in a sprint to the finish, “it’s all possible,” said Muzzio. “Booker can lose it. Holt and Pallone are substantial guys, and in a short race, any number of variables can come into play.”

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