Additional Information on Cory Booker

Additional Information on Cory Booker

Overview


BOOKER’S FABRICATED PERSONAL ANECDOTES

* Particularly infamous was a tale wherein Booker claimed to have held and comforted a teenaged gunshot victim as the latter died in Booker’s arms. But in reality, the young victim died in a hospital some time after the shooting. And according to eyewitnesses, Booker grandstanded at the site of the shooting, moving the victim around in “a big act” and thereby potentially endangering him unnecessarily.

* In numerous other speeches, Booker fabricated the persona of a hardened, violent “drug lord” named “T-Bone,” who once, in a moment of desperation, had recognized Booker’s innate compassion and thus shared with him his heartrending life story, punctuated with many sobs. But in fact, “T-Bone” never actually existed.

* In a 2007 speech, Booker told a story about the recently deceased Newark activist Judy Diggs, claiming that she had died in a “truly poetic way” – “at school in front of a roomful of kids” to whom she was reading. (Click here for a video of Booker telling this story.) Upon learning of Booker’s remarks, the Diggs family came forward to correct the record: Judy Diggs in fact had died in her office.

BOOKER’S POLITICAL POSITIONS AND VOTING RECORD

* Booker favors a steeply progressive income-tax structure where “the wealthy pay their fair share.”

* Booker believes that the key to fighting crime is to minimize poverty and improve education.

* Booker laments that the “mass incarceration” of nonwhite minorities is one of the biggest problems which the U.S. must confront.

* Rather than blaming the government regulations that required lending institutions to give mortgage loans to underqualified nonwhite borrowers in the name of “racial justice,” Booker attributes the financial crisis of 2008 to the “predatory lending” and “unchecked avarice” of “over-leveraged financial institutions.”

* Booker favors raising the minimum wage. In 2014 he voted in YES on Minimum Wage Fairness Act, which called for a $2.85-per-hour increase in the minimum wage over a two-year period.

* In 2014 Booker voted in favor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which sought to prohibit employers from paying women less than they paid equally qualified male workers. (For an explanation of why the premise that women are underpaid is false, cick here.)

* Booker supports taxpayer funding for abortions in nearly all instances; he opposes parental-consent laws for minors seeking abortions; and he opposesthe Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which was passed by bipartisan congressional majorities in 2003 and was later upheld by the Supreme Court.

* Booker favors Affirmative Action programs that require employers to give preference to women and minorities in hiring and promotion practices.

* Booker strongly favors the expansion of Obamacare.

* Booker opposes the expansion of the U.S. military.

* Booker has voted multiple times against bills that called for approving the construction of the Keystone oil pipeline (see herehere, and here).

* In 2013, Booker voted in favor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, prohibiting employment discrimination based on the real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of an individual.

* Booker is opposed to raising the retirement age in order to help the Social Security program remain solvent. He strongly opposes the privatization of Social Security.

* Booker favors the expansion of government entitlement programs.

* Unlike most Democrats, Booker supports school voucher programs designed to enable low-income parents to send their children to private schools rather than to the failing public schools of many U.S. cities.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

● During his time as Newark mayor, Booker was absent from many important government-related meetings. Between January 2011 and July 2012, he was out of town fully 21.7% of the time – sometimes visiting late-night talk shows or attending public events in other cities. And according to Breitbart News, Booker “never attended a single meeting of a corporation he ran as board chairman, the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation.”

● In July 2013, Oprah Winfrey held a fundraiser for then-Mayor Booker’s U.S. Senate campaign, dubbing him a “rock star mayor.”

● Booker has praised Senator Harry Reid as a “profoundly kind, caring, compassionate, and decent man.”

● During Booker’s tenure as board chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that was paid more than $10 million annually to run the city’s water infrastructure. When the state comptroller and the Newark Star-Ledger investigated Watershed in 2013-14, they discovered that it was routinely spending money in a profligate manner, awarding no-bid contracts to friends and cronies of the mayor, reaping the benefits of no-bid contracts awarded by the city of Newark, and using taxpayer money as a giant slush fund—at a time when budget shortfalls were forcing the city to lay off police officers and to depend, for its very solvency, upon tens of millions of dollars per year in state aid. Some examples:

  • Watershed’s executive director, Linda Watkins-Brashear, was formerly a donor and volunteer for Booker’s mayoral campaigns. During her tenure with Watershed, she wrote over 60 unauthorized checks to herself and paid a non-employee more than $23,000 for running various mundane errands.
  • When Watkins-Brashear announced in 2006 that she was leaving Watershed, she received a $209,097 severance package. But she then continued to work there until March 2013, at which time she received yet another severance package, of $453,805. All told, Watkins-Brashear paid herself $1.98 million during her last seven years at Watershed, though her official cumulative salary for that period amounted to just $1.16 million.
  • Watershed paid $15,000 to the father of one of its board members for a make-work “job,” and $16,000 to an interior-decorating firm owned by Watkins-Brashear’s ex-husband.
  • Elnardo Webster—Booker’s longtime friend, former campaign treasurer, and former law partner at Trenk DiPasquale—pocketed more than $1 million for his work as Watershed’s “counsel” during 2007-11. But neither he nor Watershed could ever produce the contract that supposedly authorized his services for the corporation.
  • During his tenure with Watershed, Webster received a 30-year tax abatement on a Newark office building that he owned.
  • A vendor who met Linda Watkins-Brashear while working on a political campaign, heard that Watershed was handing out no-bid contracts for all manner of services. To cash in on that practice, in 2008 the vendor created a landscaping company—though he had never previously done such work—and obtained a contract from Watershed worth almost $390,000. He never even purchased any landscaping equipment until after he had secured the contract.

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