Quote:

There, fixed it for you.

eesh, the Guardian. Their stuff about politics in the US is absolute garbage.

Quote:

Anything to the left of Reagan is Marxism. They said so on Fox "News".

Quote:

The piece reeks of cynicism?which is understandably difficult for foreign journalists to avoid when discussing our political theater?but Marxism?? Mind highlighting those passages?

The Guardian is probably the closest thing to a mainstream marxist broadsheet in the western hemisphere. Cory should worry if they were heaping praise on him.

Amusingly, I had this conversation a couple years ago with a friend who's so far down the left wing that he might lose a feather. He's convinced that Booker is actually a conservative in disguise, and by general classic standards, he isn't wrong. If this were the 70s or 80s, Booker would most likely be in the GOP

Quote:

If you eliminate "narcissists who thinks they're smarter than everybody else in the world" from the candidate pool, there really aren't very many politicians left. It might as well be the job description, humble people just don't crave that path. The only choice left is choosing the narcissist that represents your beliefs the best. And then be prepared to be disappointed in them sometimes, but console yourself the other narcissist would have been worse. Does Obama disappoint me? Often. But President McCain gives me shivers.

I often think of Corey Booker as the black Bret Schundler. Another narcissist who thinks he's smarter than everybody else in the world. He's luckier than Bret though. He gets to run against Steve Lonegan, a complete walkover. Corey may be a narcissist but Lonegan is a right wing lunatic.

Quote:

Not to mention some charters like LCCS are union too. But I will say sometimes it seems the experimentation theme seems to get lost and proponents appear to be pushing for more and more charters rather than having the public schools model the successful ones.

I don't see why support for charter schools is considered to a conservative position. The ultimate goal is to improve the public schools through experimentation. I can understand why the left is opposed to vouchers which divert resources from the public schools.

Is it all about the teachers' union? I don't think it is particularly liberal to choose loyalty to the union over improving public schools.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfr ... wark-neoliberal-egomaniac

-snip-

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.

-snip-