Cory 'Spartacus' Booker gets his ties on Wall Street

When Cory Booker jumped into the 2020 presidential race with his dramatic bug-eyed announcement on Friday, he promised to build his campaign the “right way,” by forgoing money from corporate political action committees and federal lobbyists.

But Spartacus' previous ties to Wall Street, the millions of dollars he accepted in donations from Wall Street companies and his defense of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital in 2012, may bite him on the buns.

“I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” he said as he sat there during a "Meet the Press" interview back when he was the failed mayor of Newark, N.J. At the time, Obama’s presidential campaign was attacking Romney, who ultimately lost, in an ad describing him as someone who, in a fake Robin Hood reversal “takes from the poor and the middle class and gives to the rich.”

Booker subsequently changed tack and waffled on his position, blasting GOP efforts to take advantage of his statements and reaffirming his support for Obama, saying the president’s campaign had a right to scrutinize Romney’s characterization of himself as a job creator, which, of course he was.

And in the Senate, he opposed a compromise bill passed last year rolling back some of the restrictions on Wall Street imposed under the Dodd-Frank reform law in 2010.

“In the wake of the greed- and excess-fueled financial crisis, big banks got a massive bailout while millions of Americans lost their homes,” he said in March. “We shouldn’t be weakening the very safeguards put in place to prevent such a catastrophe from repeating itself.”

But low and behold, the finance industry contributed $2.8 million to Booker’s Senate campaign in 2014, with many of the largest donations coming from employees of three of the country’s biggest banks, according to records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Workers at Goldman Sachs gave his campaign $80,400, compared with $78,120 from employees of Morgan Stanley and $64,582 from employees of JPMorgan Chase.

Law firms with major securities-industry practices gave the warrior Spartacus even more: Attorneys at Paul Weiss chipped in $177,020 while their peers at Sullivan & Cromwell donated $137,950.

Booker’s haul, which has already drawn scrutiny from envious progressives, far outstripped the industry’s contributions to any of his Democratic peers campaigning to move from the Senate to the White House in 2020.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, whose state is home to the headquarters of banks from Goldman to Citigroup, garnered only $1.15 million from the industry in her 2018 race. This is due, in part, to her inability to remain loyal to any one issue. She is like a weather vane and will go anywhere the wind blows.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California drew only $727,674 from Wall Street in her 2016 campaign, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts received just $355,271 in her re-election campaign last fall.

Booker had been mayor of Newark, New Jersey from 2006 to 2013. He was handed a poor, crime ridden city, and his solution was to eventually reduce the size of the police force, because liberals think backwards. Democrats have been elected to mayor of Newark consistently since 1953.

After Booker was elected, millions of dollars of private and public partnerships investment poured into Newark for Downtown development, but persistent underemployment and poverty was still an ongoing problem.

In 2008, the murder rate climbed by 30 percent according to the New York Times . It had dropped by that amount the previous year and made a bloody comeback with Spartacus in charge.

As of 2010, about 33 percent of the population was impoverished. That year, about two-thirds of voters age 18 and up, were registered Democrats, voting for the smoke and mirror promises made by that party.

Data from 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau as reported in NJ.com describes Newark as the third poorest of 35 poorest towns in the state. The median income in Newark is $33,025 and a 29.1 below poverty level, [with the latest level slightly higher]. Camden only follows Atlantic City [$26,656 and median poverty level 36.6] and Camden [$26,214 and median poverty level 38.4] as the poorest city in the state.

In 2012, CNN Money rated Newark as America's 6th most dangerous city.

And Cory Booker wants to be president when he can't even figure out how to improve a city.

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