Cory Booker Belongs in Jail Over Newark’s Water Crisis

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 1 Comments Sunday, September 15, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Don’t drink the water in Newark.

The only thing worse than the crime and corruption in the New Jersey city that gave the nation Cory Booker is its drinking water. First, they found lead in the water in schools and then in people’s homes.

In some homes the lead content in the water is four times higher than the federal limit.

And Cory Booker, the Senator from New Jersey, running to run the country, is blaming racism.

"Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention. Everyone
deserves clean, safe water - it's shameful that our national crisis of lead-contaminated water disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities like my own," Booker tweeted.

Did a “national crisis” cause Newark’s clean water crisis?

Booker probably forgot that he had served as the ex-officio chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation. It's understandable that Spartacus forgot all about it because while he was running Newark, he never actually attended a single NWCDC meeting.

And, after a while, he stopped even pretending to send a representative.

The NWCDC was being paid $10 million a year to manage Newark’s water.

Linda Watkins-Brashear, a Booker ally and donor, worked as the director of the NWCDC. At least until she was arrested, tried and convicted in a $1 million kickback scheme. The scandal broke during Booker’s final year in office. And the NWCDC, Board of Trustees, which he was supposed to be overseeing, took swift action by dissolving the board, and writing a $450,000 check to Brashear.

It was Brashear’s second severance package. The first one, of $200,000, came when she left for three weeks while still continuing to receive her salary. That was the same year Booker took office.

Nice work if you can get it.

By the end, Booker hadn’t even bothered sending representatives to NWCDC board meetings, which were being illegally decided by three people, while handing his political ally years of no-bid contracts.

Brashear had donated thousands of dollars to Booker and volunteered on his campaign. And she used the organization that was supposed to oversee Newark’s clean water to write $200,000 in checks to herself, lose $558,000 in high risk margin trading, give her ex-husband a $332,000 no-bid interior design contract, loan $20,000 to the National Black United Fund, and cover a lobster and cognac dinner.

And now, mysteriously and inexplicably, there’s a “national crisis” of lead in Newark’s water.

You can have clean water for the people or cognac for Democrat fixers, but not both.

It truly is shameful that this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s corrupt political allies stealing money meant to ensure clean water “disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities”.

President Cory Booker will make sure that the “national crisis” will affect people of all races when his crooked Democrat associates are running the country the way that they ran Newark.

Booker is black. As is Brashear.

As is Donald Bernard Sr., the senior projects manager of NWCDC, who was sentenced to 8 years in prison after pleading guilty to accepting $1 million in bribes from contractors.

Clearly, this is a national crisis of environmental racism.

How did the NWCDC get away with this for so long?

Its general counsel, Elnardo Webster II, was Booker's former law partner, friend and advisor. Elnardo was working for Trenk, DiPasquale, Della Fera & Sodono, which was also Booker’s former law firm. While the firm was making a fortune from city contracts, including for NWCDC, it was paying Booker $700,000.

A judge levied major fines against Booker’s former law firm over its NWCDC work.

Yes, this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s sleaziness must be urgently addressed as he now holds an office in the national government and would like an even bigger national office.

“Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention,” insists Booker, who never attended a single meeting of the organization that was supposed to be overseeing it.

And which he was supposed to be overseeing.

According to Booker, who spent most of his time in office alternating between Twitter and Oprah, he just couldn’t find the time. Clean water never got his attention, immediate or otherwise.

Back in May, Cory Booker had introduced the Water Infrastructure Funding Transfer Bill to help Newark move money around. "Communities across the country don't have clean drinking water, and those communities are disproportionately low-income and communities of color,” he claimed.

“This is an environmental justice issue.”

It’s not an environmental justice issue. It’s a criminal justice issue.

A normal person who chaired a board of trustees that committed flagrant illegalities, overseeing an organization where millions of dollars were stolen by one of his donors, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a disgraced law firm connected to the scandal, all of which put the public at risk, would not be appearing running for President. He would be in prison.

The environment didn’t cause this. It’s not a national crisis that somehow “hit” Newark. It’s not racial discrimination against “communities of color”.

Cory Booker keeps trying to blame racism for the actions of his corrupt political associates. And the Democrats keep acting as if their corruption is some sort of national problem to be blamed on us all.

Edward McRae, an NWCDC employee, set up a landscaping company to get NWCDC contracts, even though he had no experience in landscaping.

He didn't even buy landscaping equipment until he got the landscaping contract.

How did Eddie get so lucky?

McRae said that he met Brashear while working on an unstated political campaign and heard that it was raining contracts. It’s unknown whose campaign it was, but it was certainly a Democrat campaign.

While Booker’s pals were robbing the NWCDC blind, they knew better than to actually drink the water.

The OSC investigation found that public funds weren't just being used to buy lobster, filet magnon and cognac, but $534 for imported drinking water from Florida.

Booker is right. It is shameful.

It’s shameful that the former party of segregation fastened on to black communities like a leech while blaming its corruption on racism and an imaginary national crisis. It’s shameful that the media promoted Booker’s routine as a progressive social media guru while failing to hold him accountable.

And it’s shameful that Booker and his political allies have no shame.

Instead of apologizing, Cory Booker is trying to shift the blame for his action and inaction to all Americans. He’s trying to blame racism, instead of blaming his thieving donors and allies.

When the NWCDC was stealing money meant for clean water, Booker pretended he knew nothing. Now he knows that bottled water is being handed out in Newark because of a national crisis of racist water.

Before Brashear was sentenced to 8 years in prison for stealing almost $2 million, her lawyer claimed that, “there is no crime here”.

Hundreds of cities, and thousands of agencies and organizations across the country have been robbed by Democrat politicians, donors and activists, the same way that Booker’s pals robbed Newark.

But there’s never a crime. It’s always a “national crisis” that gets blamed on social problems and racism.

When the schools don’t work (the $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg plugged into Newark’s schools on Booker’s behalf might as well have been set on fire), and the power is out, and there’s no clean water, when residents aren’t evacuated ahead of a hurricane and the buildings are falling apart, it’s racism.

It’s never the fault of the Democrats who are responsible for the schools, the buildings and the water.

If only we cared enough, the media tells us, children wouldn’t be drinking water with lead. If only we paid higher taxes and sacrificed more, Booker’s associates would have been able to drink twice as much cognac and gorge on twice as much lobster, king crab and filet mignon.

And now, despite years of EPA warnings, Booker is demanding that the federal government get involved. He’s right again. The federal government ought to get involved. And it ought to involve handcuffs.

Cory Booker doesn’t belong in the White House. He belongs in prison.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

EPA still abusing wetlands regulation

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D. @ CFACT

 

Bad habits are hard to shed. And if you are a bureaucrat at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who has become accustomed to throwing the agency’s considerable weight around, why turn over a new leaf?

Even though the Trump administration has overturned the Obama-era “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule, some regulators within the agency are acting as if nothing has happened.
Curtis Martin is a farmer and rancher who owns land near Vale, Oregon. The property contains a small, narrow creek with little surrounding vegetation. So ecologically unhealthy is the creek that it is not fit habitat for local wildlife and is eroding its own bed. The creek has already threatened nearby roads with flooding and washouts and is depleting local groundwater.

Being a responsible steward of his land, Martin decided he would do something about it. As noted by the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Tony Francois, Curtis partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to make a series of ecologically sound improvements to the troubled creek. Among other things, Curtis and his partners placed diversion pipes at strategic locations that pump water to cattle troughs on surrounding hillsides. This keeps the cattle from drinking directly from the creek bed.

The woebegone creek went from an eyesore that degraded the local environment to an ecologically healthy, if still small and narrow, body of water.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

And what was Martin’s reward for this exercise in conservation? EPA declared the creek a “navigable water of the United States,” making it subject to federal jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Even though the creek is no more navigable than your average bathtub, EPA, by asserting jurisdiction, is letting Curtis know that the agency, and not the property owner, will call the shots on the ranch.

“If the EPA takes control of Curtis’ land, he would be required to obtain government permits before doing anything to his creek – including ecologically beneficial restoration projects,” Francois points out. “These permits require months or years and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain.”

According to PLF’s Francois, Curtis is not alone in feeling the whip of EPA wetlands bureaucrats. In neighboring Washington, two ranchers – Vic Stokes and Sam Ledgerwood – worked with local conservationists, including the Colville tribes and the Pomeroy Conservation District, to rehabilitate ecologically degraded creeks on their land for fisheries and other wildlife. Their work included depositing dead trees, staking down vegetation to mimic the effect of beaver dams, dredging the creek bottoms when they silt up, and building retention ponds that prevent erosion and create habitat.
But their creeks, too, have been declared “navigable waters” by EPA, and the two Washington ranchers are being subjected to the same kind of punishment for their acts of private conservation that the agency chose to inflict on Curtis.

It’s as if all the efforts of Trump Administration officials, including EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, to bring a measure of sanity to federal wetlands regulation had never happened. Operating on auto-pilot, agency bureaucrats are still content to throw their weight around, trample on people’s property rights, and – a cruel irony – punish people for their good conservation.

Now, the whole matter is headed for the courtroom. PLF is representing the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association (of which Curtis is a member) and the Washington Cattlemen’s Association (of which Stokes and Ledgerwood are members) in separate court battles defending the property rights of people in both states.

Instead of tying up the nation’s court system in senseless litigation, it would be far better if EPA’s Washington headquarters stepped in, knocked heads in its own wetlands bureaucracy, and withdrew the ridiculous “navigable waters” designation from the two ranches.

Bonner Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT.