Senator Cory Booker at Microsoft

What an inspiring and amazing speaker - gives you hope for American politics when all appears doomed!

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CORY BOOKER is the United States Senator from New Jersey. Born in Washington, D.C., his parents worked for IBM and relocated the family to Harrington Park, NJ. A star high school athlete, Booker earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, where he also played for the football team. While at college, Booker ran a crisis hotline for students and worked with disadvantaged youth in East Palo Alto. He then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before earning his law degree from Yale. Booker won a special election to fill the term of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg to become became New Jersey’s first African-American senator and only the 21st person in American history to go straight from Mayor to Senator.

United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good   by Cory Booker

A rising United States Senator—widely recognized as the accessible and energetic new voice of politics—makes the case that the virtues of connection and compassion must guide our nation toward a brighter future.

Cory Booker chose to live in the projects of blighted Newark, NJ, and on food stamps, to better understand the experience of poor families.  He took Hurricane Sandy victims into his own home.

He watched violence tarnish his city; for ten years he felt like he went from funeral to funeral.  As mayor from 2006 to 2013, he became the public face of an American city that had gone years without positive national attention.

In 2013, Booker won a U.S. Senate seat, becoming the first black Senator from New Jersey.  To illustrate his overarching ideas on uniting in the name of helping each other and tending to our shared resources, he WRITES ON ISSUES about which he cares deeply, AND PROVIDES SOLUTIONS:

Criminal justice: running prisons in a way that encourages true rehabilitation; race and crime; the role of the police; mass incarceration

Economic justice: the financial industry preys on the poor, and how this flies in the face of the true intent of capitalism

Environmental justice: lack of connection to the earth harms us all and limits our potential as a society