Notes and Political Updates

• Due to late breaking news about recreational marijuana legislation in New Jersey, the Farrell report has delayed its examination of the public education record of former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, one of more than a dozen candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

• Congressional Democrats must avoid falling into the political trap of advocating and voting for Trump’s impeachment as they head toward the 2020 presidential election. Otherwise, it’s “deja vu all over again.”

Like the epic battle between the biblical David, an Israelite, and the giant Goliath, a Philistine, we witnessed the culmination of a contemporary clash over legislation to legalize recreational marijuana for adult use last Tuesday. Two New Jersey Davids (both staunch Democrats), Bishop Jethro James, Senior Pastor of Paradise Baptist Church in Newark and Newark State Sen. Ron Rice, were key leaders in keeping the bill from coming up for a vote. They prevailed over two New Jersey Goliaths, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and his wingman U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D).

What is ironic is that Bishop James and Sen. Rice were very early supporters of Murphy when he announced for governor in 2016. He was then a political nobody who had dropped into New Jersey politics after serving as Ambassador to Germany in the Obama administration, and he had never run for political office.

Murphy benefitted from their extensive contacts and relationships throughout New Jersey’s African American community enabling him to secure 94 percent of the state’s black vote in the 2017 gubernatorial election. He then rejected their advice on the negative impacts of marijuana on low-income children and distressed communities as he had already signed on to carry the agenda of the cannabis industry.

Bishop James and Sen. Rice were joined by numerous organizations and individuals opposed to recreational marijuana: Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), New Jersey Responsible Approaches to Marijuana Policy (NJ RAMP), police and community groups, Democratic legislators who defied the governor from their own party, and an overwhelming number of their Republican counterparts.

The two Davids have vigorously opposed the legalization of recreational marijuana for public health and social reasons since Gov. Murphy made passage of the marijuana statute the centerpiece of his first 100 day agenda after his 2017 election. Fifteen months later, after intensive lobbying by Murphy and key corporate players in the cannabis industry to get the bill enacted, they have not gotten it across the finish line. However, Murphy and his backers have at present made a commitment to try again.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is the lead sponsor of federal legislation to achieve the same goal, was Murphy’s wingman on this marijuana initiative, having used his influence to push it in the state. Booker, a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and Murphy have framed their pro-marijuana sponsorship as a moral and social justice issue for African Americans. They are disproportionately incarcerated for marijuana use and distribution, and Murphy has promised expungement of past marijuana crimes for amounts up to five pounds.

However, if Gov. Murphy were really committed to wiping past marijuana convictions from the records of black males, he could simply use his pardon power to do so immediately rather than setting up a costly expungement process that could take several months or years to complete. New Jersey’s Attorney General has indicated that his office does not have the legal infrastructure in place to erase marijuana verdicts from their records in a timely manner.

Murphy has been able to co-opt a significant number of New Jersey’s black clergy, the New Jersey NAACP president, and others with paid appointments and other forms of political patronage. Millennial African American ministers aligned themselves with Murphy as many of them were regular consumers of marijuana while in undergraduate and graduate school as was Sen. Kamala Harris who said “I am Jamaican … and it brought joy,” in a radio interview--a statement which estranged her from her father’s family.

Black mayors, who mostly preside over poor cities, were enticed by the promise of a new funding stream and business opportunities and jobs for their residents. Nevertheless, some of the black mayors have now become aware that the two percent kickback from the proposed 42 percent tax on the drug that the state will receive are mere crumbs from the table that will only increase their city’s income by a paltry amount.

But the facts are: more than 80 percent of all cannabis dispensaries in the eleven states, where recreational marijuana for adult use is legal, are owned by whites; blacks have difficulty accessing the capital necessary to grow and cultivate marijuana; the overwhelming number of jobs in the cannabis industry are held by non-minorities; and when blacks do have marijuana dispensaries, they own much less than 50 percent of the businesses—essentially serving as minority fronts.

What is interesting is that many members of the corporate billionaire school choice Cartel that promotes publicly-funded, private school vouchers, charter schools, and charter management companies are also heavy investors in the cannabis industry. The Cartel has been created to wring profits out of the public sector—public schools, prisons, state and city governments, and other public entities. To date, it has caused many of the aforementioned entities to reach the brink of insolvency and has devastated services for children and families of color.

Even more interesting is the reality that Sen. Booker and Gov. Murphy have received the vast majority of funding in their races for political office from this Cartel that has pushed legislation to privatize K-12 education and to limit rights of teachers and public-sector unions. Now this billionaire boys club has turned to cannabis for their next profit center. Booker and Murphy want to legalize recreational marijuana so that their primary political contributors can enrich themselves even further, disregarding any negative fallout from its wider availability.

Just last month, in Fair lawn, New Jersey (Bergen County), an upper-class majority white community, a 13 year-old white female gave her 14 year-old classmate an edible marijuana gummy that sickened her to the extent that she had to be transported to the hospital for treatment. And this has occurred when it is illegal and should not have been available to minors. The community is up in arms as to how this happened. And this incident and others have led more than 40 New Jersey municipalities to vote to ban any marijuana dispensaries in their communities, including the hometown of Gov. Murphy, if recreational marijuana ever becomes law.

He and the cannabis lobby have set an end of May date for passing a renegotiated bill to legalize recreational marijuana. Opponents must take note and redouble their efforts to educate New Jersey citizens about the harmful effects of the drug, especially its wider access to children. A health crisis resulting from legalized recreational marijuana is likely to reach epidemic proportions in poor communities as the proponents have no built-in safeguards to protect our families and children.

But more importantly, there has been no evidence that African American communities have benefited in any meaningful way from business ownership and jobs in any of the eleven states where recreational cannabis has been legalized. As usual, people of color have been pimped to authorize recreational marijuana from which they derive few, if any, substantive benefits.

Murphy’s stubbornness on this issue has caused some senior members of his party to question his political judgments and have quietly begun to discuss whether he will be viable for a second term. He may be stumbling down a political path that his Goldman Sachs predecessor, Gov. Jon Corzine, treaded when he was defeated in his reelection bid in 2009 when the Democratic Party abandoned him. Murphy must realize that there has not been a two-term New Jersey Democratic governor in a quarter century.