person:robert f. kennedy

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-p

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.

    We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”

    With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “RED ALERT.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.

    One of her most effective strokes was a two-minute-long video, the creation of Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, D.S.A. activists from Detroit, who started Means of Production, a media-production company, and set out looking for working-class-oriented campaigns. They learned about Ocasio-Cortez on Facebook and sent her a direct message on Twitter. For less than ten thousand dollars, they produced a soulful social-media-ready film that showed the candidate in her apartment, on a subway platform, in a bodega, talking with a pregnant woman, to kids selling cupcakes. All the while, in voice-over, she speaks directly to the viewer:

    Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. . . . This race is about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money. It’s time we acknowledged that not all Democrats are the same. That a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us. What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.

    The video went viral. Something was afoot.

    On Election Day, in a car on the way to the billiards hall where Ocasio-Cortez was going to watch the returns, some of her advisers were getting encouraging reports from polling places. Shut it down, she said. No more looking at phones, no more guessing: “Let’s see the vote.” That night, cameras captured her expression of shock as she watched the news: a thirteen-point landslide. She had no words. It was a moment of pure joy playing out live on television. Crowley gamely accepted the results and, with a pickup band behind him, took out his guitar and dedicated “Born to Run” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For a man in six kinds of pain, he sang a creditable version.

    If the Murdoch press was predictably outraged, some establishment Democrats were wary, too. Nancy Pelosi dismissed the win as a local phenomenon. And, while her tone was curt and superior, her larger point was clear: in November, Democratic candidates, no matter what shade of blue, had to beat Republicans. Districts had to flip. At dinner, Ocasio-Cortez bristled at the establishment dismissals. She did not doubt that there were many factors in her win—her identity as a young woman, as a Latina, as a daughter of a working-class family—but she had also out-organized a party boss, hammered away at immigration and health-care issues, and brought out new voters. It was infuriating for her to listen to the condescension.

    “I’m twenty-eight years old, and I was elected on this super-idealistic platform,” she said. “Folks may want to take that away from me, but I won. When you hear ‘She won just for demographic reasons,’ or low turnout, or that I won because of all the white ‘Bernie bros’ in Astoria—maybe that all helped. But I smoked this race. I didn’t edge anybody out. I dominated. And I am going to own that.” The more complicated question was how she was going to own her identity as a democratic socialist.

    When Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed now, particularly by the establishment outlets, she is invariably asked about “the S-word,” socialism; sometimes the question is asked with a shiver of anxiety, as if she were suggesting that schoolchildren begin the day by singing the “Internationale” under a portrait of Enver Hoxha. When I asked her about her political heroes, though, there was no mention of anyone in the Marxist pantheon. She named Robert F. Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches—“that was my jam,” she said. R.F.K., at least in the last chapter of his life, his 1968 Presidential campaign, tried to forge a party coalition of workers, minorities, and the middle class.

    D.S.A., which was founded in 1982, is not a party but a dues-paying organization, and it has seen a bump in membership recently, from five thousand in 2016 to more than forty thousand today. The first co-chairs were Harrington and the author Barbara Ehrenreich. David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, was a member of D.S.A. There’s no question that some members are Marxists in the traditional sense; some want to see the destruction of capitalism and the state ownership of factories, banks, and utilities. Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A. member from Brooklyn who recently ran, unsuccessfully, for City Council, told me that the group is “a big umbrella organization for left and leftish types, from Bernie-crats to hard-core Trotskyists.” Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. member in her mid-twenties who is running for the New York State Senate with the ardent support of Ocasio-Cortez, told Jacobin, a leftist quarterly, that a democratic socialist “recognizes the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive, and is actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society.”

    Ocasio-Cortez and, for the most part, the people around her speak largely in the language of Sanders. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and yet in the most extensive speech he ever gave on the theme—at Georgetown University, in November, 2015—he did not mention Debs. Rather, he focussed almost entirely on Franklin Roosevelt and the legacy of the New Deal. He said that he shared the vision that F.D.R. set out in his 1944 State of the Union speech, what Roosevelt called the Second Bill of Rights. Sanders pointed out that universal health care was “not a radical idea” and existed in countries such as Denmark, France, Germany, and Taiwan. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production,” he said, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

    Ocasio-Cortez and her circle focus less on the malefactions of the current Administration than on the endemic corruption of the American system, particularly the role of “dark money” in American politics and the lack of basic welfare provisions for the working classes and the poor. When they hear conservatives describe as a “socialist” Barack Obama—a man who, in their view, had failed to help the real victims of the financial crisis, while bailing out the banks—they tend to laugh ruefully. “I think the right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years,” Saikat Chakrabarti, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s closest associates, said. “It inoculated us. But people focus on the labels when they are not sure what they mean. What people call socialism these days is Eisenhower Republicanism!”

    #Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez #Politique_USA #My_heroin_for_now

  • Anti-Vaccine Activist Says Trump Wants Him to Lead Panel on Immunization Safety - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/anti-vaccine-activist-trump-immunizations.html

    A prominent anti-vaccine crusader said on Tuesday that President-elect Donald J. Trump had asked him to lead a new government commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity — a possibility that spread alarm among medical experts that Mr. Trump could be giving credence to debunked conspiracy theories about the dangers of immunizations.

    The vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, said that Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly embraced discredited links between vaccines and autism, had asked him to lead the commission during a meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower on Tuesday.

    A few hours after Mr. Kennedy told reporters about the meeting, Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said that the president-elect was “exploring the possibility of forming a committee on autism, which affects so many families.” But Ms. Hicks added that no final decisions had been made.

    #vaccination #autisme

  • Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps
    http://www.gregpalast.com/ballotbandits

    The 2012 Election was stolen!
    WHAAAAT??

    Yes, Obama got most of the votes and was inaugurated.
    But 4.3 million votes were never counted – and another 4.8 million citizens were barred from registering or voting.

    This book tells you how. And WHO. That is, WHO profited from the return of Jim Crow?
    Includes 50 pages of comics from the smokin’ pen of Ted Rall and two chapters by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
    “The Most Terrifying Book a Democrat Could Read” – Huffington Post Books

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2gCgFMBOg


    „In den USA gehen sechs Millionen Stimmen verloren“ | Telepolis
    http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/48/48820/1.html

    Im Verlag Haffmans & Tolkemitt erscheint diese Tage sein neues Buch „Gern geschehen, Mr. President! Wie man die US-Wahl manipuliert in 10 einfachen Schritten“ mit einem Vorwort von Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast führt darin aus, wie in den USA der Wahlbetrug funktioniert und welche Tricks dabei angewendet werden. Es ist eine vollständig überarbeitete, aktualisierte und erweitere Neuausgabe des 2012 erschienenen Titels „Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps“.

  •  » Pourquoi les Arabes ne veulent pas de nous en Syrie, par Robert F. Kennedy, JR
    Par ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR
    http://www.les-crises.fr/pourquoi-les-arabes-ne-veulent-pas-de-nous-en-syrie-par-robert-f-kennedy-

    Ils ne détestent pas « nos libertés ». Ils détestent que nous ayons trahi nos idéaux dans leurs propres pays – pour du pétrole.

    Par ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR

    En partie parce que mon père a été assassiné par un arabe, j’ai fait un effort pour comprendre l’impact de la politique américaine au Moyen-Orient, et particulièrement des facteurs qui motivent parfois des réponses sanguinaires de la part du monde islamique envers notre pays. Tandis que nous nous concentrons sur l’émergence de l’État Islamique et recherchons l’origine de la barbarie qui a pris tellement de vies innocentes à Paris et San Bernardino, nous pourrions vouloir regarder au-delà des explications confortables relatives à la religion et l’idéologie. Nous devrions plutôt examiner les explications plus complexes de l’Histoire et du pétrole et comment elles pointent un doigt accusateur vers nos propres rivages.

    Le peu glorieux registre d’interventions violentes américaines en Syrie, très peu connu des Américains mais cependant très bien connu des Syriens, a créé un terrain fertile à un djihadisme islamique violent qui complique toute réponse effective de nos gouvernements pour relever le défi de l’État Islamique. Aussi longtemps que l’opinion publique américaine et les politiciens ignoreront ce passé, les interventions à venir vont vraisemblablement se limiter à empirer la crise. Le secrétaire d’État John Kerry a annoncé cette semaine un cessez-le-feu “provisoire” en Syrie. Mais comme les moyens et le prestige des É-U en Syrie sont très faibles – et que le cessez-le-feu ne concerne pas des belligérants importants comme l’ÉI et al-Nosra – il est condamné à se limiter au mieux à une fragile trêve.

    traduction de l’article cité par @souriyam : http://seenthis.net/messages/465617

  • Un long et intéressant article de Robert F. Kennedy Jr - oui, oui, c’est bien le fils de Bob... - fait une rétrospective des opérations de changement de régime au Moyen-Orient en lien avec la question de la géopolitique de l’énergie, afin d’éclairer la guerre en Syrie. C’est aussi, bien sûr, un réquisitoire contre ces opérations.
    Certains faits évoqués sur l’actuel conflit syrien ont été déjà largement évoqués par plusieurs seen thissiens. Mais certains faits plus anciens sont cependant moins connus :
    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/rfk-jr-why-arabs-dont-trust-america-213601?o=0
    Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria
    They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries—for oil. / R.F. Kennedy Jr ; 22.02.16

    A titre d’exemple cet extrait sur le choix dès l’époque Eisenhower de jouer le fondamentalisme islamique (aussi bien des Saudiens que des Frères musulmans) contre le nationalisme arabe, ou bien la question des routes de l’énergie dans le choix américain de renverser le chef d’Etat syrien Quwatli par un coup d’Etat militaire en 1949 :

    For Americans to really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some details about this sordid but little-remembered history. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers—CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism—which Allen Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies thath they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.
    The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.

    #gaz #pipelineistan #échapper_à_Ormuz #Syrie #regime_change

  • USA : Robert F. Kennedy Jr - Fuite de matières radioactives à Los Angeles
    http://www.brujitafr.fr/2016/01/usa-robert-f-kennedy-jr-fuite-de-matieres-radioactives-a-los-angeles.html

    Voici la vidéo , un article décrit cette entrevue , j’offre la traduction pour terminer. Si l’évènement n’a rien de visuellement spectaculaire, ce qui lui vaut une faible portée médiatique, c’est une catastrophe sans précédent qui frappe en ce moment...

  • Daily chart: African-American-Chinese | The Economist

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/03/daily-chart-9?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/dc/AfricanAmericanChinese

    African-American-Chinese
    Mar 14th 2013, 16:26 by Economist.com

    The UNDP’s favoured measure of progress throws up some intriguing comparisons

    GROSS domestic product, Robert F. Kennedy said, “measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile.” In an attempt to redress the fixation with economic output alone, in 1990 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched the Human Development Index (HDI). This index combines life expectancy at birth, the average and expected number of years in education and economic output. Only two countries, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, have seen their index scores fall since 1990, but elsewhere big strides have been made, particularly in China, Iran and India. As a result of these changes, the UNDP expects the world’s middle-class population—defined as households with incomes over $20,000 a year—to grow from 1.85 billion in 2009 to 3.25 billion in 2020. It predicts that by 2030, 80% of middle-class households will live in emerging and developing countries, accounting for 70% of global spending.

    #développment #indicateur #indice #hdi #statistique #data #pnud #nations-unies

  • Le Centre Robert Kennedy fustige le #Maroc pour sa violation des droits de l’Homme des Sahraouis
    http://www.latribune-online.com/evenement/72146.html

    Le Centre américain Robert F. Kennedy pour la justice et les droits de l’Homme (RFK Center) a dressé lundi un rapport accablant sur le Maroc, pour sa violation des droits de l’Homme des Sahraouis et a appelé à l’urgence de l’instauration d’un « mécanisme international permanent afin de protéger les droits de l’Homme du peuple sahraoui ».Ce rapport préliminaire de onze (11) pages, consacré à l’évaluation de la situation des droits de l’Homme du peuple sahraoui a été établi, rapporte le bureau de Washington de l’Agence de presse algérienne APS, à l’issue d’une visite effectuée récemment dans les territoires occupés du #Sahara_occidental par une délégation de RFK Center conduite par sa présidente, Mme Kerry Kennedy, et composée notamment de juristes et d’experts mondiaux en matière de droits de l’Homme ainsi que de l’ex-secrétaire général de l’Organisation mondiale contre la torture (Omct), M. Erik Sottas.Rappelant qu’« aucun pays ne reconnaît la souveraineté du Maroc sur le Sahara occidental », le rapport note que depuis que le dossier du Sahara occidental a été porté devant le comité de décolonisation de l’ONU, « plus d’une centaine de résolutions de l’ONU ont réaffirmé le droit à l’autodétermination des Sahraouis ».

    #conflit_territorial