Kennedy announces 2024 presidential bid

JFK’s nephew is seeking Democrat Party nomination in a challenge to US president Joe Biden

Robert Francis Kennedy Junior officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign on Wednesday, addressing a crowd in Boston, Massachusetts. The 69-year-old is the nephew of US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.

RFK Jr. is challenging the incumbent Democrat Joe Biden on a platform of “clean government, civil liberties, peace, and economic revitalization,” according to his campaign. 

In the announcement speech, Kennedy vowed to “make as many Americans as possible forget that they are Republicans or Democrats and remember that they are Americans,” arguing that people “need to focus on the values we share instead of the issues that divide us.”

Kennedy also lashed out at the censorship of dissidents as “not only antithetical to our most fundamental values, it is counterproductive in that it fuels the flames of polarization, alienation, and anger.” He added that the “blizzard of misinformation” in America will only end when the government and the media start telling the truth.

In some of the excerpts from his speech posted on Twitter, Kennedy said that many Americans believe their republic has been subverted by “a new brand of corporate feudalism, or a corporate kleptocracy.”

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The US doesn’t have fair market capitalism but “corporate crony capitalism, where the rules are written by billionaires and incumbents and large corporations, to stack the deck against the middle class,” he said. 

Kennedy also objected to government rules that force Americans to “privatize the commons” and get ahead by “poisoning each other and hurting each other.”

Without naming former president Donald Trump, Kennedy brought up his campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Many politicians earnestly want to do so, he said, but “become paralyzed” once they get into office and fail because “they don’t understand the agencies.”

Kennedy was nine when his uncle, the 35th US president, was assassinated in Texas. Five years later, his father Robert – JFK’s attorney general and later a US senator – was fatally shot during the 1968 presidential primaries. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, is now 78 and still in prison.

While his surviving uncle Ted pursued a political career in the Senate, RFK Jr. became an environmental lawyer, activist, best-selling author and radio host. He has also been an outspoken critic of aggressive child vaccinations, which got him accused of “anti-vaccine misinformation” by US health authorities and censored during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Military-industrial complex sponsors ‘drone opera’ in DC

Funded by General Dynamics, the production tells the story of a female drone operator raising a daughter by night and bombing Afghanistan by day

Residents of Washington DC looking for highbrow entertainment will soon be able to watch an opera about the home life of a “hot shot” drone operator sponsored by one of the US’ largest weapons companies.

‘Grounded’ premieres at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts this October, according to a recent announcement on the theater’s website. With music composed by Jeanine Tesori and based on a 2013 play by George Brant, the opera tells the story of “Jess,” a “hot shot F-16 pilot” who finds herself unable to fly due to an unexpected pregnancy.

Jess is reassigned to pilot drones in Afghanistan from the comfort of a trailer in Las Vegas, and “tracks terrorists by day and rocks her daughter to sleep by night.” The story examines “what’s lost when technology distances us from the horror of war? And what price is inflicted upon the operator of a lone drone in a blue sky?” according to the theater’s website.

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— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) April 18, 2023

The opera is sponsored by General Dynamics, which is the fifth-largest weapons manufacturer in the world. General Dynamics builds the F-16 fighter jets piloted by the opera’s fictional heroine as well as a number of vehicle-launched attack drones. Its former subsidiary, General Atomics, manufactures the MQ-9 Reaper drones that saw extensive use in Afghanistan, including in the 2021 strike that killed a family of unarmed civilians in Kabul.

Whether the opera will end on an anti-war note is unclear, although the DC-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft noted last week that “productions involving arms companies or the Pentagon rarely find much room to critique America’s wars abroad.”


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The US military-industrial complex often gets involved in events that promote its products. Back in December, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, and Lockheed Martin all sponsored a party at the Ukrainian embassy honoring the country’s military. Logos for all four arms makers were emblazoned on invitations to the event.

“Ukrainian diplomats should probably think harder about how it looks for them to be throwing parties with the defense contractors who are making bank off of this horrible war,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Matt Duss told Vox at the time.

NYC will track carbon footprint of residents’ food purchases

Mayor Eric Adams admitted New Yorkers were probably not “ready for this conversation”

New York City will track the carbon footprint of residents’ food consumption as part of a sweeping initiative to decrease the city’s carbon emissions from food by a third this year, Mayor Eric Adams revealed on Monday at an event for the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. 

About a fifth of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions come from household food consumption, Adams told reporters, blaming much of that total on meat and dairy. Household food consumption is supposedly the third largest contributor to city emissions totals, trailing only buildings and transportation. 

The Mayor’s Office of Food Policy has ordered city agencies to reduce their food consumption by 33% by 2030, and Adams has asked private corporations to cut their own emissions by 25% by 2030, insisting New Yorkers’ wasteful eating habits cannot continue without imperiling the planet.

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“It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint,” he said. “But now we have to talk about beef.” City officials urged New Yorkers to put down the burgers and pick up vegetables and beans.  

“A plant-based diet is better for your physical and mental health, I’m living proof of that, but…thanks to this new inventory, we’re finding out it is better for the planet,” Adams quipped. While the mayor has long professed to be a vegan, even publishing a cookbook touting his supposedly plant-based diet, he admitted last year that he enjoyed the occasional fish after a restaurant whistleblower came forward.  

The household consumption carbon footprint tracker will be viewable on the same website as the city’s breakdown of its annual greenhouse gas totals, which also includes data on producing consumer goods and using professional services.  

Last year, Adams signed New York onto the C40 Good Food Cities program, a global pledge to reduce food waste and incentivize healthier eating habits. The program aims to enforce compliance with UN climate goals by ‘nudging’ populations toward more nutritious meals, mandating a “planetary health diet” for all residents.  

Adams admitted that monitoring what’s on the end of New York’s forks was not going to be easy, telling the outlet Gothamist, “I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.” When his predecessor Michael Bloomberg tried to legally enforce healthy eating in 2012 with a heavy-handed ban on super-size sugary drinks, the state Supreme Court struck it down as arbitrary and capricious. Bloomberg, however, now runs the C40 program’s board of directors.