Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presents his positions on policy

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presents his positions on policy

Kennedy 24

www.kennedy24.com

I am posting this information because I think it is extremely important to understand what Robert Kennedy Jr. is trying to achieve. This texts gives us a sense of how Kennedy and Kucinich plan to storm the Democratic Party and take control. I do not agree with many points, but it is closer to real policy than anything I have seen in years.

I have worked with, and met with Dennis Kucinich, Kennedy’s campaign manager and I believe him to be one of the most honest and intelligent people left in American politics. He was brave enough to meet with me in person when most people did not want to touch me with a ten-foot pole. Looking at this site, I can see that Kucinich and Kennedy definitely know what they are doing. But I do not believe that it is possible to carry out reforms they suggest within the Democratic Party, no matter how inspirational the speeches, no matter how touching the images of Bobby Kennedy’s tragic campaign are. I think that a far more uncompromising position is demanded than is possible within the Democratic Party. That said, this platform is more than strong enough to sweep away the other Democratic contenders.

Honest Government: For the people

A democratic government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. But government institutions have betrayed our trust. The intelligence agencies spy on our own people. Government and tech platforms conspire to surveil and censor the public. Regulatory agencies have been captured by those they are supposed to regulate: Wall Street controls the SEC. Polluters and extractive industries dominate the EPA and BLM. Pharma controls the CDC, NIH, and FDA. Big Ag controls the USDA. Big Tech has captured the FTC. No wonder trust in government is at all-time lows. It’s time to earn it back.

From his long experience and familiarity with systems of power, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. understands that most people in corporations and government are perfectly decent human beings. They play the game, but a lot of them are fed up with its phoniness, and cynical about the paralysis of the system. They feel trapped in it. Clean government isn’t just about removing corrupt individuals. It is about changing a system in which perfectly decent people become agents of corruption without even knowing it.

 “The blizzard of misinformation that is now inundating our democracy will end only when the government and the media start telling the truth to Americans.”

We are going to remake public institutions to serve the public. We will roll back the secrecy and make government transparent. We will protect whistleblowers and prosecute officials who abuse the public trust. We will rein in the lobbyists and slam shut the revolving door that shunts people from government agencies to lucrative positions in the companies they were supposed to regulate, and back again. We will get money out of politics. We will open our institutions to real citizen involvement. We will restore integrity to government.

Reconciliation: Heal the Divide

America is more polarized and divided now than at any time in living memory. Both sides seem to agree that the basic problem is the horrible people on the other side. Both sides are wrong. The basic problem is the division itself. A divided public lacks the strength to resist exploitation or to overcome the inertia of the status quo. The classic American can-do spirit exhausts itself in endless battles. So let’s heal the divide.

 “My aim is to convince every Democrat that you’re not a Democrat, and every Republican that you are not a Republican.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has clear positions on most of today’s divisive trigger issues like abortion, guns, and immigration, but he knows that both sides have legitimate concerns and legitimate moral positions. No one is deplorable. Furthermore, most of the disagreements obscure deeper shared values. Everyone wants their children to be safe. Few relish the thought of dead fetuses, nor do they want to force women to have unwanted babies.

Everyone wants safe streets, yet few wish for millions of people to languish in prison. Robert F. Kennedy will draw on the broad moral agreements beneath our divisions. He will model careful listening, and create conditions where each group can hear the stories of the other. He will lead the way toward national reconciliation, respectful dialog, and willingness to change, to grow, and to forgive.

In the case of race relations, reconciliation includes repairing the damage caused by centuries of bigotry. Our administration will take racial healing seriously through a program of Targeted Community Repair. Our operating principle is not guilt for the sins of one’s ancestors, but rather compassion. We will invoke the authentic desire in all Americans, white and black, liberal and conservative, to improve the condition of our Black and Native brothers and sisters.

These commitments to respect and unity start right now, in the campaign.

In Kennedy's own words, “Every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side. The easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our greed, to our anger, to our fear, to our xenophobia, our bigotry, all of the alchemies of tribalism. I will appeal instead to our generosity as a people, our goodness, our kindness, and our courage.”

Environment: Clean it up!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was instrumental in transforming the Hudson from a dead river to one of America’s cleanest today. He did it by uniting liberal environmentalists with conservative rod-and-gun folks who shared a desire for a clean, healthy environment. As President, he will bring the same commitment and coalition-building to address the most pressing environmental problems in America and beyond.

“Good environmental policy—100% of the time—is identical to good economic policy.”

Recent years have seen one environmental disaster after another: floods and droughts, fires, and toxic spills. Our soils are depleted, the weather is wacky, trees are dying, and the water in many places is toxic. Chronic disease is at an all-time high. We’re going to address these problems at their root causes. First, we will shift agricultural subsidies so as to encourage regenerative practices. Today, a new generation of farmers and ranchers is building soil, replenishing groundwater, and detoxifying land, all while producing just as much food as conventional farmers and earning a decent livelihood.

Secondly, we will incentivize the transition of industry to zero-waste cycles and clean energy sources, and forge agreements with other countries to implement these policies throughout the global supply chain. These first two policies will vastly reduce the toxic waste, industrial poisons, and pesticides that make people and ecosystems sick.

Finally, we will protect wild lands from further development, by curbing mining, logging, oil drilling, and suburban sprawl. We will become a global advocate for rainforest preservation and marine restoration. We will rethink development policies that promised economic growth while ignoring ecological sustainability, and ended up delivering neither.

Revitalization: Turn it around

The time has come to reverse America’s economic decline, decades in the making. Our country faces a widening wealth gap (the most unequal since the 1920s), rampant debt, decaying infrastructure, and a hollowed-out industrial base. Every night, tens of millions of American children go to bed hungry. Millions of Americans must choose between food and medicine; millions more are living on the edge, just a single car repair away from disaster. And these problems are even worse for Black, Native, and other minority populations.

Government assistance to the nation’s most vulnerable is a high priority, but even more important is to reverse the policies that have led to such poverty in the first place. We will rebuild the industrial infrastructure, ruined by forty years of off-shoring and misguided “free trade” schemes. We will enact policies that favor small and medium businesses, which are the nation’s real job creators and the dynamos of American enterprise. We will support labor in reclaiming its fair share of American prosperity. We will break up “too-big-to-fail” banks and monopolies, and when crisis strikes, bail out the homeowners, debtors, and small business owners instead.

Global developments, particularly the end of the US dollar’s status as the world’s unchallenged reserve currency, portend turbulent economic conditions ahead. Yet at the same time, we know that America is fundamentally a wealthy nation, blessed with vast lands, rich resources, and a creative population. That is the vitality we will tap into to turn this country around.

Another key aspect of American revitalization is our healthcare system, which consumes nearly one-fifth of GDP. It isn’t just a matter of shifting the burden of who pays. The problem is much deeper.

Healthcare spending per capita has increased twelve-fold since 1960. Are we twelve times healthier? Quite the contrary: We face today a terrible pandemic—not of Covid, but of chronic disease. Autoimmunity, allergies, diabetes, obesity, addiction, anxiety, and depression afflict two-thirds of the population, up from a few percent in our grandparents’ time. A Kennedy administration will go beyond making existing modalities available to all, to include low-cost alternative and holistic therapies that have been marginalized in a pharma-dominated system. We will move from a sick care system to a wellness society.

Peace: Bring it home

In the long term, a nation’s strength does not come from its armies. America spends as much on weaponry as the next nine nations combined, yet the country has grown weaker, not stronger, over the last 30 years. Even as its military technology has reigned supreme, America has been hollowing out from the inside. We cannot be a strong or secure nation when our infrastructure, industry, society, and economy are infirm.

A high priority of a Kennedy administration will be to make America strong again. When a body is sick, it withdraws its energy from the extremities in order to nourish the vital organs. It is time to end the imperial project and attend to all that has been neglected: the crumbling cities, the antiquated railways, the failing water systems, the decaying infrastructure, the ailing economy. Annual defense-related spending is close to one trillion dollars. We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed. Now we have another chance.

As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s time to come home and restore this country.

 “America cannot be an empire abroad and continue to be a democracy at home.”

In Ukraine, the most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first.

He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine and brings our resources back where they belong. We will offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia's borders. Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine and guarantee its freedom and independence. UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions. We will put an end to this war. We will put an end to the suffering of the Ukrainian people. That will be the start of a broader program of demilitarization of all countries.

We have to stop seeing the world in terms of enemies and adversaries. As John Quincy Adams wrote, “Americans go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Robert F. Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist. He wanted to exit Vietnam. He defied the Joint Chiefs of Staff and refused to bomb Cuba, thus saving us from nuclear Armageddon. He wanted to reverse the imperialistic policies of Truman and Eisenhower, rein in the CIA, and support freedom movements around the world. He wanted to revive Roosevelt’s impulse to dissolve the British empire rather than take it over.

John F. Kennedy’s vision was tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet. But now we have another chance. The country is ailing, yes, but underneath there is vitality still. America is a land rich in resources, creativity, and intelligence. We just need to get serious about healing our society, to become strong again from the inside.

America was once an inspiration to the world, a beacon of freedom and democracy. Our priority will be nothing less than to restore our moral leadership. We will lead by example. When a warlike imperial nation disarms of its own accord, it sets a template for peace everywhere. It is not too late for us to voluntarily let go of empire and serve peace instead, as a strong and healthy nation.

Civil Liberties: Restore our rights

Our administration will make it a top priority to protect and restore the fundamental civil liberties, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that hold the essence of what America can be. These liberties have endured constant assault for over twenty years, starting with the Bush/Cheney War on Terror, and accelerating in the era of Covid lockdowns.

Freedom of speech is the capstone of all other rights and freedoms. Once a government has the power to silence its opponents, no other right is safe. We will therefore dismantle the censorship-industrial complex, in which Big Tech censors, deplatforms, shadowbans, and algorithmically suppresses any person or opinion the government asks them to. We will respect the right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, by ending mass surveillance of American citizens and the abuse of civil asset forfeiture. We will make sure that the Covid-era suspension of the right to assembly, trial by jury, and freedom of worship will never happen again. The same for the right to property. During Covid, 3.4 million business were forced to close. Many of them, including 60% of Black-owned businesses, will never reopen.

A Kennedy administration will respect American citizens and stop treating them like suspects and schoolchildren. We will stop manipulating the public with propaganda and targeted leaks. We will never weaponize the law against political opponents, nor hold our own officials above the law. We will return the intelligence agencies to their proper role as protectors not violators of liberty.

We will also take special care to ensure the civil liberties of minorities and the poor. We will end the failed War on Drugs and grant amnesty to nonviolent drug offenders. We will shut the school-to-prison pipeline, and transition prisons away from a punishment paradigm to a rehabilitation paradigm. Prisons will be an intervention in a life gone wrong, and a way to prevent offenders from harming others again.

Instead of defunding the police, we will transform the police. We will incentivize them to prevent violence, not make unnecessary arrests. We will train them in de-escalation and mediation skills and partner them with neighborhood organizations. No longer will their relationship to the public be adversarial. They will focus their attention on serious crimes, not harassing ordinary people.