Monday, October 17, 2022

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's National Hispanic Institute [NHI] Connection

 Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.


Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.


Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and Queens residents in the U.S. Congress, the Democratic Party congressional representative has, historically, been connected politically to an organization, not based in New York City, which operates under the name "National Hispanic Institute" [NHI]. As David Freedlander observed in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:


"If there was another guiding force in Ocasio-Cortez's life it was...the National Hispanic Institute [NHI]...Ocasio-Cortez participated in NHI programming before her junior year in high school when she, along with 150 or so of her peers, went to the group's Lorezo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session [LDZ]...


"At this summer institute, Ocasio-Cortez ran for every office available...Ocasio-Cortez was just one of two students from the East, and the only one from New York. She lost every election she ran for...It is easy to draw a straight line from 2018 to the teenager who went to the NHI summer program, where she learned the skills of a candidate...Ocasio-Cortez told [NHI Founder Ernesto] Nieto...`...I found that NHI helped me so much...because NHI helped me develop who I am...'


"The NHI wasn't just something that Ocasio-Cortez did a couple of summers while she was in high school. It's how she got connected to Boston University, which was actively recruiting among NHI students when Ocasio-Cortez was in high school. During college and after, she returned to work at the institute in various capacities, and when she refers to herself as `an educator' in her campaign materials, she is referring to her time leading students at NHI.


"Ocasio-Cortez wrote the afterword to [NHI Founder Ernesto] Nieto's memoir, Third Reality Revealed: Vision, Persistence, and Inventing a New Latino Identity while she was still in college...After graduation, AOC returned to NHI as a social entrepreneurship fellow and then, a couple of years after that, as a...trainer. She worked several summers in a program called the Collegiate World Series and...in 2018...lead one of the institute's seminars.


"People who were with her at NHI remember her as...ambitious...As Ocasio-Cortez bounced around in her college years, she had what was essentially a standing offer to return to NHI and work full-time..."




Saturday, October 15, 2022

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's Historic Family And Westchester Co. Background

 Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.


Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.


Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and some Queens tenants in the U.S. Congress, her family apparently historically owned two apartments in the Bronx and a house in Westchester County; and the Bronx-Queens congressional representative historically attended a high school in Westchester County. As David Freedlander noted in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:


"...Sergio Ocasio...got into Brooklyn Tech...He met AOC's mother, Bianca Cortez, in Puerto Rico, where the two married before settling in the Bronx. They bought an apartment in the...middle-income Parkchester complex for $36,000 and later bought another similarly priced unit nearby, where Ocasio kept an office...His business, Kirschenbaum and Ocasio Roman Architects PC...were beneficiaries of...state contracts...Clients included the Parkchester complex, where the Ocasio-Cortez family owned an apartment...


"Ocasio-Cortez...grew up not in the Bronx, but in Westchester County...Ocasio-Cortez was...explicit that the home in Yorktown Heights, a town of under 2,000 people in Westchester County, was purchased with the help of aunts, uncles, and other relatives...


"...In Westchester she was often the lone Latino in her class...Yorktown was not diverse...Another friend said there were only a handful of Asian kids in their class of three hundred, and no African American students..."




Friday, October 14, 2022

Democratic Congressional Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's Historic Boston U. Connection

Most U.S. anti-war movement supporters don't think that the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government since February 2022 has either decreased the danger of World War III breaking out or brought much peace to the people living in Ukraine.


Yet one of New York City's Democratic representatives in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has apparently not attempted to do very much in Washington, D.C. to oppose the U.S. Congress's support for shipping more munitions to the Ukrainian government.


Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and some Queens residents in the U.S. Congress, a private unversity in Boston, Massachusetts--Boston University--is the university that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez historically attended. As David Freedlander recalled in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:


"It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2011, and...she was a college senior, and the lone student on the Boston University campus invited to speak at the university's annual remembrance ceremony...Ocasio-Cortez studied economics and international relations at Boston Universiity...


"Friends say that she was animated in college by a lot of the same concerns that animated her early political career...Ocasio-Cortez would join [then Democratic U.S. Senator Ted] Kennedy's office as an intern...Ocasio-Cortez...worked for Kennedy's immigrant constituent office...


"...If you were a Boston University student at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century--even if you weren't a regular at the Thruman Center or part of the regular Coffee and Conversation group or in the slam poetry group or in Alianza Latina, the school's Latin American student organization--you more than likely knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was...


"She was part of what was known as `The BU 500', those...students who...seem to have a close relationship with the administration...She gave a Ted Talk alongside other Boston-area college students in which her bio read: `A social entrepreneur...She has consulted non-profits, worked in government, and launched a media enterprise...'...She was quoted in a National Public Radio [NPR] story about how college students were reacting to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces...AOC...said,`...This villain has been slayed...'"




 

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

`Fare-Free Transit'

 


A folk song from 2022 explaining why MBTA should also establish a fare-free public transit system for riders in Boston, Massachusetts in 2022.

You can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Outbound trolleys were once fare-free inBoston

And for Philly elders, the subway is fare-free

It's fare-free for all riders in Estonia

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

For new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.


You can ride all buses free in Lowell

You can ride all buses free in Lawrence

You can ride all buses free in Chapel Hill

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

You can ride all transit free in Luxembourg

And for Miami elders buses are fare-free

Elders ride free in Lebanon, Pennsylvania

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have millions of dollars to spend

To pay off "The Big Dig" debt

And they have 30 million dollars to spend

For new stations by BU's campus.


All ride for free in Corvalis, Oregon

And in campus towns like Ann Arbor

And also in Boulder and Denver

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

In France, it's fare-free in Dunkirk

And some transit is fare-free in Baltimore

All elderly ride fare-free in Scotland

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

On new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.


You can ride all buses fare-free in Malta

And in Wales it's free for elderly

You can ride all buses free in Hasselt, Belgium

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Yes, you can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Monday, October 10, 2022

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Conclusion

 


In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:


"Getting...the White House, Soros said in 2003, became the `central focus' of his life. In July 2003, he convened Democratic activists and two political strategists, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, at his summer estate in...Southampton, Long Island...The plan was about how Soros...could throw money--and a lot of it--into the political arena...


"...The second key part of the plan highlighted that...donors...could give money to...groups...Pushed by Jane Mayer in her New Yorker interview about the perceived hypocrisy of his spending large amounts of money on politics, Soros said, `...The ends justify every legal means possible.'


"Soros donated $5 million to MoveOn.org...He pledged money to America Coming Together, a group intended to mobilize voters in 17 swing states...He gave to the Center for American Progress...Altogether, Soros spent $27 million to...elect...John Kerry...The aforementioned 2004 New Yorker article on his spending was titled `The Money Man.' Jane Mayer conducted an interview with Soros over lunch at his Southampton estate...


"...Soros...supported NATO's military intervention, which did not have U.N. approval, in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s...Open Society had also been involved in Ukraine...Soros had been funding various civil society groups in Ukraine for a decade...George Soros...made money all over the world; he made...financial decisions that caused...average people to lose large amounts of money and private-equity funds he controlled used an offshore law firm Appleby...A 2017 article published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists...quoted Brooke Harrington, a Copenhagen Business School professor, as saying that the offshore industry makes `the poor pporer' and excerbates wealth inequality...


"...Soros...wants to be one of the people dictating the future of politics...Soros, through Open Society, does support NGOs...Soros was never elected...The NGOs he supports...are not accountable to the general public. Soros does have far more power than the average person, and his...work isn't bound by borders, and he did make his money as a speculator. All of that is true..."

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 10

 


In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:


"A billionaire with so much money, accountable to no one, unelected by any people to any government...It is Soros, with all his money and all his power, who is picking people--like Licht, like Finci, like Trbic'--who are then...empowered...They were given power to advance their personal agendas...


"...It seemed wrong to me that one man from abroad could have such a large role in determining who in a society was able to have a voice and a platform and tremendous sums of money with which to execute an agenda...George Soros was not from Bosnia, or the former Yugoslavia, and yet had had power and influence in the society...And who is George Soros to decide that this is the issue on which...aid and attention should be spent? Why was George Soros essentially an actor in a civil war across the world? Who appointed him...?


"...The Charter 77 Foundation, which funded...Czeck and Slovak dissidents...was launched in Stockholm in the late 1970s. Soros, working with Czechs and Slovaks in exile, was, by his own admission, their main source of support..."


Monday, October 3, 2022

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 9

 


In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:


"Soros has justified speculation...The value of the baht plunged 32 percent against the dollar, and millions of Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million...The Thai financial crisis sspread, becoming the Asia financial crisis, and Soros was blamed...At the 1997 World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF] meetings, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahather Mohamad called Soros a `criminal'...and claimed that he...caused the crash of the Malaysian ringgit...Soros...shorted the British pound...He and his employees helped trigger the Asian financial crisis..

.

"`The industry in which he made his money is an industry whose norms and rules have generally served to disenfranchise regular people over the last thirty, forty years,' said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a look at the way in which the very wealthy use philanthropy to protect the status quo and paper over problems they themselves have created, in a September 2019 phone interview...


"Soros...was still participating in a system that actively disenfranchises people...Soros...worked in finance in such a way that it broke countries' currencies..."