eye. any other questions? this has been good. good ideas. >> and these do get addictive. once you have been to one. when you get used to the complicated set up you feel good and you go home and it is hard to stop there. once you go, you will continue to go, i promise you. >> ok. thank you for taking the time tonight to come here and be with us. this is a typical group. we have these every month. during the year. we pick subjects we know will interest people in the area. and i guess that is about it. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause].

[crosstalk]

>> coverage continues on c-span networks with candidate speeches, and results. beginning with iowa caucuses. campaign 2024 on c-span. >> all this month, watch q and a. reflecting on stage core colon cancer. ♪

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skin the qr code to download. c-span now. your front row seat to washington anytime, anywhere. >> robert f kennedy talkbout the facts of homelessnessn the u.s. and how it correlates with housing prices and inflation. this event is about 40 minutes. is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

robert f. kennedy jr.: thank you. thank you very much, arizona. [cheering] i was watching tonight our ballot petition drive in this state. we need 43,000 signatures. and we have until august to get them but i'm expecting that we're going to do it a lot quicker than that. prior to launching the ballot initiative, ballot petition drive on in this state, we need to name all of our electors. those electors who couple of days after the election will go to the capitol and cast their votes for may. we got those electors very quickly.

they have to be people that are trusted, won't take a bribe, who share the values of this campaign. i want to thank all of our electors who are here tonight. [applause] a couple of minutes ago, i read for the first time the quinnipiac poll that just came out, and it has me leading both president biden and president trump among young people. [cheering] among people under 35, americans under 35 years of age. last month, it showed the same thing, the quinnipiac poll, i was at 38 in that age group, today, i'm at 40.

the momentum is building. the harvard-harris poll that came out recently -- it actually looked at a different age group which is under 45, and i'm winning in that age group as well. [cheering] i'm also winning among independents, and i'm doing very well. we're in a three-way tie with hispanic voters. with me beating president trump. and among many other cohorts. i feel very good about where we are today. i'm really happy to be here in arizona. to me, it's clear why we're doing well among young people. there is a couple of reasons.

the one group that i don't do well with our the people who know about my family which are baby boomers. but the problem with the baby boomers is that they get their news from msnbc, fox and cnn. [boos] whereas the young people are getting their news from podcasts and longform interviews and they become less subsumed in all the orthodoxies. the things we are supposed to believe and supposed to know. but the other reason is there is no other candidate who was talking about what's happening with young people. one of the polls that i read that was the most dismaying data

point i have seen since i started this campaign. it was a poll in 2013 that asked young americans under 35 if they were proud of the united states of america. at that point, 85% of them said yes. the same poll taken last month, 18% said yes. somehow during the terms of the last two presidents of the united states, all the young people in our country have lost their faith in of the united states of america. their pride in our country. they have lost, at the same time, their hope for their own future. i have six kids at home. i have seven kids, one of them is 39, he's in a house. the other six are between 20 and 30. they all got good jobs.

they went to the best colleges. they got good paying jobs, but they don't make enough to buy a home. they are in better shape than most of their generation, but none of their friends is thinking of buying a home either. for my generation, it was the essential promise of the american dream. that if you work hard, played by the rules, that you could finance a home. you could raise a family. you could take a summer vacation. you could put something aside for your retirement on one job. there is nobody in this generation that thinks that promise applies to them. this is the first generation in american history that 20-30-year-olds will believe that their lives are going to be worse off than their parents' lives. the american dream for them has become a nightmare.

and they have lost faith in our country because our generations betrayed them. we told them go to college, do what we say, work hard and everything's going to be okay. they can see that it's not going to be, this is the misery it gets them, and there is nobody listening to them. and i am listening to them. [cheers and applause] in 2019, i spent the better part of the year in san francisco trying them on cento cases -- the monsanto cases. we had 2200 cases. my little group of lawyers. there were a couple of other firms.

these were partners who got non-hodgkin's lymphoma. the weight multidistrict litigation works is you consolidate all the cases, and you try them one at a time, usually in the same courtroom until the defendant comes to the negotiating table. the first case we won $289 million from the jury. the second case, we won $89 million. the third case was a couple who were home partners, they sprayed around every day, they took their labrador retriever with them. they both came down with non-hodgkin's lymphoma at the same time and their labrador retriever died of it. we asked a billion dollars from the jury. they gave us $2.2 billion.

[applause] and at that point, monsanto came to the table and we settled the case. they promised to take roundup -- [indiscernible] out of roundup. but every morning before court, i would go down to in square in san francisco. union square is like 5th avenue in new york. it is where all the big flagship stores are. nordstrom, macy's, gap, old navy and levi are there. the big prestigious foreign brands like gucci, prada, ferragamo and bearberry all have big flagship stores there. i went back a little over a month ago on a campaign trip. i went to union square.

all of those doors are now closed down, which is acre after acre of plywood. it's like all of 5th avenue in new york, all the stores closed. people come from all over the world to shop there, and it's gone. the reason is because of the chaos out in the streets. all the homeless population that has exploded in california. i felt traumatized by what i saw. my favorite city, the most beautiful city in america. in a year, it's hard was torn out. i didn't know much about homelessness. i began studying it. my assumption was that homelessness is the result of drug addiction. and as the result of extreme poverty. that it's driven by mental illness. the weird thing is there is 520

5000 homeless people in this country, but half of them are in california. which only has 12% of the population. so, my assumption was that those homeless people had become homeless in other cities and migrated to california from new york, detroit because they didn't want to sleep on the grates and a snowstorm. it has better weather and a famously generous social services system. people also told me in san francisco when i was trying these cases and said, why are all these homeless people here? they said cities like phoenix and dallas, when the police arrest a homeless person instead of putting them on in the county jail they put them on a bus to san francisco. that's what they believed. i started studying.

my son introduced me to a writer called matthew desmond who studies homelessness, he is the world's authority, he has written a best-selling book. he is on a lot of podcasts which are fascinating. but what he shows is that homelessness is not driven by drug addiction or extreme poverty. there is much worse drug addiction and extreme poverty in places like west virginia and detroit. but they don't have a homelessness problem. it's also not true about mental illness. a lot of the homeless people are mentally ill, but they have become that way after they become homeless. it shows how your psyche begins to disintegrate after only three days on the sidewalk. he went out to the university of san francisco with researchers and they interviewed all the homeless and gave them questionnaires. what he shows is that people who

are homeless in san francisco are from san francisco. very few of them came from anywhere else. they became homeless in san francisco. what desmond shows is that this epidemic of homelessness that we're seeing in san francisco is building in all of california. it's building like a tsunami and it's about to roll across the country. and affect every community and bring with it the economic cataclysm and the social and cultural disintegration that we see now in san francisco. he says the one factor that causes homelessness that correlates directly with the rise is housing prices. [applause]

san francisco has the highest housing prices in this country. the average price of a home is $800,000 which means in order to afford it you need to hunt and $50,000. but that is now moving across the country. we have inflation everywhere. this state has some of the worst inflation in the country. 20% in the last two years. that inflation is driven by the forever wars. we printed a trillion dollars to pay for these nonsense wars since 2002. we put another $8 trillion into covid and lockdowns. we got nothing for nothing for any of that money. the politicians don't come to us and say we will spend $8

trillion to get nothing. they charge us with a stealth tax called inflation which lands on the middle class and people on fixed incomes, elderly people, etc. that's what we're paying now through inflation. inflation effects everything. food, childcare, health care, everything. but housing is spiking much higher than any other kind of inflation. the average housing price and in this country has gone from $215,000 two years ago to $400,000 today. it is going up, up, up. the driver is these large corporations like fidelity, like blackrock, vanguard and state street. those three companies own 88% of the s&p 500.

they are the majority owner. in most of big business in our country. they are now trying to buy all the single-family homes. the washington post attacked me a couple of weeks ago saying blackrock doesn't really buy single-family homes, which is true. but blackrock buys residential properties, but it owns blackstone, vanguard blackrock own blackstone one of the biggest buyers of single-family homes. it owns the company buying the single-family homes. we're now on track in this country that 40 to 60% of single-family homes are going to be owned by corporations by 2030. we're going from an ownership society to a rental society.

that is like going from being citizens to being subjects. the feudal model which they had in europe which we came here and had a revolution against. where big property owners, oligarchs, aristocrats, the corporate kleptocracy, the land-based. we have all become subjects of their ownership. i grew up during the 60's and 70's during a period, a 50-year period after world war ii that economists and social scientists called the great prosperity. it was a time when the american middle class became the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind. when my uncle was president, this country owned half the wealth on earth. we were the biggest exporter of goods in the world.

people wanted our goods everywhere. we were also a moral authority around the world. that extreme wealth that we had in this country in the american middle class was driven partially during world war ii, we obliterated the industrial base in europe, and ours was intact and cranking. most importantly, we put every american into a home after world war ii. we put a whole generation of americans with the g.i. bill and a lot of other legislative initiatives, including the highway program that made it cheaper to buy land. everybody got in a home. if you are in a home, you care about your community. you care about your police, your firefighters. you go to the pta meeting. you care about your school's coming or transportation. you care about the appearance of

your home. you care about your neighbors. but more importantly, you have an entree to the american capitalist system because you own equity which means you can borrow money. that means you have the capital to pursue an entrepreneurial impulse if you had it. and we got millions of americans homes right after world war ii. and any of them that had wanted to build a bowling alley or a garage, or restaurant, or nowadays a yoga studio -- they were able to access the money to do that. but if you don't own a home, you have no access to capital. and you can't do that. we created this ferment in this country. today we're moving in the opposite direction. i'm running now against two presidents who both are running on the platform that they

brought extraordinary prosperity to our country. you know, i spend a lot of time sitting at people's kitchen tables. long before i ran, i traveled every day, and i spent a lot of time talking to regular americans. i have done that for 40 years. i represent people against big corporations. today i'm representing 1000 families in east palestine, ohio whose lives were upended by the corporate -- [applause] whose lives were upended by the norfolk southern spill.

so, i talked to people. when i talk to people and say the president is saying you are living in great prosperity, they feel like they are being gas lighted. they are making choices now -- i said in one of those films that americans never had to make. i run into elderly people splitting their prescription pills in two to make it to the end of the week so they can pay for home heating oil and food. a kid in new hampshire the other day told me that every tuesday he has to make a decision about whether to fill up his car with gas or buy a meal that day. mothers who are downgrading their ingredients to get out of the checkout line. these are choices that americans did not have to make in the past. so many of them are living like that today.

the average american now, the average salary in this country is now $5,000 less than the cost of basic human needs of food, transportation and housing. not even good food. not food like you would buy at whole foods. yep to eat eight carats today to get the same nutritional value of a carrot when i was growing up. lousy food is filled with neo-naked toyed, atrazine and all these chemicals driving the product disease epidemic in this country. if you eat like that, at the end of the here, you are $5,000 in debt. how are americans paying that?

they are putting it on their credit cards. two months ago, we had a milestone, $1 trillion in private credit card debt with americans. the credit card companies are charging 22%. there was a commercial fishermen who sent a screenshot of his credit card bill two weeks ago. he is from wellesley, massachusetts and he sent me a bill that shows 37% interest. if the mafia did that, it would be called loansharking and they would go to prison. but for visa, mastercard, wells fargo it is the cost of business. who do you think owns every one of those companies? blackrock. you are both right. [laughter] blackrock, state street and

vanguard. you remember during covid when they closed it down 3.3 million businesses. two presidents. president trump close them closed. no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation, no notice and comment rulemaking, no public hearings, no environmental impact statement. no democratic process. a 50-year bureaucrat said everybody, close your business down. what was the business name an essential business that they couldn't close down? amazon. amazon, i'm now in litigation with amazon because amazon censored a book i did that was criticizing the lockdown.

not my couch e-book but another -- not my couch eat -- fauci book. they get to censor people criticizing the policy that was making them billions of dollars. they got to help close down all of their competitors. and we all got a 2.5 year lesson in how to use amazon, didn't wait? -- didn't we? i didn't know how to use amazon before covid. i learned, it's magical, you just find a picture of something you want and hit send and it is in your driveway in 24 hours. that's pretty amazing. and it doesn't have a union. those drivers are not getting overpaid. what happened is they got to close all their competitors and a lot of those businesses will never reopen.

41% of black-owned businesses that closed during covid will never reopen. it was very convenient to use amazon. but there was a cost to that. we lost local retailers, a restaurant that shut down and is never going to reopen. i lived in a small town in mount kisco, new york and these are local retailers who pay taxes to my community. they were the ones who employed my kids during summer vacations. they were the stores that had the plaque on the wall of appreciation from the local boy scout troop. they were the people who paid for my kids' hockey jerseys. and for their little league uniforms. and those guys are gone today. and amazon is not paying for my kids' little league or my grandchildren's little league uniforms.

and they don't pay local taxes. you had to pay a little extra at that local retailer. but that's money that was recirculating in my community all year long and enriching all of our lives. [applause] our values in this country were in many ways created on those main streets. that sense of community that we have. we're all fragmented now. it's no wonder why kids are turning to fentanyl and all these other -- going to dark places. because that sense of community was the remedy. disassociation, for the alienation that is robbing them

of meaning. but at least amazon is paying federal taxes, right? no. last year they paid zero. they are doing it right in front of us. they don't even care that we know anymore. they are stripmining the wealth and the equity from the american middle class. and they are sending it north. during covid, we shifted $4 trillion upward. it was a zero-sum game they just took it out of the pockets of the american middle class. president and president biden created 500 billionaires in 500 days. a new oligarchy for us in this country. a billionaire a day being created during the pandemic

during the lockdowns. i will give you one example, which is the ukraine war, which is a war we should have never got into. [cheers] this week, naftali bennett who was the israeli prime minister, there is a speech on the internet of where he talks about the fact that there was a peace deal signed under turkish prime minister erdogan, that he helped negotiate. in april 2022, putin wanted to get out. zelenskyy, his people initialed it. by the way, this week the

ukrainian negotiator has come clean that we had a peace agreement. it was done and president biden sent boris johnson, the british prime minister over there to force zelenskyy to tear it up. since then, he wanted the war with russia. it was a more about nato. why do we want nato in ukraine so badly? here is one of the reasons. both the democratic and republican party are getting their money from blackrock, state street and vanguard. the military contractors, northrop grumman, general dynamics, boeing, lockheed and raytheon, and a couple of others. they want to get as many nato countries as possible. why?

every time somebody new signed up as nato, part of the contract is they have to conform their weapons purchases to nato specifications. that means getting the weapons from those companies. every time they sign up, they get a whole new market that's automatic. we're fighting this war, of course, would you think owns every one of those companies? blackrock. blackrock, by the way, also owns state street and vanguard. it is really just one giant cartel that owns now everything. the head of blackrock, larry fink, is on the board of the world economic forum. yeah, boo. the world economic forum is the billionaires boys club that

meets every year at davos that meets every year to decide what the world will look like for the rest of us. the plan, the shorthand term, what they call it is the great reset. one plow swab was head of the -- when klaus schwab the head of the wf was asked to explain the great reset, he said you will own nothing and you will be happy. anyway, they are on their way to doing that. they own these companies and are making big profit. we committed in march 113 billion, by the way since they for of that agreement in april, 500,000 ukrainian kids have died in a war that never should have happened. each one of those kids has a mom and dad. i think what it would be like.

i can't imagine it. you multiply that grief by 500,000. in march of 2013, or march of last year or 2022, we committed 100 $13 billion to ukraine. just to give you an idea of what that means, the entire budget for epa is $12 billion. that's all we have got for the environment in this country. $12 billion. we committed 113 believing doll -- billion dollars paid on month ago, another 121 billion. president biden is now asking for $61 billion more. when we did this in march, what else happened? a couple things. one is we cut food stamps to 30 million americans. we cut medicare to 15 million.

and the fed printed 300 billion dollars unanticipated to bailout the silicon valley bank. so when the bankers need the money, and the military contractors need the money, the door is wide open. take what you need. take what you want. but when americans are down on their luck. when they are sick, when they are hungry, when they are suffering we have got nothing for them. the door is slammed shut. mitch mcconnell was asked that month by a reporter who is saying republicans are supposed to be concerned about debt. we are getting a $33 trillion dollar debt to our kids. they said, why are you adding to the annual deficit?

mitch mcconnell said, don't worry, because that money is not really going to ukraine. the money is going to u.s. military contractors, general dynamics, northrop grumman, boeing and lockheed. he admitted on national television that it is all just a money laundering scheme. during the republican debate, the last one, not this one, the fox announcer asked the same thing can we afford to go into all this debt in ukraine? they were all saying, with the exception of vivek, god bless him, who says we shouldn't be there. all of the other ones were saying yeah, we will put more in if i get elected. we will go to war with mexico and china. on the environment and all this other wars that we have. kim scott pipes up and he says,

don't worry, because it's not really a loan to ukraine. it's not a gift to ukraine, it's a loan. raise your hand if you think that loan will get paid back? of course it's not. everybody knows that. there is nobody who believes that loan is getting paid back. why do they bother calling it a loan? the reason is because if they called it a loan, they can impose loan conditions. one of the conditions for that loan. number one, there is a brutal austerity program that guarantees if you are poor in ukraine, you are getting nothing from the government. more importantly, it requires ukraine government to put all its government owned assets up for sale to multinational corporations.

including all of the agricultural land in ukraine. the agricultural land in ukraine is the biggest single asset in europe. it is the breadbasket of europe. it is some of the richest farmland on the face of the earth. there has been 1000 years of wars fought over that farmland. there is 500,000 ukrainian kids who don't know about this loan agreement. you have died to keep that land in the hands of ukraine. but what they don't know is the loan document forces ukraine to create a land market to sell all of its agricultural lands to multinational corporations. now 30% of it has already been sold. who do you think the buyers are? >> blackrock! robert f. kennedy jr.: not so fast. dupont, kargil and

monsanto. would you think owns all of those companies? blackrock. they are doing it right in front of us. this is a big contract. it is not what we're putting in the biggest expense, they have admitted it will be have a trillion dollars, to rebuild all the things we just wrecked with the bombs from those companies after the war. that's when the big costs come. they have already given the contract to one company to do all of that. who do you think that company is? blackrock. like i said, they are doing it right in front of us. they don't even care that we know anymore. because they think we can't do anything about it because they have a system that stops us from

effective action. what is that system? it's keeping each other at each other's throats. orchestrating hatred. orchestrating the polarization of israel that paralyzes us and creates a logjam in congress. turning republicans against democrats, blacks against whites, and getting us all hating on each other. all the big media companies which are also owned by blackrock, state street and vanguard are part of this system constantly telling us. fox and msnbc, they are all on the same side. their job is to get us to hate each other. they don't care who it is. as long as we're hating each other, nothing is going to happen. what i said when i declared my candidacy in boston seven months ago is that i'm going to spend the next mo o