"The benefits include facilitating innovation and spurring investment, ensuring citizen privacy, incentivizing ventures to grow their business and tech jobs in the United States," he added. "Non-taxable events are unreportable and that means it will be more difficult for governments to weaponize currency against free speech, which is one of my principal objectives."
KENNEDY: Nobody wanted an alternative to the U.S. dollar. This happened because of our weaponization of the U.S. dollar and unilateral weaponization of our control of the world currency. We were pounding people's personal assets if the government misbehaves and do it unilaterally. We need to deescalate our violence around the world which has driven the creation of BRICS. [China] wants to bury us but they want to do it on an economic playing field. And they need us. You know, they cannot survive without us.
Biden highlighted his stance on abortion during his campaign announcement, accusing "MAGA Republicans" of trying to dictate "what health care decisions women can make."
Kennedy Jr., however, has not made recent remarks about abortion, nor does his campaign site clarify his position on reproductive rights. When reached by Newsweek, a campaign spokesperson said Kennedy Jr. "believes strongly in the principle of bodily autonomy, whether the issue is abortion or medical mandates."
"He will keep government away from women's childbearing choices. The moral issues are best left to the woman, her family, and her religious community," the spokesperson added.
KENNEDY: In trouble.
Q: Why? A lot of the economic data is good. Consumer spending is good.
KENNEDY: Yeah, I'm aware and we're $33 trillion in debt and we have two presidential candidates who are saying they brought prosperity to this country, but you've got 57% of the American people who cannot put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency. And for those people, the engine light goes on in their car and it's like the apocalypse happened. It's the end of the world for them. We have now kids can't afford houses. Housing prices have gone from $215,000 two years ago to $400,000 today. Now, part of the American Dream that if you worked hard, you played by the rules, you can afford a house. You can take a summer vacation, you can raise a family, put money aside for retirement and that was with one job and that's not happening.
"My primary platform is to cut the costs on the military," Kennedy said on the show. "Again, what we were told was a peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We were going to cut our military budget from about $600 billion a year to $200 billion a year."
On his website, Kennedy lists rebuilding industrial infrastructure "ruined by forty years of off-shoring" among his top priorities, alongside "government assistance to the nation's most vulnerable."
KENNEDY: Yeah, but I mean, that's not the only thing I want to do. I have a number of common sense programs that will begin restoring the middle class in this country.
Q: OK, what's another one?
KENNEDY: Well, one of the reasons that the price of housing has gone up and nobody can get a house anymore, people make an offer on a house and then somebody comes in with a cash offer-- they're big institutions like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street.
Q: Buying up hundreds of thousands of homes?
KENNEDY: Right. They're targeting single family homes. They're competing with our kids, and they have these big bank books so the cost of money and mortgages to them is minuscule. And our kids have to compete with them.
Q: Well, what do we do about it?
KENNEDY: You change the tax code to make it more difficult for large corporations to accumulate thousands of houses.
KENNEDY: Are you saying that most Americans do not believe President Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy?
Q: I want to know why you believe it?
KENNEDY: I don't think anybody who has looked at my uncle's murder seriously believes that the Warren Commission was correct. The C.I.A. was involved--not only in the original conspiracy but in the 60-year coverup--and continues to maintain the coverup.
Q: What was the C.I.A.'s motivation?
KENNEDY: They were angry at my uncle. Their initial anger came when he failed to invade the Bay of Pigs and provide air cover for [Cuban opponents of Fidel Castro], which they consider a betrayal. [The CIA] had trained those men.
KENNEDY: The Inflation Reduction Act was hijacked by industry by particularly the carbon industry. There's $173 billion in subsidies in that Act for carbon capture; we need free market capitalism. We need to end the subsidies to the carbon industry. You can build a solar plant for about a billion dollars in gigawatt. A coal plant is $3.6 billion a gigawatt. A nuc plant is $14 billion a gigawatt.
Q: Yeah, but nuclear is always on.
KENNEDY: No, it isn't. No, they have more maintenance outages in nuclear power plants than almost any other sector.
Q: What is your view on nuclear power?
KENNEDY: I'm all for it if they ever make it safe and if they ever make it economic. We can make energy by burning prime rib. Why wouldn't we take the cheapest form of energy possible. Get rid of the subsidies--there's $5.2 trillion in subsidies annually for carbon. There are small subsidies relatively small for wind and solar.
KENNEDY: I'm trying to unite the country. I'm not going to pick out people and say that they're evil, they should be cancelled, or whatever. I'm a Democrat. I know what my values are. I've always spoken to Republicans my entire life. During all the years that I was a leader of the environmental movement, I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News. I think the kind of tribalism that [the media] is advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it's toxic. It's created a polarization, a division, in this country that is more dangerous than at any time since the American Civil War.
Q: Isn't there a difference between disagreement and--
KENNEDY: I believe in the same America that my father and my uncle believed in--I don't care if they're Republican or independent, or what they are.
Kennedy has also promised, if elected, to protect wild lands by curbing logging, oil drilling and mining and containing suburban sprawl.
"We will become a global advocate for rainforest preservation and marine restoration," his campaign website states. "We will rethink development policies that promised economic growth while ignoring ecological sustainability, and ended up delivering neither."
On the Hudson, Kennedy brought a series of lawsuits against municipalities and against industries, including Consolidated Edison and General Electric to stop discharging pollution and to clean up legacy contamination.
In 1995, Kennedy advocated for repeal of legislation during the 104th Congress which he considered unfriendly to the environment. In 1997, Kennedy wrote "The Riverkeepers" [book with John Cronin].
KENNEDY: China does not want a war with the United States. We spent three times on our on our military what they do. We have 800 bases abroad; they have one and a half. Look, they want to compete with us. They want to bury us but they want to do it on an economic playing field. And they need us. You know, they cannot survive without us.
Q: We're their marketplace; we are the biggest buyer of Chinese goods by far.
KENNEDY: Right, so I'm not afraid of the US competing with China head to head and countries around the world. I think that's good for us. I think we win that competition. I'm not somebody who thinks that we should divide the world. I think the shared markets are ultimately good for the world because they decrease the chance of war. When you when you treat somebody as an adversary, they tend to become one. There are a group of people in the State Department who want constant pipeline of new wars to feed the military industrial complex
Last month, Kennedy was asked if he would support "universal health care through a Medicare for All program." In his response, Kennedy shifted the goalposts in a more moderate direction, redefining "single-payer" health care to mean something more like the Obama/Biden "public option" proposal. He said, "my highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody."
Kennedy Jr. has recently knocked Biden's immigration policies, criticizing him for not closing the border. "It's not racist or insensitive to say that we need to close our borders and have an orderly immigration policy. I would expand legal immigration to this country that's orderly, that makes sense for our country, but also that our borders are impervious," he said, according to the New York Post.
He also tweeted that he would change U.S. policy in Central America, including ending the "War on Drugs" and "neoliberal extraction of resources," which he said "create desperate conditions south of the border" that compel migrants to seek to immigrate to the U.S.
KENNEDY: I'm something old. I'm a Kennedy Democrat. I believe in labor unions. I believe in a strong, robust middle class. I believe in racial justice, in policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.
Q: I don't think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.
KENNEDY: Then why did he do the lockdowns? Lockdowns robbed $4 trillion from the middle class and the poor in this country and transferred it to the super rich. We created 500 new billionaires--a billionaire a day, every day.
Q: Do you think politicians did lockdowns, in order to enrich billionaires? That was the goal?
KENNEDY: If they cared about the middle class, they wouldn't have done it. They wouldn't have shut down 3.3 million businesses without due process.
[New Yorker Fact-check: The $4 trillion figure was likely an estimate for the price of the federal bailout. Many of the 500 billionaires rose up in other countries, especially China.]
On raising the federal minimum wage, Kennedy said he did not have a specific number in mind but that "people should have a living wage in this country. 35% of Americans are not making enough money to pay for basic human needs, and that means food, transportation and housing," Kennedy said on the podcast.
He has also expressed support for bolstering unions: "We need to build rebuild unions in this country, because it's one of the key ways we can counterbalance the domination of our government by corporate power."
KENNEDY: I'm not going to pick out people and say that they're evil, they should be cancelled, or whatever. I know what my values are. I believe in the same America that my father and my uncle believed in: an America without censorship; an America that fights for our Constitution; an America that is a moral authority around the world, that projects economic power around the globe rather than military violence--if I can get people to support that, I don't care if they're Republican or independent, or what they are.
Q: Somebody like Alex Jones has nice things to say to you; do you say, "Alex Jones, I don't want your support"?
KENNEDY: I'm not a cancel-culture guy.
Q: That's not cancel culture. That's a principled insistence that he's a bridge too far.
KENNEDY: That's not consistent with my political philosophy.
KENNEDY: No, I would not. I'm not going to raise taxes. I don't think that that's the right thing to do right now. I think we really need to stimulate our economy. Another thing that I'm going to do is to create is a program that my uncle, Ted Kennedy, and John McCain originally advanced in 2007, and then it was advanced by a number of civil rights leaders, including Andrew Young and a number of others for a whole lot of reasons, a very good idea, to make passport cards free. So one of the, you know, one of the big penalties against being working poor in this country is that a lot of the working poor do not have a federal photo ID. And under the Patriot Act, the banks [are required to] investigate your ID and they don't want to handle the small accounts from poor people.
KENNEDY: Economic advice or patriotic advice?
Q: No, about doing business in China.
KENNEDY: I'm not somebody who thinks that we should divide the world. Government policy should be about fostering, developing, nurturing the middle class in this country. I don't think we should cut off trade with China. I think some of the things that are being done for example, the programs to bring semiconductor--
Q: The CHIPS Act.
KENNEDY: In the CHIPS Act, I don't like the fact that we're getting subsidies to the richest companies in the world. I'd like to see more trying to bring the industry to home. I don't think we should be rattling the sabers with China.
[Wikipedia: The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in 2022, provides roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States.]
KENNEDY: Number 1, the policies on the war. I think it's very clear that this has little to do with protecting the Ukraine. It's more to do with the neocon ambition of deposing Vladimir Putin, which I think is very problematic. It's clear from Pres. Biden's direct statements that that is why he believes we should be in Ukraine.
Q: So, would you withdraw military aid to Ukraine?
KENNEDY: I would end the war. I would negotiate a peace.
Q: Would you allow a peace that allowed much of eastern Ukraine and Crimea to remain in Russian hands?
KENNEDY: The Russians had come to two different peace agreements, both of which were eminently reasonable. I consider the terms of the Minsk Accords fair. And that's what Russia already offered to sign.
[OTI FactCheck: The Minsk Accords would grant Donbas self-determination on independence from Ukraine, and would leave Crimea annexed to Russia].
"I abhor Russia's brutal and bloody invasion of that nation," Kennedy told the crowd. "But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s."
Kennedy has been a frequent critic of America's involvement in supporting Ukraine from Russia's invasion, which he has repeatedly referred to as a "proxy war" that he claims is being fought "all for the sake of U.S. (imagined) geopolitical interests."
"They wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion," Kennedy tweeted in May. "They only pretend to think it was unprovoked. They are lying to us, manufacturing consent for war."
KENNEDY: You change the tax code to make it more difficult for large corporations to accumulate thousands of houses. Here's a direct program: If you have a rich uncle who will co-sign your mortgage, you can get a much lower rate because the bank's basing it on his his credit rating rather than yours. So I'm going to give everybody a rich uncle, which is Uncle Sam, who will guarantee mortgages for single family first time single family home buyers at 3% interest. That will reduce the average price of mortgage by $1,000 a month. I will finance that not by increasing our debt, which I'm not going to do, but rather by selling tax free 3% bonds to finance it.
Q: I'm hearing shades of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in my head
KENNEDY: We have now surpluses in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and those institutions could tie into this program, but we need this program.
The strategy that allies have landed on is to focus on podcasts and alternative media. Kennedy believes the 2024 election could be "decided by podcasts," and he intends to use them to full advantage. "In the same way that my uncle realized that television was a good medium for him in 1960, and Trump discovered that he could communicate with these large groups of people on Twitter in 2016," Kennedy says, "I think podcasts are a good medium for me."
Over time, perceptions of Kennedy shifted from widely respected environmental crusader to conspiratorial outcast. Pharmaceutical companies were pushing harmful substances on children, he argued, and U.S. regulators were lying about it the same way they had about river pollution.
He joined a struggling nonprofit called the World Mercury Project in 2016 and rebranded it as Children's Health Defense, which became one of the country's largest anti-vaccination advocacy groups. It falsely claims that a variety of childhood illnesses are being caused by the ingredients in vaccines, as well as fluoride, acetaminophen, and 5G wireless technology. Kennedy gave speeches, wrote articles, and produced videos claiming that vaccines were "making our children dumber and giving them injuries." He saw the ensuing criticism from scientists and public-health agencies as confirmation that he was right.
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The above quotations are from Interviews and analysis of presidential primary hopefuls during 2023.
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