RFK Jr. Joins The Show (08/11)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. KFI AM 640. You're listening to the John Cobel podcast on the IHeart Radio app. KFI AM 640. More stimulating talk radio. I can't even put my headphones on. You know, I have no small motor control at all here. None. It is the John Cobalt Show. We're on from 3 to 6 in an hour, whatever we did. We'll be on the podcast, John Cobalt Show on Demand. We are live on YouTube. We are live on X. And you subscribe, become a member at YouTube.com slash at John Cobalt Show. And Thursday, a live stream. Thursday, we're doing a live stream from 11 to noon. We're thereabouts. We have a surprise addition to the program. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. is coming on via phone just after Denver's 530 News. And he's going to discuss a press conference he did with Scott Turner, who's the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and they were criticizing all of California's failures that have created. The massive amount of homeless in the streets, which they say is caused by all the drugs that people take, which is true. It is not this housing nonsense. It's drugs and mental illness. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. is going to talk about that because they're cutting off the funding. Turner, he's the one who froze the funding to Lhasa. Lhasa has taken over a billion dollars in taxpayer money since 2013, even though it's a total failure. The only government entity left giving money to Lhasa is Karen Bass's administration. Counties pulled out, federal government's pulled out. I think the state has cut dramatically. And Turner said despite billions in federal funding, homelessness in California has skyrocketed. Lassa has abused taxpayer dollars. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. He's going to come on with us to talk about all this. Because the federal government increasingly is coming in and trying to address all the out-of-control issues that Bass and Gavin Newsom have failed. We had Lee Zeldin on earlier on the show, and he talked about how he's acting like a local, like a local state assemblyman. trying to help people with their permitting issues and their insurance issues. And, you know, this is the stuff that the local politicians ought to be doing for the fire victims in Altadena and the Palisades. And they're simply not. They're failing at it. Gavin Newsom, I don't know if you saw it today, he was at some, it looked like one of those over 55 homes in Michigan. Because he was basically campaigning with that nutty communist El-Sayed.

And he had like 17 older people in front of him. That was the crowd that Gavin Newsom Drew. He's campaigning for president now. And nothing's built. Altadena, Palisades, very slow progress. And then you have this. And this just came out this story. Ashley Zavala. KCR, Channel 3 in Sacramento. California's high-speed rail project could run out of money as soon as December 2027. And project leaders are not being clear about the issue. This is from the Inspector General. Benjamin Netanyahu Belknap, he's the Inspector General for the High Speed Rail. Inspector Generals are great. They tend to tell the truth. Everybody ignores them. But they go on the record and at the news media would pay attention and amplify this repeatedly. Well, Benjamin Netanyahu Belknap says the original business plan that they put out earlier this year had major gaps in information. They came out with a second version, high-speed rail. That was still no good. He says the plan violates state law because it doesn't explain how they're going to pay for the things they want to do. Listen to this. Belknap said the business plan does not sufficiently emphasize that the authority will exhaust its current funding as soon as December 2027. The state has spent $18 billion of your money on this non-existent high-speed rail. But just to do, Merced to Bakersfield is $36 billion. And get this, the L.A. to San Francisco route would cost now $231 billion. Do you remember the original price tag? The original price tag, it was going to run from Sacramento to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Anahe, to San Diego. Those five cities, it was going to be $33 billion total. And it was going to be done by 2020. Here's the current state. Only L.A. to San Francisco, $231 billion, and they're not going to get Merced to Bakersfield done before 2034, and probably later, and everything is going to cost way more. The project was supposed to get a billion dollars a year from California's greenhouse gas emission fund. You know what that is? That's all the extra gas taxes we pay that no other state does. It goes into the fake greenhouse gas fund. The money's then supposed to finance high-speed rail, and there's no high-speed rail. So you're paying $5.50 a gallon, and there's no rail. There's no track. There's no train. They haven't even bought the trains. They haven't laid down any track. California state budget.

They just passed did not include any new money for the project. They're not even financing it from the government. I don't understand this. Why don't they stop? Why won't they stop? Oh, because they're all corrupt and they're stealing the money, especially the unions that are having their members do the fake work out in the fields. They are such criminals running high-speed rail. Listen to what Bell Knapp says. The authority has obscured basic facts about the project, hindering lawmakers' ability to provide effective oversight and creating obstacles to achieve changes it seeks that requires stakeholder agreement and legislative action. In other words, they're not, they're hiding what they're doing. They're not explaining anything. And so the legislature has no way to figure out what they ought to fund or if they should fund it. The business plan does not disclose the fact that the segment's going to be delayed at least until September 2034. Wow. Oh, here's another change in the plan. You know, they keep saying this high-speed railroad is going to go to Bakersfield to Merced, and the Mercedes station was going to be built downtown? No, it's not. The official plan now moves it out into the suburbs. Well, then how would you get downtown? Oh, you know, but it keeps going on. Gavin Newsom refuses to kill it. And Bucera's not going to kill it either. This is what's crazy. Steve Hilton will kill it. Xavier Becerra will not. I don't know. I think I'm going to vote for Xavier Becerra. Okay, good idea. Worst project in the history of the United States. There is no competitor for this. This is the most expensive, most botched public works project that's ever been created. And Gavin Newsom's been guiding this thing for the last eight years. He'd make a great president. He really would. It'd be wonderful. All right. We got, all right, we got whining Nithya Raman coming up in a clip because she got kicked off the running the homeless committee. Tell you about that when we come back. And then Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. He'll be on the phone as our guest after 530, Secretary of Health and Human Services, to talk about how the Trump administration not spending any more money on the homeless scam here in L.A. So big, big hour we still have. You're listening to John Cobalt on Demand from KFI AM 640. Can't find AM 640 live everywhere on the IHeart Radio app. We are on every day from 3 to 6. Boiseline for Friday, 877 Moist 86, 877 Moist 86. So you can rage away on the Moist Line. We use the talkback feature on the IHeart Radio app. Is it worth even discussing a Karen Bass, Nithya Raman Ramen poll? It's like asking a poll.

asking people whether you'd rather die of typhoid or cholera. Well, apparently, I guess the Bass administration or the Bass campaign did a poll. They surveyed 1,200 likely voters from July 22nd to the 28th. That was the week where there was a lot of bad news from the lineage fire. And when there was a release of how street homelessness had gone up significantly, and there was a whole week of, boy, Karen Bass is bad at her job. Karen Bass is a failure. But claims that she's got a four-point edge over Nithiaram in 3733. And it becomes 4135 if you include undecided voters who are leaning towards one candidate or the other. So depending on how you look at it, this poll claims got a four to six point lead. And it is the most depressing race today. This race is the most depressing I've ever seen in my life. Because I can't even make an argument, not even a tiny sliver of an argument for either one. Both are disasters. Both are proven disasters. Both are proven disasters on the most severe issue that we've been facing for 10 years when they've been in charge, bunch of that time, of that specific issue. Among other things. I mean, Karen Bass has really effed up everything else.

And she's got the luck, or maybe this was part of the plan. I mean, it's got to be why they, it's got to be why they did the ballot harvesting and stole the election from Pratt. Maybe Bass and Rahman were in on the whole deal. Maybe they're just pretending. Normally, my mind doesn't go those places, but honestly, Pratt, Caruso. How they'd be running in this environment now? And we ended up with ramen. And only because they rigged the vote with the homeless people voting, ballot harvesting with zombieed out drug addicts. And ramen gets in there. Now, Bass, I guess part of the theater is Bass has to pretend that she and Rahman are enemies somehow. So she arranged to have Ramen kicked off the chairmanship of the homelessness and housing council. Homelessness and housing committee. So Nithya Raman puts out a social media ad. To complain about it. Let's play it. I called for an audit of our homelessness programs in Los Angeles, and now have been removed as the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee. I might be getting punished for running against Karen Bass, but Angelinos are the ones who are paying the price for these political games. Stop, stop it there. She calls for an audit. She appropriates the money out of the homeless committee. She does. I heard Michael Monks and Chris Merrill talking about this today. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. Same thing, I guess. It was like $60 million. She appropriated out of her committee for this homeless project and it only housed three people. Three people for $60 million. A lot of the money's unspent. She wants an audit. She wants an audit. She's got $60 million sitting around for a year. Three people were helped by the program. She wants an audit, and that's why she got kicked off the committee. They assume no one's paying attention and nobody cares. They're just blathering insanity. Play some more. The mayor has blocked our independently elected city controller from doing an audit of her signature homelessness program inside safe, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of the public's money, and still we've seen homelessness go up citywide. But in my district, it went down by. Stop, stop. You approved all that spending. The mayor can't spend money on her own. The city council has to approve it. You voted for it. You approved it. She didn't vote against any of this.

Does she get to her belief in defunding the police, by the way? Does that come up in this ad? No. Play some more. But in my district, it went down by almost 50%. And we did that the hard way. Wait, hang a second. That's pretty rich. A woman who made the runoff because she had all these homeless nonprofit organizations rigged the election by having... Drug zombies fill out thousands of last minute ballots. We're supposed to believe that her homeless numbers went down. That's pretty good. I remind you that she came in third in the mayoral race, third, pushed over the top by an avalanche of Skid Row voters that the nonprofits had arranged to vote. They don't have to sign the ballot, right? They're too drugged out to sign the ballot. They just have to put an X. I'm not making this up. That's really how it works. Play some more. But in my district, it went down by almost 50%. And we did that the hard way. We did outreach. We matched people to beds. We got people indoors. That's the work that needs to happen across the entire city. Stop it, stop. Shut up. Yeah, house three people with $60 million. Good Lord.

All right, we come back. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., Secretary for Health and Human Services, he and the Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Scott Turner, Turner's been on our show. Well, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s going to come on because they did a media event today about how California has failed with all its homeless policies, and all this homelessness is a lot of it's caused by drugs. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. coming out to discuss things. You're listening to John Cobalt on, On Demand, from KFI, AM 640. KFI, AM 640, more stimulating talk radio. John Cobalt show. We're on from 3 to 6, and then in about a half an hour after 6 o'clock, whatever you missed today. And we had a lot going on. You could hear the podcast, John Cobalt Show, on demand. It's the same as the radio show. All right, let's get right to it. We've got Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. coming on with us over the phone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in town today. along with the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner. And we've had Mr. Turner on before. And we're going to talk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the federal government not putting up with all the wasted money that we send it to the homeless criminal operation here. Let's get Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. How are you? I'm good, John. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on. Tell me what your impression is of this whole homeless machine and all the billions of dollars it's spent and everything has gotten worse in the streets. What do you think is going on here? Yeah, I mean, I think it's been operated like a racket. And we, you know, today we drove past at Ramada in that... In 2019, it was bought for $2.5 million to serve as a homeless shelter, and there's still nobody in it. And meanwhile, we toured two faith-based facilities today, one of them in Los Angeles, which is a 600-bed facility, is treating, is the Dream Center, and it's... treating, you know, 600 men and women families, it treats them at a cost of $7,000 a year, or $7,500 a year. The county gets $185,000 a year. And the people at the Dream Center leave, they leave with a job, they leave with a year of sobriety. And they leave with money in the bank. And they have a tremendous success rate. And yet the county rent facilities are just a disaster. And then, you know, there's so much fraud in all of them. We just closed down an entire program in Minnesota because we expected to...

spend about $13 million a year on this program that provides housing to people with disabilities and to elderly people. The cost during the Biden administration went up to $200 million a year. And when we looked into it, the people who were running these facilities were not actually taking care of clients. They were spending the money on houses for themselves, on automobiles, fancy automobiles and luxury items and just stealing it. And because so much money it disappeared, we had to shut down the entire program, which shows that when the people who are stealing or committing fraud against HUD, against Medicaid, are not just stealing taxpayer money. They're stealing money from the people who desperately need help, who deserve to be able to take advantage of these programs. And they're the poorest people in our society, and that is who they're stealing from. To justify all the money that they spend, they'll insist that the drugs and the mental illness is not the cause of the problem. They need these billions to build more housing, which, of course, never gets built or takes forever. I think they're building housing for a million dollars a unit in some of these programs in L.A. Yeah. I mean, you know, the problem with my agency started with my predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who came into that agency. My agency, HHS, has a $2.2 trillion dollar budget. It's twice the size of the Pentagon. When he got there, there were only 80 people in the agency who were doing program integrity. So that's 80 people who are there whose job it is to make sure that none of that, $2.2 trillion, gets stolen every year. And we do 4 million transactions a day just at Medicaid. Four million, he said. Say if you can reconnect. He did it. 76 of them. So that when I came in, there was literally only six people in the entire agency doing program integrity. And that just gave permission to the fraudsters all across the country. And, you know, we've now closed down 8,000 auspices in Los Angeles. How do we, these are, you know, hospices are these facilities that are supposed to take care of people at the end of their lives. The way that we found out they were committing fraud is that none of the people in them were ever dying. The patients typically in a hospice last about three months. These people were living forever. And when we went down, we closed 5,000 of them down, and there was no complaints. Oh, nobody called because they all, they were just operations. They didn't have patients. They had patient numbers, and they were charging my agency $6,000 a month for every one of these patients, and it all happened because Xavier Piscera took the gatekeepers out of my agency. He also implemented a system called Pay and Chase.

So, John, when invoices come into my agency from doctors, from hospitals, from hospices, from durable medical equipment sales who say, okay, we just sold some equipment to a Medicaid patient, here's the bill, pay it. We know that a lot of those are fraudulent, and a lot of them we can tell when they get to our agency that they are highly likely to be fraudulent claims. If there's one claim from one doctor for $5 million for durable medical equipment in a six-week period, we know it's got to be fraudulent. You couldn't see that many patients. So there's ways that most of this can be detected before you pay. The Sarah changed the rule so that the policy. so that every invoice that comes into the agency gets paid, and then when you find out that it's fraudulent, you chase it and claw the money back, which of course never happens. So all of these systems were just completely dismantled. These systems for program integrity for fraud detection were dismantled when he was in there. And now we're living with the fallout from now. We're living with hundreds of billions of dollars being stolen from the American people every single year. Why would he do that? Why would he dismantle all the infrastructure that had been built up forever to catch fraud? You know, I ask people the careers at the agency, the people who were here during the Democratic administration. And they said that when he came in and they complained and said, hey, we're being raped over the cold by fraud. He told them, we don't do fraud detection anymore. I want you to focus on enrollments. In other words, signing up as many people as possible for these programs and signing up people who, you know, including people who illegally, who could not legally get the program, people who are undocumented. aliens, people who were already enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid in another state, people who were enrolled in Obamacare, people who had a million dollar home, they're not supposed to be getting Medicaid money. And so they were focused on all of the energy, what was directed toward enrolling as many people as possible into these programs, and none of it. was directed toward fraud detection. So he didn't care how much money was getting flushed away, just as long as the enrollment numbers were booked up. Exactly. I mean, I can't look into his head. I can only tell you what I know, which is the fraud detection apparatus of my agency was completely dismantled. Great. Sarah's leading by 25 points for governor now. This is what we're going to look forward to in California here for the next four years if he wins. Speaking of the governor, how much of this should have been stopped by Gavin Newsom or county officials or L.A. city officials? How much of it is it their responsibility? Well, it's their responsibility, but they have very little incentive to do anything.

Because the federal government, for now, you know, during Obamacare, the rule was changed when they did the Medicaid expansion. So that instead of paying, you know, 50 or 60% of Medicaid, the federal government, which was supposed to pay 50 or 60%, the state pays 40 or 50. Under the Medicaid expansion, the federal government pays 90%. You know, they're seeing all these federal dollars pour into the state. And at some point, you say, hey, we don't really care if this is being stolen. We're getting so much money in the state. And it's coming from the federal government. If we don't take it, some other state will. So let's not look too carefully at the transactions. So I think the temptation to just, you know, not block this huge flow of federal dollars into the state of California. blinded them to what they should do that was right. And, you know, John, our system of government was this, all of these regulatory programs, these entitlement programs, are based on the assumption that people are generally pretty honest. And nobody is out there trying to steal that people are going to behave honestly. Well, something's broken down now in our system where that's no longer true. And, you know, if you give people, if you leave the gate door, the lock open, people are going to come in and steal. And that is what happened. It was predictable. And, you know, it's terrible for our country. It's just terrible. I understand you have to go. I want to thank you for coming on, and I hope he can come on again and talk more about this, because this is one of the biggest issues that's killing the state. Yeah. All right. Good to talk to you, John. Good to talk with you. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.., and he is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And we'll have more. You're listening to John Cobalt on demand from KFI AM 640.

KFI, AM 640, more stimulating talk radio, John Cobalt show. And let me tell you're going to have the podcast released in just a few minutes shortly after 6 o'clock. We had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a few minutes ago. And if you're just joining us and you missed it, you ought to listen to it. He gave a good roadmap on what the incentive is. for all this money to get stolen and for Gavin Newsom not to do anything about it. He explained at a press conference today that they're cutting off the homeless money from the federal government to Lhasa because so much of it has been wasted. And so much of the Medicaid money has been wasted as well with the fake hospices. And he said there's no incentive for Gavin Newsom's government to track the waste because 90% of the money is federal tax money. It used to be 6040 or 50-50 between what the federal government pays and the state pays. Now it's 90-10. So they don't care. And progressives measure success by how many people they enroll in a program. That's what they brag about. That's what they run for office on. So at the same time that, you know, they've changed the formula where 90% of Medicaid money is federal money, so Gavin Newsom doesn't care. Xavier Becerra, who had Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s job, he told them we're not in the fraud catching business anymore. Fraud detection business. We're in the enrollment business. It matters how many people we sign up for all these programs. They bloated the rolls. They sent huge amounts to the state. And here, no one's looking at oversight. No one has any oversight in Washington for fraud, nor in Sacramento. So you have hundreds and hundreds of these fake hospices taking the money and running with it. Work same thing in the homeless industry. No oversight in Washington in the past. None in Los Angeles. So all these whack-a-dood-lorn profits say, hey, I got a program for the homeless. You know, give me $22 million. Okay, here. That's it. When there's a huge pot of money, this is human nature. Every bad person who can get access to the money will get access to the money and steal it. And there is no incentive on the part of a Gavin Newsom, a Xavier Becerra, a Karen Bass, to stop it. They're about bragging how many people they've enrolled. How many people join the program? I guess that gets them votes. For people who feel like the government should be spending money on all the poor people and the sick people and the elderly people. Except the money doesn't go to them. Like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just said, not only they're stealing from the taxpayer, in Los Angeles, they're stealing from all the drug-addicted mentally ill people who deserve the homeless money from government.

They deserve to have the money for their drug treatment and their mental health treatment and some kind of shelter, and they're not getting it. Because nonprofits are running off with it, just like the fake hospice businessman and Van Nuys are running off with the money. Xavier Becerra doesn't care. Bass doesn't care. Gavin Newsom doesn't care. You never hear any of them discussing it in the detail that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just did. Never. Not their money, tax money. They don't care about solving the problem. Their friends are running all these nonprofits. And then they kick back campaign donations to the likes of Bass and Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra. And they're so sure that Democratic voters will vote for them no matter what, Xavier Becerra's not even campaigning anymore. Bass was so unworthy about getting reelected that her Inside Safe program is a massive failure and she doesn't care either. Street homeless is up. Okay, fine. Let's roll with it. I'll get elected anyway. In a case somebody like Spencer Pratt sneaks into the system, well, they have a backup plan. What did Gavin Newsom call it? Break glass in an emergency. He had a plan? The election didn't go right for governor. Well, that break glass plan is the ballot harvesting, is the vote rigging, is siding up homeless people by the thousands. All the drug zombies. That's the great glass in an emergency. Anyway, listen. We also had Lee Zeldin on. He runs the Environmental Protection Agency, and he's been doing a tremendous amount of work he and his staff trying to help out the people in the Palisades and Altadena. So listen to that as well in the podcast. All right? So we had Lee Zeldin on. We had Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. on, and we will see you tomorrow. We got Michael Crozier with the news live in the KFI 24-hour newsroom. You've been listening to the John Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the show live on KFI AM 640 from 3 to 6 p.m. every Monday through Friday. And of course, any time on demand on the IHeart Radio app. KFI AM 640. More stimulating talk. What if your favorite way to unwind could actually reward you? With misplay, it can. Stop scrolling social media for nothing. Mistplay lets you earn points just for discovering and playing mobile games. Redeem them for gift cards from brands you love simply for doing what you already do to relax. Download Mistplay today and make your downtime more rewarding.