Be in league with him still, so yeh we’re in more democratic times now and that’s a paradox
because in one the elite is still just as powerful as it ever was,
but the mass of the people are now becoming more and more powerful,
and one day those graphs will cross.
Let’s talk about ‘The Killing of Tony Blair’.
Of course, the killing we’re talking about is financial killing.
Blair was infamous for being a failed property speculator
before he got into politics, he bought some properties…
Bought at the top and sold at the bottom…
…so how did this failed property speculator, how did he
suddenly become so wealthy, what was his magic there?
Well I think it’s a- by the way the title of the movie is a triple-entendre:
Blair killed the Labour Party, killed a million people and is making a killing…
In Iraq, you’re referring to?
Yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But the killing that he’s making-
because he always believed in the profits rather than the prophets, Peace be upon them-
and he is making a killing now by cashing in on the crimes that he committed earlier.
And this is an incentive to, given by big capitalist corporations and brutal dictatorships,
as an inducement to the existing crop of politicians.
Today’s leaders can look forward to the kind of life of Riley
that Tony Blair is now living, at least in financial terms.
So it’s a good inducement to them to follow policies that don’t challenge the big-power
and don’t challenge the financial power of the oligarchy.
It seems like in politics that the goal used to [be] a crowning achievement,
maybe be the Prime Minister, or the President of the United States,
now it’s just something on your résumé, on your way
to getting your real job that you really want,
[whether you’re] Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.
Barack Obama seems like a completely empty suit,
just using the office to get to his real job, with real big bucks at the other end.
That’s absolutely right, British Prime Ministers, indeed senior Ministers,
used to retire with a title to the countryside and sedately, sagely
give us their advice from time to time, usually with a speech in the House of Lords.
Nowadays as you say there’s a revolving door;
you come out of Downing Street, out of the Cabinet Office and into the corporate offices
and in Blair’s case, onto the payroll of a series of dictatorships which become ever more laughable,
the latest one being Mongolia.
Mr Tony Blair is now the consultant to the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Mongolia,
as well as Kuwait and many other countries that I should save for the documentary.
So it’s a double-whammy really.
We suffered from the bad policies that he followed whilst in office
and he is now profiting mightily from those bad policies.
So the man who lost money on a property in Islington, which was very hard to do,
is now earning something like £25 million per year.
This phrase ‘blood for oil’ which we heard during the Iraq War and Blair vehemently denied it.
Yet if you look at his post-Iraq War track record,
it seems pretty much his entire wealth derives from oil
that some argue comes exactly from blood, or from war.
Was this a case of…
what’s done a lot is you’ll just spit back at somebody what they accuse you of being
in the hope that they’ll somehow turn it around. Isn’t this exactly blood for oil?
Well in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, of course Lady Macbeth looks at this damned spot,
which all the perfumes of Arabia will not expunge,
and I think that Blair has that spot.
In her case it was a red spot, in his case it’s a black spot but stained with red.
It’s oil, it’s banking, it’s the dictatorships that
themselves have a Sovereign Wealth Fund because of oil,
and he is literally raking it in and hiding it behind thick hedges of obscurity
with offshore locations and a myriad, a labyrinth, of financial layers and protections.
But we are on his trail and we intend to get to the bottom of his wealth,
we want to count it and we want to adumbrate the sources of it.
This project ‘The Killing of Tony Blair’, it’s on
Kickstarter, people can go to the website right now,
participate in underwriting and financing this project.
So from what I’m hearing George, you’re going to be doing a little travelling,
you’re going to be going to these countries, is that correct?
Well we hope to get location; it depends partly on the budget.
We’ve set £150,000 as the ultimate budget for this documentary.
We need to raise £50,000 from Kickstarter.
You know how it works: if you don’t raise the whole £50,000, you don’t get anything at all,
so we need to reach £50,000 to kick-start the project.
But the more budget we get the more travelling we can do to the scene of the crimes
but we need library footage, we need people’s anecdotes.
If you’ve got any pictures, or any video, or any testimony that you want to give
about the killings of Tony Blair then we’d like to hear them.
You can supply them to us and, who knows, they might make it onto the picture.
By the way, everyone who gives on Kickstarter, even £5,
will get their name at the end of the film,
there forever as one of the people who made this documentary.
Historical documentary!
Yeh it could be a turning point.
Fantastic. Let’s just talk about Blair again.
One of the stories that I picked up on from the Financial Times, actually,
the story was that Prince Bandar was in his office at 10 Downing Street
and said that if he didn’t get the Serious Fraud Office in this country
to call off the Slush fund scandal between British Aerospace and Saudi Arabia,
that he could not guarantee that another 7/7 bus bombing wouldn't occur in London.
So here you have Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia
threatening a sitting Prime Minister with an act of terror and he folded like a cheap tent.
I mean that was outrageous!
In this world, how does something like that happen
where a Prime Minister is threatened in his office and not more is made of it?
By a potentate elected by no one,
one of the group presiding over the un-freest country in the world.
This dictatorship of Saudi Arabia swaggers around the world threatening all sorts of people.
There are stories circulating that Bandar is
threatening other people with the same kind of thing,
and I don’t know if it’s true, I wasn’t there,
but I do know that Saudi Arabia is the source of a great deal of the Islamist extremism in the world.
Their extreme Wahhabi ideology is the ideology of those
who cut open people’s chests and eat their hearts of video.
OK so terrorism is something that this country is trying to fight
and yet there seems to be a remarkable disconnect here,
because here they were threatened with an act of terrorism from a Saudi in 10 Downing Street,
but then again we just had an incident where the partner of Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda,
right here at Heathrow Airport, is held for 9 hours under the Anti-Terrorism Law.
Bandar: he’s free. Bandar can walk away and just continue the Slush fund.
Somebody’s a journalist: he’s a terrorist.
You’re sitting in the Houses of Parliament right now
for Bradford West. What was your reaction to that?
Well I once asked David Cameron, quite recently:
what’s the difference between the Al-Qaeda we’re funding in Syria
and the Al-Qaeda that we’re fighting in Mali
at the time the British and the French invaded Mali just a few months ago?
And of course, answer came there none, for there is no answer.
People who are blowing the whistle about crimes committed by the states
like this one and by the United States are criminalised,
hunted down- Bradley Manning got 35 years-
whilst Bandar can threaten people with terrorism and walk down a red carpet
back to his private jet at Heathrow to fly out.
Maybe you can fill in some gaps in a story that I’m
very intrigued with, particularly with Tony Blair.
They went to Libya, they met with Colonel Gaddafi, they reintroduced him,
they had a coming-out party after absolving him of the Pan-Am bombing situation,
he’s going to re-join the community.
Tony Blair then reintroduced his Sovereign Wealth Fund to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs,
who proceeded to blow it, who lost billions of that.
And shortly thereafter was his comeuppance.
So Tony Blair, seemingly working at that time as an advisor to JP Morgan,
is using what I would call financial terrorism to create a political outcome in these regions
and we’ve had this conversation before,
I equate what these bankers do with their derivatives
and their debt that they inject into these locations for
a tremendous derivative, even in their own counties,
as being predatory in a sense and that the bankers here in this country need to be prosecuted,
either as a racket, or as predators on the system, not just getting these fines.
They’re constantly getting these civil fines, they need to be criminally indicted…
They need to be behind bars. I think that’s right.
As long as fines are all that happens,
then the corporations can absorb that, it’s kind of a tax right-off.
But until bankers feel that cell door shutting after them
then it will not discourage them from the kind of
activities that you’ve been so ruthless in pursuing.
And if I’m ever the Mayor of London, you’ll be my Finance & Economics Tsar,
we’ll be sitting here and they’ll be jumping in the river on the other side.
The odds of you becoming Mayor of London…
I’m third favourite and I haven’t even declared!
You’re 25/1 now!
And there’s a mysterious blank spot at the bottom where the possibility of you running under Labour.
It says that the market will be void if I’m the Labour candidate
which has encouraged a lot of interesting speculation
but the other government party, the Liberal Democrats, are 66/1
so I’ve clearly got a better chance than them if I decide to run but if I did,
part of the manifesto would be to clean up this place over the river,
which is a nest of malfeasance and where white-collar
criminals swan around in their Lamborghinis,
on their big bonuses, pursuing all sorts of financial malpractice
which has brought the country to the edge of ruin, and not just this country.
But on the Gaddafi point:
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the favourite son of the late dictator was ensconced here in London.
He was in and out of 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair even helped him with his PhD
and the London School of Economics became, for a brief and inglorious period,
the Libyan School of Economics when Saif was ensconced there and giving them money.
Even the Green Room in the London School of Economics was effectively inspired by him.
This grisly story of the Blairs and the Gaddafis
will be an important centrepiece of the documentary that I am making.
The Killing of Tony Blair: they can participate in
funding it, and being a part of it, on kickstarter.com.
Look it up. George Galloway, thanks for being on the Keiser Report.
Thank you, Max, thanks always.