1 00:00:00,613 --> 00:00:07,260 Be in league with him still, so yeh we’re in more democratic times now and that’s a paradox 2 00:00:07,260 --> 00:00:11,622 because in one the elite is still just as powerful as it ever was, 3 00:00:11,622 --> 00:00:16,014 but the mass of the people are now becoming more and more powerful, 4 00:00:16,014 --> 00:00:18,364 and one day those graphs will cross. 5 00:00:18,364 --> 00:00:20,884 Let’s talk about ‘The Killing of Tony Blair’. 6 00:00:20,884 --> 00:00:23,763 Of course, the killing we’re talking about is financial killing. 7 00:00:23,763 --> 00:00:26,992 Blair was infamous for being a failed property speculator 8 00:00:26,992 --> 00:00:30,466 before he got into politics, he bought some properties… 9 00:00:30,466 --> 00:00:32,701 Bought at the top and sold at the bottom… 10 00:00:32,701 --> 00:00:35,572 …so how did this failed property speculator, how did he 11 00:00:35,585 --> 00:00:38,467 suddenly become so wealthy, what was his magic there? 12 00:00:38,467 --> 00:00:42,830 Well I think it’s a- by the way the title of the movie is a triple-entendre: 13 00:00:42,830 --> 00:00:47,153 Blair killed the Labour Party, killed a million people and is making a killing… 14 00:00:47,153 --> 00:00:49,584 In Iraq, you’re referring to? 15 00:00:49,584 --> 00:00:52,268 Yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. 16 00:00:52,268 --> 00:00:54,094 But the killing that he’s making- 17 00:00:54,094 --> 00:00:59,237 because he always believed in the profits rather than the prophets, Peace be upon them- 18 00:00:59,237 --> 00:01:05,666 and he is making a killing now by cashing in on the crimes that he committed earlier. 19 00:01:05,666 --> 00:01:13,277 And this is an incentive to, given by big capitalist corporations and brutal dictatorships, 20 00:01:13,277 --> 00:01:17,404 as an inducement to the existing crop of politicians. 21 00:01:17,404 --> 00:01:21,981 Today’s leaders can look forward to the kind of life of Riley 22 00:01:21,981 --> 00:01:25,899 that Tony Blair is now living, at least in financial terms. 23 00:01:25,899 --> 00:01:33,439 So it’s a good inducement to them to follow policies that don’t challenge the big-power 24 00:01:33,439 --> 00:01:37,222 and don’t challenge the financial power of the oligarchy. 25 00:01:37,222 --> 00:01:41,367 It seems like in politics that the goal used to [be] a crowning achievement, 26 00:01:41,367 --> 00:01:43,806 maybe be the Prime Minister, or the President of the United States, 27 00:01:43,806 --> 00:01:45,945 now it’s just something on your résumé, on your way 28 00:01:45,958 --> 00:01:48,107 to getting your real job that you really want, 29 00:01:48,107 --> 00:01:50,518 [whether you’re] Bill Clinton or Tony Blair. 30 00:01:50,518 --> 00:01:53,666 Barack Obama seems like a completely empty suit, 31 00:01:53,666 --> 00:01:58,224 just using the office to get to his real job, with real big bucks at the other end. 32 00:01:58,224 --> 00:02:01,580 That’s absolutely right, British Prime Ministers, indeed senior Ministers, 33 00:02:01,580 --> 00:02:07,809 used to retire with a title to the countryside and sedately, sagely 34 00:02:07,809 --> 00:02:11,430 give us their advice from time to time, usually with a speech in the House of Lords. 35 00:02:11,430 --> 00:02:14,101 Nowadays as you say there’s a revolving door; 36 00:02:14,101 --> 00:02:18,993 you come out of Downing Street, out of the Cabinet Office and into the corporate offices 37 00:02:18,993 --> 00:02:26,650 and in Blair’s case, onto the payroll of a series of dictatorships which become ever more laughable, 38 00:02:26,650 --> 00:02:28,389 the latest one being Mongolia. 39 00:02:28,389 --> 00:02:34,399 Mr Tony Blair is now the consultant to the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Mongolia, 40 00:02:34,399 --> 00:02:41,153 as well as Kuwait and many other countries that I should save for the documentary. 41 00:02:42,102 --> 00:02:45,033 So it’s a double-whammy really. 42 00:02:45,033 --> 00:02:49,196 We suffered from the bad policies that he followed whilst in office 43 00:02:49,196 --> 00:02:54,051 and he is now profiting mightily from those bad policies. 44 00:02:54,051 --> 00:02:58,102 So the man who lost money on a property in Islington, which was very hard to do, 45 00:02:58,102 --> 00:03:03,138 is now earning something like £25 million per year. 46 00:03:03,138 --> 00:03:08,510 This phrase ‘blood for oil’ which we heard during the Iraq War and Blair vehemently denied it. 47 00:03:08,510 --> 00:03:11,172 Yet if you look at his post-Iraq War track record, 48 00:03:11,172 --> 00:03:14,838 it seems pretty much his entire wealth derives from oil 49 00:03:14,838 --> 00:03:18,698 that some argue comes exactly from blood, or from war. 50 00:03:21,070 --> 00:03:22,542 Was this a case of… 51 00:03:24,079 --> 00:03:28,827 what’s done a lot is you’ll just spit back at somebody what they accuse you of being 52 00:03:28,827 --> 00:03:35,024 in the hope that they’ll somehow turn it around. Isn’t this exactly blood for oil? 53 00:03:35,024 --> 00:03:40,687 Well in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, of course Lady Macbeth looks at this damned spot, 54 00:03:40,687 --> 00:03:43,696 which all the perfumes of Arabia will not expunge, 55 00:03:43,696 --> 00:03:46,437 and I think that Blair has that spot. 56 00:03:46,437 --> 00:03:51,201 In her case it was a red spot, in his case it’s a black spot but stained with red. 57 00:03:51,201 --> 00:03:54,988 It’s oil, it’s banking, it’s the dictatorships that 58 00:03:55,001 --> 00:03:58,798 themselves have a Sovereign Wealth Fund because of oil, 59 00:03:58,798 --> 00:04:07,105 and he is literally raking it in and hiding it behind thick hedges of obscurity 60 00:04:07,105 --> 00:04:15,374 with offshore locations and a myriad, a labyrinth, of financial layers and protections. 61 00:04:15,374 --> 00:04:20,726 But we are on his trail and we intend to get to the bottom of his wealth, 62 00:04:20,726 --> 00:04:26,131 we want to count it and we want to adumbrate the sources of it. 63 00:04:26,131 --> 00:04:29,046 This project ‘The Killing of Tony Blair’, it’s on 64 00:04:29,059 --> 00:04:31,984 Kickstarter, people can go to the website right now, 65 00:04:31,984 --> 00:04:35,057 participate in underwriting and financing this project. 66 00:04:35,057 --> 00:04:37,972 So from what I’m hearing George, you’re going to be doing a little travelling, 67 00:04:37,972 --> 00:04:40,067 you’re going to be going to these countries, is that correct? 68 00:04:40,067 --> 00:04:44,007 Well we hope to get location; it depends partly on the budget. 69 00:04:44,007 --> 00:04:48,785 We’ve set £150,000 as the ultimate budget for this documentary. 70 00:04:48,785 --> 00:04:51,074 We need to raise £50,000 from Kickstarter. 71 00:04:51,074 --> 00:04:54,508 You know how it works: if you don’t raise the whole £50,000, you don’t get anything at all, 72 00:04:54,508 --> 00:04:57,952 so we need to reach £50,000 to kick-start the project. 73 00:04:57,952 --> 00:05:03,527 But the more budget we get the more travelling we can do to the scene of the crimes 74 00:05:03,527 --> 00:05:08,391 but we need library footage, we need people’s anecdotes. 75 00:05:08,391 --> 00:05:14,700 If you’ve got any pictures, or any video, or any testimony that you want to give 76 00:05:14,700 --> 00:05:19,361 about the killings of Tony Blair then we’d like to hear them. 77 00:05:19,361 --> 00:05:23,421 You can supply them to us and, who knows, they might make it onto the picture. 78 00:05:23,421 --> 00:05:27,032 By the way, everyone who gives on Kickstarter, even £5, 79 00:05:27,032 --> 00:05:29,041 will get their name at the end of the film, 80 00:05:29,041 --> 00:05:33,456 there forever as one of the people who made this documentary. 81 00:05:33,456 --> 00:05:34,340 Historical documentary! 82 00:05:34,340 --> 00:05:36,583 Yeh it could be a turning point. 83 00:05:36,583 --> 00:05:39,799 Fantastic. Let’s just talk about Blair again. 84 00:05:39,799 --> 00:05:45,248 One of the stories that I picked up on from the Financial Times, actually, 85 00:05:45,248 --> 00:05:49,763 the story was that Prince Bandar was in his office at 10 Downing Street 86 00:05:49,763 --> 00:05:53,053 and said that if he didn’t get the Serious Fraud Office in this country 87 00:05:53,053 --> 00:05:57,808 to call off the Slush fund scandal between British Aerospace and Saudi Arabia, 88 00:05:57,808 --> 00:06:02,408 that he could not guarantee that another 7/7 bus bombing wouldn't occur in London. 89 00:06:02,408 --> 00:06:06,000 So here you have Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia 90 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:11,096 threatening a sitting Prime Minister with an act of terror and he folded like a cheap tent. 91 00:06:11,096 --> 00:06:12,892 I mean that was outrageous! 92 00:06:17,343 --> 00:06:21,132 In this world, how does something like that happen 93 00:06:21,132 --> 00:06:26,509 where a Prime Minister is threatened in his office and not more is made of it? 94 00:06:26,509 --> 00:06:28,959 By a potentate elected by no one, 95 00:06:28,959 --> 00:06:33,543 one of the group presiding over the un-freest country in the world. 96 00:06:33,543 --> 00:06:38,898 This dictatorship of Saudi Arabia swaggers around the world threatening all sorts of people. 97 00:06:38,898 --> 00:06:42,852 There are stories circulating that Bandar is 98 00:06:42,865 --> 00:06:46,829 threatening other people with the same kind of thing, 99 00:06:46,829 --> 00:06:49,194 and I don’t know if it’s true, I wasn’t there, 100 00:06:49,194 --> 00:06:58,104 but I do know that Saudi Arabia is the source of a great deal of the Islamist extremism in the world. 101 00:06:58,104 --> 00:07:03,536 Their extreme Wahhabi ideology is the ideology of those 102 00:07:03,536 --> 00:07:06,867 who cut open people’s chests and eat their hearts of video. 103 00:07:06,867 --> 00:07:14,694 OK so terrorism is something that this country is trying to fight 104 00:07:14,694 --> 00:07:18,416 and yet there seems to be a remarkable disconnect here, 105 00:07:18,416 --> 00:07:23,150 because here they were threatened with an act of terrorism from a Saudi in 10 Downing Street, 106 00:07:23,150 --> 00:07:30,203 but then again we just had an incident where the partner of Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda, 107 00:07:30,203 --> 00:07:35,745 right here at Heathrow Airport, is held for 9 hours under the Anti-Terrorism Law. 108 00:07:35,745 --> 00:07:40,047 Bandar: he’s free. Bandar can walk away and just continue the Slush fund. 109 00:07:40,047 --> 00:07:43,252 Somebody’s a journalist: he’s a terrorist. 110 00:07:43,252 --> 00:07:46,010 You’re sitting in the Houses of Parliament right now 111 00:07:46,023 --> 00:07:48,792 for Bradford West. What was your reaction to that? 112 00:07:48,792 --> 00:07:52,548 Well I once asked David Cameron, quite recently: 113 00:07:52,548 --> 00:07:56,332 what’s the difference between the Al-Qaeda we’re funding in Syria 114 00:07:56,332 --> 00:07:59,427 and the Al-Qaeda that we’re fighting in Mali 115 00:07:59,427 --> 00:08:03,861 at the time the British and the French invaded Mali just a few months ago? 116 00:08:03,861 --> 00:08:08,329 And of course, answer came there none, for there is no answer. 117 00:08:08,329 --> 00:08:14,487 People who are blowing the whistle about crimes committed by the states 118 00:08:14,487 --> 00:08:18,093 like this one and by the United States are criminalised, 119 00:08:18,106 --> 00:08:21,722 hunted down- Bradley Manning got 35 years- 120 00:08:21,722 --> 00:08:28,075 whilst Bandar can threaten people with terrorism and walk down a red carpet 121 00:08:28,075 --> 00:08:31,541 back to his private jet at Heathrow to fly out. 122 00:08:31,541 --> 00:08:34,843 Maybe you can fill in some gaps in a story that I’m 123 00:08:34,856 --> 00:08:38,168 very intrigued with, particularly with Tony Blair. 124 00:08:38,168 --> 00:08:43,989 They went to Libya, they met with Colonel Gaddafi, they reintroduced him, 125 00:08:43,989 --> 00:08:50,036 they had a coming-out party after absolving him of the Pan-Am bombing situation, 126 00:08:50,036 --> 00:08:51,804 he’s going to re-join the community. 127 00:08:51,804 --> 00:08:57,337 Tony Blair then reintroduced his Sovereign Wealth Fund to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, 128 00:08:57,337 --> 00:09:01,116 who proceeded to blow it, who lost billions of that. 129 00:09:01,116 --> 00:09:04,193 And shortly thereafter was his comeuppance. 130 00:09:04,193 --> 00:09:10,487 So Tony Blair, seemingly working at that time as an advisor to JP Morgan, 131 00:09:10,487 --> 00:09:19,297 is using what I would call financial terrorism to create a political outcome in these regions 132 00:09:19,297 --> 00:09:22,337 and we’ve had this conversation before, 133 00:09:22,337 --> 00:09:27,482 I equate what these bankers do with their derivatives 134 00:09:27,482 --> 00:09:30,067 and their debt that they inject into these locations for 135 00:09:30,080 --> 00:09:32,676 a tremendous derivative, even in their own counties, 136 00:09:32,676 --> 00:09:39,852 as being predatory in a sense and that the bankers here in this country need to be prosecuted, 137 00:09:39,852 --> 00:09:47,137 either as a racket, or as predators on the system, not just getting these fines. 138 00:09:47,137 --> 00:09:51,400 They’re constantly getting these civil fines, they need to be criminally indicted… 139 00:09:51,400 --> 00:09:53,491 They need to be behind bars. I think that’s right. 140 00:09:53,491 --> 00:09:56,183 As long as fines are all that happens, 141 00:09:56,183 --> 00:09:59,905 then the corporations can absorb that, it’s kind of a tax right-off. 142 00:09:59,905 --> 00:10:06,581 But until bankers feel that cell door shutting after them 143 00:10:06,581 --> 00:10:09,960 then it will not discourage them from the kind of 144 00:10:09,973 --> 00:10:13,363 activities that you’ve been so ruthless in pursuing. 145 00:10:13,363 --> 00:10:18,212 And if I’m ever the Mayor of London, you’ll be my Finance & Economics Tsar, 146 00:10:18,212 --> 00:10:23,264 we’ll be sitting here and they’ll be jumping in the river on the other side. 147 00:10:23,264 --> 00:10:24,211 The odds of you becoming Mayor of London… 148 00:10:24,211 --> 00:10:26,568 I’m third favourite and I haven’t even declared! 149 00:10:26,568 --> 00:10:27,907 You’re 25/1 now! 150 00:10:27,907 --> 00:10:33,106 And there’s a mysterious blank spot at the bottom where the possibility of you running under Labour. 151 00:10:33,106 --> 00:10:36,505 It says that the market will be void if I’m the Labour candidate 152 00:10:36,505 --> 00:10:38,776 which has encouraged a lot of interesting speculation 153 00:10:38,776 --> 00:10:41,925 but the other government party, the Liberal Democrats, are 66/1 154 00:10:41,925 --> 00:10:47,074 so I’ve clearly got a better chance than them if I decide to run but if I did, 155 00:10:47,074 --> 00:10:51,344 part of the manifesto would be to clean up this place over the river, 156 00:10:51,344 --> 00:10:55,726 which is a nest of malfeasance and where white-collar 157 00:10:55,739 --> 00:11:00,132 criminals swan around in their Lamborghinis, 158 00:11:00,132 --> 00:11:05,556 on their big bonuses, pursuing all sorts of financial malpractice 159 00:11:05,556 --> 00:11:10,701 which has brought the country to the edge of ruin, and not just this country. 160 00:11:10,701 --> 00:11:12,906 But on the Gaddafi point: 161 00:11:12,906 --> 00:11:20,066 Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the favourite son of the late dictator was ensconced here in London. 162 00:11:20,066 --> 00:11:25,978 He was in and out of 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair even helped him with his PhD 163 00:11:25,978 --> 00:11:31,272 and the London School of Economics became, for a brief and inglorious period, 164 00:11:31,272 --> 00:11:35,833 the Libyan School of Economics when Saif was ensconced there and giving them money. 165 00:11:35,833 --> 00:11:42,459 Even the Green Room in the London School of Economics was effectively inspired by him. 166 00:11:42,459 --> 00:11:46,728 This grisly story of the Blairs and the Gaddafis 167 00:11:46,728 --> 00:11:52,734 will be an important centrepiece of the documentary that I am making. 168 00:11:52,734 --> 00:11:55,784 The Killing of Tony Blair: they can participate in 169 00:11:55,797 --> 00:11:58,858 funding it, and being a part of it, on kickstarter.com. 170 00:11:58,858 --> 00:12:02,078 Look it up. George Galloway, thanks for being on the Keiser Report. 171 00:12:02,078 --> 00:12:03,666 Thank you, Max, thanks always.