Saturday, July 30, 2011

Don Quixote on Capitalism, or Getting Screwed by our Government

For quite some time, we had thought the entire political theater of the debt ceiling would be solved at the last minute because the financial sector, which after all runs our country, would force its raising because of the injury to it that would be done otherwise.

However, it seems that there is enough money in the treasury to either pay the interest on our many loans (meaning the government’s loans) or to pay the salaries of the servicemen and the social security checks of the citizens.  There can be little doubt what would be decided.

Once the financial sector is satisfied, it has no further interest in the welfare of anyone else.

Of course, if we are wrong, we welcome the alternative.

At any rate, all of this is being caused by right-wing interests and this brings up a very important question:  Is Capitalism Working for You?  It is quite clear that the overwhelming majority of Americans are unhappy with their present economic status, or more importantly, standard of living.  It is also quite clear that this fact exists precisely because of our current economic system: Capitalism. 

For some reason, it is considered blasphemy to even consider this fact, much less say or write it.  Yet it is so obvious and blatant that the brainwashing done in our educational system, media, and general discourse has managed to accomplish this feat.  This is certainly a tribute to the power of propaganda and the general lack of critical thinking present.

Nevertheless, here is a fairly straightforward and easy to comprehend presentation of the problems inherent in it as it stands.  All of the postings we have made of Nobel Prize winners in Economics seem not to have made any difference on the subject, and it is doubtful whether this will have any effect either.

So, like Don Quixote, we once again attack the windmill:


Richard Wolff: Debt Showdown is "Political Theater" Burdening Society’s Most Vulnerable

Reddit_20Email_20Addthis_20
Debt_button
Republicans have agreed to a vote today on a budget plan they say will cut the deficit $917 billion over 10 years. The move sets the stage for a showdown against unified Democratic opposition in the Senate and threats of a White House veto. To discuss the debt talks and economic austerity worldwide, we’re joined by Richard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of several books, including "Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It." "This is political theater in which two parties are posturing for the election coming next year," says Wolff. "To put it in perspective, the number of times the government has raised the debt ceiling since 1940? Ninety, almost twice a year. This is a normal, automatic Guest:
Richard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and visiting professor at New School University. He hosts a weekly program on WBAI 99.5 FM called Economic Update every Saturday at noon. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

JUAN GONZALEZ: After weeks of infighting, Republicans have agreed to vote today on a budget plan they say will cut the deficit $917 billion over 10 years. The move sets the stage for a [showdown] against unified Democratic opposition in the Senate. Independent Senators Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders are promising to block it. White House spokesman James Carney warned yesterday that time is running out to reach a compromise. Carney also said Treasury Department officials may soon have to decide who will get government checks and who won’t, if the Treasury loses borrowing authority.
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: Among the many obligations we have, the 80 million checks that the Treasury Department alone issues, payments that it issues every month, of the 1.2 billion payments the federal government makes in a year, those include veterans’ payments, Social Security payments, disability payments. They include the bills to contractors, small businesses, big businesses, that do work with the government, the people who manufacture the ammunition that we send to our troops in Afghanistan. And choices then have to be made. And it’s a Sophie’s choice, right? Who do you save? Who do you pay? That’s an impossible situation that this country has never faced, and should never face, if Congress does what it was elected to do and does its job.
AMY GOODMAN: White House spokesperson Jay Carney.
To discuss the debt talks, we’re joined by Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, visiting professor here in New York at New School University, also hosts a weekly program on WBAI called Economic Update.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: So we are watching this dance in Washington. The House is going to vote today around the issue of the debt ceiling. The Senate says it’s dead in the water. President Obama is vowing to veto. What does this all mean?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, basically, your word "dance" is perfect. This is theater. This is political theater in which the two parties are posturing for the election coming next year, using this occasion—to put it in perspective, the number of times the government has raised the debt ceiling since 1940? Ninety, almost twice a year. This is a normal, automatic procedure. Every president, Republican and Democrat, has asked for it. When they ask, typically, the representatives of the other party say, "Well, you’re not managing the government real well," and then they vote for it. And that has happened over and over again. So what you’re seeing is a decision, politically, to make it theatric, out of what otherwise would have been a normal procedure.
A hundred years ago, the Congress said, in order to control the government and not to allow businesses and rich people to be able to invest in government money easily, we’re going to have the government limit how much can be borrowed. That was the idea. Now it became automatic, as we became a debt society—excuse me—and so, suddenly, the Republicans basically decided to make theater, to run their campaign a little early this year, and to slow it all down and make a big to-do.
The world expects that this will have to be undone in a few days or weeks. They’re kind of amazed to see it being stretched like this, this old, normal procedure. And the assumption is that the politics in the United States has become as dysfunctional as our economic situation. And so, that’s the danger, that this rigmarole, this theater, is really a sign that normal life in the United States has been disrupted on a scale that people haven’t seen before.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But when you say that the Republicans decided to make theater out of it, it seems to me that the Democrats also have participated in the process by making this seem like it’s—Armageddon will occur unless we get this done by August 2nd. And in essence, at times it seems almost like the Obama administration is seeking this deadline to start moving in a more centrist direction economically that it has wanted to do, but has been absent the type of crisis that it would be able to convince the American public that it needs to do.
RICHARD WOLFF: There are certainly signs of that. And they’re very troubling to many of us who are economists, right, left and center, because basically, the Democrats have said, "We will do massive cuts. They just won’t be as massive as the Republicans want." And then they will appeal to the American people in the hope that Americans will choose the lesser evil: the Democrats who won’t cut so terribly compared to the Republicans.
And the Republicans are appealing to folks that are very upset by the economic situation, don’t know who to be angry at. In the American way, they get angry at the government. It’s a little bit amazing, if you take a step back. The overwhelming majority of people who’ve lost our jobs in this crisis have been fired by private employers. The overwhelming majority of people who have been thrown out of their homes have been—have had that happen because a private bank has gone to court to get that to happen. And yet, the American people have this tendency, built into our culture, to leap right over the person who’s actually done you the damage and to blame the government. And so, the government, in general, and the particular government of Mr. Obama, is the target, and the Republicans are playing on this. And that’s their ploy.
And the Democrats are saying, "Well, we’re not so bad. We’re going to tax the rich, just a little, and the corporations a little less. And that’s something the Republicans won’t do. And we will protect your Social Security, at least more than..."
But you’re right. In the process, everything moves over to massive cutting. And besides the morals of that, it’s economically crazy. In an economic situation where recovery is very poor, very uneven, to have the government cut back, the way that spokesman for the White House just told us, is to make an economic situation that’s bad worse. So you see a kind of political game being played at the cost of worsening the underlying economic situation. And for the world, that suggests a society that’s not working.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama on Monday night, when he addressed the nation, reiterating his call for what he described as a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction involving spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The first approach says, let’s live within our means by making serious historic cuts in government spending; let’s cut domestic spending to the lowest level it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower was president; let’s cut defense spending at the Pentagon by hundreds of billions of dollars; let’s cut out waste and fraud in healthcare programs like Medicare, and at the same time, let’s make modest adjustments so that Medicare is still there for future generations; finally, let’s ask the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their breaks in the tax code and special deductions. This balanced approach asks everyone to give a little, without requiring anyone to sacrifice too much. It would reduce the deficit by around $4 trillion and put us on a path to pay down our debt. And the cuts wouldn’t happen so abruptly that they’d be a drag on our economy or prevent us from helping small businesses and middle-class families get back on their feet right now.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Shortly after the President addressed the nation on the budget crisis Monday night, House Speaker John Boehner responded in a televised address.
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: The President is adamant that we cannot make fundamental changes to our entitlement programs. As the father of two daughters, I know these programs won’t be there for them and their kids unless significant action is taken now. And the sad truth is that the President wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today. This is just not going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Wolff, economist, author, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It, I did actually hear the reference to war by President Obama, but it’s rarely, rarely raised by Democrats or Republicans. One of your colleagues, Joe Stiglitz, said, over time, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost $5 trillion.
RICHARD WOLFF: There are a number of things that are not on the table. And frankly, I’m amazed that the President refers to what he does as a "balanced approach." First of all, the war and its enormous costs, off the table in any serious way. Going back to a serious taxation of corporations and of the rich in America, just, for example, at the scale that they were taxed in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, off the table.
Basically what’s being done is to suggest that now, after a "recovery," in quotations, that has only recovered the stock market and corporate profits and bank reserves, that has done nothing about unemployment and foreclosure—we haven’t had a balanced economic arrangement in this country for years. So, suddenly we’re going to be balanced in what’s coming next. That’s a strange kind of logic. Why is there not facing up to the war, the fact that you’re not taxing the rich? And perhaps the worst, we’re at a crisis because we have an economic system that hasn’t worked well, and the government bailed out banks and corporations by using public money. That was done to help them. It hasn’t helped many other folks. So now is not the time to do balance. Now is the time to correct the imbalance that has built up over all these years. And I think that would be where the President really ought to start.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But you do argue, contrary to some other liberal economists like Paul Krugman, that the deficits are a major problem and that the increasing deficit spending of the U.S. government has to be brought under control. So that would seem to indicate that your main push would be to obviously cut war spending, but also to raise taxes significantly.
RICHARD WOLFF: The most amazing thing to me is that we talk about fixing a government budget that’s in trouble, and we don’t talk about the revenue side in a serious way. That is an amazing thing. If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.
Let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home. If you go back to the 1940s, here’s what you discover, that the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. If you compare that to today, here are the numbers. For every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents. That is a dramatic change that has no parallel in the rest of our tax code.
Another example. In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.
So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.
AMY GOODMAN: And the argument that you give the money to the corporations and to the banks, and they will help people? They are the generator of jobs?
RICHARD WOLFF: The Republicans say it, and President Obama has said it repeatedly. He is going to provide incentives, he said, for years now. He is going to provide inducements and support for the private sector to put people back to work. We have a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. That’s what it’s been for the last two years. That policy has not worked. If corporations were going to do what the President gave them incentives to do, they would have done it. They’re not doing it. There’s no sign they’re going to do it. You have to face: that policy didn’t work.
What’s the alternative? Well, we don’t have to look far. Roosevelt, in the 1930s, the last time we faced this kind of situation, went on the radio in 1933 and 1934, and he gave speeches. And in those speeches, he said the following: if the private sector either cannot or will not provide work for millions of our citizens, ready, able and willing to work, then the government has to do it. And between 1934 and 1941, the federal government created and filled 11 million jobs.
The most amazing thing in the United States is not that we are not doing it. The most amazing thing is, there’s no bill to do it, there’s no discussion to do it. The president of the country never refers to it, keeps telling us—and the Republicans do the same—that the private sector is where we should focus our expectations. The private sector has answered: "We are not going to hire people here. We’re either going to hire no one, because we don’t like the way the economy looks, or we’re going to hire people in other countries, because they pay lower wages there." That’s a response of the private sector taking care of itself. It’s not a responsible way to run a society.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And one issue that you raised, in terms of how the corporations and bank profits have recovered tremendously, but—and many of these companies are sitting on huge piles of cash, that rather than invest in new machinery or bring in new workers, they’re just sitting on their money, and presumably investing it, because they’re not going to put it in at the bank rates or CD rates, so they’re obviously investing the money that they have, rather than create those jobs.
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, even more interesting, and maybe a bit of a shock to folks who don’t follow this, what the corporations are doing when they hold back the money—because it’s not profitable for them to hire—in large part, is they lend it to the United States government to fund these deficits. The United States government refuses to tax corporations and the rich. It then runs a deficit. It spends more than it takes in, because it’s not taxing them. And here comes the punchline. It then turns around to the people it didn’t tax—corporations and the rich—and borrows the money from them, paying them interest and paying them back. If the United States wanted to stimulate our economy in an effective way—
AMY GOODMAN: Pay even tax-deductible interest.
RICHARD WOLFF: Right, also. But if the government really wanted to do something, go get the money from them, stimulate, which will help them, and if you tax them to do it, you wouldn’t have a national debt. You wouldn’t run a deficit. We’re running a deficit because the people who run this society would like us to deal with our economic problems, not by taxing those who have it, the way we used to, but instead by endlessly borrowing them. And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt. And they want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but we’re going to come back. Lots of people are sending us questions. They’re tweeting them in. They’re sending it to us on Facebook. You can go to facebook.com/democracynow or twitter.com/democracynow. We want to hear from you. We’re talking to Richard Wolff, who’s at New School University here in New York. His new book is _Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It." Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Richard Wolff. His book, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. And people are sending us in questions. There is, as Richard Wolff says, an enormous hunger to understand all this. Eli Rivers on Facebook asks, "Given how the masses are getting continually and increasingly financially punished for events they had little or nothing to have caused, is it reasonable to assume that there will be major political upheavals in the near future? It seems we are almost at a breaking point." Professor Wolff?
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I think the—in a sense, that’s coming here in the United States, your previous guest explaining the gaps in wealth among the people, becoming more and more extreme. The signs are everywhere of a society like ours polarizing in a way that is going to undercut assumptions about what it means to be an American, expectations about realizing an American Dream. Those things are falling away, and people have to face that, and they’re upset. I think part of what we call the Tea Party is simply an expression, not so much of this or that ideological persuasion, but of a level of upset about economics and the future for their own children, that makes people look somewhere for something.
Europe also, I think, shows us the future. In Europe, where people are more organized, in trade unions, in socialist, communist and other political parties, there are vehicles that these institutions provide for public anger and public disagreement to be voiced in a reasonable and consistent way. In all the major countries of Europe, not just Greece, Portugal, Ireland and those that are in trouble, but in France and Germany and so on, there have been massive public actions in the streets showing that people do not want, to use one of the slogans in France, do not want the costs of an economic crisis to be borne by the mass of people who didn’t cause it and who have already suffered from it, and that has to stop. And that is shifting European politics. And while we don’t have the level of organization of people in this country that they do, I do think we will build them again, we will rebuild them from what they were before, because there has to be a change from the very direction that the questioner asks. And I’m sure that’s coming.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But in Europe, you have the remarkable situation that the more conservative parties are being pressured by the street to adopt more conciliatory policies in terms of dealing with the crisis, whereas in the United States—
RICHARD WOLFF: Going the other way.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —the more liberal parties are being—are seeing no pressure from the street, are increasingly moving to the right, in terms of how they see the need to deal with the crisis.
RICHARD WOLFF: It’s a wonderful case study. The German example is probably the best one—the biggest economy in Europe, the most important, run by a woman now named Angela Merkel, who runs that society. She did a remarkable thing over the last two months. She said there will be no bailout of Greece, unless banks are made to pay a part of the cost. Other governments in Europe didn’t have the courage. Why is this woman, a conservative, wanting to make sure the banks pay? Because she lost the last three bi-elections, and the critics of her are saying, "Your political career is over if you don’t stop making everyone in the society pay, except those who, A, caused this crisis, and, B, have been bailed out by the government to this point." So she actually changes. And I think that’s a sign that the pushback from masses of people, which will take many different forms, is already underway there and will come here.
AMY GOODMAN: Why are the people in the United States so different?
RICHARD WOLFF: I think it’s the question of organization. Over the last 50 years, we, the collective American people, have let the organizations that express mass concerns about economics atrophy. We’re at the end of a 50-year decline of our trade union movement. We don’t have the kinds of political parties we used to have in this country and that were very powerful in this country. And so, we don’t have the vehicles to articulate, express and bring political force to the way people feel. And so they go wherever there’s a little bit of organization—Tea Party—even if it’s a little strange and a little outside their frame, because it’s something. I think the message of other people will be, if we can form the kinds of organizations that articulate these positions, there are a lot of people out there ready, willing and able to become part of that.
AMY GOODMAN: This is another question from Facebook. Steve Cipolla asks, "Does it continue to make sense to refer to U.S. economic policy in isolation? Isn’t the real long-term threat to economic (and political) stability the persistence of increasing global income inequality?"
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, but we are still dealing with corporations that have their bases, most of them, here in the United States. Are they more global than ever? Yes. Is that a serious problem? Absolutely. You know, 30, 40 years ago, we spoke about corporations moving production jobs out of the United States. Ten or 15 years ago, we began to talk about outsourcing, moving white-collar jobs out. The most recent addition to that is the decision of corporations, as they look around the world, to say, you know, the growth of our market, the growth of demand, it’s in Asia, it’s in Latin America, it’s in parts of—it’s not here. The American people are exhausted. Their wages are going nowhere. We have high unemployment. And the fact is, no one is going to lend them much more money because they’re tapped out. So they’re not a growing market.
So you see American corporations literally focused, for production and for consumption, elsewhere. That means they’re going to take care of themselves in the world. And if we don’t want to be left behind, if we don’t want the United States to become a backwater, then the freedom of corporations to do what they want has to be reined in. And that’s a difficult issue for Americans to confront and deal with. And we live in an ideology in which we’re supposed to believe that what corporations choose to do will magically be the best for all of us. It hasn’t worked that way. That’s why we are where we are. Basic change is the order of the day.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in other regions of the world, that change is occurring. We’ve covered quite extensively here on Democracy Now! the changes in Latin America, where actually the income and the wealth gap is shrinking in the past decade for the first time in the memory of the political establishment of Latin America as a result of all of the socially oriented governments that have come to power.
RICHARD WOLFF: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: It’s a completely different path from what’s going on here in the United States.
RICHARD WOLFF: And I think it also speaks to our situation, because before that happened, before you had Evo Morales, before you had Chávez, before you had—and whatever you think of their particular policies, you had an upswelling of people saying the status quo that has got us into this dead end is not tolerable. And they developed new organizations. They rebuilt old organizations. And suddenly, basic changes in policy, which reined in the power of private enterprise, which said that capitalist enterprises are not the be-all and end-all of how to run a society, those kinds of movements attracted millions of people, gained political power. And there really is no reason to believe that our society is immune or unable to do, in its own way and its own traditions, something similar.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to ask you about another question Brian Clifford asks on our Facebook page. "In the current moment, people in liberal democratic states seem to have internalized capitalism as a natural and unquestionable order. How does the left rupture such subjectivities?"
RICHARD WOLFF: Good question. You know, again, it’s our history. For 50 years, it has been unacceptable politically in the United States to ask what is basically a straightforward question. We have a particular economic system. It’s called capitalism. We have every right as a society to ask of that system, is it working? Is it working for us? Do the benefits and the costs balance themselves out in a way that says we want to keep the system, or that says we want to change the system, or that says we ought to look for an alternative system? We’ve been afraid to ask that question. We’ve been afraid to have public debates. That’s the legacy of the Cold War. We can’t afford anymore to not do that. We have to do as the questioner says: raise the question.
As it is put in a very powerful slogan in Germany by a new party that now gets 12 percent of the national vote, here’s their slogan—it’s in Germany: Can Germany do better than capitalism? And their answer is yes. And that has forced a conversation about this system, its limits, its strengths and weaknesses. That’s long overdue in the United States. And one of the results of this crisis, and now of this governmental paralysis, is to give a strong impetus to asking those questions. And that doesn’t mean accepting the alternatives of the past. The old efforts of going beyond capitalism had strength, but they also had horrible weaknesses. We will learn from that, as human beings always have. And we can forge a country out of an opening of the debate about this economic system. And I want to be part of that, and I think the American people are ready and interested in doing it, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us. Richard Wolff, an economist, just back actually from Europe, but teaches here in New York at New School University. His book is called Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.



Creative Commons LicenseThe original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Friday, July 22, 2011

MURDOCK AND ISRAEL






Illustration: From Kieth Tucker of www.whatnow.toons on the Murdock Empire.

 

MURDOCK AND ISRAEL

Or
Two asses in one panty




The subtitle comes from an Arabic expression meaning “virtually the same,” among other things.  It does not imply that one is married to the other.

            We have never willfully even used the term “Murdock” as we do not use the adults only filter.  Sure, we have used some terms such as “fuck,” “shit,” and “piss,” but we never sunk to that level of obscenity – until now.  We have been impressed with the way the British hold their officials accountable and conduct investigations.  In our country, we have not had that degree of intensity since Sam Ervin and the Watergate investigation (although that was actually more about Nixon’s hatred of the privileged than any break-in).

            We told you that we would be following the flotilla to Gaza.  Below the discussion of Murdock is a discussion of and report on the flotilla and also a new Israeli law that is so fascistic than even Mr. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League has attacked it.






British PM Cameron Refuses to Apologize for Murdoch Scandal, But Acknowledges BSkyB Takeover Talks

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has returned to the United States as his media empire faces a growing number of challenges over the phone-hacking scandal that’s led to a number of arrests in Britain and prompted an investigation here in the United States. British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared before an emergency session of Parliament on Wednesday to address the scandal. Cameron refused to apologize for hiring Andy Coulson, a former Murdoch employee who recently served as Cameron’s communications chief at Downing Street, but admitted that he had talked to Murdoch executives about News Corp.’s attempt to take over the satellite company BSkyB. [includes rush transcript]
British Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Opposition leader Ed Miliband, addressing the Murdoch scandal before the British Parliament.
Related stories

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

JUAN GONZALEZ: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch returned to the United States on Wednesday as his media empire is facing a growing number of challenges across the globe. Here in the United States, Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey urged the Justice Department and the FBI on Wednesday to investigate whether a U.S.-based subsidiary of News Corp. illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens. It’s been alleged that employees of a Murdoch-owned advertising company hacked into the website of a competitor called Floorgraphics 11 times between 2003 and 2004. Meanwhile, Murdoch faces at least two shareholder lawsuits in the United States. The independent directors on the board of News Corp. have hired former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey and former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White. News Corp. has also hired a prominent attorney in the United States specializing in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
AMY GOODMAN: In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron appeared before an emergency session of Parliament Wednesday. He refused to apologize for hiring Andy Coulson, a journalist at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal that’s rocked Britain’s press. Up until January, Coulson served as Cameron’s communications chief at Downing Street. Then he was arrested.
PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON: I have said very clearly that if it turns out Andy Coulson knew about the hacking at the News of the World, he will not only have lied to me, but he will have lied to the police, to a select committee, to the Press Complaints Commission and, of course, perjured himself in a court of law. More to the point, if that comes to pass, he could also expect to face severe criminal charges. I have an old-fashioned view about "innocent until proven guilty." But if it turns out I’ve been lied to, that would be a moment for a profound apology. And in that event, I can tell you I will not fall short.
ED MILIBAND: It’s not about hindsight, Mr. Speaker. It’s not about whether Mr. Coulson lied to him. It is about all the information and warnings that the Prime Minister ignored. He was warned, and he preferred to ignore the warnings. So that the country can have the leadership we need, why doesn’t he do more—why doesn’t he do more than give a half-apology and provide the full apology now for hiring Mr. Coulson and bringing him into the heart of Downing Street?
AMY GOODMAN: Opposition leader Ed Miliband responding to British Prime Minister David Cameron. During Wednesday’s session of Parliament, Cameron also admitted he had talked to Murdoch executives about News Corp.’s attempt to take over the satellite company BSkyB. He was questioned by Labour MP Dennis Skinner.
DENNIS SKINNER: As prime minister, did he ever discuss the question of the BSkyB bid with News International at the meetings that they attended?
PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON: I never had one inappropriate conversation. And let me be clear. Let me be clear. Let me be clear. I completely—I completely took myself out of any decision making about this bid.
Whereas Rebekah Brooks was invited six times a year to Number Ten Downing Street under both the former prime ministers, she hasn’t been invited to Number Ten Downing Street by me. Now, of course, I have set out—the great contrast—the great contrast is I have not—I have set out all of the contacts and meetings that I’ve had, in complete contrast to the party opposite. And I can say—I can say this to the honorable gentlemen: I have never held a slumber party or seen her in her pajamas.
AMY GOODMAN: That was British Prime Minister David Cameron. In a moment, we will talk with Nick Davies. He is the reporter who has broken the Murdoch media scandal wide open. Back in 30 seconds.

Creative Commons LicenseThe original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Murdoch Empire "Pummeled" by Phone-Hacking Scandal Exposed by Guardian Journalist Nick Davies

To talk more about the phone-hacking scandal and what it reveals about the Rupert Murdoch media empire, we speak with the British journalist who has been most responsible for exposing the widening story. Nick Davies has been covering the phone-hacking case at The Guardian newspaper with 75 stories over the past three years. He has been described as Britain’s one-man Woodward and Bernstein, a comparison to the legendary Washington Post reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. Just over two weeks ago, Davies revealed the Murdoch-owned News of the World had illegally hacked into the phone of the missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance. "The Milly Dowler story was fantastically powerful… But I never foresaw this extraordinary chain reaction of emotion, which just pummeled the entire Murdoch camp," Davies says. "Within three days, it reached a point where nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s ally anymore. For years, the opposite has been the case, that nobody could been seen to be Murdoch’s enemy." [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Nick Davies, longtime Guardian reporter who exposed the phone-hacking scandal.
Related stories

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links


Related Democracy Now! Stories

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, now joining us from the newsroom of The Guardian, is the reporter who has broken the media Murdoch—the Murdoch media scandal wide open. He is Nick Davies, award-winning investigative journalist at The Guardian in London. Nick Davies, welcome to Democracy Now! Well, did you ever think that the—though you’ve been covering this for quite some time, that your report on the hacking of the murder victim Milly Dowler’s voicemail by the News of the World would shake the Murdoch empire to the extent that it has?
NICK DAVIES: No. So, I’ve been working on this thing for three years, very slowly parceling out the truth. I mean, I think I’ve done 75 stories on it. But the Milly Dowler story was fantastically powerful. I mean, I knew when I filed it that it was the most powerful story we had done so far. But I never foresaw this extraordinary chain reaction of emotion, which just pummeled the entire Murdoch camp. And really very rapidly, within three days, it reached a point where nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s ally anymore. And that’s a really, really extraordinary thing in this country, because for years the opposite has been the case, that nobody could be seen to be Murdoch’s enemy. It’s kind of like having a bully in the school playground. And once the bully has beaten up a few people, everybody else in the playground recognizes that the bully is there. The bully doesn’t even have to do anything particularly serious. All the other kids tiptoe around. And that means governments and police forces and other newspapers have all been tiptoeing around Murdoch, frightened to say anything against him. And this one story about this 13-year-old girl, at the end of this long sequence of stories, just broke through and changed the whole dynamic.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Nick Davies, many of us here in the United States who watched the hearings this week were really surprised at the extent to which the members of Parliament really were dogged in their questioning and fairly confrontational in their questioning. Could you explain to us the degree of change that’s occurred among these MPs versus how they treated the Murdoch empire in the past?
NICK DAVIES: OK, you look at it this way. For the last two or three years, while we’ve been trying to get this story out, there’s been a maximum of four members of Parliament who were willing to stand up and talk about it. That’s out of a total of about 630.
Take as an example, there’s a guy called Chris Bryant. He’s been very good on this. Back in March 2003, he was a member of one of those parliamentary select committees. And he had in front of him, as witnesses, Rebekah Brooks, the then-editor of The Sun, previously editor of the News of the World, and her close friend and fellow editor, Andy Couslon, who’s the guy who goes to work for David Cameron. Way back there in March 2003, Chris Bryant asked a brave question. He said to Rebekah, "Have you ever paid the police for information?" And she, not considering the impact of her reply, said, "Yes, we have paid the police in the past." Now this was dynamite. You’re not supposed to admit to paying bribes to police officers. OK, that was March.
In December 2003, the Murdoch press exposed Chris Bryant. They accused him of what is in their ghastly moral framework a crime, which was that he was gay. And they published a photograph of him wearing a skimpy pair of underpants. They did that to humiliate that man, that politician, that elected politician, to punish him for daring to ask a difficult question and provoking a difficult answer. And that is a microcosm of why most of the rest of the 630 elected MPs stayed quiet and why the police go quiet and the news organizations go quiet. The Murdoch organization deals in power. And part of that power is about frightening people.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Davies, on Monday, on the eve of the Murdochs testifying, Sean Hoare, a former reporter with News of the World, who helped blow the whistle on the Murdoch-owned paper, was found dead in his home. Hoare had been the source a New York Times story tying the phone hacking to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who would later become the chief spokesperson for Prime Minister David Cameron—Coulson arrested as the scandal broke open. Hoare discussed his allegations against Andy Coulson in an interview last September.
SEAN HOARE: I have stood by Andy and been requested to tap phones, OK? Or hack into them and so on. He was well aware that the practice exists. To deny it is a lie, is simply a lie.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Sean Hoare, found dead in his home. The police immediately said it was not suspicious. Nick Davies, you knew Sean Hoare. Can you talk about what happened? Do you believe it was suspicious? And what is his significance?
NICK DAVIES: Well, first of all, there has always been a submerged network of former News of the World journalists who have assisted me and other people at The Guardian and the guys at the New York Times. Where Sean distinguished himself was that he was the first to come out on the record. And in doing that, he showed real bravery. And he did this in the New York Times, not The Guardian. Real bravery because of the intimidation which the Murdoch organization uses. And specifically if you’re a journalist and you come out and speak out against this organization, you’re losing any prospect of employment in the biggest media organization in the country. Sean did it. OK.
Now, I got to know him reasonably well, and he was a really, really—he was a good guy, had wonderful stories to tell. He dies this week. I’m afraid that unless somebody comes up with some evidence to contradict me, the sad fact is that Sean, who was many years younger than me, died because his body was ruined by alcohol and cocaine and ketamine. And in the background, the reason why he consumed quite so much alcohol and cocaine and ketamine and all the rest of it is because there was a long period of time when Murdoch’s newspapers paid him to do that. So, the way he put it to me was, "I was paid to go out and do drugs with rockstars." And he was a show business correspondent, so he went out with a lot of very famous rockstars and ingested massive quantities of alcohol and drugs. And Sean was a great guy. He had enormous bounce to him. So he made no bones about it. He had, you know, enormous fun doing it. He enjoyed doing it. But looking back, he could see that it had ruined his body. He had become very, very ill. His liver was in a terrible state. He said to me, "My liver is so bad, the doctors tell me I must be dead already." So, a kind of black joke. And so, I am afraid that his body caught up with him, and he died. And it’s very tempting for outsiders to say, "Well, that can’t be a fluke. That can’t be a coincidence." But unless somebody comes up with something I haven’t heard of, it was just a coincidence.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of—
NICK DAVIES: And if you were going to kill him, you would have killed him a year ago, before he started talking.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of what he was saying, pointing the finger at Andy Coulson?
NICK DAVIES: Yes, when he went on the record with the New York Times, it was very important. He was the first journalist to come on the record and say, "Andy Coulson definitely knew about this, firsthand. I promise you that that’s the case." And he kept on saying it, like the interview with you. He was really good. Because it was easy then for the Conservative Party, which was employing Andy Coulson, to deploy their members of Parliament to go out and smear Sean. They said, "Oh, well, he took drugs. You can’t believe him." Your spot—there’s absolutely no logic in that; that’s just a smear. So they gave him a good, old smearing.
And then the police, Scotland Yard, who were still in the phase when they were absolutely not interested in seeing the truth, they went around and interviewed him. But as soon as they come into the room, instead of saying, "OK, you’re an important witness," they said, "You’re a suspect. And anything you say could be used against you." So Sean used foul language and invited them to go. But he was good. He stood by his guns. I really liked him.
You know, it’s easy to look at an organization like the News of the World and see its ruthless invasion of privacy, its lust for destroying people’s lives in order to make money, and assume that everybody within it is as bad as the organization. But in fact there were lots of individuals in there who worked there, smelled the smell, and walked out and left it. And there’s a lot of good people who have helped us along the way.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Guardian reporter Nick Davies, who broke this Murdoch media scandal wide open. By the way, that interview of Sean Hoare was done by the BBC. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Nick Davies, I’d like to ask you about two other things that were kind of overshadowed in the hearings with the Murdochs and with Rebekah Brooks. One was the testimony of Sir Paul Stephenson, the now-resigned head of Scotland Yard, and the other was a press statement that was put out by the law firm that the Murdochs—that had supposedly—had hired and which held many of the documents that are now raising many major questions. First of all, about Sir Paul Stephenson, one of the shocking things in his testimony was that 10 out of the 45 employees of the press office of Scotland Yard were former employees of News of the World. Could you talk about this incestuous relationship between Scotland Yard and the News Corporation properties in England?
NICK DAVIES: OK, so if you see this in context, the reality of life in this country for some decades has been: you can’t run a government and you can’t run a police force unless you are on close, friendly terms with the Murdoch organization. So, there are all sorts of connections between the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard—that’s biggest police force in the country—and News International, which owns Murdoch’s newspapers in this country. And so, the fact that ex-journalists were being employed by their press office is part of that picture. But there’s a whole set of connections.
And to me, what’s so revealing about this story is what—the sequence is this, you see? You have News of the World journalists going out there breaking the law, routinely, and they’re allowed to get away with it. But then they make a terrible mistake: they hack into the voicemail of the one group of people who are more prestigious or powerful than the Murdochs. That’s the royal family. They get caught hacking Prince William’s phone. So, finally, the police have to come in and do something, like their job. But at that point, when the police have the option of gathering evidence to show how much crime was being committed by Murdoch’s people, they chose not to. They did a little job on the royal family as victims. They sent the royal correspondent of the paper to prison. They sent the investigator to prison. And the rest, of all the evidence that they collected during that inquiry, they didn’t properly investigate, because they didn’t want to get into a fight with that powerful organization. And then, you see the seriousness of that, that they were exempted from normal law enforcement just because they’re so powerful. Really, really wrong.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the issue of the law firm? Because the same day that the Murdochs testified, the law firm put out a statement that they would like to be released from their lawyer-client privilege to be able to set the record straight about things that were being said about them. And the importance of this law firm and the records that they kept, supposedly not even letting the Murdochs know of what was in it?
AMY GOODMAN: And now, apparently, the gag has been lifted.
NICK DAVIES: OK, so, just to understand the narrative, the chronology, back in 2007, there’s a trial. The royal correspondent and the inspector go to prison. Those two guys come out, and the royal correspondent, in particular, says, "You sacked me, and I want some compensation." And he then says, "Look, I know everything that was going on in your newspaper. And if you don’t give me decent compensation, I’m going to blow the whistle on you." So News International then take this collection of emails and send it to a firm of lawyers. The firm of lawyers look at them and then write a letter, which says, "There’s no evidence in these emails that anybody knew that the royal correspondent was breaking the law." And you’ll see that’s a very, very narrow statement of denial.
What has now emerged is that those same emails included all sorts of evidence of criminal activity, including the bribing of police officers. So when the Murdochs, James and Rupert, gave their evidence to the select committee, they said, "Well, we didn’t know that was in there. This law firm should have told us that there was evidence of crime in all these emails. Don’t blame us. Blame the law firm." The law firm is saying, "We want permission," which I think they’ve now got, "to publish the instructions which we were given by Murdoch’s organization."
Now, I don’t know what those instructions are, but the implication is that they were told to look through the emails and report only on the very narrow question, "Do these emails contain evidence that the royal correspondent was instructed to hack royal voicemail?" And because they weren’t asked whether also there was an orgy of other criminal activity revealed, they didn’t. So, they’re going to throw the ball back at the Murdochs, you see? We’re in that cover-up phase, who was responsible.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get to actor Hugh Grant, who secretly recorded a reporter of News of the World admitting to phone hacking. He’s now suing the Metropolitan Police over their potential involvement in the hacking cases. Speaking on the BBC, Hugh Grant recounted his conversation with the tabloid reporter.
HUGH GRANT: By sheer coincidence, I broke down in the middle of Kent in my car. It’s a long story, but basically a guy got out of a car the other side of the road, started taking pictures of me. He was Paul McMullan, this ex-News of the World features editor. And I was swearing at him, etc. And anyway, I finally got talking to him. He started boasting about how my phone had been hacked and all the dirtiest tactics of the News of the World and about their relationship with the police and about their relationship with five successive prime ministers. And I was revolted and astonished.
And then I went back a few months later to the pub he now runs in Dover and pretended to be dropping in for a pint. And I bugged him. It just seemed like symmetry. And I got him talking again about all these things, and I published them all in the New Statesman. And one of the things he told me—
BBC REPORTER: And what did he—what did he admit?
HUGH GRANT: Well, all the things I’ve just said, that—you know, how extensive and what an industrial-scale phone hacking went on at the News of the World, particularly under Andy Coulson; how that it wasn’t just the News of the World, it was all the tabloids; and how money regularly passed hands between News International and officers at the Metropolitan Police; how Margaret Thatcher was the first prime minister to realize that it’s very hard to get elected in this country without the backing of the Murdoch press, so she was the first one to become an undignified sycophant to that organization, to that media tycoon, where a pattern has been followed by every single prime minister since, including this one. And he did—when I asked him, because I had heard a rumor—I said, "And do you think the News of the World hacked the phones of the family and friends of the little girl’s murdered at Soham?" He said, "Yes, I think that almost certainly happened."
AMY GOODMAN: That was actor Hugh Grant. He said that McMullan admitted to the hacking going on, the phone hacking, not only at News of the World, but other newspapers. So let’s take it from there, Nick Davies. You’ve been on this story now for years. What is left to expose? What do you think was most important that came out of the parliamentary hearings? What wasn’t asked? And where are you headed now?
NICK DAVIES: That was a lot of questions. OK, so, what remains to be exposed? So, what Hugh Grant says there is correct, first of all, that the criminal activity was going on in lots of other newspapers in Fleet Street. Whether or not we get to expose that depends on whether or not we can actually find evidence to prove it, because if all you do is to state it without being able to produce evidence, they will deny it. So, that’s one whole chunk of stuff.
There’s another whole thing about whether or not this story has a U.S. end to it. And I would say it wouldn’t be surprising if it turned out that Murdoch journalists visiting the United States had done this kind of thing. It wouldn’t be surprising if Murdoch journalists permanently based for his news organizations in the States had done these kind of things. But we need to be careful, because it is all about evidence. And I have a bit of a worry at the moment that one of the tabloids over here a few days ago, the Daily Mirror, ran a big front-page story which implied that victims of 9/11 had had their phones hacked by Murdoch journalists. Now, at the moment, I am not aware that there is any evidence anywhere to support that. And if at the end of the current FBI inquiry they come up empty and say, "Well, we can’t find the evidence," then you can bet that the Murdoch crew will use that to try to discredit the entire story. And it does worry me that the Daily Mirror shot off too early. And so, that’s a worry as to whether or not—but in general terms, I would say it’s highly likely that evidence could be produced.
And the other interesting thing is this story breaking overnight, which is whether or not the Murdoch people were using private investigators to do illegal things on the commercial, not on the journalistic, side of their operation. Were they engaged in industrial espionage, for want of a better word? So there’s at least three different ways for this story to keep breaking.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the impact politically on the Prime Minister, Cameron, and the impact on Scotland Yard?
NICK DAVIES: Well, so, the impact on Scotland Yard has been absolutely huge. You know, the commissioner has resigned. The assistant commissioner, who was responsible for the job, has resigned. They face an internal police inquiry, which is likely to throw up more dirt than a judicial inquiry, which is going to focus in on the implications of their far-too-cozy relationship with Rupert Murdoch and their failure to enforce the law. I mean, there’s a lot of damage being done.
Insofar as Cameron is concerned, it’s a slightly grayer picture. Clearly it’s doing him political damage. Will the story reach the point where he’s actually forced to leave office? I have never thought it would. But the temperature is rising. There’s an interesting story breaking about how, when David Cameron, as prime minister, hired Andy Coulson, formerly of the News of the World, to be his media adviser, he failed to put him through the normal level of vetting. Now that’s a strange thing to do. You would think that that was part of the routine. You’re going to be allowed into the Prime Minister’s office. You’re going to see the most secret paperwork, take part in the most secret meetings. You have to be fully vetted. But he was vetted up to only a sort of medium level. What was that about? That begins to look like somebody took a decision not to look too deep, in case they came up with a reason which wouldn’t allow them to hire him. And you understand, in the background, the reason they feel they have to hire him is they have to have the Murdoch organization on side. Otherwise, they can’t run the country. And therefore, if you can have a Murdoch man in your office, that establishes the connection. So that’s what tempts Cameron to make a terrible mistake. But we haven’t got there yet. We do not have, at the moment, evidence which would force the Prime Minister out of office.
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Davies, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning investigative journalist for The Guardian, speaking to us from The Guardian’s offices in London. We will link to all of your articles. Thanks so much.

Creative Commons LicenseThe original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

After Thwarting Flotilla, Israeli Navy Seizes Lone Gaza-Bound Ship that Eluded Greek Authorities

Earlier this week, three Israeli missile ships and seven commando boats intercepted a French ship attempting to reach the Gaza Strip. The ship, Dignité-Al Karama, was the sole representative of the original 10-strong international aid flotilla hoping to break the blockade on Gaza and express support for Palestinians living under occupation. At least 150 soldiers were sent to sea early Tuesday morning to prevent the 10 civilian activists, the three crew members and the three journalists on the flotilla from reaching Gaza’s port. Fifteen passengers were arrested, prevented from seeing their lawyers, and sent for deportation. We speak with Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass, one of the few journalists who was aboard the ship. Hass is also the one of the only Israeli journalists to have spent several years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz correspondent.
Related stories

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Israel, where three missile ships and seven commando boats intercepted a "freedom flotilla" trying to breach the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip earlier this week. The French boat, Dignité-Al Karama was the sole representative of the original 10-strong flotilla hoping to break the blockade on Gaza and express support for Palestinians living under occupation. At least 150 soldiers were sent to sea early Tuesday morning to prevent the 10 civilian activists, the three crew members and three journalists on the flotilla from reaching Gaza’s port. AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli defense spokesman, Captain Barak Raz, said the boat had been boarded peacefully and was towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
CAPT. BARAK RAZ: After boarding the boat, which we did in a very professional manner, we ensured the safety of everybody on board. Everything appeared to be OK. They were given food and water. And right now the boat is being led toward the port of Ashdod.
AMY GOODMAN: After the boat was intercepted, 15 passengers were arrested and prevented from seeing their lawyers. Mahmoud Abu Daf, who heads the End of the Siege Committee, condemned the boat’s seizure and subsequent arrests.
MAHMOUD ABU DAF: [translated] We condemn the occupation’s act of seizing the Dignity ship and forcing it to go to the Ashdod port. We consider this a political and military piracy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by one of the only journalists who was aboard the ship. Amira Hass is with Ha’aretz. She’s the correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She’s the only one of the Israeli journalists to have spent years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.
Amira, welcome to Democracy Now! Describe what happened on the Dignité, on the boat.
AMIRA HASS: Good morning.
Some 60 miles away from Gaza, we got the signal from an Israeli warship asking where we were heading to. One of the—one on board said, "To Gaza." Then they said, "It’s illegal. It’s not allowed." The person—it’s Professor Vangelis Pissias, the Greek—tried to explain that this is a mission of peace and solidarity. There are no arms, no cargo, just wishing to reach Gaza. And they were replied again by, "No, this is not legal, or not allowed." Immediately then, all communication was jammed. We could not call anymore. We could not get calls anymore. The internet did not work.
And soon after, we saw four commando boats, very quick, very fast boats, approaching us. Masked men were aiming their rifles at us. They were, of course, in uniforms, IDF uniforms. They were aiming all sorts of guns that I don’t even know how to name them. There were two cannon—two of them had—each of them had a cannon, a water cannon. Then, three more were added to the four. They distanced a bit, then returned.
At around 2:00, they approached, started to use the water cannon, and shouted something. One of on board, Dror Feiler, who is an Israeli, shouted back in Hebrew. Another activist, Claude Léostic of France, said, "This is—we are on the way to Gaza. This is international water. You have no right to impound us." And yet, they managed to enter on board.
It was not violent as the former flotillas or the boats that were in past years, when they attacked people physically. But the very act, of course, is violent, the very act of—imagine 10 vessels, three warships and seven gunboats, attacking this small bucket. We looked like a bucket rocking in the sea. This was very violent. But physically, we were spared what—the fate that was the one of the Mavi Marmara.
AMY GOODMAN: Amira, can you explain how it was that the—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah?
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how it was that this boat, the only one of the 10 of this flotilla—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —made it out of Greek waters, when all the others, like the U.S.-flagged _Audacity of Hope, which we covered with reporters on board, were not able to make it out? How did they escape the Greek authorities, who were congratulated by the Israeli authorities for keeping the others?
AMIRA HASS: Because their port of origin was Corse, a French port in Corse, the island of Corse. And so, the Greek authorities could not use all their bureaucratic tricks which they used on the other boats in order to prevent them from leaving.
AMY GOODMAN: This was Corsica?
AMIRA HASS: Still, they were trying. Still, the—they left—on the 25th of June, they left Corse. Then they stayed in the high sea for almost—for more than a week. Then they’re waiting for all the other boats. Then they waited near Crete. Then they entered one of the ports of Crete. Then they managed to get some—also with difficulty, some permits by the Greek coastal guard. The only reason is that it did not originate from Greece. All the rest were subject to very harsh Greek tricks, of course by order of the Israeli government. There is no doubt about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the purpose, what the people on board the bucket, as you described it, the boat, that did get taken in to Ashdod—what their purpose was in challenging the blockade?
AMIRA HASS: The purpose was, of course, to accomplish the mission, even though it was already in Lilliputian measures—to complete the mission or to show the determination of people, not only of those 10 who were on board, of 10 activists, but of the entire group. And as—I have spent about a month with the activists, because at the beginning I was together with the Tahrir, I was staying with the people on Tahrir, the Canadian boat, which had some other delegations. And I’ve learned not only about these 10, but about the majority of the participants, that—in this flotilla, in this very flotilla, that they were really—really are motivated by, I would say, very clear emancipatory values and ideals and personal history of each person, not only in the Palestinian issue, in the Palestinian focalism in freedom, but in different issues that concern equality and rights and freedom. Many on the Canadian boat are involved in the fight for rights of First Nations. There are feminists, of course. There are people who are involved in—people from Australia who are involved in their struggles there against mistreatment and exploitation of refugees. So this was a very clear message of the whole flotilla. This emancipatory message was very clear for me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Amira—
AMIRA HASS: But at a certain moment, when the—yes?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Amira, if you can, I would like you to stay on as we bring in another guest.

Creative Commons LicenseThe original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

After Thwarting Flotilla, Israeli Navy Seizes Lone Gaza-Bound Ship that Eluded Greek Authorities

Earlier this week, three Israeli missile ships and seven commando boats intercepted a French ship attempting to reach the Gaza Strip. The ship, Dignité-Al Karama, was the sole representative of the original 10-strong international aid flotilla hoping to break the blockade on Gaza and express support for Palestinians living under occupation. At least 150 soldiers were sent to sea early Tuesday morning to prevent the 10 civilian activists, the three crew members and the three journalists on the flotilla from reaching Gaza’s port. Fifteen passengers were arrested, prevented from seeing their lawyers, and sent for deportation. We speak with Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass, one of the few journalists who was aboard the ship. Hass is also the one of the only Israeli journalists to have spent several years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz correspondent.
Related stories

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

Related Links

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Israel, where three missile ships and seven commando boats intercepted a "freedom flotilla" trying to breach the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip earlier this week. The French boat, Dignité-Al Karama was the sole representative of the original 10-strong flotilla hoping to break the blockade on Gaza and express support for Palestinians living under occupation. At least 150 soldiers were sent to sea early Tuesday morning to prevent the 10 civilian activists, the three crew members and three journalists on the flotilla from reaching Gaza’s port. AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli defense spokesman, Captain Barak Raz, said the boat had been boarded peacefully and was towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
CAPT. BARAK RAZ: After boarding the boat, which we did in a very professional manner, we ensured the safety of everybody on board. Everything appeared to be OK. They were given food and water. And right now the boat is being led toward the port of Ashdod.
AMY GOODMAN: After the boat was intercepted, 15 passengers were arrested and prevented from seeing their lawyers. Mahmoud Abu Daf, who heads the End of the Siege Committee, condemned the boat’s seizure and subsequent arrests.
MAHMOUD ABU DAF: [translated] We condemn the occupation’s act of seizing the Dignity ship and forcing it to go to the Ashdod port. We consider this a political and military piracy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by one of the only journalists who was aboard the ship. Amira Hass is with Ha’aretz. She’s the correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She’s the only one of the Israeli journalists to have spent years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.
Amira, welcome to Democracy Now! Describe what happened on the Dignité, on the boat.
AMIRA HASS: Good morning.
Some 60 miles away from Gaza, we got the signal from an Israeli warship asking where we were heading to. One of the—one on board said, "To Gaza." Then they said, "It’s illegal. It’s not allowed." The person—it’s Professor Vangelis Pissias, the Greek—tried to explain that this is a mission of peace and solidarity. There are no arms, no cargo, just wishing to reach Gaza. And they were replied again by, "No, this is not legal, or not allowed." Immediately then, all communication was jammed. We could not call anymore. We could not get calls anymore. The internet did not work.
And soon after, we saw four commando boats, very quick, very fast boats, approaching us. Masked men were aiming their rifles at us. They were, of course, in uniforms, IDF uniforms. They were aiming all sorts of guns that I don’t even know how to name them. There were two cannon—two of them had—each of them had a cannon, a water cannon. Then, three more were added to the four. They distanced a bit, then returned.
At around 2:00, they approached, started to use the water cannon, and shouted something. One of on board, Dror Feiler, who is an Israeli, shouted back in Hebrew. Another activist, Claude Léostic of France, said, "This is—we are on the way to Gaza. This is international water. You have no right to impound us." And yet, they managed to enter on board.
It was not violent as the former flotillas or the boats that were in past years, when they attacked people physically. But the very act, of course, is violent, the very act of—imagine 10 vessels, three warships and seven gunboats, attacking this small bucket. We looked like a bucket rocking in the sea. This was very violent. But physically, we were spared what—the fate that was the one of the Mavi Marmara.
AMY GOODMAN: Amira, can you explain how it was that the—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah?
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how it was that this boat, the only one of the 10 of this flotilla—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —made it out of Greek waters, when all the others, like the U.S.-flagged _Audacity of Hope, which we covered with reporters on board, were not able to make it out? How did they escape the Greek authorities, who were congratulated by the Israeli authorities for keeping the others?
AMIRA HASS: Because their port of origin was Corse, a French port in Corse, the island of Corse. And so, the Greek authorities could not use all their bureaucratic tricks which they used on the other boats in order to prevent them from leaving.
AMY GOODMAN: This was Corsica?
AMIRA HASS: Still, they were trying. Still, the—they left—on the 25th of June, they left Corse. Then they stayed in the high sea for almost—for more than a week. Then they’re waiting for all the other boats. Then they waited near Crete. Then they entered one of the ports of Crete. Then they managed to get some—also with difficulty, some permits by the Greek coastal guard. The only reason is that it did not originate from Greece. All the rest were subject to very harsh Greek tricks, of course by order of the Israeli government. There is no doubt about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the purpose, what the people on board the bucket, as you described it, the boat, that did get taken in to Ashdod—what their purpose was in challenging the blockade?
AMIRA HASS: The purpose was, of course, to accomplish the mission, even though it was already in Lilliputian measures—to complete the mission or to show the determination of people, not only of those 10 who were on board, of 10 activists, but of the entire group. And as—I have spent about a month with the activists, because at the beginning I was together with the Tahrir, I was staying with the people on Tahrir, the Canadian boat, which had some other delegations. And I’ve learned not only about these 10, but about the majority of the participants, that—in this flotilla, in this very flotilla, that they were really—really are motivated by, I would say, very clear emancipatory values and ideals and personal history of each person, not only in the Palestinian issue, in the Palestinian focalism in freedom, but in different issues that concern equality and rights and freedom. Many on the Canadian boat are involved in the fight for rights of First Nations. There are feminists, of course. There are people who are involved in—people from Australia who are involved in their struggles there against mistreatment and exploitation of refugees. So this was a very clear message of the whole flotilla. This emancipatory message was very clear for me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Amira—
AMIRA HASS: But at a certain moment, when the—yes?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Amira, if you can, I would like you to stay on as we bring in another guest.

Creative Commons LicenseThe original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.