AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show with Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, four-time former presidential candidate. We’ll talk to him about several topics, including his new book, The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right. He’s also the founder of Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper, has been named by Time and Life magazines one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century.
But, Ralph, let’s begin with U.S. policy in Gaza. Amidst the protests nationwide calling for a ceasefire, senior Biden education official Tariq Habash resigned this week — he’s the first Biden appointee — over what he called Biden’s, quote, “complete unwillingness to demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire” in Gaza. Biden is facing reelection amidst a broader Middle East conflict. Ralph, you said, quote, “Biden and Congress are vigorously enabling the annihilations” in Gaza. What do you mean? And what do you feel needs to happen?
RALPH NADER: Well, the important thing in the U.S. here is to focus on Congress and the White House, because they are waist deep in this genocidal war in Gaza. The Congress is basically a rubber stamp and doesn’t even have public hearings as it shovels billions of dollars to Israel. And it’s about to pass, unless Bernie Sanders and others who are opposed, a $14.3 billion — with a “B” — appropriation for Israel, military arms and other aspects of the Israeli right-wing regime’s priorities.
And $14.3 billion is larger than the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s 20 times the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Agency. It’s four times the budget of the National Park Service, which has 300 million visitors. So there is rising opposition to it in the Congress, mostly among Democrats, but not enough. And I think the Jewish Voice for Peace and other valiant people who are resisting should focus more on the Congress.
As far as Biden is concerned, it really gives a new meaning to hypocrisy. He keeps saying publicly that Israel should reduce its impact on civilian casualties and let humanitarian trucks in. At the same time, he’s sending ships full of munitions and cargo planes full of munitions to Netanyahu. You cannot have humanitarian trucks coming in — and there needs to be about 700, at least, a day — if you don’t have a ceasefire, because who’s going to go in? The roads are torn up. They can’t get to their destination. The hospitals and clinics have been destroyed or disabled. There’s no markets. There’s no ability to receive these materials. And the Israelis are letting in maybe 10, 20 trucks a day, but they’re delaying hundreds and hundreds of trucks ready to come in, which Biden has already paid for. So, Biden is playing Netanyahu’s game, but he’s trying to get away with highfalutin adherence to international law.
We don’t hear enough about the violation of international law, U.S. treaties, Geneva Conventions. It’s as if the U.S. can do anything it wants in Syria and Iraq, and Israel can continue to bomb repeatedly in Syria and do other violent acts, and the press never raises the issue of law. Without law, you have anarchy. You have what you’re seeing now.
And the U.S. is very much involved. And people are very concerned about a wider conflict here. The Israelis already struck in Beirut. And you have the Red Sea situation with the Houthi boats. And the U.S. is all over the place, aircraft carriers. They have 24/7 drones over Gaza. So, that’ll be a very good record when the reckoning comes after this war is over.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, you are Lebanese American, Ralph, is that right, your family from Lebanon?
RALPH NADER: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you a question that relates to this. You know, the protests around Gaza on college campuses around the country ultimately have led to the ouster of two college presidents, Liz Magill at UPenn, and now you have Claudine Gay. And I wanted to ask you about the protest yesterday led by Al Sharpton outside the New York office of the billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who helped lead a campaign that led to this week’s ouster of the Harvard University president, the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. Ackman, a Harvard alum, major donor to the university, has publicly railed against Harvard and other schools for supporting DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — programs. Al Sharpton vowed to keep protesting outside Ackman’s office. This is what he said.
REV. AL SHARPTON: We have started these weekly one-hour protests in front of Mr. Ackman’s office. He has said that the resignation of Dr. Gay at Harvard is not the end of it. They are going to keep fighting 'til they end DEI, which is diversity, equity and inclusion. That's declaring a war on all of us — Blacks, women, gays. DEI was designed to bring fairness and equality to people that had been historically marginalized and eliminated.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Al Sharpton. As part of his campaign to oust Gay as Harvard president, Bill Ackman helped amplify allegations that Gay had committed plagiarism in her academic work, but now Ackman’s wife, the MIT professor Neri Oxman, is facing a plagiarism scandal of her own. Business Insider has revealed Oxman plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation at MIT. On Thursday, she apologized and admitted making mistakes. Of course, there was no plagiarism panel that was set up — that’s the process at Harvard — that would evaluate President Gay before she was, ultimately, I guess you could probably say, pushed out by Harvard Corporation, with a lot of pressure from these major donors, like Bill Ackman. Your response, before we move into your book on corporate executives who did it right?
RALPH NADER: What’s been revealed is the big donors to these universities, especially private universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, have been exercising their baleful influence for many years over the curriculum. You know, it’s not surprising that Harvard Law School, for decades, never had a course on corporate law — corporate crime, rather. So, these large donors now have been revealed to have enormous power over the board of overseers over Harvard University. And that’s the next investigation for good student newspapers like The Harvard Crimson.
The stuff on plagiarism, it could be serious, but not in this case, given the review of the president’s past writings. The big issue is the slaughter, is the suppression of speech on college campuses dealing with the slaughter over there in Gaza.
And the fatality count is grossly undercounted, Amy. I know you refer to the official Hamas health authority count, where they only count people whose names they know who died, and so it’s over 22,000, 58,000 injuries. This is a massive undercount.
As the head of the global health department at University of Edinburgh said in an article in The Guardian the other day, there’s going to be half a million Gazans who are going to die before the end of this year, not only from the bombing, but from the effect of the bombing in terms of the destruction of the healthcare system, infectious diseases, polluted water, diarrhea, which little children — which is often a high rate of fatality, and very quickly — lack of any food, no shelter, 85% of the 2.3 million people homeless. They have no connection to sanitation, food, protection, the winter elements. My estimate now is at least 100,000 have died. And more will die every day because of the effects that I’ve just described.
The World Health Organization said they’ve never seen a situation like this in decades. The amount of — number of children being killed, in November, it was 150 a day from the Israeli bombing, and that’s compared to two a day in Afghanistan and less than one a day in Ukraine. So, that’s the main issue.
And the campus controversy talking about slurs and ethnic slurs and so forth, what’s behind it all is to repress the academic world from speaking out and acting on what our government is doing to make all this possible.
And then, we also have to focus on these corporations, for a lot of this aid to Israel bounces back into contracts for missiles. Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, they’re raking it in. And people talk about the lobby in this country supporting any Israeli government can do no wrong, no matter how extreme. We have to talk about the military-industrial complex here on Capitol Hill pushing for more and more of these immense sales and profits.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, you just wrote a book. You are deeply critical right now of the corporations you just mentioned. But your book is The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right. Some may be surprised to see you, this corporate critic, writing this book, famous for Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, among other things. But in this last minute — and then we’ll do a post-show interview — talk about why you wrote it.
RALPH NADER: Because there are not enough good yardsticks to evaluate the misbehavior of giant CEOs of these multinational corporations, who distort markets, control markets, but they tell you, when you take — you criticize them for their munitions production, for opiates, for fossil fuels, for high drug prices, “Oh, we’re just meeting market demand.” Well, these 12 CEOs, they made profit, but they reversed the business model, focusing on protecting and treating workers right, consumer right, and the environment. And they spoke out against war. They spoke out against — Anita Roddick of The Body Shop spoke out against the cosmetic industry’s harm on young customers. Ray Anderson changed his entire —
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, we have to leave it there, but we’re going to do Part 2 and post it at democracynow.org. Ralph Nader, author of The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
An Israeli strike hit a vehicle in Gaza on Sunday that killed two journalists, including the eldest son of a veteran Al Jazeera correspondent who already lost much of his family in earlier bombings.
Journalists Hamza Dahdouh, Mustafa Thuraya and Hazem Rajab were driving to an assignment in southwest Gaza ― an area that was supposedly a safe zone ― when a missile blew up their car. The attack killed Dahdouh and Thuraya, and severely injured Rajab.
Hamza Dahdouh, a 27-year-old journalist, was the son of prominent Gaza correspondent and Al Jazeera Arabic bureau chief Wael Dahdouh. Hamza, who the network said was very attached to his family, followed in his father’s footsteps and joined Al Jazeera to help report on the territory.
“Hamza was everything to me, the eldest boy, he was the soul of my soul,” Wael Dahdouh told Al Jazeera on Sunday from the cemetery where his son was buried. “These are the tears of parting and loss, the tears of humanity.”
Shaimaa Khalil (BBC NEWS) adds:
Four other members of bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh's family were also killed in October.
His wife Amna, his grandchild Adam, his 15-year-old son Mahmoud and seven-year-old daughter Sham all died in an Israeli strike.
Hamdah Salhut (ALJAZEERA) writes:
The Israeli army issued a statement responding to journalists who asked for comment all day from the Israeli army on why these journalists were targeted and killed inside of Gaza.
It says: “An Israeli military aircraft identified and struck a terrorist operative who was operating an aircraft that posed a threat to troops. We are aware of the reports that during the strike, two other suspects who were in the same vehicle as the terrorists were also hit.”
Just pay attention to this wording. They’re calling the journalists in the car “suspects”. We do know that third person in the car who was seriously injured was Hazem Rajab, a content creator and a journalist. If you go to his page, you can see that he operates a drone for photography purposes. And if the Israeli military is releasing this statement, they are also calling these journalists, all three of them, suspects.
It’s interesting that the Israeli military took several hours to respond to questions from journalists, just releasing this statement before midnight local time. But the Israeli military is going to have a lot of other questions to answer… because what they’re saying and what happened on the ground is not adding up.
This is not the first time the Israeli government has been accused of killing journalists (as we noted in Saturday's "Context and history matter"). From WIKIPEDIA:
On January 27, 2005, during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, [CNN's Eason] Jordan was reported to have said that American troops were targeting journalists. Although there is no transcript of Jordan's statement (the event was videotaped, but the WEF refused to release it, or make a transcript of the event), Barney Frank claimed Jordan seemed to be suggesting "it was official military policy to take out journalists", and later added that some U.S. soldiers targeted reporters "maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger"—claims that Jordan denied.[11] However, U.S. News & World Report editor-at-large David Gergen, who moderated the discussion,[12] and BBC executive Richard Sambrook defended Jordan and claimed his remarks, though controversial, were not as extreme as they were hyped and that he did not deserve to be removed from CNN.[11][12] But U.S. entrepreneur Rony Abovitz, former CNN reporter Rebecca MacKinnon, U.S. journalist Bret Stephens, Swiss journalist Bernard Rapazz, U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, and French historian Justin Vaïsse were also present, and confirmed the essentials of Frank's account.[13] Bloggers who covered the story (most newspapers and networks chose not to) noted that Jordan had been accusing Israeli and U.S. troops of deliberately targeting journalists as early as October 2002, and had made similar specific claims about Iraq in November 2004.[14] They also noted his admission, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, that CNN had deliberately downplayed the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime in order to maintain CNN's access to the country.[15] For this last piece, he was harshly criticized by the New Republic's Franklin Foer, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, who said CNN should have left Iraq rather than spread the regime's propaganda.[16]
Since October 7, Israeli forces have killed dozens of media workers in the Gaza Strip, where around 1,000 journalists were working before the assault. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the war "than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year."
"CPJ is particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families by the Israeli military," the group said last month. An investigation by Reporters Without Borders concluded that Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and his colleagues were deliberately targeted in October 13 strikes in southern Lebanon.
Reporters Without Borders has filed two war crimes complaints with the International Criminal Court since early October. The second complaint, submitted last month, accuses the Israel Defense Forces of intentionally killing seven Palestinian journalists.
"Targeting reporters is a war crime," the group wrote in a social media post on Sunday.
Blinken had said he was “deeply sorry” about the “unimaginable loss” of Wael Dahdouh, whose son was killed in an Israeli attack.
“The total dissonance of being sorry about an outcome that you have actively enabled at every stage,” Middle East expert Khaled Elgindy wrote in a social media post addressing Blinken’s comments.
Hmm. This morning, THE NATIONAL notes, "An Israeli strike on south Lebanon on Monday killed a senior commander in Hezbollah's elite Radwan force, three security sources told Reuters. The security sources identified him as Wissam Al Tawil, the deputy head of a unit within the Radwan force. They said he and another Hezbollah fighter were killed when their car was hit in a strike on the Lebanese village of Majdal Selm."
Who is the country slaughtering Gaza and attacking other countries in the region?
Doesn't look like it's the Arab neighbors. Today, Antony's in Israel where he will play footsie with Netanyahu.
Linda Bordoni (VATICAN NEWS) reports that Pope Francis has again called for peace, this time in his annual new year speech:
And immediately he shone the light on the central theme of his discourse – Peace - which he said, is primarily a gift of God, for it is He who left us His peace. “Yet it is also a responsibility incumbent upon all of us,” he added.
Greeting the ambassadors from throughout the globe accredited to the Holy See on Monday, 8 January 2024, he expressed deep concern about the escalating conflicts worldwide and described the current state of affairs as a "third world war fought piecemeal" openly addressing specific geopolitical crises.
Recalling the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, the Holy Father condemned the October 7 attack on the Israeli people.
“I renew my condemnation of this act and of every instance of terrorism and extremism. This is not the way to resolve disputes between peoples; those disputes are only aggravated and cause suffering for everyone,” he said.
And condemning the subsequent military response to that act that has led to full-scale war in Gaza - where over 22,000 people have been killed and millions injured and displaced - the Pope decried the fact that it “provoked a strong Israeli military response in Gaza that has led to the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, mainly civilians, including many young people and children, and has caused an exceptionally grave humanitarian crisis and inconceivable suffering.”
Thus, he called for an immediate ceasefire, the release of hostages, and access to humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people.
He also reiterated his support for a “two-state” solution, as well as an “internationally guaranteed special status for the City of Jerusalem, aiming for lasting peace and security.
A group of former White House interns signed an open letter to Joe Biden imploring his administration to support an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.
The signatories, which include interns who worked in the White House and executive office of the president during 2022 and the summer of 2023, accuse the president of having “betrayed” his promise to pursue equality and justice by supporting Israel’s bombardment in Gaza.
“Consistently, you call upon young people to lead through the world’s most pressing challenges,” the former interns wrote. “Yet our voices are ignored as our generation speaks in solidarity with the majority of Americans and the world, underscoring the contrast between the values we embraced together and the actions we now witness.”
[. . .]
“Our dissatisfaction with your actions reflects the sentiments of young people across the United States – individuals whom you credited as instrumental in securing your 2020 victory,” the letter says. “We urge the President and Vice President to take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by: standing with our allies around the world in demanding a permanent ceasefire, ending unconditional military aid to Israel, securing the release of Israeli and Palestinian hostages alike, and labeling Israel’s recent actions as war crimes. Anything less than these measures undermines the justice we collectively aspired to achieve.”
The letter reflects an internal rebellion among staffers and aides at the White House, across the administration and among the Democratic National Committee who have sought to apply pressure to Biden to back a ceasefire through a series of open letters, dissent cables and in at least two instances, resignations. In December, a group of White House interns sent a letter to Biden demanding a “permanent ceasefire”. They did not sign their names, instead identifying themselves by the office where they worked.
Last week, Tariq Habash, a top adviser at the education department and its only Palestinian American political appointee, resigned in protest of the administration’s handling of the war. In his letter to Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, Habash wrote that he could no longer serve an administration that had “put millions of innocent lives in danger”.
Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) reports:
As members of Congress return to Capitol Hill next week, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna will continue his fight for a lasting cease-fire in Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, which has killed at least 22,600 Palestinians.
"We need this war to stop. It is a humanitarian catastrophe," the California Democrat told Common Dreams in an interview Friday, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began his fourth trip to the Middle East in three months.
"So many of the people killed in Gaza are children," Khanna said. "I have heard stories in my district of folks who have relatives in Gaza and they talk about families that have lost multiple children."
"It is a matter of conscience," he argued, noting that Palestinians in Gaza face not only Israeli bombs and bullets but also the risk of starvation and spreading disease. "Every international humanitarian organization is begging the United States for the war to stop."
At Egypt’s Rafah border crossing, lines of hundreds of trucks carrying aid wait for weeks to enter Gaza, and a warehouse is full of goods rejected by Israeli inspectors, everything from water testing equipment to medical kits for delivering babies, two US senators said Saturday after a visit to the border.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley pointed to a cumbersome process that is slowing relief to the Palestinian population in the besieged territory — largely due to Israeli inspections of aid cargos, with seemingly arbitrary rejections of vital humanitarian equipment. The system to ensure that aid deliveries within Gaza don’t get hit by Israeli forces is “totally broken,” they said.
“What struck me yesterday was the miles of backed-up trucks. We couldn’t count, but there were hundreds,” Merkley said in a briefing with Van Hollen to a group of reporters in Cairo.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II says: “Everyone must acknowledge the brutality of what was committed in Gaza before we work to achieve peace.”
“Resignation to reality reaches the point of complicity,” he added in a follow-up post on X.
Abdullah urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and bring an end to the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian territory as the three-month-long war continues to rage.
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