John Oliver: ‘Gaza is being starved by Israel'

The Guardian

3 days ago

John Oliver opened his latest episode of Last Week Tonight with a look at the dire famine in Gaza, which Israeli leaders and American supporters continue to deny. Oliver honed in on former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who denied the credibility of images from Gaza of emaciated children.
'I kind of hoped we were done with Megyn Kelly as a society,' said Oliver to cheers, 'and collectively, you actually don't have to litigate this case one photo at a time. He cited reports from the United Nations, aid organizations and Israeli human rights groups all confirming the same thing: 'What's happening in Gaza right now is a famine,' he said. 'All the information we have points to that, except for this fucking guy [Netanyahu] and a few adult junior detectives squinting at each photo of a skeletal child to figure out if they're the right kind of dying.'
Oliver also referred to a 2024 CNN article in which Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said 'it may be just and moral' to starve 2 million Palestinians, but 'no one in the world would let us'. Oliver concluded that Smotrich is 'basically complaining that the world is cock-blocking him from committing genocide better. And that is the argument for sustained international pressure here, and that country best positioned to apply it is this one.' The US is 'the one that gave Israel nearly $18bn in military aid during the first year of this war alone'.
'Look, 'Gaza is starving' is a sentence that's objectively true, but it's also slightly misleading because it's too passive,' he added. 'Gaza is being starved by Israel.'
Oliver then pivoted to his main segment on corporate crime, which is booming under the Trump administration. Trump, Oliver reminded, was convicted on 33 counts of falsifying business records; since retaking office, his administration has halted or dropped 109 enforcement actions against corporate misconduct, and even issued the first ever pardon of a corporation, for crypto exchange BitMex.
'It is frankly no wonder experts have called this moment 'the ripest environment for corruption by public officials and business executives in a generation',' said Oliver. 'Though to be unfair, it's not like the environment was unripe before Trump took office. Republican and Democratic administrations have both taken a pretty lax approach to corporate crime for a while now. You might have noticed that stories about corporate malfeasance rarely end with executives going to jail or the companies getting shutting down.'
Oliver focused on one key reason why: deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), which are 'basically out-of-court settlements for companies to avoid being prosecuted', he explained. 'Essentially, the government will come to a company and say 'hi, company. Government here. You did a crime, and we have enough evidence to prosecute you.' But instead of then doing that, they then strike a deal where if the company behaves itself for a certain amount of time, the criminal charges eventually disappear.'
Unfortunately, DPAs also 'don't really do much', Oliver continued. 'And sometimes, companies that have done massive harm have used them to literally get away with murder.'
Oliver first looked at the history of DPAs, which were never supposed to apply to corporations. The concept arose out of a 1974 law that was supposed to help juvenile and first-time offenders avoid prosecution in favor of rehabilitation. DPAs for corporations flourished in the wake of the Enron scandal, when many employees of the fraudulent company's embattled accounting firm Andersen blamed the government for shutting down the company and putting them out of work.
The argument for DPAs is that they prevent innocent employees from getting hurt, dissuade future wrongdoing, and still allow the Department of Justice to prosecute individuals. 'But there are problems with literally all that,' said Oliver. For one, nearly half of companies receiving DPAs end up paying no fine at all, and no employees were prosecuted in two-thirds of cases.
Oliver used three high-profile examples to illustrate the point, starting with automotive giant GM, which was held liable for knowingly producing cars with a faulty 'off' switch resulting in crashes that killed 124 people over several years. The government ordered GM to pay $900m fines, during a year in which they made close to $10bn in profit. 'I'm not saying it's nothing, but 9% of one year's profits just doesn't seem enough for essentially marketing the automotive equivalent of the Titan submersible,' Oliver quipped. No individuals were held responsible, but because the company withheld information, at one least one woman was convicted of negligent homicide for a crash involving her boyfriend that later determined to be caused by the faulty switch. (Her conviction has since been overturned.)
'Thankfully, GM hasn't killed any more people with its cars since then, as of taping,' said Oliver. 'But other companies with DPAs have shown a much greater propensity for recidivism,' such as HSBC. In the early 2010s, the company got in trouble for allowing Mexican cartels to launder $880m in drug trafficking proceeds and facilitating $660m in transactions by sanctioned regimes. The company paid a fine of around $2bn, during a year in which they made over $13bn in profit, and no individuals were prosecuted.
When the deal expired in 2017, the government dropped all charges … and a month later, the government charged them with rigging currency rates, and offered them another DPA. 'That is ridiculous,' said Oliver. 'At this point, it's not even a deferred prosecution agreement. It's more like prosecutorial edging. I'll say it before and I'll say it again: let the government come.'
Finally, there's Boeing, which entered into a DPA in 2021 following the catastrophic crashes of two 737 Max planes the company knew were poorly designed. Boeing agreed to a fine and three years of demonstrating good behavior to avoid prosecution. 'It's an agreement that many felt was toothless,' said Oliver, 'especially given that one judge involved with the case later called what Boeing had done 'the deadliest corporate crime in US history'.'
At the start of 2024, just two days before their probationary period was set to end, Alaska Airlines passengers filed a class-action suit against the company after a door broke off a 737 Max mid-flight. Though the incident demonstrated Boeing was not in compliance with the DPA, the government offered them a plea deal and another fine. This year, the Trump administration downgraded Boeing's punishment to a non-prosecution agreement, removing the possibility of prosecuting them over the 737 Max in the future. 'Which is completely infuriating,' Oliver fumed, as it is 'clearly great news for stockholders and not for anyone else.'
'This is not sustainable,' said Oliver of a cycle where corporate misbehavior leads to harm to government fine on repeat. 'And unfortunately, I wouldn't expect any of that to change for at least, say, three-and-a-half years But it is worth asking for a hypothetical future, when we have a government that isn't run by a pro-corruption felon, what could we be doing better to hold corporations accountable?'
Oliver recommended making DPAs more of a deterrent by dramatically increasing fines and actually prosecuting executives, and more transparency of corporate compliance records. 'But the hard truth here is, if we want more accountability, the government is going to have to show more willingness to prosecute repeat offenders, even if it affects a large company's ability to do business.'