Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcasting since 1999. The show is archived at: www.gorilla-radio.com. The GR blog is at: gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com, and you can find and support the program at GRadio.Substack.com. Financial support is also possible through the Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/PacificFreePress. He's too the past contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com, (now defunct) and tweets at @paciffreepress. G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media. Some past guests include: M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, Ramzy Baroud, David Barsamian, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Paul Cienfuegos, Yves Engler, Laura Flanders, Denis Halliday, Julia Butterfly Hill, Sam Husseini, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Ingmar Lee, Dave Lindorff, Andrew Gavin Marshall, Stefania Maurizi, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, Ted Rall, Paul Craig Roberts, John Ross, David Rovics, Joan Russow, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, David Swanson, Andy Worthington, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.
Last week, the Clark government announced a new policy concerning mining, logging, and the recreational use of the Great Bear Rainforest.
The so-called GBR agreement follows a pattern of inviting selected Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations and First Nations representatives into the backrooms where resource allocation decisions between industry and government are crafted.
The deal has divided environmentalists, as did the first of its kind that created what’s now known as the Great Bear Rainforest, prompting praise and criticism on both the front and editorial pages.
Ingmar Lee lives along British Columbia’s mid-coast, in an area the GBR encompasses. He’s a long-time, BC-based environment defender whose past efforts to save the forests and watershed ecosystems of Vancouver Island include being among the few who took to the trees in the iconic Cathedral Grove, (and remaining for two years) fighting the destruction of the suburban forest for highways in Langford, scaling the BC Legislature flag pole to garner press in opposition to the Enbridge pipeline scheme, and dismantling seismic explosives in the heart of Sandhill Crane nesting grounds on Denny Island. Ingmar also created and maintains the Facebook site, 10,000 Ton Tanker, the only sustained media effort to bring attention to regular foreign oil tanker traffic within BC’s supposed tanker moratorium area.
Welcome to the official beginnings of America’s full on hurly-burly, hurdy gurdy, election season. In case you’re just returned from your extraterrestrial vacation, the Iowa caucus kicked off the 2016 democracy pageant Monday, and despite the escalating insanity of American political life since the first era of hope in the 1960’s, this year seems by orders of magnitude the zaniest poll in living memory; really one for the books.
William Blum has been writing books chronicling the progress of his native America through the World for more than four decades. Leaving his State Department job with the Johnson administration, Bill became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, the Capitol’s first “alternative newspaper.”
He’s also worked as a freelance journalist, filing stories from Europe, (notably collaborating with former CIA operative, Philip Agee) and in the Americas, with an extended stay in post-Allende Chile.
William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, from which his website, KillingHope.org takes its name, was first published in 1995 and is cited by Noam Chomsky as “far and away the best book on the topic.” Blum’s other titles include: ‘West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir,’ ‘America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – The Truth About U.S. Foreign Policy and Everything Else,’ ‘Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire,’ and ‘Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.’
William Blum in the first half.
And; last week, the environmental organization, Wilderness Committee won in BC’s Supreme Court a ruling throwing out a defamation suit brought by extractive industry heavy weight, Taseko Mines. In what the CBC reported as a “strongly worded” decision, Supreme court Justice Gordon Funt ordered Taseko pay “special costs.” Wilderness Committee National Policy Director, Gwen Barlee expressed relief over the court win, saying “It’s time for British Columbia to enact anti-SLAPP legislation to prevent this from happening again.”
Joe Foy is the Wilderness Committee’s National Campaign Director, and joins us in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio braodcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of the coming week from our city’s streets, and beyond there too. But first, William Blum and the American election crucible fires lit.
Despite decades of abuse, and now the daily revelations of the criminal mismanagement of Flint, Michigan’s water supply, the Great Lakes and its tributaries are still viewed by industry, government, and sadly the citizenry at large, as a vast toilet, ready and able to handle all our societal effluence.
The latest to offer up its downstream product for the Lakes’ biosphere is Ontario Power Generation, who hope to make for eternal inclusion there a nuclear waste dump next to Lake Huron. And, bad news: in the waning days of the unlamented Stephen Harper regime past, the project was approved.
But that’s just the beginning of the story.
Joyce Nelson is an award-winning Canadian freelance writer/researcher whose articles appear in the Watershed Sentinel and at CounterPunch.org. Nelson is also an author, some of whose book titles include: ‘The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age,’ ‘Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media,’ ‘Sign Crimes/Road Kill: From Mediascape to Landscape,’ and the poetry chapbook, ‘Battlefronts.’ Her recent article at CounterPunch.org, ‘Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump: The Battle Continues’ examines the combatants in the far from done deal to dump nuclear waste within a stone’s skip of Lake Huron.
Joyce Nelson in the first half.
And; as Barak Obama winds down his second and last term the inmates at the prison he promised to close down on day one of his presidency languish at Guantánamo Bay yet. And, as he has since 2011, Andy Worthington again crossed the Atlantic this year to mark still another anniversary of America’s Gitmo gulag.
He was joined in New York by legendary musician and long-time justice advocate, Roger Waters in calling for the release of those remaining in the prison and to kick off the US leg of the Close Guantánamo Campaign. Worthington is also a journalist and author whose book titles include: ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,’ and ‘The Guantánamo Files: Stories of 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.’ He is too co-director of the film, ‘Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.’
Andy Worthington and an end in sight finally for Camp X-Ray’s remaining prisoners in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of good goings on for the coming week upon the streets of our town, and beyond there too. But first, enjoining Joyce Nelson and the Great Lakes nuclear battle at the Lake called Huron.
Last week, international sanctions against Iran’s civilian nuclear program were finally dropped. Despite no evidence of nuclear weapons development, the embattled country’s agreement to stringent International Atomic Energy Agency conditions allows it join – in a still limited way – the World economy.
It all goes a long way in ensuring the IAEA’s mission of “Atoms for Peace.” But, what about those other atoms in other countries that are clearly not devoted to peace? The United States of America, chief amongst Iran’s prosecutors, is the planet’s single-largest repository of veritable nuclear weaponry, yet it suffers no sanction, or onerous inspection requirements.
And why, a quarter century after the fall of its Cold War nemesis, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is America still pursuing a policy of nuclear weapons development anyway?
John LaForge is a long-time staffer at Nukewatch, the Wisconsin-based nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group, whose countless articles on the topic have appeared in Nukewatch’s quarterly and at online sites like: New Internationalist, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Earth Island Journal and at CounterPunch.org.
He’s also co-editor, with Arianne S. Peterson, of the revised edition of the book, ‘Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the the United States.’ A lot has changed since the first edition, issued in 1987 when Ronald Reagan’s steely resolve rallied America, and Mikhail Gorbachov’s Soviets promised imminent and total destruction, and yet America’s nuclear arms program remains.
John LaForge in the first half.
And; President Obama delivered his final State of the Union Speech last week. It’s the first step in America’s transfer of power pageant, scheduled to culminate this time next year with the inauguration of Hillary Clinton, (or coronation of Donald Trump). From Honest Abe Lincoln, to Tricky Dick Nixon, the President IS for a time We the People; but how much real power does a president have in the modern context, and can that person’s character exercise a moral authority potent enough to move America one way or the other?
Matt Peppe’s analyses of U.S. foreign policy and Latin America appear on his blog, Just the Facts, and across the internet at prominent news sites like: MintPress News, Counterpunch, Latino Rebels, Countercurrents, Global Research, Dissident Voice, and others. His recent update to the article, ‘Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Soaked Legacy’ takes on the elder statesman’s real role in a brutal period of American history, questioning both the notion of Carter as, and the practical possibility of, a “good” American president.
Matte Peppe and Jimmy Carter, good president, or just another bad peanut? in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good goings on going on in and around our streets, and beyond, in the coming week. But first, John LaForge and the Nuclear Heartland, an answer to “Where have all the missiles gone…?”
President Obama delivered his final State of the Union Speech last week. It’s the first step in America’s transfer of power pageant, scheduled to culminate this time next year with the inauguration of Hillary Clinton, (or coronation of Donald Trump). Despite constitutional checks and balances, for most the Executive Branch symbolizes the entirety of the World’s most powerful country; and rightly or not, the individual occupying the Oval Office singly personfies that all-mighty nation. From Honest Abe Lincoln, to Tricky Dick Nixon, the President IS for a time We the People; but how much real power does a president have in the modern context, and can that person’s character exercise a moral authority potent enough to move America one way or the other?
Matt Peppe’s analyses of U.S. foreign policy and Latin America appear on his blog, Just the Facts, and across the internet at prominent news sites like: MintPress News, Counterpunch, Latino Rebels, Countercurrents, Global Research, Dissident Voice, and others. His recent update to the article, ‘Jimmy Carter’s Blood-Soaked Legacy’ takes on the elder statesman’s real role in a brutal period of American history, questioning both the notion of Carter as, or the practical possibility of, a “good” American president.
Matte Peppe and “Jimmy Carter, good president, or just another bad peanut?”
2016 marks incarceration year 35 for jail yard journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and regardless of what anyone may think about his guilt or innocence, or the spurious nature of the State’s case, or despicable way in which American Justice is generally conducted, the fact remains: Jailers are responsible for the health and well-being of those jailed.
This tenet holds as true for the most clearly, undeniably guilty as for the most blatantly obvious political prisoner; as true in Nuremberg, Germany as it is in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray.
In this, the State of Pennsylvania has failed Abu-Jamal, as it fails untold others imprisoned within a diseased environment that can only be described as an enforced epidemic.
Dave Lindorff is an award-winning print journalist, broadcaster, and founder of the web news site, This Can’t Be Happening.net, (a website that has, since 2004 taken on the task of filling some of the vast investigative journalism vacuum in American media today). He is too an author, whose titles include: ‘This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy,’ ‘Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains,’ and ‘Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.’
Dave Lindorff in the first half.
And; the local fight against the Site-C dam project precedes even Mumia Abu-Jamal’s long struggle. Generations have opposed the imposition of a plan the entity called British Columbia has proposed for the area it calls the Peace River Valley. That plan would see the lives of thousands submerged by the ambitions of a few; it would see a People’s history erased, and a way of life for its descendants destroyed. It is a plan that would, in effect, continue an unacceptable, unviable, and unconscionable way of thinking and acting and being on this land whose time is done. It is a dam too far, and is now more than a site, but a symbol where a line, The Line, has been drawn.
Ken Boon is a farmer in the Peace, and President of the Peace Valley Landowner Association. He is currently at Rocky Mountain Fort Camp as part of the blockade to stop the crews sent there to clear a path for the Site-C dam.
Ken Boon standing against the dam in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good goings on planned for the streets of our city, and beyond, in the coming week. But first; Dave Lindorff and Pennsylvania’s penal system failing the humanity test.
Welcome to our first show of the new year. Beginnings, even arbitrarily designated calendrical ones, offer opportunities for self-reflection and change-making both in our personal lives and in the life of the greater society.
And, looking back at the year just past, it’s easy to see there’s plenty of change needed in not only the way the World is run, but also in the way we great primates think about our place in it. But what are we to do?
A good start, my first guest suggests, is becoming a little more conscious of the preconceptions and biases limiting our understanding.
Derrick Broze is a freelance journalist, community activist, gardener, promoter from Houston, Texas, and co-author of the book, ‘The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality.’ He’s founder of both the Houston Free Thinkers, and The Conscious Resistance Network, and hosts the weekly podcast, The Conscious Resistance Live.
According to Broze, consciously resisting means, “being willing to engage in self reflection, and pursuing knowledge of the self.” The goal is freedom; freedom from the linear patterns of thought and action taught and reinforced by a society with an apparent death wish; or, as Derrick puts it, “Without knowing our own doubts, hopes, fears, dreams, insecurities and strengths we can not truly know what freedom means to us as an individual.”
Derrick Broze in the first half.
And; there’s no doubt, who informs us about the world effects how we live in it. Currently, Big M media within the Anglo-American power configuration is struggling to maintain the structural integrity of its narrative surrounding the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and the great refugee exodus that conflict has created. Crucial to any good yarn of course is the villain; in this case the Black Hats are IS. Known variously as ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, and the Islamic State, these are the actors whose dastardliness makes anything done by us, naturally the heroes of this epic, just OK, (if not actually justified).
But what if ISIL, ISIS, Daesh, and/or the Islamic State is not who, or what the storytellers say it is? What if the story is just that, a story invented to cover the real motives behind the nightmare unleashed on Syria, and the whole of the middle east?
Tim Anderson is an Australian solidarity activist and academic at the University of Sydney. He has degrees in economics and international politics, and a doctorate in the political economy of economic liberalization in Australia. While his scholarly studies focus on economic development, human rights and self-determination within the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, his latest articles, published at Global Research, explore the complex web of local and international interests at play in Syria and Iraq conflict. His latest is, ‘The Dirty War in Syria: Washington Supports Islamic State -The Evidence’.
Tim Anderson and the role frenemies play in Washington’s great Middle East game in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emertius and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of the coming week from our city’s streets, and beyond there too. But first, Derrick Broze, actively raising the consciousness level of alternative journalism.
Welcome to another Gorilla Radio Year-Ender show, wherein we generally try to take the tenure of the times through some of the stories covered here over the last 12 months, and attempt to weave from them a tapestry giving fair representation of the Canadian zeitgeist, and that of the broader World in 2015.
The hope is, a thorough conning of the year past can provide hints as to where we can expect the tide of events to take us in the next, New Year. This year however, I’ve decided on a different course; instead of merely a going over of the events of 2015, I’ll play selections from my long-favoured accompanying music, Grant Wakefield’s ‘The Fire This Time.’
The instrumental side of Wakefield’s masterful work has featured as background music for X-Mas specials, and those other occasions where there are no guests, but I’ve rarely played the documentary side of the disc.
It’s a terrible account of the Forever War’s commencement, and the sowing of the dragon’s teeth determining the news events we’ve seen reported, sans context, since. Fittingly, this year I go back, way back, to provide that deeper background, beginning at the beginning of this bloody new era…
I remember like it was yesterday… I was standing at the desk of a Mexican post office in Merida, on the Yucatan Peninsula. It was January 17th, 1991. There was a television mounted on the wall, the volume turned to distortion level, (as everything seems to be down south of south of the border). CNN blared, and red rockets flared as America and her allies dared kick off Desert Storm, (what would become the Mother of All Wars, the one that’s giving even now, nearly 25 years later).
The post office clerk followed my gaze to the teevee on the wall and said, “Es bueno, no?” And I said, “No, muey malo.” Grant Wakefield said much more; his ‘The Fire This Time,’ audio-documentary is a unique and necessary chronicling of the 1990-91 Gulf War. The CD’s liner notes inform,
“In April 1999 Grant Wakefield and Miriam Ryle travelled to Iraq intending to update Ryle’s 1994 documentary “Voices From Iraq.” They shot footage of the life in and around Baghdad, and filmed several interviews (including one with the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, Hans Von Sponeck). On their return they offered the unedited footage to BBC and Channel 4. It was refused. Upon this, Grant Wakefield searched for another way to share the collected material with the public and decided to make an audio CD. The documentary tells the story of Iraq, and its appointed role in the geopolitics of the West, from the colonial times at the beginning of the 20th century, till the period of the embargo at the end of the nineties… The story is narrated by Grant Wakefield, and complimented by a collage of samples from the collected footage, interviews, newsbroadcasts, and official (government and military) statements. The music was provided by various electronical artists, and Grant Wakefield mixed his narrative over it. The second CD is the instrumental version of the songs used for the first disc.”
That first disc is the one I rely so heavily upon for special programs like today’s. But, it’s the second disc I believe so crucial to gaining an understanding of the world we live in today; an understanding impossible to reach outside the context of the first Gulf War, and the true motives behind it.
So, here then is Grant Wakefield’s The Fire This Time, where be the seeds of perpetual war are planted.
Welcome to the umpteenth Gorilla Radio X-Mas Special. As we’ve done in years past so we will again today do; to wit, take a look at where we are this festive time of year, counting our blessings, while wishing the best for those around us, and too forgetting the slights we’ve suffered, unburdening ourselves the weight of animosities carried throughout the year to live finally life joyous as it is intended to be.
This year we’ll be joined by: Ini Kamoze, James Carroll, Gil Scott-Heron, Transglobal Underground, Hawksley Workman, Brian Ferry, the Pogues, Sarah Simpson, and maybe even a surprise or two.
Yesterday, the jury in the Freddie Gray manslaughter trial against the first of six Baltimore police officers involved in Gray’s wrongful death passed a note to the judge declaring themselves deadlocked following a first day of deliberation. Gray died of injuries sustained either during his arrest, or while being transported in the back of a police van, and he joins Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Alonzo Smith as another of the better known in a too long list of black people killed by police in suspect circumstances.
Thanks to the proliferation of cell phone cameras, and the increasing effectiveness of social networks, public consciousness of how Black America is policed is reaching outside the Black community; but it’s not news to those within it.
Long before cell phones, Facebook, or Twitter hashtag campaigns, Carl Dix was fighting for the rights and dignity of all people. He spent two years in a military prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam, emerging to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and long before Hands Up and Black Lives Matter became a part of the modern media landscape, Carl initiated the ‘October 22 Coalition to STOP Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.’
Twenty years later, Carl Dix has joined with Cornel West and many others to create the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, and its campaigns Stop ‘Stop-and-Frisk,’ and #RiseUpOctober that brings almost 100 families of police murder victims together in New York City. #RiseUpOctober was out in the streets this week, standing in solidarity with Hollywood film director, Quentin Tarantino, whose latest film release faces the threat of a boycott organized by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and the Fraternal Order of Police because of Tarantino’s support of #RiseUpOctober and its call to “Stop the Police Terror.”
Carl Dix in the first half.
And; as reports of Turkish complicity in the oil trade that sustains IS, or Islamic State, connections that go to the very top of the Turkish ruling elite, become more widely disseminated, new allegations of that country’s involvement in supplying to its “terrorist” allies the sarin gas used in the infamous Ghouta gas attacks of 2013. You may recall, those attacks were blamed on the Syrian government, and were very nearly conflated then into a pretext for an all-out American attack against Syria. If nothing else, these new revelations remind, we have a very murky understanding of what’s going on way over there; certainly not sufficient to make the life and death decisions going to war demand.
Brad Hoff is an author, journalist, educator and Managing Editor of Levant Report.com. The former Marine has taught ancient and modern history at the college and high school levels, and has lived and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, spending most of his time in Syria prior to the 2011 uprising. His articles also appear at Antiwar.com and Foreign Policy Journal among other on-line sites. Brad’s latest article charts the curious career of ISIS commander, Omar “the Chechen” al-Shishani. I spoke to Brad in late September…
Brad Hoff getting a better idea of the players the Great Syrian Game in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good things coming to the streetz of our town in the coming week, and beyond there too. But first, Carl Dix and the fight to #Stop Police Terror.
Ten thousand kilometers from the Peace River Valley, as the purple martin flies, Brazil’s embattled environmental authority has authorized the construction of the Belo Monte Dam; despite the fact the dam does not comply with IBAMA’s, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, own legislated prerequisites guaranteeing the quote: “conditions necessary to guarantee the life, health and integrity of affected communities.”
It’s an international disgrace; one Antonia Melo, leader of Movimiento Xingú Vivo para Siempre says is simply a crime. The Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) says: “The authorization clearly violates Brazil’s international human rights commitments, especially with respect to the indigenous communities of the Xingú River basin. Those affected populations are protected by precautionary measures granted in 2011 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which the Brazilian government continues to ignore.”
And yet, the project is going ahead; clearly a case of government corruption and a callous disregard for the rights of indigenous people and the environment they depend upon for survival. Meanwhile, at the other end of the martin’s migration another dam, but the story is the same.
Ken Boon is president of the Peace Valley Landowners Association, the group challenging a BC Supreme Court decision to allow the project proceed in hopes of stopping destructive preparatory work.
Ken Boon in the first half.
And; as predicted, Haitians are not accepting the massive fraud masquerading as democracy. October’s presidential election was farcical, even by Haiti’s standards; standards so low, the poll preceding this latest, long-delayed vote, was overturned by edict of foreign powers occupying the Caribbean island. This time around, opposition parties say more than 10,000 Haitian police, aided by as many as 2,500 U.N. personnel from Minustah interfered with voting stations, and are accused of stealing and stuffing ballots.
Kevin Pina is an American filmmaker, journalist, educator, and broadcaster with Pacifica Radio’s public affairs program, Flashpoints. Pina’s film credits include: ‘El Salvador: In the Name of Democracy,’ ‘Berkeley in the Sixties,’ ‘Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest,’ ‘Haiti: Harvest of Hope,’ ‘Haiti: The UNtold Story,’ and ‘HAITI: We Must Kill the Bandits.’ Kevin has lived in and reported from Haiti, and was jailed by the infamous Baby Doc Duvalier for reporting on the abuses of that nefarious regime. I spoke with Kevin in September about the then-coming presidential elections.
Kevin Pina and a Haitian deja vu at the ballot box in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of the coming week for our city’s streets, and beyond there too. But first, Ken Boon and Site C, damning the people’s will.
Do you ever get the feeling things are disappearing around you? Afraid to turn your attention away for a moment, in case you look back to see the world you knew irreparably altered; gone forever?
You’re not mad. Our world has become ever more ephemeral; a lot less “reality” based lately. Whether “the cloud,” or other digital technologies emerging to nudge our familiar hardware existence aside, it’s all a part of what my first guest calls being, “Vapourized.”
And, this is not only happening in media, where the last decade has seen the newspaper, magazine, and music business rocked by new digital habits, but is also moving into the electronics industries.
Robert Tercek is a 21st Century Renaissance man whose nearly 23 year career pre-dates most of what makes up our modern world.
Tercek has created breakthrough entertainment experiences across digital platforms, including: satellite television, game consoles, broadband Internet, interactive teevee, and mobile networks. His expertise includes too working the executive suites; most recently serving as President of Digital Media at OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a Senior Vice President of Digital Media at Sony Pictures, and as Creative Director at MTV. Robert also co-founded five startup ventures, including 7th Level, Inc, and is the author of the book, ‘Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success In A Dematerialized World.’
Robert Tercek in the first half.
And; last month, barely a week into his mandate, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau ordered Transport Canada coordinate with the Fisheries, Natural Resources, and Environment Ministries to put in place an oil tanker moratorium along BC’s north coast. It’s a stunning reversal of federal policy; but what does it mean in real terms?
Ingmar Lee is a long-time, BC-based environment defender whose latest effort is ‘10,000 Ton Tanker’ campaign to clear BC’s inside passage of dangerous tanker traffic currently flying under the radar. His past efforts to save the forests and watershed ecosystems of Vancouver Island include being among the few who took to the trees in the iconic Cathedral Grove, and remaining for two years while the law, loggers, and Weyerhaeuser threatened them every day in every way they could. The fact the Grove remains at all is due in great part to he and his “outlaw” cohorts.
Between campaigns like Cathedral Grove, fighting the destruction of the suburban forest to make way for highways in Langford, scaling the BC Legislature flag pole to garner press in opposition to the Enbridge pipeline scheme, and dismantling seismic explosives in the heart of Sandhill Crane nesting grounds, Ingmar earned an Asia Studies degree from the University of Victoria, with a minor in Environmental Studies.
Ingmar Lee and a tanker by another name in the second segment.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good doings and otherwise planned for the streets of our town in the coming week; and beyond there too. But first, Robert Tercek and ‘Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success In A Dematerialized World.’
Nuclear power’s role in our energy future will doubtless play a large part in the forthcoming COP21 talks in Paris.
Long-cited as the “safe” and “carbon friendly” alternative to fossil fuels, even environmental stalwarts like George Monbiot promote nukes, if only for the transitional period required for the world to switch to CO2-free forms of energy generation.
But does nuclear power really buy us time when its downstream by-products are an eternal threat?
John LaForge is a long-time staffer at Nukewatch, the Wisconsin-based nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group. His countless articles on the topic have appeared in Nukewatch’s quarterly and at online sites like: New Internationalist, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Earth Island Journal and at CounterPunch.org, where I found his latest, ‘Exploding Radioactive Waste Warning: Keep It Above Ground’ a disturbing account of a homegrown nuclear emergency you probably haven’t heard about.
John is co-recipient of the US Peace and Justice Studies Association’s 2004 Social Courage Award, and is a 1986 War Resisters League Peace Awardee who has spent in total more than four years in prisons and jails for his non-violent resistance to our war system.
John LaForge in the first segment.
And; the World became a distinctly more dangerous place yesterday with the shooting down by Turkey of a Russian warplane. That the two Russian pilots were reportedly shot dead* as they hung in their parachutes, and the body of at least one paraded across social media, makes a Turkish walkback from its actions, and any Russian face-saving measure, even more difficult. Turkey’s actions are, in the opinion of my second segment guest, the gravest crisis NATO has ever faced – seeing one of its members unilaterally provoking war with a regional Superpower.
Patrick Henningsen is a freelance journalist and co-founder of the online news site, 21st Century wire, launched during the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Patrick’s geopolitical analyses and commentaries are featured online at RT and Al Jazeera, and of course at 21Wire, where he’s been working overtime these past two weeks since the attacks in Paris, and now covering this stunning development over Syria.
Patrick Henninsen and what bitter grist Turkey’s shootdown brings to NATO’s table in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFIV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of the coming week from our city’s streets, and beyond there too. But first; John LaForge and “when it rains it burns,” Nevada’s little-known nuclear mishap.
This past summer, the retreat of a salmon farming operation from Clayoquot Sound marked a first for the long fight to protect wild salmon.
For those whose epic migration cycle begins and ends in the rivers and creeks of the Sound, they must first and last traverse a gauntlet of more than twenty such operations.
Opposition to the fish farms, referred to by opponents as the sea-based equivalents to land-based feedlot, or “factory farms,” has grown throughout British Columbia due to environmental impacts and concern for the genetic survival of the five distinct Pacific salmon species.
While the success at home, in Clayoquot, is heartening for all engaged in the effort to preserve wild salmon, sometime the fight must be taken to the source; and it is with that in mind a delegation of First Nations and local enviros are heading to Norway, the very heart of the salmon farming industry, to attend a transcontinental Wild Salmon Conference and meet up with their European counterparts.
Bonny Glambeck is with Clayoquot Action, the Tofino-based conservation society committed to the Sound’s biocultural diversity. Their goal is simple, they say; “keep Clayoquot Sound clean and green for future generations, to preserve the diversity and integrity of the ecosystems, and to maintain and develop community and cultural richness.”
Bonny Glambeck in the first segment.
And; it’s not only on the streets of Europe’s capitals, militarization is taking hold in the most varied of venues. For example, a newly released report reveals the so-called security strategy of the Canadian/US mining giant Tahoe Resources, and to the people of southeastern Guatemala, the Escobal Project looks a little like the Third-World War. Investigative Journalist, Luis Solano’s ‘Under Siege: Peaceful Resistance to Tahoe Resources and Militarization in Guatemala’ untangles, says MiningWatch Canada, a web of relationships and tactics leading to the militarization of local farming communities.
“From the outset,” writes Solano, “Tahoe Resources hired a US security and defence contractor that boasts experience with corporations working in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a security plan that treated peaceful protest and community leaders as if they were armed insurgents.”
Jennifer Moore is the Latin America Program Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada. From her Ecuador-base, Jen spent years in Latin America as a freelance print and broadcast journalist, specializing in communities affected by Canadian-financed mining companies and exposing, among others, Blackfire Explorations’ and its notorious Payback Mine in Chiapas, Mexico. MiningWatch Canada helped sponsor Luis Solano’s recent ‘Under Siege’ tour through Canada.
Jennifer Moore and resisting Tahoe in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz of happenings on and around our streets, and beyond, in the coming week. But first, Bonnie Glambeck and On to Norway! with Clayoquot Action.
[Note: This is a reloaded version of an interview lost during one of the site’s numerous hack attacks. – ape] This week: Marking Armistice Day in Victoria, I went down to the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion memorial, tucked quietly in the bushes beside the fountains, between the Legislature Buildings and the Grand Pacific Hotel, there to stand with the stalwart, white-poppy adorned peace proponents who speechify and personalize what war and peace mean to them. And;Terry Glavin is an award-winning journalist, editor at Transmontanus Books, a new columnist at the Ottawa Citizen, and he recently delivered the Harvey Southam Fellowship lecture in journalism, ‘Orwell and Everything After’ at the University of Victoria. Terry Glavin is the author of six and co-author of four books, and his latest is ‘Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.’ He is also co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. Terry Glavin and where next Afghanistan in the second half. And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news from Victoria’s streets and beyond. But first, remembering all the fallen on Armistice Day in Victoria.
