This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

This week: American activist David Swanson on election year politics at home and abroad, Vancouver Island documentary filmmaker, environmental activist, and campaigner for the homeless, Richard Boyce on the back room deals delivering public forest lands into the hands of Big Timber; and, Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed on good local goings-on in the coming week.

 

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca .  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com . And, you can check out the GR blog at:  http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com   

Fittingly, American jurists will not be ruling on the case of a female Halliburton employee gang raped by co-workers in Iraq. As with the myriad crimes against conscience being committed under the blinkered eyes of justice in Iraq, the repeated violation of a young American woman, drugged and locked away in a shipping container by co-workers, and denied food, water, or medical assistance by armed Halliburton guards, falls between the jurisdictional cracks created by erstwhile Baghdad proconsul, L. Paul Bremer's edict exempting American contractors in Iraq from in-country criminal prosecution, regardless of the offence.

 

This means, like the uncounted Iraqi widows of the teeming hundreds of thousands of undocumented dead victims of the occupation, Jamie Leigh Jones can't get a hearing for her case in America's courts.

 

No matter; it's election time in the U.S., and corporate media has taken its cue, and turned its attention away from war, economic meltdown, and the growing armies of dispossessed Americans, focussing instead on the long horse race for the cat-bird's seat at Pennsylvania Avenue. This to the exclusion of fringe stories like Jamie Leigh Jones,' and the others swept up by the daily killing and brutality underpinning the American project in Iraq and elsewhere.

 

David Swanson is a Washington-based activist, writer, broadcaster, and creator of activist site, ImpeachCheney.org. He is the D.C. director of Democrats.com and co-founder of AfterDowningstreet.org. Among other things, David works with the group United for Peace and Justice, and between stints as a newspaper reporter and communications director, he served as Dennis Kucinich's press secretary during the 2004 presidential comapaign, and consultant for his 2008 run.

 

David Swanson and America 2008 in the first segment.

And; there is another "legally sanctioned" rape of a sort, visited at the hands of companies like Western Forest Products and its accomplices in the British Columbia government upon the forests of Vancouver Island.

 

Today in B.C., forestry corporations, in partnership with the provincial Liberal government, are beavering away at undermining the province's Tree Farm License system of "forest" management put in place more than half a century ago.

 

The TFL was ostensibly put in place to ensure British Columbians benefited, financially at least, from the removal of vast tracts of forest lands. Now, logging companies realize the unsustainability of their timber business model and are instead becoming real estate developers on a grand scale, paving not replanting the public lands gifted them by the government.

 

Richard Boyce is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photo-journalist and Vancouver Islander whose keen environmental concern has led him to explore much of the island's back country. He is the creator of Island Bound Media Works, found at www.islandbound.ca, and writes the bi-weekly environmental column, 'Island Lens' for the Parksville-Qualicum News. Richard also serves as a Victoria outreach worker for HomlessNation.org.

 

Richard's latest project, 'Aerial Rainforest Gardens' examines life in the high canopy of Vancouver Island's dwindling wild forests. Richard Boyce and giving away the tree farm in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, David Swanson and an American stock-taking election year.

 

 

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Scott Horton, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Chalmers Johnson, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, David Robb, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., and many others.

Pacific Free Press is a new sister site to Atlantic Free Press (already a Google News Source). Like AFP, PFP is not a simple news aggregator. All of our writers have been contacted, have joined the site and said they will contribute their editorials that appear on their own blogs or are syndicated elsewhere - and - some have stated they will provide original work that will be initially exclusive to Pacific Free Press. The sheer amount of writers working with Atlantic Free Press has brought us to the point where we felt we need to divide some of the material by starting a new site.

Using our Open Source content management system (CMS), Joomla, our writers use a WYSIWYG editor to contribute their submissions and images and we publish upon review - it's cutting edge participatory journalism.

We have set up an Author's Guide which is used for training the writers on Joomla, podcasting (yes we podcast), and other emerging methods to communicate their media.

We don't comb the net, hunting down articles, that we would 'like' to appear in our publication and have been working for over a year to put together a core team of people to work with us.

The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press. We have over a dozen PHD's on our writer's list - from all parts of the globe.

Key writers who are onboard and will provide original work include:

Some of our other writers include Andrew Bard Schmookler, Anwaar Hussain, Chris Floyd, Craig Murray, Dave Lindorff, David Swanson, Doug Mitchell, Frank Pitz, Ingmar Lee, James Kunstler, James Petras, Jason Miller, Jennifer Matsui, Jeremy R. Hammond, Joel S. Hirschhorn, Joshua Frank, Katherine Hughes, Kevin Harris, Larry C. Johnson, Linda Milazzo, Manuel Valenzuela, Mark Crispin Miller, Mel Seesholtz, Michael Wills, Mickey Z, Mike Whitney, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Nicola Nasser, Norman Solomon, Paul J. Balles, Paul Lehto, Paul William Roberts, Phil Rockstroh, Ramzy Baroud, Richard Kastelein, Richard Marsden, Robert Jensen, Rod Amis, Rosemarie Jackowski, S. Artesian, Sam Welch, Seth Sandronsky, Shahid Alam, Shepherd Bliss, Stephen Lendman, Tom Chartier, Tom Engelhardt, Walter Brasch, Weldon Berger, Will Durst, William Bowles, William A. Cook, William Blum, Winter Patriot and many others found here.
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/component/option,com_comprofiler/task,usersList/Itemid,35/

Our strategy for Pacificfreepress.com is to provide pennings from dissident and alternative writers (Libertarian and Left) whose work does not appear in Google News due to the lack of solid, reputable sources for work of this kind. Google News is a rather fair and level playing field - with mathematical algorithms as it's objective editors rather then inherently subjective humans. Hence the importance of us being part of the roster at Google News.

We feel that creating another vehicle for the West Coast and East Asia Region (as opposed to Atlantic Free Press) will allow more direction towards producing works from a variety of Asian and Pacific West Coast voices which would be a great resource for Google News and an outlet for alternative and dissident journalists that don't normally get mainstream media coverage.

Best

Richard Kastelein
V.O.F. Expathos, The Netherlands
www.pacificfreepress.com
www.atlanticfreepress.com
www.chris-floyd.com

 

 

 

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