Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Laura Flanders, Jack Layton, and J9 for Monday, March 3, 2008

Sun

Mar

2008

Written by Chris Cook

Sunday, 02 March 2008 14:26

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

This week: broadcaster, journalist, and author, Laura Flanders on 'Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America;' political activist, NDP national party leader, and author, Jack Layton on his latest, 'Homelessness: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis;' and Janine Bandcroft will bring us up to speed with good goings-on in and around the south island 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. You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

Elections and rumours of elections are happening everywhere: Tony Blair despatched to a virtual Suzerainty in the Middle East, to make room for his successor, the Claudius-like Gordon Brown, currently drooling over the tribes of Britain; John Howard, stalwart Washington emissary in the Pacific, gone to be replaced by Howard-Lite "liberal" Labour Party leader, Kevin Rudd in Australia; the sycophantic Conservative Party's Stephen Harper, whose minority government tongue for now replaces "Liberal" party predecessor, Paul Martin's on the emperor's boot; and of course 'Le Grand Spectacle' U.S. presidential pageant, running already interminably over-long, and not due to conclude for another eight months time.

Add to these the marginal races of Russia, Africa, South America, Kosovo, et cetera, and it begins to seem we Earthlings are truly living in Democracy's Golden Age. But, how true the glitter of this gilded cage?

Laura Flanders is a journalist and author whose book titles include: 'Bush Women: Tales of a Cynical Species,' 'Real Majority, Media Minority: The Costs of Sidelining Women in Reporting' and contributed an essay on Hillary Clinton included in 'The Contenders;' she also served as editor of the anthology, 'The W. Effect: Bush's War on Women,' and her latest book is, 'Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America.'

Laura Flanders is also the host of Air America Radio's, Radio Nation, heard around America on the Air America network, and around the world over XM Satellite.

Laura Flanders and getting on your political grit for Mission Improbable in the first half.

And; though they seldom vote, 'The Homeless' are the fastest growing constituency in Canada. More than a quarter of a million Canadian citizens are estimated to now have no fixed address. Many thousands occupy shelters, sofas, cars, jails and out-buildings, while thousands more call the cold streets and alleys of the nation home.

It's a crisis across the country, though besides occassional lip service, and half-assed ameliorative measures, all levels of government are so far failing to adequately come to grips with this crisis.

Jack Layton is a long-time political scholar and social activist, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, and author, whose titles include: 'Speaking Out: Ideas That Work For Canadians,' 'Speaking Out Louder,' and his latest, 'Homelessness: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis.'

Jack Layton and addressing Canada's unaddressed 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, Laura Flanders and blue grit for a rum, red America.

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. 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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