This Week on GR
by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com
We will too tonight feature a veritable musical melange along with the expected compendium of mine own bloviation.
Sadly, we'll miss Janine Bandcroft's weekly contribution, as she's in transit even now.
Listen. Hear.
5:11:00 7:00 Electricity: A Tale of Two Cities (900 wds) - (b/g audio Fire This Time)
One of the year's biggest stories in Canada this year is one continuing even now. The effects of the massive ice storm in Ontario are still being felt in Toronto and environs. The Greater Toronto Area is what we hear most about; but the true extent of the pre-Christmas arctic blast is being felt much farther afield than the GTA. Across eastern Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, Michigan and Maine millions are discovering what life without electricity is like; and how miserable and dangerous life without electricity can be in the winter.
In Toronto, the disgraced Mayor Ford, whose fall is a prominent story on other year just past round-up shows itself, has seen his office by-passed for the response to the disaster, a prescient move made by city council just weeks before the storm. Instead, Deputy Mayor, Norm Kelly and the city's emergency management program committee are in charge. It is for Mayor Ford to be the media face for the GTA, and to issue a 'state of emergency' where necessary, something he has so far not done. Ford's nemesis, the Toronto Star newspaper has been busy despite the darkness, asking question benighted citizens want answered.
An article by Star staffers answers five of those questions; a couple being : Why were so many people - more than 750,000 estimated in the GTA alone - left in the dark after the storm? and: Why are so many people still without power? Readers also question whether Ice Storm 2013 qualifies as an official "disaster"; and when, if ever, was the last time Toronto was blacked out like this; and who's going to pick up the mounting piles of garbage - especially organic garbage, like spoiled food?
The answers in short are: This is the largest, longest power outage in the city's history; why so many were effected is due to the architecture of the power grid and the increased numbers of people and households in the region, many requiring time-intensive single line repair service, since the last great incident in 1965; and yes, extra crews will be deployed for garbage pick-up, and special provisions will be made for organic household waste.
But is it a disaster?
The Star reports Public Safety Canada's Canadian Disaster Database saying, the disaster designation criterion is: "10 or more people killed; 100 or more people affected/injured/infected/evacuated or homeless; an appeal for national/international assistance; [and] historical significance and significant damage/interruption of normal processes such that the community affected cannot recover on its own." According to these criteria, only the 1999 snowstorm, and a deadly 1944 blizzard that killed 21 people have merited the disaster designation in Toronto's history.
Every year Torontonians freeze to death on the streets of the city. The Star reported the storm's supposed first homeless person killed Friday. Five days earlier, a man identified as 'Richard' was found dead outside the doors of the Carlton and Church street Loblaws. But death by exposure is nothing novel in the nation's richest city. According to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Richard lay on the sidewalk frozen dead even as holiday shoppers walked past him, eager to get the last minute trimmings for Christmas celebrations. OCAP held services for Richard today in Toronto, and they provide some sobering statistics for the citizens of this northern country, Canada to mull over. OCAP says;
"The average life expectancy of a person who is homeless in Canada is a shocking 39 years old for women, and 46 years old for men. Homeless men are 8 times more likely to die than men of the same age in the general population. These deaths of people well before their time are preventable. The chronic lack of affordable, accessible and safe housing, the lack of an adequate income, the lack of sufficient programs and services, all contribute to the high mortality rates among homeless and underhoused people. As a result of these government decisions to prioritize profit over human lives, our communities experience loss at a rapid rate."
City councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam believes the city has failed in its response to homelessness, saying;
“We have had so many opportunities to respond, and I don’t think that we have done a good job.”
“We know that the homeless population in Toronto is getting larger and older, so there is a social tsunami coming our way and we need to be much more proactive as we try to address it.” Adding;
“We have a very wealthy city, and yet we have people who are living on our streets. It’s tough, [and] obviously, we can’t look the other way, and yet, thousands of people do. (This man) is our responsibility.”
Toronto averages 2 homeless deaths per week, and the wall of The Homeless Memorial at Church of the Holy Trinity chronicles more than 700 names of those who have died on the city's streets. Certainly these enough of these Canadians have been "affected/injured/infected and necessarily evacuated," and many more than 100 have died. And yet, there's no emergency declared here, no disaster designation appeal made nationally or internationally by the powers that be. Meanwhile, Mayor Ford remains adamant in his refusal to declare a state of emergency, sayings;
“This is not a state of emergency.” “State of emergency is basically when the whole city is paralyzed, business can’t open, people can’t get out of their houses. We’re not in that situation. We’ve discussed this numerous times and we’re not even close to a state of emergency.”
5:18:00 4:10 Music - Christian Doscher - Straight Lines - GasCD [Continuous play]
5:22:10 3:48 Music - DJ Serious (D.Yan/Sourav Deb) - Trap Doors - GasCD
5:24:58 1:02 Cart(s)
5:26:00 3:00 Remembering 2013 - Iraq and Imperialism
Welcome back to GR, etc. Tonight we've left the usual show format to bring you the annual GR Year-Ender Extravaganza. Joining me musically, in the background is again, Grant Wakefield and his compilation disc(s) 'The Fire This Time.' Grant is a UK-based documentary filmmaker, and works as a technician in the industry. He put together this audio collage in homage to those killed by the first American military invasion of Iraq in 1991. The so-called Operation Desert Storm was George H. W. Bush's nod to keeping world oil supplies suppressed for the benefit of his friends in Saudi Arabia. Of course, it also benefited the Ayatollah's of Iran, a bitter pill America and her Middle East ally Israel are still trying to avoid swallowing. Since Bush senior's war against the late Saddam Hussein, Iraq, and the region, has been in continuous turmoil.
Just this week past, car bombings throughout Iraq killed scores, and the US quietly announced its intention of supplying Hellfire missiles, those drone deployed munitions, commonly used to blow up wedding parties, farmers' markets, and community gatherings of all description throughout the Arc of Instability created by America and her allies in an effort to reign in the "terrorists" still fighting from the rubble it has made of the region; to eradicate those still resisting its imperial hegemony.
When background to the wars in the region are reported in the state/corporate media, an inexcusably rare occurrence, it is almost exclusively framed in the false context of the September 11th attacks of 2001. The exclusion of events in the middle east preceding 9/11 make it difficult for citizens of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Western Europe to grasp the full scope of the current situation there, and let slip into obscurity the continual criminality of the Anglo-American Axis powers. Conveniently excised from the narrative is the 8 years-long Iran/Iraq war fomented by the US; the more than decade-long sanctions campaign against the subsequently war ravaged Iraq; and the formative role America and Israel played in Lebanon's civil war; and this list is by no means definitive. What it amounts to though is a concerted effort by Western governments and their allies in media and academia to erase inconvenient facts from popular discourse. It is in effect a war on history, a debasement of truth, and a deliberate obliteration of the past; a memory war.
5:29:00 4:44 Memory War - Asian Dub Foundation - Community Music
5:33:44 2:00 Remembering 2013 - Defend our Coast Rally Nov 16, 2013 (stick)
Denial of the historical and continuing genocide against the First Peoples of this continent, North America and the erasure of what's left of the wilderness and its natural inhabitants here is a necessary forgetting, a collective amnesia required for the plans of those who would sacrifice for all time the real treasures still abiding here for personal and transitory profits. Remembering the truth of what this means is the battle that will dominate local politics in British Columbia and Canada for the year and years to come. In November, I went down to the Defend Our Coast demonstration, held as so many before it on the grounds of the Legislature here in Victoria.
5:35:44 10:50 Defend Our Coast Rally, Victoria - (Stick)
5:46:36 3:20 Music - Kinny Starr - Rise - Sun Again
5:50:00 3:00 Remembering 2013 - Bringing it home
During last year's Year-Ender show, I wrote:
"You may too recall, the Daiichi plant's six nuclear reactors were damaged in varying degrees by the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck off the coast of Japan in March of 2011. So why, you may ask, would that ancient event still be making un-news in 2012? Well, the Daiichi plant meltdown was never fixed. Nearly two years after the fact, several of the plants nuclear reactors are still busy melting away, releasing unknown amounts, or at least unreleased to the world's media, of Cesium -137 into the atmosphere. Even as millions of gallons of sea water, desperately dumped into the smouldering cooling tanks runs off contaminated back to the sea, the message motif coming from the company and its cohorts in the Japanese government is "No problemo!""
Not a lot has changed this year, excepting for the untold amounts of Cesium-137 that has entered the atmosphere and the millions of gallons of contaminated coolant water that has entered the Pacific Ocean since then. After several revisions of what constitutes safe radiation exposure levels for humans and sea creatures still harvested by Japan's fishing fleets, the nub of the issue remains: Nobody yet knows how to fix Fukushima.
I spoke a couple weeks ago to Mimi German of the Oregon-based citizen activist group No Nukes Northwest. She's also a founder of Radcast.org, a collection of concerned citizens doing the job both the American and Canadian governments seem unwilling to do, monitoring radiation levels coming from the stricken plant here on the west coast of North America. I also spoke recently with physician, author, and lecturer Dr. Helen Caldicott and she expressed extreme concern about allowing Japanese utility Tepco, the company responsible for Daiichi solely in charge of efforts to rescue the contaminated rods remaining in the wreckage of the facility. She says, though the radioactive pollution being released by Fukushima will remain in the biosphere for the next million years, "No container lasts more than a hundred years." See ya next year Fukushima.
5:53:00 4:15 Music - Funk Asylum - The Dinner is Ruined - GasCD
5:57:15 1:00 Remembering 2013 - Hugo Out
That's it for this year's show. Of course, there were a lot more un and under-reported stories out there; the ongoing targeting of Gaza's civilian population not least. You think it's hard going a week without electricity Hogtown...and we saw the end of Venezuela's extraordinary reformist president, Hugo Chavez. I happened to be in Cuba in January, while Hugo was there being treated for cancer. The people of Cuba will miss him almost as much as Venezuela's underclass. Thanks to Janine Bandcroft, and the staff that keep the wheels turning up here. Stay tuned for Arnold...This is for you, Commandante.
5:58:00 4:00 Music - Nathalie Cordone - Hasta Siempre
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