Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Janine Bandcroft GR Year-Ender 2014 Dec. 31, 2014

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

Happy New Year! You know that means it's time for our annual GR Year-Ender show!

It's been an eventful year here, and as has become the custom, I'll highlight some of the most impressive stories we covered during its course.

In a new news twist however, I'll mix in audio from story intros, and throw a little of the year's music featured to boot.

So, first up a piece from the much utilized, GasCD compilation album, and Chritian Doscher's 'Straight Lines'.


Listen. Hear.

As he has since 2011, Andy Worthington again crossed the U.S. in 2014, marking another infamous anniversary of America's gulag at Guantánamo Bay with a speaking tour. A long-time justice advocate for the inmates of Guantánamo Bay, 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 also co-directed the film, 'Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.' From January 8th last year, Andy visited several US cities with Debra Sweet, National Director of the World Can't Wait campaign to shutter the prison, and he'll be back this coming year. A January 8th, 2015 event in New York City kicks off a five city tour talking up the closing, finally, of Camp X-ray and advocating for the release of all its remaining prisoners. This past month, 10 men were released; six Yemenis being sent into exile in Uruguay, while four Afghans were repatriated. But, more than a hundred men remain there still; many being long ago cleared of any terrorist, or military affiliations.

Well, roughly a fortnight ago Christy Clark's BC Liberal government made crystal clear, for any who still doubt the obvious, they are a captured entity whose loyalty and affiliation to the people and places around this province is a distant second place consideration to servicing the needs of the rapacious industrial monster that has settled over this province. Like a great darkening eclipse, determined to suck from the very soil we stand upon all that lives and breathes, our new overlords promise to leave nothing behind them but dust and ashes, (while naturally providing good fortune for their few, well-connected fifth columnists in government and local business). Yes, Crusty Crack has opened wide the legs of the province to allow the construction of the long-proposed, but always denied, (on the grounds of common sense) Site C project on the Peace River. Despite, or perhaps in spite, of all advice to the contrary, the lying in the high weeds Liberals gave the project the "Good to Go!" condemning a great swath of the Peace forever in the process. All for the promise of transitory profits, trinkets, and a pocket full of promises made by offshore corporate behemoths who care as much for the people of BC as they do for the peoples and lands of Asia they've already despoiled.

Israel attacked Gaza again this year past. This time, their "Operation Protective Edge" killed more than two thousand Gazan "patients" and left hundreds of thousands more wounded, homeless, jobless, and left to spend the winter huddled in the darkened husks of their city. Israel bombed hospitals, police, fire, and power stations, destroying all those things identifying modern civic life. The governments of Canada and the United States maintained steadfast support for the Jewish State, even as it violated every ordinance of international law. Rallies were held around the World, but to little apparent avail. I went down to several of Victoria's rallies, and recorded this next one, bizarrely crashed by both Christian Zionists, and Israeli tourists.

Police violence played large in the news in 2014. From Michael Brown and "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" in Ferguson, Missouri to the inflamatory, video-captured killing by a gang of New York's finest of "loosie" cigarette salesman, Eric Garner. In New York City and around America, that killing has found expression in the now famous phrase, "I can't breathe." Just last week, another teenager was killed, just a few miles from Ferguson, by a policeman who alleges 18 year-old Antonio Martin pointed a pistol at him at a gas station. Riots ensued.

Amnesty International released a report last week that warns of an impending "humanitarian disaster" in Eastern Ukraine due to a blockade of, mostly Russian, aid by Kyiv's fascist military forces. Amnesty says the government Stephen Harper and Barak Obama support is committing a war crime by starving the civilian populations in the east of the country. Canada's media is in lock-step support of Harper and the coupsters too, chucking out inconvenient notions of democracy, the defense of individual rights and rule of law, or even the advocacy of basic decency when it comes to forwarding America and company's corporate agenda. Much as seen in Chile, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Bolivia, Libya, Egypt, and everywhere else national sovereignty rears its ugly mug, unchallenged hegemony is the Real Politic that really counts in the New American Century.

That does it for this year's Year Ender. Some of the stories we didn't have time for here, but covered over the course of the last year include: Fukushima, still melting after all these years; the Hong Kong student democracy uprising; the Burrard Mountain stand-off against Kinder Morgan; the Imperial Metals Mount Polley mine tailings spill disaster; Police abuse in Canada and abroad; the murder of 43 Mexican students through a collaboration between various Mexican government agencies and organized crime; stolen elections in Canada and the United States; and burgeoning, so-called austerity measures that always amount to a war against the poorest, and others, like the great news of the release of the last of the Cuban Five!

In short, we did what we have done for the past fifteen and more years here; reiterating our guiding principles of: Dedication to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in corporate and state media. You can check out the year's past stories at Pacific Free Press.com, under the Gorilla Radio banner. Thanks as always o Janine Bandcroft and all the folks at the station that keep the wheels turning week in and week out, and stayed tuned for more. That's all I've got for you this year.

Here's wishing you all have a happy and prosperous New Year!