This Week on GR
by C.L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com
The late, and truly great, British playwright, Harold Pinter summed up the age in his 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech. Delivered dramatically via video stream – something not so common then – and at the height of America’s military demolition of Iraq . The terminally ill Pinter spent most of his thirty two and a half minute address addressing the profoundly ignorant state in which We the people exist, and how we blithely allow the horrors of our times be committed in our name. Who hearing that speech could forget his hoarsely stentorian remonstration of the Bush claque and its cowardly coalition’s willful crimes? “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter.”
Seventeen years later, and millions killed, maimed, dispossessed and made desperate the lying and killing continues apace. Pinter would be unsurprised, because as he said then, for the powerful, “… it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives.” And so it is in Canada today, as we march towards another global war, standing on guard in ignorance.
Yves Engler is a MontrĂ©al-based activist, and author of 12 books, mostly on Canadian foreign policy, including his latest, ‘Stand on Guard For Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military’. He’s also a prolific essayist whose many articles appear at numerous sites online, including at his website, YvesEngler.com, where his recent article, ‘Is It Time for Canada to Apologize to Libya?‘ appears.
Yves Engler in the first half.
And; what’s old is news again: Inflation, the economy’s nemesis so long thought slain has resurfaced, its dragon’s teeth popping up in balance sheets and union negotiation positions, and most scarily, ravishing family budgets the World over.
Yves Smith is a Harvard Business School grad, blogger, and author whose investment banking and management career has intersected all the biggest names on Wall Street. In late 2006, seeing the financial ice bergs on the horizon and frustrated by the “obvious under-reporting…of the risk in all credit instruments” she started Naked Capitalism in an effort to “promote critical thinking through the medium of a finance and economics blog.”
Her 2010 book, ‘ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism‘ followed, dissecting the “obvious” and inevitable 2008 financial disaster and the dismal Obama administration reaction to it. Yves’ has also written articles for many major publications, appeared on US network television and alternative online news programs like The Real News, Democracy Now, and the now-banned RT.
Her recent article at Naked Capitalism, ‘The G-7 is Still Pushing Its Nutty Russia Oil Price Cap Idea‘ reveals how at sea the West is in what is rapidly emerging as a truly New (economic) World Order.
Yves Smith and the stark state of a capitalist system in crisis in the second half.
But first, Yves Engler and “the considerable bearing of the truth on where the World stands now“.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing since 1998; in Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: cfuv.ca. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com/