[PAA-Discuss] Crisis at Pacifica

[Wendy Schroell]

I don't have time to read this right now [also don't want to get really
really irritated while I'm at work] but can tell you that this guy Iain Boal
is far from objective on this subject.  There is an extreme propaganda
campaign going on at KPFA right now - would give the Republican Attack Ad
writers a run for their money.  More later.

wendy

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Ron and Kris Graham <
graham2639 at mindspring.com> wrote:

>  *Can someone please give me some insight as to what is going on within
> Pacifica? Are there problems related to governance within KPFT? Please
> inform. Thanks.*
>
> * *
>
> *Kris*
>
> * *
>
> *http://www.counterpunch.org/boal11042010.html*
>
> * *
>
> November 4, 2010
> *The Two-Percent Putsch * *Crisis at Pacifica*
>
> By IAIN A. BOAL
>
> Capital’s most severe crisis in seventy years ought to be a moment of
> significant opportunity for the left. But as the right mobilizes disgruntled
> Americans via its vast radio, television, web, and print empires, the one
> mass medium available to the left—Pacifica Radio—is driving out its best and
> brightest. A network that has the potential to reach a quarter of the US
> public is opting for irrelevant and unlistenable programming at a time when
> competent and genuinely radical journalism is urgently needed, and
> justifying its warped choice with the Thatcherite mantra: there is no
> alternative.
>
> In two previous dispatches to CounterPunch here<http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10062009.html>and
> here <http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10272009.html>  I described the
> pathological state of Pacifica's byzantine governance structure - a national
> board containing 122 members, baroque bylaws, and vastly expensive and
> corrupt local board elections. The chief result has been the ascendancy of a
> kind of Tea Party of the left, featuring ex-Scientologists, miracle cure
> hucksters, and conspiracists who believe that Amy Goodman's *Democracy
> Now!, *Pacifica's premier program, is taking CIA money to suppress "the
> truth about 9/11". Add to that an austerity plan to stick it to the workers,
> right out of the Thatcher/Sarkozy playbook, and you have Pacifica Radio in
> 2010.
>
> Under cover of budget cuts, the Mad Hats who control the Pacifica National
> Board are seeking to dispense with those who oppose their conspiracy-driven
> agenda—or simply strive for well-produced, quality radio. The axe has fallen
> first on WBAI's acclaimed 'Behind the News', an island of lucid analysis in
> the mass media swamp, hosted by the economic journalist Doug Henwood, author
> of *Wall Street* and publisher of *Left Business Observer. *In the midst
> of a gathering emergency, the brains trust at WBAI decided that Henwood's
> program, which provides some of the best economic analysis anywhere, should
> be cut to twice a month. Henwood tendered his resignation, blasting the
> swerve towards “chem-trails and footpads and 9/11 nuttery”. A day later the
> vitamin supplements mogul Gary Null, notorious for his claim that HIV does
> not cause AIDS, announced that he would be returning to the airwaves of WBAI
> on November 15th. (ACT UP wrote to Pacifica that “returning Gary Null to the
> air for financial reasons would be unethical profiteering, because he gives
> out information that can cause people to become infected with HIV or fail to
> treat the infection properly.”)
>
> The Mad Hats are now focusing on the flagship station of the Pacifica
> network, KPFA in the San Francisco Bay Area, which thus far has been mainly
> free of such conspiracism and snake oil. Three members of the Pacifica
> National Board have drawn up a list of their staff enemies to be fired,
> which includes the majority of the workers at some of the most successful
> programs, in terms of listenership and fundraising, on KPFA's air: the *Morning
> Show*, the noon program of radical ideas *Against the Grain*, and the *Evening
> News*. *Against the Grain* host Sasha Lilley's fate was apparently sealed
> when she interviewed me about my CounterPunch article on why the Pacifica
> board system had cost more than $2.4 million dollars since 2002 and why it
> needed to be replaced. Those at the top of Pacifica were incensed and
> demanded her firing.
>
> Laying off these workers would not only violate KPFA's contract with the
> Communications Workers of America. It would seriously compromise the
> solvency of what has been the most financially successful station in the
> network. KPFA has historically subsidized the other four Pacifica stations,
> and has financed and executed some of the most groundbreaking reportage,
> from the McCarthy era to the Free Speech Movement to the Iran-Contra
> investigations to, recently, the latter-day Winter Soldier hearings.
>
> At KPFA, the union and local management have come up with an alternative
> menu of cuts, so that the station can balance its budget while preserving
> the ability to produce high quality programming. The cuts focus on KPFA's
> parent organization Pacifica itself, whose bureaucracy has become an
> enormous financial drain on the five stations. In spite of the tough
> economic times, KPFA raises enough money to pay for itself—it just doesn't
> raise enough money to pay for Pacifica as well. Pacifica is demanding the
> station hand over $800,000 of KPFA listeners' money in the coming fiscal
> year and has flatly refused to make any of the recommended cuts. The
> Pacifica National Board refuses to reduce the number of its famously
> expensive—and dysfunctional, as a search of YouTube can attest—quarterly
> board meetings. KPFA's union has asked Pacifica's executive director, Arlene
> Engelhardt, to disclose her own salary (which should be a matter of public
> record) but she has refused. Austerity is just for the workers, after all.
>
> In the place of programs of journalistic integrity and serious intellectual
> inquiry, KPFA listeners only have to look to WBAI to imagine what the sound
> of their radio station will soon be: programs about the Illuminati,
> microchips used for mind-control, and neo-populist goldbuggery. And all
> because “there is no alternative” but to cut experienced journalists and
> union jobs.
>
> If I've invoked Lewis Carroll more than Lewis Hill (the syndicalist founder
> and guiding spirit of Pacifica) in this dispatch - it's because there is
> truly a Mad Hatter's Tea Party feel about some of the current proceedings.
> But it is at the same time terribly serious, and not simply for the station
> workers whose livelihoods are threatened. Let's remind ourselves of what is
> at stake. The network has the signal power to reach one fourth of the
> population of the United States - that's an extraordinary earprint. Don't
> believe those who glibly assert that terrestrial radio is old school and a
> dying medium. The money men don't believe it - that's why the WBAI license,
> in the wake of the great privatizing grab of Clinton's 1996
> Telecommunications Act, was being appraised at a staggering $250 million.
> And the same goes for KPFA, which pumps out more than 50,000 watts over
> Northern California.
>
> Make no mistake, Pacifica remains a vital space for dissenting and
> antinomian voices in the United States. If this network is lost, it is
> inconceivable that the Left could ever get such a chance again. It was,
> after all, only an accident that the conscientious objectors and poets who
> instigated the network were given a license to broadcast at all. Following
> the catastrophe of a global war, the founding Pacificans in 1946 recognized
> that the hand letter-press and the Gestetner duplicating machine were not
> adequate to the task of communicating beyond the confines of a small coterie
> of war resisters, anarcho-pacifists and bohemians in Berkeley and San
> Francisco. They dreamed of what Dwight Macdonald called “big effects”. They
> hoped to broadcast, for example, to the communities around the naval base of
> Oakland and the dockyards of Richmond, using AM radio. The state refused
> them access to the powerful and dominant medium of AM, but they were granted
> an FM license, mainly because frequency modulation was a novel technology
> then in its infancy. Virtually nobody had a receiver in those pioneering
> post-war years; Lewis Hill even gave away sets to the first subscribers. Few
> foresaw how extraordinarily valuable public access to the FM spectrum would
> eventually become. This precious resource, held in trust by the foundation,
> is not only being squandered, but is now mortally endangered.
>
> To those who would say there is no alternative to cuts or to the dominance
> of the mainstream media, I would answer, yes, there is indeed an
> alternative. Radio must be put first over a delusional, power-hungry
> bureaucracy and a governance system run amok. Crackpot electoralism has
> allowed the will of ten of thousands of listeners and subscribers to be
> thwarted by candidates whose mandate rests upon as few as two hundred votes.
> A plurality of 2 per cent! How did this absurd situation come to pass?
> Abstractly committed to democracy but too bored to vote in a relentless
> train of mind-numbing elections, thousands of dedicated supporters of
> Pacifica will wake up this month to find their favorite programs
> inexplicably decimated, while their putative representatives, parading the
> mantle of “community”, continue to spend millions of dollars of listener
> pledges on yet more board meetings and ballotry.
>
> The only hope for the long term health of Pacifica is to scrap as soon as
> possible the fatally flawed governance structure and start over. This means
> collecting approximately 800 signatures of current subscribers, that is, one
> percent of the membership, to begin the process of revising the bylaws. A
> national "Salvage Pacifica" campaign must be initiated as the immediate
> priority. So once again I invite concerned readers and the silent majority
> of actual listeners to contact salvagepacifica at gmail.com<http://us.mc541.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=salvagepacifica@gmail.com>,
> and the business of reconstitution can begin.
>
> "The crisis", Antonio Gramsci wrote from Mussolini's prisons, "consists
> precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in
> this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." We've seen the
> morbid symptoms on display. It's time to move ahead to rescue—and
> revitalize—this invaluable resource for the left.
>
> *Iain Boal* is a social historian of science and technics, and co-author
> of Retort's *Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War *(Verso).
> He can be reached at boal at sonic.net.
>
> * *
>
> ---------------
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