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.<div>
<br></div><div>wendy<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Ron and Kris Graham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:graham2639@mindspring.com">graham2639@mindspring.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" color="black" face="Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:bold">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.</span></font></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" color="black" face="Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:bold"> </span></font></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" color="black" face="Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:bold">Kris</span></font></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" color="black" face="Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:bold"> </span></font></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" color="black" face="Comic Sans MS"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:bold"><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/boal11042010.html" target="_blank">http://www.counterpunch.org/boal11042010.html</a></span></font></b></p>
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<p align="right" style="text-align:right"><font size="2" color="#990000" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:#990000">November 4, 2010</span></font></p>
<h1><em><b><i><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:13.5pt">The
Two-Percent Putsch </span></font></i></b></em></h1>
<h1><b><font size="5" color="#990000" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:18.0pt;color:#990000">Crisis at Pacifica</span></font></b></h1>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:13.5pt">By IAIN
A. BOAL </span></font></p>
<p><span><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">C</span></font></span><span>apital’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.</span></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">In two previous dispatches to CounterPunch <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10062009.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10272009.html" target="_blank">here</a> 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 <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Democracy Now!, </font></i></em>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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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 <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Wall Street</font></i></em> and
publisher of <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Left Business Observer. </font></i></em>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.”)</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" color="red" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:red">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 <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Morning Show</font></i></em>, the noon program of
radical ideas <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Against the Grain</font></i></em>,
and the <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Evening News</font></i></em>. <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Against the Grain</font></i></em> 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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" color="red" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:red">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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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. </span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">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.
</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" color="red" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:red">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.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" color="red" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:red">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 <a href="http://us.mc541.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=salvagepacifica@gmail.com" target="_blank"><font color="red"><span style="color:red">salvagepacifica@gmail.com</span></font></a>,
and the business of reconstitution can begin.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">"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.</span></font></p>
<p><strong><b><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Iain Boal</span></font></b></strong> is a social
historian of science and technics, and co-author of Retort's <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of
War </font></i></em>(Verso). He can be reached at <a href="mailto:boal@sonic.net" target="_blank">boal@sonic.net</a>. </p>
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