KPFA Weekday News, Friday, 01.22.2011, Interviews Morning Show Advocate on Air

You got the date wrong, idiot. Look on your calendar; Friday was January 21. We celebrated Roe v Wade, guaranteeing American women the right to a safe and legal abortion on Saturday January 22, 38 years ago. We have already covered this issue with the link to the program at
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/01/21/18669829.php

Pamela Drake needs to be sued as Doe 1 in the lawsuit naming the others promoting this blackmailing fundraising scheme, which has been reported to the attorney general by Pacifica.

WE DO NOT EVER WANT TO HEAR THIS FUNDRAISING SCHEME PROMOTED ON KPFA AGAIN, AND ESPECIALLY NOT ON ANY NEWS PROGRAM. The General Manager should retire Mark Mericle for being complicit in promoting this garbage on our public airwaves, on a program for which we the listener-subscribers pay. If not, then we will complain again and again as we are not paying for the Thug Hallinan Gang's destruction of our radio station to promote their Republican Party plant, Brian Edwards-Tiekert. That is clearly what this is all about.

60K and unending meanness do not creative talent make! Yea! Pacifica for having the leadership, experience and common sense to see this plea for what it is, a desperate attempt to buy/steal a career for the formerly favored. The 60K gasps you hear are drowning egos grasping at the last straws of control.

Thank you PacificaKPFA for not falling to threats from the entrenched and the entitled. O how deafening the screams of mediocrity!

The text above the photo states:
"There have long been disputes as to whether or not KPFA programmers are entitled to use KPFA air time to discuss station politics."

KPFA *should* discuss station politics on the air. You can't have good democratic governance without an informed electorate - people who are informed about *issues* in KPFA. governance.
There should be a regular program for this. There is the LSB show, including both factions, but it happens less than once a month - not enough to reach many listeners.

As far as news reporting on KPFA, it needs to be "fair & balanced".
Fair and Balanced would mean giving both perspectives, since the listeners are unlikely to get other perspectives elsewhere on KPFA issues, as they would on say Israel/Palestine issues.
So now, the anti-democratic forces (now masquerading as pro-democratic for their current purposes) are giving *their* spin on *their* news programs, devoid of a contrasting point of view.
(Around the last LSB election, they put on 3 programs speaking *against* voting And democracy at KPFA - with no pro-democracy interviewees included.)

I sent the following comment after hearing the above segment - and guess what, it disapperared from the comment page! I sent it again and guess what, the same thing happened again. I sent it a third time and - it would not post! Sound like they are blacklisting dissent on their web page. Suppression of dissent - at KPFA?

My comment:
Regarding the layoff of Morning Show hosts, unfortunately most of us have heard only the story Ceele, KPFAworker, and the News Department present - that Pacifica's layoffs were arbitrary, senseless, politically motivated, and hostile. This is because those fighting the layoffs have put out this information endlessly, and have used KPFA's airwaves to do so.
It is not too much to ask that the News Department (and other KPFA programmers) cover KPFA affairs in a fair and balanced manner.
If Arlene Engelhardt can't be interviewed, there are plenty of other people at the station, the LSB, among the listener activists, who can explain that KPFA was terminally overspent, could not meet payroll, owes Pacifica therefore Free Speech Radio News therefore Democracy Now money, that the station and thereby the entire network of 5 stations and serving 160 affiliates could go into bankruptcy and be sold to the highest bidders, and all for the sake of 2 jobs. While by 2010 every other station had cut back on paid staff down to about 24 FTE's and KPFA remained at 32%+, and cut payroll to 44.71 to 44.79% of expenditures, while KPFA remained at 64.65%. Pacifica itself cut down to bare bones staffing.
The News Department is not demonstrating journalistic integrity by supporting one side of a "controversy", but helping to protect "turf" with disinformation to the point of destroying this unique progressive nationwide network oasis of truth telling.
For another view see http://supportkpfa.org

http://danielborgstrom.blogspot.com/2011/01/grover-norquist-solution-at-kpfa.html

tHIS LICE CALLED SAVE KPFA HAS NO SENSE OF INTELLECTUELLE HONESTY AND SHOULD NEVER BE ENTRUSTED WITH KPFA AIR WAVE. FROM THE RANTING VERMINE OF ARLINE EVERY MORNING TO THE EMPTINESS AND USELESS ROTTEN WHITE SHIT OF ALL THIS ASSHOLES INFLATED BY THE ILLUSION OF THEIR SELF IMPORTANT WHITENESS THIS KUNTS HAVE TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES TO HELL.

Stop Thug Hallinan Gang and BIG POTATO are the best thing to happen to SaveKPFA since Arlene Engelhardt...keep it up kids

This is not news or journalism-this is favoritism. Which is the problem. AND now we know who is behind it...

SECTION 3. PRINCIPLES

The Foundation is committed to peace and social justice, and seeks to involve in its governance and operations individuals committed to these principles.

SECTION 4. COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY

The Foundation is committed to diversity and inclusion of people of all nations, races, ethnicities, creeds, colors, classes, genders, sexual orientations, ages and people with disabilities in its programming, staff, management, committees and governance.

so if the Foundation is committed to diversity, isn't laying off Aimee Allison, whom is black, reducing diversity?

Just saying...

Consciousness counts. You can be black white yellow or green -but you have to be real. Aimee started off well but within 6 months of being on the air she grew increasingly confrontational, petty and power struck. Allison marched around the station ordering people about, demanding and commanding, as in, "Parked in the middle of the lot again!!!-I am not surprised!!! Move your car I have to leave!" -direct quote.

Every one knows the KPFA parking lot is a free for all parking brawl-best approached with patieince and humor. So what was she really saying? Allison revealed her own state of advanced ego. This mindset is common among the misguided semi pro who misuses fledgling power, mistakes it for a permanent endowment and confuses being mean and smart with being tough and a leader. Aimee behaved badly including confused attempts on air to publicly humiliate other staffer members. There is such a thing as a fool who nevertheless has power.

This brush with the brevity of power proved revealing, it showed the difference between a grounded well rounded, seasoned professional, respected for correctly directing their power and the abusive behavior of those new to the game who let fledgling power go to their head, not knowing that things can change in an instant. Or that they can remain in the same job forever and fail, over time to grow, becoming stagnant and irrelevant. Hence the term "Ego Tripping".

In Aimee's case-it is about motive, mind set, and the consciousness behind the the color.

Our responsibility as staff is to KPFA its mission and its Vision;personality driven radio is a weak substitute for empowerment, education, information and entertainment. Treat people with dignity and respect and no matter if a door closes, opportunities come and go, another door inevitably opens and power by definition is never lost. Life long careers are carved of integrity and dignity, a career is more than a long held job. Careers are made not in spite of ups and downs but because of them.

Finally, if KARMA IS REAL and so is consciousness. Sadly, this lesson is best learned by observing those who lack the latter.

"You can be black white yellow or green -but you have to be real."

The oft-quoted Pacifica Mission Statement does not support your conjecture of a need to "be real". But your diatribe is indicative of what many out in radiolandia have contended: that people within KPFA and Pacifica disliked Aimee Allison and Brian Edwards-Tiekert, and their ouster was pursuant of that sentiment, rather than economic necessity.

To reiterate, there is no objective basis for what constitutes "be[ing] real", or if you like, a wholly subjective notion. By the way, where are the ICR folk crowing about your lack of verisimilitude for posting annonymously?

The Grover Norquist Solution at KPFA or so good it bears repeating-
by Daniel Borgström

If Grover Norquist had been a consultant for the gatekeeper group of paid staff that seems to run things at KPFA, he might've recommended something like: "You should reduce Pacifica Radio down to a size where you can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

As it has turned out, Grover Norquist wasn't needed, at least not in flesh and blood. The members and supporters of the station's power clique have done it without him--they have "starved the beast." Today both KPFA and Pacifica are broke, sliding towards bankruptcy. I can't imagine why the clique is doing this, except to speculate that they might have plans for resurrecting KPFA with outside funding, and with themselves in total control.

The current financial crisis didn't start in the fall of 2010, or that summer either. It's the result of years of living beyond the station's means. Warnings were sounded at least as far back as a meeting in 2005 when several board members expressed concern that there were too many FTEs. I remember asking the person next to me what an FTE was. "A full-time equivalent," I was told, and it was afterwards explained to me that the station was acquiring more paid staff than it could afford in the long run. This was detailed in the local board’s Minority Report of September 17, 2005.

In those days the station was doing reasonably well financially. But, according to several local board members, LaVarn Williams, Max Blanchet and Marnie Tattersall (all with solid backgrounds in finance), the cost of so much paid staff was not sustainable. KPFA needed to slow down on the hiring, look ahead, and plan accordingly.

Year after year, warnings from the opposition were ignored, dismissed, disregarded. Those expressing them were sometimes even yelled at. The unsustainable budgets were promoted by the "Concerned Listeners," the slate of board members who represent the station's power clique. The "Concerned Listeners" formerly called themselves "KPFA Forward" and more recently they've again changed their name, now to "Save KPFA." (For the sake of simplicity in what follows, they will be referred to as "CL/mgmt group" or just "CL'ers.")

So the CL'ers refused to acknowledge publicly what was clearly going to happen. Why? An intriguing email from that same month, September 2005, turned up as sort of a one-email Wikileak. It's the email which infamously suggested "dismantling the LSB." An even more foreboding line in that same email read: "How do we make our enemies own the problems that are to come?" The author was Brian Edwards-Tiekert, CL spokesperson and later longtime treasurer of the board.

It wasn't just the bloated budgets that caused the eventual crisis. During those same years, lawsuits against KPFA/Pacifica were poorly handled, costing hundreds of thousands of the listeners' dollars. Attorney Dan Siegel (then General Counsel for Pacifica) is considered a very smart lawyer, so why did he handle these legal matters so poorly?

There was also the CL'ers' unholy alliance with the JUC, the New York group which was then running WBAI into the ground, generating another financial drain on the Pacifica network. Interestingly, those two groups, the CL'ers and the JUC, seemed to thoroughly dislike each other. Their alliance appears to have been one of convenience, a mutual non-aggression pact, the deal apparently being: "We'll shield you from oversight and you shield us from oversight." Mismanagement at both stations bled the network--that was the result. But was it intentional, at least on the part of some of the players, at one or both of the stations?

Several years passed in this irresponsible fashion, but by 2008 the inevitable financial crisis was no longer deniable. Even the CL'ers were expressing concern; Brian Edwards-Tiekert called for layoffs throughout the network. These very necessary cutbacks were carried out at the rest of Pacifica's five stations, but strangely enough, not at KPFA, as we were to see.

It was always difficult, often impossible, to get accurate, detailed information from the management of KPFA. In 2005 & 2006, LSB members LaVarn Williams and Richard Phelps spent a over a year fighting for access to financial records. They won that battle, but the war went on. The power clique did not willingly share information; board members outside the inner circle continued to be denied access to records and information.

The station's then manager, Lemlem Rijio, (whose job it was to implement layoffs, and who never did) was also supposed to attend every LSB meeting and give a report, but she seldom did this either. On one of the rare occasions when she did attend, on March 14, 2009, opposition board members plied her with questions about the station's finances, and she answered evasively. When Staff Rep Shahram Aghamir asked, "How much is being spent on the consultants?" the manager at first tried to avoid the question, then said, "I will send you a confidential email." The confidential email never arrived.

As the mounting financial crisis became ever more apparent, the CL'ers began a disinformation campaign against the Pacifica national office. On August 6, 2009 there was a front page article in the Berkeley Daily Planet accusing Pacifica of improperly taking $100K from KPFA. That news leak came from Brian Edwards-Tiekert, the treasurer. But on investigation it was found that no such "raid" on KPFA's money had occurred. The newspaper printed a retraction the following week, but CL'ers continued to spread the story, despite its having been exposed as false. Later, Conn Hallinan, who certainly must have known the facts, since he was the LSB chair, wrote an email accusing Pacifica of "an old fashioned smash and grab" on KPFA's funds.

That was the beginning of a swiftboating campaign against Pacifica, in which the CL'ers are working to conjure up images of 1999, portraying Pacifica as the bad guy, the oppressor of KPFA, the beast which must be starved. In the recent 2010 election, the CL'ers even stole the name of an opposing group from 1993, and called themselves "Save KPFA." Members of the original 1993 Save KPFA group were outraged and objected strenuously. But the CL'ers are still using their new ill-gotten name.

At the end of 2009 it was discovered that a $375,000 check had been left in a drawer, left to expire. KPFA's former General Manager, Lemlem Rijio, took the fall for that. But it seems highly unlikely that she was the only one who knew about that "forgotten" check.

"How could anyone forget about a six-figure check!" KPFA activists have been asking; and some began connecting dots, wondering if it were intentional--that perhaps the CL/mgmt folks were deliberately working to bankrupt Pacifica in order to somehow acquire KPFA. Till then, the likelihood of the CL'ers deliberately acting in such a reckless manner had seemed so far-fetched that few expressed such suspicions. But as the spring of 2010 became summer, and then autumn, more and more connectable dots turned up. For example, we learned that during the last two years they spent the remaining $780,000 of the station's cash reserves rather than implement the layoffs.

Finally, in October, the new Executive Director of Pacifica, Arlene Engelhardt, stepped in and took the necessary action on layoffs. Some of the newscasters and show hosts--the core of the station's power clique--openly mutinied and launched an on-air campaign against Pacifica, attacking Ms. Engelhardt, trashing the network, and encouraging subscribers to withhold donations. They openly boasted of receiving non-donation pledges totaling $25K, eventually $55K. In effect, a defunding drive.

Much has happened during the two months since then, more than I can possibly fit it into this article, so I'm skipping numerous significant events including the LSB election, a series of rallies, forums, a canceled fund-drive followed by a successful one, a resolution taken to the Berkeley City Council, court appearances, a new Morning Show, a new general manager, and more. I'll talk about all that in a later article. Meanwhile, the CL'ers' intense and well-organized PR campaign against Pacifica continues as KPFA totters on the edge of bankruptcy.

So what do the CL'ers (now " Save KPFA") want? In their campaign statements, they present themselves as the champions of transparency, accountability, and democracy--the exact opposite of what they have been practicing all these years. More consistent with their practice is Matthew Lasar's call for a return to the system that was in place during the hijacker regime of the 1990's; in June 2010 he wrote: "I'd like to see governance go back to something like what it was around 1998--smaller, self appointed local station boards." Lasar is a high profile CL supporter who signs his name "Matthew Lasar, Pacifica historian" and is lauded as such by the CL'ers.

The CL'ers have recently become quite open with their desire to break with Pacifica. That would be their opportunity to rid themselves of the checks and balances, put a final end to any vestige of transparency and accountability, and openly run the station as an undisguised oligarchy. No elections, no Program Council, no UnPaid Staff Organization, and no more involvement from the community, except for financial support. While this might seem a more efficient way to run the station, it would open the door to corruption and manipulation by wealthy interests.

Exactly how the CL'ers might've planned to go about acquiring a bankrupt KPFA is less clear. Bankruptcy would result in the sale of the five Pacifica stations, including KPFA. The KPFA signal is reportedly worth $200 million, and such a sum would be difficult to raise. Some have speculated that the CL'ers might've made an arrangement with a major corporation to take over the station on the condition that they be left in charge. Or perhaps the CL'ers are "playing chicken" with the fate of the Pacifica network in the expectation that Pacifica may be willing to give them a deal on the station.

The CL'ers PR campaign is sophisticated and highly effective. They've invested a lot of time and effort in this. If they were not planning some such scenario, then it can only be surmised that they have been destroying both KPFA and Pacifica out of sheer stupidity.

DANIEL BORGSTRÖM
January 21, 2011

Only the equally shallow fail to understand the danger of engaging a fool with power.

It is all about the bottom line and the community flees the confused the false and the self righteous -or check the donation drop off which picked up as soon as the old Morning Group left the building. Facts do not lie unlike those blinded by wego-ego/CLers

What is real and what is personality driven?

10 Years of KPFA Finances - from audited financial statements available here:
http://pacificana.org/filebrowser/National/Financials/Audits

We're snowed in but not plowed under: Face the facts and follow the money. THAT IS REAL. Do you know the difference now??? Do you Care? I think not-its all about the personality. Let the blind lead the blind into bankruptcy, then.

I do enjoy pithy statements; the more subjective, the better!

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving one's self"