PACIFICA Holds Elections, a Victory for the Left?

Elections for Pacifica Radio Listener Station Boards began on January 5th. These elections will make Pacifica Radio the first non-profit in the nation to elect its leadership by a direct vote of its contributing members. As many of you may remember a centrist corporate board closely alinged with Capitalism and the Democratic party took over the left of center Pacifica Foundation during the 1990's. A settlement in 2001 returned control of the foundation to the progressives only after a massive national campaign that spanned over two years and involved tens of thousands of people and over a hundred arrests. An active listenership arose in the aftermath of that campaign that has continued to be interested in and involved in the ongoing discussion of the Pacifica foundation's mission, programming, and governence. The Pacifica campaign failed to produce a single unifying vision about these issues however and in the aftermath of the campaign deep and bitter divisions developed between different camps with differing ideas about what the left itself is and stands for.

Nationally the biggest of those divisions has arisen over the question of race and racial inclusion at Pacifica. The poles of that debate have been defined by groups of the active listenership at Pacifica's two largest stations NYC's WBAI and Berkley's KPFA. Because I am an active member of the NY based faction to most aggresively raise the issue of race at Pacifica, the Unity Caucus, I will attempt to refrain from defining the politics of those opposed to our position and invite such people to respond if they feel I have misstated their position.

First you might well ask yourself why is there a Unity Caucus at all? From John Brown then to Marylin Buck now there have been whites on the American left who have given their very lives in the fight against racism and imperialism....the left by definition opposes racism. While that is true, different people on the left have differing interpetations of what it means to oppose racism. Unlike imperialism, which involves peoples who live outside our borders and struggles that our involvement in is peripheral at best, the struggle against racism involves us here in this country. Opposing racism means inclusion, the sharing of power and resources between people of very different backgrounds who share common goals and ideas. Under that definition a person can be against racism who is not part of the left at all....and many are. As someone who has spent my whole adult life on the life on the left it disappoints me that I can go to a Republican fundraiser in DC (local or national) and see more racial diversity than is most often the case on the still largely segregated left, where a Nader fundraiser is not likely to be very diverse. As we all know though while both George Bush's cabinet and fundraisers may be diverse, the policies pursued by his government and his party hit hardest at Blacks and immigrants (the same can be said for his predecessor).

Hey don't get me wrong here I'm no Zapata, or Sandino who for his whole life had the conciousness I have today....I grew in understanding and I'm writing this to share what understanding I have gained, not to beat you up. I felt I had to say that because the debate here at Pacifica has become viscious. Many of us in the Unity Caucus feel that our enemies, and we've made a lot of them, are defending racism in order to hold onto power and control the foundations resources.

Lets go back to that idea of sharing power and resources as at least partially defining inclusion because I have seen some ideas of how to do that out there in the wider society that strike me as just plain wrong. In and of itself, for the group holding institutional power (control over the purse strings) to employ members of other racial groups is not anti-racist...J. Edgar Hoover had a Black cook and driver, he was deeply racist. If all of the decision making power over who is hired and what their responsibilities are(institutional power) is held by the members of a single group, no matter how that power is accquired, it has the potential to be racist (I make exception for the family owned business in some cases). In and of themselves elections don't guarantee racial balance. The composition of the US Senate would be vastly different if they did. Just as important as having an election is how it is conducted,. as we all saw in 2000. The government of the United States was set up to legitimatize and propagate the power of wealthy white men over natives, blacks, colonized Mexicans, foreigners, and women. One look at the Senate today should tell you how little has changed in the last 200 years.

While they may not have changed in 200 years, the rest of us have and the members of the Unity Caucus within Pacifica wanted for our bylaws to reflect another conciousness than the racist conciousness in power over the apparat of the state itself. We felt because Pacifica has positioned itself historically to be the voice of oppressed and marginalized people here and around the world that such people should have a voice in Pacifica. For that reason part of the active listenership in NY put forward a proposal to guarantee that our election didn't result in the establishment of something resembling the US Senate.

Our proposal called for additional seats to be added to listener station boards in the event that our progressive listeners returned listener station boards that looked like the Senate. That didn't mean we wanted to include some random people who fit into a demographic in order to celebrate "diversity". It meant including non-white activists doing work in our listening area to helping us develope a base of support in communities of color in such places as Oakland.

Under our proposal people of color involved in the governance of the foundation would represent actual constituancies in our listening areas, not just be people similar to those in power already but with a different skin tone or accent. We confronted a wall as solid as the one confronted by peoples in devolping world countries when they want power and resources controlled by multi-national corporations. At the national level whites hold institutional power at Pacifica, the programming reflects that and has historically reflected that.

The corporate culture, and that's what it is lets get real, that dominates the Pacifica Foundation is a culture that can mobilize 15,000, largely white, progressives to march and camp out to defend a station that is two or three miles from Oakland but who largely ignore that Oakland is there. NY's WBAI was the first station in the NY metro area to broadcast rap music. For a very brief time that meant we controlled the widespread dissemination of rap at its begining. If we had been willing to we could have shaped the developement of the whole genre. If we had been willing to do with rap in NY what is done with Jazz at 89.3 WPFW in Washington DC we would not be in financial crises we are in today. We could have promoted politically concious sound before the white owned corporations promoted a version that validated black stereotypes already enshrined in the white community and sold it back to Black America (and then resold it to white America). It would have been impossible to sell such an idea within Pacifica then and it would be impossible now in my opinion.

Now national leadership turns around and says we are going to have a vote, only paid members can vote, people of all nationalities can run, so we are not racist. That's the Berkley model. Those were the bylaws that they passed. The Unity Caucus didn't like that model. We don't think that the peoples who lack institutional power are to likely to be active members. So now across the nation we're being attacked as anti-democratic and "ultra-vanguardist" (I hadn't heard that one for a minute). If you're a Mexican agricultural worker who speaks Spanish are you going to listen to a station with no Spanish language programs? Is that going to be your source for news and public affairs? Are you and your freinds going to run out and pay $25.00 and run in the election to change that? I don't know about you but I'm changing the channel. We thought we could soften the impact of the new bylaws by offering a waiver to economically disadvantaged people in our listening area interested enough to vote.

We had vested interests here, I'll be honest, for example we can get a handful of left leaning day labors to vote for us because we support Spanish language programming. As we don't have such programming at now at WPFW though it isn't too likely the're going to come in and volunteer. We even got that one passed by the national board (someone was sick and someone else quit....we had a one day majority), but then of course our new elections supervisor, who is white, was appointed by the white majority, and comes from the whitest state in America consulted with an unnamed "Pacifica lawyer" (who was probablly also white and who I suspect sits on the board and leads the opposition or is married to her and hence is unnamed by her staff person) told him that it would be illegal to allow that and invalidate the election, we challenged but of course the judge agreed (can yah all guess his race by now).

At this point a few of my enemies are at least thinking that the centerist corporate board that ran the network for most of the nineties was an exclusively African-American board. They can't say that because they know I'd mention things like imperialism, slavery, and the holocaust, all of which were done by white people, but their at least thinking it. So now I'm going to answer the arguement no one makes and I'm not going to mention imperialism, slavery, or the holocaust again.

White progressives founded Pacifica. White America at one time long ago suffered from a lot of guilt brought on by those events I've agreed I won't mention anymore (that was before they discovered reverse discrimination). These feelings of guilt were particularly acute among progressives who stood up for inclusion. As C. Wright Mills (a white progressive) points out in Organizational Man the tendency in corporate culture is for those in power to promote the advancement of people like themselves. The institutional culture at Pacifica was and is similar in that regard.

So when those in power long ago thought about inclusion they thought about the inclusion of those who were educated as they themselves were, preferablly at good eastern colleges (no slight to Stanford or Oberlin intended) and came from 'good' middle class families. Such people could be counted on to act responsibly. Much of the struggle during the 1950's, 60's, and 70's was driven by a push for Black integration.These white progressives were not intimidated by those willing to be vocal about race matters, it was concern over these matters that had made an inclusion an issue for white progressives. It was regretablly a castle built on sand. Many of those most vocal about race and integration were careerists anxious to achieve for themselves little more than integration with the oppressers and divorce from the oppressed. Once in positions of institutional power such people sought to decapitate the left with its critique of "class privledge" and its desire for structural change. Now I ask you whose decision was it to bring in, retain, and promote such people to begin with.... cause it weren't ours.

That has been what its been like from our prespective since 2001. When the first vote on the bylaws revealed how deep and bitter the divisions were with no plan gaining a majority a mediation was held in Chicago to try to reach concensus. We came out of that mediation feeling really good about Pacifica. The whole time we were talking to the white majority though they were working the phones to get a revote in LA so they wouldn't need to compromise with us. They got it. It was outside the time frame mandated by the court...but the court extended its deadline after the fact.

My question throughout all of this is what will be accomplished that is of benifit to the left as a whole by continuing white America's legacy of racism within Pacifica? The Republican party is actively campaigning for people of color while white progressives kick us to the curb. . If you were a young person of color what would you want to be in? We should be nuturing understanding between ourselves, instead whites are fighting against us. In case you haven't notice the movement doesn't collectively don't have much real estate. Name a single city where the left can call a strike in even one sector like transportation for even one day...we can't.

Progressives have been using minorities to their own advantage for years.

They stick us in failed schools, make it impossible to police our neighborhoods so our streets are soaked in blood, they make us welfare dependents, destroy our family structure and all the while tell us they're our only friends. With friends like that. . .

You know what? Mayor Giuliani was the best thing to happen to minorities in New York. The number of us getting slaughtered in the streets every day dropped to record lows.

You know what? School choice would let my kids go to the same hoitey toitey private schools that Michael Moore sends his daughter too!

You know what else? Privatizing social security would have given me a nice nest egg when my mother died.

Instead, she worked every day of her life and never got a penny out of social security, despite having paid thousands into the system.

Let it be said: Republicans have the right policies for minorities.

In a previous post, I alluded to rumours of these problems at KPFK and in the white liberal community
in general. I wasn't alone in suggesting that these race issues in the progressive community need
to be addressed in earnest if the movement wants to move forward. Nowardays we even have greens
and pseudo-progressives who are anti-immigrant or anti-Latino, and they freak out when they
perceive that their "white privilege" is diminishing. It's not. White males still have the numbers
to put bush back in the white house.

Maybe its a class issue and people will fall back on their class roots when they feel like they're being disenfranchised. Maybe its just an Angelino neurosis, brought on by the fact that L.A. is a Latino metropolis and some whites are starting to feel disenfranchised (so then they vote for Ahh..nold with the other young
white males).

America is changing, progressives should be the last to fall behind.

Slick says, "[Liberals] stick [minorities] in failed schools." The schools are failing largely because conservatives have reduced funding and resisted any efforts to make the underfunded schools better. The right has taken the attitude that schools that are performing poorly need to be punished instead of trying to find out why they are not doing better.

"School choice" has never allowed the same opportunities to children in depressed communities, as these programs do not fully fund the private education, and the programs suck money out of the public school system, thereby widening the divide between the haves and have nots. They also lower the level of control over school standards.

Privatizing Social Security similarly robs the system of money to pay current recipients and does not provide any greater old age security. Privatization plans allow individuals to put their money into highly speculative investments which may make them worse off then they are now.

The left is right.

The person who posted this is full of swill. He and his fellow phonies don't represent any minority communities; they represent themselves and are motivated primarily by careerism and hunger for power. They are leaders without followers and bureaucrats to the bone. They frankly admit that they know that they can't win high level positions in Pacifica through elections so they want to be appointed like Bush was in 2000.
These people are race-baiters and Stalinists. They are trying to stir up racial and ethnic hatreds in order to ride a crest of hatred into office. Notice the rant about LA being a Mexican-American metropolis. This is nonsense; almost every race and ethnic group in the world resides in LA - how are Chinese Americans or Iranian immigrants supposed to feel comfortable with a station leadership that thinks it is living in a Mexican-American metropolis?
In reality this crowd holds voting and democracy in contempt; they think that leaders should be chosen by other leaders, top down - as was done in the Stalinist USSR and Maoist China. Well, to hell with that. Reject them, and reject Stalinism and race-baiting along with them.

I was checking out a cohort's school situation in the inner city, and I guess it's considered a failed school, but, by my estimation, it's doing OK. The kids go in 3 years behind grade level, and they leave 3 years behind grade level.

Fact: you can't realistically cram 7 years of education into 4 years of school.

What is a school to do when kids come in a lagging behind kids in non-immigrant, mostly white communities. The solution isn't to demand that they catch up quick. I think the solution is to keep them in school a little longer, and extend the school day.

Yes, this costs money, but, so what? The people will come out with education. That is the goal, isn't it?

Opps - about the school comment - it's not germane to the article. This is:

The article is a blatant hit piece against whites.

I think the essence of the problem isn't whites, but politics. I hear, on KPFK, and read on this site, stuff that, politically, I seriously disagree with. I think the positions are conservative, or are a kind of paranoid politics of fear, or are strictly spectacle.

As a listener, I tolerate (and sometimes enjoy) that stuff to get at grassroots politics programming. This is stuff about local social, labor, arts, and literary activity: local stuff with a leftist political slant. The local stuff, as often as not, is by or about people of color.

KPFK has a demonstrated a model of inclusion that I think is pretty good. Instead of focusing on specific programmers, they have several collectives that produce programming.

This is an ad-hoc training situation, where underrepresented people get another inroad into KPFK airtime, apart from the existing training system. The effect has made the programming a bit less professional, but, has increased the station's diverstiy significantly in many ways, particularly with age, and with more educational content.

I suspect that the people pushing this "anti white" agenda are not interested in the collectives model. They don't mention it, and they don't seem to see the world as a diverstiy of viewpoints, but as a pitched battle between whites and others played out in acts of racism.

(That's not to say I don't sometimes see the world that way. I do. I just don't think it's the way racism will be destroyed in a white-majority situation.)

If you do the research you will see that inner city schools spend the same per student as suburban. The differences in education are attributed to the student's family lives (influenced by the welfare state) and the party leadership of the community. Democratic areas almost uniformly have worse education that Republic areas.

As to more rational -- that's mighty white of you to say its okay for minority kids to graduate 3 years behind.

And I love the notion that people shouldn't have the freedom to invest their own retirement because their too stupid to make good decisions. Yeah, you're a "man of the people".

If its my money, earned with my blood sweat and tears, I should decide how its invested, not some bureacrat whose never worked a real day in his life.

Spending in the some of the worst districts is actually way above state average!

For example, Oakland will have $7,933 in revenues to spend per student, Fresno $7,994. San Jose will have revenues of $8,372 per student, Los Angeles $9,028, and San Francisco $10,021. Most amazing, though, is the Sausalito Elementary School District in Marin County which will have a whopping $16,555 in revenues per student.

Despite the high revenues of these districts, students in these districts have, for the most part, performed poorly on state achievement tests. Table 1 lists the 1999 SAT-9 reading and math test results in grades 2, 6, 9, and 11 for the 11 districts. The SAT-9 test, which is part of the state’s STAR assessment system, is a nationally normed standardized multiple-choice exam. District scores are reported by the percentage of students who score at or above the 50th percentile. As shown in Table 1, many of the district scores are below or well below the 50th percentile. For example, in Sausalito, where per-pupil spending is thousands of dollars higher than the highest per-pupil-spending state, large majorities of students in the listed grades scored below the 50th percentile.7

Slick again: One could logically argue that it is actually BETTER for minorities if you cut spending down to the levels of successful schools! In reality though, the key is to get rid of the big city bosses (Democrats), who view the schools as just another revenue source and place to park their cronies in do nothing tenured union jobs!

The article I wrote was published to encourage discussion and debate. I am glad that it has done so. With the exception of a handful of neo-nazis, zionists, and police officers some thoughtful discussion has taken place. Even the crudest attempts to create a diverse and multi-generational movement, such as outright paying people varyious amounts of money to participate in meetings, protests, photo-ops, and organizations for no better reason than to create a veener of diversity, recognize that achieving diversity in the movement is important. The question is how to go about achieving it. Within Pacifica, as is the case in the movement as a whole, some people want diversity without inclusion of communities of color in descision making. They are happy enough to include individual people of color, indeed they sometimes pay such people quite generously for their participation and promote them to postions of actual power because they resemble those who already hold institutional power. That was the case with the old corporate board at Pacifica, it is also the case with Dr. Rice and Secretary Powell. In the case of the Bush administration, sharing power would require appionting someone like Cong. John Conyers to an important position where he had real decision making power, or opening a dialogue about reparations for slavery with black community leaders. Something other than finding a handful of people to serve in the Bush administration who have a different racial background than George but hold his veiws. Veiws that are radically different from those held by 80% of their community. At Pacifica it would have required moving serious and commited black radicals such as Kwame' Toure into positions of actual power. Instead a bunch of corporate liberals were put in charge of a progressive radio network because they didn't scare anybody in power. Periodically holders of institutional power recognize the need to include people radically different from themselves, such as when the residents of a drug treatment center are brought out of their institution for a protest involuntarilly, or when homeless people are paid to go to a housing action. These attempts, crude and offensive as they are, most often are recognition of the need for community involvement by oppressed communities. They are offensive because they assume that there are no competent people within such communities who care about issues, and because there is no real interest in sharing power with oppressed communities. In the case of Pacifica it often feels as though their isn't really much interest in sharing power with radical people of color. It seems at times that the people who call the shots here are more comfortable working with careerists from similar class backgrounds to their own, than in establishing a principled relationship with radical people of color with a goal of empowering oppressed communities. Sadly that seems to be the case across the institutional left.

I feel compeled to comment on the collective production model being used at KPFK. We use a similar model here and have established a multi-racial collective of unpaid staff who produce the program Voices with Vision. Four other shows here in DC use a similar approach. Free Speech Radio, which I gave my one minute of fame over to, uses a similar model nationally. About 40% of the dc co-op collective is white (mostly lesbian feminist women) our senior producer is an Arab muslim woman. We have no budget from the station, but we all get along well. I love this production model and see in it the future of Pacifica. We are too centralized and corporate in our decision making as it is. The more we can empower small groups of unpaid staff the beter off we'll be.

It seems to me that bringing outright anti-semites (all of them fruitcakes and people with no visible support in any minority community) into positions of responsibility at KPFK is not going to combat zionism. On the contrary, it is going to help the zionist/AIPAC campaign to smear any kind of anti-zionism or opposition to Israeli militarism, racism and expansionism with the label of anti-semitism. Anti-semites, of whatever racial or ethnic background, do not belong in leftist movements or at a radio station that claims to stand for progress. Think about that when you vote.