With candidates of socialist perspective taking the lead on issues in the 2008 election, listeners of self-proclaimed Pacifica "Revolutionary Radio" KPFK wonder if the station will continue to censor their candidates and positions and ignore their core point that, as a matter of empirical fact, liberal reform has failed and shows no prospect for success with an Obama election.
The Socialist Equality Party has announced its candidates for the 2008 Presidential election, Jerome White and Bill van Auken Reject Obama and McCain! Support the socialist alternative in 2008! Build the Socialist Equality Party!
The party is well know for its web site, the World Socialist Web Site, www.wsws.org.
Immediately following the announcement of the 0,000,000 Bush-Paulson bank bailout plan, while Harry Reid, Nancy Peolsi, Barack Obama, and John McCain were indicating initial support for it, SEP candidate White denounced the plan No to Wall Street bailout! The socialist answer to the financial crisis :
"Both the plan itself and the manner in which it is being imposed are deeply undemocratic. Exploiting the breakdown in US and global financial markets, the financial aristocracy, which is responsible for the crisis, is exercising its control over the government, both political parties, and the media to implement policies of the most far-reaching character without any genuine debate or discussion. ...
"That Obama and the entire Democratic Party leadership have lined up to endorse this windfall for the richest people in the country explodes their pretensions to offering an alternative to Bush and McCain and underscores the total subordination of both parties to the financial elite.
White called for:
"Government of, by and for the working class to carry out emergency measures to resolve the crisis in the interests of working people, including a halt to all foreclosures and repossession of homes, the creation of millions of public works jobs, a ban on wage-cutting and layoffs, and an enormous expansion in public services.
The Socialist Equality Party enjoys significant support in Southern California and the KPFK community, and listeners often mention its web site on call-ins.
However in substantive coverage, KPFK continues to censor such perspectives from its programs and news coverage and programs and the divide and debate in the political left between those who still believe that liberal reform is possible in American society and those who believe that experience has shown that it has not worked and will not work. KPFK allows only expression of the former, despite ongoing accumulation of evidence for nearly a hundred years now that reform is destined to fail and recognition of this fact by many of its listeners.
For nearly 100 years, reformers has said that we can turn the country around and get it back on the right track if we can enact this or that measure of reform. In the latter 19th century the Progressives enacted significant reforms, such as the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts, only to see them nullified effectively by a conservative judiciary and the business takeover of government.
The excesses of that era led to the Great Depression and a second wave of reform in the New Deal and the post war civil rights era. Reactionary forces succeeded again in reversing these reforms with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and by the end of the administration of Bill Clinton, the post Depression financial system reforms were gone, the Wagner Act, providing for labor rights, repealed by the judiciary and Taft Hartley, and AFDC practically history. Through three elections, 2000, 2004, 2008, no candidate even gave or gives lip service to measures of liberal, or progressive, reform, such as ending the wars and the war economy, health care, civil rights, or reversing government policies transferring income from the bottom to the top economic layers of society.
Per the socialists, this history of failure shows the futility of trying to reform the present profit based system. In response, KPFK liberal reformers have little more than faith-based responses. The Socialists say hope comes only in changing the underlying system based on private accumulation of individual and family wealth.
If KPFK allowed true expression and stopped its censorship, perhaps the community could have this debate.
Original: Pacifica Los Angeles KPFK Listeners Ask:Will Censorship of Socialist Perspectives Continue