Gilardin's response to KPFA staff letter #1

> Subject: Why did staff inside KPFA not prevent the 10-year corporate raid?
>
> Dear All,
> This is my response to the letter from KPFA staff (July 22, 2004),
> attacking members of the current KPFA Local Station Board. I had hoped
> that I would never have had to write such a letter.
> Feel free to re-post. I'm not on any of the Pacifica lists, just on
> alliance and grc
> Maria Gilardin
> __________________________
>
> During the slow motion take over of KPFA that began in 1992 and reached
> its climax in the attempted sale of KPFA and the lock-out of station
> staff in 1999 we, community members and members of Take Back KPFA and
> the Coalition for a democratic Pacifica (CdP) waited, first patiently
> and then with more and more anxiety for a letter or statement from
> staff, alerting the community to the hijacking of KPFA and Pacifica.
>
> That letter was never written. Had not three courageous programmers
> finally gone public KPFA listeners might never have known and the logo
> of another network might be disgracing the building on MLK Jr. Way
> today.
>
> As somebody who picketed the Pacifica National office in Berkeley dozens
> of times in those seven years, who attended protest rallies when staff
> was kicked out, who was present at countless KPFA Local Board meetings
> where the restructuring of Pacifica became apparent to anybody taking
> the trouble to go and listen, I was amazed - as were many other Pacifica
> activists - at the passive, fearful silence, not to mention instances of
> outright support for those changes, coming especially from the long -
> time paid KPFA staff.
>
> Since 1992, and for seven long years we put flyers into staff mail
> boxes, issued press releases to the media and copied them to staff; even
> setting up a micro power radio station outside of KPFA and tuning the
> receivers inside KPFA to the pirate frequency. We wrote messages in
> chalk on the sidewalk for you to see when you came out - and saw you
> leave through the back door. We called you personally on the phone,
> asked friends of yours to intervene and help rescue KPFA and Pacifica
> before it was too late. But save for the one exceptional action by three
> staff members, none of you who were there did anything for almost seven
> years - until the summer of 1999.
>
> When Dennis Bernstein and two others called attention to the 1997 union
> contract that was signed as a sweetheart deal with KPFA mamagement, they
> were denounced by staff. Much later, when Nicole Sawaya was fired and
> her firing protested by Larry Bensky, Robbie Osman, and Dennis
> Bernstein, no unified support for Nicole came from staff who returned to
> the station without her.
>
> >From 1992 to early 1999, respected programmers went on the air,
> supported the purges of 1995, when 165 community programmers were
> dismissed all at once, and maligned Take Back KPFA and the CdP.
>
> The New Pacifica is just 6 months old. When the National and Local
> Boards were seated in February of this year the time of hijacks and
> take-overs finally ended. This should have been a time to celebrate.
>
> NOW, all of a sudden, in July 2004, you are writing a letter claiming
> that the newly elected board -or at least some of the members ? are your
> enemy: http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/08/1700779.php
> Others have dealt with some of the complaints:
> http://indybay.org/news/2004/08/1692265.php
> I am addressing those of you who signed the letter.
>
> I am troubled by the signatures of unpaid staff whom I know, respect,
> and like. Why would you have signed a document that is largely based on
> incidents you did not take part in or witness? I asked some of the
> parties accused and their recollections differ considerably from the
> statements in the staff letter.
>
> I am addressing the question of the presence of "saboteurs from former
> Pacifica Executive Director Pat Scott’s regime" on KPFA staff because I
> think these parts of the letter are addressed at me.
>
> It is easy to blame Pat Scott for everything. Bertolt Brecht wrote in
> his poem on history: (Julius) "Caesar conquered Gaul. Did he not at
> least have a cook with him?" Pat Scott could not have done what she and
> those who followed her did, if she had not had a lot of help. And having
> knowledge and not acting on it is a serious matter. There are issues of
> integrity, ethics, and responsibility involved. I am, of course,
> excluding all those who signed this letter who played no part in this. I
> am addressing those among paid staff of the period of 1992 to 1999, many
> of whom are still there, who were the supporters of the take-over.
>
> The time line below gives the most important events in that slow motion
> take-over of KPFA and Pacifica, during which anyone present should have
> been aware of fundamental change taking place in the structure of the
> station, the bylaws, the governance, and the national office. It was a
> very serious matter, involving the plunder of millions of dollars of
> listener money over those many years. The time line shows how benefits
> accrued to those who collaborated, and lists the many missed
> opportunities to protect KPFA and Pacifica from the takeover. For the
> most part names have been withheld by me to still protect the guilty.
>
> We, who worked for years in the Save KPFA and Pacifica movement, have
> never addressed that most important question:
>
> Why did staff inside KPFA not prevent the 10-year corporate raid?
>
> Many of current paid staff were inside the station between 1992 and
> 2002. You saw what was going on from day to day. Some of you held
> positions directly assisting the hijackers. And if you did not see it
> you saw us picketing the station, pleading with you to act. However,
> instead of ringing the alarm you ignored us and persecuted the lone
> whistle blowers inside the station.
>
> You could have prevented the take over. We did not want to blame you.
> We were sure that ultimately even the collaborators would welcome
> change. Even those who helped Pat Scott and those who followed her could
> not have been happy in that role. We understand that he amount of
> intimidation was immense. Not everybody has the guts to stand up. We
> thought you would be relieved to live and work without fear and
> compromise.
>
> However, now, just five months into the new era of Pacifica, many of the
> names of those who collaborated with the old regime appear on the staff
> letter of July 22, 2004. I know that the mainstream media feels
> empowered to re-write history, but when it happens at KPFA it must
> become a cause of wider community concern.
>
> I am writing this because there are now two stories, two parallel
> narratives. The inside and the outside story of KPFA and Pacifica and
> they are totally different. Collaborators have become heroes, victims
> made perpetrators; actions and in-actions reverse their order. Michael
> Moore is right. We are living in fictional times. But we cannot allow
> fiction to invade KPFA.
>
> Here is a list of some of your missed opportunities to save KPFA and
> Pacifica:
>
> In June, 1993, KPFA was picketed by African-American programmers from
> KPFK in L.A. They were protesting Pacifica Executive Director Pat
> Scott’s purges at our sister station. They had hoped for help from you ?
> none was forthcoming.
>
> 1994: Pat Scott changed the face of community radio by voting as a
> member of the CPB task force to peg CPB funding to Arbitron ratings, a
> decision that almost defunded KPFK and several other community stations.
> There was not a word from staff.
>
> February 1995: Pacifica program directors were told to mainstream
> programming. The staff of KPFA voiced no opposition. Instead management
> at KPFA began to prepare the purges of August 1995.
>
> March/April, 1995: Pat Scott hired the American Consulting Group, listed
> by the AFL-CIO as a notorious union-buster, to break the KPFA union
> (United Electrical Workers). Did nobody notice that they were there?
>
> May 1995: Bill Mandel was fired for deviating from his subject matter
> and breaking the "Gag Rule". More than 60 people picketed the station ?
> no paid staff among them. Some of you went on the air and said it was a
> good thing to fire people who had been there so long and were "old".
> Now, that some of you have been there for almost as many years, "term
> limit"s is no longer talked about.
>
> June 1995: The National Board began to hold secret meeting in violation
> of CPB funding guidelines. For the next two years, Take Back KPFA
> activists picketed at National Board meeting sites, often struggling to
> raise enough money to send representatives to other cities. There was
> never, in all these years any participation from paid staff until it was
> almost too late in 1999, until your own sinecures were threatened.
>
> August 1995: All 7 to 8 pm weekday public affairs slots were replaced
> with music and 165 programmers, many of them community activists, were
> removed from the air. Some were informed, as they went on the air, that
> this was their final program. (The large number of 165 was due to the
> fact that these evening slots were programmed by collectives: Native
> Americans, Gay community, the Women's Department, Pacific Islanders
> etc.) This mass removal changed the demographics at the station in a
> dramatic way, since a substantial number of the evening programmers were
> people of color.
>
> In the context of the 1995 purge four KPFA departments were eliminated
> without resistance from paid staff.
>
> The Women's Department had as department heads, over time, an
> African-American, a Native American woman and a Latina. The Third World
> Department had an African-American woman as the long-time department
> head and the Public Affairs Department had an African-American
> department head and later two Latino directors. KPFA paid staff also
> agreed to the firing of the last FOLIO editor, and the termination of
> the FOLIO department, ending publication of, not only a literary
> supplement, and reference guide and resource, but an essential form of
> monthly outreach to KPFA's listeners, continuous since the station's
> founding in 1949.
>
> All three programming departments (Third World, Women, and Public
> Affairs) had a degree of diversity. They also allowed for community
> participation in the programming of KPFA that no longer exists in the
> tightly controlled "air-strips" and remnants of PA programs that have
> become the private property of a host. Several paid staffers voiced
> approval of the demise of these departments on the air.
>
> November, 1995: Brian McConville, investigator from the Inspector
> General’s office of the CPB (Corp. for Public Broadcasting) launched an
> investigation into the violation of open meeting rules of the Pacifica
> National Board. Following Pat Scott's intervention with his boss, he was
> fired 17 days later and the investigation is suspended. At the time,
> both management and staff never bothered announcing that the meetings
> were even taking place.
>
> May, 1996: The presence of the American Consulting Group at KPFA, and
> Pacifica, was exposed by Take Back KPFA. The producer of the labor
> program on KPFA did not have the courage to mention its presence in
> KPFA’s union negotiations while interviewing a union activist on the
> role of the ACG in preventing union organizing at the Lafayette Park
> Hotel The rest of the staff also maintained radio silence concerning
> ACG's role at the station.
>
> December, 1996: CPB’s Deputy Inspector Mike Donovan was fired after
> attempting to continue the investigation into the violation of open
> meeting rules of the Pacifica National Board. No word from staff.
> Unconcerned with anything outside of the station’s front door, paid
> staff probably didn’t know about it.
>
> 1996-1997: The union at WBAI, the United Electrical Workers (UE),
> refused to submit to Scott’s order to kick the unpaid staff from the
> union. While the WBAI/UE fought all the way up to the NLRB for inclusion
> of the unpaid staff in the bargaining unit - and even initially were
> victorious at the New York level (Feb. 1997) - KPFA paid staff knuckled
> under to Scott and left the UE and joined the CWA (Communication Workers
> of America), breaking solidarity with their sister union members in New
> York, and as well as with KPFA's unpaid staff who they unceremoniously
> booted out.
>
> There was, however, a pay-off. In return for two-tier pay raises, job
> protection and a pension plan, staff agreed to NOT go on strike, NOT do
> sit down actions, and NOT employ work stoppages, slow downs or boycotts,
> sympathy strikes or corporate campaigns against management.
>
> A courageous letter signed by three dissident staff members and former
> union stewards appeared in the S.F. Bay Guardian in October 1997,
> pointing out that: "CWA members granted management the absolute right to
> fire at will all on-air personnel hired after Sept. 1 1997. "
>
> And "The new agreement, which both CWA and Pacifica have called
> "win-win," creates the same kind of unfair two-tier pay system that BART
> and UPS workers successfully opposed in their recent strikes. It
> specifically states that management can hire temporary workers for as
> low as $7.50 an hour for work for which other employees receive a
> substantially higher wage. "
>
> Paid staff gave up all these rights at a crucial time where any such
> action as a work stoppage, slow down or boycott, sympathy strike or
> corporate campaign would have exposed the hijacking of Pacifica and the
> enormous financial fraud committed by the leadership.
>
> March, 1997: Community members hired a lawyer to fight to retain the
> rights of local board members to sit on the National Board while
> Pacifica began to change the bylaws to make the National Board self
> perpetuating and exclude station board members and staff from the
> National Board.
>
> 1997: National Board meeting in Oakland: Take Back KPFA had a sizable
> picket outside the Oakland hotel where the board was meeting. Inside
> Mary Frances Berry was voted in as the new chair of Pacifica. KPFA
> representative and Board Secretary Roberta Brooks attempted to have a
> motion entered into the minutes as passed that had not been approved at
> the last meeting. A Take Back KPFA member held up a tape recording of
> that meeting to prove it. At that moment KPFA paid staff entered in
> their new CWA T-shirts. They read a prepared statement regarding their
> personal pay issues and left. We ran after them, pleading with them to
> stay and listen or to join the picket line outside. One and all, they
> refused.
>
> With the exception of KPFA, the media were beginning to take interest in
> the story, and articles were posted and disseminated via the internet.
> While the urgency of the KPFA/Pacifica issue became increasingly
> apparent, paid staff kept completely silent.
>
> The last chance for KPFA staff to write a letter came and went in
> February, 1999 when Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ed Herman wrote a
> moving appeal, alerting the public to the imminent danger. We ? the
> activists on the outside - hoped that, finally, staff would have the
> courage to put their names to that letter. They did not sign on - not
> even under the wings of luminaries such as Chomsky, Zinn and Herman.
>
> That was the last chance to rescue KPFA and Pacifica before the lockout
> and occupation of the station by security guards. In retrospect it is
> evident that paid staff only began to act when their personal jobs were
> at stake. It is sad to say that a large number of paid KPFA staff seem
> to be people who see this not as a station that belongs to the
> community, accountable and inclusive, but as a place to pick up a
> pay-check.
>
> When on July 14, 1999 armed guards, hired by Pacifica, tried to arrest
> Dennis Bernstein after he disclosed the attempt to sell KPFA on Flash
> Points, Dennis tried to find a way to warn listeners of the take-over by
> running upstairs to the news department. Mark Mericle was just reading
> the headlines and was getting ready to lead with a story on health care.
> As Dennis tried to get his attention and removed the feed reel with the
> story from the tape deck, Mark refused twice to deviate from his
> schedule. Only when the board operator opened the microphone and the
> sounds of the struggle went on the air did Mark report on what was going
> on.
>
> The battle for Pacifica was not over when staff returned to the station
> after the 1999 lockout. Paid staff returned without Nicole Sawaya and
> accepted the appointment of Jim Bennett by the Pacifica National office
> in her stead.
>
> Silence among the paid staff fell again on the station at the end of
> 1999 as the fight over
> the dissolution of the national hi-jack board of Pacifica continued.
> Most of staff did not participate in the law suits, in the pickets of
> National Board members, or in the boycott of Pacifica National News.
> Staff was very late in supporting Free Speech Radio News - started in a
> garage in Berkeley - and even late in supporting Democracy Now!
>
> While members from community organizations, most notably from the CdP,
> were arrested at picket lines, and organized and financed the first two
> rounds of elections for a KPFA Local Station Board, staff retained their
> silence. Staff as a whole did not allow the Local Station Board to
> report on the developments of the bylaws via regular Local Station Board
> reports. Listeners who depend on the station to keep them informed about
> such things had to wait for sympathetic programmers to offer time.
>
> KPFA staff as a group refused to participate in the boycott of Pacifica
> National. From 1999 until removal of the last hijackers from Pacifica’s
> national staff in 2002, KPFA transferred to that office hundreds of
> thousands of dollars of listener donations used to fight the community
> and the lawsuits.
>
> The crucial period from early 2002 until very recently saw KPFA and
> Pacifica under judge’s orders to develop a new set of bylaws. The Local
> Station Boards and committees, several dozen people at each station
> worked, very hard at consensus. At KPFA the board held meetings at the
> station to make it easy for staff to participate in the writing of the
> bylaws. One staff member participated.
>
> Listeners wrote into the bylaws unprecedented rights and representation
> for staff on the local and national boards, giving them 25% membership
> on all boards. Under the old bylaws staff representation was zero.
>
> Community stations across the country interviewed members on the bylaws
> committees, and even participated in the process. But staff at KPFA for
> which the bylaws were written maintained an almost uniform silence.
>
> The story repeated itself in changes concerning Program Councils. Many
> community stations have such councils: Madison, Wisconsin; Portland,
> Oregon; and the GRC (Grassroots Radio Coalition) contributed from their
> experience. KPFA staff almost entirely ignored the debates over
> responsibility and rights of Program Councils and then sabotaged the
> outcome by not attending meetings or overturning decisions taken in
> them.
>
> In the years from 1999 to today, KPFA staff had unprecedented freedom to
> run the affairs of the station as they pleased. Pacifica's national
> office no longer interfered. There was an in-house General Manager who
> was willing to cooperate fully with paid staff. There was no Program
> Director for most of that time. KPFA paid staff was in charge -- and is
> now.
>
> If there have been no significant changes in all these years, is it
> because KPFA is already perfect? Even the paid staff majority would not
> say that. Even friends of staff, such as Doug Henwood, say - terrible to
> hear - that "KPFA is irrelevant". KPFA is known as Pat Scott Radio
> because it still operates under the same system of NPR - derived
> structures, in violation of the founders intent, and with a paid staff
> lacking in diversity as it was in 1995.
>
> KPFA, as a station, in spite of its freedom from interference by the
> National Board, has not participated in the media democracy movement, in
> the resurgence of community radio via the GRC, the micropower movement,
> Indy media or other efforts to free the air and open access. As a
> station with a huge staff and unprecedented resources KPFA has been
> unable even to conceive of what Amy Goodman has actually done,
> initiating a national media collaboration involving] radio (ranging from
> community to NPR stations) with television and the internet.
>
> Democracy has a hard time coming to KPFA in spite (or some would say,
> because of) the leanings of so many paid staff members towards the
> Democratic Party. There can hardly be a clearer indication of entrenched
> and reactionary power, than more than a year's adamant resistance to
> shifting the station's most popular and respected program, Democracy
> Now! to a time when most working people can hear it. Ownership of
> airtime, turf and power have also prevented an open, honest discussion
> over strategies to produce the best possible programming for the station
> as a whole.
>
> To those of you who read through this long and critical letter, please
> consider what is truly most to your advantage, and that of the community
> you have obligated yourselves to serve. Please support a free and
> democratic KPFA.
>
> Maria Gilardin