RadioPoetics.org

Friends,

You wouldn't know it from listening to KPFA, but the election for the Local Station Board is going on right now . If you're a member - i.e., if you donated $25 or more, or volunteered at least three hours, in the 12 months ending Aug. 31 - you should have a received a large blue envelope containing your ballot and other materials several weeks ago. Ballots must be received at the station by Nov. 15, so you have another 10 days or so to get yours in the mail. Just please don't forget about it. For all its many failings, KPFA remains an invaluable vehicle for communicating progressive ideas and news from our communities and people's movements around the world. A strong LSB just might help make the station take better advantage of its potential.

But whom should you vote for, and behind all the nastiness, what's really at stake? After almost a year on the LSB and almost six months on the Program Council (during most of which it didn't meet), I have a lot to say about those questions - as you'll see if you bother to read all the way through this long message. But for those who just want my suggestions about the candidates, here are my top choices (and remember that the rank order matters a lot in the "single transferable vote" system Pacifica uses):

Joe Wanzala
Chandra Hauptman
Tracy Rosenberg
Attila Nagy
CC Campbell Rock
Steve Conley

After those six, depending on how I happen to feel at that moment about people with good goals but a political style I find problematic, I'll probably vote for:

Richard Phelps
Stan Woods
Gerald Sanders
Mara Rivera
Dave Heller

Why is it so hard to figure out what these elections are all about?

Unfortunately, even people who try to follow KPFA politics have a hard time figuring out how to choose and rank the candidates who'll best represent them; for the average listener, it's virtually impossible. And this year it seems to be tougher than ever. That's partly because there are three full-fledged slates plus one quasi-slate (four "independents" campaigning together) plus several other individual candidates in the running. They all seem to be sincere and more or less progressive people, and, frankly, they don't always do a good job explaining their differences.

But the other reason it's hard to sort things out is that KPFA hasn't been doing much to help. Ballots were mailed Oct. 15, but two weeks later, KPFA still hadn't posted to its web site the detailed questionnaires candidates were asked to fill out, hadn't posted the audio archives of the one previous on-air candidate forum, and hadn't held any in-person candidate events. In recent days things have improved somewhat - the questionnaires are now available online ( http://www.pacificafoundation.org/elections/kpfa-listener-candidates-que... ), and there was another online forum and one (poorly publicized) in-person forum - but with just ten remaining in the voting period, the station still has not aired any of the "carts" (recorded pitches) candidates were asked to prepare weeks earlier.

The only conclusion one can draw, I think, is that the powers that be don't actually want listeners to understand the issues.

What's at stake?

The overarching issue, for me, is how to make KPFA and Pacifica a more dynamic and effective voice for peace and justice. If I thought the best way to make that happen were to leave the staff and management to run the station and network by themselves, without listener involvement, I'd gladly find other ways to spend my time, because I'm not all that interested in governance issues for their own sake. I got involved in them only when I became convinced that they were really related to how well the station and network function as vehicles for social change.

The current by-laws, as you probably know, were adopted in the wake of the crisis that came to a head in 1999, when the Pacifica national board, increasingly out of touch with listeners and local staff, moved to "hijack" the network, evidently with the goal of converting it into a more mainstream, corporate operation. A broad alliance of listeners and programmers managed to recover control of the network. The by-laws they eventually put in place were intended to create a system of governance that allowed for strong management, but obliged it to take into account the views of the listeners and the entire staff (paid and unpaid).

Unfortunately, the listener-staff alliance has largely unraveled, at least at KPFA. (I don't claim to understand what's going on at the other Pacifica stations, but it appears that there are similar dynamics across the network, though of course each situation has unique features.) Many staff members, particularly but not exclusively paid staffers, seem to have decided they don't really like the system of governance embodied in the by-laws. Instead, they have, with considerable success, promoted a model in which power is shared (albeit sometimes uneasily) between the paid staff and managers drawn from their own ranks, while listeners and unpaid staff are largely frozen out of decision-making. The question the KPFA community now confronts is whether to accept this trend or to make a renewed attempt to implement the letter and spirit of the by-laws - to leave the station in the hands of a self-perpetuating oligarchy or to push forward to a model in which listeners and the unpaid staff, as well as the paid staff and managers, have a real voice

KPFA's current management - interim general manager Lemlem Rijio and interim program director Sasha Lilley - are shrewd and energetic, and in my opinion they have some good ideas for improvements, but they have made it clear that they have no use for any body they don't control. Specifically: they routinely ignore the LSB (Lemlem is an ex officio member and is supposed to give a report every month, but hasn't attended for months); Sasha suspended the Program Council for months, and now that it has reconstituted itself, she wants it to do nothing but fill out forms; and Lemlem tried to decertify the Unpaid Staff Organization (UPSO) exactly at the moment when that group was pulling itself together after a long hiatus.

For sure, the station and the network need strong managers - no one thinks they can be run by committee. The question is whether we should have strong managers who consult only among themselves and an in-group of paid staffers, or whether all the station's constituencies can have seats at the table.

What do these governance issues have to do with what goes on the air, you might be asking. It turns out that there's actually a pretty close connection. On the one hand, the people who want listeners and unpaid staff to have a real voice in the direction of the station tend also to want more community news, activist voices, and honest and open political debate, including about "touchy" issues like Zionism and the Israel lobby, 9/11, and the role of the Democratic party. (None of this equates, as the Concerned Listeners group and some others would have you believe, to some kind of ultra-left takeover.) On the other hand, most of the management and staff who want to run things for themselves seem to be afraid of anything that departs from "professional" radio norms or that might offend the left-liberal crowd.

Lemlem and Sasha tried, for example, to enforce a policy that would prohibit programmers from inviting listeners to turn out for demonstrations - Miguel Molina got written up for saying "be there" (literally, just those two words) about a perfectly legal antiwar demonstration - even though their own lawyers eventually admitted that there are no legal or regulatory grounds to ban such "calls to action." And look what happened when Larry Bensky quit: many of us thought that offered a great opportunity to try out some sharp new voices on Sunday morning, but management, with no consultation with the Program Council or anyone else, picked Peter Laufer, a middle-aged white guy with what seem to be quite squishy politics - and an ego almost as big as Larry's.

More on the candidates

In the face of management's offensive, it's critical, in my view, that we elect more board members willing to stand up firmly for the rights of listeners and unpaid staff. But that's not enough - they also have to be people who can work effectively on a board that's inevitably going to be divided. That means people who can fight for their principles without sacrificing civility and lapsing into unproductive bitterness and sectarianism, and who are willing to make compromises on secondary issues in order to put together a majority on the really important things.

Joe Wanzala, Chandra Hauptman, Tracy Rosenberg, and Steve Conley fit that description. They are all members of the quasi-slate that calls itself the "i-team" ("i" for independent - http://radiopoetics.org/ ). Joe and Chandra are incumbent members of the LSB running for re-election; Steve has previously been a member; and Tracy is a long-time media activist (including having served as facilitator of the KPFA Program Council). I've found them all to be smart, thoughtful, committed progressives. They recognize the need for strong management - Chandra played a central role in getting Nicole Sawaya hired as Pacifica's new executive director, while Joe has been a major force in efforts to recruit a capable general manager to KPFA on a permanent basis - efforts that we hope will soon bear fruit - but they also have long records of standing up for the rights of listeners and staff (unpaid as well as paid). They fight hard for their principles, but without getting belligerent, rhetorical, or inflexible.

CC Campbell Rock is a veteran journalist but relatively new to the KPFA scene (I just met for the first time last week) - she's a native New Orleansian and Katrina evacuee. Since she's been in the Bay Area, she has worked with the Bay View newspaper and visited Venezuela, among other activities. I know a bunch of people who speak very highly of her, I like what I've seen of her writing, and she's part of a community that should be represented on the board.

She is runnning on a slate called Voices for Justice ( http://voicesforjusticeradio.googlepages.com/ ), which also includes Steve Zeltzer, Sureya Sayadi, and Carl Bryant. I agree with them on a lot of the issues; my problem with them is that Steve and Sureya have adopted a really hostile attitude toward just about everyone involved with the station. I understand where their frustration comes from, but I think the way they respond, rather than winning allies, tends to turn good people off.

Attila Nagy is an incumbent who consistently votes along progressive lines, who is (or at least acts like) a model of calmness and civility, and who in particular does his best to stick up for the interests of listeners in the North Bay and the other outlying areas the station generally tends to neglect.

Attila is part of the People's Radio slate, along with Phelps, Woods, Sanders, Rivera, Heller, and Bob English. I like their program, and more often than not (though not always) I vote with them on the board. Richard, their de facto leader, works hard as a board member, has a sharp mind, and, as a lawyer, provides an important counterweight to the Pacifica lawyers, who are way too tied in with management. Stan Woods, an incumbent member of the LSB, has also worked hard for the station, among other good causes, for many years, And the rest are good people, too.

My main problem with the group is that Richard is just profoundly sectarian in the way he approaches the world, and all too often the others (except Attila) follow his lead. As you can see in their multi-part statement in the election booklet, they devote most of their energy to attacking those they consider enemies, and not much to their ideas for improving the station. And the obstructionists aren't their only targets - not infrequently they (Richard in particular) turn their fire on anyone who doesn't completely toe their line, including me and the "i-team" folks.

What about the "Concerned Listeners"?

Whatever you do, I urge you not to vote for any of the Concerned Listener candidates - Gendelman, Hallinan, Mar, McDonough, Medrano, Enriquez, Robins, and Van Eyck. Most of them have good records as activists, and of course they have all kinds of endorsements, though mostly from station staffers and people in the academic and labor worlds who have never had much involvement with KPFA. Aside from Sherry Gendelman, however, most of the CL candidates don't seem to know much about the real dynamics on the board and at the station. They were evidently recruited, mainly by people associated with the Wellstone Democratic club, to give blind support to management and the old-guard staff, and those who did the recruiting provided them with an analysis of the issues that bears little relationship to reality. (They left a copy of their "Orientation Packet" lying around...)

The organizers of Concerned Listeners had a similar recruiting strategy last year, and in some ways it has back-fired on them - some of their candidates, once they got on the board and began to see what's really going on, have started voting pretty independently. But that process takes a long time, whereas a lot of the key votes (for officers, reps to the Pacifica National Board, committee positions) take place right at the beginning of the term. And some of the CL members just keep voting down the line for whatever management and the entrenched staff are for; when even they can't defend management actions (as on the interim general manager's recent attempt to "derecognize" the Unpaid Staff Organization and on the motion below about the station's outrageous policies on public-service announcements), they simply try to prevent the board from doing anything, and when they can't win at that, they simply abstain.

The biggest thing the Concerned Listeners have going for them is money. Because many of them come out of or have strong connections with the more affluent parts of the KPFA community, they are able to raise thousands of dollars to support their campaign. This year they sent a mailing to every listener-subscriber promoting their candidates - something none of the other slates or candidates could afford. If KPFA were doing what it should be doing to publicize the election and give all candidates a real opportunity to communicate their positions, one mailing might not matter. But with the station virtually blanking out news of the election for weeks, the Concerned Listeners mailing was the only thing many subscribers have had to go on in making thier choices. The net effect is that KPFA is in danger of falling into the same pay-to-play pattern that corrupts government elections in this country: candidates with personal wealth or rich backers have a huge advantage over everyone else.

One promising development

Aside from the election, I want to take advantage of this message to pass on one bit of good news from the October LSB meeting: by a vote of 13-0 with three abstentions, the board finally endorsed a resolution I submitted in February calling on management to come up with a simple way for activist groups to get their demos and other events announced on the air. Under the current rules, only 501(c)3s can even submit items for the community calendar or public-service announcements; they have to be submitted at least three weeks in advance (with priority to people who have theirs in 4-6 weeks in advance); carts are allowed only for fundraisers, not for free events; no group can submit more than one event per month; and so on. The net effect is that big, established, mostly cultural-oriented groups can get on, but real grassroots activists can't, unless (like so much else at the station) they have personal connections with the staff, and even then they can usually get an announcement on only one show. (I've personally run up against the current rules when organizing events for Act Against Torture and the International Solidarity Movement; I know the Haiti Action Committee, the Woodfin workers, and the Friends of Deir Ibzia have also; and I'm sure there are scores of others. Even the Middle East Children's Alliance, which is big, established and relatively well connected at the station, gets screwed by the one-event-a-month limit.)

The next challenge will be to get management and staff to implement the resolution we passed. Voting for the candidates I suggested above is one way to help make that happen - and to make other changes that can make KPFA a more effective instrument in the struggle for peace and justice.

Thanks for your attention.

Henry Norr