Category Archives: Audio

Election In The Garbage Can Redux

 

A brief clip from the Pacifica National Board meeting of 1-12-2017 with the lame duck board. It starts with the usual protest about the board excluding 75% of WBAI’s representation, which they have now done for 345 consecutive days. KPFA director Jose Luis Fuentes seems to make an intoxicated aside. Then we move on to once again, for the second time, decertify the 2016 board elections. The board moves to pay someone undetermined $1,500 to recount the ballots and if the recount changes the results, then director and officer elections of the past month would all get redone. IED Brazon then contradicts  and says the board is acting contrary to the bylaws (a point Pacifica in Exile has been known to make) and  the 2016 LSB elections are indeed certified.

Pacifica Vs. Obamacare (and a point of snipe)

 

A summary reel of Pacifica’s December 27 national finance committee. In order:

1) A brief discussion of the still-invisible FY 2014 audit, which at two years late is claimed to be done but is impossible to locate

2) The motion to pass DC station WPFW’s budget, which like all the budgets in the current cycle is both 3 months late and inaccurate pending  large rises in central services fees several stations will face due to Cerene Robert’s SCA motion granting credits for sideband rental revenue

3) A discussion and vote on the budget for LA station KPFK, where GM Leslie Radford, already responsible for $285,000 in contract violations, proposes balancing the budget by stripping Pacifica’s LA employees of all dependent health care for both spouses and dependent children. In addition to the ERISA issues brought up on the call, later research uncovered the proposal was a violation of the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act and would lead to more fines and penalties for Pacifica. The board majority on the committee passed it anyway

4) A late night poison pill from Cerene Roberts.

Busted Eardrums

At a 3-hour Pacifica National Board meeting on 11-3 at which nothing actually happened, Houston listener rep Adriana Casenave, always notable for the volume of her participation, goes for irony of the first degree by invoking a point of privilege regarding her nemesis, Houston rep Bill Crosier, accusing him of busting her eardrum.

Casenave then embarks on a lengthy screaming fit at 4x the volume as she goes to war with the chair – over a two-minute extension of time. After she loses her shrieking challenge to the chair and the 2-minute extension of time is approved, Casenave exits the meeting, apparently unable to bear her defeat.

Be warned that the clip can cause aural discomfort and listen at your own risk.

From the same meeting is a brief bonus clip of a hilarious segment when no less than five board members change their vote at the last minute, apparently succombing to confusion about which faction is voting is yes and which one is voting no on a fairly innocuous motion to notice an affiliates director election for 2016-2017. It was the only substantive motion voted on for the three hour duration of the meeting.

 

Radford’s KPFK Shutdown

 

In this clip from KPFK’s 10-16 local station board meeting, GM Radford threatens that if she is forced to pay for the SAG-AFTRA arbitration loss caused by her union contract violations in 2015, she will turn off KPFK’s repeater signals in Malibu, Santa Barbara and Ridgecrest/China Lake, turn off the station’s transmitter altogether from midnight to 6am, and turn off the air conditioning.

Board members suggested instead reversing Radford-initiated program changes that decreased revenue and provided documentation that the changes had cost the station at least $137,000.

Radford replied that programmers whose hours were removed, Roy Tuckman and Sonali Kolhtakar had “refused” to return to their old on-air schedules. Later in the meeting, both Tuckman and Kolhatkar responded in emails that they had not refused and would be pleased to resume their previous broadcast schedules and fundraise for the station.

Turning off the transmitter from midnight to 6am would likely violate signed rental contracts in effect for the use of the station’s sideband signals, besides angering the large overnight audience cultivated by Roy of Hollywood for decades.

Financial statements released for the fiscal year that ended 9-30-2016 documented a KPFK listener support loss of $300K between 2015 and 2016, the largest in the network for the year.

As reported by the Pacifica National Office:

KPFK listener support  10-1-2014 to 9-30-2015: $3,000,802.

KPFK listener support 10-1-2015 to 9-30-2016: $2,701,054.

The $137,000 projected increase in listener support would pay for 65% of the cost of Radford’s union violations. A return to the pre-Radford listener support numbers in 2017 would pay for them entirely.

Archive Shut Down Budget Motion

 

In Tuesday’s national finance committee, contention broke out when, in lieu of news about 50-year-old unique archival reel-to-reel Pacifica recordings being sold off on E-Bay after a storage container was auctioned for nonpayment, Save KPFA’s Barbara Whipperman proposed asking for a shut down and transfer budget for the network’s archives department. After much yelling (some of it here, but not all of it), the proposal failed on a 4-4 tie vote with Siegel/Brazonites Adriana Casenave, Cerene Roberts, Michael Novick and board chair Tony Norman voting it down.

Chair of the Board Diagnosis: Executive Officers Do Not Implement

 

In the September 20 meeting of Pacifica’s financial committee, three hours resulted in only a recommendation to create a task force. Along the way, chair of the board Tony Norman gave his diagnosis of the problem: the executive staff won’t implement the ideas of the board of directors. His comments are recorded below and transcribed.  Continue reading Chair of the Board Diagnosis: Executive Officers Do Not Implement

Radford on SAG-AFTRA: It’s All John Proffitt’s Fault

 

In this clip from the September 18th KPFK local station board meeting, GM Radford, whose salary cuts, layoffs and denial of severance pay actions in September and October of 2015 resulted in a $200,000 plus arbitration loss for violating the station’s SAG-AFTRA union contract, blithely proclaims her actions are not her fault at all and decides Pacifica should pay for her six-figure labor violations settlement. Continue reading Radford on SAG-AFTRA: It’s All John Proffitt’s Fault

PNB Uncensored – Streaming Now

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Berkeley-The special meeting on finances called by board members Jan Goodman, Jonathan Alexander, Grace Aaron and Bill Crosier is now streaming at kpftx.org, the independent server that once served as KPFT-In-Exile when the Pacifica membership community was rebelling against another bad board 17 years ago.

You can listen live here. Click on the listen now on the upper left side below the leaf image. A full length audio archive as well as a highlights reel will be available after the meeting.  Continue reading PNB Uncensored – Streaming Now

The Secret Underwriters

 

In a “special meeting on fundraising” by Pacifica’s national finance committee that is unlike any fundraising meeting you have ever heard before,  Siegel-Brazonite Adriana Casenave hurls accusations of secret underwriters and payroll slush funds at the financially-troubled radio network her faction has controlled since a March 2014 coup.

Perhaps the moral of the story is the better you know the board majority, the less you trust them.

No Talking … Or Else

 

At the June 29th PNB coordinating committee, the Siegel/Brazon faction cracked down on board members talking about the network’s growing financial crisis with the chief financial officer and determined that a secret executive session must be held immediately to prevent any more unsupervised talking about the financial emergency and discipline those involved for “bad behavior”. You can hear the scary unsupervised talking that ensued on June 26th here: Tracy-rosenberg – Pnb-special-meeting-on-finances-6262016