Berkeley -“There have been so many grievances filed it will make your head spin” were the words of one of KPFK-FM’s two SAG-AFTRA union stewards on Friday September 4th, a week after the LA entertainment union stated it was taking Pacifica Radio into arbitration alleging union-busting and contract violations. The handling of staff reductions has been an unmitigated disaster, with laid off employees receiving notices days late with incorrect job titles on them, Pacifica not applying for promised workshare benefits until one day before all employees were shifted to half-time, and employer-provided cell phones shut off this week with no notification.
The SAG-AFTRA union says manager Radford’s plan, as endorsed by local and national boards and faux-corporate counsel Dan Siegel, will work by attrition to force many, if not most, of the station’s union staffers to eventually resign without severance packages- and having to contest unemployment benefits. After several months on half-time pay, Radford’s 2016 “reorganization plan” would require employees to take on other jobs to move back into work schedules paying more than $25,000-$30,000 annually. No positions beyond 50% time are provided in Radford’s document, so senior employees would have to bump their junior colleagues out of jobs to secure 80% or 100% work schedules at a living wage.
Pacifica last went to arbitration with a labor union in 2010-2011 after two people were laid off at KPFA with 5 NLRB complaints dismissed, one layoff upheld and the other reversed. Pacifica’s position is much shakier this time with local operating deficits half the size, maximal impact to KPFK employees with shrunken paychecks for months with no reduction in job duties, a questionable use of the EDD Worksharing program as layoffs are not being prevented but are occurring at the same time with potentially more to follow, and the targeting of an employee with 11 years of seniority as the sole full-time layoff (more than twice Edwards-Tiekert’s seniority at the time of his arbitration). Pacifica spent in excess of $150,000 on the 5 grievances and two arbitration hearings using KQED law firm Folger-Levin in 2011, so it is likely the half-time work reductions will save little to no money in the end, although they may achieve the goal of forcing many employees to quit voluntarily, releasing Pacifica from severance pay obligations.
The union’s position in arbitration can only have been strengthened by the incomprehensible series of errors, omissions and mis-statements provided by Radford and Pacifica’s national office finance staff in the past two and a half weeks. First, Radford confessed to staff that she terminated the business manager after discovering the temporary agency employee had been writing checks to herself and another unauthorized person for at least 8 months, completely undetected by former CFO Salvador.
Then the Pacifica national office issued three different income statements for KPFK within 13 days, with half-million dollar swings between the figures which were attributed to “double-booking” hundreds of thousands of dollars of income in nine of the past ten months. You can download all three versions at the link provided above.
Finally, GM Radford after announcing the receipt and deposit of a $134,000 bequest from the Rosen estate here, and here, and here, backtracked on her written and verbal statements to KPFK’s local station board and emailed Pacifica’s ED, board chair, controller and “financial consultant, Raul Salvador” on September 3rd that “this was a huge and mistaken misreading on my part” and the bequest amount was only $20,000, not $134,000.
The email’s recipient list is puzzling as Pacifica’s financial staff, specifically the controller Efren Llarinas and financial consultant Salvador who was reported by Radford on August 17 to be replacing KPFK’s business manager, should have had direct access to KPFK’s financial records. Even more puzzling, PNB treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert posted on Facebook two weeks prior to Radford’s email that the Rosen check was for $20,000, not $134,000, only to lapse into silence when shown Radford’s written report to KPFK’s local board stating the amount was $134,000. How Edwards-Tiekert was aware Radford’s statement was untrue when Pacifica’s controller, ED and financial consultant were not, and why he said nothing else for two weeks as Radford repeated her statement over and over again, has not been explained. Requests by several board members and members for a xerox of the Rosen check and deposit records have not yet been satisfied.
WBAI, whose books are kept locally on Quickbooks and then replicated in the national Microsoft Dynamics/Great Plains accounting system, has a project to reconcile the two sets of books. An income statement issued from the local Quickbooks system showed a year to date surplus of $10,905, while national’s latest income statement showed a year-to-date loss of $375,624 through July 31.
KPFA too, is experiencing its share of financial weirdness with the local station board receiving a draft budget for 2016 from the station’s general manager on August 22nd that projected a $664,000 goal for the upcoming fund drive that begins on September 15th. Then an email was sent to station staff a mere 11 days later stating the goal of the fund drive starting September 15th was $540,000, a $120,000 reduction. Nothing had been sent notifying the board of the change, providing a reason for the change, or indicating what changes will be made to the draft budget to cover the $120,000 drop.
In the larger financial picture, Llarinas, currently holding the position of interim controller, has stated to the national finance committee that he cannot verify the accuracy of the financial statements issued due to the failure to reconcile bank accounts. Llarinas suggested “centralizing” the finances. This is a more intense suggestion than that made by fomer ED Summer Reese in February 2013 when she proposed relocating Pacifica’s 21 bank accounts scattered among 6 different banks (Wells Fargo, Chase, B of A, Comerica, Bank of Georgetown and Mechanics) to the same bank to reduce the networks annual bank charges. Reese’s proposal was denounced by the Siegel/Brazon faction as a “power grab” and never voted on and the network has continued to run up in excess of $100,000 annually in bank admin charges and perform as many as 25 wire transfers a month between banking institutions to administer payroll, health benefits and network services payments.
Houston board member Bob Mark addressed the futility of the network’s current procedures and lack of accountability for financial staff in this clip from Pacifica’s audit committee where common sense does not prevail.
Frontiers Magazine, the voice of Southern California’s LGBT community for 34 years, took a look at homophobic broadcasts on KPFK in August and the overall condition of the station, which has broadcast IMRU Radio, the only LGBT radio show in Southern California, for close to 40 years. Host/producer Steve Pride is a member of the station’s local board and affiliated with the independents, who do not support the Siegel/Brazon faction that installed community college teacher Radford as the station’s general manager in May. Radford refused to speak to Frontiers reporter Karen Ocamp, but expelled national board member Kim Kaufman did, and spoke of a “Shock Doctrine” tactic being applied to KPFK. Kaufman’s quote is excerpted below. You can read the full Frontiers article here.
“This is the Shock Doctrine being played out at KPFK—create a financial crisis yourself and then use it to further your goals. One goal, Kaufman contends, is to use the financial crisis to eventually cause the breakup of the Pacifica network, the assets of which would then be “scooped up” by longtime Pacifica insider and Oakland attorney Dan Siegel. Siegel, Kaufman alleges, “has a reason to negotiate badly on KPFK’s behalf. A month ago it was discovered that he and another Berkeley board member, Margy Wilkinson, had filed Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State creating a new nonprofit called KPFA Foundation, which he publicly stated was to acquire assets of Pacifica, such as broadcasting licenses, in the event of a Pacifica Foundation insolvency, dissolution or governmental intervention.”
The interview that was broadcast on KPFK compared homosexuality to bestiality and suggested an “epidemic” of African-American homosexuality was caused by “conditioning” among a series of disturbing statements that sought to incite anger at and pity for black queer people.
A lengthy expose in New York Magazine exposed the history of Grain Brain author David Perlmutter, whose series of books and affiliated products have been used as premiums heavily on Pacifica’s California stations (as well as some NPR stations). Grain Brain, which repurposed the Atkins Diet as a dementia preventative, was featured at least ten times in KPFA’s May 2015 fund drive, most heavily used by Brian Edwards-Tiekert and Sonali Kolhatkar on Upfront and Uprising, and also pitched by them in fund drive specials throughout the station’s broadcast day. Perlmutter has written another book called Brain Maker, announced as a premium in upcoming fall fund drives which addresses treatments for autism, Tourette’s syndrome and multiple sclerosis, advising DIY fecal transfers and probiotic enemas.
The lengthy and well-researched NY Magazine article can be read here. For the purposes of this newsletter, we will summarize with a clip from the article and also print the article’s set of links sourced through the Internet Archive of Perlmutter’s ever-changing websites selling supplements over the past decades.
“He is similarly confident about the treatment regimens proposed in Brain Maker, telling his readers about astonishing transformations accomplished through simple dietary changes such as going gluten-free, eating fermented foods, and taking probiotics. He’s right. The stories do seem miraculous: dramatic improvements in autistic symptoms after probiotics and DIY fecal transplants; Tourette’s symptoms gone after a regimen of probiotic enemas; multiple sclerosis successfully treated with nutritional supplements, probiotic enemas, and fecal transplants.
But for medical researchers, claims of dramatic improvements as a result of unproven treatments generally raise red flags. A 2014 commentary on Grain Brain, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, puts it bluntly: “The declaration that a single, simple ‘cure’ can successfully treat numerous diverse diseases and symptoms is reminiscent of the oratory of the ‘snake oil’ merchants of generations ago.” Yale physician and nutrition researcher David Katz, no friend of the food industry, is equally dismissive, describing Grain Brain’s arguments as “the raw power of pop culture repetition, not the staying power of truth,” he said. “Whole wheat does not make us fat; whole grains do not make us stupid.”
I asked Jonathan Eisen, a microbiome expert at the University of California, Davis, about Brain Maker. “To think we can magically heal diseases by changing to a gluten-free diet and taking some probiotics is idiotic, quite frankly,” he told me. After Eisen read the case study of an autistic boy that Perlmutter highlights in Brain Maker and on his website — his words were even harsher. “It resembles more the presentation of a snake-oil salesman than that of a person interested in actually figuring out how to help people,” said Eisen”
2011: https://web.archive.org/web/
2005: http://web.archive.org/web/
2001: http://web.archive.org/web/
KPFA was wracked with a censorship controversy a few months ago, when program director Laura Prives prevented Guns and Butter host Bonnie Faulkner from airing a discussion of SB 277, California’s bill mandating childhood vaccinations, with WBAI Natural Living host Gary Null. Prives vetoed Null’s appearance on the basis that “Null has built a career of selling remedies, supplements and alternative medical advice” and stating moreover “KPFA has a serious responsibility to provide its listeners with accurate, science-based information on public health. It is about protecting the public airwaves from mis-information and from people who stand to profit by offering dubious remedies“.
Pacifica in Exile will refrain from the commenting on the relative “dubiousness” of DIY fecal transplants and enemas, but will suggest that there are better criteria for editorial judgment than factional affiliation.
National Board members Cerene Roberts and Jose-Luis Fuentes burnt more than an hour of Pacifica’s governance committee advocating for a re-arrangement of the meeting schedule to avoid an in-person meeting in Berkeley next year. The motion may or may not be taken up by the full national board, but the earnest effort probably speaks to the board’s desire to avoid being confronted by CA members, who are upset about the failure to conduct the election and the unionbusting at KPFK.
KPFA’s Twit Wit Radio satire touched on some of Pacifica’s weekly news in their September 6th episode where a familiar-sounding voice comments that “It is next to impossible to privatize a solvent radio network.” You can listen to the 30-minute episode here or at www.kpfa.org.
Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at [email protected].
For readers who may wish to do more, any donor to a California-based not for profit organization like Pacifica may file a complaint to the open file at the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the Office of the CA Attorney General. Pacifica’s case number is CT011303. The form and instructions for filing may be downloaded here.
To subscribe to this newsletter, please visit our spanking new website at www.pacificainexile.org
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Started in 1946 by conscientious objector Lew Hill, Pacifica’s storied history includes impounded program tapes for a 1954 on-air discussion of marijuana, broadcasting the Seymour Hersh revelations of the My Lai massacre, bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, going to jail rather than turning over the Patty Hearst tapes to the FBI, and Supreme Court cases including the 1984 decision that noncommercial broadcasters have the constitutional right to editorialize, and the Seven Dirty Words ruling following George Carlin’s incendiary performances on WBAI. Pacifica Foundation Radio operates noncommercial radio stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and syndicates content to over 180 affiliates. It invented listener-supported radio.
to share the spread the words here, see also on
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2015/09/273140.php
and kpfkcommentators.blogspot.com
and hope the information we learn here will be disseminated every-anywhere else also, or there is no hope if it is all left only to the ‘insiders’ to take, define, spend and control.
the information too.