Berkeley-Pacifica’s 2015 board elections ended with a bang when the KPFK election delivered a huge supermajority (17 out of 24 seats) for the Committee to Strengthen KPFK/Candidate Slate group in a stinging rebuke for the majority Siegel/Brazon faction. The last time any Pacifica local board had a supermajority was more than five years ago.

(*Late-breaking: an independent verification changes the results to 18/24. It remains to be seen if the final order will be adjusted by Pacifica).

The overwhelming results indicate severe listener distress at the direction of the LA station under Margy Wilkinson-appointed general manager Leslie Radford – with staff cut to 50% time, premium defaults and unpopular program changes.

The unpopular program change announced the day before the election ended: the substitution of long-time late late night host Roy of Hollywood from midnight to 3am on Mondays through Thursdays, entered its third day. The replacement, the obscenity-laden “Safe Harbor”, has been using as its theme the FCC term for the late night fine-free period. The rap music and talk programs are thematically connected by their generous use of profanity. Here are some samples: The full programs are also archived on Soundcloud. KPFK has disabled downloads for the profanity-laced programs on kpfk.org,

Safe Harbor 1: “Saying Whatever The Fuck They Want”.

Safe Harbor 2: Shit, Goddamn, Fuck Yeah: The Listeners Revolt.

Safe Harbor 3: “Sex Education Baybee or The Phone Guy is Falling Asleep”

At KPFT, former PNB chair Bill Crosier and incumbent PNB member Teresa Allen were the big election winners, collecting 52% of the first place votes between themselves.

At New York’s WBAI, election results released before the meeting were ignored as the Justice and Unity Caucus (the NY Siegel-Brazonites) attempted to get themselves back into the local majority by pretending new election results had not already come out and trying to seat a 3rd runner-up from the previous election in 2012 to a vacant seat. The meeting ended in disarray, with the NYPD being called after outgoing chair John Brinkley got into a physical altercation with treasurer R. Paul Martin.

The NY results were closely divided, but left the Siegel/Brazonites in a small minority which they appear to be trying to overturn using trickery. The highest-scoring candidate, the leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart who was released from prison in December of 2013 and suffers from terminal breast cancer, ran as a write-in candidate after being declared ineligible by Pacifica’s election staff due to not having made a donation to Pacifica during the year preceding her candidacy.

The final election results, with the Siegel/Brazon faction losing three of the four station signal areas that had elections, should result in a change in the majority on the national board, but may not, due to the majority’s shenanigans with the affiliate representative directors for 2016, who were handpicked by the majority with no general call for nominations out to the networks 200 affiliate stations and elected one by one with no competition, despite neither nominating station having the written contract required by the network’s bylaws.

The election rhetoric at all the stations was heated and racially polarized. KPFK’s “volunteer coordinator” Adam Rice, who is Caucasian, went so far as to call his opponents, who just swept the election, the “White Citizens Council”, a reference to the network of white supremacist organizations in the Southern United States determined to maintain racial segregation.

The wording will be familiar to KPFA listeners who heard programmer JR Valrey use the same term on-air in 2013. Valrey, who is African-American, directed it AT the Siegel/Brazon faction at KPFA, the same faction Rice supports in Los Angeles.

The Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action has informed Pacifica In Exile that despite their website saying so on January 9, 2016 and a similar claim on Pacifica executive director Lydia Brazon’s own website, that she is not the president of the Southern California chapter of ADA.

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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.