By John Ervin

(Posted at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Civil-Liberty-Alert-Liste-by-John-Ervin-Civil-Liberties_Civil-Liberties_Pacifica_Radio-160404-143.html

Civil Liberty Alert: Listener-Funded Pacifica Radio Under Siege In N.Y. And D.C.

When it comes to dissidence and democracy, nobody does it better than KPFK, KPFA, WBAI and their sister stations in DC and Houston, and more than a hundred eighty affiliates.

We can make a strong case that Pacifica Radio, the bastion and bulwark of listener-funded media for well over a half century, has done more to protect our lives and liberty, and has done it better, than the Department Of Homeland Security.

In plain fact, there is probably no other uniquely American institution in our times that has done more to watch our backs.

KPFK in my home town L.A. and its parent Pacifica Radio, nationally, both as my long-time Democracy University on-the-air, have done more to educate and enlighten me than any other source I’ve known, including Youtube and the rest of the new media universe.

And so it should come as no surprise that for the past three years, as has happened a number of times before in its storied past, there has been an intense putsch and ongoing coup to loosen up and appropriate Pacifica’s licenses, and hence to drive it off our cultural and political landscape.

Starting in 2013 at its flagship station in Berkeley, Pacifica Radio has been put through the most convoluted fifth column-style shenanigans, now recently culminating with the new CFO there, Sam Agarwal “anticipating” a 60 day deadline for recommending the liquidation of WBAI in New York and WPFW in DC. The two East Coast stations, the closest to the national centers of power, would be put up for auction or sale, due to their being a number of months behind in network payments (although in recent years both famed California stations, KPFK and KPFA, had fallen behind in the same way, and for longer periods, without them being offered up for liquidation at that time).

Summer Reese, the executive director, was fired only six weeks into a three year contract two years ago, as she began to audit the stations and crack down on alleged piracy in NY. She and stalwarts occupied the national office until forced to decamp by court order. At the time, Reese said she was “occupying to stop the breakup of the network”.

Those words look prescient today.

Gary Null, a very popular muckraker and host at WBAI with a high national profile in the dissident community, says he has had forensic evidence of illegally-copied premium products, both his own and those of others, even as all kinds of malfeasance from the usual suspects are proliferating across our landscape.

Roy of Hollywood, aka Roy Tuckman, host of KPFK’s most popular broadcast, “Something’s Happening”, had his show recently trimmed from its perennial schedule ~ maintained for the past forty years from midnight to 6 AM ~ to half that, now starting at the very wee hour of 3AM, as an apparent consequence of his raising the alarm on the air at KPFK, with his staunch efforts resulting in a crucial success for the stations’ listeners in recent elections, through a majority of independents for Pacifica being voted into office on the LA local board. (I have been fan and listener to his show, “Something’s Happening ~ Dynamite Radio for Night People” since its inception in 1977.)

Meanwhile, there are Tea Party affiliates and millionaires pulling all kinds of strings to try to wrest control of the stations and boards, gaining entrance to their affairs through a variety of Trojan Horse incursions. Can you say, “Operation Mockingbird” or “COINTELPRO” or the 1% trying to buy out “Radio for the 99%”?

Coincidence or Conspiracy?? We report, you decide.

For a more comprehensive calendar of all the derring-do, see this article “A Timeline of the Coup” at https://pacificainexile.org/archives/1817 .

We don’t expect all readers to have a complete grasp of the blow by blow of this 15 rounder. But we ask all lovers of free speech, civil liberties, and American media democracy (i.e., the free flow of information) to write Pacifica at PNB@PACIFICA.ORG and sound the alarm at the mere mention of so dastardly a deed as liquidation of these unique and singular franchises of freedom.

As one former (ousted) WBAI program director has put it succinctly, “We feel it is an important institution. It has the capacity to do something very unique in media, which is to tell the truth.”

The Pacifica network has an irreplaceable and truly pre-eminent mission to America: because it accepts no money from corporations or groups, only from its listeners, it has the ability to connect us to vital and crucial news and culture that is available nowhere else on the airwaves.

And due to the medium of voice and radio, it carries that message from their lips to our ears, from heart to hearts.

As they are unabashedly unbound by special interests, there are those who thus tag them “anarchists.”

But they are in plain fact political and cultural performance artists for things we need to know to thrive.

Abraham Lincoln summoned “the better angels of our nature,” and those who listened were the wiser.

In an age of the homogenization of the American individual, Pacifica Radio has called out, loud and clear ~ and for 67 years, now ~ a certain something that is perhaps even more essential for our needs, while we face an increasingly clandestine and crushing tyranny from USA Inc.

And as with artists and activists alike we may call that precious commodity “the better anarchists of our nature.”

So please let the National Board hear from you. No sale, no liquidation, no millionaires, and no operation mockingbird.

For more useful historical context, please read:

Nat Henthoff, “Can WBAI be saved” from April 10, 2001

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/can-wbai-be-saved-6416052

~and HoustonPress: “The Day the KKK Bombed KPFT”

http://www.houstonpress.com/music/the-day-the-kkk-bombed-kpft-6497751

~and for a very good short history of CIA blanketing infiltration of American media, germinating from the dawn of the agency in the late 1940s under the rubric of “Operation Mockingbird,” see this at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

John Ervin is a freelance writer involved for the past ten years with the investigations of electronic voting fraud and several of the other highly organized corporatic crimes While a longtime member of the American Federation of Musicians (local 4) he has performed as a concert pianist. During and after the Bush v. Gore fiasco, he became an accidental journalist, as he began to research in greater depth the activities and rise of America’s secret government and the heavy-handed influence of the American intelligence communities in disrupting or re-directing many of our democratic processes and institutions. This research has served as motivation to share historical facts and questions surrounding the hidden and deeper politics that contribute to the long-standing and ongoing deformation of our society.  For over ten years Ervin has been advocating for the convening of independent media throughout the world ~low power radio broadcasters, community radio, independent film makers, indy musicians and journalists, et al~ to form and maintain a clearing-house of information that bears upon the security of communities world-wide, a global “neighborhood watch”, a sure defense against top-down, privatized governmental intelligence, and Ervin continues to lobby for the establishment of a parallel “intelligence analysis in exile” ~ a far more faithful mirror of what the CIA was originally intended to be as strictly a non-operational, intelligence-gatherer~ but as a grass-roots creation and evolution for the safety of all our peoples.