Berkeley-Apparently distressed by the unwillingness of the federal courts to support the unauthorized shutdown of WBAI, comrade Donald Goldmacher has issued an appeal to the aging Stalinists of Berkeley to dig deep into their land-owner pockets and fund a new lawsuit to take control of the Pacifica Foundation away from board of directors that just won’t vote the way he wants.
The new communist revolution that Goldmacher appeals to his “comrades” to support has a distinctly capitalist tinge. His need to “bring the national board to a standstill” requires a corporate attorney. A corporate attorney with “connections” and a “steep hourly rate“. They need big bucks. NOW.
You can read the full email here.
Comrade Goldmacher further loses the thread with of what used to be called solidarity, supporting independent media, or even the more mainstream duty of care required of a nonprofit board member by stating “Many of the Pacifica stations would not be missed. But KPFA would be missed”.
Goldmacher appears flummoxed that the thousands of membership dollars he and his cohorts spent without board authorization to transfer the WBAI TRO to federal court went to waste. After mis-spelling Foster Garvey attorney John Crigler’s name, he attributes Foster Garvey’s crushing loss in federal court to “New York politics”, missing the judge’s lengthy explanation of why the humongous filing was lacking in legal merit.
Joining in his appeal to his comrades is former PNB director Carole (Big Tent) Travis, KPFA LSB chair Christina Huggins, and KPFA LSB secretary Carol Wolfley, who sends plaintive emails about mediation while secretly appealing for rich people to dig deep to pay connected corporate attorneys to bring the board to a standstill.
No replay of the 1999 shutdown of KPFA would be complete without a misdirected email from our modern-day Michael Palmer. One of Goldmacher’s “comrades” with a conscience redirected his email appeal to friends at WBAI in the spirit of “take a look at this horseshit”.
So how about it, KPFA members? Did you elect your local station board delegates to hire connected corporate attorneys to bring the board to a standstill? It takes signatures by 286 KPFA members to call for recall. It may be time to start collecting them.
Comrade Goldmacher is likely infuriated after his planned kangaroo court for the one KPFA director working to keep all of the community radio licenses in Pacifica’s care up and running, failed. The removal of Voorhees was abruptly canceled after Goldmacher refused to provide any evidence for his allegations against Voorhees. Having run out of fellow directors to prevent from voting or remove from the board, Goldmacher is turning to corporate attorneys in his desperate attempt to overturn a board of directors vote he lost.
Contrary to his foolish misdirected email, Pacifica will not die if WBAI returns to local broadcasting and servicing its local community with NY-based content. If WBAI’s fund drive had been allowed to continue, by now it would have made at least $300,000 that Pacifica doesn’t have, instead of the boatload of legal bills from Foster Garvey that it does have. According to the professional (and expensive) media accountants (NETA) that Goldmacher refers to in his email, KPFA is projected to lose far more money in its 2020 operation than WBAI is and also lost more money in 2019. The national office would be in far more financial distress due to its unsupervised overspending without the $783,000 given to it by WBAI from bequests from the WBAI signal area in 2018-2019. Which the national office all spent. That’s the entire Pacifica National Office payroll of $657,000. WBAI paid for it all in 2019.
WBAI is missed. Very much. The courtrooms in NY have been full, every time. The metrics don’t even support Goldmacher’s overheated rhetorical appeals to his comrades. After a PNB director from KPFK launched an attack on WBAI’s arbitron ratings, it turned out through easily found online reports that KPFK’s Arbitron ratings were far lower than WBAI’s over the last four months. In fact, WBAI’s AQH percentage is about the same as KPFA’s, and both substantially trail the Washington station.
Here are the numbers for anyone interested:
KPFK: https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb003
June 2019 .01 July 2019 .01 August 2019 .01 September 2019 .02
Total: .05
WBAI: https://ratings.radio-online.com/cgi-bin/rol.exe/arb001
June 2019 .02 July 2019 .02 August 2019 .01 September 2019 .02
Total: .07
KPFA: https://ratings.radio-online.com/cgi-bin/rol.exe/arb009
June 2019 .02 July 2019 .02 August 2019 .02 September 2019 .02
Total: .08
KPFT: https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb033
June 2019 .02 July 2019 .02 August 2019 .03 September 2019 .01
Total: .08
WPFW: https://ratings.radio-online.com/cgi-bin/rol.exe/arb015
June 2019 .02 July 2019 .02 August 2019 .03 September 2019 .04
Total: 1.1
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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-sponsored radio.