Berkeley-Only in Berkeley will the network’s troubled board elections come to a close today, with balloting extended to January 4th in Los Angeles, NY and Houston. The election supervisor has decided to close the Northern California elections despite a large number of voters stating they haven’t gotten ballots and that their requests for replacements have gone unanswered. In last nights national board meeting, L. Joy Williams stated she had more than 600 “unread emails”, most of which are likely to be from voters trying to vote. The closing of the balloting under these circumstances runs contrary to California law which upholds the rights of eligible voters to vote and expects organizations to demonstrate a good faith effort to accommodate those who attempt to participate. If even half of the unread emails come from the Berkeley signal area, the quantity could cause a measurable change in the outcome. Continue reading More Than 600 Unread Emails
All posts by Pacifica In Exile
Mr. Destructo
Former Siegel and Yee associate attorney Jose Luis Fuentes, who replaced his then-boss Dan Siegel on the Pacifica National Board in January of 2014, has the solution to Pacifica’s problems: jettison the executive director position and sell everything off.
Fuentes has been aggressively pursuing the Siegel/Brazon faction’s bankruptcy strategy, and spent all of Tuesday nights Pacifica governance committee meeting discussing bylaws amendments to dispense with a paid executive director permanently (the network has only had one for 7 of the last 21 months) and to enable the lame duck board to sell off assets without the permission of the network’s members and donors.
Fuentes’ boss of 12 years, Dan Siegel colluded with Margy Wilkinson when both were board members in 2013 to secretly set up a new foundation under their sole control to recover foundation assets should be they be sold off. Wilkinson then went on to orchestrate the firing of the networks ED, replace her with herself and hire Siegel as the corporate counsel.
KPFA-Pacifica Union History and Politics
by Bob English
Joe and Lew Hill (1879-1915) – (1919-1957)
IWW and Pacifica Radio
Two named Hill, Lew following Joe a century ago, different national, cultural and class origins; both radical humanists who died young yet contributed so much to our world with unifying, progressive missions and legacies far beyond their lifetimes. Continue reading KPFA-Pacifica Union History and Politics
Latest Audit In History
Berkeley-Ten days after Pacifica’s interim controller issued a long list of accounting schedules and bank reconciliations to meet a projected start date on November 30th for the 2014 audit, it looks likely that deadline, the latest in a long series of blown deadlines, will be missed. Requests from board members for a copy of a signed engagement letter with auditor Armanino have been met with silence. The last meeting of the board’s audit committee wasn’t attended by either the committee chair or the secretary and disbanded rapidly. Continue reading Latest Audit In History
KPFK Stream Gone for 106 Hours
The Internet stream at Pacifica’s LA station KPFK has been broken for more than 100 hours since 9am on Wednesday November 25th.
The breakdown is suspected to have been caused by an inept repair of the station’s program archive uploader which was out of order from November 16th to November 25th. Continue reading KPFK Stream Gone for 106 Hours
System Breakdown
Berkeley-The Pacifica Foundation, 19 months into a coup by the Siegel/Brazon faction, is starting to project its internal demolition onto on-air operations. In the past two weeks, LA station KPFK’s website has collapsed at least three times, once for 4 entire days and the station fell off terrestrial broadcast, the website at www.pacifica.org went dark, the website at www.kpfa.org went dark, WBAI-FM aired the Progressive Radio Network’s internet stream having misplaced its own programs, and the LA archives failed, storing only 15 of the last 132 hours of programming since 6:00am on Monday November 16th. Continue reading System Breakdown
What’s The “New Low” and Who Is “Sleazy”?
By Frank Sterling
I was astonished to read the latest edition of Save KPFA and its attack on local station board member Janet Kobren. As we all may have heard, the $400,000 bequest left to the Pacifica Foundation was almost grabbed by KPFA for its sole use.
So who has sunk to the “new low” of “sleazy politics”, the person who has pointed out the mistake or the people who show their greed by hoarding the money for themselves to dole it out as they see fit? And their intense expression of hatred and vitriol for a person whose fiduciary duty it is to oversee funds for our network and who pointed out the mistake. Continue reading What’s The “New Low” and Who Is “Sleazy”?
Joe Hill’s Last Will: 100 Years Later
by Bob English.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me …
Swedish-American labor organizer, poet and songwriter Joe Hill was executed 100 years ago on Nov 19, 1915. Born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund, Oct 7, 1879, he emigrated to the US in 1902. Working on the West Coast as a migrant laborer in 1910, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the “Wobblies,” a radical union of immigrants (subjected to the anti-immigrant hysteria of that period), founded on the principle of One Big Industrial Union for all workers. Continue reading Joe Hill’s Last Will: 100 Years Later
Partial Document Dump Re: Bequest
Berkeley-The “60 pages you can’t see” of documentation regarding the bequest directed to Pacifica Foundation Radio that was incorrectly reported as a restricted donation for the exclusive use of KPFA-Radio, has finally been made available. The national board of directors voted the bequest had been made to the Pacifica Foundation and then to distribute the document package to the network’s five local station boards. Continue reading Partial Document Dump Re: Bequest
The Limits Of Documentation
At KPFA’s local station board meeting, Save KPFA-affiliated secretary Craig Alderson began the conversation about the misdirected bequest, whose 60+ pages of paperwork continue to be available only to board members, by saying “we all know the limits of documentation”.
This clip contains then-ED Wilkinson making a verbal slip: “I desperately wanted the money to be for KPFA – er – for the foundation”.
Later in the three hour meeting, UCR member Janet Kobren, who was verbally assaulted by Save KPFA board members calling her “unethical”, read from the hidden package emails from Pacifica CFO Salvador saying he “had only bits of information and could he please see the bequest paperwork” and Wilkinson stating she “had not shared it with him”. Continue reading The Limits Of Documentation