Monday, April 28, 2014

They call it Stormy Monday, but...

Berkeley-On Monday morning, Siegel and Yee, claiming they represent the Pacifica Foundation despite no evidence of a letter of retention or a vote of the board, are rushing into court to seek an order to send the police to clear out the Pacifica national headquarters. The request, while not yet calendered in Department 15, will supposedly be heard between 9 and 9:15am. The request states the Berkeley Police Department, despite numerous entreaties by Wilkinson, has refused to attack without such a court order. Police were last called to Martin Luther King Junior Way in 2008, when unpaid staffer Nadra Foster was declared a "trespasser" by KPFA management and police were called to hog-tie and remove her. Foster's wrist was severely sprained in the melee and she later received a settlement from the Berkeley Police Department. 

On Tuesday April 29th, an ad-hoc group called the "Coalition Against The Corporate Takeover of KPFA and Pacifica" plans a press conference and protest in front of Siegel and Yee's offices at 499 14th Street at noon. The group is demanding Siegel's firm "get their conflicted hands off of KPFA and Pacifica" and declares "it is time to call a halt to this wrecking operation."The State Bar of California responded to a bar association complaint against Siegel associate Jose Luis Fuentes by commenting  "civil remedies would have to be sought, such as dismissing Mr. Fuentes from the board". 
The amended PDGG vs. Pacifica complaint can be found here in a 137-page full complaint and a 24-page Memorandum of Points and Authorities.

5 comments:

  1. Regarding the first paragraph. I am looking forward to it.

    Regarding the second paragraph - didn't Amy Goodman resort to the same antics and eventually imposed her contract on Pacifica?

    Psssst.... all of the professionals are on the Pacifica Foundation side aka the Majority on the Board.

    Who and why is trying to disbar Fuentes? Who filed the complaint?

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    1. It was Tracy Rosenberg and Jim DeMaegt who made the most noise and propagated the most numerous smears against Fuentes. They can't stand that he works in Siegel's law firm, and is part of the PNB majority. I don't know the nature of JDM's law practice, but I know that Siegel and Yee have involved themselves in numerous civil rights suits over the years.

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  2. James Phillip De Maegt versus Jose Luis Fuentes. Fuentes handled civil rights cases and appears to be, again, the more mainstream of the two. De Maegt represented an individual named Hasan Hasan, who may have been a left wing campus activist, who was arrested on a felony terroristic threat charge and held on a 100,000 bail. He was considered a terrorism suspect and may have violated his immigration status, at which time De Maegt represented him with an attorney named Guillermo Suarez, who appears to be an immigration lawyer. California Bar website shows that Suarez has a single one year suspension, because his immigration law practice allowed non-lawyers handle immigration paperwork. In one instance a person in deportation proceedings hired an immigration lawyer and his case was assigned to a non-lawyer (a Paralegal, perhaps?), who did not know what he or she was doing, mishandled the person's deportation case and failed to properly advise the client. Again, this is not James De Maegt, but there may be associative links between Summer Reese and Guillermo Suarez via immigration reform activism. other than that, De Maegt kept a low profile. Again. it seems like a more radical and less prominent lashing out at the mainstream. Another interesting dynamic is that the Pacifica Majority consists of the more mainstream Latino activists, who were likely motivated by the Civil Rights issues, and took advantage of the opportunities availed to them by the successful civil rights struggle. The Pro-Reese faction, seems to be more activist oriented and more radical and more hostile to the mainstream women, who were born and are the products of white privilege. My guess is, coming from a more secure economic background, the Pro Reese members, such as Janet Coleman and Kim Kaufman, etc, are more apt to burn their bridges and be more antagonistic to the mainstream, then the Latinos on the Pacifica board, who struggled for years to gain acceptance and equality in the mainstream. I believe that this is the nature of the rift.

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    1. It's an interesting analysis, BB. For me the division is much simpler: Save KPFA really does want to preserve the station so many of us have supported and cherished all these years, and to do that by expanding on its strengths and its existing support base. Reese, Rosenberg, et al. appear to be mostly about accrediting themselves as radical activist truth-purveyors-- and the cost to the station is of little consequence. If their course has bad effects, they prefer to spin a story about how it's not their fault, but that of their predecessors, or the inevitable decline of terrestrial radio, or Pacifica factional fighting-- or that those aren't really bad effects. "WBAI is stabilizing..."

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  3. I agree, that the conflict is about the KPFA. The reason for the conflict is that KPFA content really is progressive journalism as opposed to the fringe/marketing ideology of Summer Reese. Reese got the boot, because she dipped into the KPFA till to pay off the BAI severance money, among other reasons. This is yet another in a series of Pacifica National Board versus local radio stations wars. The fact that PNB offers nothing but despotism, and their only syndicated offering is the Democracy Now!, which they can't run at a profit. Shows the incompetence of the Pacifica National Board. Notice how the KPFA's morning show was replaced with the "Morning Mix" a Pacifica version of the Clear Channel's syndication on a small model, using the early BAI style free-form programming, which I understand, failed at KPFA.

    All this is par for the course, the really disturbing element is the fringe ideology and the marketing culture that Reese brought on board.

    Also, the deep and apparent cultural divisions among the initial members of the two factions on the PNB indicates that there is a deeper root to this conflict and progressive vs fringe is another manifestation of this split in Pacifica.

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