The August 16, 2015 Exile report

Tracy Rosenberg's latest excavation digs up a new buffoon in Pacifica's ever growing collection of embarrassing opportunists. Her name is Frances Cress Welding and she makes Pat Robertson sound sane. If she isn't mentally ill, she is at best an irresponsible, homophobic racist who shamelessly attempts to cash in on and contribute to the biases that plague today's culture. As such, she is a perfect fit for the vandalized Pacifica.

Leslie Radford, a major bozo sneaked into power by the dysfunctional Margy Wilkinson, put the KPFK fund drive on hold to make room for "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend," an outrageous continuum of the dumbing down of Pacifica.

If you think today's WBAI is a haven for barefaced neer-do-wells and pathetic armchair activists, you are right. However, KPFK may have topped everything with this one. If there is anyone more embarrassing that this woman, it is the person who takes her nonsense seriously and helps her spread it. 

Read Tracy's newsletter and hear this horror for yourself. 

Forget About That 
Election Thing

Berkeley - On Thursday night, Pacifica's election supervisor announced that despite soliciting over 100 local board candidates across the country, the Pacifica Foundation would not be mailing ballots to its 55,000 members on August 29th to replace 72 local and national board members squatting in their seats for the 20th month past the expiration of their elected terms. The reason given: an inability to pay the approximately $50,000 printing and postage bill.

National election supervisor L. Joy Williams, who has been on payroll since January of 2015, made this report to the board's election committee Thursday evening. No written announcement has been made on Pacifica's election or home website at press time for this newsletter. Williams said she had been notified less than a week earlier that the required deposit to the mail house would not be made.

Pacifica's latest set of financials (for the period ending June 30) show current fiscal year income at $10.071 million dollars with a surplus of $855,000, almost all tied to two unexpected bequest gifts to KPFA totaling $941,000. The surplus is mostly on paper as KPFA reported having less than $400,000 remaining in its bank account on July 11 and then canceled its summer fund drive. ED Proffitt had stated to the national board he did not foresee having sufficient financial resources for the month of August. Even with almost a million dollars in unexpected gifts, the network remains $375K short of projected revenues, meaning the actual shortfall between anticipated income developed in the budget process by management and the 2014 finance committee, has been more than $1.3 million so far.

The Foundation did not seem to have discussed having an online-only election or using nonprofit bulk mailing discounts to save money prior to pulling the plug on the election Thursday. The hope appears to be  fall fund drives scheduled to start in 4-5 weeks will be more successful in providing the needed revenue. ED John Proffitt has departed for a European vacation and will not return until after Labor Day weekend. 

The delay comes as Pacifica's elections received their first news coverage in about a decade, when the entry of Iraq war veteran and Occupy Oakland hero Scott Olsen into KPFA's local board race garnered attention in local papers.

Attorney Dan Siegel confirmed via e-mail that his and Margy Wilkinson's purpose in secretly incorporating the "KPFA Foundation" in California in 2013 and headquartering the new organization at the Oakland office of Siegel's law firm, was to acquire the KPFA broadcasting license in the event of  Pacifica dissolution. Siegel indicated he and Wilkinson had not pursued full 501c3 designation from the IRS or opened up a bank account for the new nonprofit. Siegel's implication, that the clandestine nonprofit could not receive KPFA's broadcasting license due to the failure to carry out those actions, is untrue as documented by this Catholic Radio Association Guide to acquiring a noncommercial educational radio broadcasting license. (p.3 "What is necessary to apply for a NCE FM? 2) The applicant must be a non-profit, educational entity. This can be as simple as two people being members of an unincorporated association).

If desired, further confirmation can be found via the bidding process opened up by the San Mateo Community College District for the noncommercial educational televison license for KCSM-TV accepted as FCC-eligible two proposals to purchase the license from the College District by entities incorporated less than four days prior to the date of their offers: (The San Mateo Community Television Corporation, which incorporated on February 9, 2012 by attorney Michael Couzens and submitted a bid to purchase the noncommercial television broadcasting  license on February 13, 2012 - and FM Media, which was incorporated on February 24, 2012 by Ken Ikeda on February 24, 2012, 11 days after submitting a proposal to buy the KCSM TV license from the Community College District). These documents were secured via a public records request and are available on the Internet. 

LA station KPFK's financial meltdown took some dramatic turns this week, with the summer "mini-drive" extended twice, now to a full month until August 21st. The drive is $300,000 short of goal after 24 days. The station abruptly fired its latest business manager. Former CFO Salvador selected and trained the new business manager to "fix" the breakdown in LA's accounting records last fall. Salvador himself is the replacement and is now working as the KPFK business manager on a consulting contract, more than 3 months after his resignation as CFO. (PNB Chair Lydia Brazon's note to Salvador after his January 2014 termination telling him "you'll be back" can be seen here).

The extent of the record-keeping breakdown in LA continues to unfold, with statements issued by Salvador on January 29, 2015showing $451,00 less in income and $402K less in expenses than financial statements issued 3 days ago, for the same period ending 9-30-2014. The scale of the missing entries indicates that 2014 financial statements issued to the board of directors and used for budgeting and financial reporting all that year, were fictional.

2014 IED Margy Wilkinson added to KPFK's current cash crunch by raiding a restricted fund containing grant monies solicited for the renovation of the music studio. $30,000 was transferred out of the restricted bank account to Pacifica's national office on June 27 and 30, 2014 and has not been replaced in the past 12 months. The transfers were undisclosed until uncovered by directors inspections by former PNB members Kim Kaufman and Richard Uzzell last fall. Music director/project manager Maggie LePique asked for the renovation funds to be replaced at the PNB meeting in June of 2015, a year after their removal, but with KPFK staff facing severe schedule reductions, if not layoffs, and new GM Radford's statement that perhaps the music studio's historic grand piano should be hocked to meet payroll, the project will likely have to be abandoned and the 100% restricted funds returned to the donor.

Among other questionable programming decisions at KPFK, new manager Radford put the struggling pledge drive on a "break" this weekend to air a 30-hour Afrikan Mental Liberation Marathon, an independently produced dawn to dusk black nationalist-oriented program . The program has disturbed queer-identified staff members and listeners with aggressively homophobic positions presented with little to no counterpoint.

A KPFK staffer provided this clip of an interview with psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing in which she compares queer sex to human-dog mating, states that male semen is a dietary protein like sweet potatoes and greens, and homosexuality in Ancient Greece was caused by shock at the larger sizes of African genitals - among other bizarre statements deeply disrespectful towards LBGT people who are charaterized as mentally ill. You can hear for yourself here.

The program is presented at an ironic time, given the ascendance of the Black Lives Matter movement co-founded by an out black queer woman deeply interested in affirming the lives and  leadership of black queer and transgender people in the fight against white supremacy. Alicia Garza was the grand marshall at San Francisco's 2015 Pride Parade in June saying "The way I want to live in the world is to be unafraid, unashamed, and to be who I am" .

Wilkinson appointed Radford, a community college drama and speech adjunct, who served on Pacifica national and local boards as a stalwart member of Wilkinson's faction, as KPFK's general manager on her last day, while her replacement John Proffitt, was in his car on the way to California.  57 of KPFK's staffers objected to the hire.

At WBAI In New York, Jeannie Hopper is set to replace Mario Marillo as the interim program director, despite some grumbling by the Justice and Unity/Save KPFA/Grassroots KPFK board faction, whom she is not affiliated with. ED John Proffitt, who visited WBAI last month for the first time, strongly supported Hopper in this sound clip from the national finance committee. Proffitt also clarified that negotiations with the Empire State Building where WBAI's antenna is housed on prohibitively expensive terms, have not resulted in any reduction in a revised lease and that the amount WBAI owes Empire as it makes partial payments on the lease that currently runs through 2020, is "staggering".

At Texas's KPFT, the good news is the long road to replacing the blown transmitter is almost at an end with the Indiegogo campaign to raise the last $18,000 at 85% of goal. The installation of the new equipment promises to help the station bridge fund drive shortfalls that have plagued it since a combination of lightening strikes, age and digital broadcasting in HD combined overwhelmed its broadcasting equipment. The local station board, which has helped get the word out about the Houston station's first  crowdsourcing campaign, has been pre-occupied with the April director's inspection by national board member Adriana Casenave, which caused the station to be charged $5,950 to recover old banking documents, (later negotiated down to $3,000). Casenave castigated this publication and Houston treasurer Bill Crosier as "liars" when word leaked out about the expense to the station. Documentation was finally released verifying the scope of the Casenave requests (which approach the size of the document request made by the State of California),  and the bank charges to find and duplicate 585 documents for Casenave. Frustration boiled over when Casenave left the documents waiting in KPFT's office for months after being notified they were ready for pick-up.

Although elections may be postponed, electioneering is not and the Berkeley "Save KPFA" faction suffered an embarrassing foible on August 13th when they they had to remove an "endorsers" page from their 2015 election materials after listed "endorser" Diana Bohn noted that not only had she not endorsed the Save KPFA candidate slate, she was in fact working on the opposition UCR campaign, and another listener observed that two of the prominent 2015 endorsers had been deceased for more than two years.

Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at pnb@pacifica.org.