Please attend the next Local Station Board (LSB) meeting on Wednesday February 9, 2011, at 7 PM, in downtown Brooklyn/Metrotech.
There is a lot a stake and you need to pay close attention. Additionally, there is a mandatory “Public Comment” period during which you may express your concerns.
WBAI Local Station Board
Wed., Feb. 9 – 7:00 PM
The Commons
388 Atlantic Avenue – 2nd fl (Elevator avail.)
btw. Bond & Hoyt Streets
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Travel: 2,3,4,5,B,D,N,Q,R to Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street; B 63, B 65 buses
Please attend the next Local Station Board (LSB) meeting on Wednesday February 9, 2011, in downtown Brooklyn/Metrotech.
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BACKGROUND
We believe that WBAI must practice genuine openness and the due process it demands of the world’s businesses and governments. WBAI and Pacifica’s management has been hypocritical and retrograde.
Since 2009, across the Pacifica network, scores of staff have been fired and banned; listeners have been barred from stations they fed with their labor and dollars; and programs have been moved and removed — most without consultation or direct notification and virtually all arbitrarily. None received due process.
About three months ago, massive program changes were shoved through without notice or discussion as required in the Pacifica Bylaws, staff contracts, common sense and decency.
Virtually all WBAI alternative and complementary health and health advocacy programs were slashed in half and shoved from midday slots to 11 pm. “Global Medicine Review” with Dr. Kamau Kokayi and Faybiene Miranda were in Kokayi’s words “Browned-out and Nullified,” both WBAI’s economic analysis and its personal finance programs are gone, and the mostly-female produced “Tuesday Arts Magazine” has been removed.
During what is surely a watershed period for Haiti/Ayiti, “Haiti, the Struggle Continues” was reduced by 25%, a new program whose host likes her gospel singers “fat and Black only, please” was introduced in a brand-new old morning music line-up, and cultural icon, activist-poet Louis Reyes Rivera’s “Perspective” was unceremoniously cut from the schedule in which blank spots remain.
Rivera’s disappearance came after 2010 LSB election results named him 1st runner-up making him eligible to fill any local board staff seat vacated before the next LSB election (2012). His high placement came in spite of actions to undermine his candidacy by the “independent” national election supervisor who illegally and severely censored his candidate statement under direction of her “superiors” – Pacifica’s Executive Director (ED) Arlene Engelhardt and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) LaVarn Williams.
A Steward of the Unpaid Staff union, Rivera had directly criticized the abuses of the local and national “coup” management since their takeover at WBAI and Pacifica in 2009. CFO Williams held the title of WBAI Interim General Manager from May 2009 to January 2010, and with the direction of her cohorts on the ACE-dominated board oversaw a purge, firing and banning without process former Program Director Bernard White, producers Don DeBar, the late Kamau Khalfani and several others.
After members had a look/listen at their operation, in spite of disfranchisement and other dirty election tricks, Williams’ ACE associates barely managed to hang onto their majority in the 2010 local board.
Laid-off station staff have been replaced without union-required call-backs and positions have been created and/or filed without contractually-mandated job postings and search committees. ACE supporters hold the majority of paid staff positions.
The station’s newly announced general manager, Berthold Reimers, was either candidate or endorser of the ACE slate in every election except this last when as Interim General Manager, he controlled the staff election list. On the ballot mail date, 40% of staff members whom he “approved” for voting were not sent ballots.
Reimers has little management and absolutely no media experience, and was hired after a process by an ACE-dominated LSB search committee which saw minority members excluded from notice of meetings and then dropped for absences. To date, among other things, its erstwhile chair cannot account for how a 12-person committee became a 13-member body but that didn’t stop Pacifica ED Arlene Engelhardt from accepting their report.
According to the treasurer – a fellow ACEist – Reimers has not been available to meet with the local board committee established to review the station’s deficit budget quarterly spending. There’s been no monthly local finance meeting since October. He has managed to be on many tele-conferences of the Finance Committee of the Pacifica National Board where during his budget presentations he had to be repeatedly instructed on such elementary principles of compensation including the differences between calculations for an employee versus a contractor.
So although it was clear that pretty multi-colored graphs notwithstanding, there were no evidence of financial genius in this man who had served as an HMO number-cruncher, ED Engelhardt made his job permanent. Some may wonder whether the local or national board has seen his contract but few wonder whether the fix was in.
WHAT’S NEXT?
That same Management Search Committee whose composition violated, for more than a year, multiple aspects of the motion that created it is supposedly in the process of searching for a program director. Its meetings have not been publicly noticed and are held on station premises from which some boardmembers are barred and during the business day when most ordinary working people cannot attend. What good thing can come from such a corrupted process?
Having failed to block Bernard White as a candidate and with him receiving almost twice as many votes as any other candidate, the ACEist are now trying to get the national board to retroactively change the rules of membership and void White’s. Anyone hired “for cause” which in ACE’s Pacifica means just because…
On the boards, voting for officers and other positions is done by secret ballot. No one has to reveal their vote and conversely no one else has a right to ask. So after an 11-11 tie for both the pro tem and permanent Chair between John Brinkley of Plainfield and Mitchel Cohen who as 2008-2010 Chair became known for disappearing opposition items from the board’s agenda between meetings, naming meeting attendees who the law specifically states may choose to remain anonymous, shouting encouragement to friends who heckle the opposition and other such examples of the presence of bias and the absence of discipline, it was quite something when James “Jamie” Ross was caught angrily demanding of two women whether one of them had voted for John Brinkley. (One expects that in the 2 months past the grilling has been varied and intensified and after hand-writing tests, the violator properly disciplined.)
The ACEists refused to draw straws or to share power by co-chairing for alternating periods, and so the drama will continue at this meeting. Remaining officers should also be elected.
In the meantime, Alex Steinberg has been trying to get the national board to end in-person WBAI LSB meetings. Outside of the watchful views of members, the kind of voting “error” described above will not be a problem. That the Bylaws clearly intend for in-person meetings by the use of language such as “Meetings will be held “in facilities of sufficient size to accommodate Members affiliated with that radio station and the public, preferably in the station” is apparently not a serious consideration.
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