Louis Reyes Rivera is running as a staff representative to the LSB on a three-point platform – No gag rules ever. Due process always. USOC’s role cannot be abrogated at will. I am equally concerned with the need for long-range planning towards economic stability and inclusion of every constituent community.
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I am running as a staff representative to the LSB on a three-point platform: No gag rules ever. Due process always. The role of USOC (Unpaid Staff Organizing Committee) cannot be abrogated at will.
I am equally concerned with the need for fresh approaches to fundraising, long-range planning towards economic stability, and program policies that better reflect the inclusion of every constituent community. Moreover, I hold foremost that elected representatives to the LSB must engender the station’s integrity and practice of principled behavior. How principled we are is what makes us relevant to our constituent communities.
Everywhere I go, people ask me, “What’s going on at ’BAI?” Don’t believe our listeners don’t suspect that something’s amiss here – or that, as producers, we can simply cover up, ignore, or deny the obvious.
Just 18 months ago, a new majority faction took over the Pacifica National Board, and L.A. board member Grace Aaron became Chair as well as Interim Executive Director. Pacifica’s legal Counsel, Dan Siegel, promptly resigned, stating that he would not be party to a surreptitious agenda. He had previously represented listeners and staff in successful lawsuits against culminating coups in Berkeley and New York.
Among Aaron’s initial acts was a failed attempt to take over WBAI’s radio signal and the issuance of a gag order throughout the network, threatening violators with removal from the air. To date and from top to bottom, 20-plus people, including national officers, local managers, unpaid producers and listeners, have been arbitrarily fired, banned, or forced out of their respective stations.
No less than eleven producers (two of them union stewards), two general managers and a program director were eliminated from WBAI alone, and in a manner that bespeaks vindictiveness at the direct expense of both due process and Pacifica by-laws. Once banned, they could not be subjects or guests of any program at the risk of retaliation against the producer. Yet we continue to tout WBAI as the single local alternative that insists on Free Speech Radio; our own LSB is itself as culpable here as management.
In this past decade, WBAI has had no fewer than ten general managers, thus making impossible any effort to strategize and implement a sound master plan for our station’s financial well-being. In addition, with barely 40 paid staff, WBAI relies heavily on over 200 producers who have been ably represented by USOC, a union recognized by every station manager prior to these past 14 months. For Pacifica administrators to implement policies that are tantamount to union-busting is both shameful and criminally negligent of the Pacifica Mission – that our producers have remained more silent than not is equally shameful.
“Thus,” wrote William Shakespeare, “calamity makes cowards of us all.” I urge you to turn aside that tendency and vote for Louis Reyes Rivera, Bob Lederer and William Heerwagen.
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Known as the Janitor of History, poet/essayist Louis Reyes Rivera has been studying his craft since 1960 and teaching it since 1969. The recipient of over 20 awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award (1995), a Special Congressional Recognition Award (1988), and the CCNY 125th Anniversary Medal (1973), Rivera has assisted in the publication of well over 200 books, including John Oliver Killens’ Great Black Russian, Adal Maldonado’s Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and The Bandana Republic, among others.
Considered a necessary bridge between the African and Latino American communities, Rivera has taught Pan-African, African-American, Caribbean and Puerto Rican literature and history in colleges, prisons and community centers. His essays and poems have appeared in such award-winning collections as In Defense of Mumia; ALOUD: Live from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Sons And Lovers, and his own Scattered Scripture, which earned him the Institute of Latin American Writers 1996 Poetry Prize.
For the past ten years, he’s conducted a bi-monthly writing workshop at Sistas’ Place, in Brooklyn, and continues to work in clubs and festivals with Jazz bands (Sun Ra All-Stars Project, Ahmed Abdullah’s Diaspora, the James Spaulding Ensemble, Ebonic Tones and his own band, The Jazzoets). He has appeared on many public access programs, including Russell Simmons’ HBO Def Poetry. Currently, Louis Reyes Rivera can be heard every Thursday, at 2pm, on radio station WBAI (99.5 FM; www.wbai.org), hosting a weekly show, Perspective.
Contact: Shamal Books, GPO Box 16, NYC 10116 / 718.622.4426 and/or via email: louisreyesrivera@aol.com
1. Why do you want to be on the Local Station Board (LSB)?
I believe I bring to the LSB table a rational voice capable of building bridges between factions. My initial point of reference is the need to search for and establish practical common ground on behalf of the station itself.
2. How do you envision the LSB working with the Pacifica Foundation, staff and listener members?
The LSB must continually renegotiate WBAI’s relationship to the Pacifica Foundation within the construct of both evaluatory critique and open discourse in order to best solidify the station’s ongoing progressive development, expansion and sustainability.
3. How can your station better serve the community? Please define community.
The immediate WBAI Community consists of every citizen within reach of its airwaves. As such, WBAI can better serve its community by fully recognizing the diversity of and responsibilities to all of its constituents. The integrity of station policies and programming must be reviewed and made to reflect the sensibilities and socio-political concerns of its listeners as equitably as possible.
4. Describe some actions you would take to increase the influence of the station in underrepresented communities and to increase the diversity of the listening audience.
Visibility is the key to increasing influence. As a member of the LSB, I would recommend and work towards making WBAI more visibly relevant to younger audiences via live broadcasts of the arts and by expanding upon the following: in addition to Public Affairs programming, a stronger focus on alternative activism as a public relations strategy, i.e., not only coverage of but actual participation in this city’s annually-held constituent arts festivals, conferences, and especially those parades that celebrate each of its diverse communities (i.e., Italian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, West Indian, Irish, Gay & Lesbian, African American parades); not only coverage of but allowing for open endorsements of the most progressive independent candidates to elective offices in tandem with Op Ed monitoring of local legislative bodies as a way of evaluating the results of producers’ endorsements.
5. What sources of funding, other than listener donations, do you feel your station should solicit? Do you have any ideas with respect to improving the current funding mechanisms?
We need to engage professional fund raisers to organize and promote monthly outdoor summer concerts and winter indoor concerts, and to implement annual Citizens’ Awards dinners, as well, to lay out grounds for soliciting funds from our upper middle class constituents to help defray the costs for professional training of high school students (Special Intern Programs) in practical media application. We also need to charge for and/or corroborate membership usage of archives (i.e., improve and build upon public use of archives); as well, to seek out other arenas through which to sublet selective programs on radio stations outside of our signals. In conjunction with WBAI management, the LSB must initiate policy guides to encourage the News Department to produce low cost premiums as part of major fund drives.
6. Please state briefly the skills, experience, educational background, work history, organizational affiliations, areas of community service, areas of interest and expertise that you would bring to the Pacifica network as a member of the Local Station Board.
I am called The Janitor of History, the Dean of Nuyorican Letters, and a living bridge between African and Latino communities. For over 40 years, I’ve remained a highly respected cultural worker – poet, editor, educator and performing artist. I am currently the Chair of the National Writers Union New York Chapter and maintain an information blog, Great Things Happ’nin’, which, like the program I host, Perspective, blends social concerns with the arts.
7, On which Local Station Board committees are you interested in actively serving? If you are a current Local Station Board member, on which committees do you currently serve?
I am open to participating on committees concerned with audience development and budgetary matters.
8. If you are currently on the Board and wish to be re-elected please describe your 3 year experience on the LSB. What did you accomplish? What were the obstacles you faced? Do you envision any change in the next three years if you are re-elected?
Not Applicable.
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