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Disfranchisement, Nullification and Bills of Attainder
Unhappy because top vote-getter former Program Director Bernard White bested their multi-millionaire leader by an almost 2-to-1 ratio in spite of their violations of election rules and the racist lies in their campaign materials, ACE (a.k.a. the “Independents”) are attempting to invalidate the expressed will of the largest group of WBAI members who voted in the recent Local Station Board (LSB) election.
The ACE-ists, who supported the 2009 Spring Coup from the West Coast and engineered the disappearance of General Manager Anthony Riddle and the firing of Program Director Bernard White, are represented on the Pacifica National Board (PNB) by listeners Alex Steinberg and Jennifer Jaeger and WBAI Public Affairs Director Kathy Davis (not to be confused with Lisa Davis, a Justice & Unity member who served on the LSB for 6 years, and whose term recently ended).
At the PNB meeting on December 17, 2010, Kathy Davis brought a motion to retroactively revise the organization’s rules to allow the expulsion of White from his seat on the Local Station Board (LSB) and from membership in the Pacifica Foundation. At the same meeting, a PNB member from the Houston station, Richard Uzzell, brought a motion with slightly different terms but the same effect. The conference call ended before either motion could be taken up.
As revised in 2003, the Pacifica Bylaws state that a listener becomes a member and is able to vote and run for the LSB by making a donation of $25 or volunteering 3 hours in an applicable year. However, Davis’s motion would bar anyone fired “for cause” from sitting on a station’s LSB or from holding a membership in Pacifica. Coming from the group on the LSB that removed General Manager Riddle so that their hand-picked replacement could fire Program Director White, it is clear that this motion is a continuance of the targeting of Bernard White.
Davis’s motion is essentially a Bill of Attainder (legislation finding an individual guilty and punishing them without a trial – outlawed by the U.S. Constitution) that allows the ACE-ists to brand Bernard White guilty of the crime of being fired – unemployment and the trashing of his name not being sufficient harm done – and allowing them to revoke his membership as a consequence.
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Making Public Meetings Available to a Privileged Few
(See below for text of motion and Nia Bediako’s statement in opposition)
Another nefarious piece of business before the PNB is Alex Steinberg’s motion to hold future WBAI LSB meetings by telephone, thereby excluding the station’s members from participation. These meetings would be in lieu of live, in-person meetings, which the Bylaws state “shall be held within the local radio station area in facilities of sufficient size to accommodate Members affiliated with that radio station and the public, preferably in the station.” The motion first refers to the immediate upcoming LSB meeting, and then goes on to state, “This directive shall remain in place for subsequent meetings of the WBAI LSB until such time as a further review by the PNB establishes that significant progress has been made towards establishing an atmosphere of mutual respect and comity that will allow the WBAI LSB to resume in person meetings.”
Steinberg would have the meetings web-streamed, and provide a telephone number where the public can call in their comments. This makes the meetings available to those who can listen on the Internet for 3 hours and who have access to a phone. Is that what we fought and paid for?
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Who’s Who
The Actors:
Brought the attainder motions of disfranchisement and nullification: Kathy Davis, national boardmember from WBAI and Public Affairs Director, and Richard Uzzell, national boardmember from KPFT in Houston
Argued to push the nullification motion ahead of other business and proposing to shut the public out of LSB meetings: Alex Steinberg, national boardmember from WBAI
Argued to block White from running in the election: Former WBAI local boardmember and music programmer Delphine Blue and, following her, newly re-elected WBAI local boardmember Carolyn Birden.
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YOUR ACTION:
Write to the Pacifica National Board – pnb@pacifica.org – and please copy us at info@justiceunity.org.
Demand that they STOP trying to thwart the voters’ will, violating the Bylaws by changing membership rules retroactively and without allowing for a vote by those affected, while targeting those they oppose. This behavior is not only totally un-Pacifican – it is also contrary to common human decency and the most minimal sense of fairness.
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Nia Bediako Expresses Her Opposition to Motion Requiring WBAI LSB Telephonic Meetings
To: pnb@pacifica.org
From: Nia Bediako <nia.bediako@bnbcpa.com>
Delivered-To: mailing list WBAI-LSB-PUBLIC@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:31:07 -0500
Subject: [WBAI-LSB-PUBLIC] My Opposition to WBAI’s Telephonic LSB Meetings
To my colleagues,
This “motion” to mandate phone meetings by the WBAI LSB, should have been immediately ruled out-of-order because it’s a direct violation of the Pacifica by-laws. Since that did not happen, I want to emphasize two important points:
First, and again, the motion is a blatant violation of Article 7, Section 6 of the Pacifica Bylaws, which says in part: “LSB meetings shall be open to the public and to all Members…” and “Meetings shall be held within the local radio station area in facilities of sufficient size to accommodate Members affiliated with that radio station and the public, preferably in the station….” Resorting to phone meetings shuts out all those without home Internet access (contrary to Alex’s point that people should simply get Internet access at their local library, most libraries in New York shut down for the evening long before LSB meetings have ended).
Second, I want to set the record straight about what really happened at the last LSB meeting on Dec. 8, which fundamentally contradicts Alex’s stated premise for bringing this motion. It is simply untrue that that “the WBAI LSB failed to elect any officers at its December meeting or conduct any of the business of the LSB as a result of disruptive activity by members of the audience…”
The meeting was called to order at 7:27 (half an hour late due to late arrivals by board members). The agenda as adopted called for adjournment two hours later, at 9:30. The first six agenda items — which included 45 minutes for each of the 24 members to introduce themselves and state their expectations for the year — were allocated a total of 100 minutes, i.e., until 9:00 PM, which would have left a mere 30 minutes before adjournment — which normally would have meant the immediate convening of 30 minutes of public comment. “My side” suggested interspersing Public Comment between ballot counts but of course that was rejected and all 6 of those items were completed. The last item of business completed at that point was the election of what outgoing Chair Mitch Cohen had listed in his draft agenda as a “Chair pro-tem to preside over election of officers.”
The election for Chair pro tem went without incident — board members from each “side” passed out and collected ballots and worked together on the ballot count, which resulted in an 11-11 tie between Mitch Cohen and John Brinkley (which no one contested was an accurate result). John then suggested, in the spirit of several board members’ earlier statements that there should be an effort to cross lines and work together, that the two of them serve as co-chairs for this short period until the permanent officers were elected. After some hesitation, Mitch agreed to this. Jamie Ross’s draft minutes say, “Both agreed to share chair pro-tem.” The two men proceeded to run the next stage with relative comity.
The next item — which began as the meeting rapidly approached its agreed-upon time limit — was the election of officers. Mitch’s approach to that changed drastically after the votes were counted in the election for permanent chair — which followed the identical procedure as the Chair pro tem election. The outcome was also identical (11-11 tie), unsurprisingly. Yet Jamie Ross immediately claimed — based on no evidence whatsoever — that one of the board members who had collected some of the ballots in both elections had the second time somehow switched one of them to create the tie. Based on that unsupported allegation, Jamie moved to redo the election. At that point, I strongly protested, saying there was no basis to redo a finished election. I noted that the by-laws require that a tie in an IRV (that is, single-seat) election be resolved by “drawing lots” — the equivalent of a coin flip, which has been done in past ties in Pacifica. But when I asked Mitch to follow the by-laws and do a coin flip, he refused. As an alternative, I then suggested that he follow the same practice as was just agreed to with a shared co-chairing arrangement, he refused that as well.
Just to rewind a bit. It was shortly before the results of the chair were announced, I happened to pass by (on my way back from the bathroom) the part of the table where Jamie Ross was seated and I saw him addressing two women elected with the support of his allies, loudly and aggressively questioning them, “Did you vote for John? Did you?”. This type of blatant attempt at intimidation was shameful and was a perfect illustration of why a redo of the election would have been illegal — it would have led to a clear effort to bully some member or members into changing their vote.
Meanwhile, John and Mitch were privately conferring about what to do. Other board members from both sides at times joined the conversation. Several members of the audience were, it is true, expressing their support “sharing power,” some of them loudly. Clearly they were angry at this blatant attempt to subvert the democratically expressed will of the board. But these expressions from the audience did not prevent business from being done, as the board itself was deadlocked, unable to move forward. At times various board members spoke publicly with their opinions about what action to take. In the end, someone noted that it was 9:30, so the allotted time for the meeting had expired, but that there had to be the required 30 minutes of public comment. The board then voted to extend for 20 minutes to have that public comment, which left the officer election unfinished.
The 20 minutes of public comment then occurred in an orderly fashion, after which I made a motion to extend the meeting to finish the elections, but this did not get the 2/3 needed to pass.
That is in essence what happened. In other words, it was not “disruptive activity by members of the audience” that prevented further business from being done but rather: a) the refusal of the outgoing chair and his allies (by this point no longer representing a majority) to follow proper procedures, and b) the fact that even before the controversy, the late start of the meeting and the unrealistic amount of agenda items ensured that only a fraction of the agenda would be completed no matter what else had happened. Also, with two off-duty police officers working as security guards things certainly would not have been able to get out of control as Alex has untruthfully stated over and over.
In sum, Alex has premised his motion to mandate phone meetings on a false rendering of what happened at the last meeting. This is on top of the fact that it is a complete violation of the bylaws.
So the motion needs to be ruled out of order. But if it is not, I certainly hope that the board will exercise sound judgment and vote down this unjustified, exclusionary, and transparency-destroying motion which beyond violating Pacifica’s bylaws also violates regulations of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting requiring open public meetings of grantees’ boards.
Sincerely and Truthfully,
Nia
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FOR REFERENCE:
Alex Steinberg’s motion on WBAI LSB meetings is as follows:
Whereas the WBAI LSB failed to elect any officers at its December meeting or conduct any of the business of the LSB as a result of disruptive activity by members of the audience and whereas the Pacifica Foundation cannot afford to pay expenses for meeting places and security for an LSB that is not carrying out its bylaws mandated responsibilities, the Pacifica National Board, in an effort to bring the WBAI LSB into compliance with its responsibilities, directs the WBAI LSB to conduct its meetings via telephone conference.
This directive applies to the first meeting of the WBAI LSB/delegates assembly in January. That meeting is directed to elect officers of the LSB and Directors for the Pacifica Foundation as its first order of business. This directive shall remain in place for subsequent meetings of the WBAI LSB until such time as a further review by the PNB establishes that significant progress has been made towards establishing an atmosphere of mutual respect and comity that will allow the WBAI LSB to resume in person meetings.
All secret ballots at telephone conference meetings of the WBAI LSB shall be conducted by email to a neutral third party who will tabulate the votes and announce the results. The Pacifica legal counsel or his representative is hereby designated to be a neutral third party responsible for counting secret ballots. WBAI LSB telephone conference meetings will be streamed on the Internet – unless they are part of an executive session – so that the public may listen and a special telephone number will be made available for the public to phone in public comments.
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