The current Board Majority on the Listener Station Board (LSB) which we intend to replace has operated under a variety of names including Concerned Listeners, Save KPFA and is now misleadingly calling themselves United for Independent Radio, stealing the organizational name of those who opposed most of them from 2009 to 2017.
(Their opposition was called United for Community Radio. You see the similarity).
Recent History
The current LSB board majority’s long-standing plans to break KPFA away from the Pacifica network has been temporarily blocked by listeners who were disturbed by the ardent push towards voluntary bankruptcy and KPFA’s rightward drift.
Rescue Pacifica seeks to restore listener democracy at KPFA by re-establishing a Community Program Council, which KPFA had from 2000 to 2007. Such a body would have fair and transparent procedures for launching and or cancelling popular programs. It would avoid the sudden yanking of programs off the air {Guns and Butter, Discreet Music, Counterspin} with nothing particularly new, unique or compelling replacing them.
The Secret KPFA Foundation
In Sept of 2013 KPFA board chair, Margy Wilkinson, current PNB member Carole Travis and their personal lawyer Dan Siegel acted in secret to file articles of incorporation with the California Secretary of State, using KPFA’s call letters and mission statement to establish a fictitious shell company; The KPFA Foundation. There are two officers named on the secret incorporation papers; Margy Wilkinson and Daniel Siegel, neither of whom notified any other member of the KPFA station board of their action until it was discovered in 2015, a full two years after they had expropriated KPFA’s call letters and mission statement without permission. The secret KPFA Foundation is still a California Corporation. Why?
Big Tent Radio.
In April 2017, majority board chair, Carole Travis devised a plan, again in secret, to replace Pacifica’s democratically elected governance system with a self appointed board of celebrities headed by Bill Moyers. Travis was forced to admit at a public meeting of the actual board, that she personally lobbied Moyers to recruit him as executive director of a new organization she called Big Tent Radio. Moyers turned her offer down, but Travis approached numerous celebrities and big money politicians representing herself as a KPFA officer without notifying the membership or even her colleagues on the board. Some of those celebrities contacted Pacifica Radio to ask what the heck was going on and sunlit her secret scheme. Travis has since boasted of her secretive and destructive behavior: “I would do it again.”
Voluntary Bankruptcy
To escape having to win a vote of the membership before trying to break up the network, as the bylaws require, the current board majority refused to submit timely audits from 2014-2016, assuring the loss of millions of dollars in unrestricted Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding that kept the network solvent.
This was a deliberate act of sabotage to bolster the case for voluntary bankruptcy. Pacifica submitted 25 years of consecutive annual audit reports from 1986 to 2012 with the same crappy accounting system it has now.
But with more than $100 million dollars in assets and less than $10 million in outstanding debt, the network is a poor candidate for“voluntary” bankruptcy since assets are far greater than debt. However, once in voluntary bankruptcy court a bankruptcy judge has the power to end democratic governance, force the rewriting of the Pacific bylaws in the previous authoritarian direction that led to the armed shutdown of KPFA in 1999, or break up the network into pieces, with no need for consent from the members.
Affiliate Station Collapse
According to the director of the Pacifica Affiliates Program, the 250 grassroots stations who rebroadcast Pacifica programs across the American heartland, the community radio ecosystem would be severely impacted, possibly fatally, by a breakup of the Pacifica network as Save KPFA has been scheming and plotting to accomplish – for years.
KPFA doesn’t have to go that way. Vote for Rescue Pacifica candidates.
DISCLAIMER: This is not an official Pacifica Foundation website nor an official website of any of the five Pacifica Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio). Opinions and facts alleged on this site belong to the author(s) of the website only and should NOT be assumed to be true or to reflect the editorial stance or policy of the Pacifica Foundation, or any of the five Pacifica Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio), or the opinions of its management, Pacifica National Board, station staff or other listener members.