Pacifica Restructuring Project, document 7 of 7
[On Tu24Sep (apologies for the delay) will be posted an analysis of this latest attempt to break-up Pacifica, & it will examine, in context, these seven docs. The post will synthesise & develop the comments already made.]
Significantly, you’ll search in vain for any reference here to Pacifica. It’s striking that none of their bios mentions Pacifica, none gives any connection with Pacifica – not a Pacifica member, not a Pacifica donor, not even appearing in a Pacifica broadcast. Scratching amongst the scratchings, all we have is an alternate who works at a radio station “that carries a number of Pacifica programs”. Well, knock me down with a feather.
In a nutshell, these non-profit/academic worthies have nothing to do with Pacifica.
Nevertheless, I can acknowledge that Ms Boghosian & Ms Ransby (please read her book on Ella Baker) are Calvinistic, striving to do good works on our mortal coil. Whether that may extend to PacificaWorld is an open question.
After all, the breaker faction have presented no evidence of the views of these worthies on Pacifica. Now, why is that?
It isn’t rational to vote for a set of by-laws, with individuals locked in, without knowing what they think about Pacifica, & what directions they see it going in. Trust has to be earnt. Trust doesn’t spring from a sculptured bio.
Note that although Ms B is a co-host of the invaluable Law & Disorder, a WBAI programme, that wasn’t judged as persuasive, as worthy of inclusion in her bio, a fact that could be used to help her become a Pacifica director – odd or what? Yesterday: https://lawanddisorder.org/wp-content/uploads/lawanddisorder20190916.mp3.
(The extra-size heads seem strangely appropriate, yes?)
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MWZAASjhKpIFPWfBW4FoK3X6NouJnKj8sitJAi7-5D8/edit (at-large directors; 3 pages) & https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aTNTG_KYGHlABmFdC_YQ1AcnLI02VduFq5ELRFaXbrE/edit (alternates; 1 page)
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The Gang of Six:
Proposed Transition At-Large Directors for Pacifica
Click on names below for more information about each person
Heidi Boghosian is an attorney and executive director of the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute in New York, a charitable organization providing grants and support to activist organizations. As national executive director of the National Lawyers Guild from 1999-2014, she oversaw the growth of the Guild’s Legal Observer program after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and through the Occupy movement. Her nonprofit background includes serving as associate director of an alternatives-to- incarceration program for youth, serving as director of development at the Big Sister Association of Boston, and providing organizational management assistance to grassroots AIDS organizations through the Community Service Society of New York. She planned donor cultivation events for basic biomedical research at The Rockefeller University. She also worked in commercial operations at the ABC affiliate WCVB-TV in Boston.
Heidi wrote the book Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (City Lights, 2013); it was published a month after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Her writings have focused on the policing of protest and the intersection of government and corporate surveillance.
Judy Graboyes has worked in the financial arena for over 30 years, doing accounting, asset management for affordable housing, and community development lending. She previously served as treasurer and on the audit committee for two Bay Area boards of directors; Conard House in San Francisco and Pie Ranch in Pescadero.
She has a Bachelor of Arts in Management from St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA and a Master of Real Estate Development from the University of Southern California. She has dedicated her career to affordable housing, and is also a musician, activist, and event producer.
Bob King, retired President of the United Auto Workers, like all UAW officials started out as a worker on the shop floor and worked up through the ranks. Bob was a skilled tradesman from Local 600, the notorious Ford River Rouge Plant. All through his career King was actively supporting and building organizations of international worker solidarity and direct united action of workers in solidarity with each other.
Known for his activism and passionate belief in social and economic justice, since retiring King has remained very active in social justice causes in his community and globally.
He has been a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, he co-taught a seminar for both undergraduate and graduate students on “Labor and the Global Economy”, and currently is a Lecturer at the University of Michigan teaching the importance of collective action and collective bargaining in winning greater economic equality in the US and the world.
In 1990 King led delegations to El Salvador to support trade unionists and church members who were victims of a long campaign of deadly bombings, death-squad murders and disappearances carried out by Salvadoran military officers trained by the U.S. military’s School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Ga. King has long been involved in efforts to close the school because its graduates use the training received there to terrorize religious activists, community activists, trade unionists, and political activists in Latin America.
During King’s term as UAW President he assigned UAW organizers to work in Mexico with workers, students and independent unions to organize automotive facilities in Mexico.
In his earlier life, he joined UAW Local 600 in 1970 when he was hired at Ford’s Detroit Parts Depot and began his electrical apprenticeship in 1972. King, a member of the UAW International Skilled Trades Advisory Committee, was elected vice president of Local 600 in 1981 and president in 1984. He was re-elected in 1987 and was twice elected chair of the UAW-Ford Negotiating Committee. While at Local 600 King was active in the fight to end apartheid, the successful campaign and legal action to open Dearborn parks, support for UAW Colt strikers, and many other social justice fights.
Barbara Ransby is a Professor or History; Gender and Women’s Studies; and African American Studies, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an historian, writer, and longtime political activist. Ransby has published dozens of articles and essays in popular and scholarly venues. She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist Ella Baker, entitled Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina, 2003), which won no less than six major awards.
Dr. Ransby’s most recent book is Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century (University of California Press, 2018). Ransby has also published in numerous scholarly and popular publications. She also wrote Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale University Press, January 2013). She serves on the editorial boards of The Black Commentator (an online journal); the London-based journal, Race and Class; the Justice, Power and Politics Series at University of North Carolina Press; and the Scholar’s Advisory Committee of Ms. magazine. In the summer of 2012 she became the second Editor-in-Chief of SOULS, a critical journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society published quarterly.
In terms of her activism, Ransby was an initiator of the African American Women in Defense of Ourselves campaign in 1991, a co-convener of The Black Radical Congress in 1998, and a founder of Ella’s Daughters, a network of women working in Ella Baker’s tradition. She has published and lectured widely at conferences, community forums and on over 50 college campuses. Professor Ransby received a BA in History from Columbia University and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Michigan.
Walter Riley is a lawyer practicing criminal defense, civil rights, and police misconduct. Growing up in the Jim Crow South lead to activism very young. He served extensively with Durham’s and North Carolina’s NAACP and as President of the Young Adult Chapter received national recognition for organizing voter registration campaigns, lunch counter sit-ins, job campaigns, and desegregation protests in public accommodations, schools and businesses. He chaired Durham’s chapter of CORE’s Freedom Highways Project to desegregate public facilities on Highway 1 from Maine to Florida and was a CORE South East Regional Organizer in the early 60s. He has been honored in Durham, N.C. for leadership and activism in the civil rights movement. He became a student activist at San Francisco State University, joined Students for a Democratic Society, then Progressive Labor Party; opposed the Viet Nam war, Organized a Black Anti Draft Union in the community, worked with the Black Panther Party, became a founding member of Peace and Freedom Party, Co-Chaired with Eldridge Cleaver the Black Caucus of Peace and Freedom. His activism has included workers rights, labor, education/schools, anti apartheid, police misconduct, voter registration and cultural activism.
Riley is currently a member of the California Bar Association, National Lawyers Guild, Charles Houston Bar Association, the ACLU, #BlackLivesMatter, and Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). He has served on the Boards of Global Exchange, Berkeley Jazz School, Oakland Music Conservatory and The East Bay Center For Performing Arts. Walter Riley is the Chair of the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. He was the lead attorney for the Black Friday 14, and other #BlackLivesMatter protesters. He has received numerous awards.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive magazine, a one-hundred-nine year-old Madison-based progressive bi-monthly. Prior to that, he served over two decades as WORT’s Operations Coordinator. He worked at the station in music and news programming since 1983. In addition to working as a journalist in the U.S., Cuba, Nicaragua & Mexico, Norm has been involved in the collective management of two Madison institutions – Lakeside Press and Mifflin Street Co-op. He is also former Director of the Old Town School of Folk Music-Madison, and served in the 1970’s as Facilities Manager for the Northwestern University Archeological Program.
He is active in the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the GrassRoots Radio Coalition, IndyMedia, and AMARC: the World Association of Community Broadcasters. His reports and interviews have appeared on Free Speech Radio News, Democracy Now!, and AirAmerica, and in print in Z Magazine, the Capital Times, AlterNet, Toward Freedom, the Tico Times, the Feminist Connection, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of the book REBEL REPORTING: John Ross Speaks to Independent Journalists.
He has covered the WTO meetings in Seattle & Cancun, the FTAA meetings in Miami, the Democratic Conventions in 1996, 2000 & 2008, 2012, and the Republican Conventions in 2004, 2008, 2012 & 2016, and the Spring 2004 & 2009 presidential elections in El Salvador, Mexican presidential elections of 1988 and 2006, and the November 2013 presidential election in Honduras. He has coordinated community radio coverage at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002, 2003 & 2005, and the Polycentric Forum in Caracas, Venezuela in 2006, the WSF in Nairobi 2007, Belem in 2009, Dakar in 2011, & Tunis in 2013 and 2015, Montreal in 2016, and the US Social Forums in Atlanta & Detroit. He also coordinated the IraqJournal website in 2002-2003. In 2011, he regularly reported on protests in Madison, Wisconsin for Iran’s PressTV and other outlets.
Stockwell also is an experienced graphic designer and artist, and has prepared numerous successful grant applications.
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The Three In-Waiting:
Alternate Transition At-Large Directors,
if any of the ones listed here decide to withdraw
before new Directors are seated in 2020
Terri Burke has been Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas since 2008. In those years, the Texas affiliate has grown from a staff of seven to a staff of 70. Headquartered in Houston with offices in Austin, Dallas, El Paso and Brownsville on the border, the ACLU of Texas has been a leader in supporting immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, voting rights and in holding the line in the Culture Wars battles at the Texas Legislature. Instead of law school, her “postgraduate work” after the University of Texas was in reporting on how the sausage is made in two very different state legislatures; as a business reporter covering a boom and a bust; and as a senior editor and an editor-in-chief, leading two different staffs to Pulitzer Prizes. A native Houstonian, her newspaper career took her through Dallas, Austin, Albuquerque, Abilene (Tx) and Hartford, Ct. She served on the boards of Planned Parenthood of West Texas, Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and the Day Nursery of Abilene (a non-profit preschool and day care). Burke served for 10 years on the board of the Texas Association of Managing Editors, including a two-year term as President, and five years on the board of the Nonprofit Management Center of West Texas, which served nonprofits in 24 West Texas counties, including a three-year stint as board president for an organization that provides resources, training and support for nonprofits ranging from direct service providers to arts associations and museums and civic engagement organizations. She is married with two daughters, one son-in-law and a practically perfect in every way granddaughter.
Mustafaa Carroll is the past Executive Director of CAIR (Council on Amercan-Islamic Relations) in Dallas and Houston, and a management consultant
Louis Vandenberg is Director and General Manager of KUCR, the University of California-Riverside radio station that carries a number of Pacifica programs
PacificaWatch 