[Please use this convenient folder to read all available docs on the attempted coup by Vernile & the other breakers against Pacifica, with WBAI as the current main target:https://mega.nz/#F!OuwyiKxY!wFtGGKGkG2R9x3A65uX4Gg]
First of the two-page judgment by Judge Nervo, granting a restraining order against Pacifica Foundation, Inc. (unfortunately, there had to be separate posts as the software only allows one large image):
See what happens when pseudo-progressives try to streamroller their way through? Remember, Dictator Vernile & Breakers Co. have never presented an evidenced argument to smash WBAI by reducing it to a relay transmitter. No doubt Interim Chief Financial Officer Tamra Swiderski will compile some figures into a dossier to give to the judge. These concocted figures must be challenged by a certified public accountant, not least because ICFO Swiderski recently told the PNB Finance Cttee that Pacifica lacks current statements, both management & financial, for any station & therefore for the Foundation as a whole. Pacifica must also be requested to provide all the data, so including supporting evidence, used in compiling these figures. The contrived nature of the figures must be exposed.
It’s no less than unfortunate that it takes a capitalist court to begin a process of enforcing the transparency, & accountability, that the pseudo-progressives dominating Pacifica have proved so inept in achieving.
They have perpetuated an obdurate & deep secrecy culture that has disabled Pacifica & helped bring it to this point. This must change.
[Please use this folder to read all available docs on the attempted coup by Vernile & the other breakers against Pacifica, with WBAI as the current main target:https://mega.nz/#F!OuwyiKxY!wFtGGKGkG2R9x3A65uX4Gg]
General Manager Berthold Reimers email to staff, with copy of the restraining order attached, 10.38pm, M7Oct2019 (unfortunately, there had to be separate posts here as the software only allows one large image; copy of the restraining order appears as the next two posts): https://mega.nz/#!XyBFCIKD!TIwlGLtGdJA9BJVRIWWhn3gLy5UaMNNWAsCRrb72K6A
Pacifica listeners, unbeknownst to them, have been funding for weeks a coup, paying the wages of authoritarians, paying for security guards, paying for a secret plan, an action that is the very antithesis of what Pacifica stands for.
Bulldozering through the break up of Pacifica . . . “peaceful, informed dialogue” . . . the hypocrisy of dictators.
The rational response to this nonsense by the 11 anti-breaker directors on the Pacifica National Board:
• today, the 11 anti-breaker directors on the Pacifica National Board must issue an open letter condemning the unauthorised move by Vernile & his associates, such as the station manager of KPFA in the Bay Area, Quincy McCoy; &
• declare that all those involved will be fired for acting beyond their powers, not least in using members’ subscriptions & listeners’ donations to defy all that Pacifica stands for.
The rational response to this nonsense by the anti-breaker delegates on the three Local Station Boards that have their monthly meeting tomorrow, WBAI in New York, WPFW in DC, KPFT in Houston:
• the anti-breaker delegates must move a motion in support of the letter of the anti-breaker directors;
“Emergency Session: The entire staff of WBAI has just been laid off. This an emergency meeting to discuss this situation” (my emphases), posted 5.06pm ET at the Pacifica Calendar & Meeting Achive.
The interim Executive Director terminates all of WBAI’s employee as if this morning. They cited financial problems. As of now WBAI is controlled by Mr. Vernile and the National Office. There is a show on the air now that I do not recognize. This means your shows are no longer on WBAI per this action by Mr. Vernile. I will keep you posted. Thanks much for all you do, Berthold — Berthold Reimers WBAI Radio 99.5 FM General Manager
. . . screenshot of the homepage – the only webpage WBAI has, showing the audio button of the relay, https://www.wbai.org/. . .
[Vernile’s letter, then a commentary.]
~~~
Dear PNB Director,
Immediate action must be taken to address a dire financial crisis that seriously threatens the viability of the Pacifica Foundation. As a result of the ongoing financial shortfalls and poor payroll planning at WBAI, the Foundation lacks the financial reserves to pay: (all of our) or (national and PRA) staff salaries, health care, needed legal and engineering services, required insurance for our loan and legally required audit services.
Paramount, we have a legal obligation to have the resources available to pay our staff. Our financial condition makes it clear that it will be impossible to sustain this legal obligation without immediate action. The Pacifica handbook is clear that when payroll cannot be made that layoffs must be made immediately.
In addition, unless action is taken, we will also lose our NETA partner by month’s end due to nonpayment. NETA support includes: HR, retirement administration, audit coordination, payroll and finance. This will be catastrophic for our operations, employees and listeners.
Under its current management and strategy, WBAI is exposing the Foundation to insolvency. In short: • WBAI has repeatedly missed payroll, employee health insurance payments, and payments to Pacifica Central services. • They have failed to meet the last 2 payroll cycles and lack the cash reserves to meet the next. • WBAI studio rent is currently behind by two months. • WBAI constantly requires the support of the other Pacifica units, PRA and our affiliates to maintain current operations. This is no longer possible, as our reserves are virtually exhausted. • WBAI’s accumulated debt to Pacifica Central Services is over $4 million • WBAI is currently subjecting its listeners to over 140 days of on-air fundraising, rarely reaching its modest goals, despite being in the largest metro area in the US, on a prime, mid-dial FM channel.
The accumulated debt and ongoing financial mismanagement threaten our larger Foundation and its current, vitally important work that serves hundreds of thousands of US residents and online listeners worldwide.
So, with a sober understanding that the survival of Pacifica is at stake, we need to cease local staff operations at WBAI and operate the station via a remote Pacifica network feed as allowed by FCC regulations. As soon as financially and logistically possible, a plan will be drawn up to address how we can rebuild the station into a vibrant local going operation.
Pacifica will undertake the task of rebuilding WBAI, advancing the service at the other four Pacifica stations, strengthening our services to affiliates, redirecting badly needed resources to the Archives and completing a long overdue list of organizational projects that all directly impact Pacifica’s viability.
Please keep this document confidential because it may affect our relationship with our creditors.
(this letter is undated; read online using Clouseau’s best friend, or download)
~~~
The WBAI website has closed, simply having a homepage with an audiofile button: https://wbai.org/.
There are two takeaways at the start of this new crisis:
no evidence has ever been presented to justify smashing WBAI; &
the IED is not carrying out a policy of the Pacifica National Board; instead, he’s probably coordinating with the core of the breaker faction, with them keeping the PNB paralysed, with its 11-11 split.
Despite this dictatorial bluster by the IED – and he is proving to be an IED – no evidenced case has EVER been presented within Pacifica to smash WBAI. Not by an IED or ED, not by an ICFO or CFO, not by a Chair of the board of directors, not by any group of directors, or an individual director. Not even by the current incarnation of those who have been trying to break up Pacifica for longer than a decade. No-one has presented an evidenced case. As the Interim Chief Financial Officer has told the PNB Finance Cttee, she hasn’t even got current monthly statements, be they management or financial, for any station, let alone the Foundation as a whole.
As repeatedly demonstrated here, & at Chris Albertson’s blog, http://wbai-nowthen.blogspot.com, it’s spurious to say WBAI is the problem. The Executive Director appoints station managers; the Executive Director is responsible for all major contracts. If fiefdoms exist it’s because the ED, & the PNB, want an easier life – that’s until the moment when the strained string snaps.
Instead of evidenced argument, there’s been a splutter, then a stream, & now a flood of assertions, unsubstantiated claims, citing a putative fact ripped from its context. And power need not be constrained by reason, as we saw today.
To the same meeting was a report by Pacifica directors Alex Steinberg, James Sagurton, & Shawn Rhodes, & its accuracy has been proven by events:
“the goal of these behind the scene machinations is not the revival of WBAI but its dismantling”
“We believe WBAI is in grave danger”
“a
series of events has transpired in the past two weeks that should
raise the alarm bells about the continued existence of WBAI as an
independent radio station”
“a group of
Directors on the PNB is intent on usurping the role of the WBAI LSB in
evaluating management. They are intent on removing WBAI’s management
team by executive fiat”
“we are once more hearing about why a team from California should be sent immediately to take over and manage WBAI”
“This report is meant to alert the WBAI LSB and WBAI staff, listeners and supporters to the dangers we are facing”
a complete inability of the opposition to exercise leadership by coming up with a plan to cope with falling membership, failing fund-drives, & the $3.265m loan from the Foundation for the Jewish Community (FJC), &, in the last month, to counter a renewed attempt to break-up the Pacifica network.
The immediate task is to counter this coup. The PNB Finance Cttee meets tomorrow, Tuesday, 8.30pm ET, livestream link at https://kpftx.org/. WBAI’s Local Station Board meets Wednesday, 7.30pm ET (the same evening the LSB’s meet in DC, WPFW, & Houston, KPFT). The PNB next meets the following day, an hour earlier than usual, also at 7.30pm ET. Whether quorum is achieved will depend on the breaker faction, which started the paralysis of the PNB when it tried to push its move for a new Pacifica constitution at the Su29Sep PNB meeting.
Some obvious questions: who planned & executed all the logistics in today’s operation, including hiring the ‘security guards’, all funded by Pacifica listeners? how long has this planning been going on? who authorised this expenditure of listeners’ donations? and who went to the trouble of designing the graphic that is now WBAI’s sole webpage?
Oddly, the Amsterdam News cites “a letter from the station’s owner, the Pacifica Foundation”, which isn’t on its own website, https://pacifica.org/, & doesn’t seem to be in the public realm. “‘Due to ongoing and continued projections fo [sic] further financial loses at WBAI, local operations are being discontinued as of October 7, 2019 […] We realize this news will come as a deep and painful shock, but we can no longer jeopardize the survival of the entire network.'” [This is a statement Vernile distributed, not under his own name but that of “Pacifica Foundation”; it’s here: https://pacificaradiowatch.home.blog/2019/10/07/the-cowardly-letter-sent-by-vernile-he-didnt-even-have-the-guts-to-sign-it/]
Who would have thought that Ukraine would have dominated the week’s news? A comedian, as well. Imagine? So, very much a side issue has been those royals in the land of an incomplete capitalist revolution, those odd peeps, who instead of a president have a monarch, sitting on a throne above not a Senate but a gathering of lords, the House of Lords, & not a House of Representatives but a gathering of commoners, the House of Commons.
Meghan Markle, a former TV actress, married a British royal, Harry Windsor, & Mr Windsor was so annoyed by media types allegedly hacking his family phones that he’s taken them to court. And this is where Pacifica comes in.
But he hasn’t always been taciturn. Here he is, in 1983, a 24-year-old, full of himself, discoursing for a good hour, on so-called libertarian politics, low voter turnout, even on the need for compromise (44:23). But his interviewer had him sussed from the start: after John says he got his B.S. at Stony Brook, he walked straight into a “you got a lot of that, yeah” (56:40) – poor John, he was forced to pause. https://www.2600.com/chatterbox/1983/1083.html (from 3:04). (The Chatterbox homepage mentions Samori Marksman, linking both to the WBAI tributes the day after he had died on 23Mar1999, & to his funeral ceremony. The tributes start with Al Lewis, a man who was much more than Grandpa Munster.)
And now to Charlotte Church. A pre-teen prodigy, she wooed the world with her sweet tones. The New York Times, predictably, called her “the major minor”. And, being valuable, she soon fell into the arms of an enemy of the people, a corporation. Sony. But, given their resources, there was virtue in this, as the NYT related: “John Vernile, vice president for promotion of Sony Classical, says, ‘Charlotte has done more to make young kids aware of classical music and opera than anyone has done in years'” (1Apr2001 – no, this is not an April Fool’s). Yes, John Vernile. And the same article gives a touching, life-affirming moment, recounted by Fred Child (I kid you not), host of NPR’s ‘Performance Today’, when, around 1999, “I had dinner with John Vernile and Charlotte and her mother in a little Italian restaurant in San Antonio”, before events took an unexpected turn. Sweet. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/01/magazine/the-major-minor.html
Sadly, Charlotte’s contract with Sony ended in 2006, & it wasn’t renewed. She was 20. Products on shelves carry best-by dates & expiry dates. But celebrity can live on, with the media staying interested. Even enough to keep hacking someone’s phone. She took Rupert Murdoch’s News International to court. And Trusted John was called in to help. In a 2012 story on the case, the UK newspaper, The Independent, called him “Mr Vernile, her former development manager at Sony Records and now her manager”. Reminiscing, he himself says, “I [was] managing a major U.K. phone hacking lawsuit against News Corp.”. So, given the work lawyers do, it’s not clear what John actually did. Anyway, main thing is he got paid. (Appended are his longish quotes from The Independent article.) https://www.allaccess.com/triple-a/10-questions/archive/19586/10-questions-with-john-vernile
And so, finally, Mr Quincy McCoy, much loved KPFA station manager. Where does Quince fit into all this? Another of Charlotte’s managers, along the way? Maybe the centre of his own phone hacking scandal? Or internet hacking? . . . Well, that’s getting closer. . .
John used to work on Second Street. Not Manhattan, San Francisco. For Gavin Report. The late ’90s. He ran the IT depot – well, ran it in a John kinda way. This was John, in his SF incarnation: “INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY/ONLINE SERVICES Executive Director JOHN VERNILE” (unpaginated, p. 9 of the PDF). And who’s that above him, in the Gavin who’s who, heading his own section in the radio music trade weekly? “THE NEW MAINSTREAM Senior Editor QUINCY MCCOY”. https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Gavin-Report/90/98/Gavin-Report-1998-07-03.pdf
Peas in a pod.
In this issue of Gavin, 3July1998, Quincy has an article on Michael Jordan, ‘Fundamentals make legends’ (p. 10; p. 12 of the PDF), & also a rosy-eyed piece on the reluctance of large Japanese firms to lay off workers (p. 8; p. 10 of the PDF).
Small world.
Finally, John in The Independent, Tu28Feb2012:
“To take on NI [News International], she and her manager John Vernile began reconstructing her life during the height of the NOTW’s [News of the World] illegal hacking adventures […] Mr Vernile, her former development manager at Sony Records and now her manager, shares Church’s anger. ‘You can understand the proper journalism of investigating criminals, people who’ve done something wrong,’ he says. ‘But that’s what these rats were hiding behind. Proper journalism needs a mechanism to protect sources, to be aggressive, and to bend the rules to get to the truth. But they were using that same protection to conduct this vivisection of private individuals.’
“He adds: ‘The only analogy I can think of is organised crime. They wanted to get to Charlotte, but they never targeted her: they went for her driver, her friends, her manager, her family – everyone around her.’ […] Mr Vernile says: ‘From the memos that came from inside the NOTW we learned who was watching us, and who inside the company was told. We saw the traffic between reporters, the newsdesk editors, features, finance people, lawyers, and others. It was a community, people from different departments, all communicating with each other.’
“He adds: ‘The memos we saw painted a picture of an internal culture. Then in court [at the pre-trial meetings – original interpolation] you see their resources: 25 lawyers all trying to bury you. So you need to up your game. With all those lawyers you know they are serious. But if they have that many people in one room, you know they are worried. And if they are worried they have something to hide. We thought – we can figure this out.'”
The directors of the Foundation meet as the Pacifica National Board. Or they should. But since Sunday, the PNB has been cleaved: the breaker faction having their meeting, & the Pacifica solidarians having theirs. This destructive dynamic must end. Leadership must be exercised. The factions must address the myriad, deep problems ripping Pacifica apart. Pacifica must be put first – now as always. But are the directors up to the task?
This is nothing new. Boycott behaviour occurred on the PNB either side of New Year, 27Dec & 10Jan. It also happened in Houston, with two ‘KPFT Local Station Boards’ sitting from early Jan for over two months. In New York, paralysis came in a different way, with the WBAI LSB failing to meet for 10 months, 14June2018-9Apr2019.
As is usual with Pacifica, this West Coast morning, admin just censored the archive, removing the audiofiles of the Su29Sep & Th3Oct PNB meetings. What they think they’ll achieve, when peeps expect such nonsense & record ‘Stereo Mix’ as a matter of course, heaven knows. Pacifica’s pervasive & obdurate secrecy culture corrodes trust, shreds hope, drives people away.
Postscript . . . & the IED, John Vernile? MII, Missing in Inaction. Attended neither. I know he hates being a public figure, but when the organisation is disintegrating around you, it’s somewhat cowardly to retreat to Tarrytown. But maybe Pacifica’s got to him. A lull before the storm . . . a weekend visit to a zoo in the Bronx.
. . . not Robert Natkin, Untitled (Color-Bath), 1978 . . .
Beneath dark clouds, besides frantic factionalising, foreboding mounts in PacificaWorld. Voting soon ends in the 10 Local Station Board pseudo-elections (spoiler), raising the perennial question, will quora be met, 10% for listeners, 25% for staff? We’re over six weeks in, with 13 days remaining. The ‘boxes’ get sealed at the stroke of oriental midnight, Tu15Oct, then carted off for counting, not to Renee’s basement but to a secure, hardened facility in RealWorld. No expense sparred for ‘Grassroots Democracy at Pacifica Radio’, as had by the strapline of the website of the National Elections Supervisor, the one & only battler, Reneeeeeee Pennnnnnnaloza.
So, what’s the scale of the problem? The NES has been stingy with info – and carefully avoided attending even one public PNB session (& presumably no private ones). Since voting has started, she has issued only three of what she calls “progress reports” – compared with six in the prior period. They’re all undated, &unnumbered, but one can refer to them by the latest info they give: 28Aug, 5Sep, & 20Sep (her 15Sep link is dead). Only the 5Sep gives the absolute number of voters, the others just giving percentages (to one decimal place). The 20Sep’s percentages aren’t even in numerical form: they’re pretty blobs on a graph (although KPFA-Listeners is missing). Hence estimates have had to be made. https://elections.pacifica.org/wordpress/election-progress-reports-2019/
So, the scale of the problem? At the end of 20Sep, with 25 days to go, quorum had only been met by KPFA-Staff, & listener quora satisfaction were roughly half or worse (ranging from 55% to 38%). Effectively, listener turnout needs to double in those 25 days to achieve the five quora.
(The 20Sep report gave no info whatsoever about KPFA-Listeners (neither did its blue blob appear on the 5Sep graph). For calculation purposes, it’s prudent, & so reasonable, to assume it holds its 5Sep station rank, closer to WBAI than to KPFT. Given the greater unreliability of this number, it’s preceded with a ‘?’, as is any number it helps generate.)
Given the inadequate info made public by the NES, what’s the estimate of the number of listeners that still need to vote? At F20Sep, it was ?2 480 (staff being ~71), meaning aggregate listener turnout had only reached ?47% of the aggregated quora (?2 147 out of 4 556). These are the station deficiencies, totalling the needed ?2 409 listener voters: KPFA ?688, KPFK 819, KPFT 160, WPFW 308, WBAI 434.
From the graph, these are the estimated data at F20Sep for the 10 pseudo-elections, in this order: electorate (#) — quorum (#) — turnout (%, #) — voters needed (#):
KPFA-Listeners: 14 311, 1 432, ?5.2, ?744, ?688 . . . so ?48% of quorum still needed at F20Sep
KPFA-Staff: 233, 59, 27.5, 64, quorate
KPFK-Listeners: 13 210, 1 321, 3.8, 502, 819 . . . so 62% of quorum still needed at F20Sep
KPFK-Staff: 279, 70, 9.4, 26, 44 (so 63% of staff quorum still needed at F20Sep)
KPFT-Listeners: 3 549, 355, 5.5, 195, 160 . . . so 45% of quorum still needed at F20Sep
KPFT-Staff: 140, 35, 19.2, 27, 8
WPFW-Listeners: 6 289, 629, 5.1, 321, 308 . . . so 49% of quorum still needed at F20Sep
WPFW-Staff: 109, 28, 23.0, 25, 3
WBAI-Listeners: 8 186, 819, 4.7, 385, 434 . . . so 53% of quorum still needed at F20Sep
WBAI-Staff: 199, 50, 16.9, 34, 16
Doesn’t look too good, does it. But are appearances deceptive? No need to talk here about appearances & essences (Moor from the Luxembourg border, volume 3, chapter 48). Instead, we can consider this appearance, this generated outcome, with that of the previous LSB pseudo-election, nominally 2018, when voting occurred this year, F18Jan to Tu5Mar.
Comparing the voting periods, for 25 days to go, 20Sep corresponds to 8Feb. Here are the station listener data, for turnout at the end of 8Feb, & how many days spare after quorum was actually made; they’re taken from the NES’ graph in her final report:
KPFA, 5.0% & 1Mar, 4+ days before voting closed; KPFK, 3.1% & 1+ days; KPFT, 5.2% & 7+ days; WBAI, 5.3% & 4+ days. (There was no WPFW-Listeners event as there were only five verified candidates for the nine vacant seats.) https://mega.nz/#!fyAwGICZ!-4uWYMHZW3CHxt6yCOITu006SVZ4AyNPjT9bWw6csb0, page 15; page 16 of the PDF
(Odd graph: the vertical axis has 11 lines for each 10 units; also note that the horizontal axis starts each week with a Sunday, privileging Christian mores, which one may think is surprising for Pacifica, but such peeps obviously don’t know the majority of Pacifica’s posted schedule grids, KPFK, KPFT, & WPFW.)
So, pulling these two data sets together, listener turnout (%) at 20Sep compared with 8Feb: KPFA, ?5.2 (cf. 5.0); KPFK, 3.8 (cf. 3.1); KPFT, 5.5 (cf. 5.2); WPFW, 5.1 (no comparative); WBAI, 4.7 (cf. 5.3). (Also the laggard staff pseudo-election: KPFK-Staff, 9.4 (cf. 8.0).)
At this stage, with 25 days to go, the estimate is that all, bar WBAI, are better than earlier this year.
Conclusion: no need to be over-confident, but, on balance, things are slightly better, not worse.
So it’s not just sororities that have rush. It’s just that PacificaWorld seems to have a special kind of rush: ballot-box stuffing – of blank ballots. The NES’ final report (pp. 2-9) gives the station figures for “[a]bstain”, just a few percentage points. This is odd, because with the absence of a glossary one has to rely on the ordinary usage, where abstaining means not participating – which in PacificaWorld is usually of the order of 85-90% for listener members & 55% for staff members. But the NES also published primary data files, termed ‘Raw Results’ or ‘ChoicePlusPro’, giving the ordered preferences of each voter, who is anonymised by a code. By inspecting these, one realises that the number of ballots lacking preferences matches the number of ‘abstainers’ (except when the NES’ final report is in error, as shown below).
The NES’ material, surprisingly, doesn’t disclose how many ballots had write-ins, were defaced, etc. In fact, no definitions are offered of a valid or invalid ballot. What one can say, however, is that the NES’ “abstain” percentage = (# “abstain” x 100) ÷ (# ballots with preferences + # ballots without preferences).
Listener ‘abstentions’ given in the NES’ final report: KPFA, 113, 5.5%; KPFK, 141, 8.9%; KPFT, 44, 6.7% (as corrected; see below); WPFW didn’t have a contest; WBAI, 71, 7.9%. Without ‘abstentions’, KPFK-Listeners would still have made quorum – by a mere seven ballots: 14 366 listener-members; 1 437 for quorum; turnout 1 585; ‘abstentions’ 141, leaving 1 444. So, better to be safe. Protect the organisation. Carry Pacifica insurance. Then put it into action.
Note that the NES’ final report gave wrong ‘abstention’ figures for KPFT-Listeners, a typo, simply repeating those for the preceding contest in her list, KPFK-Staff – pp. 5-6. As noted, the authoritative source is the ‘Raw Results’: for KPFT-Listeners, amongst the 661 ballots listed, the 44 ‘abstainers’ were voter 2KKB (line 20 of the spreadsheet), 34YW (34), 3Q35 (45), …, & Z7QC (642).
Note that for the staff pseudo-elections, the raw data show that the NES, in her final report, double-counted the numbers she had for ballots without preferences, thereby inflating the “Total Ballot Return” (p. 17), although none affected the meeting of quora. Checking the raw data, for the ballots without preferences in the six smaller elections, the NES in her final report got one right out of six: KPFA-Staff, raw data 7 (final report 3); KPFK-Staff, 15 (7); KPFT-Listeners, 44 (7); KPFT-Staff, 6 (5); WPFW-Staff, 4 (4); WBAI-Staff, 5 (1).
Lastly, why do the two exercises this year deserve being recognised as pseudo-elections? On 29Oct2018 the then NES, Graeme Drew, told ED Maxie Jackson of his “decision to terminate the 2018 election process” (letter to PNB, 30Oct2018, p. 1, my emphasis). Why? “I am unable to reliably verify any of the applicants for candidacy due to the poor quality of elector lists” (p. 2, my emphasis). “Poor quality” is the polite term for the technical one: not materially accurate. Oh.
Not materially accurate elector lists. That means they’re corrupted. That means any process using them becomes corrupted. It makes that process corrupt. Any putative election process relying on such corrupted means is rendered corrupt. It’s not an election but a pseudo-election.
Pacifica has chosen not to reassure members, staff, listeners, grantors, donors, & vendors by making evidence publicly available, proving that the evaluation of NES Drew is no longer true. Instead, we’ve seen a Local Elections Supervisor make a heady rise, becoming dizzy with success: starting out as the KPFA LES, combining that with becoming the KPFK LES, then also the KPFT LES when she took her fourth concurrent job, as the NES, all this during the nominal 2018 pseudo-election. Having successfully stitched that up, where was the surprise when she was appointed the 2019 NES – moreover, chances of being challenged from within the apparatus were minimised because there was no apparatus: no LES’s have been hired, possibly steamrollering by-law Article 4, Section 4(B). In the politics of administration, NES Penaloza is the definition of a safe pair of hands. https://pacifica.org/indexed_bylaws/art4sec4.html
PacificaWatch 