[Announce-DAN] FW: ZNet Update -- Gloves Off re Pacifica...and Pacifica Activist Announcement

["Michael Albert" <buildingbridges@mindspring.com> (by way of Mark Cohen <buildingbridges@mindspring.com>)]

Hello,

This is another mailing, all too quickly. to the ZNet Update list. Note that
as usual people can add or remove addresses at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

I am sending an update again, after four rather than ten or twelve days
because these are trying times in U.S. alternative media and it is important
that the Pacifica struggle rise in people's awareness.

I will limit comments about updates to noting that we have a new transcript
of a December major address by Chomsky on the Mideast situation, an
interesting article on the energy crisis in California from the LA Weekly,
new material in Mideast Watch, and a new DU essay from within Yugoslavia,
and that the new public forum system is coming along very nicely, already
frequented by hundreds of users. Finally, we are working on a top page
makeover, and if all goes well, before the next update it should be online.
Take a look every so often, if you have time for it.

But to the main purpose of this message...

Here is an essay on what needs to be done regarding Pacifica right now, and
how it might best be accomplished, called "Gloves Off." It went out as last
night's ZNet Sustainer Commentary...and, beneath it, we also include an
announcement of a new Pacifica Campaign established quickly upon the firing
of Juan Gonzles including information about what you can yourselves do. This
is very much worth attending to.


----------


Gloves Off
By Michael Albert

February 2, in “Resolving the Pacifica Crisis Revisted,” I argued that
progressive organizations should employ participatory and self-managing
rather than corporate structures. I urged that advocating self-managing
structures has not only long-run but also short-run relevance to Pacifica,
because Pacifica activism will grow quicker and be stronger and wiser if it
pursues positive aims. Nonetheless, removing the current Pacifica board is
the immediate priority, and in this second Pacifica commentary I focus on
that task.

After years of travail, everyone progressive should recognize the Pacifica
board’s opposition to positive outcomes. If knowing who these people
are--representatives from Real Estate Firms, strike-breaking law firms, and
other agencies that Pacifica is supposed to critique but who instead now
rule over Pacifica—is not enough to make the point, then surely the board’s
proclivity for authoritarian policy-making, repression of disagreement,
disdain for listeners, worship of commercial tactics, and shameless lying,
ought to reveal their true intentions. So I assume that after perusing the
facts progressives will all agree the board has got to go.

For those new to the conflict, however, who have not yet heard enough facts
to take such a stand, please consult ZNet’s Pacifica coverage at
http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/progpacif.htm There you will find plenty
of articles on Pacifica and especially links to the even more comprehensive
“Save Pacifica,” “Free Pacifica,” and most recently “Pacifica Campaign”
sites. In sum, you will learn about the board’s agenda to subjugate all
employees to their directives, to commercialize and de-radicalize content,
to mainstream and corporatize Pacifica’s station, and to enlarge audience by
emphasizing politically irrelevant content rather than providing a
progressive, critical, and honest voice about society’s problems. You will
find that the board is an obstacle to progressive change at Pacifica,
whether to transcend corporate themes with participatory arrangements, or
even to just return to a remotely sane work environment.

But how can workers, listeners, anyone else dismiss the Pacifica board? They
appoint and regulate themselves. They administer their bylaws to benefit
themselves. They meet in secret, well beyond scrutiny. When progressives
oppose them, they see it as a positive sign that they must be doing
something right. And there isn’t even a pretense regarding recall. One
option, as with any conflict in our society, is legal challenges, now well
underway. But what can non-lawyers do to help remove the Pacifica board?

Whenever progressive activists seek some outcome against recalcitrant
opponents who share none of our values and care not a whit for our logic,
one instruction becomes paramount. We must raise social costs that our
opponents find sufficient to cause them to change their ways.

If we want to win a stoplight from a small town bureaucracy, to win higher
wages or better conditions from General Motors, to win a new affirmative
action or labor law from Congress, or to curtail or stop a war waged by the
White House, the basic logic is always the same. We must raise social costs
to the decision-makers that coerce them to jettison the option they prefer
and enact the option we demand. The task in trying to get Pacifica board
members to quit their official positions is to understand what constitutes
social costs that they won’t want to endure.

Some people feel Pacifica’s board is engaged in an ideological crusade to
destroy Pacifica as a vehicle of dissent. It is possible this is an element
of their motivation, yes, but when you get down to the individuals involved,
I think they remain in the game mostly for their own personal gain. On the
one hand, they want the status of being big players at a big commercial or
non-profit but mainstream institution. On the other hand, want anticipate
remunerating themselves handsomely once they get the rabble out of the way.
Indeed, supposing that they sell a station and have tens or even a hundred
million dollars to disperse, self-remuneration becomes serious business.

My point is that the board’s authoritarian members are not just loose
cannons or ideological zealots lacking reason. Beyond making a potentially
more radical station less so for their elite brethren, their behavior also
has a potentially large personal payback that beckons them to carry through
their dastardly deeds. So how do we get them to resign?

Using the logic of raising social costs to force elites to acquiesce to our
demands, we have to act in such ways that the costs to the board members, in
their own eyes, of continuing on their chosen path, is simply too high to
endure, even in pursuit of the grand goodies they are seeking.

So what costs can we raise that high?

Well, these folks work for companies and agencies larger than themselves.
They don’t want to lose those positions, even in pursuit of lucre gained
from hijacking Pacifica. So acts that raise costs to those firms, who in
turn put pressure on the board members to resign from Pacifica, are very
much to the point. Likewise, even while gaining goodies from commercializing
Pacifica is the carrot that drives the board’s members, being embarrassed
and isolated as immoral hypocrites at every turn in their lives, from their
front yards, to their social clubs, to even their leisure time dining out,
would be a big minus. These people are not fighting to preserve their daily
bread, but for bonus income and for added status on top of already being
very well off. They enjoy being respected but don’t like travail. They love
accolades and spoils of war, but despise constant criticism or bringing
embarrassment and loss to their main employers. The debits can be made to
outweigh the greed.

Second, however, while activists are making life miserable for Pacfiica’s
board members, listeners may be donating their hard-earned monies to
Pacifica in hopes of supporting its true mission. However, despite their
good intentions, listener’s donations will actually fuel management’s
assaults against the station’s progressive mission. Listeners will donate
out of respect for Democracy Now, and to provide funds to finance not only
that show’s continuation but other radical shows as good or even better in
the future. However, these donations will actually finance the board’s
efforts to hound and harass and curtail Democracy Now, already leading to
the protest resignation of Juan Gonzales and the unstinting battering that
Amy Goodman has been receiving. A second component of the effort to force
the Pacifica board to resign must be, therefore, to withhold the funds that
give them breathing room. To rejuvenate Pacifica, its listeners must
ironically withhold support from it until the board is back in the hands of
people who care about Pacifica’s mission. For Pacifica’s listeners to
finance campaigns waged against people like Juan Gonzales and Amy Goodman
and shows like Democracy Now is not a winning posture. Instead, why not
donate directly to saving, restoring, and improving Pacifica?

So let’s cut to the chase. I think the positive goal for Pacifica should be:

-> A workplace that embodies remuneration for effort expended, equitable
work apportionment, and people having a say in their workplace circumstances
in proportion to how much they are impacted by them.

-> An overarching policy-making board that represents more or less equally
the station’s workers, its listeners, and the progressive movements of
society at large.

-> A reiteration of the values guiding Pacifica’s programming, hopefully to
educate and empower the public for dealing with racial, gender, sexual,
authority, disability, ecological, geo-political, class-based and other
violations of justice, reason, and human integrity in our society and
internationally.

At the same time the short-run aim to save and reinvigorate Pacifica has to
be removing the emissaries of corporate values who corrupt its current
board. We must now focus the most massive criticism and militant disruption
of business as usual that we can possibly muster on the reactionary board
members themselves, throughout their daily lives, and even more relevantly,
on the institutions that employ them. These people fight dirty. They harass,
they fire, and they lie. In reply, we should not become thugs, but we should
certainly take the gloves off and go bare knuckled.


-------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FEBRUARY 6, 2001
TEL: 212-871-9322
E-MAIL: PACIFICACAMPAIGN@YAHOO.COM

CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED FOR A FUNDING BOYCOTT OF
PACIFICA RADIO'S FIVE-STATION NETWORK

A new organization is calling for listeners of Pacifica radio stations
around the country to show their opposition to the current corporate
takeover of the network by refusing to donate any money to Pacifica until
its current board of directors resigns and is replaced by a new board that
is democratically accountable to listeners, staff and the communities the
stations serve.

The Pacifica Campaign, the group spearheading the boycott, was hastily
founded this weekend following last week¹s dramatic on-air resignation by
Juan Gonzalez, longtime co-host of Pacifica's national flagship news show,
Democracy Now!.

In his resignation, Gonzalez criticized a "clique" on the board that has
"hijacked" the network. That clique, Gonzalez said, has routinely squashed
free speech on the Pacifica stations, has violated the civil and labor
rights of listeners and staff, and has illegally changed the non-profit
network's by-laws in preparation for a possible sale of one or more of the
stations.

Gonzalez, who joined with some 35 New York city activists to found the new
group this past weekend, is serving as interim coordinator of the campaign.

As part of the campaign, the group will seek to pressure individual board
members to resign by utilizing  non-violent, direct action and by launching
an educational campaign to the public that exposes the roles of the
individual board members in the current crisis.

Starting today, the Pacifica Campaign will have five full-time volunteer
organizers and scores of part-time volunteers working on the effort. We have
also retained the services of Ray Roger's Corporate Campaign Inc., a group
that specializes in mounting nationwide boycotts against anti-labor and
anti-community organizations.

In the few days since Juan Gonzalez's resignation, the campaign has been
flooded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls of support from Pacifica
listeners who want to help.

Organizers will be contacting those listeners directly during the next few
days. Meanwhile, we urge all listeners to do the following:

    1) DO NOT PLEDGE ANY MONEY TO ANY PACIFICA STATION
    2) IF YOU HAVE ALREADY PLEDGED MONEY, DO NOT SEND YOUR CHECK IN
    3) CONTRIBUTE MONEY INSTEAD TO THE PACIFICA CAMPAIGN, OR TO THE THREE
LEGAL SUITS CURRENTLY CHALLENGING THE BOARD'S LEGITIMACY, OR TO A LOCAL
LISTENER GROUP IN YOUR AREA -- IN SHORT, TO THOSE FIGHTING TO REFORM
PACIFICA.
       TAX DEDUCTIBLE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PACIFICA CAMPAIGN CAN BE MADE
PAYABLE TO: THE INSTITUTE FOR MEDIA ANALYSIS/PACIFICA CAMPAIGN. THE MAILING
ADDRESS IS:
       THE PACIFICA CAMPAIGN
       51 MACDOUGAL STREET, #80
       NEW YORK, NY 10012

    4) CALL YOUR LOCAL PACIFICA STATION AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN AND LET THEM
KNOW YOU WILL NOT GIVE ANY MONEY UNTIL THE CURRENT BOARD OF DIRECTORS
RESIGNS
    5) DO NOT COOPERATE WITH PACIFICA'S FUND DRIVE BY OFFERING AS PREMIUMS
ANY BOOKS OR TAPES YOU HAVE AUTHORED OR PRODUCED.


Also, do not be confused if you hear the host of your favorite show urging
you on-the-air to pledge money. Many producers and hosts are opposed to the
policies of the current board of directors, but they are prevented by gag
rules from voicing their displeasure and they must ask for pledges from
listeners or they can be fired. It is important to keep shows like Democracy
Now! on the air.

For now, we are urging producers who oppose the board to keep soliciting
pledges but to "work to rule," i.e., do the minimal amount of fundraising
work and with as little enthusiasm as possible.

As we reduce the money coming into Pacifica we will reduce the board's
ability to continue its anti-listener policies. At the same time, we will be
increasing the pressure on individual board members, until they have no
recourse but to resign.

We will oust the hijackers and return Pacifica to its original mission.

For more information, go to the campaign website:
http://pacificacampaign.org. Or call 212-871-9322



**********************************************
Mailing Address:
The Pacifica Campaign
51 MacDougal St., #80
NY, NY  10012

www.pacificacampaign.org
pacificacampaign@yahoo.com






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