Are We Missing Our Own Party?

On Friday it was sunny but cold out, so I decided to go eat lunch in the Ferry Building, where I could stay warm but enjoy the view of the Bay and the boats. As I crossed the median strip between Market and Embarcadero, I noticed a Palestinian flag. I looked to see what it was and realized there was a small group of people – maybe 20 – with a number of different flags, all in the red, black, white and green common to the Arab world. I didn’t know but assumed that one was Egypt, one probably Libya, maybe another Tunisia. I got closer and realized that they were friends of mine, women from Code Pink and people from the various Palestine solidarity groups. I stopped for a moment, gave them a fist pump, but I was still in lunchtime mode, only 45 minutes left to eat and do an errand, so I wasn’t going to join the demo. Someone was talking through a bullhorn. I tried to understand what she was saying, but the bullhorn mike was too close to her mouth and the sound was muffled. I heard a number, like 700,000 something, but I wasn’t sure what it referred to. At first glance, I didn’t see any signs in English. When I looked more closely, there were some, no doubt saying “End US Aid to Israel,” “Down with Dictators,” all the things we typically say.

I understand that earlier there were a record number of journalists and the media coverage was great. Maybe there were also more people and the message was clearer. But for me, as a passerby, it was incomprehensible. Well, that’s unfair. Someone who wanted to comprehend it would be able to, but someone just walking by who was not Arab and not engaged in the issues would not be clear about who these people were or why they were standing there. I didn’t see anyone handing out leaflets, and there was certainly nothing that they were encouraging workers in the area to do.

Yesterday, I mentioned my impression to one of the organizers, which I probably should not have done. She said, “Well, that’s okay because we really just did it for ourselves.” Now I have said many times that cheering ourselves up is a perfectly legitimate reason to do actions. I do it all the time. There are times, lots of times, most of our times, when that’s the best we can do. This is not one of those times. This is a time when having a strategy could really pay off.

This is a moment when we should be able to build our movements by the tens of thousands. Whether we’re organizing workers or promoting international solidarity or confronting police violence or fighting budget cuts, we should be able to use the rising tide of mass mobilization and people power to get people to join us and support us. But there seems to be a perception or belief on the left that that is going to happen spontaneously, or even that it is already happening, that we don’t have to do anything but go out there and people will be inspired and connect with us. In meeting after meeting, I ask, “Does anyone else work in a corporate setting?” If anyone nodded, they would presumably know why I was asking. But in fact, no one ever does nod. My coworkers, who are mostly nonengaged leftists, are certainly interested in and supportive of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya and the protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest, but they neither hear about the solidarity protests before they happen nor would they consider going if they did. But they could, if someone asked them to. During the early part of the Iraq War, I saw many of them at protests. Even a few years ago, a group of workers from the copy center went to an anti-war protest on their lunch hour, because one of them had gotten a flier from The World Can’t Wait outside of a bookstore on Market Street. The conclusion I’m forced to draw is that most activists in this area, at least, do not regularly interact with nonactivists.

I spent most of yesterday at a meeting about boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, so I wasn’t able to join my friend, who works for the State of California, at the San Francisco demonstration in solidarity with public workers in Wisconsin. I guess it was pretty big, but none of the local people at the meeting I was at seemed to know about it. The thing is that you can have a pretty big demonstration attended by mainly public workers, because there are a lot of them. But that can also make you think that you are building a movement that extends beyond your interest group, and you’re not.

The actions in Wisconsin (which sadly do NOT (yet) comprise an uprising or a revolution, inspired as they may have been by the uprisings in North Africa), give public sector unions an unprecedented opportunity to gain support from nonunionized private sector workers. This is the time when union organizers in every city should be leafleting outside every transportation depot that carries people to their jobs in the morning, reminding workers that the unions are fighting for them, even if they don’t know it. If I were them, I would be making a palm card or a sign that said, “You have an eight-hour day [5 day week, minimum wage, sick pay] because of us.” Moreover, I would be printing up fliers that say, “Don’t ask why we should have benefits you don’t, ask how you can get them too.” Maybe the unions are doing that somewhere, but they are not doing it at the carpool drop-off point where I and thousands of my fellow San Francisco workers pour out of cars every day, or at the entrances to the BART stations in the evenings. They’re not even out there suggesting that we join their solidarity protests or send a pizza to the Capitol in Madison. They seem to be satisfied with opinion polls showing that 60% of Wisconsinites support the unions. 60% doesn’t actually seem that good, given what they have been doing.

For us in the international solidarity movements, particularly solidarity with parts of the Middle East, this is a time when we can really capitalize on the positive images of Arab people that are for once appearing daily in our media. But we cannot imagine that people are going to leap from those to coming out to our actions or telling their representatives to oppose U.S. aid to Israel. We need to think about what would get us from what we are: a pretty insular, but steadily growing, minority voice, to a serious factor in U.S. policy. One small idea that came up at our meeting last night: posters featuring identical photos of protesters in Egypt and Palestine being greeted with the same weapons, both provided by our tax money, with the caption, “Support Democracy in the Middle East, End U.S. Aid to Egypt and Israel.” And a website where people could actually find out how to do that.

This is a time when if we had a clear, simple target for boycott/divestment, we could make huge inroads, especially if we could show that it was connected both to repression in Palestine and in the Arab world (which many of them are). Because we haven’t done the ground work, we may not be poised to take advantage of this moment. But if it tells us anything, it is that there will be another, and the next time, we have no excuse not to be ready.

We Are All Egyptians

I started writing this last Monday, but I couldn't finish it. A type of awe built inside me as I watched the events in Egypt unfold. They speak for themselves and any effort to interpret or encapsulate them feels inappropriate. At the same time, all of us who are activists anywhere in the world need to ask, "What can we learn from their example?" The people of North Africa have created an opportunity for activists all over the world, by showing that change in a progressive direction is possible. The Egyptians forced the United States government to change its allegiance. And that in itself is just a humongous accomplishment. We have an obligation to them, as well as to ourselves, to look for a way to capitalize on it.

Some local activists respond by doing the same things they always do, stubbornly insisting that there's no magic bullet, that it's just a matter of doing it over and over again. Jeff Mackler, from Socialist Action and the new United National Action Committee, said that on KPFA's Morning Mix the other day. ANSWER has embodied that belief by calling solidarity demonstrations fastly and furiously, or perhaps by putting their name and their signs in front of demonstrations that were going to happen anyway. San Francisco Women In Black, my group, did it by holding our regular monthly vigil and adding a few signs about solidarity with Egyptian women.

Other activists of my generation and older have seized on the media analysis of these revolutions by saying "We have to use Facebook and Twitter." I can save them the trouble. I use Facebook and Twitter and it gets me nowhere. No one signs up for my events, no one retweets my tweets. It's hard not to take it personally, but I don't really think it's a reflection on the wisdom or relevance of my posts (though I could sure be wrong). It's that most of my friends are not spending much time logged into Facebook, and they won't log in just to sign up for my events. Only a few of them are on Twitter, and if they know how to follow me, they might read my tweets now and then but they don't retweet. Neither do I. I follow about 20 people, fewer than follow me (and let me apologize to anyone who does follow me because they don't get much, I generally remember to tweet every two months or so), but I have never once retweeted any post, however profound (and it's hard to be profound in 140 characters).

Last Saturday, my friend Preeti and I were on the way to UN Plaza for the demonstration in solidarity with the Egyptian uprising. She mentioned that all her friends said they were going, and commented, "If this were about some local issue, none of them would be going." We were just on time, and there were a lot of people in the plaza already. Some people said 5,000 or more. I am not good at crowds so I won't even try to estimate, but I know that the largest demonstrations I attended last year demanding single payer health care, or even the more moderate call for a public option, had about 200 people at them. I repeated Preeti's comment to some of my friends. They all said the same thing: "Well, but there wouldn't be a million people out there."

I said, "Well, the only reason there are a million people in Tahrir Square is because everyone came."

That seemed a truism to me, but the people I said it to apparently hadn't thought of it. Some of them looked confused.

A couple days later on Democracy Now!, I heard the video created by social media activist and April 6 Movement member Asmaa Mahfouz. This is the video callout that has been credited with kicking off the Egyptian uprising, although doubtless it was only one strand of the social braid that converged on the square. But the line in Mahfouz's video that especially caught my attention was this one:

"Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful of people, I want to tell him, 'You are the reason behind this, and you are a traitor, just like the president or any security cop who beats us in the streets.' Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference."

Okay, you may say, but really she knew that they would not just be a handful of people. She was just responding to the type of thing people usually say.

You'd be wrong.

Earlier in the video she tells this tale, "Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, 'May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.' … I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I'll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor. I even wrote my number so maybe people will come down with me. No one came except three guys—three guys and three armored cars of riot police."

No one came except three guys. That was on January 18. So what changed between that day and January 25? In another video she posted on the 24th, this is what she said.

"Tomorrow is the 25th, the day we've been waiting for, the day we all worked so hard for. The most beautiful thing about it is that those who worked on this were not politicians at all. It was all of us, all Egyptians. We worked hard. Children no older than 14, they printed the poster and started distributing it after prayers. Old people in their sixties and seventies helped, as well. People distributed it everywhere they could—in taxis, at the metro, in the street, in schools, universities, companies, government agencies. All of Egypt awaits tomorrow."

Asmaa didn't say anything about Facebook or Twitter. It's not that they didn't use it. It's been well documented that they did. But those media were supplemental to the old face-to-face ways of organizing. They are great for mobilizing the wired generation, the ones who never go more than a few seconds without checking their iPhones or Blackberries. But the key was the handing it out after prayers, in taxis, at the metro, in schools. That's the piece that we seem to have forgotten. Many actions these days are organized without even a paper flier. Email blasts have replaced phone trees. Admittedly, some actions organized exclusively online work out better than those where we try to use all the methods we know. Our actions for single payer in 2008 are an example – we did phone calls, we did fliering, we had trainings, and ultimately, we had the same 200 people that we can usually get. I can't explain why exactly. Some combination of people not having belief that it would do any good and not feeling the issue was a priority.

And the fact that their friends were not doing it. I know this for a fact. More than any other factor, what makes people decide to participate in something or not is whether or not their community – friends, family, church groups, whatever – is doing it. That's what Facebook is great for among those who use it for their social as well as their political networking. (Remember, it is a "social network.") It lets people know that they won't be showing up alone, it makes it a happening thing among a crowd of friends. But even virtual friendship is not something you can fake. Lots of people have "friends" on Facebook who are not their friends in the world, and those people are not going to follow them to a protest or other activity unless they're famous. Most of my Facebook friends seem to wait until they see who else has responded that they're coming to something to make their own decisions. Which is of course part of the problem. In a sheep society, the shepherd has all the power, and with apologies to those of you who have been trying in vain to lead a mass movement for oh, so many years, we have no shepherds that many people want to follow.

We can't copy the Egyptians or the Tunisians. We certainly don't want anyone copying them by lighting themselves on fire. We should not cynically invoke their struggle every time we are trying to get anyone to do anything, hoping to bathe ourselves in their reflected glory. We need to look carefully at their situation and our own, and discuss the differences and the similarities. And then we need to act on them, and not let this moment – like so many others – pass us by.

Yesterday on KPFA/Pacifica's "Living Room," I heard someone (I think it was David Madland of the American Worker Project - I can't check because the link on the website is broken) talking about the assault on public sector unions, which I wrote about a little while ago. He said that private sector workers need to defend the unions, even if they are not in one, because the unions are what prevent our wages and benefits from plummeting.

He is right, but he is wrong. He is right that without the unions, private sector workers would be screwed, and therefore, we should defend them. But he’s wrong to put it on private sector workers who have never in their lives seen a union organizer to step up and get out there and walk the line for the unions. As I wrote back in October, it’s the unions that need to realize that they need us, the unorganized private sector, because without us, they are very vulnerable to these attacks. The interviewee also said that polls show that 53% of U.S. nonunion workers would join a union if they had the opportunity to do so and thought they wouldn’t be fired for doing it. And that’s without the unions doing ANYTHING to reach out or counter the anti-union propaganda that we’ve all been hearing for decades. If they made even a token effort to organize any of the private sector work force, they could probably get that number up to like 80%. And if any of those organizing drives were successful, then the public worker-private worker class war would be out the window, the U.S. labor movement would be back in gear, and initiatives like cutting or privatizing Social Security and Medicare would suddenly get a lot harder.

So why do I say it’s the unions’ responsibility? Because one, they are the ones who have the resources to actually go to where those private sector workers are and talk to some; two, they are the ones who know – or should know – that we have need to get it together; and three, that would mean they were actually doing something that private sector workers could support, as opposed to now, when if one is (like me) a private sector worker who wants to defend the principal of collective bargaining, one has to look high and low for a picket line to join.

So come on, brethren. You’ve figured out that you need the support of the corporate sellout private sector workers you've shunned all these years. So now figure out that you need to do more than whine about us not supporting you, especially since the vast majority of working class people are not listening to Pacifica.

Twice Censored: Underreported Women's and Gender Issues of 2010

I was trying to think of what to do for last Monday's Women's Magazine, the first show of the New Year, when I ran across the Project Censored List of Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009-2010. Guess how many of those 25 stories related to a women's or gender issue?

You guessed it: NOT ONE.

Does that mean women's issues get lots of attention? I don't think so. But it does point to the masculinist bias of even the progressive media and media watchdogs.

So I built the show around a dozen or so women's or gender issues that I feel were short-shrifted last year.

Check out my list, and let me know what you would have put on yours.

The Bad Sexual Politics of Julian Assange

When I heard that Julian Assange, founder/principal publisher of Wikileaks, was wanted for sexual assault, it was a “where is the nearest hole for me to crawl into” moment. It didn’t get better.

The debate between feminists Jaclyn Friedman and Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now! did not make me feel better; it made me feel worse. For those who missed it, Friedman, the author of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, argued that the case would “raise the bar for the women of Sweden and the women internationally for what we can expect from our justice systems.” I can’t see this case raising any bar except the ones in whatever prison they decide to send Julian Assange to.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and the lesser known but more relevant Fire With Fire, countered that when Assange started having sex with someone while she was asleep after repeatedly refusing to use a condom, “it seems to me that when you say, ‘OK, you better not have HIV,’ he said, ‘Of course not.’ Quote, ‘She couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night.’ To me, that—I mean, if I was making love with a woman, if I was—you know, if I was a lesbian making love with a woman and we had that conversation, I would keep making love with her, because we had had a discussion about it and reached a conclusion.”

If that is Naomi Wolf’s idea of a positive sexual encounter, I’m just glad she’s not a lesbian.

I have little doubt that whatever else did or did not happen, these women did not get the idea to make criminal complaints against Assange by themselves. But the problem I have is that the women in this situation are props. Depending on your world view, either Assange is a persecuted hero or he is a sexual predator. The likelihood that he is both a persecuted hero and a sexual abuser doesn’t seem to come up. Both of these young women were supporters of Wikileaks and probably had a liberal amount of hero worship for Assange. If he took advantage of that admiration to coerce them to do what he wanted in bed, that doesn’t make him much different from Mike Tyson or Ben Roethlisberger.

When do we get to talk about the tendency of men in progressive movements (just like those in every other kind of movement) to treat the women they work with as lesser beings and sex objects?

In the few weeks before the Assange arrest thrust this issue into our national conversations, I happened to read about two incidents that occurred some years earlier.

The first concerned an allegation of domestic violence against the best known member of the revolutionary “youth” group STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), which was active in the Bay Area in the mid 1990s. This was an incident I knew about at the time, because a couple women I knew from Women Against Rape were asked by STORM to help investigate it. My recollection is that they left the group in the aftermath, feeling that they were being used as window-dressing to give legitimacy to the group and its process. Last month, I happened to run across something that STORM had written about this incident, which I had never read before. The conclusion of their investigation was that the incident had not happened, that the woman involved had made up the accusation as part of some kind of COINTELPRO – CounterIntelligence Program to discredit a revolutionary man of color. Again, I don’t know what happened. What struck me about the reflection, written some years after the incident was resolved (in STORM’s mind), was that they never considered the possibility of multiple truths, that the woman involved actually experienced violence at the same time that the man had no awareness of having committed it. I personally witnessed that man being physically aggressive and threatening toward women I knew, when they disagreed with him during an action, and he refused to be held accountable after that incident, so I am predisposed to believe that he was capable of similar aggression toward a woman he was involved with and would be unlikely to cop to it.

The other piece I was reading had to do with our local Pacifica radio station, KPFA in Berkeley. KPFA, the oldest listener-sponsored radio station in the country, has a long history of bad gender dynamics and accusations of violence against men who are revered by portions of the left. We are currently mired in a terrible political crisis brought on by a huge financial deficit, and in that context a lot of old muck is getting raked up, including some related to two men accused of sexual harassment. One is an on-air personality with whom I personally am usually on the same side politically. This man, who is white, has been accused of harassment by a string of women. Most recently, a friend of mine won an enormous settlement of her claim against him and the station, which is one of the many reasons KPFA and Pacifica are in such financial trouble. The other was a former station manager who was accused of sexually harassing a stream of women. Other men jumped to his defense, saying that he was being targeted because of racism (he was African American), notwithstanding that nearly all of the women who accused him were women of color. The word “COINTELPRO” was again invoked.

A close friend of mine is an incredible organizer and has been instrumental in forming or sustaining a number of progressive organizations over the years. Like most of us whose lives center around movement work, he usually gets involved with women he meets doing political work. And for some reason (guess), when he stops being involved with them, they always end up feeling like they have to leave the organization. At one point, an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexual harassment. The organization was bitterly divided over the question of whether he was guilty or the woman was just an embittered reject. I don’t remember how that situation was resolved, but I do remember what a mutual friend said about it: “It probably wasn’t legally harassment, but he definitely has bad sexual politics.”

I suspect that every movement woman who ever dated men has had an experience like the ones described in the Assange police reports. When I was younger I had two encounters with male friends in the movement who wanted to have sex with me. I wanted to be close and cuddle with them, but not to have sex. They knew I was a lesbian. I kept saying I didn’t want to have sex and they kept insisting, and eventually I gave in. I would not say that I was raped. I didn’t feel afraid of them. If they still lived in this area, I would probably still be friendly with them. Even if I were the kind of person who thought of calling the police as an option, I would not have considered calling the police on them. Nevertheless, I know that what they did was coercive sex and was not okay.

A long time ago, a friend of mine was date raped by someone she had been going out with, who was in the same political group she was in. Some of the women in the group were dismissive of her accusation, saying, "If she was raped, I've been raped 100 times." One of the woman's male friends said that he felt uncomfortable judging this man because he had committed rapes when he was in a fraternity in college. It was very hard for this woman to remain in that organization, which was pretty much the only radical direct action group in town at that time. Fortunately, the group as a whole came together and forced the man to take responsibility for his action. They kicked him out of their full meetings, but the men's group continued to work with him and discuss what had happened. I don't know if he ever got it, and the group didn't last that much longer after that, but that was an example of a system for community justice that other progressive groups could emulate.

The women involved in the Assange case should not be letting themselves be used by the forces that want to put him away for creating a place for people to leak information. They should not be looking to the criminal “justice” system to remedy bad treatment by a man they believed in and trusted. But progressive people, especially people who call themselves feminists, should not be defending his behavior. We need to defend the rights of whistleblowers, the rights of journalists and the public’s right to know. We also need to defend the right of women to say no to sex, even with people they have had sex with before and plan to have it with again. Refusing to use a condom is a serious violation of a person’s right to safety, and if a man doesn’t want to have sex with a condom and a woman wants him to wear one, then he has no right to nag at her or coerce her to change her mind. He certainly has no right to initiate unprotected sex with her while she is sleeping, in the hope, presumably, that she’ll be too out of it to protest.

We must figure out how to hold all our political heroes, male and female, accountable for their bad sexual politics. When do we get started on that?

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party Comes to KPFA

I hate to say it, but what is going on at KPFA is a lefty version of the Tea Party. People are using the rhetoric of freedom, fairness, workers’ rights and diversity to subvert democracy, diversity and a lot of community programming. And they are determined to destroy probably the most valuable resource the left in this country has. (They're also, in general, good progressive people. I want to say that out front. I am friendly with some of them. But I believe they are good progressive people with a very bad vision for community radio.)

They’re extremely well organized, they are extremely unified, and they have been able to get their talking points broadcasting non-stop on the airwaves. And the people who know the truth and oppose what they are trying to do are either being timid or complacent, keeping their heads down, not organizing, talking in platitudes, wanting to compromise.

And when it is done we are likely to have lost both Pacifica and KPFA.

It’s about workers’ rights.

It is about workers’ rights, but not the right to organize or have a fair contract. It’s about the right of certain workers, who run the union, some of whom are or were managers, to decide who and what goes on the air, without meddling by ignorant community members.

The “union busting” offense that Pacifica committed was laying off people at the bottom of the seniority ladder, rather than people who raise less money in on-air fund drives. This offense is specifically required by the contract and rearticulated by the union negotiators when the contract was renewed last spring. (Tracy Rosenberg, who participated in the meeting where the two possible sets of layoffs were discussed, outlines the choice in an open letter. [I have some issues with Tracy, who has used her positions as both a KPFA rep to the Pacifica Finance Committee and Executive Director of Media Alliance, to wage political struggles against KPFA board members she has conflicts with. Even so, I found the evidence she presents pretty convincing.])

(Note: Pacifica's ED showed terrible lack of strategic sense in the way that the layoffs were done. I disagree with taking the Morning Show off the air before replacement hosts were lined up. If it's true that she has refused to talk with the union leadership, I condemn that, and I strongly disapprove of hiring Folger & Levin, a union-busting law firm, to defend against a lawsuit rather than trying to work with the union. But that doesn't change what I know to be true.)

It’s about democracy.

It is about democracy. The people who are vocally demanding their jobs back and their allies on the local station board don’t believe in it, at least not for KPFA. They insist that board elections are a waste of money. They have openly said that the only role for the elected community leadership is to raise money so that paid staff can make all the decisions about programming. They disparage unpaid staff – many of whom have been at the station much longer than most of them – and paid programmers they feel are not up to their lofty (white) standards of professionalism. (Larry Bensky famously referred to all of us as “clowns” on Michael Krasny’s Forum two weeks ago.) They disbanded the Program Council, the mechanism for community input into the programming grid, and de-recognized the Unpaid Staff Organization, which was established when unpaid staff were kicked out of the union.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert, the principal spokesperson of this “Save KPFA” movement and one of the laid off hosts, was quoted in a recent article as saying, “Fifteen hours of airtime were dedicated to candidate forums for the local board. We spent more time covering KPFA’s election than Afghanistan’s and Iraq's elections combined.” Fifteen hours a year doesn’t sound like too much democracy to me. If that’s more time than we spent on the Iraq and Afghan elections, that might say something about our coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn’t say anything about the value or lack thereof of KPFA elections.

It’s about diversity.

The union is on the warpath because the hosts of the Morning Show were laid off. The person who has been most vocal, and whose job is the reason that there can be no peace (Brian Edwards-Tiekert again), is a white man. He and the people who support him have used the fact that a number of people of color chose to accept severance packages to make it seem that they are standing up for diversity at the station. In fact, at least some of those people of color left because those same people made them feel unwelcome. That’s not conjecture – one of them told me that personally. He said the show he helped to start, Hard Knock Radio, probably the single most unique show on KPFA, is devalued because they can’t raise much money through on-air promotions. They could raise a lot of money through concerts, but KPFA management (not Pacifica) would never agree to front money for security, venues and fliers for concerts, though they frequently put on speaking events, often taking a loss in order to get a recording they can use for premiums during fund drives. When the “Save KPFA” team goes on and on about how the Morning Show raises more money than anyone else, that’s in part a dig at Hard Knock.

A year and a half ago, the clique that runs the union and the station proposed eliminating Women’s Magazine to make room for a weekly “greatest hits” version of Letters to Washington. They did eliminate an hour of Music of the World for the daily version of Letters. In September, the station managers, who were part of that clique, proposed eliminating Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints. If that had happened, they would not be picketing or screaming about injustice, despite the fact that the programmers on those shows have much more seniority than the Morning Show staff who were laid off.

The producers of Poor News Network, which airs on the Morning Show once a month, recently wrote in an open letter, “Throughout our tenure on KPFA we have consistently faced internal harassment and a varying amount of disrespect from paid staff on the show, saying we were airing ‘too much Spanish’ and/or our people didn’t speak correctly, even to the point that when we were supposed to produce a second show per month, which Andrea Lewis fought with for, it was vetoed in the end for not being ‘professional enough’.”

It’s about local control.

It is. The people who are protesting and picketing at KPFA feel they would be better off independent of Pacifica and the other four stations. They don’t care if people in Houston and DC lose their Pacifica stations, they don’t care if Free Speech Radio News or even Democracy Now can continue broadcasting, as long as they get to keep the money they raise locally. (FSRN and Democracy Now are funded by Pacifica, out of the money they get from the five member stations and the affiliates. People in the know have said that Democracy Now might be able to survive on syndication fees alone, but FSRN never could. It is a source of news that is not heard anywhere else, and a source of income and training for local journalists all over the Global South.)

If KPFA cannot pay its bills and Pacifica cannot raise the money to bail it out, the entire network goes into bankruptcy. This part is rumor, but I am pretty confident of it: that is what the ruling clique hopes will happen. They are amassing a war chest to buy the station by encouraging people to withhold money from Pacifica and put it in a separate fund instead, as was done in 1999. This idea did not spring up only after the layoffs – many people believe the $375,000 check that was supposedly misplaced by the previous General Manager was intended for this purpose.

But there is no guarantee, and in fact it is unlikely, that that is the way a Pacifica bankruptcy would end up. It would be up to a bankruptcy judge who would not be bound by Pacifica’s mission statement or any other concerns. The chair of Pacifica’s board recently wrote, “The outcome of bankruptcy hearings will not be five progressive stations running their own affairs, but more likely two commercial stations and three new Christian radio channels.”

Of course, they may hope to force Pacifica to sell KPFA to them under threat that otherwise, they will take the whole network down. If they succeed, they will not only be free of the “albatross” of Pacifica’s expense (though they will have to assume a lot of expenses that are now paid by Pacifica including insurance, licensing fees and auditors). They will also be free of those pesky bylaws and the democracy they foist on us. They will be able to do away with the local station board and the Program Council and get all us scruffy unprofessional “clowns” off their airwaves.

In the recent board election, the top vote-getter was Mal Bernstein, of the “Save KPFA” slate. In an on air candidate forum, he stated that the “core shows” on KPFA are the Morning Show, Against the Grain, Letters to Washington, Sunday and the evening News. Notice anything about those shows? Notice what that “core” does not include? If he and his allies win this fight, we can assume that what we will hear is more time devoted to shows like those, and less time to shows like Hard Knock, Voices of the Middle East, La Raza Chronicles, APEX and Full Circle.

A friend recently asked me, “Who is organizing for the real left/people of color at KPFA?” The sad answer is, I fear, no one.

No doubt, the KPFA Tea Party (or should I call them the Tiekert Party?) will dismiss me as exactly the type of conspiracy theorist/snake oil huckster they are trying to banish from our airwaves. You may choose to believe them, but keep this in mind: the other Tea Party also denies that its rise has anything to do with racism.

Become an Iron-Jawed Angel, Don't Vote for One

There’s a letter that made the rounds on email and feminist blogs a few weeks ago. It read in part:

“Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle [the woman suffragists] waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. … So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining?”

On election day, I read something very similar on Daily Kos (I can’t find it now) invoking the spirit of the African American civil rights movement to exhort people to go out and vote.

It’s true, many people fought and died at many different times for the rights of disenfranchised groups to vote. But they didn’t fight for the vote as a symbol of equality. Voting was supposed to bring actual equality. Which is a greater betrayal of the suffragists and the martyrs of Freedom Summer? Not voting, or voting for someone who will use my vote to give more money to billionaires? Not voting, or voting for a progressive woman Speaker of the House who was willing to trade away our reproductive rights for a health care plan that delivered millions of our hard-earned dollars to the insurance industry? Not voting, or voting for the man who imprisoned eight sixty- and seventy-year-old former Black Panthers for a 36-year-old murder they didn’t commit?

Sure, I went to the polls. I mostly voted for people that had no chance to win. Sadder than that, I probably wouldn’t even have liked their policies if they did win. I did cast my second-choice vote for Oakland mayor for Jean Quan, and it looks like all those second-place votes may actually propel her over Don Perata, which would be a victory for actual democracy. Maybe it will convince other progressive cities to try ranked-choice voting which, despite dire predictions, has yet to bring down the power grid or cause a volcano to erupt in Oakland (which has no volcanoes, in case you were wondering). I voted for legalized marijuana, which we didn’t get, and for implementing California’s Clean Air Act, which we did. We voted to drop the two-thirds majority requirement for passing a state budget, but two-thirds is still needed to raise any taxes so it’s not worth much.

In the end, voting will not turn around the despair that I feel around and within me. It won’t put money back into our bankrupt community college and university system, or find jobs for the millions who have been out of work so long they’ve stopped looking. It won’t provide childcare or job training for single mothers trying to squirm their way out of poverty; it won’t provide restorative justice for survivors of sexual assault.


If anything reminds us how little the Voting Rights Act has actually done to increase racial equality, it’s the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle in Los Angeles last Friday, before the final election results in our state were even known. Mehserle is the white transit cop who killed 20-year-old Oscar Grant last New Year’s morning with one shot to the back while Oscar was pinned on the ground. On Friday he was sentenced to two years (including four months already served) for involuntary manslaughter. On Friday night, Oakland police, led by African American police chief Anthony Batts, herded protesters into a trap where 152 were arrested, ostensibly because a very few people broke a few windows. I am not condoning breaking windows of small businesses or cars. But the chief made it clear that the plan to break up the march was crafted long before a single window was broken, and executed as soon as the marchers deviated from an agreed-upon route. They didn’t arrest the few vandals, they arrested everyone they considered part of an “illegal assembly.” The story I heard from people who were there was that when the vandalism started, the crowd chanted for it to stop and it did.

Yes, we should be inspired by the suffragists and the civil rights movement. But the lesson we need to take from them is not that we must vote even if there is nothing we want to vote for, but that we can and must organize for the change we truly need.