Carol Spooner writes:

I hope you will find time to read this timely & thought-provoking essay by Lyn Gerry one of the early founders of the "Free Pacifica" movement back in 1994-1995. Lyn maintains the Free Pacifica web page at
freepacifical with archives rich in information on the "how and why" Pacifica reached its current state. Carol Spooner, Committee to Remove the Pacifica Board, web page
http://home.pon.net/wildrose/remove.htm]

Dear All,

The possibility of a mediated settlement to the lawsuits and other
recent developments in the Pacifica struggle have heated up
discussions regarding "democratizing" Pacifica. I have recently
heard people within our movement who I consider admirable, whose
lives and work have been dedicated to the sort of values and
actions that I believe most of us concerned about Pacifica would
appreciate, speak with disparagement about "democracy" at
Pacifica.
It was quite clear to me that their feelings of antipathy were not
based on seeing democracy as an obstacle to their ability to
dominate others, as has been the case with the hijackers, but
rather they feared that "democracy" would be used against them
as an instrument of domination. Therefore, as a person in this
struggle who has been advocating "democracy" and
"accountability" since the mid-nineties I wanted to take the liberty
to state my concept of democracy and why I think structural and
cultural change at Pacifica is essential not only for its future
defense and preservation, but also for the realization of its mission
vis a vis society more fully.

I hope that this will provoke thought and discussion within the
movement. This struggle I believe needs to have larger goals than
bringing back banned and fired people and programs, electing or
refranchising local boards and replacing malefactors with good
people, though all these things are important.

There seems to be a variety of different conceptualizations of what
we are trying to achieve. I'm wondering what are genuine
differences and what are misunderstandings.

This message is not a "sample by-laws" effort. Before one can
even create the nuts and bolts of a structure, I believe we must
come to some consensus on what we are trying to achieve, and
why. Any structure that favors a maldistribution of power and
participation will never yield equity even if weilded by individuals
committed to the idea of equity. Nor can a structure designed to
promote equity fullfil its intent if inhabited by individuals hostile to
its fundamental premise. A structure can however limit the damage
such individuals are able to do.

It seems essential to first define what is meant by the terms
"democracy" and "accountability " Here's what it means to me:
(what does it mean to you?)

1) The people affected by a decision are the ones who make it
2) People who are doing work decide how they do that work.
3) People doing work on behalf of others must be accountable to
those others, and work on behalf of the needs of others as well as
their own.

I'm sure that you have already noticed that these three notions are
potentially in conflict with one another. There is no perfect method
of social organization, and in any social group their will always be
conflicting as well as congruent interests. The challenge is to
create a system that favors equity, and also to approach the
implementation of that system with a committment to the goals the
system was designed to enable.

I mention this because many committed activists in this struggle
do not appear to question the basic premise of how Pacifica is
presently structured. Yet, the present structure was a conscious
creation designed to disempower all but a few. I submit that even if
everyone were to elect the most fabulous people on earth to
supplant those presently in control, that this would not remedy the
serious problem of how power is distributed. "Well-intentioned"
people have abused power as often as "ill-intentioned" people it
seems to me.

Let's pretend for example that every "representative" in the US
Congress actually represents the interests of the people they
purport to represent. Even if I believe that my representative really
speaks for me, the fact is that 449 people have more to say about
what happens in my community than I do, speaking through my
representative.

Looked at this way, this state of affairs is inherently undemocratic
in terms of the definition above.

In terms of Pacifica, the notion that national board members and
their surrogates (managers) from KPFA, KPFK, KPFT or WPFW,
should have more to say about what is broadcast on, for example,
WBAI than anyone (and everyone) at WBAI is in my view a
structural problem that any meaningful change of governance will
have to remedy. In short, the level of democratic empowerment is
inversely proportional to the degree of centralization that exists in
decision-making ability, based on principle #1 and #2 as defined
above.

Yet, as members of "Pacifica" we also have common interests,
both on a philosophical and often practical level.

Practical level is the easy one: we may want to have collaborative
projects that involve pooling our resources; we then must give a lot
of weight to principle #3. So if we jointly fund and produce a daily
newscast, we all want to chime in on how to make that cast
relevant to our station and community. And if we are working
within this structure with a mindset based on equitable goals, we
will likewise be concerned that our joint project serves the needs of
those with whom we collaborate as well, just as we will expect our
collaborators to take our needs to heart.

Those who we task with a job of realizing the project through their
work, have to be supported by us. In turn, they have an obligation
to do their utmost to realize our collectively agreed upon goal with
a good faith effort to accomodate the needs of all concerned.

This all might sound pretty obvious but the reality is that this has
happened far less than it ought in Pacifica.

This is not something that can be enforced through a legal
instrument such as by-laws. A by-laws could express the right of
everyone to participate. The good faith effort to operate the
participatory structure fairly and with integrity must come from us
as individual participants. A by-law could give us however, the
ability to remove persons entering the structure for malevolent
purposes - and the lack of that is a major contributing factor to the
present state of affairs at Pacifica. And that lack of a structural
remedy was quite intentional on the part of the "Five Year
PLanners" who put this in motion. Quite simply, they meant to
impose their will on others. They meant to dominate.

(Jack O'dell, who recently endorsed the Pacifica campaign, is one
of the parties responsible. He has apparently stated with some
dismay that "this was not what he wanted to happen." I would
argue that anyone who sets out to determine a course for a group
of people, and does so through intimidation and against their will,
should expect a bad outcome. I would also argue that such an
approach is fundamentally at odds with what Pacifica was founded
to accomplish. Pacifica was founded by people who understood
that one could not build a world of peace, freedom and equality at
gunpoint (or "my way or the highway" fiats handed down from on
high.))

What about that other level, the philosphical level of common
interest? Here the mission is central. Pacifica was founded
with a specific purpose, and meant to realize that purpose through
broadcasting by exposing to understanding the [mal] functioning of
society which led to war, and discussing new ideas that might
bring solutions. The recent interview with Robert Farrell published in
Random Lengths is a great illustration of someone who, in my
view, even given the benefit of the doubt of having good intentions,
does not fundamentally understand either the type or method of
impact Pacifica broadcasting/discourse was meant to have on
society.

Farrell spoke about the need to have "all points of view
represented" as his concept of "Free Speech Radio." He
mentioned that in the past there had been conservative voices
present which he claims are no longer present. ( I dispute his
characterization of the present broadcast content, but lets just take
his words at face value for the sake of argument)

In the 1960's, broadcasters at KPFK read the John Birch Society
manifesto, The Blue Book, on the air in its entirety. By
contemporary accounts that I have read, the broadcasters' purpose
was not to have a "Noah's Ark" of political perspectives. Rather,
the ideas of the John Birch Society were creating controversy. The
Pacifica broadcasters wanted to address the ideas the JBS were
putting forward, examine them. It therefore seemed necessary to
make people aware of what those ideas were . In a way respectful
of the intelligence of the audience, the broadcasters presented
the position of the JBS in their own words. A listener could gain
an understanding of what this group was about, and make their
own decisions as to the validity of those ideas. They could also
listen to others commenting on the validity of those ideas on the
radio with a shared knowledge base to work with. It was about
education, learning and full sources of information, of bringing the
listener into the dialog as an equal- not "balance" or an arbitrary
sort of variety.

The people who founded Pacifica did so because they had
something to say and nowhere to say it. This is as true now as
then. When Hill went around to pitch his idea to people in the
comunity, he didn't visit the American Legion, the Chamber of
Commerce (or Democratic Party headquarters.) Pacifica is about
something specific. It was not to be some sort of "neutral"
broadcasting entity, nor the tool of a political party.

The rallying cry of the original coup group (Pat Scott etc) was that
Pacifica needed to "change" to be "relevant" and that those who
opposed their will were simply "opposed to change." The reality is
that Pacifica has always changed, and evolved, not as an end in
itself, but as a by product of its being a haven for the examination
of emerging social and artistic movements, many times the first
platform where those ideas were spoken about. But the hijack
group intended to unilaterally impose a change, one which suited
their particular agenda, an arbitrary change, motivated by their own
will. And the irony was that they were very much behind the curve
of emerging movements, and deftly removed along with the others
many of what are now significant voices in the movements that are
gathering momemtum. Even if one assumes good intentions on
their part, their arrogance was intolerable.

The "anarchic systems" their strategic plan so disparaged were
exactly what made it possible to draw innovative people to Pacifica.
It was a home for oddballs built by oddballs. Pacifica's founders
were not saints, and were products of their time and place, and
thus to our comtemporary eyes, perhaps deficient in addressing
many of the areas that now seem important to us today. And they
themselves fought with new generations coming in who were
responding to different concerns and priorities. But they at least let
them in the door, something not now happening.

One of my fears, and possibly others' fears, is that an
implementation of "democracy" will translate into an
implementation of bureaucracy that will create barriers alienating to
creative people. I am concerned about the preservation of the
principle of what was meant by "Free Speech" in the Pacifica
context: That a broadcaster was free to decide what she wanted to
say, not subject to the dictates of a management.

This is exactly the type of free speech that the coup was designed
to stamp out. Broadcasters, the coup planners intended, would
tailor their speech to the political and economic objectives of the
management, and the paycheck was one of the instruments that
would be put into play to accomplish this. US courts have already
ruled that an employee has no free speech rights with respect to
the authority of the employer. The erosion of Pacifica as a largely
volunteer broadcast force was about control, not improvement. The
union busting was about the same thing - a destruction of worker
democracy, what they saw as the abrogation of management
perogatives. The disenfrachisement of the Local Boards was about
being able to control who had those management perogatives.

But I am concerned that some of the people who have been
involved with this struggle seem to be similarly authoritarian in their
thinking, perfectly comfortable with a system of control, as long as
it is *they* who are doing the controlling.

We must dismantle the structure of control put in place by the
hijackers, not merely repopulate it with new controllers. It is
founded on something rotten. Their conception of a "network" was
backward, corporate, dead. They created a stultifying hierarchy and
called it a "network."

Another one of their mantras has been "expanding audience" and
those who disagreed were represented as wankers who just
wanted to talk to themsleves, just "elitist." I would argue that it is
they who were elitist.

They decided that they were the smart ones who knew
what was best for everybody. That the listeners, or the potential
listeners, were also not too bright, and needed to be fed
predigested information which, moreover, was designed to steer
those listening into adopting their agenda and position by making
them followers.

The original principle of "the intelligent listener" meant presuming
the intelligence of the listener. There are a lot of people in this
society who are functionally stupid because they have never been
addressed as intelligent, they've been conditioned to obey rather
than think. There is no tighter link to war and militarism than the
culture of obedience, of following the leader, of obeying the order -
of "my way or the highway."

The conduct of war depends on a large body of people
unaccustomed to thinking for themselves who will obey orders. Our
schooling conditions us far more to obedience than to thought.
Thanks to the research of Matthew Lasar who has documented
what seemed obvious - the founders of Pacifica were more
concerned with how they reached out to people than how many
they reached out to. They wanted to encourage independent
thinking and subvert the culture of obedience. They wanted to
create thoughtful determined rebellion against the system of war
and its masters.. And they wanted most of all to reach the working
class, the cannon fodder. If the soldiers refuse to fight, the war is
over, the generals be damned.

But Farrell and the rest of the lot, they want to be in Washington
DC, near those "movers and shakers." Even if they were motivated
by sincere objectives, this has been, and continues to be a failing
strategy to transform society.

Pacifica is about transforming society to end war. Pacifica's
founders wanted Pacifica to demonstrate the principles it
advocated. To say that this goal hasn't been realized is extreme
understatement. I believe that at this juncture, we are called upon
to take that goal up again. It's more than just a nice idea.

Pacifica will always be under attack. The atmosphere of
competition, egoism, insularity and elitism that existed in Pacifica
prior to the takeover gave this coup a foothold. Had there not been
problems of a serious nature, those who purported to be making
"positive changes" would not have gotten the inital support of many
who have since realized they erred.

This message doesn't end with a proposal on how to accomplish
all this. I certainly don't know how any more than anyone else. If it
can be done, we shall have to figure out a way to do it together.

Thanks for your attention.

Lyn Gerry

This bulletin comes from
the Committee to Remove the Pacifica Board

(sponsoring the "listeners' lawsuit")
web page: http://home.pon.net/wildrose/remove.htm