The forty fourth WBAI Local Station Board (LSB) meeting was held on Tuesday, April 25, 2006, at 6:30 PM at Local1199's Bread and Roses Art Gallery, 310 W. 43^rd St. in Manhattan. This is not an official Web page of the LSB.

This meeting began 45 minutes late. The faction currently in charge immediately began loading up the agenda with all sorts of agenda items which were really attacks on interim General Manager (iGM) Indra Hardat. Ms. Hardat's demands for fiscal responsibility and her refusal to knuckle under to demands for patronage have enraged the faction.

They did indeed pass a motion that said that the LSB “... calls upon the Interim General Manager to retract her allegations, and .... not to make further public allegations ..., and calls upon her to handle any allegations of breaches by employees of the institution's rules by following Pacifica's personnel procedures, including written notification and full due process for the employee in question.”

Amazingly, this one page, multi-paragraph motion, and the page and a half of appendices in small type were offered by Berta Silva, who usually can't get through a page of the minutes without errors or inconsistencies. Gosh, she sure has improved.

Voting for this motion were Marion Borenstein, Omowale Clay, Lisa Davis, Sarah Flounders, Ray Laforest, Bob Lederer, Lawrence E. Lucas, Cerene Roberts, Berta Silva, Paul Surovell, Evan Tobias and Michael Warren.

Voting against this motion were Carolyn Birden, Steve Brown, R. Paul Martin, Berthold Reimers and Shawn Rhodes.

During the public comment session I could see that Ed Marshall was swinging his arm at Steve Brown, with papers coming within maybe a foot of Steve Brown's face, in an obvious effort at provocation. Marshall in fact had to walk down the length of the table in order to got so unusually close to Steve Brown. Madame Chair allowed this, of course.

And Bob Lederer passed out a statement in writing wherein he waives any confidentiality about his layoff including salary, benefits and anything else. So the faction is going to really go all out for its faction leader now. What an amazingly corrupt use of the power of the LSB. And they were hollering “Micromanagement!” when in 2004, the LSB simply asked questions of Don Rojas.

Lots of the public comment session was devoted to attacks on iGM Indra Hardat. During her time to speak Ms. Hardat mentioned that she'd witnessed the hijacking of WBAI's books twice. She noted that WBAI used to be able to support itself, but that now resources are being drained to go elsewhere. She gave out a written report that detailed various fund raising efforts, and said that, “... we have managed to reduce our huge deficit to almost zero.”

And Martin Attarian is going to have a stroke or something if he goes that nuts at every damned public comment session he attends; he has gone especially over the top at the last two LSB meetings. What I saw, sitting right in back of where he stood, was that at the end of his extended remarks and fulminations he had flipped to an entirely filled, handwritten page of more stuff to say when he was finally called on time! He was so worked up that he didn't even get around to attacking me this time.

Ibrahim Gonzales got up and spoke out for permanent suspension for those who physically attack others at the station.

We got to the executive session portion of this meeting about an hour and a quarter later than we were supposed to. Of course I can't say anything about exactly what went on during that exalted executive session, but anyone could see that the session lasted only about 20+ minutes, and that Indra Hardat left the room when the general public left the room, so she didn't attend.

And I don't think that it would violate any confidentiality if I characterized the executive session as a waste of time, in my opinion of course.

Here's the page showing the attendance at the LSB meetings.

Here is the newsletter I wrote for the WBAI Staff about the April 25, 2006, LSB meeting

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