The one hundred nineteenth WBAI Local Station Board (LSB) meeting was held on Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at the Local 1199 MLK Center, 310 West 43rd St. between 8th & 9th Aves. in Manhattan. This is not an official Web page of the LSB.
This meeting began 36 minutes late.
The LSB was at long last able to get to a Treasurer's Report at this meeting. The last Treasurer's Report the LSB allowed to happen was in July 2011! So I started to give it, and a faction operative disrupted it.
I started out letting people know that there are two stations that right now are considered to be even more financially distressed than WBAI. I gave some details, I got about a minute and a half into this report about the financial details that are affecting WBAI and all of Pacifica, when this this LSB member, one John Brinkley of the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign, aka the faction, starts disrupting the report, saying it wasn't about WBAI enough! I don't know if this guy was just wanting to disrupt the meeting and the report, as the faction operatives have a habit of doing, if he has a very short attention span, if he doesn't understand that WBAI is a part of the Pacifica Foundation, or what his problem might be. The Chair was not of much use in restoring order, but then that's become the usual situation with the Chair.
Of course WBAI, as I explained, is not self sustaining. WBAI needs to have a bunch of its bills paid by the Pacifica National Office. So if other stations are in worse shape than WBAI and there's no money to help WBAI because those radio stations are draining what's left of the Pacifica Foundation's finances then there is a very big problem right there that we'll be having to face. Also, since Pacifica has been illiquid for some time, and some may very well say it's insolvent right now, the entire Pacifica Foundation could have one really big problem soon.
In large part, of course, that so-called Justice & Unity Campaign has caused WBAI to be unable to make enough money to be self-sustaining, and their allies in other Pacifica stations have been doing their best to bankrupt Pacifica. The so-called Justice & Unity Campaign's allies in Berkeley, California have made noises about taking “their” station, KPFA, out of Pacifica and having it run by that faction out there. Former WBAI Program Director Bernard White, who is now on the WBAI LSB, has advocated selling WBAI in the past. In an interview some years ago, when he was still the Program Director of WBAI, Bernard White talked about the old hijacker PNB of 1998-2002, he said that “... Many of them wanted to sell the radio station, so they [could] make some money," and then later in that interview he's quoted as saying, "It's not really a bad idea - WBAI could sell for $350 million and you can take $100 million and create a smaller radio station and take the $200 million and buy smaller radio stations.” And of course the faction operatives would be right there to collect anything that might happen to fall off the table from such a transaction. On top of that radio stations aren't always for sale, at least not ones that can serve Greater New York City. The implementation of such a sale would destroy WBAI.
So I gave my report, and then we went on to a General Manager's report. And then at 9:21 PM we adjourned to an executive session meeting. When the LSB puts out an official report on what it did in that executive session meeting I'll post that here. The executive session meeting ended at 10:18 PM.
I have edited the audio I recorded of the Treasurer's report to cut out some repeated phrases, and to try and reduce some of the occasional distortion in the recording. I use a tiny MP3 player to record what I say that these meetings, mostly because the faction operatives have in the past of claiming that people have said things that they have not condemning them for it. So the audio is pretty bad to start out with, and it clips at times. I have made some adjustments to the audio levels to make the report easier to hear, and I've removed some extraneous bits. You can hear that during these reports some people, both on the LSB and in the audience, never shut up. At one point an audience member can be heard laughing at the parts of the report about the dire financial straits the station is in. And you can hear some of the disruption. The audio of the Treasurer's report is here.
Here's the page showing the attendance at the LSB meetings.
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