Public Comment

The current attack on KPFA, WBAI, and Pacifica by revolutionary fascists in NYC, where they originated, and by their members who came to Berkeley in the 1960s, originally to recruit young college students at UC Berkeley, and after the Civil Rights Movement ended they were less involved in recruiting students, and they turned their attention to KPFA in Berkeley and to WBAI in New York City, as desirable targets to promote their global violent anti-democratic revolution. Over the decades that followed they had minor successes at influencing or invading these stations. Some of their members became active inside the stations as volunteers, or even as employees, and one was even successful at becoming the KPFA General Manager for a short while. However, although they attempted to do some damage to KPFA and WBAI for many years since the 1960s, they did little damage to the stations until 2003.  

Both KPFA and WBAI remained uncorrupted progressive stations until a court order, after the 1999 attack, that all KPFA-Pacifica stations should have Local Station Boards to create a more democratic relationship between the stations and the listeners. The Judge who made this order was well intentioned, but she didn’t realize how the new station Boards could be used to harm WBAI and KPFA. Many welcomed the idea of a closer, more democratic, relationship between listeners and the station. However, the Berkeley fascists saw these new LSBs as their opportunity to gain control over KPFA, WBAI, and the Pacifica network. All these fascists had to do to get elected to the new LSBs in Berkeley and New York was to lie to the listener-voters about who they were and what their intentions were. 

During the first LSB election in 2003, the original fascist organization in New York was larger, over 9,000 members, and was better organized and was instantly more able to dominate and control the WBAI Board, and they turned the WBAI station over to a group of violent thugs who managed WBAI with fear, threats and violence.  

In Berkeley, with their smaller less organized fascist membership they had less success to harm KPFA. But although the KPFA board had a minority of democracy-hating fascist Board members, this smaller group of haters on the Berkeley LSB were not able to harm the station, but were able to successfully cripple this board and prevent the pro-democracy majority from functioning democratically for the first three years. The KPFA board meetings were reduced to hate-speech, fear, threats, intimidation, and finally to physical violence at board meetings. After the first couple of board meetings in 2004, the original large, but confused, audience of listeners and station staff stopped attending these hate-meetings, and they still haven’t returned. 

It wasn’t until 2007, when a group of honest KPFA listeners, called “Concerned Listeners” had organized to successfully replace the original fascist-corrupted board, resulting in KPFA’s first democratically functioning board. 

The frustrated Berkeley fascists who lost control were furious, and they immediately started a hate campaign to take back their power to corrupt the KPFA Board. They held fake KPFA meetings to demonize the Concerned Listeners, where very few actual real listeners attended. They tried again later to hold two fake “KPFA-Crisis” meetings to again demonize the Concerned Listeners, but these meetings also failed to attract listeners. At future LSB elections they split up their single, easy-to-identify fascist organization into several smaller fascist organizations, pretending to be progressive organizations, but even that deceit didn’t work to get fascists back on the board during 2007, 2008, and 2009. 

Now at this 2009 LSB election they are using every trick possible to regain control over the KPFA Board. The Election Supervisors are totally controlled by the fascists, and were present, on the stage, at the fake “KPFA-CRISIS meetings. The fake “Forums” they organized for today’s “listeners to meet the LSB Candidates” events were deliberately designed to prevent any useful communications between the candidates and the listeners, to help listeners make voting choices. But these fake meetings were an excellent and deliberate opportunity for the fascists to pretend that they were honest progressive candidates.  

The ballots that the listener-voters use to vote have now been re-designed to make any verification of any stolen ballots impossible. And although after the last two elections where stolen ballots were not available to be stolen, this election has great potential for stolen ballots being introduced into the final vote-counting process—unless observer-volunteers at the vote-counting event participate in watching for multiple ballots with obviously duplicated choices by fascists who want to steal this election.  

There will be, as usual, anti-KPFA fascists at the final vote count who are expected to introduce stolen ballots into the  

count, and the election supervisors will do nothing to stop it. But real listener-observers have a right to assure an honest election by insisting that those involved in the vote count have no back-packs or luggage with them inside the vote count area that can contain piles of stolen Ballots to include in the final vote count. And the usual lack of security of the ballot box at the station needs to be controlled by a third party, besides the election supervisors, who seem controlled by the Berkeley fascists. 

Additional deceitful tactics used by the Berkeley fascists includes approaching honest progressive community leaders to endorse the candidacy of these fascists who want to re-take control over the KPFA-LSB. They have also seduced the honest progressive publishers of the Bay View newspaper to publish articles demonizing KPFA management. 

Demonizing is a powerful tool used by all bullies everywhere to control people with fear. Every war that America has been involved in, since the American Revolution, has been made possible by first demonization an “enemy” to frighten Americans into surrendering their young sons lives to die on foreign battlefields. The Secretary of State lying to President Truman started the bloody Korean War. The Viet Nam war was started by a lie about an attack on an American vessel. The recent two mid-east Arab wars were made possible by the demonizing lie that Arabs had crashed planes into the World Trade towers. The real truth is on the web. 

Hitler, the world’s greatest demonizer, demonized the Jews, killed them, and then said to the German people, “See, I have saved you from these evil people!” Today the Berkeley fascists demonize the Concerned Listeners with the lie that they are harming KPFA, using their usual hate-speech without saying how they are harming KPFA. The undefined “harm” is that the CLers took the damaged LSB away from the democracy-hating fascists who really want to harm KPFA. Beware of any fascist warnings against evil because they are the evil that we need protection from. 

Jim Weber has been involved in KPFA politics for decades.