Thursday, October 31, 2019

Scary That WBAI Is Off The Air On Halloween - But Happy Halloween Anyway

Right now WBAI, New York's only truly listener supported public radio station, has been taken off the air by a rogue group of minority insiders.  It's making it very difficult to figure out the logistics of contributing funds to WBAI or to the true Pacifica Radio network. . . BUT it's Halloween. so in the midst of all these other scary things going on . . . .  (We hope you'll find this fun listening.)

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 1

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 2

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 3

WBAI October 31st Halloween No. 4
Comedy aside, stay tuned because there will soon be a time when it will be important for WBAI to start collecting contributions of funds again (and a time when membership increases will be very helpful too).  In the meantime, one thing you can do that doesn't involve donating to WBAI right now is to sign the following petition requesting that WBAI be put back on the air:
@WBAI New York Broadcasters: Say No To Pacifica Across America! - Sign the Petition! http://chng.it/S4X2c25N via@Change
We have this posted as another update about teh scary things that have happened to WBAI-- its a resolution of the Pacfica Governance Committee chastising those who shut down WBAI:
Resolution of The Pacifica National Board Governance Committee Responding To Acts Recently Taken By Certain Actors Within The Pacifica National Foundation Environment

Monday, October 28, 2019

New Book “Home Wreckers” Identifies NYPL Trustee (And 42nd Street Library Namesake) Stephen A. Schwarzman As Key Culprit (Along With His Friends and Neighbors) In The Huge Theft That’s Responsible For Depleting Wealth of Other Americans

NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, a principal subject in Aaron Glantz's new book, "Homewreckers," is featured prominently on its cover and scrutinized within the pages inside.
It’s time to write, yet again, about why NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman has a terrible reputation that sinks lower and lower with everything you ever find out about him. 

We just got finished writing about Mr. Schwarzman in connection with his friendship and praise for the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).  Crown Prince MBS is the Saudi leader who has enmeshed our country along with his in the war crimes and siege warfare against Yemen and he is the one everyone is looking at in connection with the dismemberment murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  See:  Stopped!! NYPL's Plan To Turn Over Its 42nd Street Central Reference Library Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom For Event Honoring The Infamous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Good Friend of Stephen Schwarzman?)

We were writing then because of the plans the NYPL had to turn over its Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom space in the famed 42nd Street Central Reference Library for Prince MBS to have a reputation laundering event where Prince MBS would teach young people how to manage their reputations.  It seems like everything these days is about reputation laundering for reputation management.  See: As The Brooklyn Public Library Holds Gala At The Barclays Arena Honoring Nets And Barclay’s Arena, Citizens Defending Libraries Is There With A Message: End Faux Philanthropy; Take Less And Don’t Sell Our libraries! and A Flourish of Stories About So-Called Philanthropy Being Used As A Guise For Diminishing The Public Commons– That Includes Libraries.

Yes, in its great unfettered wisdom, the NYPL, its trustees and senior management, was going to allow the Crown Prince to launder his reputation in the grand 42nd Street Library that, already for reputation laundering purposes, is now officially and ostentatiously called the “Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.”

In that article about MBS and Schwarzman we also passed along information about Stephen A. Schwarzman hobnobbing happily with Gislaine Maxwell, now famous and in the news for the stories about how she was the key and apparently foremost helper, Jeffrey Epstein’s number one elf, in running his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail ring. . . and we passed along information about how Mr. Schwarzman and his businesses factor prominently in the burning up and deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.

As usual with Mr. Schwarzman, if you hang around a little while, there will be more information arriving that, if it is at all possible, drags your opinion of him down even further.

Now there is a new book out featuring its outstanding villains conspicuously on its cover.  Yes, Stephen Schwarzman is one of the main ones the book tells us stories about.  The book is Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Shady Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, by Aaron Glantz.  Glantz has won a Peabody award for investigative journalism and was a recent finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on modern-day redlining.

Glantz’s book which has, on its cover, members of what Glantz describes as “President Donald Trump’s inner circle” has, in addition to Schwarzman and Trump, Trump Cabinet members Steven Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary of the United States, and Wilbur Ross the current United States Secretary of Commerce.  Helping make Schwarzman more officially a member of that Trump inner circle is that, as you can pick up from the caption to one of the photo illustrations in the book’s interior, Trump made Schwarzman chair of his strategic and policy forum of corporate advisors and “titans”– You see Trump sitting next to Schwarzman at one of its meetings. (CDL video of them together here.)

Glantz’s book is about the unfettered mechanics of an enormous transfer of wealth that robbed a substantial portion of Americans of the share of national wealth they once traditionally held, enriching a very few at the very top and very specifically the men on the cover of the book as the prime examples.

Glantz is smart to stand back and unfold his story in big picture terms, laying out the two main aspects it divides into.  First, the astonishing transfer of wealth that occurred, removing almost all the wealth and financial security from a broad base of Americans, and secondly, how unfair that transfer to a small elite group of insiders was, accomplished by financial manipulations which government aligned itself to assist, and sometimes even subsidized to make the seizures riskless for those seizing the wealth, and which oft times descended into unchallenged illegalities.  Schwarzman was a leader and one of the few key players in these events as Glantz tells the story.

Talking about his book recently on Democracy Now, Glantz speaks of how so “much of Americans’ wealth is in their homes,” because we as Americans have very few other ways to save.  Thus it is of enormous consequence, as he points out that “eight million Americans lost their homes in the Great Recession” with financial groups like Schwarzman’s acquiring those homes through foreclosures.  Now, points out Glantz, “we live now in a society where the wealth gap between the richest one-tenth of 1% and the other 90% is bigger than it’s been in a hundred years.”  And with that shift of wealth along with power comes other things: Although Glanz didn’t note it, the very wealthiest are now paying taxes at a lower overall rate than the middle class.  Schwarzman is an advocate of taxing the poor more.

The Democracy Now interview with Glantz is at: Part 1 (part of DN daily broadcast): Homewreckers: How Wall Street, Banks & Trump’s Inner Circle Used the 2008 Housing Crash to Get Rich, October 15, 2019, and Part 2 (DN Web Exclusive): “The Federal Government Actually Paid Him”: How Steve Mnuchin Profited from the Housing Bust, October 15, 2019.
           
More specifically Glantz observes:
    . . . the richest 0.1 of 1% of the American people have the same amount of wealth as the other 90%. And that is because, in America, 80% of most middle-class families’ wealth goes to only five things: food, housing, shelter, transportation, healthcare. All those other things, besides housing, just disappear as soon as you spend your money. Housing is the only way that most Americans have to save. The average American family has $4,000 in the bank. So, either you put your money in equity in your house, or you pay it to your landlord,
Glanz then asks “who profited” off this transfer of wealth through foreclosures on these homes.  Glanz spotlights Invitation Homes, founded by Schwarzman and his Blackstone group, as one of the main profiteers, and observes that Schwarzman’s company now owns 80,000 homes all across the country.  In 2013, on Charlie Rose just a few years after the great recession began, Schwarzman was able to brag that his was the “largest real estate investor in the world” and that:
We started actually buying individual houses from Foreclosure about a year and a quarter ago. We're now the largest owner of houses in the United States.
Indeed, unsurprisingly, Glantz’s book confirms that the “biggest buyer of foreclosed homes was” Schwarzman’s “Blackstone Group.”  On that Charlie Rose broadcast, Schwarzman told Rose that he had absolute confidence in the future of the housing market in the United States in light of the real estate market turnaround following the Great Recession’s downturn, which enabled that wholesale acquisition of foreclosed homes by him and his company, and that “in fact it's turned out to be so even faster than we wanted it to.”  Presumably, he could only have been meaning that had the downturn continued longer he would have been able to buy up still more foreclosed homes to profit even more.  See: Noticing New York: On Charlie Rose NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman Confirms Suspicions: His $100 Million To The Library Was Linked To NYPL’s Real Estate Plans, June 22, 2013.

When Americans lose the wealth of their home investments, they lose more: They are at the mercy of the decisions of landlords to increase rents or to neglect to make habitable the premises they then need to rent.  Glantz notes of Invitation Homes that because it’s a publicly traded company you can “very clearly their rent increases” and “the relatively small amount of money they spend on maintenance.”

Something else has happened, a shift of wealth on another level, with all these foreclosures.  Glantz writes:
The Obama administration's bulk sales gave rise to a class of landlord that has never been seen before.  At the beginning if 2012, national Real Estate Investor magazine reported, not a single landlord owned as many as a thousand single-family homes.  But just two years later, industry analysts were tracking more than a dozen vulture companies that had swooped in after the housing bust to buy thousands—removing then from individual ownership and concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaire investors.
More explicitly, his book covers how, until this sea change, the landlord industry had been mostly an industry run by moms and pops, dominated by “small investors doing it locally across the country.”  In other words, those renting to tenants once comprised an interstitial layer of  a somewhat more wealthy group of people with closer ties to the community.   Their absence from the local landscape leads to other consequences; writes Glantz: “the corporate landlords were far more likely to file eviction notices than mom-and-pops.”  In fact, the way in which the Blackstone and Invitation Home owners have supplanted the mom and pop landlords means that landlords who once made personal and judgement based decisions about whether to evict families and how to accommodate hardships when families are pulling themselves through a financial crisis have been replaced by a whole new eviction industry running based on numerical formulae. . . .

. . . Worse, that new eviction industry is now pursuing practices that are apparently designed to make money out of the cycle of fines and desperation that launching threatened and actual evictions entail, with, for instance, some owners who “see the late fees they impose prior to eviction as extra income,” given that tenants can wind up paying “22 percent more every year in housing costs because of the added fines and fees.”  That is not to mention that just raising the rent extraordinarily can be a de facto eviction, and the fact the cost of low income housing, rising faster than inflation, is also rising even faster than expensive apartments.

The late-paying renter, with already limited options, is less able to move because they don’t want an eviction notice trailing them around, and is this forced to continue paying nearly unaffordable rent.  They are:
thus transformed into a perpetual debtor. Never able to catch up, her power to demand basic services or repairs, to complain about anything at all, dwindles from little to nothing.
This was covered in (and quotes above come from) the recent multi-part “On The Media” series about the alarming current state of eviction in the United States, The Scarlet E (especially Part III of the series)* : See: The Scarlet E, Part I: Why?, June 7, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part II: 40 Acres, June 14, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part III: Tenants and Landlords, June 21, 2019, and The Scarlet E, Part IV: Solutions, June 28, 2019.
(* This On The Media series done by co-host Brooke Gladstone, is an example of the excellence of the work On The Media can often produce, and used to do so more regularly, but it makes for a confusing problem, because On The Media recently has also been churning out some truly appalling propaganda pieces, particularly when it involves reporting on narratives concerning information from the intelligence communities and rationales for more perpetual war.  Typically, it's been co-host Bob Garfield who has become the prime mouthpiece for these suspect pieces.  Whereas, On The Media used to encourage a meta-awareness of media and often used to teach media literacy by interrogating narratives offered by other sectors of the media, Garfield now, more and more, seems to be stenographically transmitting talking points from the intelligence communities and military industrial complex.  It’s been so bad that Garfield even had to broadcast a mea culpa in one follow-up segment- May 24, 2019, his apology though wasn’t as maxima culpa as it should have been.  Very interestingly, Garfield’s mea culpa segment stands out exceptionally on the On The Media site as one for which there has been no transcript provided, making it less likely to Google- Garfield's more important apology is thus harder to find than the original apologized for segment for which there is a transcript.)
The Scarlet E series explains how, as the Blackstones of the industry Walmartize property ownership, the increased “social distance” with landlords no longer personally talking with or intimately interrelating with tenants means there are no personal or locally tailored solutions to problems or avoiding cycles of despair.

The Scarlet E also notes (Part II) that tale that the data tells: “One of a plague that could have been contained had it not been purposefully designed to diminish the wealth and power of specific populations–black and brown ones.”

During the Democracy Now interview of author Aaron Glantz, Juan González brought up “the disproportionate impact that this loss of equity in all these homes had, especially on the African-American and Latino communities, which were even more dependent on home equity for what little wealth they had or net wealth they had.”  In fact, the following week in a Democracy Now interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor at Princeton University about her new book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership,” it was noted that:
Recent census data reveals the homeownership rate for African Americans has fallen to its lowest level since before the civil rights movement. In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to just 40%, the lowest level since 1950.
Glanz responded to González noting that:
What we see is that banks, like Steve Mnuchin’s bank, concentrated their foreclosures in communities of color. And then, when they started making loans again when the economy improved, they didn’t make loans to those communities. [virtually none– Glantz gives numbers.]
And now Steve Mnuchin, as the treasury secretary, is in charge of regulating every American bank.
The book depicts how, throughout the transfer of homeownership wealth and equity resulting from the Great Recession, the government wasn’t on the side of the resident homeowners; it was on the side of the big investors like Schwarzman.  In the Democracy Now interview Juan González note, “Julián Castro, now a presidential candidate, was at HUD supposedly in charge of the efforts to assist homeowners, and that’s come under heavy criticism, what the Obama administration did to help these homeowners.”
                       
Big picture, some may remember– everyone ought to remember–  that at the beginning of the Great Recession there was even a question about whether a firm like Goldman Sachs would go bankrupt given the risks it had taken along with similar financial institutions that were bad bets. The bad bets and inappropriate risk taking on the part of Wall Street firms were what triggered the enormous economic downturn that negatively affected everyone else in the economy. Other firms, Lehman and Bear Stearns did collapse, and if firms like Goldman had been allowed to fail it could, properly handled, have led to a generally desirable break up the monopolies in the industry that are not good for democracy (see Tim Wu’s work).

Instead, with Goldman advisors sitting in the top positions in government guiding most of the decisions, government saved Goldman and the rest the firms like it, coming to Wall Street’s rescue.  Government did not concentrate on rescuing the resident homeowners who had been negatively affected by Wall Street’s bad decisions.  It was a question of how and where the money to “rescue” the economy was pumped into the economy.  It went to the financial sector and was used to fund the overall transfer of homeownership wealth.

In 2008, there was fear of a “deflationary recession” as had occurred during the Great Depression. In essence, that’s a market recognition that values of homes were now inflated.  A recognition that homes generally were not worth what had been presumed when banks made loans on them would normally mean that both the homeowners and the bank that lent them money would be forced together and at the same time to cope with the fact that they had both made bad more or less, the same, mostly shared bad decisions about the market.  If the home is worth less than previously, there aren’t alternative buyers on the horizon and the bank’s best outcome is to write down the amount of the loan and allow the resident homeowner to pay off a lower mortgage amount or pay a reduced rate of interest.  In that case, the wealth reflected by the homes doesn’t get transferred elsewhere.

There are ways to avoid “deflationary recession” and keep the resident homeowners in place. That’s if the choice is to bail out homeowners (rather than Wall Street), and Glantz told Democracy Now that there were many “very senior people” inside the Obama administration who pushed for those kinds of programs as an alternative response, but he says that advice was consistently ignored.  Glantz says:
all these people came forward, and they said, “We don’t need to bail out the banks. We can have a program like Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s to bail out the people.” And then learning that that New Deal program actually made money for the government as it helped millions — it helped a million Americans stay in their homes, created the 30-year fixed mortgage, and then how, even when foreclosures happened, this government-run bank sold them off one at a time to individual families instead of in bulk to speculators . .  there were like very senior people in the room who were making this argument the whole time, who were just ignored every step of the way.
Instead, the threat of deflation was battled by pumping up the market back up by streaming money into the hands of the banks.  With pumped in funds, the financial sector, sidestepping the need to take necessary loses and it gained the upper hand to force transfers.

In the Scarlet E series it is noted that what made things significantly worse for the prospect of resident owners continuing to own their own homes was the way the banks, who had previously been requiring little equity be paid before the Great Recession, changed the borrowing rules as the federal “rescue” money flowed to Wall Street.  The changed rules favored big investors:
 . .  banks went from stupid to stupid . .  they [started giving out loans to no one]. You had to put 25, 30 percent down. So then the question is who has the opportunity to take advantage of this market. The answer I think is larger landlords or private equity; people that have capital. . .  that property gets consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. And so then the house -- the most intimate of spaces the most sacred, protected of spaces -- the house becomes a pure commodity and it becomes something that's driven completely by a market logic.
Under the terms by which some of the federal money was dispensed, there were, in theory, some rules at least, to benefit the beleaguered homeowners.  They were supposed to be followed by the banks getting the federal dollars being pumped in.  Glanz, however informs us about how those rules were not, in fact, followed.

Part of Glantz’s book involves tracking the stories of actual individual homeowner families affected by the crisis.  One of the happier through lines of these stories in his book is about Sandy Jolley, albeit, she is one of those lost her home to foreclosure.  After losing her home, Ms. Jolley won an $89 million whistleblower settlement against Steve Mnuchin’s bank. An attorney who took her case had her meet with the  Justice Department, the FBI, and the HUD inspector general when she contacted him to present “evidence of a massive fraud.”  Of that multi-million dollar settlement, Ms. Jolley got $1.6 million for herself.  It took ten years.  By that time, Steve Mnuchin had profitably sold his bank and was the Treasury Secretary.  Also, Glantz points out that while Mnuchin’s bank had to pay the $89 million whistleblower settlement, it had received over $1 billion in federal subsidies in connection with its foreclosure portfolio.

In his book Glantz describes the sweet deal “loss-share” agreement subsidies that his “homewreckers” got from the government; Mnuchin for OneWest Bank, John Otting for US Bank, Wilbur Ross and Stephen Schwarzman for BankUnited–  The banks got to keep all the money they made on foreclosures or anything else, but if they “lost money foreclosing on homeowners, the government would pay for it,” to the tune of billions of dollars. By the way, note how this lays the pavement on the raceway to speed up home foreclosures all the more.

In Glantz’s Democracy Now interview, there was a natural focus on candidates now running in the 2020 presidential campaign.  In addition, to noting, as mentioned above, that Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro was at HUD when HUD and the federal government was failing so miserably to address the needs of those who owned their own homes, Glantz gave prominent mention in the interview to the fact that a number of the other Democratic candidates in the field have plans “to tackle the housing challenges of ordinary Americans, many who are still struggling after the devastating 2008 housing market collapse.”  Specifically listed as having proposals are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg.  Joe Biden was mentioned as apparently having no plan.  Julián Castro got no mention as having a plan.  Glantz also made specific mention that “Kamala Harris says she wants to put $100 billion towards promoting African-American homeownership.”  And he noted “black homeownership rate in this country is below the level that it was at when segregation and discrimination was legal.”

That made it sound like Kamala Harris could be depended upon to be part of a solution.  But, as needs to warned, Democracy Now’s often excellent news coverage tends to give you about 85% of the news.  It’s been said that Steve Mnuchin would probably not be Treasury Secretary today if he had been prosecuted for his bank’s mortgage fraud in California back when it was happening.  (And much the same applies to Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary.)  And prosecuting Mnuchin and his bank is something it has been noted, Kamala Harris, who was Attorney General of the state of California at the time didn’t do.

Although it went unmentioned in the Democracy Now interview, Glantz’s book deals (pages 86 to 88) with how Mnuchin’s bank OneWest falsified and backdated documents and evaded other required procedures in order to accelerate the foreclosure mill operations maximally- it would also have disqualified the bank from receiving more federal foreclosure subsidies.  Kamal Harris disregarded the “strong recommendations of her staff” and did not sue Mnuchin’s bank.

Something else you didn’t hear on Democracy Now that you would have heard if you were picking up your news from Jimmy Dore’s Radio Show (one of the shows on WBAI radio, currently subject to a destructive dismantlement attack on the Pacifica Public Radio Network)— Steve Mnuchin has since that time been a donor to Kamala Harris’ campaigning.  In other words, if you get a lot of your news from Democracy Now, you need to work to supplement what you hear there by informing yourself from other sources as well.

Citizens Defending Libraries has included the following in flyers it has distributed:
It has been noted that if Steve Mnuchin had been vigorously prosecuted at the local level for his business’s mortgage fraud, misrepresentations, backdating and falsification of documents to rev up the pace of his OneWest foreclosure mill, he wouldn’t be Treasury Secretary, appointed by Donald Trump today- Similarly, had NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman investigated the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library plunder with Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman involved on the selling side and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as principal financial beneficiary, those two Trump henchmen might not be in significant positions of power today.  The whole political landscape at the national level could be different, not to mention having healthier local politics.
Two of the co-founders of Citizens Defending Libraries spoke to Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now host who created the Democracy Now program (incubated out of WBIA radio her in NYC), on November 12, 2015 at the Brooklyn For Peace fund raiser where Ms. Goodman was honored and they discussed with her why Democracy Now should cover these matters and the sell off and shrinkage of New York City libraries.  We sent follow up materials to the Democracy Now producers about what that coverage ought to consist of.  Democracy Now never followed up and never covered this other story other story they could have covered involving Steve Schwarzman before Trump was elected and Schwarzman appointed the head of Trump’s economic policy council.

Not only did the unprosecuted Mnuchin become Treasury Secretary, he was able to sell his OneWest bank at a nice profit.  Glantz makes a point in his book about how small the club of elites is.  The club is so small that Mnuchin did no have to go very far at all to sell his bank, he sold it to his neighbor John Thain owning another apartment in the 740 Park Avenue where they both live.  Glantz makes a point about how many of the characters in his book, corporate raider Ronald Perlman, Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman chief John Thain, and Steve Schwarzman all reside at 740 Park Avenue.  Nowhere in Glantz's book does he mention that the address is also famous as David Koch’s address or that the conglomeration of billionaires at 740 Park Avenue was the subject of a documentary about escalating wealth and income inequality that Alex Gibney made, “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream.”

Schwarzman’s apartment at 740 Park Avenue was formerly owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  Small world, he bought it from another wealthy NYPL trustee.  It’s twenty thousand square feet, has thirty-five rooms, thirteen bathrooms.  Schwarzman doesn’t have to worry about going out to the public library, he has his own “pine-paneled library” in the apartment.  The apartment is just one of Schwarzman’s homes. Amy Goodman’s reaction on Democracy Now:
So, when you want to sell banks or whatever, you just go trick-or-treating in your own apartment building.
In his book, Glanz describes the lavish birthday parties Schwarzman has given himself, both his sixtieth birthday party in 2007 (where the wealthy attending came dressed as European nobility of the past and “Among the most popular costumes was Marie Antionette"- Rod Stewart was paid something around $1 million to perform and Patti Labelle sang as well) and his seventieth birthday (Gwen Stefani sang there).  The seventieth was quite as lavish as the sixtieth, live camels, trapeze artists, fireworks, etc., but Glantz notes that while the 2007 birthday's lavishness “sparked condemnation” even from conservative sources, by 2017 with Trump in office, this kind of excess was taken largely in stride, going mostly unnoticed and unremarked upon.

Glanz’s book says that “Schwarzman sought to rehabilitate his image” after his “controversial [sixtieth] birthday party” by transferring $100 million to the New York Public Library, which is when Schwarzman’s name was put on New York's  42nd Street Astor, Tilden, and Lenox Central Reference Library (the one with the lions).  Glanz apparently didn’t do enough research on Schwarzman to realize that this $100 million transfer was not merely for reputation laundering purposes, it was also intended to jump start New York library real estate deals, including the first one, the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library sale that benefitted Jared Kushner.                               

Schwarzman is thoroughly covered in Glantz’s book, which is 330 pages before the acknowledgments start.  Schwarzman gets mentioned some 53 there and his Blackstone gets mentioned some 41 times in all.

Blackstone, acting quickly. has a defense web page site up with Invitation Homes attacking the book:  Correcting the Record on Blackstone and Invitation Homes- Correcting the numerous falsehoods and mischaracterizations in Aaron Glantz's recent book that references Invitation Homes and Blackstone.  Nevertheless, when you look at that web site, it s not clear what are asserted to be the "numerous falsehoods," what would make them "numerous," or what the corrections are that the site means to offer.

The New York Times has just reported that NYPL trustee Stephen Schwarzman, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Jared Kushner are all going to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman upcoming economic event despite the infamy.  Despite the dismemberment killing.  Despite Yemen.  It’s just business- as usual.

Notes the Times article:
Since then, many executives have pledged to continue their partnerships with Saudi Arabia, which range from joint investments in entities like Blackstone’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund. . .
The Schwarzman Blackstone multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund deal is Saudi seed money to be used to privatize American infrastructure.

Privatization, whether it it turning libraries into real estate deals or selling American infrastructure, is a symptom of wealth inequality.   It means that accumulated wealth, running out of other things in which to invest its capital, needs to start buying up what was previously the public commons as one of the few things still left to acquire and collect rent on. It also reflects how the increasing imbalance of power enfeebles the public’s ability to fend off these encroaching advances.  Lastly, with the shift of resources to the wealthy and the powerful, there is less and less public money to invest in the public’s resources to maintain them healthily and robustly to benefit all of society. 

The parallels of such privatization to the shift of wealth described here and by Glantz with respect to homeownership are obvious.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Resolution of The Pacifica National Board Governance Committee Responding To Acts Recently Taken By Certain Actors Within The Pacifica National Foundation Environment

We have recently been letting you know that, much like what is happening with New York City Libraries, in a dismantling attack on WBAI, New York's only truly listener supported public radio station and the Pacifica network of terrestrial public radio station of which WBAI is a part, WBAI has recently been removed from the New York air waves by a small group acting secretly to shut it down.

See:
    •    How The Proposed Self-cannibalizing Sale of WBAI Radio (And Other Pacifica Network Stations?) To “Finance” Pacifica Operations Is Like The Self-cannibalizing Selling Off of New York City’s Important Libraries To “Finance” Libraries- There Is Absolutely No Future In It


    •   Resolution of WBAI’s Local Station Board Responding To Shutdown of WBAI New York
Also for more overview and fairly regular updates on what is going on with the Pacifica Network as well as WBAI, which the costly shut down has now brought much focus to, we highly recommend the post you can find at Pacifica in Exile.  The perspective you will find there is informed and insightful.

There is also a petition up that you can now sign requesting that WBAI be put back on the air.

We further present the following resolution that was adopted by the Pacifica National Board Governance Committee on October 23, as providing more insight.
Resolution of The Pacifica National Board Governance Committee Responding To Acts Recently Taken By Certain Actors Within The Pacifica National Foundation Environment                                               
Whereas, a number of acts have been taken recently by individuals within the Pacifica Foundation environment including actions taken to shutdown one of Pacifica’s five terrestrial radio stations, WBAI, broadcasting in New York City to the New York metropolitan region, and also the filing of a lawsuit against the Pacifica Foundation as well as against the individuals who are directors of the Pacifica Foundation;

Whereas, the actions to shutdown WBAI were taken in secret and without consultation with those whom it would be expected would be required to be informed and from whom approvals would be required in accordance with the good and proper governance of Pacifica including how it is envisioned and provided for under the Pacifica Foundation bylaws, including that the actions were done without consultation and kept secret from the WBAI Local Station Board and from the Pacifica National Board;

Whereas, the filing of the lawsuit against the Pacifica Foundation as well as against the individuals who are directors of the Pacifica Foundation was undertaken with secrecy and without discussion or consultation with the Pacifica National Board Governance Committee which has as its purview and responsibility ensuring the proper governance of the Pacifica Foundation including that is to “regularly review the Foundation's bylaws and policies for governance of Board activities,” but the Bylaws lawsuit was kept secret from the Pacifica National Board Governance Committee and it was not consulted about it beforehand;

Whereas, it is an especial affront to this committee that members of this committee, with the resources and recourse of the committee available, participated in the filing of the bylaws lawsuit without such consultation;

Whereas, the Bylaws lawsuit, by its own express terms appears to be an effort to supplant, with costly litigation, the normal appropriate governance of the Pacifica Foundation; and

Whereas, the Pacifica National Board has recently voted taking a number of actions to reverse the shutdown of WBAI and take other corrective action with respect; now, therefore be it

RESOLVED, by the Pacifica National Board Governance Committee as follows:

Section 1.  We declare a general condemnation of the unauthorized and secretive actions described above that were recently taken by those certain actors responsible for them.

Section 2.  We second the actions of the Pacifica National board by calling for the restoration  of WBAI to the status in which it stood as of October 4, 2019.

Section 3.  We note for the record that the need to call for this restoration of WBAI and the taking of other corrective action with respect thereto is necessary because of the substantial breaches of good corporate governance that the actions of those shutting down WBAI reflected.

Section 4.  We note for the record that these substantial breaches of good governance, injurious to the Pacifica Foundation to, are also undermining of the trust that is essential to good governance within our Pacifica Foundation so important to our functioning at maximum effectiveness and on an even keel such that much work must now be done to restore that trust.

Section 5.  We call for an immediate withdrawal by the plaintiffs of the bylaws lawsuit and their efforts to supplant normal governance.
                       
Section 6.   This resolution shall take effect immediately and direct the chair of this committee to forward this resolution to the Pacifica National Board and make every effort to promulgate it widely for public view and to ensure it becomes widely known that the Committee denounces the shutdown of WBAI, the locking out of WBAI's staff, the taking over of its programming and the attempt to supplant the Pacifica Foundation’s appropriate internal governance with costly litigation. 

Friday, October 18, 2019

Yahoo (i.e. Verizon, Which also Owns AOL Plus Much More) Is Deleting All Content Ever Posted To Yahoo Groups– Once More We Say: The Internet Giveth, and The Internet Taketh Away

Here is another occasion on which to say it: The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.

Say au revoir to all the content that was ever posted Yahoo Groups. Will that content cease to exist entirely?  Who knows? . . .   Maybe that content and all the data that somebody might have harvested from it will continue to exist in somebody’s archive somewhere; it just won’t be available to the those individuals who were induced to use this forum, “one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards” (according to Wikipedia) lulled by the sense that the services there were supposedly free and so convenient.

Now it’s far from convenient if that’s where you trusted to have your data reside. The content people offered up to the Yahoo platform’s care taking will evanesce in a wholesale deletion on December 14th.  If you want to try to save all your own content yourself, Yahoo says there is a process you can follow to try to do so, but, according to Ars Technica “It can take up to 30 days for the request to finish processing and the download to become available.”

For more information, the deletions which are imminent have been written about here: Goodbye, Yahoo Groups — Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo GroupsYou have until December 14 to download files before they're permanently removed, by Jon Brodkin, October 17, 2019, Deleting Yahoo Groups will leave a permanent stain on Yahoo’s legacy- The once-popular community site is part of internet history. Now Verizon plans to bulldoze much of it, by Harry McCracken, October 17, 2019, Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down and All Content Will Be Permanently Removed, - Users won't be able to upload new content to the site after October 28 and have until December 14 to archive their content, Yahoo said in an announcement, by Jordan Pearson, October 16, 2019.

One of those articles, Fast Company’s, observes that:
deleting a couple of decades of existing material, Verizon is eradicating a meaningful chunk of the internet’s collective memory. The Yahoo Groups archive is an irreplaceable record of what people cared about in its heyday. If it survived, it would only grow more valuable with time.
The Vice article notes:
This isn't the first time that Yahoo has turned the switch off on an important, if niche, platform and left users in the lurch. In 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, taking roughly 7 million personal websites with it. At the time, digital archivists raced to save what content they could.
"These guys found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse," archivist Jason Scott told Time soon after it was shut down.
The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.  We’ve been saying that already in other contexts.  For instance, we just pointed out how the New York libraries were replacing DVDs with internet streaming of films from Kanopy (the internet giveth). .  But now the libraries are discontinuing the Kanopy film streaming service (the internet taketh away).  See:  Kanopy, The Internet Movie Streaming Service That Was Being Used By NYC Libraries To Help Make Up For Elimination Of DVDs Is Now Being Abandoned!- The internet giveth! And The internet taketh away!

Or consider this National Notice article by Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White: There are about fifteen different ways to get your news from Democracy Now; just one of them is safely not through the internet (the internet giveth) and safely immune to its shut down and censorship (internet taketh away).  That alternative to the DN pipes that all flow through the internet is WBAI terrestrial radio. . . .
National Notice: How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”
. . . But, right now, a minority rogue faction of individuals, including some that managed to get on the Pacifica radio network’s national board, executed an unauthorized, stealth-attack shut down of WBAI.  Who knows who encouraged and supplied resources to these renegades?  The Pacifica board, having voted to reverse their destruction, is still working to get WBAI back on the air.  The excuse for the WBAI shutdown?: The internet has bled financial resources from all of the five Pacifica terrestrial radio stations, so its time to engage in some disaster capitalism tactics to corporatize and privatize Pacifica Network assets (the internet taketh away).

The rogue faction shutting down WBAI seemed very intent on destruction and removed from the internet all of WBAI’s archives, an Orwellian move that overnight banished all of WBAI’s history as well as recent, topical shows from the public access (the internet taketh away).

Back to Yahoo: Did you know that when Verizon, which owns AOL, acquired Yahoo, Yahoo became an identical clone of AOL?  The internet taketh away.  Did you know that AOL and Yahoo then simultaneously imposed new rules severely limiting the number of people you could include in your email group lists?  The internet taketh away.  That meant that existing group email lists you may have been using to communicate, for instance, with active and involved members of Citizens Defending Libraries could no longer be used as before.  Did you know that this is at a time when sending out such emails with curated information has become an especially important tool to cut through the noise and manipulation of the internet? . .  The internet taketh away

In some respects, the ability to put up and share content via Yahoo Groups was viewed as an alternative to Facebook.  Another alternative to Facebook, Google+, was taken down and all its content disappeared with its takedown.  Everything that Yoko Ono had posted there disappeared.  The internet taketh away.  It was taken down at the same time that Facebook was launching a censorship campaign working with the NATO war group, the Atlantic Council.  By going down just at the same time as the Facebook censorship campaign was launched, no one needed to try to observe whether the Google+ “competing” site would run a parallel censorship operation to Facebook’s.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Important For WBAI Radio- Participate And Vote (By October 15th) In the 2019 Local Station Board Elections- Candidate Interviews, Electronic Ballots

During the last WBAI elections we posted information about the important of WBAI and how important it is to vote in the Local Station Board elections: WBAI Radio- An Important Voice- Keeping It Meaningful & Alternative (Library Defenders Running For Its Local Station Board).

Right now there is the added factor that it is important to vote in the WBAI elections to protect WBAI, which was just shut down by a renegade group.  See: Resolution of WBAI’s Local Station Board Responding To Shutdown of WBAI New York.

The WBAI shutdown and elimination of web pages about the election have made it harder to vote, but voting, no matter who you vote for is the most important thing.  Voting, no matter what, is the most important thing. We need about 200 more people to vote to reach a quorum and that is critical.  You need to vote ASAP and at least by October 15th.

You have the right to vote if you have contributed $25 more more between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

You will need to vote electronically. Here is what you need to do. 

Your voting email should probably come in to you from . . vote@simplyvoting.com
. . . with the subject line:  2019 Pacifica Station Elections - WBAI Listener.

If you specially request a ballot the subject line may be: Your e-ballot is here.

If you are having trouble finding your election emails to vote, A helpful search of mails is for: wbailb.
 
You will be sent to a link to vote and supplied with information to enter there like:
Elector ID - wbailb119XX
Password - DTKRXX
After that you can use drop down menus to assign numbers to rank the candidates you want. You can vote for as many candidates as you like in the order of your preference.

Who should you vote for?  Candidates are running on three slates.  One slate is the Indy Slate on which Citizens Defending Libraries co-founders, Carolyn McIntyre and Michael D. D. White, ran and were elected in the last election.  There is also a brand new slate of candidates, the Red Wave candidates, with a lot of candidates who are from DSA.  The candidates from all three slates of candidate are unanimously opposed to the shut down of WBAI that has occurred.

If you want to listen to the candidates (or watch a video) of the candidates debating, and perhaps learn about various aspect of running a radio station like WBAI and the Pacifica Network, here are links- (the debates were moderated by CDL co-founder Michael D. D. White):

Audio:
First Atrium WBAI Local Station Board Election 2019 Candidates Debate

Second Atrium WBAI Local Station Board Election 2019 Candidates Debate
Third Atrium WBAI Local Station Board Election 2019 Candidates Debate
Video:
WBAI Local Station Board Candidates Questioned 9/15/2019
If you want advice on who to vote for, it can make a difference, the way that the ranked choice voting formulas work, if people vote similarly.

There is a recommended ranking of voting that was widely distributed that combines candidates from the Indy and Red Wave slates.  It is below:

   
The listener candidate names in ranked order above are:
1.    DeeDee Halleck
2.    James Sagurton
3.    Marilyn Vogt-Downey
4.    Jim Dingeman
5.    Maxine Harrison-Gallmon
6.    Jack De Palma
7.    Katherine O'Sullivan
8.    Ana Garcia
9.    Safia Albaiti
10.    Simone Norman
11.    Steve Finkelstein
12.    David Andersson
13.    Rosa Palmeri
14.    Jez Zerbe
15.    Michael Mordowanec   

Thursday, October 10, 2019

How The Proposed Self-cannibalizing Sale of WBAI Radio (And Other Pacifica Network Stations?) To “Finance” Pacifica Operations Is Like The Self-cannibalizing Selling Off of New York City’s Important Libraries To “Finance” Libraries- There Is Absolutely No Future In It

The following is part of a previous recent post: Resolution of WBAI’s Local Station Board Responding To Shutdown of WBAI New York.  We republish this part here, because it stands alone as something that our library defending public will want to think about.

Our New York City library defenders defenders are aware of how the NYC libraries system is being slowly dismantled as core assets, major libraries are being sold off and shrunk, library by library: Donnell, the Second biggest Library in Brooklyn, the only NYC Science Library, the emptying of millions of books from the stacks from the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the shrinkage and book elimination at the biggest circulating library Mid-Manhttan, etc.

Here are what we wrote:

There is a lot of what is going on with respect to this attempted takeover of WBAI that will feel familiar to New Yorkers who have paid close attention to the privatizing sell-off of libraries and the transformation of libraries and their traditions into less democratic reformulations that are less threatening to the consumer model based power structures of our society.

There is, for instance, the deceptive descriptions that a corporate press is far too ready to repeat.  For instance, without talking to anyone else, the New York Times unsekptically quoted John Vernile the Interim Executive Director who acted by stealth to close WBAI as he offered reassurance that WBAI was not going away, that "Pacifica was determined not to sell that prime piece of radio real estate," and that "Pacifica, he said, wants to `rebuild' WBAI at some point, although he did not offer a clear target date."  "Rebuild WBAI"?: That sounds like the assurance that NYC libraries were being sold to build new and better "libraries of the future" or "libraries of the 21st Century."   . .  But you "build" from the ground up, not the top down, which is what WBAI has been doing.  Also, this rhetoric is contrary to the known internal dialogues of the people associated with Mr. Vernile: Selling WBAI is exactly what they are talking about and advocating.

There is also the strategy of working secretly in advance attempting to take people by surprise, to make things a "done deal" or "fait acompli" by the time the curtain is raised on what's planned.

Going along with this with New York Libraries and with Pacifica's handling of WBAI is the funny bookkeeping that manufactures a "crisis" to justify proposals to finance in self-cannibalizing sales of core and valuable public properties.  Naomi Klein has written about the various tactics of "crisis capitalism" and this variation is one of them.

We New Yorkers also know that when the privatizers want a public asset disposed of, a favorite tactic of the privatizers is to use every ruse to have that asset become, along the way, as shabby, unattractive, and hopefully as alienating as possible.  That can be involve something as grotesque as not cleaning or fixing the bathrooms of libraries, and we have also seen in a remarkable pattern of unvarying repetition, that with every library that comes up as a next target for sale (except for the brand new SIBL, Science, Industry and Business Library), the air conditioning mysteriously breaks and becomes unfixable.  If NYU wants to build on what was dedicated as public park space it is supposed to maintain, that park space fills with trash, etc.  (It is too much to summarize right now, but part of the challenges WBAI has faced in recent years involve financial arrangements, that were not beneficial that the Pacfica national office as decision make saddled it with.) 

WBAI has been doing a remarkable job of relying on volunteers to successfully operate on a shoe string.  Pacifica does not, as advertised, have a debt crisis, but it does have a cash flow challenge engendered in part by what the internet seeming offers for free (but its not).  Cash flow challenges are frequently dealt with by investing to generate new revenue.  In any budget there are what is known as "expenditure driven revenues."  Arguably Pacifica has been quite stingy recently in allocating resources.  WBAI in the largest, perhaps most influential metropolitan media market does its 24/7 programming with just 7 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) employees.  The much smaller Pacifica station in Berkeley never reduced staff to cut costs when others did and has, an FTE staff that is several multiples of that number.

A WBAI listener who recently died very recently, just months ago, contributed over $700,000.  With the investment of a small fraction of that money, not much more than $40,000, WBAI could be activating use of the High Definition capabilities of its new far less expensive, but far better HD antenna.  In short order WBAI could be broadcasting three times as much content 24/7 over the three HD terrestrial radio channels made possible (mirrored by internet streams of those channels).  It probably wouldn't triple income for WBAI, but it would substantially increase it without comparable increases in expense, and it would hugely boost WBAI's media profile in NYC.  Pacifica directed and sequestered these funds elsewhere.   

In the world of the New York City library sell-offs, the background plans associated with the library sell-offs involve long lists of multiple libraries to be turned into real estate deals, but, in classic divide-and-conquer fashion, the public only hears about one or two of these libraries being for sale at a time.  In the case of Pacifica, if WBAI is marshaled to the fore to be the subject of a self-cannibalizing sale, there is nothing to prevent other Pacifica stations to be moved against in subsequent stealth attacks for future self-cannibalizing sales.

The New York City library sales involve the template of consolidating shrinkages; a central library with smaller, perhaps fewer satellite libraries and in total, there is less aggregate library space than before.  When WBAI was taken off the air, its website was replaced with a page unveiling a new brand, look or concept of Pacifica: "Pacifica Across America."


The Web Page that replaced WBAI when it was taken off the air and its web pages and archives removed from the internet
What is "Pacifica Across America"?  How would "Pacifica Across America" come into existence and manifest itself?  Through the internet?  Would there be a centralized station operating that supplied the content?

One other thing that New York City library defenders are very familiar with when it comes to the book-eliminating reformulations libraries is the way that the changes being made are pushing those seeking information toward the digital and into the internet, which is far less private and far more subject to control and outside influence.

In resisting the court's Temporary Restraining Order ordering that WBAI be restored to the air, Counsel representing Mr. Vernile along with whoever acted with him to take the station off the air were eager to argue that decision of the issue should be removed to federal court and determined as an FCC (Federal Communications Commission).  The Chair of the FCC is Ajit Pai, a corporate media conglomerate lobbyist who is using his chair position at the FCC to eliminate net neutrality, which then allows for the content control privatizing initiatives of the corporate conglomerates to prevail much more easily.  .  .  .  

. . .  Additionally, it has been reported that“leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”

That would go a long way to ensure that the content of any centrally based Pacifica Across America internet operation would be tame and nonthreatening to those in power.

When outside interests want to move in to take over and privatize, they don't always think in terms of acquiring the public assets in question: Taking control of the board that owns the public assets equates to the same thing.  In New York, one of the first two libraries for sale "as one of the most valuable" was the Pacific Branch, Carnegie designed and donated libraries in Brooklyn immediately next to Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly project (both of those targeted libraries were next to Fores City Ratner property).  Real estate interests had targeted the Pacific Branch library for direct acquisition in the mid-1970s.  Back then, when the community fought to fend off the attack, the Brooklyn Public Library's public spirited board fought with the community to defeat the sell off.  When plans again surfaced in early 2013 to sell the Pacific Library, the BPL's board had been populated by real estate interests and the BPL was took the side of the real estate community in arguing for and promoting the sell off of the Branch.

If the Pacifica network radio stations are subject to consolidating privatizing sell offs and replaced something more central that swings further toward the corporate mainstream in the flavor of its politics, its is not just the terrestrial stations and their current local voices that would be lost.  The Pacifica archives, a vast amount of content representing a tremendously important record of an alternative view of history, would also be under control of of that entity.  That content, to which WBAI, with its sister stations, has been a significant contributor is a money maker for Pacifica.  New York City library defenders are familiar with the consolidating elimination of access to books that is means information availability is ever more subject to the decisions of a corporately minded group in control.

If it seems that, with a takeover of the Pacifica's board, Pacifica could become the enemy of its own public assets, it should be remembered that intent and potential of setting up Pacifica as a network was the opposite.  The intent, and the way it has worked in the past was that the network of Pacifica stations would have the extra strength of being cross-supporting.  So, for instance, as one small example, the New York Times reported in 1972 that when "Houston was blown off the air twice during its first months of broadcasting when its transmitter was bombed, allegedly by a right wing group. Then WBAI held several successful fund raising marathons for the crippled station, and Manhattan listeners pledged some $5,000 for the Houston affiliate."

In fact, over the years, WBAI has done much to support and keep the other Pacifica stations afloat and solvent.

Cross-supporting, the stations can be an insurance policy for each other to ensure that they are all kept alive.  That interrelationship works in another beneficial way too: Each station with its own independent voice is an insurance policy for free speech.  Lest something outrageous go unremarked upon at one station, other stations can point that out. 

* * * 

It is noted in the resolution that one of the first and most important things WBAI listener members can do right is to make vote in the interfered with ongoing Local Station Board election.  This is important especially to help ensure that a quorum is reached in that election (only about 200 more listener votes are needed for that purpose); it's not just important who you vote for.  Voting, no matter what, is the most important thing.  We will post more about the election.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Resolution of WBAI’s Local Station Board Responding To Shutdown of WBAI New York

New Yorkers are just becoming aware that WBAI listener-supported public radio was seized and shut down on Monday of this week.  It was seized and shut down in an improper and probably highly illegal stealth attack, information about which is provided here, but is not widely available to New Yorkers yet.  As of now WBAI has obtained a court order that the station be returned to its proper management and its normal broadcasting restored.

 New Yorkers need better means of getting information and being informed.  WBAI was one of the few outlets that provided that information.  WBAI is New York's only listener-supported public radio station.  (WNYC, which refers to itself as listener supported, is 70% corporately captured, as reflected by its increasingly corporate press release points of view and tendency to promote instigation and perpetuation of the Unites States' perpetual wars. .    . and probably also by the $1 million annual income of WNYC's recent president, Laura Walker.)

We have noted (see our Project Censored interview) the parallels between why it's important to preserve traditional libraries and why terrestrial radio is similarly important, and how the censoring forces aligning to dismantle traditional libraries have are similarly interested in wanting to sabotage and end listener supported terrestrial radio stations like WBAI.  We have noted that "the fight to protect WBAI as an information commons obviously involves a significant overlap with the fight to defend the libraries." In fact (disclosure), this is why two of the Citizens Defending Libraries co-founders went on WBAI's Local Station board, to protect the station and ensure its success.  

Here,  explaining much of what has happened respecting the recent seizure if the WBAI station by hostile interests, is the resolution that was adopted unanimously on Wednesday night, October 9th, by the WBAI's Local Station Board that is demanding the restoration of this New York radios station to properly serve the public.  (And here is a link to video of the WBAI local station board meeting where the resolution was adopted provided by Joe Friendly.


Resolution of WBAI’s Local Station Board Responding To Shutdown of WBAI New York
Whereas, Article Seven, Local Station Boards, Section 3: Specific Powers and Duties, Subparagraph E. of the Bylaws (“Bylaws”), assigns various responsibilities respecting local station management to the WBAI Local Station Board (“WBAILSB” or “LSB”) as the Local Station Board for WBAI New York radio, including, in part:
    1.    “To screen and select a pool of candidates for the position of General Manager” and that the “LSB may initiate the process to fire a station General Manager.”

    2.    “To screen and select a pool of candidates for the position of station Program Director, from which pool of approved candidates the station's General Manager shall hire the station's Program Director.”

    3.    To evaluate “the station's Program Director.”

    4.    “To work with station management to ensure that station programming fulfills the purposes of the Foundation and is responsive to the diverse needs of the listeners (demographic) and communities (geographic) served by the station, and that station policies and procedures for making programming decisions and for program evaluation are working in a fair, collaborative and respectful manner to provide quality programming,” and

    5.    “To ensure that the station works diligently towards the goal of diversity in staffing at all levels and maintenance of a discrimination-free atmosphere in the workplace.”
Whereas, the WBAILSB has been working diligently in all respects to fulfill its responsibilities and yet WBAI’s broadcasting has apparently been shut down nevertheless without proper procedure or involvement of the WABILSB;

Whereas, WBAI was given in trust to Pacifica to maintain the vision of WBAI founder Louis Schweitzer to broadcast diverse and contrary views to the New York community; and

Whereas, a new Interim Executive Director for the Pacifica Foundation, Jon Vernile, appeared at WBAI with several other individuals, who are supposed to be currently serving as Directors of the Pacifica Foundation National Board (“PNB”) together with the other individuals taking direction from Mr. Vernile and/or these the two aforementioned Directors of the PNB (the “IED Crew”) and seized control of WBAI’s premises in order to shut down WBAI’s normal authorized broadcasting and replace it with other content of their own choosing; now, therefore be it

RESOLVED, by the LSB as follows:

Section 1.  We declare for the record that the IED Crew have shut down WBAI without notifying the LSB or any of its officers of these actions or providing any explanation thereto, and this is despite the fact that LSB Chair previously reached out to the IED seeking to open communications with the IED and offering to inform the IED about station and LSB operations and management, to which invitation the IED never responded, and despite the fact that the LSB’s Management Evaluation Committee similarly contacted the IED and similarly offered to inform him of its work underway, to which invitation the IED also did not respond.

Section 2.  We declare for the record that WBAI’s broadcast signal has since been used to broadcast programming that we hereby find is not “responsive to the diverse needs of the listeners (demographic) and communities (geographic) served by the station,” that such programing is not properly reflective of “station policies and procedures” and is not being produced by “working in a fair, collaborative and respectful manner” and is not providing “quality programming”; in fact, we find WBAI’s content has been politically neutered.

Section 3.  We declare for the record that the programming broadcast over WBAI by those seizing the WBAI station is harmful to WBAI and its brand, and to the community, and is driving away WBAI listeners.

Section 4.  Those seizing the WBAI station to shut it down have violated the Bylaws by not continuing to broadcast notice of the October 9, 2019 LSB meeting as required by the Bylaws.

Section 5.  We declare for the record that the WBAILSB made no decision to recommend the firing of WBAI’s General Manager, Berthold Reimers, nor of Interim Program Manager Linda Perry, nor has it voted in any way to express dissatisfaction with their work that could justify any current action that would hurt WBAI and Pacifica by removing them from their positions, especially in the arrogant, destructive, and illegal manner that the IED Crew acted.

Section 6.  We hereby direct that whatever acting General Manager the IED has put in place in charge of WBAI be removed and that whatever acting Program Director put in charge by the IED Crew (this is specifically not a reference to Linda Perry) also be removed, because, for at least three full business days, they have not identified themselves to the LSB or taken any steps to establish the relationship and coordination with the LSB required under the Bylaws, nor were whatever people who may hold such positions put in place by the IED Crew with proper procedures or involvement of the WBAILSB, and we further declare for the record that we did not endorse, or in any way concur in any actions of the IED Crew putting any such individuals in place, which we consider to be illegitimate and in contravention of the legal processes stipulated in the Bylaws.

Section 7.  The apparently ultra vires, unauthorized actions of the IED Crew that were launched with intentional secrecy are quite obviously intentionally harmful to WBAI and very significantly to Pacifica as a whole, including financially, and, accordingly, the LSB is committed to investigating for further appropriate action the likely personal liability of all members of the IED Crew, as well as any PNB member or other person assisting them in any way in such actions taken by them prior to authorization of the PNB.

Section 8.  Although we read in the New York Times that “Pacifica leaders said that the decision to shut down the station had been in the works for months, and that it was an essential step to save the larger foundation from ruin,” we do not know who the people are who are identifying themselves as these “Pacifica leaders,” and the LSB was never advised of, or consulted with about “the decision to shut down the station” that assertedly, “had been in the works for months,” and, as such, we think it is clear there could not have been any emergency reason for the formulation of secret plans to shut down the station without PNB or LSB knowledge, approval or consultation pursuant to referred to “months” of secrete planning.

Section 9.  The LSB finds for the record that unnoticed shutdown of WBAI was apparently intended to inflict extra harm on WBAI and Pacifica as a network by doing it in the middle of on ongoing, successful fund drive by WBAI and in the middle of an ongoing LSB election, thus impeding the right of WBAI voters to a free and fair election, including particularly, but not limited to impeding the ability of WBAI members to vote by taking down WBAI’s web pages and web links about the election.

Section 10. The WBAILSB finds it utterly reprehensible and believes it criminal that the IED Crew involved in this insubordinate insurrection arbitrarily shut down WBAI’s web pages and web links about the election, and redirected WBAI listener-donated funds to KPFA in California without first informing the PNB Directors and gaining the approval of WBAI's management and/or governing body and that the IED Crew arbitrarily and illegally occupied the station’s premises, evicted and locked out street producers, took equipment and station funds, solicited funds on WBAI’s airwaves for other station, and took intellectual property.

Section 11.  We find that in multiple ways the actions of the IED have been pretextual, associated with the dissemination of false information, and also appear to be discriminatory in intent and in result.

Section 12.  We urge all WBAI members to make every effort they can to vote in the Local Station Board elections, irrespective of the impediments thrown up by the actions of the IED Crew, while also recognizing that it is now probably necessary for Pacifica to attempt corrections for the defects the IED Crew have introduced into the election process. 

Section 13.  The LSB hereby supports and encourages all funding efforts to ensure that WBAI continues as a station broadcasting in New York appropriately reflecting the needs of our local communities.
                  
Section 14.  The LSB is particularly affronted and concerned that the months of planning this seizure by the IED Crew has entailed the deliberate elimination of WBAI’s archives, which, no longer available, means WBAI history is being erased in a very Orwellian fashion at exactly the time when the public seeing WBAI in the news should be able to explore and discover the content of the station that the IED Crew is now making the subject of controversy.

Section 15. The WBAILSB calls on any counsel representing Pacifica not to provide legal representation and counsel for any of the IED Crew in connection with their insubordination, insurrection, and ultra vires acts, as to do so would be, and must be handled as, an unwaiveable conflict of interest.

Section 16. The WBAILSB calls upon the PNB not to indemnify any of the IED Crew in connection with their insubordination, insurrection, and ultra vires acts; and instead, we ask the PNB to consider how it can recover for the losses sustained by WBAI and the rest of Pacifica by personally pursuing the individuals of the IED Crew who engaged in such acts.

Section 17. The WBAILSB urges the Directors of the PNB who have not invalidated their status as Directors by participating as a member of the IED Crew or by acting to support their actions, to remove from the Board and from any position in Pacifica all who participated in this attempted coup.

Section 18. The WBAILSB expresses, on behalf of the station, our gratitude to the Mayor of New York City and to the New York State Attorney General, for their expressions of friendship and support for WBAI, and urge them to assist WBAI in getting back on its feet.

Section 19. The WBAILSB finds that, as seized by the IDE Crew, the purpose of serving the New York community by broadcasting diverse and contrary views, for which WBAI founder Louis Schweitzer entrusted Pacifica with his gift is not being met or even minimally respected.
           
Section 20.  This resolution shall take effect immediately and direct the LSB chair to forward this resolution to the PNB and make every effort to promulgate it widely for public view and to ensure it becomes widely known that the LSB denounces this locking out of WBAI's staff and the taking over of its programming.
It is noted in the resolution that one of the first and most important things WBAI listener members can do right is to make vote in the interfered with ongoing Local Station Board election.  This is important especially to help ensure that a quorum is reached in that election (only about 200 more listener votes are needed for that purpose); it's not just important who you vote for.  Voting, no matter what, is the most important thing.  We will post more about the election.

There is a lot of what is going on with respect to this attempted takeover of WBAI that will feel familiar to New Yorkers who have paid close attention to the privatizing sell-off of libraries and the transformation of libraries and their traditions into less democratic reformulations that are less threatening to the consumer model based power structures of our society.

There is, for instance, the deceptive descriptions that a corporate press is far too ready to repeat.  For instance, without talking to anyone else, the New York Times unsekptically quoted John Vernile the Interim Executive Director who acted by stealth to close WBAI as he offered reassurance that WBAI was not going away, that "Pacifica was determined not to sell that prime piece of radio real estate," and that "Pacifica, he said, wants to `rebuild' WBAI at some point, although he did not offer a clear target date."  "Rebuild WBAI"?: That sounds like the assurance that NYC libraries were being sold to build new and better "libraries of the future" or "libraries of the 21st Century."   . .  But you "build" from the ground up, not the top down, which is what WBAI has been doing.  Also, this rhetoric is contrary to the known internal dialogues of the people associated with Mr. Vernile: Selling WBAI is exactly what they are talking about and advocating.

There is also the strategy of working secretly in advance attempting to take people by surprise, to make things a "done deal" or "fait acompli" by the time the curtain is raised on what's planned.

Going along with this with New York Libraries and with Pacifica's handling of WBAI is the funny bookkeeping that manufactures a "crisis" to justify proposals to finance in self-cannibalizing sales of core and valuable public properties.  Naomi Klein has written about the various tactics of "crisis capitalism" and this variation is one of them.

We New Yorkers also know that when the privatizers want a public asset disposed of, a favorite tactic of the privatizers is to use every ruse to have that asset become, along the way, as shabby, unattractive, and hopefully as alienating as possible.  That can be involve something as grotesque as not cleaning or fixing the bathrooms of libraries, and we have also seen in a remarkable pattern of unvarying repetition, that with every library that comes up as a next target for sale (except for the brand new SIBL, Science, Industry and Business Library), the air conditioning mysteriously breaks and becomes unfixable.  If NYU wants to build on what was dedicated as public park space it is supposed to maintain, that park space fills with trash, etc.  (It is too much to summarize right now, but part of the challenges WBAI has faced in recent years involve financial arrangements, that were not beneficial that the Pacfica national office as decision make saddled it with.) 

WBAI has been doing a remarkable job of relying on volunteers to successfully operate on a shoe string.  Pacifica does not, as advertised, have a debt crisis, but it does have a cash flow challenge engendered in part by what the internet seeming offers for free (but its not).  Cash flow challenges are frequently dealt with by investing to generate new revenue.  In any budget there are what is known as "expenditure driven revenues."  Arguably Pacifica has been quite stingy recently in allocating resources.  WBAI in the largest, perhaps most influential metropolitan media market does its 24/7 programming with just 7 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) employees.  The much smaller Pacifica station in Berkeley never reduced staff to cut costs when others did and has, an FTE staff that is several multiples of that number.

A WBAI listener who recently died very recently, just months ago, contributed over $700,000.  With the investment of a small fraction of that money, not much more than $40,000, WBAI could be activating use of the High Definition capabilities of its new far less expensive, but far better HD antenna.  In short order WBAI could be broadcasting three times as much content 24/7 over the three HD terrestrial radio channels made possible (mirrored by internet streams of those channels).  It probably wouldn't triple income for WBAI, but it would substantially increase it without comparable increases in expense, and it would hugely boost WBAI's media profile in NYC.  Pacifica directed and sequestered these funds elsewhere.   

In the world of the New York City library sell-offs, the background plans associated with the library sell-offs involve long lists of multiple libraries to be turned into real estate deals, but, in classic divide-and-conquer fashion, the public only hears about one or two of these libraries being for sale at a time.  In the case of Pacifica, if WBAI is marshaled to the fore to be the subject of a self-cannibalizing sale, there is nothing to prevent other Pacifica stations to be moved against in subsequent stealth attacks for future self-cannibalizing sales.

The New York City library sales involve the template of consolidating shrinkages; a central library with smaller, perhaps fewer satellite libraries and in total, there is less aggregate library space than before.  When WBAI was taken off the air, its website was replaced with a page unveiling a new brand, look or concept of Pacifica: "Pacifica Across America."

The Web Page that replaced WBAI when it was taken off the air and its web pages and archives removed from the internet
What is "Pacifica Across America"?  How would "Pacifica Across America" come into existence and manifest itself?  Through the internet?  Would there be a centralized station operating that supplied the content?

One other thing that New York City library defenders are very familiar with when it comes to the book-eliminating reformulations libraries is the way that the changes being made are pushing those seeking information toward the digital and into the internet, which is far less private and far more subject to control and outside influence.

In resisting the court's Temporary Restraining Order ordering that WBAI be restored to the air, Counsel representing Mr. Vernile along with whoever acted with him to take the station off the air were eager to argue that decision of the issue should be removed to federal court and determined as an FCC (Federal Communications Commission).  The Chair of the FCC is Ajit Pai, a corporate media conglomerate lobbyist who is using his chair position at the FCC to eliminate net neutrality, which then allows for the content control privatizing initiatives of the corporate conglomerates to prevail much more easily.  .  .  .  

. . .  Additionally, it has been reported that“leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”

That would go a long way to ensure that the content of any centrally based Pacifica Across America internet operation would be tame and nonthreatening to those in power.

When outside interests want to move in to take over and privatize, they don't always think in terms of acquiring the public assets in question: Taking control of the board that owns the public assets equates to the same thing.  In New York, one of the first two libraries for sale "as one of the most valuable" was the Pacific Branch, Carnegie designed and donated libraries in Brooklyn immediately next to Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly project (both of those targeted libraries were next to Fores City Ratner property).  Real estate interests had targeted the Pacific Branch library for direct acquisition in the mid-1970s.  Back then, when the community fought to fend off the attack, the Brooklyn Public Library's public spirited board fought with the community to defeat the sell off.  When plans again surfaced in early 2013 to sell the Pacific Library, the BPL's board had been populated by real estate interests and the BPL was took the side of the real estate community in arguing for and promoting the sell off of the Branch.

If the Pacifica network radio stations are subject to consolidating privatizing sell offs and replaced something more central that swings further toward the corporate mainstream in the flavor of its politics, its is not just the terrestrial stations and their current local voices that would be lost.  The Pacifica archives, a vast amount of content representing a tremendously important record of an alternative view of history, would also be under control of of that entity.  That content, to which WBAI, with its sister stations, has been a significant contributor is a money maker for Pacifica.  New York City library defenders are familiar with the consolidating elimination of access to books that is means information availability is ever more subject to the decisions of a corporately minded group in control.

If it seems that, with a takeover of the Pacifica's board, Pacifica could become the enemy of its own public assets, it should be remembered that intent and potential of setting up Pacifica as a network was the opposite.  The intent, and the way it has worked in the past was that the network of Pacifica stations would have the extra strength of being cross-supporting.  So, for instance, as one small example, the New York Times reported in 1972 that when "Houston was blown off the air twice during its first months of broadcasting when its transmitter was bombed, allegedly by a right wing group. Then WBAI held several successful fund raising marathons for the crippled station, and Manhattan listeners pledged some $5,000 for the Houston affiliate."

In fact, over the years, WBAI has done much to support and keep the other Pacifica stations afloat and solvent.


Cross-supporting, the stations can be an insurance policy for each other to ensure that they are all kept alive.  That interrelationship works in another beneficial way too: Each station with its own independent voice is an insurance policy for free speech.  Lest something outrageous go unremarked upon at one station, other stations can point that out.