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Living Lightly:

The Campaign to take back Pacifica

By RUSSELL MOKHIBER and ROBERT WEISSMAN

Denis Moynihan is an organizer with the Pacifica Campaign to take back the Pacifica radio network from those who would sell off one or more of the five Pacifica stations for millions, or who would transform the stations into something indistinguishable from the rest of the noise makers on the FM dial.

We met Moynihan last week in the hallway outside our offices.  Moynihan was on his way to the offices of Epstein, Becker and Green, a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C. that boasts of its union-busting prowess.

John Murdock, a partner with Epstein, Becker and Green, joined the Pacifica radio National Board of Directors last year. Epstein, Becker and Green now represent the Pacifica Board in a wide array of legal actions.

How corporatists like Murdock ended up hijacking a radio network which was started fifty years ago by activist Lew Hill to be a listener-supported, community radio network providing a forum for free expression and dissenting voices, is not easily answered.  This question was addressed most recently by Matthew Lasar in his compelling history, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Temple University Press, 2000).  It has something to do with failing to pay attention to the things we care about.  However it happened, people are out to right the wrong; the campaign is on to take back Pacifica, and Moynihan is on the front line.

In addition to boasting about helping its clients “maintain a union-free workplace,” Epstein, Becker  and Green has this thing for hospital mergers.  The afternoon that we dropped by, the firm was hosting a seminar so that its health care lawyers could boast about how they beat back a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenge to the merger of two large hospitals in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

When we walked into the meeting, about 40 lawyers were sitting around a conference table listening to partner Bill Kopit wax eloquent on the wonders of hospital mergers. When question time arose, we made the point that yes, Epstein, Becker and Green has the right to represent big hospital chains as it wishes, and to extol the virtues of mergers, but millions of Americans are demanding the same level of health care coverge that Europeans and Canadians receive — a single-payer universal health insurance.  Ironically, this would put many of Epstein, Becker and Green's health care clients out of business.

One of the few places one can hear open and robust discussion about universal health insurance is on Democracy Now, the award-winning one-hour news show hosted by Amy Goodman, on the Pacifica network — that is, on those days that the corporatists who have hijacked the network allow the show to air without interruption.

So, we suggested that Epstein, Becker and Green stick to its big business clients, get its hands off the only national radio voice that addresses the issue of national health insurance, and return the network to the listeners who fund it, support it, listen to it and defend it. Moynihan then rose and handed out flyers to everyone in the room. The flyer has the picture of a vulture hovering over Pacifica’s five stations — KPFA (San Francisco), WBAI (New York City), KPFT (Houston), KPFK (Los Angeles), and WPFW (Washington, D.C.).  Moynihan made his patented five minute speech, outlining the hijacking of Pacifica, and Murdock’s role as both board member and lawyer to Pacifica, and the campaign’s intent to inform Epstein, Becker and Green's lawyers in public meetings until justice is done.  The lawyers listened quietly, and we left.

These types of actions are happening throughout the country.  Last month, Michael Palmer, another corporatist Pacifica Board of Directors member, faced the heat and resigned.  Palmer is a vice president of CB Richard Ellis, the nation’s largest commercial real estate services company. The company’s web site claims to possess “unequaled knowledge of Mexico” and encourages clients to “co-locate near worker housing areas that will enjoy lower turnover and less competition for their workforce than other maquiladoras.”  Palmer’s claim to fame among Pacifica listeners came in 1999, when he wrote an e-mail urging the sale of WBAI and KPFA. Unfortunately for him, the e-mail was made public and outraged Pacifica listeners, who confronted Palmer and CB Richard Ellis executives relentlessly. Last month Palmer resigned from the Pacifica board.

Next on the Pacifica Campaign list is Ken Ford, who works for the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) in Washington, D.C. The NAHB takes the lead in public policy attacks on the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other mechanisms of law and order that might get in the way of sprawl-until-we-die growth.

Recently, about 15 Pacifica Campaigners attended the NAHB Board of Directors' meeting. How they got into the meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel will be left to historians to divine. But once in, they mingled with the 1,000 “builders” on the floor of the Hilton’s International Ballroom. One of the them bounded to the front of the ballroom, and began addressing the crowd about Ken Ford’s participation in the “attempted destruction” of the Pacifica Foundation. The young campaigner was tossed from the Hotel and told never to return.

The great thing about the Pacifica Campaign is its in-your-face activism.  At its root, it's about human beings showing up and confronting the forces of corporatism.  It beats phones, faxes and e-mails. Meet the enemy. Look them in the eye. Speak your mind. Demand resignation.

Take back Pacifica from the corporatists. (www.pacificacampaign.org).

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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Singing in harmony builds communities

By TINA ARNOPOLE DRISKILL

“Singing in harmony is the paradigm for how we might respect differences while coming together to create a greater whole. It emphasizes both the strength of the individual voice to hold its own while recognizing that the whole sounds only as good as the individual parts. It’s about blending and listening and helping others without losing your own voice. That is the ideal of community... living where each person does his/her own thing and yet works in harmony with everyone else to the betterment of the community. Where there is a weak voice everyone needs to figure out how to strengthen it or the whole community suffers.”

These are the words of Linda Hirschhorn, singer, cantor, songwriter, choral conductor, arranger and social political activist, who sat in at Lawrence-Livermore Nuclear Laboratory alongside our own Jim Higgs and other Modesto Peace/Life contemporaries. It was during the 1980’s that she became active in the anti-nuclear and Central American movements, which inspired her to begin writing songs of protest.

A cantor and Jewish educator in the San Francisco Bay Area and founder/ member of Vocolot, a women’s a capella ensemble, Hirchhorn recently visited Modesto to share her views on the connection between music (particularly singing in harmony), social justice and spirituality. She likens music “to a beautiful crystal with many facets to delve into and explore,” and finds in choral music a “symbol or paradigm of how to create utopian community.”

She says she “became a songwriter at the age of 23, when no song...seemed to express adequately [her] own particular view of the world.” She cut her musical teeth on Jewish Orthodox liturgical chants, while sharing the synagogue balcony with the “Chazzan’s [cantor’s] seven daughters,” as the male members of the congregation chanted the prayers downstairs. At nine she joined a yeshiva choir learning under a noted arranger and conductor. As a graduate of the High School of Music and Art in New York, she went from liturgical music to singing “the requisite number of masses and requiems” until she “discovered the Jewish Zamir Chorale of New York”. Upon moving to California in 1970 she joined the San Francisco and Oakland Symphony choruses.

Hirschhorn has also spent many years at Habonim Labor Zionist Youth Movement camps learning folk, American and international working class songs. It was at these camps that “my political consciousness was formed,” she says. In the 1960’s she experienced Israeli kibbutz living and attended the University of Jerusalem where she steeped herself in the songs of Israeli pioneers and contemporary poets. Her twenties found her ensconced in the Greenwich Village coffee house folk scene.

She became conflicted between the singer who sang nostalgic songs of Israel at Sunday schools and ladies luncheons and the persona who sang peace songs at protest rallies. “I didn’t think the Jewish luncheon circuit would be interested in my political views—particularly those that expressed concerns about the Palestinians, and I felt too self-conscious to sing in Hebrew in the world of folk festivals, coffee houses and political demonstrations (often organized by many secular unaffiliated Jews!)” she explains.

“It wasn’t until I connected with the women’s and feminist movement that a slow integration began,” she states. “Jewish feminism with its insistence upon and permission for an honest expression of one’s deepest self without shame or inhibition helped me integrate my political and Jewish roots and at last feel empowered to do something about having been relegated to the balcony all those early years.” (At age 48 she was officially invested as a cantor and was allowed to sing the cherished melodies of her childhood from the downstairs pulpit of her girlhood Washington Heights synagogue.)

.“The Hebrew and English texts that I began to write and seek out, more and more spoke to women’s and [other] social issues.”

In June of 1995, Hirschhorn traveled to Kiev, Ukraine, with project Kesher to form the first International Jewish Women’s Chorus, which included 75 women of different classes, lifestyles and experiences from all over the world. “Our common language,” she says, “was the music, [which] opened the doors to further [and continuing] social intercourse and connections between women.”

Hirschhorn's  artist-in-residency program, “A Concert Starring You”, takes her around the country and across denominational lines to help communities establish choruses, empowering groups and individuals to make their own music, find their own creativity and be the stars of their own shows. She sees music as a powerful way to question and understand text, which in turn leads to resolution of the spiritual quest.

“Writing songs...is one of the deepest ways I connect with my own sense of spirituality. Heschel tells us it is an essential component of the human spirit to do and experience wonder, to revel in creation and to participate in it. The discovery of new textures of voices weaving in and out of each other keeps my sense of wonder alive. A lyric deepens my understanding of the world and my existence in it,” she claims. “It’s like having my own revelation taking place on a regular basis. St. Augustine has said that singing a prayer is like saying it twice. Perhaps writing the music for a prayer is like saying it four times,” she surmises. Writing a song “becomes my quest for the ultimate perfect combination of voices, words and textures...not unlike the human quest for understudying the divine.

“A truly beautiful song makes the melody and words feel like an organic whole, even as it integrates and is influenced by the overtones and rhythms of a surrounding culture,” she concludes. “ In Abraham Heschel’s essay, the Vocation of the Cantor, he talks about music as the soul of language, how the music must not distort or contradict the meaning of a word, but enhance and glorify it. A word has a soul and we must learn how to attain insight into its life. Songs should give wings to our prayers, songs should give color to our grief and joy, songs should express the depths of our greatest yearnings.”

MORNING IN MINDANAO

I.

"Have you heard about the purges?"
she asked over breakfast.
Morning light turning the room to gold.

"The movement told me to leave for a week.
They had targeted my boyfriend as an agent,
though I didn't know it then."

"When I got back, he was gone.
I was frantic. I search everywhere,
asked everyone I knew.
Until finally,
a friend
told me what happened."

"We took them to the mountains, " he said.
"Each was in a cage.
For two weeks we tortured them,
and then,
a bullet to the head."

"I showed no emotion then," she said.
"He was surprised at that,
I only asked - What about our defense of
human rights?
He had no answer -

just the letter he handed me,
written by my boyfriend
shortly before he was executed,
where he swore
his love,
and his innocence."

"Time passed, some healing,
until
over a meal with my new boyfriend,
this same man
out of the blue says,
"You know you were right.
We were wrong to kill your boyfriend.
We were just so paranoid.
I've thought alot about it.
I don't think he was an agent at all."

"And then I cried," she said.
"I sobbed, raged.
So unfair,
so needless,
so wasteful.
How do I make sense of it?
My husband says it happened so we could be together."

Her face lightens from sorrow
as her 4 year old storms into view,
demanding her full attention.

"I'm grateful he told me,"
collecting the dishes.
"I can't hate him either.
He's my friend, too.
There's been enough hating."

Walking to the car
long morning shadows
fall across her face
as she opens the gate
and goes to work.

II.

I carry your story
in my heart
like some urgent message
from the frontlines
that must inform
where we go from here.

The intelligence of grief.
Aching truth
of precious life betrayed.

But I know my heart,
like so many others,
moved for the moment -
but then
the static:
It's just how it is.
It's not my fault. It's not my problem.
It's over now anyway.
Nothing can be done,
or said,
or felt.
Grow up! Get on with your life!
Don't be morbid, depressing, a downer.
Who do you think you are anyway?

The message clouds,
the gift,
the redemptive opportunity
fades from view.
Slowly,
surely,
it will be our undoing.

- Thomas Hampson

Author's note: I wrote this during a sabbatical in the Philippines. Mindanao is a large island in the southern Philippines. It has been a battle ground in struggles over land rights, indigenous people's rights and Muslim autonomy. The progressive movement that arose in opposition to Ferdinand Marcos was strong there, too. Unfortunately, in fear of government spies they began to brutally purge suspected traitors. The story recalled in this poem arises from that time.

Book Review

By MYRTLE OSNER

“Nickel and Dimed (on (not) getting by in America)"  by Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Holt, 2001.

As I read this book, my mind immediately went back to 1934, during the Great Depression, the year my mother died while working at cleaning apartments. It was a menial job, just like Ehrenreich describes in this book. My father was out of work, having lost his job when the banks failed. That was another time, but this book proves to me at least that very low income working people are at the same place as my family was during the depression. For the record, today, Barbara Ehrenreich notes, the bottom of the economy is not better off than many people were during the depression, they are just invisible.

Ehrenreich’s editor, Lewis Lapham, took her out to lunch to discuss poverty in today’s world. “How does anyone live on the wages of the unskilled? How were the roughly four million women booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? “ Someone ought to go out and try it for themselves. Lapham said, “YOU!”

So began the odyssey from job to job of Ehrenreich, who limited herself to the actual cash she earned, including food, lodging, and even working two jobs, she was hanging on by her fingernails. No benefits exist in these jobs. If you get sick, you lose your job, period. Sharing time and working side by side with these workers revealed a lot that we may know exists but don’t want to face: all are hard manual labor, repetitive, tedious work, often with abominable working conditions and supervisors so uncaring and domineering the rest of us wouldn’t think twice about quitting. No wonder the turnover is so fast in most of the jobs.

Finding a place to live as a single fiftyish woman, that was safe and clean, was the first hurdle, almost impossible on the wages earned. Frequently during her job search she took two jobs at once, revealing that many of her co-workers did the same to make ends meet. Even then, take home pay was eroded by demands that they wear uniforms, keep them clean when no washing facilities existed in the housing, as well as other ways used to dock their pay. Worst of all were the hassles endured by women with children, whose child care dilemmas are a nightmare. Just getting the children to child care (assuming that such a thing even exists), when you can’t afford a car or gas, for instance, then finding a place safe for the children is daunting. To cope, many families double up, crowding several in one apartment inadequate for one family. When she asked women who had stuck with the job, they usually had a family to help care for the children. Women who were looking for work because of being denied welfare (you know, “welfare to work”), the task of going from place to place just looking for work drained them, and the application process always included long waits, trips to many agencies often spread out over a big city, drug tests, “personality surveys” designed to trip you up.

Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, an aide in an Alzheimer’s ward, housework with Merry Maids, at Wal-Mart (her diatribe against their practices will stop you from ever going there again). Her conclusion is that people on minimum wage can’t make it because of the high cost and unavailability of housing. Just getting together first and last month’s rent is impossible if you haven’t a job to begin with. Other costs pale beside this one. But why go on? A statement taken from a Church Women United newsletter, attributed to a “Former AFDC recipient “ should suffice:

“I was on welfare for several years. In the years since I got off I’ve paid four times as much back to the government in taxes than they ever gave me on welfare.” (from a woman got an education while on welfare.)

“Funding public good is not exactly a high priority of government, which is busily cutting programs for children in favor of a huge tax cut for the rich.” Katha Pollitt in The Nation May 28, 2001.  

Read this book if you dare to be disturbed, and never again will you criticize low income workers.

“No group or class should be freed from doing the toil of the culture. One of our current problems is that there are too many people who simply have no idea how much unpleasant, tedious and repetitive work is required to support their high level activities, and how ineffective they would be without the effort of those they all too often disdain.”

                        Robert Theobald