From: Carl Gunther <cgunther at ix.netcom.com> To: freekpfk at yahoogroups.com Subject: Debunking the Cooper Exit Letter Copies to: freepacifica at recordist.com, NewPacifica at yahoogroups.com,
WBAIelections at yahoogroups.com Send reply to: cgunther at ix.netcom.com Date sent: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 10:35:24 -0800
Mark Cooper's letter, which is appended below, is a long string of outrageous deceptions and lies whose intended effect is to destroy KPFK and its community. With patience, however, it is not difficult to untie the many strands of his absurdly tangled web.
I have attempted to respond to every important point in his message, in more or less the same order as he has presented them. The letter turns out to be astonishing in that there is hardly a single truth to be found in it, and when some trivial truth *is* presented, without a single important exception, that truth is used to support an even greater lie.
Cooper starts by claiming that the basis for his removal, the charge that he refused to fundraise for the station, is false. He makes a tortured argument for this on the grounds that although in fact, as he admits, he refused to ask listeners for money, he agreed to continue to do his program. So, by his own admission, he clearly *was* refusing to cooperate in the fund drive by not doing the pitch. The hosts do the pitch during fundraising, not somebody else.
His claim to be cooperating is false on those grounds alone.
But it goes much deeper than that. Anyone who has listened to his program in the last week knows that he has attempted to actively alienate his listeners from the station's new leadership, and has actively questioned whether listeners should give funds to the station. Just as he is continuing to do in this letter, even after he has been shown the door. Clearly, his intent is to sabotage the station in any way that he can. So, his claim of cooperation is, it must be said, an outright lie, not just an obfuscation. His arguments in this very letter amount to an assertion that the station does not deserve to exist. For station management to keep such a person on the air during a critical fund drive would indicate a suicidal tendency which, I am happy to report, they apparently do not have to the degree that Cooper would prefer.
Cooper wants the station dead because it is easier to speak ill of the dead than to do the same to the living, who can defend themselves. He wants the station dead so that he can revise the history of his relationship to the station in order to cover up his role in supporting the old regime that ran the network into debt and attempted to destroy its mission. He wants to claim that he was outside of the fray, and that while the two tigers fought he was warning, warning, warning - but no one would listen to his cries, "and *that*, my friends, is why the station no longer exists today."
The continued existence and success of the station after his exit, and its recovery from the massive debt and the destruction of its programming and community that he helped to precipitate would, and will, be a continuing proof that he fought the *bad* fight, not the good one, and lost. It is, like Nicaragua, the threat of a good example, which must be destroyed.
Cooper charges that the network's current leaders, because they filed lawsuits against the former Board, are therefore responsible for bankrupting the station.
This argument presumes that there would have been no danger to the network if the old Board had been allowed to proceed unchecked. That presumption is completely false. Had the lawsuits not been filed, the old Board would have continued to destroy Pacifica's mission, and would probably have proceeded in its plans to sell off one or more of its stations. It had already replaced KPFT's programming with a country music format and WPFW's programming with a jazz music format. It brought in Mark Schubb to KPFK, who removed close to 150 staff and volunteers, including many programs that served minority viewpoints and underrepresented communities. I could of course go on, but the point is that the actions of the old Board made the lawsuits an absolute necessity. Therefore, the old Board and its supporters, including Cooper, were and are responsible for any attendant expenditures.
Not to mention the fact that the money spent by the old Board itself on the lawsuits was many times that spent by the dissidents, in part because of contracts awarded to law firms with direct personal connections to members of the Board. And not to mention the fact that the old Board awarded "severance" packages to loyalists, including Schubb, totalling nearly a half a million dollars in the last year or so prior to its defeat. And not to mention the money spent for "security" firms to eavesdrop on employees, union busting experts, and other measures intended to prevent a revolt against censorship and injustice by totalitarian means.
So, for Cooper to claim that current management is responsible for the debt of the station is, quite simply, a lie. And for Cooper to pretend that he was above all of this "fussing and fighting" when he functioned throughout as a propagandist and apologist for the old regime is yet another fabrication. You can see why he wants the station dead, because as long as it lives it can let people know the truth of what Cooper and his allies have atttempted to do to it.
Its very existence is a reproach to him and his ilk.
Cooper goes on to cast doubt upon the network's viability, trying to convince his readers that the network will fail and that therefore their money will be wasted. This is untrue, but Cooper is trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He will not be allowed to succeed.
He claims that there is no mature and rational business plan, even after the first public audit in many years was performed by the network's new leadership (which is the only reason that Cooper himself, or anyone, even *knows* the full extent of the debt we are in), and even after hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost-cutting measures have been put into place, including at least one very important one that Cooper himself decried on the air (the shutdown of PNN - which he also condemns in this letter).
Speaking of the shutdown of PNN, that "20 year old National newscast," Cooper fails to mention that it is being replaced with Free Speech Radio News, which was founded by former PNN members, including Verna Avery Brown, who resigned in protest at the censorship and intimidation placed upon them by Cooper's good friends (who he doesn't seem to know so well anymore) on the old national Board.
So, in many respects, in fact in almost *every* respect, the replacement of PNN with FSRN represents the *restoration* of that distinguished "20 year old National newscast" to its former integrity, and, to a significant extent, to its former staff.
As for the charge that our new Treasurer served jail time for tax evasion, that is something that I have never heard before. Considering the source of the information, its credibility doesn't amount to much. If there *is* any truth to it, then its significance is completely other than is being claimed by Cooper, given that his claims of malfeasance in the present tense are completely contradicted by reality. Jabari presided over the audit that first revealed the extent of Pacifica's debt and created the basis for addressing it in the competent and professional manner that the current Board *has* been addressing it. So, the charge is an ad hominem at best.
As for the charge that "cronies" were hired into executive positions, what does that mean? Who is a crony - someone you already know? How many people populate a new organization's leadership with people who they *don't* know? "Crony" is just a pejorative term for a trusted associate, who may have struggled beside you to free the network from its bondage and who now is continuing to work beside you to bring it back to its glory. Note that Dan Coughlin, one of those singled out for abuse, has just taken a voluntary and hefty cut in his pay as part of his commitment to getting the network back on its feet. That is not the action of someone who is trying to benefit from his friendships in a corrupt manner, as implied by Cooper's ugly and ultimately self-revealing characterization.
To top everything, Cooper accuses the new leadership of Pacifica of shirking moral responsibility! That is exactly what Cooper himself is doing throughout this entire assault upon reality. After all of the false accusations that I have listed and exposed above, he has the unmitigated chutzpah to further attack the network's new leadership for failing to show the proper remorse for things that they never did! This mendacious propagandist then has the gall to say that the attitude of this "unrepentant" leadership is "intellectually offensive!" It is astonishing how often and how well Cooper reveals his own character in the false portraits that he paints of his intended victims.
Cooper moves on to claim that he was attacked in the past for the "crime" of having "raised money for KPFK." He must be referring to the fact that he and Mark Schubb, during the last fund drive, hid from listeners the knowledge that their every penny was going straight to the old national Board, where it was being ground into dust in a final attempt to defeat the lawsuits that were then nearing a successful result for our movement. All this while unpaid bills at the station were running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Schubb and Cooper were fully aware of what was going on, but hid that reality from their victims, the listeners, who paid for the final folly of the old Board in the belief that they were funding the urgent needs of the station.
He moves on to vent his hatred at the Local Advisory Board (LAB), whose members, in an effort that can only be described as heroic, started the lawsuits that ultimately freed the network from its bondage and made possible the flowering of democracy within the network, which will include the election of that very Local Advisory Board no later than this December. He disparages the LAB as "unelected," despite the fact that no body in the history of Pacifica has *ever* been elected by listeners before the year 2000 (see below), and despite the fact that the LAB was the primary agent in mandating that its own members should become elected by the listeners, as they will be at the end of this year, and that such elections were a fundamental demand of the LAB and of the listener lawsuits that was incorporated into the legal settlement that the old Board was eventually forced to sign.
It is interesting to see how opportunistically Cooper seizes upon the concept of democracy as an instrument of attack, when from 1996 until the old regime was ousted he supported Mark Schubb's selectively enforced "gag rule" that prohibited the discussion of any matters "internal" to Pacifica, although any child can tell you that free speech is an absolutely essential precondition for the existence of democratic forms.
Such "internal" matters included not only the lawsuits and the old Board's profligate wastage of listener contributions, but also the first listener-based elections of a Local Advisory Board in any Pacifica (or other!) radio station's history in 2000 and again in 2001, at Pacifica's flagship station KPFA in Berkeley, led by the very listeners' movement that Cooper decries. This revolutionary development in the democratization of the network was utterly censored from KPFK's reportage by those great proponents of "democratization" of the LABs, Mssrs. Schubb and Cooper.
After all of the above deceptions and lies, it is truly refreshing when Cooper moves on to half-truths, presumably because he has run out of the 100 proof stuff. This transition begins when he correctly quotes Dan Coughlin as saying that the network has “separated itself... from the communities that have supported the stations for decades.”
Coughlin's words represent the acknowledgement and mourning of loss that must occur before healing can begin. The network has truly been damaged by the purging of African-American, immigrant and other underrepresented communities from the station's programming. The process of repair and rapprochement must now begin. But to claim from this statement that the largely white and liberal demographic addressed by Cooper's programming is unwelcome at the station is a divisive lie that is intended to split the KPFK audience along racial, ethnic and economic lines. KPFK's new leadership wants to keep the white liberal audience while broadening its programming to include other, formerly locked out groups. It is our movement's sincere desire that the white liberal community will support this necessary broadening, and that these listeners will take an active interest in communities and issues other than their own. With hard work, the old and the new audience will get to know one another, and will come together in a cooperative relationship, despite the worst efforts of utterly destructive and divisive people to prevent it.
I have to give Cooper credit for one thing, though - when he sees a weakness in the progressive community, he moves right in to exploit it. And what better crack in the rusted progressive armor than the well-known schism between African Americans and Jews?
That is why, when Ron Wilkins and three other former African American programmers who were purged by the Schubb/Cooper axis recently came back for an hour on air after years of absence, they were immediately greeted by Cooper's on-air charges of anti-Semitism, which he repeats in this letter.
Make no mistake - Cooper has no intention of healing the rift between these two communities, which used to be allied in a mutually supportive progressive alliance. He wants divisive issues, and the more divisive the better, so that he can kill KPFK and everything that it stands for before people can see its potential to express and bind together the sundered pieces of the greater community - a realization that will cause them to rush to its support.
There is without a doubt a current of anti-Semitism that runs through the African American community, and, unfortunately, a complementary and much more pervasive racism against African Americans that runs through the entire white community, although I believe to a somewhat lesser extent in the Jewish community than among whites as a whole. We need African American leaders and programmers who can acknowledge this wrong and self-defeating current and work against it, while forcefully bringing to light the racism of the white community, which is reflected more in mass imprisonments and police violence than in the impotent bitterness of hateful speech with which victims express the damage that racism has done to their hearts and their minds.
Ron Wilkins is a leading voice of the African American community, and that community deserves and needs to be heard on KPFK. When he and other programmers were removed from the station by Mark Schubb, charges of anti- Semitism were part of the reasons provided. But these programmers were never replaced by other voices from that same community, giving the lie to that explanation. The rueful reference to another African American programmer by Wilkins as a "paint job" was not an empty epithet but a substantive criticism. What the term means is a person of color who does not represent the issues or interests of communities of color on the air. In short, a token representative of a group who uses his color to present the comforting illusion to a largely while audience that all is well and that racism is an unfortunate historical fact whose effects are no longer felt in our "much more enlightened" era.
Can the white community have a dialogue about race and racism with leaders of color who are not willing to put on a happy face and style? Can we hear the unpleasant and sometimes warped anger that results from harsh social policies and actions, engage with it in a critical manner, and try to build the community once again? Marc Cooper hopes not, but for those of us who believe Los Angeles could become a real city again instead of an uneasy collection of haves and have nots, of victims and executioners, of prisoners and wardens, that dream is still alive, and KPFK can be one of its instruments.
Marc Cooper says that he sees the future of KPFK as "very dark," but that is just another example of his penchant for painting each hopeful collective effort with the sullen projections of his convoluted mind.
The next part of his letter extols the increased fundraising, audience and professionalism that he claims Pacifica experienced under Mark Schubb. Whatever the truth of these claims, they have nothing to do with Pacifica or with Pacifica's mission, in which Cooper quite evidently has only a negative interest. And when he claims that 2 out of 3 of current listeners have come to the station in the last five years, what he's describing is a massive turnover in audience that came at the expense of communities that had no other access to the airwaves, not just an increase in overall numbers. What he is describing, in fact, is the near-elimination of diversity from the air.
Any commercial radio format will make more money and attract more listeners than any public station could ever hope to do. That is not the goal of Pacifica. Pacifica's mission is to honor and support diverse communities and to examine just what it is that keeps them from working cooperatively together. Pacifica is that small, determined group of people you keep hearing about who are intent upon changing the world. It's not KROC, it's not KCRW, and it's certainly not the divisiveness represented by Marc Cooper.
The self-promoting redux of Cooper's career that occurs next in the letter does not require any answer. I would never argue - especially after analyzing this letter - that he is not talented. But what we need at KPFK are talented people with good intentions, not people who are intent upon wrecking the station and its community of listeners.
Cooper moves on to equate political protest to "know-nothingism," without any justification whatever. The analysis of books by individuals holding forth on the air is evidently done by intellectuals, while people who collectively demonstrate their desire for change in the streets are apparently motivated by some brute instinct, some herd mentality, some inexplicable impulse that, for Cooper, could not possibly originate in the mind.
I can only guess that that is because Cooper equates having a heart with lacking an intellect, cooperation with an inability to fend for one's self, and involvement in community with a lack of individual merit.
That is not just elitism; it is a fundamental distrust and antipathy toward the very concept of community. While Cooper believes that individuals can become great, he fears and rejects those who wish to become a part of something that is *greater* than themselves.
That must be why so much of his effort in this letter is aimed at tearing down and breaking apart any and all manifestations of a collective consciousness and identity.
People like Cooper are a part of the current process of decay, and they seem to grow more numerous and influential with every passing year. But our desire to unite is still strong, and despite those who work to prevent it, we will continue to find one another, just as we have done in this current precious moment.
Carl
----- The following is Marc Cooper's original missive, to which the above is a response --CG
------- Forwarded message follows ------- Please take a moment to read and feel free to forward to as many other KPFK listeners as possible.. MARC
Tuesday Night February 19, 2002
-- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA www.disweb.org