You were fired? KPFK is a racist in practice, but preach all this ‘we are world’ bullshit for the audience to hear.

I could hear the attitude in the others voice around you when you were on the air. I hear the snarky laughs and playing down of African Americans achievements on this show all the time.

1. Yesterday’s (3-2-10) show Global Village (forgot the host name – look her up) – What is so funny about Nina Simone having a romantic relationship with a Head of State in Liberia? Just what are you and your racist commentator snickering about?

2. Sonali, why do you try to down play the achievements of Black Women like Angela Davis on your show, but scream with passion the achievements on Howard Zen?

I don’t like this carrying on. This is Los Angeles, you know. Very racist – 1950′s style racist – towards African Americans. I am from the Midwest, and we are WAY MORE progressive than the West – IF YOU CALL WHAT THE WEST DOES AS PROGRESSIVE. its actually the most RACIALLY AND SOCIALLY REGRESSIVE REGION OF THE UNITED STATES.

BLACK FOLKS don’t take no shit – like you Jerry – but we don’t get fired. We get justice. We fight hard for justice.

Jerry I miss you. We all miss you. We would like to see JUSTICE HAPPEN, AND YOU GET YOUR JOB BACK. But those racist assholes DO NOT LIVE THE MESSAGE THEY “PREACH” TO THE PUBLIC: FREE SPEECH.

You son of a bitches.

I have spent alot of money to KPFK.

I am FINISHED with KPFK.

I will never donate to KPFK again.

“Romey says: We must organize to shut KPFK down until Jerry is rehired &
Sean Heitkemper is fired!…. Boycott the Fundrive! Jam the Lines,
Keep Jerry At KPFK BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!”

Is this the Spirit of our fellow members in the Progressive Community??
KPFK has positively contributed to millions of people, in one way or another, for decades. Why sabotage this station for ANY reason?? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Let’s practice compassion and positive communication. Problems have solutions; adding aggression/animosity to the mix only creates deep lasting resentment and destroys the spirit of what we all set-out to accomplish in the 1st place. There are 2 SIDES to every story, and we have only heard Jerry’s (on this Blog) so far. You can find truths on both sides; and if both sides understood that, they would work towards compromises and solutions.
Let all this animosity end. I see aggressive confrontations all the time in the so called “Left – Progressive Community”. If people are self-righteous and attack problems with animosity… then, I don’t see where the “Progressive” are any different then the “Bush” people of the world.

Let’s be better than this.

When free speech is placed into the domain of property owners, these property owners decide, based upon their own privately held property interest and based upon their particular social class interest (which they call a community interest), what should be distributed for consideration by the masses of people. Rarely will these property owners allow a point of view disseminated that will fly in the face of their own narrowly defined interest. And when they do on those rare occasions, it is because a power struggle has broken out between rival groups within the elite which requires mobilizing the masses temporally in order to prevail in resolving the immediate issue.

When Bush was beating the drums for making war on Iraq, a public discussion in all the national newspapers about American imperialism emerged . As soon as the issue was resolved (in favor of Bush and the neocons) the talk about imperialism disappeared. Another more recent example revolves around the financial melt down. Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times (9/6/09) narrowly defined the failure to predict the banking collapse within the profession of economics as due to the ascendancy of the “Freshwater School of Economics” centered around the University of Chicago. But Krugman also pointed out that the “Saltwater Schools” located within east and west coast elite universities also failed to predict the coming disaster. He concluded that “…economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly.” The problem with Krugman’s analysis is his failure to spotlight schools of economics that had predicted the meltdown (e.g. Stagnation Theory centered around Monthly Review Magazine).

The overall long term effect of a small elite controlling the free speech distribution rights is to narrow the public debate. Issues are framed according to what is responsible debate and what lies outside the mainstream. Once an issue has been narrowly framed and widely distributed seeping down to every level in society, anyone attempting to open up and widen the debate within social institutions and at any institutional level are automatically, in a knee jerk fashion, looked upon with suspicion and quickly marginalized. Thus no one with a dissenting opinion about the coming Iraq War writing in the main stream media could get published because the pro war/anti war debate had already been resolved in favor of war. With war decided upon the new debate concerned itself with what strategies should be implemented in order to win the war. By late 2002 antiwar views were considered irresponsible.

With the rise of the internet, an avalanche of free speech outlets circumventing the distribution privileges of private owners has emerged. People are able to speak to each other and do it in a wide variety of venues thereby opening up and widening the debate over the issues of the day. Since I don’t know enough about how internet information is accessed and distributed I don’t know how important the internet really is. Should the internet become a major player in debating important issues uncontrolled by the distribution elites then that would be a victory for real free speech. How long this will be allowed to continue? I suspect, should it become a threat to those elites, controls will be put in place and free speech will again become a controlled commodity, a myth in America.