Matt Lasar has an article in the Nation titled "Can Pacifica be Saved?" (http://www.thenation.com/article/197825/pacifica-radio-worth-saving) That's a good question. Lasar doesn't talk much about the programming, mostly about the dysfunctional financial/organizational setup.
I sort of gave up on WBAI, the NYC affiliate of Pacifica, about a decade ago but still have it preset on my Boston Audio tabletop radio (a fantastic piece of electronics) in between two sports stations, WFAN and ESPN. While going between WFAN and ESPN last night, I thought I'd give the station 30 seconds of my time. A guy was giving a talk about rotten "the system" was in the USA focused on the two-party system and its major donors, Koch on one side and Soros on the other. He pronounced Koch as "Katch" rather than "Coke", which I thought was odd but not nearly as odd as his take on Soros. He said that Soros was trying to make people "dumb" so that they would be more obedient and the way he was doing that was by promoting marijuana. He supposedly wanted it to be dispensed in high schools. Now the truth is that Soros's fight against repressive drug laws is one of the best things his foundation does. I kept it on until they announced the name of the speaker. It turned out to be Webster Tarpley, a former member of the Larouche cult who has made a name for himself as a conspiracy theorist par excellence. Here's some info on him from Wikipedia: "Tarpley maintains that the September 11 attacks were engineered by a rogue network of the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies as a false flag operation. "On November 21, 2011, while traveling to Syria, Tarpley told Syria's Addounia TV that the Syrian Civil War was a NATO-CIA ploy to destabilize Syria using mercenaries and death squads against the population and the Syrian government." Here are some of the books he has written: --Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate --Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of America: Polygamy, Theocracy, and Subversion Tarpley was a guest on Bonnie Faulkner's "Guns and Bread", a show that originates from KPFA, the Berkeley Pacifica affiliate. If you have a taste for that sort of thing, you can hear the Tarpley show here: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/111349 Faulkner, like Tarpley, is a long-standing 911 Truther. Can Pacifica be saved? That's a good question. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
