September 2009
September 29, 2009 - Want to see something strange?
It may not be available to see for long, but starting yesterday, if you go to www.kdna.org, you can see the web site built for KDNA back in 1999 by former founders Rosa Ramon and Chuck Reinsch. They bought the domain for KDNA, paid for the web hosting, and maintained the site for the next 8 years. Current station manager, Gabriel Martinez in 2007 said he wanted to do it himself. Although they had concerns, after all they were volunteers doing it for free, they said sure, its all your's. So Martinez hired a consultant for $15,000 and built a new site. Now, Fernandez has hired yet another consultant for another $7,000 to build another site. Looks like she has taken down Gabriel's site in preparation to launch her own. Hope she understands that the material they are publishing now belongs to Ramon and Reinsch, and that they share it only in support of the fired and abused staff, and the community that is suffering under her regime. There's a lot of history there that Fernandez has been trying to erase from memory.
Note: This year the video histories were re-encoded in better quality than the 1999 originals - the technology has changed and there are now places (youtube) that will stream media for free. So if you want to watch the videos, do it here: Video history
September 27, 2009 - "First of all, this conversation never took place."*
The other night at El Centro de la Raza’s annual auction fund raiser we were talking about the troubles at KDNA. Someone mentioned Maria Fernandez having a MBA (Masters of Business Administration) and then, laughing, said “that’s the problem.” We’re not so sure. It is too simple, and, even if the media finds it convenient to blame MBA’s for last year’s financial collapse, we aren’t going to paint with so broad a brush. Being educated in business administration and financial management does not necessarily mean that the holder of a MBA is driven only by avarice and greed, and is devoid of ethics and conscience. There are MBA’s that use their educations to not only advance their own careers, but also to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged, that care about and work to build a community that values social and economic justice.
So, if having an MBA is not Fernandez’s problem, what is? A couple of weeks ago you might have heard about, or actually listened to, tapes of Bernie Madoff talking on the telephone, telling the person at the other end how to confound the investigators of the Securities and Exchange Commission. We were startled, but not surprised, to hear Madoff’s primary directive: don’t write it down. "The best thing to do is not get involved with written instructions, if possible," Madoff says. "Cause anytime you say you have something in writing, they ask for it." So it turns out that one of the first things we heard about Fernandez, about which we wrote earlier this year, could have been lifted from chapter one of the Bernie Madoff playbook. “If I didn’t write it down, I didn’t say it.”
We thought it was pretty bad at the time, but hearing it coming out of the mouth of someone who had just been convicted of fraud and sentenced to 150 years in prison, put the words in a whole new light. Cheating on your taxes, on the speed limit, on one’s spouse has somehow become acceptable, and even admired behavior in contemporary society. Doing the right thing, more often than not, means finishing last, and is for chumps. We always thought that accountability meant standing behind your words, whether they were written down or spoken, but there appears to be a new standard to which some now adhere whereby all that matters is not getting caught.
Oh well. Maria Fernandez is clearly not in Bernie Madoff’s league, she just happens to employ one of his tried and true methods for achieving whatever she wants. “If I didn’t write it down, I didn’t say it.”
* Bernie Madoff, from the wit and wisdom of….
September 21, 2009
More excerpts from the August 21st "listening session":
September 8, 2009 - Listening to the silence
Since the August 21st “listening session”, we have anxiously waited for some kind of indication that the Board was listening, that they heard what the community said, that they had some modest level of understanding, empathy, and compassion. With the passing of time, we have accepted the truth: This Board has none of that. They used the community, just as they attempted to use us with their “cease fire”, to stall and use the time to abuse the staff and try and get the community adjusted to a version of KDNA and NCEC that has no use for farm workers, for campesinos, or for the disadvantaged that have been at the core of KDNA’s mission for 29 years.
Chuck Reinsch went to the so-called “listening session”. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:
Forty years ago this country was taken up in a great desire for change. Many of us looked at what our predecessors had left us, and while thanking them, also said we need to make some changes. Some people joined communes, some experimented with lifestyles. Some took to the streets. And some of us looked at radio and television, and thought, here is a way to make change. Here is a way for us to bring the world to Americans isolated and insulated from the pain and anguish, the hunger and despair, and the many ways other citizens of this planet have worked to solve the problems inherent in being human.
In 1961 Newton Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, made what became known as his “vast wasteland” speech. Although he was referring to television, his words applied equally to radio. We could see it to be a tremendously powerful tool that could educate, inform and entertain, but that was being wasted in lulling listeners into stupefied silence. We said this is wrong. This resource should be used for a higher purpose, in service of the public interest. It must change, and we vowed to make that change happen.
So, with a history rooted in advocating for change, it came as something of a shock to me, when I criticized the actions of this Board of Directors and their executive director, to hear I was suffering from something they are calling “founders syndrome”. It has been one of the saddest successes in the controlling of oppressed peoples that the oppressor can convince their victims that they are inferior and not competent to rule their own destinies. The sorry fact is that the decisions of this Board are not in promotion of change, but are sad expressions of their own self-loathing, and the consequence of their decisions is to set back the progress made in thirty years of empowering disenfranchised people.
We did not create this radio station to entertain ourselves, to become wealthy, to persuade people to one political view or another, or to become monarchs ruling a kingdom. Radio is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, because the airwaves belong to the people, and the operators of radio stations must answer to the people. This radio station was created to educate people, Spanish speaking farm workers, in how to use one of the most powerful communications tools on the planet, with the hope they would share that knowledge and build upon it.
This was, for us, a great experiment. And it was a miracle, for which we take no credit, that it worked, and that for nearly thirty years the knowledge of creating radio, and learning the confidence to speak out without fear of reprisal, became a culture of participatory radio in the Yakima Valley. The measure of success of a “community” radio station is to what degree the community takes ownership in it, and claims it as their own. And while the campesinos of the Yakima valley listened with their ears, they took the radio to their hearts and it became their champion, their friend, and family member.
The events of the last year do not give any evidence that the Board or management of KDNA has a better idea. In fact, they appear to be completely bereft of any creative ideas. Instead they have replaced the NCEC/KDNA mission of service to the community with one of their own, to destroy what has made this the valuable organization that it is: the creativity, the imaginations, and the personality of the staff and volunteers that are the heart of KDNA. The community will not stand for this. Over these thirty years, the community has learned that the airwaves are not the personal plaything of a board chair with “dictator syndrome”. The airwaves belong to the community and as much as this Board would like to exercise by fiat, like a petty dictator, the community knows the truth: ultimately this Board will pass away and be forgotten. Now is the time for the Board to withdraw gracefully, because, one way or another, the community will win.
Other news:
The community has written and is distributing its fourth letter about the kidnapping of their radio station Radio Cadena Continua Secuestrada #4.
