KPFT Notes

Community Media Review is making a “last call” for reports about media programs or projects which involve international connections for our issue on global media policy (Winter Issue). This is a great opportunity to tell local success stories (or bring light to the limiting factors of brave efforts) about the use of community media.

In particular we are seeking content concerning:

· Models for involvement: How are U.S. community media producers involved with communities in other parts of the world? (This includes community tv or radio programs which bring immigrant communities news or culture from their home countries; solidarity and support programs which showcase efforts to aid communities or media projects in other parts of the world; or travel programs.); how do U.S. community media producers keep in touch/ maintain international connections through community media? (i.e., how can we be involved in these issues); what are examples of programs and reports from immigrant communities on politics and the arts? How are these reports relevant to our own communities?

We are looking for short reports, with pictures or graphics – 500 1000 words (though there will be room for longer pieces in the online version).

The deadline for finished articles is September 30th. Please let us know that you are thinking of submitting as soon as possible to be considered for inclusion.

For more details about this issue, including a fuller background on our thoughts and aims for the issue, as well as draft outlines, go to the Global Communications Policy Blog at http://communitymediareview.org/blog/19.

Please send ideas, articles and questions to the co-editors: Diana Agosta (dagosta@igc.org) and Marshall Parker (marshallp@houston-mediasource.org), or to the CMR managing editor, Scott Alumbaugh (sea@communitymediareview.org

After a month or so off, I wanted to rechristen my Re-Mix recommendations. The Pacifica election filing period is over and you will soon be receiving ballots. Educate yourself about the candidates by checking our LSB Meeting Archives. Well worth your time.

Tomorrow begins this quarter’s Pacifica National Board meeting. Agenda is as follows:

Pacifica National Board Meeting
September 29 – October 1, 2006
Walnut Creek Holiday Inn

Walnut Creek, CA

Friday, September 29, 2006

10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Executive session, with counsel present, to consider:
- FSRN contract negotiations
- Personnel issues
- Legal matters
- LSB-related issues

PNB Opening Session - 6 – 9 p.m.

6 – 6:30 p.m.
Welcome and roll call
Approval of agenda
Consideration of motions on meeting procedure

(i.e. speaking time agreed to by members, processing of procedural motions, etc)
Approval of available minutes

6:30 – 6:45 Network overview – Executive Director

6:45 – 7:15 Budget overview – Chief Financial Officer

7:15 – 7:50 Finance Committee Action Items

7:50 – 8:00 Break

8 – 8:15 National Elections Supervisor Report

8:15 – 9 Public Comment

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Public Session — 9 a.m. – 9:30 p.m.

9 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. FY07 Budget approval process

(including breaks and public comment)

Note: Pacifica’s budget is divided into 7 sections, one for each station, one for the national office (NO), and one for the Pacifica Radio Archives (PRA). Thirty five minutes will be allotted to each section of the budget, divided as described below:

Finance committee recommendation (3 min)
CFO comment (3 min)
GM/unit manager comment (4 min)
Debate (15 min)
Public comment (5 min, 1 min per person)
Voting (5 min)

9 – 9:35 a.m. National office budget

9:35 – 10:10 Pacifica Radio Archives budget

10:10-10:20 Break

10:20-10:55 KPFA budget

10:55-11:30 KPFK budget

11:30 – 12:05 p.m. KPFT budget

12:05 – 12:15 Break

12:15 – 12:50 WBAI budget

12:50 – 1:25 WPFW budget

1:30 – 2:30 Lunch

2:30 – 4:15 Discussion

Topic: network economic model, including distribution and licensing strategies. (The discussion will include all unit managers, the national tech director, affiliates coordinator, and webmaster)

4:15 – 4:45 p.m. Public Comment

4:45 – 5:00 Break

5 – 9:30 Station and staff reports

(Note: for all reports, the manager or staff member will have 1/3 of the allotted time for presentation, 2/3 of the time will be used for discussion with the board)

5:00 – 5:40 Focus Station – WPFW

5:40 – 6:30 Focus Station – KPFA
(Note: will include a 10 min presentation by the KPFA LSB chair)

6:30 – 7 Pacifica Radio Archive

7 – 8:00 Dinner

8 – 9 Station Reports: KPFK, KPFT, WBAI

9 – 9:30 Tech staff report (Tech director & webmaster)

Sunday, October 1, 2006

9 a.m. – 10 a.m. Executive session

Public Session — 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

10 – 11 a.m. Received reports from committees, inc. LSB’s

11 – 11:15 Affiliates Coordinator report

11:15 – 12: 15 p.m. Action items from committees

12:15 –1 Lunch

1 – 2 Unfinished business

2 – 3 New business

3 Adjournment

Notes: The PNB will forego formal Committee presentations, unless a Committee informs the PNB of pressing action items. Any written reports will be received by the PNB for consideration and any necessary referrals to Committee.

I am in Northern California for the upcoming national board meeting and will keep you posted. In the meantime, this piece appeared in the September 26 Chronicle of Higher Education.

Advocacy Group Challenges Program for Minority Journalists as Discriminatory

By PETER SCHMIDT / Chronicle of Higher Education

An advocacy group plans to file a federal lawsuit today challenging a summer program for minority student journalists operated by Virginia Commonwealth University, the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and the publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The program is one of at least 20 for minority high-school students operated by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund in connection with colleges around the nation. For nearly 40 years, the fund has helped finance the programs with the intent of inspiring minority students to pursue careers in newspaper journalism.

The Center for Individual Rights, which has been a leader in the fight against affirmative action, alleges that the Virginia Commonwealth University Urban Journalism Workshop engages in illegal racial discrimination by excluding white students. It argues that the program’s race-exclusive eligibility criteria violate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law, as well as various federal civil-rights statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and ethnic discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funds.

Virginia Commonwealth’s legal department declined comment Monday, saying it would not respond to a lawsuit that it had not yet seen. A university spokeswoman, Pamela Lepley, would say only that the summer workshop in question was “a very well-respected program” and “a very good program that we have been involved with for more than two decades.”

Richard Holden, executive director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, refused to comment on the lawsuit or to say whether the two-week Virginia Commonwealth program and others like it are race-exclusive. The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund is supported through the contributions of Dow Jones & Company (publisher of The Wall Street Journal), the Dow Jones Foundation, and other newspaper publishers around the nation. Newspapers help pay for many of the other summer journalism programs supported by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and in some cases provide the programs with instructors.

The lawsuit the Center for Individual Rights expects to file today wouldn’t mark the first time a college program for minority students has encountered opposition. Two other advocacy groups, the Center for Equal Opportunity and the American Civil Rights Institute, began challenging race-exclusive college programs in late 2002, but their avenue of attack has typically been to send colleges letters urging them to open the programs up to members of any race and threatening to file a discrimination complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights if the colleges fail to do so. Nearly all of the more than 100 colleges that the groups have contacted so far have complied with the demands.

The Center for Individual Rights has been heavily involved in the fight against race-conscious college admissions, helping to represent the plaintiffs in key federal lawsuits challenging such policies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Washington.

In an interview Monday, Terence J. Pell, the center’s president, said the lawsuit challenging the Virginia Commonwealth program was “sort of the logical next step” in the fight against race-exclusive programs. He argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 rulings in the two lawsuits his group helped bring against the University of Michigan established once and for all that colleges could not operate programs that excluded members of any ethnicity or race. Although the Supreme Court reaffirmed that colleges could give some consideration to applicants’ race or ethnicity for the sake of promoting racial diversity, race-exclusive programs “produce just the opposite” by creating environments that consist solely of members of certain favored minority groups, he said.

In cases where race-exclusive programs are operated by colleges in tandem with businesses or philanthropies, those involved “all sort of point fingers at each other” when accused of discrimination, and argue that some other participant in the effort is requiring race exclusivity, Mr. Pell alleged. He said the lawsuit named as defendants everyone involved with the Virginia Commonwealth program, including the university, Richmond Times-Dispatch publisher Media General Inc., and individuals who helped finance and administer the summer workshop, because “it is necessary to bring everybody into court and solve this once and for all on the record.”

The plaintiff in the case, Emily Smith, is a junior at Monacan High School, in Virginia’s Chesterfield County, who submitted an application to participate in the Virginia Commonwealth summer program last March. The lawsuit alleges that Virginia Commonwealth initially notified Ms. Smith that she had been accepted for the workshop but then rescinded its offer after one of its faculty members called Ms. Smith, asked her race, and learned that she was white. The lawsuit asks that Ms. Smith, a 15-year-old with muscular dystrophy, be awarded damages because Virginia Commonwealth’s actions wasted her time, caused her emotional distress, and closed educational opportunities to her.

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s guidelines for newspapers and colleges involved with such summer workshops say “each participant must be a minority (defined as U.S. citizens who are black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native.)”

Among the other colleges involved in similar programs this past summer were Florida A & M University, Kent State University, Marquette University, Monmouth University, New York University, San Francisco State University, Seattle University, the University of Alabama, the University of Arizona, the University of Kentucky, the University of Miami, the University of Missouri, and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Syndicate Says ‘Boondocks’ May Not Return
Cartoonist Hasn’t Answered Pleas to Resume Comic Strip

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006; Page C01

It’s over for “The Boondocks” comic strip, at least for now. After six years — a remarkably short run for a strip that found its way into 300-plus newspapers, including The Washington Post — Universal Press Syndicate told subscribers yesterday they should start looking for someone to replace political/social satirist Aaron McGruder.

McGruder, a Columbia native who in his twenties became the Garry Trudeau of the hip-hop generation, took a sabbatical six months ago to recharge. The syndicate kept checking with him, reminding him that its newspaper clients needed several weeks in order to prepare for his return or his departure.

Apparently, the mind behind young black radicals Huey and Riley Freeman has gone Hollywood, or at least has further hopes of doing so, and has decided he can’t devote himself to the grind of a daily strip. His late-night animated show, “The Boondocks,” on the Cartoon Network was recently renewed for another season, the first-season DVD is out, and a film is reportedly in the works.

Perhaps for McGruder, whose broad and sometimes outrageous characterizations forced readers to confront racial stereotypes and caused cartoon editors to blanch, the future of the funny papers is in pixels rather than picas.

The cartoonist, 31, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. A message on his voicemail indicated he was taking some time to “restore his creative juices.”

The heavies at Universal are clearly not happy with the way McGruder handled the situation, although they worded their news release carefully.

“Although Aaron McGruder has made no statement about retiring or resuming The Boondocks for print newspapers . . . newspapers should not count on it coming back in the foreseeable future,” Universal’s president, Lee Salem, said in the release. “Numerous attempts . . . to pin McGruder down on a date that the strip would be coming back were unsuccessful.”

According to industry sources, McGruder’s editor at Universal, Greg Melvin, flew to Los Angeles recently and spent a couple of days trying to get the cartoonist to abide by the terms of his agreement to return in six months.

“We were getting dozens of phone calls every day from newspapers asking when he was coming back,” Salem said in a telephone interview. “It seemed unfair to keep them dangling.” He added that if McGruder decides to return, Universal would welcome him back.

McGruder created “The Boondocks” in 1997 for the Diamondback, the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, and was getting nibbles from television types, according to Salem, when Universal signed him in 1999.

The strip came at a time when newspapers were hungry for a hip black cartoonist, and McGruder had attitude to spare. His work either infuriated readers or made them laugh out loud.

He routinely slapped around Black Entertainment Television and its founder, Bob Johnson, for its dependence on booty-shaking videos. His strips after the invasion of Iraq about Condoleezza Rice needing a man were provocative enough that many papers, including The Post, refused to run them.

His apparent departure raises several questions, according to those in the industry. Is he pulling a Dave Chappelle here? The 33-year-old comedian stunned his fans when he bolted last year from his Comedy Central show, ditching a $50 million deal and returning to a stand-up tour onstage.

If McGruder is really a political commentator at heart, will he miss the immediacy of a daily strip? “I’m not going to say a strip carries the same rewards as TV, but you can comment with far more immediacy,” Salem said.

And how successful will he be without his daily newspaper base?

Other cartoonists have successfully pursued outside interests, aided in part, says Jake Morrissey, a New York editor who worked with cartoonists at United Media and Universal Press, because “every single day their work was in front of millions of people’s eyes.”

Some of them also took sabbaticals when at the top of their game — Garry Trudeau after 12 years penning “Doonesbury” and Bill Watterson after six years with “Calvin and Hobbes”; Gary Larson walked away from “The Far Side” for several years. When they returned, so did their readers.

But there’s no guarantee that will happen. Says Morrissey, “When you leave, Americans’ attention goes on to something else.”

Syndicate Says ‘Boondocks’ May Not Return
Cartoonist Hasn’t Answered Pleas to Resume Comic Strip

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 26, 2006; Page C01

It’s over for “The Boondocks” comic strip, at least for now. After six years — a remarkably short run for a strip that found its way into 300-plus newspapers, including The Washington Post — Universal Press Syndicate told subscribers yesterday they should start looking for someone to replace political/social satirist Aaron McGruder.

McGruder, a Columbia native who in his twenties became the Garry Trudeau of the hip-hop generation, took a sabbatical six months ago to recharge. The syndicate kept checking with him, reminding him that its newspaper clients needed several weeks in order to prepare for his return or his departure.

Apparently, the mind behind young black radicals Huey and Riley Freeman has gone Hollywood, or at least has further hopes of doing so, and has decided he can’t devote himself to the grind of a daily strip. His late-night animated show, “The Boondocks,” on the Cartoon Network was recently renewed for another season, the first-season DVD is out, and a film is reportedly in the works.

Perhaps for McGruder, whose broad and sometimes outrageous characterizations forced readers to confront racial stereotypes and caused cartoon editors to blanch, the future of the funny papers is in pixels rather than picas.

The cartoonist, 31, did not respond to a request for comment yesterday. A message on his voicemail indicated he was taking some time to “restore his creative juices.”

The heavies at Universal are clearly not happy with the way McGruder handled the situation, although they worded their news release carefully.

“Although Aaron McGruder has made no statement about retiring or resuming The Boondocks for print newspapers . . . newspapers should not count on it coming back in the foreseeable future,” Universal’s president, Lee Salem, said in the release. “Numerous attempts . . . to pin McGruder down on a date that the strip would be coming back were unsuccessful.”

According to industry sources, McGruder’s editor at Universal, Greg Melvin, flew to Los Angeles recently and spent a couple of days trying to get the cartoonist to abide by the terms of his agreement to return in six months.

“We were getting dozens of phone calls every day from newspapers asking when he was coming back,” Salem said in a telephone interview. “It seemed unfair to keep them dangling.” He added that if McGruder decides to return, Universal would welcome him back.

McGruder created “The Boondocks” in 1997 for the Diamondback, the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, and was getting nibbles from television types, according to Salem, when Universal signed him in 1999.

The strip came at a time when newspapers were hungry for a hip black cartoonist, and McGruder had attitude to spare. His work either infuriated readers or made them laugh out loud.

He routinely slapped around Black Entertainment Television and its founder, Bob Johnson, for its dependence on booty-shaking videos. His strips after the invasion of Iraq about Condoleezza Rice needing a man were provocative enough that many papers, including The Post, refused to run them.

His apparent departure raises several questions, according to those in the industry. Is he pulling a Dave Chappelle here? The 33-year-old comedian stunned his fans when he bolted last year from his Comedy Central show, ditching a $50 million deal and returning to a stand-up tour onstage.

If McGruder is really a political commentator at heart, will he miss the immediacy of a daily strip? “I’m not going to say a strip carries the same rewards as TV, but you can comment with far more immediacy,” Salem said.

And how successful will he be without his daily newspaper base?

Other cartoonists have successfully pursued outside interests, aided in part, says Jake Morrissey, a New York editor who worked with cartoonists at United Media and Universal Press, because “every single day their work was in front of millions of people’s eyes.”

Some of them also took sabbaticals when at the top of their game — Garry Trudeau after 12 years penning “Doonesbury” and Bill Watterson after six years with “Calvin and Hobbes”; Gary Larson walked away from “The Far Side” for several years. When they returned, so did their readers.

But there’s no guarantee that will happen. Says Morrissey, “When you leave, Americans’ attention goes on to something else.”

Country’s Hot, but Big Cities Offer Cold Shoulder

By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 24, 2006; Page N02

On the same night that country stars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw opened a set of three sold-out shows at Los Angeles’s Staples Center, the city’s only country-music radio station dropped the format entirely. Keith Urban’s “Tonight I Wanna Cry” faded out and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started” launched KZLA’s new sound, a mix of R&B and dance hits.

With last month’s format switch in Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest markets now have no country on the radio. New York lost its last country station in 2002, a year after San Francisco fell into the same status.

Country’s decline on the radio seems paradoxical at first, because the genre is doing better than much of the rest of the music industry these days. While CD sales have drooped in most formats, sales of country albums jumped by 18 percent in the first half of this year, Nielsen SoundScan figures show. After a painful drop in the quality of new country in the late 1990s and early part of this decade, the music is coming back strong, according to critics and radio executives.

In Washington, WMZQ (98.7 FM) is keeping its country format and maintaining its strong showing in the ratings. “We’ve been holding our own with our audience in this very diverse, ethnic area,” says the station’s program director, George King. “We’re a rural, outside-the-Beltway format, but among non-ethnics, we’re in the top two or three stations.” (“Non-ethnics” is the industry term for whites.)

Color, it seems, is what drove KZLA, the country station with the nation’s second-highest billings, to drop the format. Country attracts an almost all-white audience, and in some big cities, including Los Angeles and New York, whites are in the minority. Increasingly, radio companies believe they can fine-tune other music formats to create the largest possible audience of black, Latino and white listeners.

Whites are barely more than 40 percent of the population in the Los Angeles area, and country listeners are about 98 percent white, Rick Cummings, president of radio at Emmis Communications (which owns KZLA), told the Los Angeles Times. “My job is to attract as large an audience as possible,” he said. “KZLA is now playing music that appeals to Hispanic adult women, and that will hopefully attract other suburban women of different ethnicities.”

WMZQ’s audience is about 95 percent white, King says, just as the Washington area’s top-rated stations — which tend to be hip-hop and black hits stations — attract overwhelmingly black audiences. But one crucial difference in listening habits might portend a difficult future for country on the radio: Blacks and Latinos tend to listen to radio for much longer each day than do whites.

In addition, white listeners are more likely to switch their music habits over to iPods and other MP3 devices, making them less devoted radio listeners. As long as blacks and Latinos continue to adopt iPods and satellite radio at a slower rate than whites, stations will be tempted to aim their programming at those groups.

Rock has been hardest hit by this calculus, but at least in major coastal cities, country might be vulnerable too.

Country might find a saving grace in another aspect of audience demographics. King says country stations benefit from having a somewhat older audience than pop stations — WMZQ’s average listener is about 46 — and middle-aged country fans are less likely to have turned their ears entirely over to downloaded tunes.

“We’re an adult format,” King says, “so we’re not as deeply affected by MP3s as the more tech-savvy pop audience. I’m 45 and the perfect example: Do I own an MP3 player? No. Do my kids? Absolutely.”

Measured purely by the number of stations playing a given form of music, country remains the dominant format on American radio, with about one-fifth of all stations devoting their airtime to the music. But the great majority of those stations are in small, rural markets, especially in the South.

Country fans in some big urban centers eventually might find themselves with nowhere to go but satellite radio. XM and Sirius devote several channels to various specialized country formats, where listeners can choose between country classics, contemporary hits and themed channels, such as Sirius’s Outlaw Country, where the deejays play up their renegade personalities and the afternoon jock signs off each day with “See ya later, fornicators!”

What WMZQ offers to counter the appeal of the thinly sliced niches on satellite radio is local deejays, news and traffic — and the sense of being part of a community based where listeners live. The station’s programming is all local except for the overnight show, which is syndicated fare from Los Angeles.

It’s too soon to say which technology will prevail. In Los Angeles, the format switch on KZLA meant that the city’s largest country music festival lost its sponsor. Within hours, however, another source of country stepped into the breach: XM announced it would take over sponsorship of the festival.

Tonight will mark the launch of Informed Dissent and Informativo Pacifica on KPFT. You can catch Informed Dissent at 11 tonight and Informativo Pacifica at 11:30.

Informed Dissent is the Pacifica Foundation’s first major foray into programming in many years. In the tradition of Democracy Now, which was launched as an election-year program ten years ago, Informed Dissent seeks to bring focus to the mid-term elections this year, covering both the daily events and the root causes of conflict around the globe. I am proud to say KPFT is well represented on Informed Dissent, with contributions from Pokey Anderson and Mark Bebawi of the Monitor; Akua Holt of Pan African Journal; and Curt Schroell of the InnerSide. The program is produced by Otis Hardy Maclay, KPFT’s former program director as well as producer of We the People, Us the Folks and many other great programs.

Informed Dissent produces four programs per week, and airs Monday to Thursday here on KPFT. Friday nights at 11, KPFT welcomes an old friend back to our program schedule. Although Counterspin, the weekly program by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, has bounced about the schedule over the last few years, it’s not a statement on the importance of the program, which we’ve actively sought to return to the airwaves. We’re excited to return Counterspin to our schedule on Friday night, where it traditionally aired.

Informativo Pacifica is the fulfillment of a resolution by the national board of directors that the network launches a progressive news source in Spanish. All five of Pacifica’s signal areas feature large Spanish-speaking populations and a significant amount of Spanish-language media. However, media consolidation has hit Spanish-language markets just as heavily as what you hear about on KPFT. There is a severe lack of politically progressive reporting, contextual voices and analytical coverage of global issues. For those reasons and others, we are proud to introduce Informativo Pacifica to KPFT listeners. Informativo is produced at KPFK in Los Angeles by Fernando Velasquez, who brings over 10 years of experience to this role. As of last Friday, KPFT began submitting content to Informativo, and we hope to launch daily news as part of Informativo shortly.

One of the most common questions about Informativo has to do with whether the program can be produced bilingually or solely in Spanish. The national board resolution called for a Spanish-language news program, which Informativo set to fulfill. However, there has been developing opinion that the program be done in both Spanish and English, similar to what KPFK does with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, KPFK’s interlingual news program. I expect this will be an ongoing question, for which your input is welcomed.

KPFT is the only station in the five-signal-area Pacifica network to carry BOTH Informed Dissent and Informativo Pacifica.

As of today, Flashpoints joins our family of programming on KPFT’s podcasting site, KPFTi.org. Internet delivery of programming, as well as HD Radio and other venues, is a response by many radio stations to provide multiple streams of programming from which listeners can choose, in some cases without even having to be in front of a radio. Many of these technologies are developing, but what research indicates is that they’re experiencing a surge in usage, attract a younger, more connected audience and represent growth opportunities for KPFT. We appreciate the coverage that Flashpoints offers to listeners and hope to see listeners catching Flashpoints online.

In addition to our program debuts tonight, we also welcome Coming to America to our schedule. Our new program on immigration started early this month. It is produced by former KPFT Assistant News Director Valarie Torres and hosted by Gordon Quan, former Houston City Council member and immigration attorney who has been outspoken on a number of important city issues. Coming to America airs Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

Finally, I have a number of administrative issues to report on.

September’s New Voices training concluded this past week with several individuals I expect to host another New Voices training shortly. October may instead be changed to focus solely on news, but we will keep you updated.
This month, I have been addressing the issue of freelancing with KPFT’s news department. Issues that come up are matters of ethics, transparency and space considerations. I want to thank Tucker Wilson of our news department for leading productive discussions about these issues.

And finally, we’re in development of a program on men’s issues, featuring the New Conversation with Men segment that appeared on Earth 101 some months ago. In the spring, KPFT’s program council approved a men’s program to alternate Saturday nights with Hot and Bothered, and I expect we will see that program launch in October.

Today is the deadline to submit your candidate statement and petition for the 2006 Local Station Board elections. If you have wanted to apply, but hadn’t collected signatures and the like, come by KPFT (419 Lovett, 77006) between noon and 5 p.m. to meet others, to get signatures and more.

Address to the United Nations

By HUGO CHAVEZ

Representatives of the governments of the world, good morning to all of you. First of all, I would like to invite you, very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it.

Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, ‘Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.’” [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] “It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet.

The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time, [flips through the pages, which are numerous] I will just leave it as a recommendation.

It reads easily, it is a very good book, I’m sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.

The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.

An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: “The Devil’s Recipe.”

As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

The world parent’s statement — cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that’s their democratic model. It’s the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that’s imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.

What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.

What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, ight here, in this room, and I’m quoting, “Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom.”

Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother — he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there’s an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.

The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It’s not that we are extremists. It’s that the world is waking up. It’s waking up all over. And people are standing up.

I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.

Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.

The president then — and this he said himself, he said: “I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace.”

That’s true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They’ll say yes.

But the government doesn’t want peace. The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.

It wants peace. But what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela — new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?

This is crossfire? He’s thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.

This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, “We’re suffering because we see homes destroyed.”

The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples — to the peoples of the world. He came to say — I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly.

And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?

And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, “Yankee imperialist, go home.” I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.

And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed — fully, fully confirmed.

I don’t think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let’s accept – let’s be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It’s worthless.

Oh, yes, it’s good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel’s yesterday, or President Mullah’s. Yes, it’s good for that.

And there are a lot of speeches, and we’ve heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile.

But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.

Last year, Madam, we made four modest proposals that we felt to be crucially important. We have to assume the responsibility our heads of state, our ambassadors, our representatives, and we have to discuss it.

The first is expansion, and Mullah talked about this yesterday right here. The Security Council, both as it has permanent and non-permanent categories, (inaudible) developing countries and LDCs must be given access as new permanent members. That’s step one.

Second, effective methods to address and resolve world conflicts, transparent decisions.

Point three, the immediate suppression — and that is something everyone’s calling for — of the anti-democratic mechanism known as the veto, the veto on decisions of the Security Council.

Let me give you a recent example. The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented.

Fourthly, we have to strengthen, as we’ve always said, the role and the powers of the secretary general of the United Nations.

Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his peech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions.

Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking.

Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet.

This is how Venezuela has presented itself. Bolivar’s home has sought a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council.

Let’s see. Well, there’s been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council.

The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.

And I would like to thank all the countries that have kindly announced their support for Venezuela, even though the ballot is a secret one and there’s no need to announce hings.

But since the imperium has attacked, openly, they strengthened the convictions of many countries. And their support strengthens us.

Mercosur, as a bloc, has expressed its support, our brothers in Mercosur. Venezuela, with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, is a full member of Mercosur.

And many other Latin American countries, CARICOM, Bolivia have expressed their support for Venezuela. The Arab League, the full Arab League has voiced its support. And I am immensely grateful to the Arab world, to our Arab brothers, our Caribbean brothers, the African Union. Almost all of Africa has expressed its support for Venezuela and countries such as Russia or China and many others.

I thank you all warmly on behalf of Venezuela, on behalf of our people, and on behalf of the truth, because Venezuela, with a seat on the Security Council, will be expressing not only Venezuela’s thoughts, but it will also be the voice of all the peoples of the world, and we will defend dignity and truth.

Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said “helplessly optimistic,” because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.

As Silvio Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?

What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.

We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Venezuela joins that struggle, and that’s why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.

President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier.

And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists.

And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.

And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.

And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to.

And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.

Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I’m here today.

But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.

We mentioned Cuba. Yes, we were just there a few days ago. We just came from there happily.

And there you see another era born. The Summit of the 15, the Summit of the Nonaligned, adopted a historic resolution. This is the outcome document. Don’t worry, I’m not going to read it.

But you have a whole set of resolutions here that were adopted after open debate in a transparent matter — more than 50 heads of state. Havana was the capital of the south for a few weeks, and we have now launched, once again, the group of the nonaligned with new momentum.

And if there is anything I could ask all of you here, my companions, my brothers and sisters, it is to please lend your good will to lend momentum to the Nonaligned Movement for the birth of the new era, to prevent hegemony and prevent further advances of imperialism.

And as you know, Fidel Castro is the president of the nonaligned for the next three years, and we can trust him to lead the charge very efficiently.

Unfortunately they thought, “Oh, Fidel was going to die.” But they’re going to be disappointed because he didn’t. And he’s not only alive, he’s back in his green fatigues, and he’s now presiding the nonaligned.

So, my dear colleagues, Madam President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We are men and women of the south.

With this document, with these ideas, with these criticisms, I’m now closing my file. I’m taking the book with me. And, don’t forget, I’m recommending it very warmly and very humbly to all of you.

We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.

And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We’ve proposed Venezuela.

You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

May God bless us all. Good day to you.