[Kzyxtalk] nly contribute to a public radio station that pays its airpeople as much per hour as it pays their boss. There are plenty such stations around. Look them up.

[Marco McClean]

In a post to the MCN Discussion listserv, titled /F*** [actual stars, 
yes] a Wage, Take Over the Business: A How-To with Economist Richard 
Wolff/, Del Potter quotes Richard Wolff saying:

 >...In neoclassical economics here’s how it works... The
worker is understood to be one of the partners in a production
relationship. The employer is understood to be another partner in the
relationship. And in this view, the worker brings his/her contribution,
brain power and muscle power, to the process, and the employer brings
his/her contribution, variously described as entrepreneurship or managerial
talent or some similar characteristic. The output is then divided with the
proper reward given to each contributing partner.

 >The workers get back out of the joint product the wage, and the employer
gets back the profits. And so, this is a world of fairness, a world of
shared output, in which everybody more or less gets out of the process a
reward corresponding to what they contribute. If profits go up it is
explained, because the clever owner/manager/board of directors did a fine
job, right. And this is appropriate because if they got more it’s because
they contributed more.

 >Marx in response to this heaps ridicule. He says the logical flaw is that
these morons need to infer that because the capitalists get money, 
profits, they must have
contributed something. The whole point, says Marx, is to understand that 
they
don’t. They didn’t contribute crap, zilch, nothing! And the mystery is only
that the workers accept that a portion of what they produce goes to
somebody who didn’t produce anything at all...


Marco here. Okay, now think of it in concrete, local real-world terms. 
You've got a supposedly public radio station, KZYX, where Uncle Sam, in 
the form of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, pays about $150,000 
a year to keep it going, to pay for everything --roof, rent, water, 
electricity, repairs, wires, replacement tchotchkes, NPR programs 
($25,000 there), tower dues, music publishers' fees-- really, 
everything, and 150 gees is about three times enough money to do the 
whole job. That's just one grant. And the bigger government grant is in 
the form of control of the broadcast licenses for the main transmitter 
and the two translator stations. You have to practically commit murder 
before the FCC will yank the license from you once they've granted it, 
and they granted the license for KZYX more than a quarter century ago. 
26 years times $150,000 equals almost FOUR MILLION DOLLARS our taxes 
paid to MCPB, the local corporation that maintains the fiction of public 
radio that is KZYX.

KZYX management just only counting last year disposed of $575,000. In 
that year they didn't buy a new transmitter or establish a new 
translator station or build a new studio or do any appreciable 
maintenance. Where did that money go? About half of it, the handful of 
bosses paid themselves --over /$250,000/-- and they somehow found a way 
to piss away the rest, and so they need to run pledge drives and 
donation drives to get that money back, basically to ensure they 
continue to be able to pay themselves, not because the station needs the 
money to exist and run, because it doesn't (see previous paragraph). The 
general manager refuses to divulge the individual salaries, but a good 
guess for what David Steffen, the "business underwriting coordinator", 
was paid is in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. His efforts, such as they 
are, do not even return the investment in him, but he's the loudest of 
the lot at MCPB meetings in vilifying the sort of people who point these 
things out. To him, they're (we're) crazy, ignorant haters who want to 
tear down the station. He's just one example. I don't need to --do I?-- 
go again into a rundown of the details of all the office people and 
their frantic periodic (pledge drive time) pretense of how busy and 
valuable they are. No one with a brain in his head would give those 
people a tenth of the money nor power that they feel entitled to. 
They're just used to getting the money and keeping the power. To them, 
it's theirs, so shut up.

The bosses pay the airpeople, the workers, /nothing/, but dragoon them 
into giving up a good chunk of their airtime to begging for money to 
"keep the great shows on the air." The shows are not even the 
airpeople's shows; the airpeople don't have creative control. The 
station manager, Mary Aigner, flies into a rage when anyone diverges 
even in the slightest degree from the limits in the agreement she 
extracts from them. You might have read that recently Mary declared to 
the board that she won't be allowing even the tiny amount of freedom 
afforded by the Safe Harbor rules, and the board went, /Sure, fine, 
whatever. You know best, Mary./

Years ago everyone who had any kind of a free spirit and a sense of 
experimentation in the radio arts was weeded out of KZYX --by Mary, 
actually-- and now you've got NPR and a bunch of mindlessly repeating 
cookie-cutter recorded crap from the East Coast and a pack of timid 
puppies who are just so grateful to be on the air at all, and they're 
going to keep showing up on time and working, and they're not gonna squawk.

And they're not gonna take over the business so they can be paid. That 
was the point that I was getting to.

Oh, right, I almost forgot. Look up Lorenzo Milam in Wikipedia, learn a 
little about him, and then read this essay he wrote for Salon in 2001, 
titled National Private Radio: http://www.salon.com/2001/07/02/npr1/

-----------------
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com