[Kzyxtalk] KZYXUniversal PerspectivesThursday 7pm:Burn the Wagon

[Marco McClean]

On 1/9/2023 10:05 AM, Chris Skyhawk wrote:
 > Please join hostChris Skyhawk for Universal Perspectives on KZYX on 
ThursdayJan.12 at 7pm, he will be continuing the series:Late Stage 
Capitalism:What’s next?”His guest will be Juan Red Hawk Dominguez;Juan 
has a podcast called:Burn the wagon”which highlights numerous Indigenous 
voices, in an attempt too burn the wagon of patriarchy, colonialism and 
capitalismKZYX signal is 90.7/91.5fm and on the web at KZYX.org 
<http://kzyx.org/>

Marco here. Okay, I'll do that. But, Chris, I'm reminded by your mention 
of the image of burning the wagon of capitalism: you should demand to be 
paid for your essential work and your valuable show. More than half a 
million dollars a year flush through KZYX. Much of it is skimmed off by 
management for their personal selves. They're like the guys at a 
worksite sitting on folding chairs with a clipboard on their lap while 
guys like you shovel and carry and weld and pour cement, except that the 
shovelers and welders and carriers and pourers are actually being paid. 
You're doing the work the radio station is there for in the first place. 
The manager and business flack and fundraising czar, and 
bells-and-whistles coordinators are not. If anyone should be paid it 
should be you. They get paid. So should you.

And KZYX has plenty of cash to pay you because of tax-derived grant 
money, and tax-write-off donations from corporations and rich families 
who got rich because of the capitalism that your fellow bird-theme-named 
colleague decries. And KZYX is able to constantly beg for yet more money 
from the entire county on real radio waves because of the free license 
to use high power on a broadcast band frequency, granted to Mendocino 
County Public Broadcasting Corp. by the federal government. We're all 
paying for KZYX, mainly paying the managers of it, whether we want to or 
not. And those write-offs would have paid for needed services, and the 
radio station would still be on the air with your shows.

You mention colonization. National Public Radio is as unaccountable to 
the public as a giant corporation can be. Try to get a peek into its 
inner workings and see how far you get-- how much this or that costs, 
who's paid exactly what, who made this or that programming decision and 
who benefited from it. You can't even find out out how to get through to 
someone important on the phone there. KZYX is just one of over a 
thousand NPR-colonized stations. NPR, like the other media empires, is a 
huge and oppressive parasitic creature, and in many ways it's the most 
opaque of them.

All the airpeople who make the canned crap thousands of miles away that 
fills so much of KZYX's airtime are paid very well to do their shows. 
Years ago it was leaked that Ira Glass, for example, and the producers 
of his show are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for that, 
for a one-hour-per-week show. You might have read about the problems Mr. 
Glass had selling his multi-million-dollar Chelsea apartment. He's 
/wealthy/ from so-called nonprofit radio. This is America, fine, some 
people are lucky, but meanwhile all the local airpeople at KZYX 
preparing for and doing all your shows all year long all put together, 
for the same reasons and with the same dedication and in some cases, 
sometimes, the same quality, are paid /nothing/.

The only reason the manager of KZYX is not paying you is, she doesn't 
have to if she doesn't want to, and she doesn't want to, so she's not. 
If just you and the other ironclad unfireable ones there were to speak 
up, things might change. On commercial radio it's /against the law/ to 
not pay airpeople. KMFB's budget was less than half KZYX's, it got no 
annual $160,000 CPB grants, was cut none of the slack so-called 
noncommercial radio gets. It had greater expenses, bigger obligatory 
fees to pay. And everyone at KMFB was paid. The manager made sure we 
were paid before he paid himself; that's the manager's first and main 
job in any business, especially a creative business: pay the ones doing 
the work. Famous painters who have others paint their paintings and then 
sign their famous name on them- they pay the workers. People who sell 
weed pay the kids to produce and trim the product. School administrators 
pay teachers whether or not they love teaching so much that they'd come 
to work anyway. This is like that.

I would like to have /my/ show on KZYX and I'd require to be paid for 
it. I applied in February of 2012, contacted and contacted again, drove 
out there, met with one manager after another, one program director 
after another, as they turned over like rotisserie chickens in those 
years; I wrote email after email, ran for the board of directors, showed 
up at meeting after meeting, and I'm still waiting, and doing radio on 
other stations while I wait. It wouldn't be difficult to arrange it, 
just a phone call from the manager and two minutes' work for the IT 
person to set the automation to grab my stream, or anyone's, just like 
it does with Ralph Nader, and Amy Goodman, and the Snap Judgment guy, 
and All Things Considered, yadda yadda, and all the shows from Mendocino 
County studios too. Once it's set, the switching is automatic; it's not 
much more complicated than the alarm clock app in your phone. I have 
been doing my current style of show as regularly as clockwork all Friday 
night every Friday night on various stations since early 1997, from 
various studios and remote studios, after publishing years of countywide 
newspapers, after putting on weekly invitational variety teevee shows 
for years on public access teevee, after building whole small radio 
stations from parts pulled from discarded household electronics, and 
writing and producing radio drama with all ages, both recorded and live, 
and recording music and events, and all the while doing regular theater 
projects, doing every job in every medium, and that's not all. If anyone 
you know around here is more reliable than I am, and has accomplished as 
much in radio, teevee, publishing, broadcasting in general, tell me who 
that is; I'd like to interview them. On the radio.

In short, Chris, I wish you'd require to be paid and set the precedent 
at KZYX, so they'll have to scramble to come up with another reason than 
that for cowardly excluding me and people like me. At least California 
minimum wage, for your airtime and reasonable prep time. It's wrong when 
charity organizations pay workers poorly while the bosses are paid well. 
That's a national scandal across many industries. It's way worse than 
even that when management is paid well and workers are paid nothing. I 
know you like to do your show, but will that change when you're paid? 
Won't you still like to do it? And then if you don't need or want the 
money, give it back to the radio station or give it to someone else who 
needs it. Buy a homeless person a bag of doughnuts. A kaleidoscope of 
possibilities.

Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com