WPFW needs a home, not scare tactics about a corporate takeover

Posted on March 27, 2013 by TheFightBack
Pacifica Radio's WPFW 89.3 FM

Pacifica Radio’s WPFW 89.3 FM

“Clear Channel is not going to interfere with this station.” – Tony Norman

Pacifica Radio’s WPFW 89.3 FM has called D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood home for the past 15 years, but it’s not likely to much longer. The City Paper building, which houses the station, is being demolished in order to make way for a taxpayer subsidized luxury hotel. Forced to move, and having looked at several properties in D.C.’s hot real estate market, the station has settled on an affordable space just outside the District in downtown Silver Spring on top of a Metro stop.

Even though the new location would provide the station – which is listener-sponsored, commercial-free and near-broke – with huge savings, some programmers and their allies have launched a campaign to stop the move. They’ve taken to the airwaves to drum up fear, telling listeners that there will be a corporate takeover if WPFW signs a sublease, landlord-tenant agreement with Metro Networks Communications, which is a part of Total Traffic Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel, the media conglomerate. This effort comes on the heels of a nearly two-year-long campaign by the same programmers to fire the general manager, John Hughes, who removed some of their shows.  Continue reading →

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A discussion on censorship in the age of the Internet and a debate net neutrality

Posted on March 24, 2013 by admin
Steven Titch, Robert Corn-Revere and Pete Tucker

Steven Titch, Robert Corn-Revere and Pete Tucker at Reason

(Video at bottom)

Last week, noted First Amendment attorney Robert Corn-Revere gave a talk on censorship in the age of the Internet. Directly following the talk at Reason magazine’s D.C. office, TheFightBack’s Pete Tucker joined Corn-Revere for a wide-ranging discussion on threats to an open internet.

The two also debated the issue of net neutrality, the principal which calls for all web content to be governed by the same set of rules, preventing the powerful from receiving special treatment, including faster download times for their sites.   Continue reading →

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Voices of the 99% Radio examines local D.C. politics and news coverage

Posted on February 19, 2013 by TheFightBack

Listen to Bullet Points with Navid Nasr on Voices of 99%: 

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TheFightBack’s Pete Tucker joined Bullet Points with Navid Nasr on Voices of the 99% for a discussion on the Washington Post’s selective scrutinizing of politicians, as well as the paper’s education business interests.

Continue reading →

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The Post has favorites and Jim Graham isn’t one of them

Posted on February 18, 2013 by TheFightBack

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham. Photo courtesy of Washington City Paper

The Washington Post has called for the resignation of yet another member of the D.C. Council. And who is the Post going after this time?

Is it the longest serving member of the council, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who chairs the all-important Finance and Revenue Committee while also earning a salary of $190,000 from the elite lobbying firm Patton Boggs? Nope. Despite overseeing deals that have placed a couple billion taxpayer dollars into private pockets, including those belonging to a client of his firm, the Post won’t say Jack about Evans.

Continue reading →

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D.C. taxpayers get short end of West End deal

Posted on February 13, 2013 by TheFightBack

The new West End Library will occupy part of the first two floors of this high-end condo building

By Thomas Hedges – You can find Hedges’s reports at Truthdig. He works at The Center for Responsive Law, founded by Ralph Nader  

The non-profit group D.C. Library Renaissance Project (DCLRP) worries that a deal between city officials and developer Eastbanc, which was awarded the rights to develop three plots of land in the West End neighborhood, will not only shortchange taxpayers but set an unsavory precedent for the way D.C. does business with private developers in the future.

Under the West End Parcels deal, the city will give the land to Eastbanc in exchange for building a new replacement library and fire station, which Eastbanc says will total $20 million. According to the DCLRP the costs are inflated but far worse is the land value being given away – $100 million, they say.

The West End’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission and its civic groups, however, dispute that number, and they’re in favor of the deal. In a letter to Ralph Nader, DCLRP’s founder, they wrote, “The community as a whole agrees with our support of the now approved development plan for the library. They believe that the proposed new library, fire station, and affordable housing are extraordinary community benefits needed to replace our outdated facilities.”

Continue reading →

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Coming home to save the farm

Posted on February 10, 2013 by TheFightBack

This article was published in Dirt Magazine and written by Becca Tucker (Pete’s sister)

Sophia Maravell speaks with Dirt editor Becca Tucker

Fifteen miles from the White House grows a variety of Native American red polenta once extinct in the United States. Farmer Nick Maravell has been propagating heirloom seeds here, smack dab in the middle of suburban Potomac, Maryland, for three decades. His red polenta and other rare plant varieties have escaped contamination by genetically modified pollen thanks to an unlikely ally: a buffer of McMansions separating Maravell’s 20 acres from commercial farms.

But those McMansions have children in them, and those children play soccer. In 2011, the Board of Education revoked Maravell’s lease and instead leased the land to Montgomery County, which in turn plans to lease it to a youth soccer organization that wants to build a soccer complex. The suburbs that have insulated Nick’s Farm may, in the end, swallow it.

The community – whether because of love for the farm or an aversion to the lights and traffic a sports complex would bring – has sued the Board of Education for violating the Open Meetings Act. The lawsuit made headlines. But there is a quieter campaign underway. Sophia Maravell, 24, has moved home to save the farm where she grew up. This story is about Sophia.  Continue reading →

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REVIEW: A Ruined Detroit

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Chris Lewis

Inside the station. “Waiting room with snowdrift, Michigan Central Station” by Andrew Moore (click to enlarge)

Michigan Central Station is a carcass of a building, looming over Detroit’s west side. Once an emblem of inflatable obstacle course Detroit’s prosperity, the towering structure is now an emblem of its desperation. Its 18 stories of windows are smashed-in, leaving jagged glass teeth in their panes. Its front façade—towering windows framed by elegant pillared arches—are just as battered, ravaged by the hurricane that never was. The neoclassical flourishes that once suggested elegance now evoke malevolence, like the macabre ornamentation of a supervillain’s lair.

In separate exhibits at the National Building Museum in Chinatown, two photographers tell the story of the station and the story of a city. The ruins Inflatable Jumpers of Detroit are the subject of both “Detroit Disassembled” by Andrew Moore and “Detroit is No Dry Bones” by Camilo José Vergara. Far more than just the decline of the Motor City, the images offer a glimpse at the dregs of bygone American industrial might.  Continue reading →

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Obama and Romney agree, tonight’s debate will be a town hall in name only

Posted on October 16, 2012 by admin

Photo courtesy of nola.com

Our presidential debates are brought to you by Bud Light.  – George Farah, executive director of Open Debates

“If any audience member poses a question or makes a statement that is in any material way different than the question that the audience member earlier submitted to the moderator for review, the moderator will cut-off the questioner… [and] the Commission shall take appropriate steps to cut-off the microphone.”

The above quote comes from a 21-page “Memorandum of Understanding” between the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which sounds like an official body but isn’t, and the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The secret agreement, which Time magazine’s Mark Halperin published Monday, lays out in detail what the candidates, moderators and audience members can and cannot do at each of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, including tonight’s “town hall” at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY.

CNN’s Candy Crowley will moderate tonight’s debate, sort of. Crowley recently laid out her vision for her role as moderator. “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?'” she said. Crowley’s understanding of her role, however, doesn’t square with the agreement between the Commission and the two campaigns.   Continue reading →

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Pastor teams up with Occupy activists to save home

Posted on October 2, 2012 by admin

Rev. Vanzant speaks outside Bank of America

Listen to Rev. Vanzant 

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“This is the next phase of the Occupy movement,” said Mike Haack, an activist with Occupy Our Homes, an off-shoot of Occupy DC which works to prevent evictions. With bullhorn in hand, Haack and others stood outside Bank of America in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. The bank, which was supposed to be open, was temporarily “foreclosed.” Activists said they simultaneously shut down eleven Bank of America branches Saturday morning in an effort to raise awareness about the possible eviction of a long time District resident from his northeast D.C. home.  Continue reading →

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Uber right-wing

Posted on October 1, 2012 by admin

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick testifying before the D.C. Council

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Testifying last week before the D.C. Council, 35-year-old Uber CEO Travis Kalanick routinely interrupted councilmembers and espoused a right-wing ideology. Uber is not so much a luxury sedan service as a phone app that connects passengers with black cars (while taking 20 percent of each fare). “We’re a tech company,” Kalanick said at a talk at the Heritage Foundation in December. “I don’t have any drivers, and I don’t have any cars.”

While the drivers Uber contracts with compete directly with D.C.’s highly regulated taxicabs, Uber is seeking to remain unregulated, a situation Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham called a “fundamental inequity.” “The taxicab industry drivers and Uber drivers are in the same line of business and competing for the same customer base,” said Haimanot Bizuayehu, board member of The Small Business Association of DC Taxicab Drivers (SBA), D.C.’s largest cabbie organization. At the Heritage Foundation, Kalanick offered a similar assessment, saying, “We changed our name from Uber Cab to Uber so we’re no longer marketing ourselves as a cab company.” Continue reading →

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