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Mac McKaskle and Eduardo Vera spew a barrage of lies on the air

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Below is a direct transcript of trustee Mac McKaskle and Comunity Board chair Eduardo Vera on the air on KOOP on October 21, 1998. It would take us a month to refute all the lies and misstatements made during this show, so we're not even going to try. This is presented so that those who are already familiar with the details of the struggle can see exactly how Mac & Eduardo lied. Nearly all of the following is untrue, but I bolded the more salient lies.

 

(I didn't transcribe the "Yeah"s and "Mmm-hmm"s made while the other person was talking, and I edited out most of the "uh's" and "you knows".)

 

 

MAC: ...And what's going on at KOOP is a subset of Austin, TX, liberal politics here. The world's changing, and as to what this power structure among the liberal whites in Austin that came together, basically, I guess in the 70's, represented by things like the Austin Chronicle. You know, it was like, well, you know, here we are, and we're willing to patronize you -- we're willing to let you people be second-rate versions of us, if you'll stop speaking that Spanish, and you stop showing up acting like women are as good as men. If you'll just play your role, we'll patronize you; we'll pat you on the head and tell you we love you, just don't try to take any power from us. And that's what's happening here. I mean, this station -- we just had a group of people who decided that they saw too much power going into ... who make up the majority of the people of Austin. All of a sudden there were voices for people in Austin, voices in Spanish. We had people ATTACK Spanish-language programming on this station -- and these people are the Friends of KOOP. They came to meetings. And we asked them, "What are you doing harassing people who have Spanish language on their shows?" "Well, you know, that's not going out to everybody." Everybody was, well, if you can't speak Spanish that's your problem, not the people of Puerto Rico and not the Puerto Rican programming here. That's not their problem that you don't speak Spanish, or for that matter, you don't speak the kind of Spanish that the people of Puerto Rico speak. And that's their world: "Oh, we can't have that here at KOOP." And then, it was like the Board of Trustees ALLOWING people to have their own programming and speaking in their own languages was bad for insulting this poor white boy, who was just trying to help those poor Spanish-speaking people out. And we were attacked for this. We were attacked for telling him to shut up and do your own program and leave other people alone. That's part of the... We've lost every bit of our proactive gay programming at KOOP over, I don't know, 15 major activists have come through this station to work on gay programming and all of them have left in horrible disgust at the way they're treated at this station. From outright intimidation, threats, humiliations -- they left. And we're talking about hundreds of years, probably, a hundred years of total hard-core activism. People with original ideas, people who have created things, people who have won battles -- their voices were not wanted on here. The people at Friends of KOOP, these people that are sending you all that crap out in the mail...

 

EDUARDO: They CALL themselves "Friends of KOOP".

 

MAC: Yeah, let's make one statement really quick. Friends of KOOP is not part of KOOP Radio. They have no legal right to use our name. If you gave them money and they said it was going to KOOP Radio -- none of that money that went to Friends of KOOP goes to KOOP Radio. That goes into the pockets of the people who cashed that check. It is not tax-deductible, they are not a non-profit organization, they are a PROFIT-MAKING organization. So the members of that group, that push and push an agenda on top of KOOP Radio. Thank you...

 

But the whole point is, if you go to the women's groups and other groups, it comes from that concept what fascism comes from -- it comes from the Italian fascist movement, where they used the ancient Roman concept of the [fassi youngpun?] -- I'm probably mispronouncing -- which is a bundle of reeds, and you tie all the reeds together and you make a strong club. And the idea originally of fascism was that the workers and the corporations and the government would all get together. Well they found out when everyone gets together, that not everyone is a reed, not everyone fits in. Jews never fit in. Queers never fit in. People speaking a different language never fit in. So then the fascists, in order to exist, have to get rid of those people. You can be anything you want at KOOP as long as you follow the liberal, patronizing -- patronize or be a patronizing person. You can do anything. I mean, I've sit in meetings and heard some of the most racist trash spoken at official meetings at KOOP. I've seen racist letters attacking Latinas for, calling them incompetent, and it's because they were brown-skinned.

 

If you read this stuff that Friends of KOOP puts out, look and find out anything that really matters about what they criticize people. It's always criticizing people for broad things. They're not gonna tell you that they're criticizing them because they're women, or they're gay, or they're Latino. [in point of fact, here are several dozen specific, non-broad failings of the board, completely unrelated to diversity issues]

 

EDUARDO: Right. And then they say, "We're not racist," you know? But for some reason the constant attacks against Latinos, against women, and against gays and lesbians. And we have people like José Orta who now cannot step into this radio station for shame of how his community has been treated -- the community of ALGO and Informe Sida basically has been run out, out of this radio station, and it's just a shame.

 

MAC: Yeah, let me tell you the most disgusting thing I've heard in a long time. We got funding to produce AIDS programming here at the station. And then they run the guy who's doing, not only the AIDS programming, but managing the station -- José came on board here in early August [1998], and in two or three weeks of part-time work did more management at the station than the station's ever had, ever, in five years previous, three years on the air, experience. He literally cleaned up and tied up loose ends that we were told were, or whined about from other management sources [Jenny Wong], and, you know what? He got nothing for it. He was treated like dirt because he was gay. Rumors were going around about him have, you know, because he has AIDS. And he won't even come into this door of this building. He will have nothing to do for this place. Yet he did more work for this place, raised more money for this place -- and for what they want to do with the $5,000 we got for AIDS programming?, for AIDS to go out to the East side, to go out to, uh -- they wanted to pay off a tax fraud that the previous manager [J. Bala Wong] had pulled. They wanted to send it to the IRS to pay off their little scam, so that that person won't end up in jail where they belong for scamming a non-profit organization. And right now we have to pay that money, but Friends of KOOP, they can... those mailouts you get in the paper, those aren't free, those cost a thousand dollars to put out one of those bundles of paper. Those are not free. But do you think they're gonna pay some of that money to pay off their buddy's tax frauds? No, we've got AIDS funding. And they're upset that we would not spend AIDS funding for their little projects, none of which have anything to do with AIDS. But that's okay. Someone called it at the last station meeting that, "Well it's just jiggling accounts or juggling accounts," which in comedy was just called fraud.

 

EDUARDO: Yeah.

 

MAC: This is a non-profit organization, we don't pay taxes -- only a small amount of taxes. It's amazing that we get behind, you know, all these years and behind one tax we have to pay. [Laughs.] It's really amazing that it could be that badly run. But, we get, we're in the public interest. And you can't take funds that are put out in the public interest and just do whatever you want with them. And that people speak about that at meetings as if that's okay. The nice white liberals, you know --

 

EDUARDO: Mmm-hmm. And they were the ones running the station for the first four years, and basically they were running it so badly that the station was going under. And now in the last year the new board has done major improvements on the accounting system here for the first time. I mean, it seems like how many accounts were existing in the --

 

MAC: We don't know, we just, we didn't ever have a real accounting system. We brought into two CPA's to work with the previous management, and they both walked out after looking at our books and they were not, they were just so bad. They'd have absolutely nothing to do with it. We've had experienced bookkeepers do the same thing. And then we've done a lot of management, it's cleaned up and cleared up right now, but then they're real upset about that, because opening up the books and showing where you're money's spent gives people that listen to KOOP a view as to where their money's going and to what it's being paid for. And they don't want that, they don't want accounting systems in place that show the communities where that money's going, because if they can go out that way, they can go out and ask for money from the African-American community and say, "Oh, we have all these African-American -- oh, we will..." It goes into KOOP, it goes into their account, and it's never spent on anything dealing with African-American -- where right now you couldn't tell that because -- or you couldn't in the past, you can now, you can come in now where the books are being cleaned up And you say, "Hey, well this money is being spent over here, it's not being spent over here." In the past, they would just go, [desperate voice] "I don't know, it just went in there, you know, into the shoebox, and I guess we didn't..."

 

EDUARDO: One major example of this, like the masquerade, I mean, for some reason last year in the masquerade, there were what, three thousand or something?

 

MAC: Five thousand dollars.

 

EDUARDO: Five thousand dollars made last year. And the masquerade this year, what, fifteen, thirteen hundred? And that was being managed by the people who claim they wanna run the station again.

 

MAC: Well last year's was run by José Orta, and Barry George... Now, run those people off -- any major non-profit organization has at least one, or maybe two major fundraisers a year, and you work -- that's a main part of, if you're a member or part of that organization, is to work towards that fundraiser... "We're Friends of KOOP, we have too much time to spend, we have to do these mailouts. We can't do a mailout about our major benefit. We can't spend that time working on that. We have to spend our time whining." There's people who come to board meetings and just sit there week after week after week, but do you think they're gonna sit down and deal with funding, or getting funding sources here? No, they've never. None of those guys that are listed on the Friends of KOOP have EVER worked towards funding of KOOP Radio. But they can sit there and write that stuff up they send you and bother you in the mail. And it's amazing. It's really amazing. But, the whole point is that, they also don't want your voices, they want your MONEY. But they don't want that Spanish on this station. Or you know, a little Spanish, but talk in English so that *I* can understand and make sure you're not saying anything BAD about me.

 

EDUARDO: Yeah, this is a big example of how José Orta last year, not only developed this fundraising tool, which is the masquerade and raised $5,000, and now that he's been run out, the masquerade was managed by the people who say they want to take over the station. And they come out with thirteen hundred dollars. What does that mean? This is the type of management problem that has been happening for the last four years before the last year. And basically it's just a bullying tactic that keeps being used in terms of attacking people.

 

MAC: Well, what will happen is, if they get a new management system in, they'll say, "Oh look how this is -- we didn't have any money coming in under this, you know, I mean, women are all right, and gays are ALL RIGHT, but you really don't want them RUNNING things. We need some straight white men in there and they would have made money. Of course those straight white men had perfect opportunity to make money from this benefit, to work on this. Our invoices for our pledge drive are sitting out here and no one has done them. We haven't paid our tower rent for one month, it's about to come up AGAIN. But I guess they have time to work on this election and play all these games, but how do they expect KOOP to be on the air if we don't have a tower to send our signal out? Do they just they think that they'll be able to talk to each other over this table?

 

EDUARDO: Now something else is that some people may think that this is going to damage the station to talk about what's going on in there -- Do they think that people don't have the right to this information? That members who pay money don't have the right to this information?

 

MAC: Of course they don't think that. They think that they're right, and whatever they say is right. Like when they say things like, I hear in meetings, and people sit there and say, "We don't need people of color on the radio 'cause you can't see skin color on the radio." This is not racism, by the way, this is nice, white liberalism. And this has not been said in the back room, you know, "Well, I really think..." This is said in MEETINGS. This is said out publicly. People sit there, members of, people who are listed on that, the Friends of KOOP ballot, have said in meetings they feel bad because as straight white men they feel that they're always under pressure in the society, and how, sit there and CRY about being a straight white male in American society. And, the one, this guy really does it, he has more programming, hours of programming on the air than the entire gay community has ever been given on KOOP, him personally. Yet he feels abused as a white man in this society, and especially at KOOP. And that's the reason he's running to change that, to make KOOP better for straight white men. And I think, that sounds amazing, but this is stuff that's said in meetings, this is PUBLIC stuff that they say. We have another guy that wrote, this stuff when we were talking about him attacking Latinos, he wrote LETTERS saying this. This is official letter sent to the board where it says, someone like Aida Franco, who's been a general manager of a non-profit, doesn't have the background to be on the board of trustees, who's been in management, and just has a really good long resumé -- yet his point is, he doesn't care what that resumé says, because she has an "O" on the end of her last name is what he cares about.

 

EDUARDO: This was the engineer of KOOP who wrote this letter, and he was calling her "The Clarence Thomas of KOOP", and also said, "You come here and we see you as an enemy."

 

MAC: Well she said, you know what she said that was so terrible? "I come to meetings and all I see in here are white men sitting in the meeting." And that's why he said she was a Clarence Thomas, because she said, "Where are the Latino faces? Where are the black faces? Where are the openly-gay people at this station? Where are the women at this station?" We're saying this, and we're saying out on the air that we represent everybody, but you go to the meetings, and all you see are these white men. And that's why he attacked her for it. Because that's a wrong thing to say at KOOP. You can't say -- because these white men will patronize you if you let them. And if you're not letting them patronize you, well, that's your problem. You shouldn't be here.

 

EDUARDO: A caller called and said, "Well, what can be done with all of these problems?" But one of the things I will say is that a message has to be sent to this clique, club, that the more people, if more people from the gay and lesbian communities, from the women community, or from the Latino/Latina community, are run off from KOOP, this is not the way where KOOP should be. If they wanna keep hurting KOOP they're gonna keep running people off like this. I mean what else, the only way we have to let people know what's going on, is to communicate with our communities and say basically, these attacks continue happening to our communities, and if more communities like this continue, then maybe there needs to be a boycott of something on KOOP. But if this group wants to work together to make the station better together, then they need to stop running off people. They need to invite ALGO/Informe Sida back into the station, and change their behavior.

 

MAC: Well, I wanna bring this something, it's very, very, what's the term, "provincial" here, but I'm not quite... but this is just a window into Austin's liberal community. We've got the liberal paper here in town, the Chronicle, the little suburban throwaway here. Run your finger down the staff. We're talking about a city where almost half the population is Latino. There are about 150 names, I'm just guessing on that, on their staff list. There are two Spanish surnames on that. And yet, the editor of the Chronicle has attacked KOOP for having voices, or what he called, you know, I don't remember now, his little racist terminology. And he went on like that. And yet, it's no different. They're playing the same game. It's the same game here. It's the same game in the Democratic party. We can, you know, in the liberal politics in the city, we can elect token people, we can elect ONE Latino and ONE black and ONE closeted gay person to the City Council every year. But that's not being represented by their communities, that's being represented by the white, liberal estate. And as long as they kiss ass to that group, then it's all right. And this whole thing, and that's what I really want to get across, that this is happening across the board in Austin, and this is just ONE point in that whole spectrum. And it's one thing we need to work on this whole town, and we need to get rid of that idea that this town is liberal.

 

And I'll tell you something that just happened in this town. Two years ago, July 1996, I got woke up in the middle of the night, I know some gay sources in the Austin American police department. They said that over, they had just found a gay man murdered over on the cruising area along Town Lake. His name was Pablo Zuniga. At the time, they did, I mean, at that night, the phone call from the police department said it was a gay-bashing murder. It was brutal. We found out they arrested the guy within a couple of days who did it. His name was Charles Lowery. Even the paper put him up as, well, just a little slacker boy who was down there, and somehow this queer came onto him and he killed him. He said that the guy attacked him and he made up -- first of all, Pablo was deaf. He couldn't speak, so he never said anything to him. The fact that Lowery was the only one with a weapon at the site, how was he being the one attacked? It was like a razor or something like, a letter opener, a sharpened letter opener which he stabbed Pablo to death with. So yet, this other guy -- this guy's trial took two years because his parents have bucks, they put it off. If you compare that to the Lacresha Murray, who just got railroaded into a trial and out and into jail -- this guy is two years from the liberal District Attorney's office in Austin, Texas. They let him off scot-free. He did not get a second -- the only two alternatives whether he was a risk -- he didn't get anything for a brutal, brutal murder. At the same time, this gay man is Wyoming is killed, and that's all you hear in the local press, in the liberal press. Do you hear anything about the gay murderers that get locked away in the City of Austin? The City of Austin's LIBERAL. [District Attorney] Ronnie Earle is LIBERAL. Ronnie Earle, or his office selected a jury for this trial, but they did not go in and make sure this jury was not racist, was not homophobic, when they went in there.

 

Several years back there was a brutal murder of Nicholas West. And basically the same sort of circumstances in Tyler. And everybody in Austin was up in arms, all the liberals about how horrible these rednecks were because they murdered this guy. But in conservative Smith County, their DA made sure there were no homophobic people on that jury. Those guys got sent to Huntsville, got stiff sentences. I mean not enough, but here in Austin, who cares? Queers and the Mexicans don't vote for me, I don't care. And I got that Lowery Family money. Where is it? Where's the Chronicle? Where's it exposing this? No! But what's programming here are these nice liberals that want to take over KOOP. Where's their programming on that? Now, they'll tell you about Wyoming and those rednecks up there, those, as long it's working-class people, then you can be a bigot. But if you're a nice white liberal like the Lowerys, you're not really liberal. I mean even if you're murdering people, even if people are lying dead on the street of the city, they're not REALLY bigots, you know? As long as you're not a redneck and as long as you don't say "nigger", you're not a bigot. You can say anything you want about people and who they are or what they are here in this city, as long as it's controlling someone, as long as it's -- And this guy's out in the streets now. This Lowery character. And of course, who's he gonna kill next? Who's gonna be his next victim? But he's a little slacker. That was the way the police, I mean the press showed him as. He could fit right into the Friends of KOOP and you'd never even notice.

 

I sit here and ask people about extreme homophobic statements that were made at this station, and then laughed in my face for my bringing up and saying that we shouldn't have homophobic statements made. I was attacked, I was just asking, "Why did you make this statement?" The guy just said, "Well, I don't have to say anything." And then I was attacked for asking that. Just like people were attacked for asking why this guy was demanding we have English-speaking programs on here. You know, "You can't make, say that about him. He was being nice. He was being liberal." I mean, the guy sat there and laughed in my face, and had people were abusing me for his homophobic statements. They said, "We should have racist skinheads on KOOP because we allow gays on KOOP so we need the other side." This is the guy who runs Friends of KOOP, this is Ricardo Guerrero, who is, by the way, not a "La Raza Latino" as he tells us at the meeting. I'm not making this up. So, that's the kind of mentality, and it permeates Austin. And these people are filling, I mean, this kind of editorials and the writing that's in the Chronicle from Louis Black, and it's people, ... that something we said at KOOP makes them feel uncomfortable, makes him see the future is not his any more, it's not 1972, the Gentlemen's Agreement isn't working any more, that people want to select their own view -- the majority of people in town are no longer white, straight men. They're a very small minority of people. And it goes, the whole KOOP thing, the whole Chronicle thing, you can go right down to the liberal Democratic party here, right across the board, it's the same kind of, "As long as you fit into our mold, it's okay, but don't have your own opinions, don't go around telling people that gay men are happy to be gay. No, you hate being gay." They'll tell you that. And when we talk about doing gay programming here, that was the thing they would say, "Well, you can come on and talk about the problems that your community faces," and we're like, "Problems? Our community is not a 'problem'. We don't face 'problems'. We face our lives. We enjoy our lives. We celebrate our lives." And the same thing with Latinos. You know, "Come on and say how terrible off your life is... and to speak in our own language ... we don't talk about our own politics." Well, no, we don't want THAT. We want to sit here and then we can pat you on the head and say, "We're sorry you're not as good as we are."

 

[long section not dealing with KOOP not transcribed]

 

EDUARDO: ...We dedicate this to all white liberal supremacists...