While at last weekend's local station board meeting of KPFA where I held a protest sign, new board member Chandra Hauptman approached me, saying she was sympathetic to animal issues, and wanted to know why we are boycotting KPFA. I sent her the following:

We are disappointed and frustrated with KPFA and its censorship of vegan, animal rights, and true environmental programming, and the speciesism rampant at the station. We have appealed and lobbied for years for subject matter that can save audience members lives from the ravages of heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes, that can save the planet itself, and billions of tortured, murdered animals. All we get is betrayal - anti-vegan propaganda offered as a station premium for donation. Donate enough money, and KPFA will send you a book - "Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith - that will teach you and your family how to get sick and die, destroy the environment, perpetuate war and violence, squander resources, and kill animals by the billions. Shame on KPFA! Worldwatch Institute just published a report blaming meat and dairy for 51% of greenhouse gas emissions. Professor T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University blames meat and dairy for 90% of disease in this country. Shame on KPFA for depriving its audience of such critical information.

Shame on KPFA for violating the Pacifica mission statement dedicated to peace and to providing a voice for alternative viewpoints. Tolstoy said "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields. " Why? Why is Dennis Kucinich vegan? Why is Cindy Sheehan vegan? Why was Cesar Chavez vegan? The KPFA audience will never know. We held a protest at KPFA, only to be greeted by some speciesist programmer, eating a bowl of tuna fish, arguing with us that KPFA does present credible environmental programming, all said with ocean depletion and murder on her breath. Shame on KPFA, its ignorance, irrelevance, and indifference. One bite of a hamburger can be fatal in this age of mad cow disease. A vegan saves over 300,000 gallons of water in food growing in a year compared to cadaver eaters. The KPFA audience doesn't hear this, it doesn't hear the moral issues concerning today's holocaust, the slavery, mutilation, female exploitation, and murder of innocent sentient beings. Yet here I am for 9 years on commercial AM radio, often on right wing radio stations in the past - with a vegan, animal rights, human liberation program. There are non-violent animal rights activists wasting away in jail for nothing more than putting words on a website, or on the sidewalk with chalk. Animal rights activists top the goverment's terrorist lists, deprived of first amendment rights - while KPFA snacks on tuna fish with neurotoxic mercury - giving us a brain-dead station. How do the oppressed murder victims taste, KPFA?

We demand a weekly animal rights vegan program now - not next week, not next month - but now. I am willing to produce and host it. KPFT-Pacifica in Houston started a vegan show about 8 years ago - inspired by my program GO VEGAN WITH BOB LINDEN (www.GoVeganRadio. com, now airing in the Bay Area Saturdays at 9AM on progressive talk GREEN 960 AM). I was the first guest on the KPFT show, and I co-host regularly. (It's astonishing that there's a vegan show on a Houston Texas Pacifica radio station, and none in the Bay Area!) That Texas program always exceeds its pledge drive goal, as begging for money has lately become the main subject matter of KPFA. Perhaps people would donate if KPFA were to provide a forum for today's most important and relevant issues; but right now it doesn't deserve a penny in listener support.

Peace advocates, vegan and animal rights activists, and true environmentalists should not donate to a station with such a harmful public and societal perspective, whose policies embrace censorship, speciesism, gender bias, and racism. People of color suffer the worst death and disease rates in this country, unnecessarily - deprived of information that can save their lives, as KPFA offers a book suggesting cows' milk to the lactose intolerant and diabetic. The mighty KPFA is now diminished to trash talk. KPFA is a sell-out. I am urging everyone to boycott the very disappointing KPFA and withhold donations - as it has abdicated its role as voice of the community.

Bob Linden
www.GoVeganRadio. com
Bob@GoVeganRadio. com
818-623-6477