The re-writing of the Pacifica bylaws a few years ago allowed board members to escape term limits and almost become lifers in the governance of the overall operation of its affiliates. Just as the incoming administration has revealed its agenda by President-select George W. Bush announcement of his cabinet choices and some folks appearing shocked by individuals whose raison d etre is in direct conflict with the department they were chosen to preside over, the additions to the Pacifica National Board are equally revelatory. His name is listed basically as the board s chairman, not because he is a CPA from Texas. Based in Washington, D.C., the NAHB boasts that it is expanding its headquarters, projecting the doubling of the building to nine stories, while covertly, as attorney Rosenberg points out, is spending big bucks to prevent any legislation on the state level that might mandate any access features for the disabled. Ford and his friends at the NAHB have persistently fought against such basic access standards, universal design, or a visitable single family home provides for at least one no-step entrance, wider doorways and passageways through ground floor rooms so as to accommodate a wheelchair user, an accessible bathroom at ground level with bathroom walls that would support grab bars.
Universal design permits all people, including people with disabilities, to enter and function.
It permits people to age in place, live independently and avoid institutionalization. More directly to our concern about Ford s relation to WBAI is the fact that he was reported in the New York Times to having complained that WBAI loyalists are mired in the 1960s , adding whose opinions are currently not only insignificant but irrelevant in today s media market. Not so insignificant but extremely relevant to us is that Ford s opinion seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on historical fact. These conflicts developed after some of those who had been conscripted by their colonial rulers and taken to fight in Europe to free Europeans from nazism and fascism, returned home after the war and found themselves once again subjected to subservient status in their own countries. Thus, they soon found themselves being forced to organize national liberation movements and resort to initiating armed struggles against racist and fascistic white settler colonialists backed by the U.S. and its western allies which denied Africans the same rights that they had fought for Europeans to have in Europe.