Pacifica Station Blacklists Commentator on Business & Economics
By Sam Smith – The Progressive Review (1 Aug 2008)

Admittedly Catherine Austin Fitts has a pretty unusual background for a commentator on Pacifica’s California station KPFA. Fitts served as managing director and member of the board of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. She was Assistant Secretary of Housing and a Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., an investment bank and financial software developer. On the other hand, she was one of the most creative and unusual voices you’ll hear out of the business world, especially important when the economy is falling apart.

She was recently dumped as a guest on KPFA’s Flashpoints for reasons that are unclear, although a reader’s letter – later retracted – accusing Fitts of self dealing may have been involved. The station also appears to have decided that only academics and staff of non-profits can talk about business. Small business folk are to be excluded, as the left has successfully done for decades to its own disadvantage. Station management has declined to respond to our inquiries.

In any case, the incident is another reminder that censorship exists on the left as well as the right. Your editor, for example, has long been persona non grata at many liberal media, most likely because of his ideological quirkiness and his involvement in forming the national Green Party which many conventional liberals abhor.

The most dangerous thing one can do on either left or right is to think for yourself and thus Fitts certainly was headed for trouble from the start.

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