The MSM, including Fox on occassion, has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any major revelations about who this charlatan has surrounded himself with.
THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
Posted on 06/22/2008 3:31:15 PM PDT by 4buttons
from the link, "Who 'sent' Obama?" in the Power line post:
Certainly Ayers' politics remain unapologetically authoritarian. He recently traveled to Venezuela - only the most recent of several such trips - and delivered a speech in front of Hugo Chavez in which he spoke of education as the "motor force of revolution" and his interest in "overcom[ing] the failings of capitalist education" and said he thought Chavez was creating "something truly new and deeply humane." He closed his speech by mouthing typical slogans of the authoritarian left: "Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!"
As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and the maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign. Davidson apparently moved into the maoist movements of the 70s after the disintegration of SDS.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
The MSM, including Fox on occassion, has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any major revelations about who this charlatan has surrounded himself with.
THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
This has been out since April. I have yet to see the MSM, or the McCain campaign, pick it up and run with it.
That is discouraging!
BIG STORY from a fellow leftist who states:
-I have pointed to the joint participation of Senator Obama and Professor Bill Ayers in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education reform project, as evidence of an older and deeper relationship between Ayers and Obama than the Senator has acknowledged.
- Ayers has put a racialist stamp on his politics for several decades. He was part of the leadership of the Weather Underground group in the late 1960’s that broke apart the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. He argued then, as he does now, that “white supremacy” is the original sin of American life.
- The Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (“ABCs”) was formed then to push for the LSC idea in the Illinois state legislature. Active in the ABCs was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project...
- As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, I do not think that the link made here between the LSC’s and “democracy” is, in fact, accurate. I think that such “councils” look eerily similar to efforts by regimes like those in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Venezuela under Chavez to impose control over teachers and their independent unions by an authoritarian regime. Thus, it is not a surprise to me that Bill Ayers has traveled several times in recent years to Venezuela where he has spoken in front of Hugo Chavez and has enthusiastically applauded that regime’s efforts to link education policy to the Chavez “revolution.”
As Ayers stated in a speech there in November 2006 “La educacion es Revolucion!” He applauded “the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez” and he said he “share[d] the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution.”
- The Ayers/Hallett proposal described a three-piece structure established to carry out the CAC. The three “over-lapping entities each of which has clear tasks and responsibilities” included:
“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board (the Board); the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (the Collaborative); and the Consortium of Chicago Schools Research (CCSR).”
The first chairman of the CAC Board was Barack Obama, at that point, 33 years old and a third year associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm.
He began the Board position in early 1995 and stepped down from the chairmanship in late 1999, though he remained on the Board until the CAC phased itself out of existence and handed off its remaining assets to a permanent new institution, the Chicago Public Education Fund, in 2001.
- The co-chair of the CAC’s Collaborative from 1995 until 2000 was Bill Ayers. In 1997 Ayers was named Chicago’s “Citizen of the Year” for his work on the CAC.
Thus, the leaders of the two operative arms of the CAC from its inception until 2000 were Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
- I. Conclusion: an academic failure but political success?
The Challenge allowed Barack Obama and Bill Ayers to work together, no doubt closely, in the heat of political battle to help disburse more than $100 million to allies, particularly in the LSCs, in the Chicago School system. Under the circumstances, it seems more than a bit disingenuous of Senator Obama to dismiss Bill Ayers as “some guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
I was at the local airport today. The ignorance of some people is what is frightening and appalling. I saw one woman with a very oversized shirt that read “I (heart symbol) Obama.” I saw another woman with an Obama pin that read “Change.” I saw a guy with a CCCP T-shirt and an Obama button and then I saw a gent with a T-shirt that read “1-20-09 Bush’s Last Day” wearing a baseball cap crooked and the galling image of two pair of pants — the outer pair halfway down the posterior. All four were in their 20’s.
Obama’s first TV ad for the general election: “America is a nation of strong families and strong values. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents.”
What’s interesting to me is that he offers being brought up by a single mom and grandparents as AN EXAMPLE of a strong family, rather than family dissolution!
Proving that Newspeak has become the American language.
-The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization. In fact, at the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that government or right wing elements helped create them.
-So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School.
-The LSC’s were to be made up by a majority of parents and have the power to hire and fire principals thus creating a new power center in the school system against what both reform groups viewed as the bureaucratic and expensive school board, on the one hand, and, on the other, the teachers union. In my view these types of councils are reminiscent of the manipulative “community” bodies set up in regimes like those of Hugo Chavez and the Sandinistas - used to control genuine democratic movements such as trade unions.
- Active in the local control from below, on the “community” side of this effort, was Bill Ayers who had returned to Chicago in 1987 as an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois’ Chicago Circle campus, after surfacing from the underground and earning his Ph.D. at Columbia. Another ally in this battle at the same time was Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP), as Obama notes briefly in his Dreams From My Father. (See also, “Meeting on School Reform Halted,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1988 at 3; and “Black Parents” A letter to the Chi. Trib. on Aug. 23, 1988 from a DCP member defending the 1988 local control reform bill) The DCP had its origins in the “radical” movement started by Saul Alinsky.
-Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew, broadly, as “maoist” politics – a view of the world that was opposed to Russian style bureaucratic communism from above, instead advocates of this approach supported sending revolutionary cadre to “swim among the masses like fish in the sea” or attempting to establish guerilla foco as romantically theorized by Regis Debray and carried out with disastrous results by Che Guevara.
- Today one of the approaches used by these types is the “long march” through the (presumably “bourgeois”) institutions. (See this discussion of it by “Progressives for Obama” supporter, Fidelista and former SDS leader Carl Davidson.) Of course, the “long march” referred to is that taken by Mao and the Red Army in 1934. Now, Davidson et. al apply the concept to the tactics of the “left” inside various “reform movements” such as the anti-war movement. Davidson was one of the organizers of the 2002 anti war rally at which Obama first spoke out against the war.
- Bill raised money to start the Small Schools Workshop in the early 90s and eventually hired another former maoist from the 60s (and actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS disintegrated) named Mike Klonsky to head it up.
-Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself is a bit unusual...Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed’s key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama to Sidley.
-Obama joined a tiny, little known (outside Chicago, at least) public interest law firm called Davis Miner Barnhill. The partner who hired him was Judson Miner. Miner was a well known left wing lawyer in Chicago who had been counsel to the progressive black mayor in the 80s, Harold Washington. But Miner possibly also had ties to the Ayers family. He was law school classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago (both Class of 1967). He formed a lawyers group against the war after graduation and organized a left wing alternative to the local Chicago bar association.
-Then, in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers...
-In fact, in retrospect the Ayers/Ayers (business from above, local activism from below) joint campaign against both the Chicago School District bureaucracy and the Teachers Union is reminiscent of the kinds of alliances one finds in neo-stalinist regimes like that of Cuba, China or Sandinista-run Nicaragua. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, for example, Mao appealed to local activists to attack the party bureaucracy. These authoritarian movements often try to build their power against democratic institutions like unions. Well-intentioned liberals even from the business community are often willing to support such efforts because they view the traditional labor movement as even more of a threat than the neo-stalinist authoritarians like Castro, Chavez or Ortega. While many on the left try to portray such movements as a new form of democracy, they are anything but.
- Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who “sent” Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn.
It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to the Ayers’s in the battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the 80s.
-As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and the maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign. Davidson apparently moved into the maoist movements of the 70s after the disintegration of SDS.
” Diamond is a liberal with an interest in the international labor movement. Although a man of the left, he is hostile toward the Maoism of people like Bill Ayers”
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Outstanding post. Thanks 4buttons. Fascinating read/links. Thanks powerlineblog & Steve Diamond.
No Commie Left Behind? Bill POS Ayers (in my 1st deck of domestic enemies playing cards) BUMP!
Down in the comments in the Diamond post is an excerpt from and link to a Newsweek article dealing with David Axelrod as a PR man doing business, clandestinely, for Commonwealth Edison, which is a Tom Ayers connection.
It’s old news, but the connection is illustrated.
A gag out commericial when I saw it.
Because of the Thomas Ayers tie this might elicit a “hmmm...”:
When Illinois utility Commonwealth Edison wanted state lawmakers to back a hefty rate hike two years ago, it took a creative lobbying approach, concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest: Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE. CORE ran TV ads warning of a “California-style energy crisis” if the rate increase wasn’t approved—but without disclosing the commercials were funded by Commonwealth Edison. The ad campaign provoked a brief uproar when its ties to the utility, which is owned by Exelon Corp., became known. “It’s corporate money trying to hoodwink the public,” the state’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn said. What got scant notice then—but may soon get more scrutiny—is that CORE was the brainchild of ASK Public Strategies, a consulting firm whose senior partner is David Axelrod, now chief strategist for Barack Obama.
Tom Maguire
from...here...
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html
BIG THANKS to Tom Maguire!
Actually, there is a proper name for these councils.
Check it out.
I’m appalled that people like Ayers have influence in this society. Only buttheaded academics at a University would want the despicable man as a colleague.
“I’m appalled that people like Ayers have influence in this society.”
As I understand it, he’s *quite* influential in the field of education, and then there’s the influence his family wields.
I look at this whole situation this way: Ayers and his family were there when Obama got “made” into Chicago politics, in fact they introduced him to it at a function in their home. I believe the Ayers were the first litmus test and political hoop he had to jump through. Ayers and his family are still around, still pulling strings and using their considerable influence. You don’t get launched into politics anywhere, let alone Chicago, without paying off those you owe your debts to.
TY
obama ayers ping
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