Posted on 09/27/2008 7:46:43 AM PDT by GVnana
Subversives for Obama
Friday, 26th September 2008
There are two American election campaigns currently running. The first, in the mainstream media, accepts Barack Obama at face value, no questions asked, while it viciously turns over Sarah Palin and her family whom it subjects to lies, smears and character assassination. The second, being conducted in the blogosphere and (with one or two notable exceptions such as the Wall Street Journal) not alluded to at all by the mainstream media, is the site of verbal warfare between Camp Obama and bloggers who are practising journalism as it used to be practised – going behind the propaganda to dig out information and asking questions about it. The blogosphere is not only rebutting the Palin lies but also piling up the most disturbing revelations about Obama’s background and associations -- compounded by the troubling manner in which Camp Obama responds to these discoveries.
A few months ago, a claim was made by former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton that Obama had been funded through Harvard law school by Khalid Al-Mansour, a ‘mentor’ to the founders of the Black Panther party and advisor to ‘one of the world’s richest men,’ Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. It was Prince Alwaleed whose $10 million check to help rebuild Manhattan after 9/11 was refused by New York mayor Rudy Guiliani because the Saudi prince hinted publicly that America’s pro-Israel policies were to blame for the attacks.
According to this story by Kenneth Timmerman, Camp Obama denied this claim -- and referred to a story on Politico.com in which reporter Ben Smith wrote that ‘a spokesman for Sutton’s family, Kevin Wardally’ said that Sutton had been mistaken when he made those comments. But when contacted, Sutton’s family not only denied that Sutton had misspoken but also said they had never even heard of Kevin Wardally – who appears to work for a Harlem political consulting firm.
So the claim that Obama was funded through Harvard by a radical Black Muslim activist with ties to the Saudis remains on the table.
Some of the most troubling questions, however, arise from Obama’s relationship with the unreprentant former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. Obama has been at pains to play down this relationship, dismissing Ayers as just ‘a guy who lives in my neighborhood,’ and ‘not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.’ But thanks to the exemplary and important journalism of Stanley Kurtz, it is becoming ever clearer that such claims are deeply disingenuous and conceal a significant and long-lasting working relationship with a man who has never renounced his terrorist past. This relationship centred upon a fund called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which although founded by former ambassador Walter Annenberg to improve Chicago’s schools, funnelled some $100 million into the hands of radical activists. The CAC was the brainchild of Ayers – and for four years in the 1990s, Obama was chairman of the board.
In the Wall Street Journal, Kurtz writes that documents in the CAC archives make it clear that William Ayers and Barack Obama were partners in the CAC.
In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the ‘Collaborative,’ which shaped education policy... The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda...
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto. In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers’ and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,’ Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. ..
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
Kurtz has also been trying to discover just who appointed Obama to the CAC board.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's ‘recruitment’ to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
Here, Kurtz adds that Obama has sought to obscure the role Ayers played in choosing Obama to lead the CAC -- and also details how the CAC tried to obstruct Kurtz’s inquiries by blocking his access to the records. And here Camp Obama responds to these claims, along with Kurtz’s demolition of that response.
Nor is the relationship with Ayers the only radical question-mark over Obama’s associations. Indeed, Obama appears to be the front-man for a vast network of the most subversive radicals in the USA – an alphabet soup from the FBI menu, a veritable Rolodex of the American counter-culture. WorldNetDaily reveals:
The official campaign website of Sen. Barack Obama has completely scrubbed a series of user-generated blog postings on the candidate's site by a former top communist activist who is an associate of former Weathermen terrorist leader William Ayers. The move has raised questions regarding Obama's relationship with the deleted blogger, Mike Klonsky, who runs an education organization that was founded by Ayers and that received a substantial grant from a group directed by Obama.
Small wonder Camp Obama is sensitive to the association. Klonsky, a professor of education and leader of the New Communist movement, was national secretary of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society. In 1969, he was one of five SDS members arrested at the organization’s Chicago national headquarters for assaulting a police officer, interfering with a firefighter, and inciting mob action. As Global Labor and Politics has reported, Klonsky went on to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese Stalinist leadership who, in turn, ‘hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,” effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party.’ (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).
In 1991, Klonsky co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago – and his co-founder was one William Ayers.
As Trevor Loudon continues to document, Klonsky and his Weather Underground friends Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are part of a far more extensive -- and organised – network of Subversives for Obama. In his latest post, Loudon concludes:
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are involved in an organisation uniting three Marxist parties, a host of ‘60s radicals and terrorists and a new generation of militant activists. That organisation has spawned a spin-off organisation specifically designed to put Barack Obama in the White House and to bring about massive social change across the US.
Barack Obama appears to sit on a nexus between Marxist revolutionary activists, unrepentant former terrorists, Black Power racists, Chicago mobsters – oh, and a Saudi who is trying to buy up America. If you were to turn up at US immigration control with a background of such associates, it’s a fair bet they wouldn’t let you off the air-bridge. Yet this man may well become President of the US! If any other candidate had had merely a fleeting relationship with William Ayers, his candidacy would have been terminated before it was even articulated -- let alone what we now know about Obama’s key role in Ayers’s CAC and its funding of radical groups; let alone the fact that Obama had been mentored during his formative years by a Communist Party plant; let alone his work for organisations modelled on the seditious philosophy of Saul Alinsky; let alone his two-decade membership of a Black Power church; let alone his relationship with fraudster Tony Rezko.
And yet despite all of this, virtually no-one in the mainstream media is asking any questions. Has there ever been a more staggering, surreal and scary race to the White House?
Mike Klonsky has had a blog on Obama’s official website for a few months now (His first article is from February)...
Soooo who’s Mike Klonsky?... Quote: Michael Klonsky (born 1943) is an American educator and political activist. He is perhaps most famous for being National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1968...
...On May 12, 1969, Klonsky and four other SDSers were arrested at the organization’s Chicago national headquarters for assaulting a police officer, interfering with a firefighter, and inciting mob action[/b]. A prank call to a local police station said there had been a shooting at SDS’ offices. When the police arrived, Klonsky and the others were convinced it was a ruse to gain access to SDS’ offices.
Klonsky convinced the police everything was fine, when a second prank call brought local firefighters to the scene. When the police attempted to force entry to the offices, Klonsky and the others resisted. Convinced state repression of SDS was coming, Klonsky told a national television audience on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that police repression of the New Left was being planned by the U.S. Department of Justice...
...At SDS’ June 1969 national convention in Chicago, Klonsky played a major role in the dissolution of the organization. A group of 11 SDS national leaders—including Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, John Jacobs, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Howie Machtinger—had met in April and May of 1969 to craft a response to PL supporters within SDS.
Their article, “You Don’t Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” was published in New Left Notes on June 18, 1969, the day the convention opened.
Mike Klonsky - Communist leader...and along with Bill Ayers, promoter of American terrorism, created a school workshop that received a grant from the Annenberg Challenge, the Chicago branch created by Bill Ayers and had Barack Obama as president and chairman, and now Klonsky gets his own little blog on Obama’s offical website...
A Convergence of the Movement for a Democratic Society
November 8-10, 2007
All Events are free! at Loyola University
2:00 pm Sullivan Center.
1968 CONFIDENTIAL!: How they lived, What they dreamed, and How they organized in that world historic year!
SDS Activists to Tell All!
Marilyn Katz, Michael James, Franklin Rosemont, Michael Klonsky, Susan Klonsky. Katz is a noted speaker, an excellent debater, a publicist for good causes.
James an SDS organizer was a founder of Rising Up Angry; he edits the Heartland Journal.
Klonsky was National secretary of SDS in 1968, responsible for much of the planning and coordination of the SDS events of that year. He has devoted himself to educational reform, Teaching for Social Justice.
Susan Klonsky worked in the SDS National Office, has an excellent memory of that time and has been also working in educational reform. In the 60s Rosemont helped form the Louis Lingg Memorial chapter of SDS and was editor of Rebel Worker and Surrealist Insurrection. Beau Golwitzer, moderator.
BTTT
Mike Klonsky – a sixties New Left leader (Susan, his wife,
who was also active in SDS)
Susan and Mike live in Chicago; they co-authored Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society.
Michael and Susan Klonsky, educators who were among the early leaders of the small-schools movement, tell the story of how a once-promising model of creating new small and charter schools has been used by the neocons to reproduce many of the old inequities. “Small Schools” is the engaging story of what happens when the small-schools movement meets the Ownership Society.
Mike Klonsky:
Susan Klonsky and I write from the perspective of long-time educators and school activists who were heavily influenced by democratic schooling (and de-schooling) movements in the ‘60s, including the Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools that were central to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the ‘60s.
The early small schools efforts in New York, Philly, and Chicago were filled with much of the same transformational spirit and sense of purpose. Mainly created by rebel teachers and supported by community-based organizations, the early small schools, beginning with Deb Meier’s Central Park East in 1974, had the potential to be much more than replicable models of corporate-type restructuring (in the Starbucks sense). For us, they were primarily ways to engage whole school communities in the education of children.
Many of the new small schools were democratically run and focused on making kids more visible and on building a professional community of teachers. Even the early charter schools that followed, pioneered by progressive thinkers like Ted Kolderie, Ted Sizer, Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker and Ray Budde, looked nothing like today’s chains of Edison and KIPP schools. Words like autonomy and choice didn’t mean what they mean now under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms in N.Y. or Daley/Duncan Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Autonomy meant teachers would have more power over their teaching/learning environments and be freed up from stupid rules, while choice meant expanding choices and options within local schools for students with diverse interests and ways of learning.
Our book tells the story about what happened when that movement ran head-long into the “Ownership Society” (to use George Bush’s own campaign slogan) with its penchant for eroding public space in favor on shock-and-awe privatization, standardization, and school closings. The early small schools visionaries couldn’t have imagined their efforts to create a critical and innovative force within public education being taken over by corporate-type school operators and program vendors. They wouldn’t have dreamed of chains of small schools, bankrolled by the world’s richest men—schools actively excluding ELL kids or students with disabilities for the first two to three years.
How could this have happened? Is there a way out of the quagmire? More on this to follow.
Michael Klonsky, PhD. is a professor of education and Director of the Center for Innovative Schools.
Susan Klonsky is the Director of the Small Schools Workshop.
Would-be reformers need to beware of those who would co-opt the language of reform to undermine its ideals. Mr. Ayers and Mr. Klonsky examine how Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 initiative has used the terms of the small schools movement to promote privatization and the erosion of public space.
by William Ayers and Michael Klonsky
WE started the Small Schools Workshop in 1991, with the goal of supporting Chicago’s reformminded teachers as they tried to create new, smaller learning communities in an environment that was historically toxic. While the small schools movement at that time represented a wide range of political and educational philosophies, our vision of small schools was closely connected with issues of social justice, equity, and community. For us, small schools were not some new efficiency or simply a technical AT ODDS change. Neither were they an innovative, sophisticated
way to sort and track kids. Rather, the small schools
movement offered a strategy for engaging teachers, students, parents, and whole communities, the people
with the problem, in a movement for democratic education.
It’s no secret that the language of social movements(they are admitting that ‘their school’ is a SOCIAL MOVEMENT) can be co-opted or reduced to empty clichés. In the world
of Chicago school reform, the simple word “choice” has
become a two-edged sword.
The small schools movement was, from its inception,
a collage of educational and political forces. There
was an initial group of autonomy-seeking young activist
teachers who were trying to carve out some space
for innovation and good teaching. Dozens of new schools
were started, and new innovative models like the multiplex
at Cregier High School emerged. Later, the rug
was pulled out from under that movement, and the
new schools were all put on a strict test-prep regimen.
WILLIAM AYERS is Distinguished Professor
of Education at the University of Illinois,
Chicago. He founded the Small Schools
Workshop in 1991. MICHAEL KLONSKY
is a professor of education at Nova Southeastern
University, Ft. Lauderdale-Davie,
Fla., and has served as the workshop’s director
since 1993.
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