February 12, 2000: Barack & Michelle Obama Party Down with Radicals Ayers & Klonsky

Community Renewal Society 10th Anniversary Prom ^ | 2008-10-15 | FREE REPUBLIC WORLD EXCLUSIVE

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

	The Community Renewal Society presents Here’s to You CATALYST’s 10th Anniversary Prom
Save the date! To order tickets, call our promline: (312) 427-4830, ext. 1-300. Se Habla Espanol	Saturday, February 12, 2000 Grand Ballroom, Navy Pier   Honorary Committee Joanne Alter, Founder Working In The Schools Arnita Boswell, Founder, Board Member National Hook Up of Black Women Julie Chavez, Managing Director Bank of America Illinois Ronald Gidwitz, Partner GCG Partners Sandra Guthman, President Polk Bros. Foundation Leon Jackson, President Multi-Fac Corporation R. Eden Martin, President Civic Committee, Commercial Club of Chicago Richard Morrow, Retired Chairman and CEO Amoco Corporation Adele Simmons, Vice President Chicago Metropolis 2020 Rev. Kenneth W. Smith, Senior Fellow Chicago Community Trust Christina Tchen, Partner Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Planning Committee Susan Ansai, literacy coordinator North Lawndale Learning Community Chryssa Atkinson, communications director Chicago Annenberg Challenge John Ayers, executive director Leadership for Quality Education Willie Coles, senior program officer Steans Family Foundation James Deanes, director CPS Office of School and Community Relations Stephanie Gadlin, director of community affairs Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Gabe Gonzalez, executive director Northwest Neighborhood Federation Wanda Hopkins, advocacy trainer Parents United for Responsible Education Susan Klonsky, consultant Small Schools Workshop Rochelle Lee, president Rochelle Lee Fund Diana Nelson, public affairs director Union League Club Rose Nicholson, assistant principal Robeson High School Michelle Obama, assistant dean University of Chicago Idida Perez, executive director West Town Leadership Project Robert Quashie, account supervisor Edelman Public Relations Juan Rangel, executive director United Neighborhood Organization Timothy Russell, supervisor Sara Lee Foundation Norma White, vice president Chicago Teachers Union   To order tickets, call our promline: (312) 427-4830, ext. 1-300. Se Habla Espanol
	Home   Search  Resources  Latest Issue Background  Archives  Site Guide Guestbook  About Us Contact Us Catalyst: Independent coverage of Chicago school reform since 1989.

©1999 Community Renewal Society

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Pictures from CATALYST's 10th Anniversary Prom

* Saturday, February 12, 2000
* Grand Ballroom, Navy Pier

Click on a thumbnail to see a larger version of any picture.
Catalyst staff members	Honorary Committee co-chairs and CRS officials with Lenz
Staff from CATALYST: for Cleveland Schools	Editorial Board Chair Idida Perez with Lenz
LSC members from Funston elementary	LSC members from Saucedo magnet
The Chaperon chastises John Ayers	Emcee Steve Baskerville with CRS officials
PURE founders Joy and Bernie Noven	Lenz on the dance floor
Warren Chapman and Peter Martinez pose with Lenz	Michelle and Barack Obama with Lenz and Managing Editor Veronica Anderson
CTU Vice President Norma White	Carlos Azcoitia and Mary Cavey, past and present Spry Elementary principals
Rev. Kenneth Smith, honorary committee co-chair, leads a dance	LSC members from South Shore High School

 

 

©2000 Community Renewal Society

Home   Search  Resources  Latest Issue
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Catalyst: Independent coverage of Chicago school reform since 1989.

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John & William Ayers

Who "sent" Obama?
By Steve Diamond
originally posted April 22, 2008, with many updates since then
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html

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...

A 1987 teachers’ strike brought those two sides together to push for a reform act passed by the Illinois legislature in 1988 that created "Local School Councils" (LSC) to be elected by residents in a particular school area.

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...

Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew, broadly, as “maoist” or "neo-stalinist" 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...

Bill's brother John later got in on the small schools approach also, raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program started by Bill and chaired by Obama (see School Leadership in Times of Urban Reform edited by Bizar and Barr).

A leading figure in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying from above for cost cutting and "efficiency" in the Chicago schools in the 1980's was Bill Ayers' father, Thomas Ayers. Tom Ayers, of course, was a very prominent Chicago business man, a retired head of Commonwealth Edison, a lifelong liberal, and a supporter of open housing campaigns (in which my parents participated when I grew up in Chicago in the 60s) as well as Martin Luther King.

When the 1988 Reform Act was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE) was formed, according to Shipps, by the elite business lobby that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly elected local school council members...

Interestingly, one LSC member was John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993, John was made head of the LQE - which, by then, according to Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to re-centralize control of the schools in the hands of the mayor.

I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers also introduced Obama to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior to attending law school when Obama's DCP group was one of the only black Chicago organizations supporting the reform act passed in 1988...

Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who "sent" Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn...

 

Richard & William Ayers

Remembering a Sixties Terrorist
By Donna Ron
1/4/2006
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=9E8CD8A7-E90B-4311-8AA9-AEFD014A14B2

...Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings -- maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.

At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me

I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he f***ed me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger f*** me angrily while I hated myself.

After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to screw me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill screw me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.

I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term “date rape” yet in our political vocabulary. The notion of a psychological rape was not on the table.

I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time...

 

Susan & Michael Klonsky

Behind the Annenberg Gate: Inside the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records
By Steve Diamond
August 20, 2008
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/behind-annenberg-gate-inside-chicago.html

...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”...

One of the first grants awarded in 1995 was a $175,000 Implementation Grant to the Small Schools Workshop. The Workshop had been founded by Bill Ayers in 1992 and was headed up by his former SDS comrade and hardcore Maoist, Mike Klonsky. Klonsky actually visited China and met with its stalinist leaders in the early 1970s. Klonsky still heads up the Small Schools Workshop and, until it was summarily removed, hosted a blog on "social justice" and education issues on the official Barack Obama Presidential campaign website. Hundreds of thousands of dollars more would be forthcoming from the CAC for the Klonsky group...

Who "sent" Obama?
By Steve Diamond
originally posted April 22, 2008, with many updates since then
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html

...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 first as research director and then to head it up. Klonsky was a PhD student at UIC studying under Ayers. Obama would approved grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Workshop from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge...

[Brown Deer]

1996 Democratic Convention Diary(August 25, 1996)

After that, I inform Martha that I'm dragging her to the apartment of old friends, ex-Weathermen, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, hosting a party for Senator Leahy. Perhaps Edward Said will be there I urge her to come by promising that the event will push the edges of the envelope of her centrist politics.



Edward Wadie Saïd MRSL (إدوارد وديع سعيد‎; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, political activist, and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is a founding figure in postcolonial theory.

Senator Leahy endorses Obama

[Freedom2specul8]

marked to read more later

[ncfool]

This is why we need to be concerned about Bill Ayer’s and his connection to Barack Hussein Obama. He and his Wife Bernardine Dorhn raised this step Son Chesa who is a Communist ACTIVIST!. Funny how you can go from community activist to being a full fledged Communist. But American’s better wake up before we elect the real Manchurian Candidate. Obama’s link to Ayer’s and Dohrn are important to us as we will end up like Cuba or Venezuela a country that both Ayer’s and Chesa are really tied too. Do a Google search for this connection.

There is a chapter in the book by the son of Rashid Khalidi that again shows Why the Jewish voter should be alarmed with voting for Obama. Rashid’s son is Ismail Khalidi as radical as you can get. Read at Google Books his letter to his parents! This is very troubling if you’re an Israel supporter.

Recent Macalester College graduate Ismail Khalidi, 22, was born to Palestinian parents in Lebanon and grew up in Chicago. His letter is to his parents and he wrote it right after the seige and bombardment of Fallujah in November 2004. "It was written in a desolate time of year--winter--miming the desolate time in our country and other countries," says Khalidi. "It's really kind of a 'sad poem,' but also a way for me to take stock of what I believe in." And what he believes in is the struggle for justice.

, Khalid writes, "I know I am never doing enough and that I have much to learn, but I know that I am still learning, and that I will find my own way to fight. I know you understand that, and that is what pushes me onward when the wind chill plummets and when lies pass for truth."

You can only assume Ismail was another classmate of Chesa and taught by Ayers,Dorhn and Obama.
Obama’s Ties to anti-American friends is troubling and we need to stop his election by educating the American public.


Here is the link to a book published by Chesa and others. I can bet you that most of these activists are working for Obama or ACORN during this campaign in some stealth manner.

“LETTERS FROM YOUNG ACTIVISTS” Edited by Dan Berger Chesa Boudin and Kenyon Farrow

“Today’s Rebels SPEAK OUT”

Preface by Bernardine Dohrn

They even have a website called : http://www.lettersfromyoungactivists.org/

[AuntB]

I haven’t had the chance to research this, but Obama used to be a regular guest and host on WOVN Radio in Chicago. I would love to find some of his archives.

WVON - The Talk of Chicago - provides an interactive forum for the African- American community to discuss current, social, economic, and political issues.
wvon.com/

[BossLady]

THANKS!!!! I knew you would have the low-down.... ;)

[Munz]

birds of a feather ....

[1COUNTER-MORTER-68]

TANKS,Lu...

[GoLightly]

Anyone catch this video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnvLSrOCNB8&sdig=1

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Obama also used to do commentaries for NPR, back in the 1990s - I’d like to hear them, as well.

[ravingnutter]

Thanks for posting the Klonsky info, that was getting overlooked in the last post I saw on this. Good work.