Say Anything Blog

According to Global Labor and Politics, despite what Senator Obama may have said during the campaign, his relationship with William Ayers lasted well into his own presidential campaign.

In countries like Mexico, election losers will sometimes creat a shadow government for the purposes of harassing the existing winners.

But for the first time in American history, the winners of a presidential election seem to be setting up a Shadow Transition Team.

I recently posted on the torture/murder of Sgt. Jan Pietrzak and his wife Quianna. The two were murdered in their California home by four of Sgt. Pietrzak’s fellow Marines.

While there has been a virtual media black out on this horrific case, the New York Post has brought up the possibility that race may have been the motive for the crime.

I don’t think this is going to surprise much of anyone but some psychologists and education professors, but a new study shows that bullies enjoy hurting people.

Candidate Barack Obama promised to bring change to Washington, but President Elect Obama’s first appointment shows just how ethereal “change” can be. Obama’s first appointment was former Clinton Aide Rahm Emanual.

Riverside (California) is the site of a horrific hate crime where a white Marine Corps Sargent and his African-American wife were murdered in their own home by four Marines.

I didn’t come up withthis but I think it’s about the best explanation of the American Tax system that’s out there. I wish I could take credit for this…but I can’t

America’s Tax System

What is it when someone who doesn’t pay taxes to begin with, gets a tax cut?  It’s called redistribution of wealth.  Let me give you an example that explains this tax business:

Our tax system explained in terms of beer.

A brilliant explanation of our tax system using actual percentages, the impact of a tax cut, and the public reaction that everyone should be able to understand.

Who is Barack Obama and what does he believe in. For most politicians we can easily answer these questions. We know what Ted Kennedy and Ruby Guliani believe, because they have long careers in the public sector and have taken many stands, popular and unpopular.

We cannot say for certain what Barack Obama believes, because his career is so short (lacking any leadership experience) and because his record includes so many “present” votes.

As someon who’s done graduate work (lots and lots of graduate work) in Education. I’m very familiar with the educational philosophy of William Ayers.

Whatever Ayers may have done as a terrorist has been as harmfull as what he’s done as an Education Professor. Sol Stern has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about what kind of Education Professor William Ayers is.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411943821339043.html

Back in the 1980s, long before Barack Obama and William Ayers supposedly knew each other, both were active in the same school “reform” projects in Illinoise.

As Steve Diamond of Global Labor and Politics points out, teachers often took the brunt of Obama and Ayers education reform.

Ayers carried his authoritarian approach to politics from the late 60s into his work in education starting in the mid 1980s. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1987 and became part of the citywide school reform effort there. The major group that emerged was the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, which Ayers was a part of and later headed up. Another member of the ABCs was the Developing Communities Project headed up by Barack Obama.

ABCs primary goal, its raison d’etre, was not a progressive or democratic goal. It was set up to attack the Chicago Teachers Union which had led an unpopular strike in 1987. It also wanted to rein in the power of the Chicago school administration which it considered a bureaucratic barrier to reform.

The primary reform that ABCs lobbied for was the creation of what were called Local School Councils, or LSCs. A huge lobbying effort in 1988 led to the Chicago School Reform Act passing the legislature in 1988.  The LSCs would be set up on a school by school basis and would be made up of parents, teachers and principals, but controlled largely by parents. They were able to fire principals and control school curriculum.

Over the next several years something like 20% or more of school principals were dismissed.

Heres about the best description of what ACORN does that’s out there on the internet.

ACORN’s history makes for pretty interesting reading. The Clinton Administration found that ACORN was misspending government grants designed to help counsel the poor. Although it seeks minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country—ACORN sued the state of California to get out of paying its own employees the state minimum wage.

In 2005, the Virginia State Board of Elections admonished Project Vote and ACORN for turning in a significant number of faulty voter registrations. An audit revealed that 83% of sampled registrations that were rejected for carrying false or questionable information were submitted by Project Vote. Many of these registrations carried social security numbers that exist for other people, listed non-existent or commercial addresses, or were for convicted felons in violation of state and federal election law.

In a letter to ACORN, the State Board of Elections reported that 56% of the voter registration applications ACORN turned in were ineligible. Further, a full 35% were not submitted in a timely manner, as required by law. The State Board of Elections also commented on what appeared to be evidence of intentional voter fraud. “Additionally,” they wrote, “information appears to have been altered on some applications where information given by the applicant in one color ink has been scratched through and re-entered in another color ink. Any alteration of a voter registration application is a Class 5 Felony in accordance with § 24.2-1009 of the Code of Virginia.”

From the NY Times:

Acorn chose to treat the embezzlement of nearly $1 million eight years ago as an internal matter and did not even notify its board. After Points of Light noticed financial irregularities in early June, it took less than a month for management to alert federal prosecutors, although group officials say they have no clear idea yet what the financial impact may be.

ww.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/us/09embezzle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

”[In July 2007] ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including ‘Leon Spinks,’ ‘Frekkie Magoal’ and ‘Fruto Boy Crispila.’ Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October [2007]. A King County prosecutor called ACORN’s criminal sabotage ‘an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.’

ACORN makes a great deal of money from its “community organizing” campaigns, and shows little tolerance for rival leftist groups infringing on its turf. For instance, when ACORN set up shop in San Francisco in May 2002, it discovered that many of its potential recruits - low-income blacks and Hispanics - were networked with the Outer Mission Resident’s Association (OMRA). The San Francisco Examiner reports, “ACORN soon began a process of intimidation by busing in activists from Oakland to disrupt OMRA events. ACORN members then began showing up at some neighbors’ homes, and in one case jabbed a person in the chest.”

Also in 2008, there was evidence that ACORN corruption was rampant in Pennsylvania. For example, Philadelphia’s City Commissioners voted unanimously to present to the U.S. Attorney hundreds of fraudulent voter-registration forms turned in by the organization. All told, at least 50,663 registrations were rejected, among which were 35,888 duplicates, 689 that were filled out by people too young to vote, some 2,108 with missing signatures, another 5,093 with invalid addresses, and 6,161 not eligible because they were missing a valid HAVA (Help America Vote Act) number. Similarly, ACORN workers submitted hundreds of fraudulent registrations to the Delaware County, Pennsylvania Voter Registration Office.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6968

Yahoo News:

It’s a legitimate question to raise now that the FBI has raided the offices of the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Nevada and North Carolina, two states where Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck. ACORN has registered bogus voters in both states.

In Nevada, state officials says the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, including quarterback Tony Romo.

“Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada,” Secretary of State Ross Miller said, “and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won’t be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ibd/20081008/bs_ibd_ibd/20081008issues01

Map of ACORN election fraud:

http://www.rottenacorn.com/activityMap.html

There more if you want to look for it.

Not that most of us weren’t already aware of this, but evidence mounts that John McCain tried to do something about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac long before this issue became critical.

You can view the letter signed by McCain in 2006, a letter warning of the potential Costs of a Fannie/Freddie failure, here:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28973

Many people have wrongly assumed that the issue regarding Barack Obama and William Ayers is that Obama’s close association to a terrorist makes him a terrorist sympathizer. To those of familiar with the ideas of Professor Ayers, this is a simplistic, and not altogether helpful interpretation…and is usually presented as a straw man argument.

I for one have never argued that Obama’s association with Ayers was an endorsement of Ayer’s 1960 and 1970s violence. But I think that Obama’s association with Ayers through the Woods Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge can legitimately be regarded as an endorsement of Ayers political agenda at least with regards to education.

And what is Ayers’ educational agenda?

Irrespective of his previous activities (violent and other), Ayers is an authoritarian Marxist. He believes that humanity would be better served if the United States government were replaced with a dictatorship. He believes that the American people would be better off if our system of private enterprise were replaced by government ownership of all businesses, and almost all private property.

Steve Diamond of Global Labor and Politics (a decidedly liberal blog) describes Ayers politics as thusly:

First, what is the Ayers’ world view? Ayers is what political scientists call a “neo-stalinist.” Neo-stalinism is an authoritarian form of politics which attempts to control and build social institutions to impose state control of the economy, politics and culture on the general population. It has similarities to the original Stalinism found in the former Soviet Union but it arose in other countries and used slightly different forms and in some instances created regimes that were at odds for various reasons with the Russian regime.

So Ayers we can see is not merely a Marxist, but a believer in a particularly radical and authoritarian form of communism.

Because Ayers has devoted his life to this worldview; because he has devoted all his life’s work to the establishment of an American dictatorship, it is reasonable to conclude that all his work as a professor and as and educational “reformer” are extensions of this worldview. Ayer’s work as an Education professor is simply a different front in the battle to overthrow the American government and nationalize private property.

How has Ayers conducted this war through the educational system.

Ayers advocates what he calls a “social justice” approach to education. What that means is the promotion of his authoritarian politics through our public school system. Four key tactics that Ayers supports in order to help implement his world view are

*the creation of “local school councils” (LSCs) like those that Ayers has promoted in Chicago for the last 20 years;

*“small schools” which Ayers has also promoted since the early 1990s in Chicago and elsewhere;

*the advocacy of what Ayers and others call “social justice” teaching; and

*the payment of reparations through education spending to correct what he has seen for 40 years as the fundamentally racist nature of American society.

Local school councils and small schools, I should hasten to point out, have nothing to do with improving student test scores and outcomes. That is not their purpose and, in fact, the Ayers camp is actually opposed to objective standards like test scores as a measure of the effectiveness of our schools. The purpose of these entities is to create a political base for Ayers and his band of fellow traveling authoritarians to push their wider political agenda.

Once inside the schools Ayers, who now heads the curriculum division of the leading education professional association, attempts to alter the teaching content of classrooms to include a “politically correct” “social justice” curriculum..

The LCSs, it should be pointed out were used to intimidate teachers and administrators. Sometimes they were used to force teachers out of their jobs if they didn’t surrender to the political whim of the LCS.

It should also be pointed out that Ayers’ objectives have never been to see at risk students perform better on math and reading scores, and go on to be productive members of society.

Like Rev. Wright, who eschewed his followers to reject “middle classness,” Ayers has rejected the idea of turning at-risk students into upwardly mobile achievers. Rather his goal was to radicalize students and teachers so that they to would seek a Marxist dictatorship.

Whether or not he was conscious of it, Barack Obama participated in Ayers’ political/educational indoctrination of at-risk kids.

It also needs to be pointed out that as early as the 1980s, Obama and Ayers shared similar goals at least with regards to education, and Obama sided with Ayers, even to the detriment of black school teachers.

LSCs were mandated by a state law put in place in 1988 as a result of that lobbying. But the Times did not explain that Bill Ayers was a leading activist in that lobbying effort, a leading member alongside Obama’s DCP in the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools which led the campaign for the LSCs.

Obama and the DCP backed the LSCs even though they were viewed as an attack by many mainstream black organizations, like Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, on the secure middle class jobs that blacks had won for themselves as teachers and school administrators in Chicago. Thus, Obama was willing to risk his relationship to the wider black community in order to back this effort.

One more point to this post. The major thrust of the Chicago Annenber Challenge, which Obama worked on with William Ayers, was the implementation of Ayers’ pet educational projects:

promotion of local school councils,

financial support for small schools,

promotion of a “social justice” teaching agenda, and

a race based approach to education policy.

It sin’t Obama’s association with a terrorist that worries me. It is Obama’s work to advance the goals of a radical Marxist professor who who seeks nothing less than to impose a dictatorship on the American people.

The Quotes I borrowed can be found at the address below.

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/