Say Anything Blog

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/