Busted! The Cozy Relationship Between Barack Obama And Bill Ayers

Obama’s failure to fully disclose his relationship with the radical Ayers family and his failure to discuss his role in gutting the Chicago public schools system provide more compelling reasons to just say no to Obama.

From Obama WTF (Click through to site fir active links)

Why Obama has Obama been noticeably quiet in the area of education policy?
He has a highly embarrassing secret:

1) his work in this area in the eighties and nineties produced a dysfunctional school system
2) his partners in crime were the Ayers family

…you know those people who Obama claims he barely knows. Why? Because Bill Ayers.. was involved with the notorious Weathermen terrorist group which took credit for bombing both the Pentagon and the US capitol in the seventies.

This article was written by a Professor Steven Diamond of Santa Clara and is extracted from a piece he wrote, entitled Who Sent Obama?

So, who “sent” 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 Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left for Harvard Law School. During that time a critical issue in Chicago politics was the crisis in the public schools. A movement was underway from two angles: below in black, latino and other communities for more local control and from above by business interests who wanted to cut costs. (For a good account and analysis see Dorothy Shipps, The Invisible Hand: Big Business and Chicago School Reform, Teachers College Record, Vol. 99, #1, Fall 1997, pp. 73-116.)

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. According to Shipps, the strike “enrag[ed] parents and provid[ed] the catalyst for a coalition between community groups and Chicago United [the business lobby] that was forged in the ensuing year.” (The full story of this complicated process is provided by Shipps in her book: School Reform, Corporate Style.)

The LSC’s would 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 and 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 side of this effort was Bill Ayers who had returned to Chicago in 1987 as a professor of education at the University of Illinois’ Chicago Circle campus, after surfacing from the underground, as well as Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP). (See, for example, “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 (and it should be remembered Alinsky’s world view was one that is and was often in tension with many in the trade union movement).

Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew as “maoist” politics – a view of the world that was opposed to Russian style bureaucratic communism from above, instead supporting 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.

Thus, Bill Ayers was a vigorous advocate of local control along with a related concept called “small schools,” most likely because he believes it gives him the potential to build a political base from which to operate. He has discussed these ideas in speeches and writings on his blog. As he said in a speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in late 2006: “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”

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 an enemy of Ayers in the SDS) named Mike Klonsky to head it up. [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).]

Active in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting and “efficiency” in the Chicago schools in the 1980’s was Bill Ayers’ father, Tom Ayers. Tom Ayers, of course, was a very prominent Chicago business man, a retired head of Commonwealth Edison and 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. According to Dorothy Shipps, Tom Ayers co-authored a 1980 report of a joint public-private task force on school reform and was later nominated to head up Chicago United, a school reform group, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was opposed successfully by black community activists.

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. The head of LQE was John Ayers, brother of Bill, son of Tom. Some 6000 LSC members were elected. And they became a huge thorn in the side of school administration in Chicago.

In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I believe that in a minute. 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. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you.

So, why or how did Obama – at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the following year) – end up at Sidley?

Coincidentally, or not, Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was their key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). Coincidentally, or not, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also, hired there in the late 80s many contend through the intervention of Tom Ayers, even though she is not a member of the bar (as far as I can tell) because of her past jail time for Weather Underground activities.

It is possible that Tom Ayers 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 supporting the reform act passed in 1988. Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. It is a little unclear from her CV but Dohrn may have still been at Sidley when Obama was there since she left sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to her starting a position at Northwestern, again hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel Trienens. My best guess is that it would have been Tom Ayers who vetted Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get the attention of someone like Newton Minow. (And that would come in very handy later in Obama’s career as Kaufman suggests but not just because of the fund raising that Minow could help with but perhaps also helping with an introduction to the Kennedy family, whose recent endorsement of Obama came at such a critical moment in his campaign.)

Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law review. After graduation he went back to Chicago and to his old organization, DCP, to run a voter registration campaign. Then he joined the tiny, unknown outside of Chicago, public interest law firm of 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 likely also had ties to the Ayers family. He was law school classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago. 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 likely the key move in his 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, who designed the grant proposal and sheparded it to success. The purpose of the program was to defend the clearly failing local schools council effort that had been put in place back in 1988.

A report on the first three years of the Challenge program, when Obama was its Board chair, concluded: “The Challenge sought to build on the momentum of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act which had radically decentralized governance of the Chicago Public Schools.”

While many school principals had been fired by the LSC’s, kids were still doing poorly in schools and there was chaos of a sorts in the system. (See Shipps, Invisible Hand, for a summary of the problems.) Interestingly, Shipps concludes that the local control movement in Chicago, though backed by radicals like Ayers, gave “business the clearest voice in systemwide reform.” She argues that a district level democracy effort such as an “Education Assembly” is required rather than the parochial local control approach:

“A large districtwide elected group intended to serve as a legislative body, such an assembly would have both the staff and structure of one. This alternative vision of democracy rests on citizenship and stewardship even as it builds on the private interests and knowledge of concerned parents and neighbors. As an example of a different form of democratic governance, it serves to remind ordinary Chicagoans that they now have no systemwide forum through which to debate broad issues of equity, standards, and accountability.”

This represents a very different vision than that of Ayers & co. (not to mention of the charter school business group approach now in vogue). In fact, in retrospect the Ayers/Ayers business from above, local activism from below joint campaign against both the Chicago School District bureaucracy and Teachers Union is reminiscent of the kinds of alliances one finds in neo-stalinist regimes like that of Cuba, China or Sandinista-era 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 willing to support such efforts because they view the 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.

One educational policy analyst called the early 90s Chicago school system “dysfunctional.” The former business allies of Bill Ayers and the local control advocates broke away now. According to Shipps, “for six years, LQE [led by John Ayers until he later joined up with the charter school movement] remained a strong advocate of the 1988 reform. But in 1993 Club [ Commercial Club of Chicago ] members decided the LQE’s support for community organizing and voter turnout campaigns was not producing better schools, resurfacing their initial skepticism about political decentralization as a reform strategy. Moreover, they determined that the role of outside agitator might suit community groups, but was ill suited to corporate leadership. It was creating a rift between Club leaders and the central administrators whom they hoped to influence. Club leaders were increasingly convinced that central office accountability was a necessary component of results. As the fundamental divisions between the business view of administrative decentralization and the political version held by community activists reemerged, activists felt betrayed. They protested the “pull-back” loudly, but succeeded only in becoming less central actors in future reform efforts.”

Now the business groups backed a re-centralization of the management of the schools through a 1995 bill that gutted the power of the LSC’s. But the Annenberg money came through anyway due to the efforts of Bill Ayers, among others, and since it had to be matched 2 to 1 by corporate and foundation money, the Board Chairmanship would likely have allowed Obama to be in touch with the powerful money interests in Chicago, such as the Pritzkers (Penny Pritzker is now head of Obama’s fund raising efforts) and others that Kaufman mentions in his story.

Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who “sent” Obama?

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 a lready known Obama very well. Obama likely proved himself to Ayers in the battle for local school control when at the DCP in the 80s. One guess as to why Obama does not play up his educational experience more thoroughly now – it certainly could be of use to him one would think in beefing up his “I have the experience to be President” argument – is that it would lead to a renewed discussion of the Bill Ayers connection, which is clearly toxic for Obama.This likely explains why Obama tried a kind of head fake when asked about Ayers in the recent TV debate. Obama said Ayers was a “professor of english.” Yet, Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and served on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on grants to Chicago schools. And he did not know that Ayers was a professor of education? That strains credulity.

Perhaps this would be of just historical interest if it could be firmly established that Bill Ayers no longer has any role in the Obama campaign. But that is not something we know for sure yet. 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 president of SDS, who heads up a group called Progressives for Obama. Davidson and Katz, it appears, were key organizers of the anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign.

Now that we have some idea of who “sent” Obama, the left and labor movement deserve to know more about how the exhausted ideas of the authoritarian side of 60’s politics may still be influencing the thinking of a potential U.S. president. Maybe Andy Stern’s endorsement of Obama makes more sense, now.

Obama failure to fully disclose his relationship with the radical Ayers family and his failure to discuss his role in gutting the Chicago public schools system provide more compelling reasons to just say no to Obama.