Here is the transcript:
Senator Obama, how can we trust you? In 1995, you partnered with a man named William Ayers on a hundred million dollar education project. Sounds good, right?
Except William Ayers is a known terrorist who bombed the Pentagon and then said he didn’t do enough. You say William Ayers was “just a guy in your neighborhood”, but the Wall Street Journal tells us that you and William Ayers worked together as a team! And they must be right, because when you decided to run for the Senate, you announced your candidacy at his house! A known terrorist!
Senator Obama, we live in a world where terrorists wish to destroy us. How can we, with a clear conscience, elect a President with such close, documented ties to a terrorist? Senator Obama, how can we trust you?
This video raises a key question. How can we trust a candidate whose story has changed so much in the last few months? First, Ayers was "just a guy in my neighborhood:
Then Obama's campaign said that, their kids go to school together.
But, Ayers' kids are nearly Obama's age....and Obama's kids are in grade school...how does that work exactly? But then it got deeper....People dared to do some digging around:
Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers founded and Obama and Ayers co-chaired for five years, raising and spending at least $110 million in an effort to bolster a “radical” (Ayers’ word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to 2001.
The Woods Fund financed the hiring of Obama in 1985 by the Developing Communities Project.
According to The Nation: “The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political identity. In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (aka the “DCP”), which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago’s economically depressed South Side.”
The Woods Fund was founded by the Woods family which owned the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its mines to major Illinois power companies. Commonwealth Edison, the giant Chicago-based electric power company was headed by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.
Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund from 1993 until 2002. Bill Ayers joined the board of the Fund in 1999 and continues to serve on the board today. He chaired the board for two years during that time.
Obama’s DCP supported radical school reform project together with Bill Ayers.
In 1987 in the wake of a controversial strike by the Chicago Teachers’ Union, the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, was formed to lobby for a new Illinois law that would mandate the establishment of a new power center in Chicago public schools. Local school councils would be established to watchdog union teachers and their principals and they would have the power to fire principals at will.
Bill Ayers helped organize the ABCs group, was its contact person and later its chair. Barack Obama worked on school reform efforts for the DCP at that time and the DCP was a member of the ABCs. Chicago United, a business group established by Tom Ayers, Bill’s father, was also a member of the ABCs.
The Woods Fund also provided additional financial support to the DCP in 1988 to support its school reform efforts. A program officer of the Woods Fund at the time was Ken Rolling who would later be hired by Bill Ayers and Barack Obama as Executive Director of the $110 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Obama and Dohrn worked for elite law firm Sidley and Austin
After surfacing from the Weather Underground in 1980 Bernardine Dohrn, wife of Bill Ayers, pled guilty to criminal charges related to the violent Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969 and received three years probation. She later refused to testify in front of a grand jury convened to investigate a bank robbery carried out by former comrades of Dohrn’s from the Weather Underground. Currently a clinical faculty member at Northwestern University School of Law, she told the New York Times that she thought grand juries were “illegal” and “coercive.” She served seven months in jail.
Because of the criminal convictions Dohrn, who received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New York bar. Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984. Howard Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers. Tom Ayers’ firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for many years. She later worked in their Chicago office when she and Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987. She left Sidley in 1988.
Barack Obama left Chicago in the fall of 1988 to attend Harvard Law School. In the summer after his first year at Harvard he became an associate in the Chicago office of Sidley and Austin.
Ayers is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and co. to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.
The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge’s operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60 million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public schools.
The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power of the Councils.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn host Obama’s state senate kick-off in their Hyde Park home
In the fall of 1995 Barack Obama began his first electoral campaign to replace State Senator Alice Palmer who was attempting to run for Congress. Palmer accompanied Obama to the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn for an introduction of Obama to the Hyde Park left. Unnamed Obama campaign aides told the New York Times that this was the first time that Obama met Ayers and Dohrn, part of the campaign’s effort to minimize the relationship between their candidate and the two authoritarian leftists. Of course that was wrong, as clearly Obama and Ayers had already met well before this “meet and greet.”
The “lost years”: Ayers and Obama to the rescue of troubled youth
In 1997 Bill Ayers published a book that criticized the treatment of juvenile defendants in the criminal justice system including the practice in some states of trying these individuals as adults. Barack Obama praised the book as a “searing and timely account” in the Chicago Tribune.
In late 1997 and 1998 a bill to impose “blended” sentencing on certain juvenile offenders was proposed in the Illinois legislature where Obama was now a state senator, representing the south side Chicago district that included Ayers and Dohrn’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The bill would have allowed parallel juvenile and adult sentences with the adult sentence held as a threat to be imposed if serious offenders violated terms of their juvenile conviction.
Obama, Dohrn and Ayers opposed the bill. Michelle Obama, now working at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, organized a panel discussion there in late 1997 as the new bill was gaining momentum, to discuss Ayers’ book. Barack Obama and Ayers were on the panel and Obama was described in the event’s press release as ”working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”Obama advisor promotes a reparations approach to education reform; Ayers endorses it
In 2006 Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin, the then president of the American Education Research Association (AERA), the nation’s leading School of Education professional association, proposed a new policy to tackle the problems of America’s public schools: the repayment of centuries of “education debt” that allegedly is owed to people of color as a result of slavery and discrimination. She rooted the concept in the literature supporting reparations for slavery.
In 2007 Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent and respected professor at the Stanford University School of Education, endorsed the same idea in an article in The Nation. In late 2007 Darling-Hammond was named an education advisor to the Obama campaign. In February 2008 Darling-Hammond issued a blueprint for education reform by the next President that set as its #1 priority the repayment of the “education debt,” as proposed originally by Ladson-Billings.
Bill Ayers has endorsed the idea of repayment of the “education debt.” Ayers is now a Vice President-elect (Division B: Curriculum Studies) of the AERA.
A chapter called “Education for Democracy” by Darling-Hammond appeared in a volume co-edited by Ayers called A Light in Dark Times. A chapter co-authored by Ladson-Billings on “racing justice” appeared in a book co-edited by Ayers called Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader. Ladson-Billings wrote the foreword to Ayers’ book, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. Ayers and Ladson-Billings are co-editors of City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row just published. Ladson-Billings contributed a chapter in a book edited by Bill Ayers, Rick Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jesse L. Jackson called Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment published in 2001.
More fundamentally, Bill Ayers introduced the concept of “white supremacy” as America’s original sin within the new left group SDS as part of his effort, together with his future wife Bernardine Dohrn, to hijack the student-led antiwar movement for his still-to-come terrorist actions as a leader of the Weather Underground.
Ayers argues that the fundamental issue in American life is “white skin privilege” - that white Americans benefit from being white at the expense of blacks.
Bill Ayers long time comrade Mike Klonsky blogs for Obama
One of Bill Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s comrades in the late 60s Students for a Democratic Society was Mike Klonsky. When Dohrn and Ayers moved in one direction toward the violent tactics of the Weather Underground, Klonsky, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dropped the pro-Russian communist politics of his parents and became a committed Maoist. As leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1977 he travelled to Beijing and was toasted by the senior Beijing leadership.
When the crazy left of the 70s died in the 80s, Klonsky went to graduate school in education in Florida and then moved to Chicago. While driving a cab there he was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. It’s offices were in the Department of Education building at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus where Ayers taught. In 1995 the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge headed by Ayers and Obama gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000. The Annenberg Challenge also had its office space in the same building as Ayers Department and the Workshop, rent free courtesy of the University.
In 2008 Klonsky ran a blog on the official Obama campaign website on education policy and “social justice” teaching. When discussion of the Klonsky blog emerged in the blogosphere, it was promptly shut down by the campaign and all of the posts made by Klonsky were removed from the site.
So, now the narrative has shifted to, well, he was just a guy I knew, to our kids go to school....to, well, I was 8 years old when he did his stuff...to, well, I thought he was repentant and reformed....to....?
Well, let's look first at who Bill Ayers is and What he believes:
Bill Ayers and Communism and Blowing up People in Uniforms
William Ayers is a communist. But don't take my word for it. He said so himself:
And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to "seize power" in a violent communist takeover of the United States. Read more about Ayers manifesto here. It is chilling.
So what did Ayers and the Weathermen do?
7 October 1969 – Bombing of Haymarket Police Statue in Chicago, apparently as a “kickoff” for the “Days of Rage” riots in the city October 8–11, 1969. The Weathermen later claim credit for the bombing in their book, “Prairie Fire.”
8 October-11, 1969 – The “Days of Rage” riots occur in Chicago in which 287 Weatherman members from throughout the country were arrested and a large amount of property damage was done.
6 December 1969 – Bombing of several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The WUO stated in their book “Prairie Fire” that they had did the explosion.
27 December-31, 1969 – Weathermen hold a “War Council” meeting in Flint, MI, where they finalize their plans to submerge into an underground status from which they plan to commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are called the “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO).
13 February 1970 – Bombing of several police vehicles of the Berkeley, California, Police Department.
16 February 1970 – Bombing of Golden Gate Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department, killing one officer and injuring a number of other policemen.
6 March 1970 – Bombing in the 13th Police District of the Detroit, Michigan. 34 sticks of dynamite are discovered. During February and early March, 1970, members of the WUO, led by Bill Ayers, are reported to be in Detroit, during that period, for the purpose of bombing a police facility.
6 March 1970 – “bomb factory” located in New York’s Greenwich Village accidentally explodes. WUO members Theodore die in t. The bomb was intended to be planted at a non-commissioned officer’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb was packed with nails TO INFILICT MAXIMUM CASUALTIES UPON DETONATION.
30 March 1970 – Chicago Police discover a WUO “bomb factory” on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO “weapons cache” in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO activity in the city.
10 May 1970 – Bombing of The National Guard Association building in Washington, D.C..
21 May 1970 – The WUO under Bernardine Dohrn’s name releases its “Declaration of a State of War” communique.
6 June 1970 – The WUO sends a letter claiming credit for bombing of the San Francisco Hall of Justice; however, no explosion actually took place. Months later, workmen in this building located an unexploded device which had apparently been dormant for some time.
9 June 1970 – Bombing of The New York City Police Headquarters.
27 July 1970 – Bombing of The Presidio army base in San Francisco. [NYT, 7/27/70]
12 September 1970 – The WUO helps Dr. Timothy Leary, break out and escape from the California Men’s Colony prison.
8 October 1970 – Bombing of Marin County courthouse. [NYT, 8/10/70]
10 October 1970 – Bombing of Queens traffic-court building . [NYT, 10/10/70, p. 12]
14 October 1970 – Bombing of The Harvard Center for International Affairs [NYT, 10/14/70, p. 30]
1 March 1971 – Bombing of The United States Capitol. ” [NYT, 3/2/71]
April, 1971 – abandoned WUO “bomb factory” discovered in San Francisco, California.
29 August, 1971 – Bombing of the Office of California Prisons. [LAT, 8/29/71]
17 September 1971 – Bombing of The New York Department of Corrections in Albany, NY [NYT, 9/18/71]
15 October 1971 – Bombing of William Bundy’s office in the MIT research center. [NYT, 10/16/71]
19 May 1972 – Bombing of The Pentagon . [NYT, 5/19/72]
18 May 1973 – Bombing of the 103rd Police Precinct in New York
28 September 1973 – Bombing of ITT headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy. [NYT, 9/28/73]
6 March 1974 – Bombing of the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San Francisco
31 May 1974 – Bombing of The Office of the California Attorney General.
17 June 1974 – Bombing of Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters .
11 September 1974 – Bombing of Anaconda Corporation (part of the Rockefeller Corporation).
29 January 1975 – Bombing of the State Department in (AP. “State Department Rattled by Blast,” The Daily Times-News, January 29 1975, p.1)
16 June 1975 – Bombing of Banco de Ponce (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York.
September, 1975 – Bombing of the Kennecott Corporation.
October 20, 1981 – Brinks robbery in which several members of the Weather Underground stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car near Nyack, New York. The robbers murdered 2 police officers and 1 Brinks guard. Several others were wounded.
1981 “Guilty as hel*. Free as a bird. America is a great country,” Ayers said when interviewed by David Horowitz.
September 11, 2001 “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers is quoted in NYT article
Gosh, that last line happened after Barack Obama was associated with Ayers and worked with him. Are we to believe that Barack Obama never read the New York Times?
And we have this audio where Ayers talks about being unrepentant...back in the 1990s:
So What Have We Learned?
Obama has changed his narrative several times. However, he still likes to say there was really no relationship. However:
Both worked in the same building,
both worked on the same boards,
Obama's wife had a luncheon for Bill Ayers where Obama was a panelist,
Obama reviewed Ayers' book,
Obama launched his career in Ayers' living room,
AND, FOR SOMEONE WHO IS SO INTELLIGENT, OBAMA DIDN'T READ THE NY TIMES OR SEE AYERS CALLING HIMSELF A MARXIST AND ANARCHIST, NOR THE INTERVIEW WHERE HE SAID HE WAS UNREPENTANT AND "DIDN'T DO ENOUGH?"
This all seems a bit hard to swallow.
Obama...if he can't be honest about his friends, how can we trust him?
Answer: DON'T FIND OUT....DON'T VOTE OBAMA....HE LACKS THE JUDGEMENT, AND CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
Previously on WMD:
Obama's Radical Friends Update
Obama and Ayers: More Proof....
Obama and Education: Epic Fail....
Did Ayers Ghostwrite Obama's Memoirs?
Obama Fronted Afro Centrist Groups...Ayers/Wright
