INSTANBUL/MOSCOW, August 23 (RIA Novosti) - NATO has sent a Polish frigate and a U.S. destroyer through the Bosporus to boost its presence in the Black Sea, where it is delivering humanitarian cargoes to Georgia, a source in the Turkish navy said.
"Two more NATO ships passed through the strait and entered the Black Sea on Friday evening," the source told RIA Novosti.
The deputy head of Russia's General Staff said the Navy was aware that NATO was strengthening its presence in the sea.
"The situation in the Black Sea is escalating. NATO is continuing to build up its naval presence in the area," Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn told reporters Saturday.
A Navy officer said Friday that Russia would continue its operations to ensure the security of shipping to and from Georgia's separatist republic of Abkhazia.
"The Black Sea fleet continues to carry out its task of maritime traffic security patrols off the coast of Abkhazia," Captain Igor Dygalo said.
The ORP General Pulaski and the USS McFaul joined two ships from Germany and Spain that entered the sea earlier Friday.
The Turkish navy source expected the NATO presence in the Black Sea to grow to about seven vessels.
Nogovitsyn on Friday expressed doubts that NATO vessels needed to be in the Black Sea, and he promised that Russia would respond swiftly to any provocations against its Black Sea Fleet.
Tensions between NATO and Russia are high following the recent conflict over Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Monday, August 25
Getting a little crowded in the Black Sea
NATO sends more ships into Black Sea
Sunday, August 24
Catching up with Marc Lemire
Marc sent word last night that the dates have been set for closing arguments in his constitutional challenge to Section 13:
September 15-17, starting at 9:30 AM.
At this point (one never knows with the Canadian Human Rights Commission) the hearing will be open to the public.
So if you'd like to attend to give Marc moral support and be a witness to important history in the never-ending battle for freedom of speech -- or if you would just love to see the CHRC "exposed as spies, thought police, hate posters and political censors," as Marc puts it with relish, here's the address for the hearing room:
Quality Hotel & Executive Suites
Northampton Room 754
Bronte Road
Oakville, Ontario
More information about the case will be released closer to the hearing. Watch Marc's FreedomSite for details.
Also, on August 10, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada ruled in Marc Lemire’s favor with regard to a Privacy Act complaint and chastised the Canadian Human Rights Commission for improperly withholding information. See here for the juicy details.
September 15-17, starting at 9:30 AM.
At this point (one never knows with the Canadian Human Rights Commission) the hearing will be open to the public.
So if you'd like to attend to give Marc moral support and be a witness to important history in the never-ending battle for freedom of speech -- or if you would just love to see the CHRC "exposed as spies, thought police, hate posters and political censors," as Marc puts it with relish, here's the address for the hearing room:
Quality Hotel & Executive Suites
Northampton Room 754
Bronte Road
Oakville, Ontario
More information about the case will be released closer to the hearing. Watch Marc's FreedomSite for details.
Also, on August 10, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada ruled in Marc Lemire’s favor with regard to a Privacy Act complaint and chastised the Canadian Human Rights Commission for improperly withholding information. See here for the juicy details.
Steve Diamond reports on the Obama-Ayers Annenberg Mystery Tour
Reminder: Steve Diamond will be on John Batchelor's Sunday radio show again on the KFI-640 AM portion at 10:20 PM Eastern time. The KFI portion can be heard online at this link. KFI and John's website also have podcasts of the show.
************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond on the latest twists and turns in the saga. He also has some pointed questions:
Obama/Ayers Update: Annenberg Mystery Tour Continues
UIC News Release
************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond on the latest twists and turns in the saga. He also has some pointed questions:
Obama/Ayers Update: Annenberg Mystery Tour Continues
As I blogged Friday, a small victory for full public disclosure of key information about our presidential candidates has been achieved by the pressure of the blogosphere with a small hand from the MSM.
After oddly blocking access to a fully processed and publicly listed archive of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a $160 million school reform effort led by, among others, Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, from 1995 until the end of 2001, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has now agreed to once again allow public access to the records of the CAC.
But a careful review of the press release issued by UIC announcing the reversal of the shutdown leaves several important questions unanswered:
1) Were any of the materials tampered with or changed in any way after the University was contacted by Dr. Stanley Kurtz, a writer for the National Review, who was the individual whose request to review the CAC documents triggered the UIC shutdown?
The press release issued by UIC says the CAC records were in a "secure location" pending resolution of the questions surrounding the University's rights to possess the documents. But the University only concludes that its rights to the material have been established, it does not say that there have been no alterations to the document collection.
Earlier there were public statements that the University did not have valid ownership of the documents and thus was in touch with the donor of the materials. Since that would lead to a renegotiation of the gift it would conceivably allow the donor to revise the contents of the collection. I do not believe that the University should have contacted the donor at all as I explain below.
2) Who "called into question" the right of the University to "grant public access" to the records?
The CAC records were processed and available for review at the UIC Special Collections Library, as Dr. Kurtz notes in his review of the CAC shutdown on NRO.
The Library even provided him with a "finding aid," a type of outline of the documents that helps researchers identify which documents they need to review. Given that there are 70 linear feet of CAC material at UIC this is clearly essential.
However, finding aids are NOT prepared for material for which the University (actually this is true for almost all Universities) feels it may not have ownership rights.
An earlier statement by a UIC spokesperson stated that UIC contacted the donor of the CAC records and that it was then discovered that an "ownership agreement" had not been prepared for the CAC records. This is most likely not accurate. No such agreement is likely in this situation. A gift of corporate records, such as those of the CAC, is valid without a written instrument.
Universities, including the University of Illinois do typically negotiate a "deed of gift" to accompany a gift so that the University is protected against future claims to the gifted material.
A "deed of gift" is not the same as a valid gift of documents to a University. It is an additional agreement by the donor of the documents to grant the University certain rights to use the material.
Universities want deeds of gift in order to protect their intellectual property rights to the archive. In other words, the University would have very likely validly possessed the documents even without a deed of gift and should not have denied Dr. Kurtz access to them.
But if there was no deed of gift it is unheard of for a university to:
1. invest the time and effort to process an archive and
2. prepare a finding aid and then place the documents in one of their libraries and then
3. place a description of the archive online and then
4. tell a researcher who inquires that the archive is ready for review!
But more fundamentally there would be no reason for anyone in the Special Collections Library to even question the validity of the gift of the CAC documents!
And a donor would never be allowed to know who or when someone is asking to review a validly granted gift of documents. That violates the confidentiality of library users. It reminds me of the concerns that civil libertarians have properly raised about the Patriot Act.
That leaves only one possible conclusion: Someone inside the UIC Library clearly was concerned that a critic of Barack Obama might be attempting to examine these public records. That led to an unprecedented and, in my view, highly inappropriate notice to the donor of the CAC documents that a potential political critic of Obama was interested in the documents.
Thus, the University should explain clearly who "called into question" its ownership of the CAC records.
3) The possible involvement of Bill Ayers remains unclear.
Bill Ayers, the former terrorist leader of the Weather Underground, is now a prominent member of the UIC faculty in their College of Education. He was the founder of the CAC and helped pick Barack Obama as the CAC Board Chair in 1995.
Bill Ayers co-chaired the key operational arm of the CAC, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which he had helped organize in 1994 when preparing the original application for the $49.2 mn Annenberg Challenge grant. The CAC's offices were actually originally set up, rent free, in the same building as the College of Education of the UIC, where Ayers has long taught.
Legally, the CAC records were the possession of the CAC until it dissolved in January 2002. The press release of UIC says the records came to UIC then. That means it is most likely the case that the CAC itself was the donor. While earlier reports indicated that UIC had contacted the donor, that would appear to be impossible since the CAC no longer exists! And the latest press release makes no mention of a donor.
That obviously raises the question - who has the UIC Library been talking to about the gift outside of the UIC Library?
If someone inside UIC raised an alarm about an Obama critic on its turf, who did they alert?
It is at least reasonable to fear they spoke to Bill Ayers, a prominent and likely powerful member of the UIC faculty. It is reasonable to assume, for example, that the decision to house the CAC documents at UIC in the first place was made upon the recommendation of Ayers.
After all, the CAC also had a research arm that contracted with the University of Chicago to examine the impact of the CAC on student achievement. It is conceivable that the records could have been housed at the University of Chicago's internationally respected libraries. (Perhaps the fact that the assessment of the CAC revealed the CAC to have been a failure had something to do with that decision.)
Of course, Ayers is a close political ally of Barack Obama and it would have been highly inappropriate of the UIC Library to warn him of the entry of an Obama critic onto UIC turf only to allow him and the Library to invent an excuse - the allegedly missing but legally unnecessary "deed of gift" - to prevent access to the validly possessed CAC records.
Without a full explanation of the role of Ayers in this series of events, it is unlikely that the public will feel reassured that the CAC documents have not been tampered with.
4) The role of the Chicago Public Education Fund led by Susan Crown and Penny Pritzker, among others, should be explained.
A final possible explanation of the mystery donor is that the legal successor to the CAC, the Chicago Public Education Fund, was contacted, again inappropriately, as the donor. If that was the case then it raises a concern about the potential role of Penny Pritzker, who serves on the board of the CPEF. Pritzker is the Finance Chair of the Obama campaign.
In sum, the CAC records at UIC were more than likely in the valid possession of UIC when Dr. Kurtz asked to review them. No alarm bell should have been set off and he should have been allowed to review them freely and without hindrance. The University has now increased public uncertainty by refusing to disclose all of the relevant facts that surround this controversy. Until they do so, doubts will remain over whether the CAC collection is complete.
Dr. Kurtz has now announced that he will be in Chicago on Tuesday when he has an appointment to begin a review of the CAC records. It will certainly be interesting to hear what he finds. My earlier review and analysis of CAC records provided me by Brown University, including board minutes, annual reports and financial records indicate several important conclusions:
1) Bill Ayers and Barack Obama played key leadership roles in the CAC. This calls into question the contention by Obama that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in [my] neighborhood."
2) The CAC handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Small Schools Workshop founded by Bill Ayers and then run by Mike Klonsky, former SDS comrade of Bill Ayers who founded a Maoist sect in the 1970s.
3) The CAC gave the Developing Communities Project (DCP), once headed by Barack Obama grants to pursue its educational reform agenda.
4) The CAC invested millions of dollars in supporting a controversial and troubled "community control" school governance system known as Local School Councils set up in 1988 in Chicago when both Ayers and Obama's DCP were part of a coalition that backed the reform.
A recent research report to the Ford Foundation on the CAC notes that the CAC was often in conflict with Mayor Daley as he tried to both wrest control of the CAC grant and as he attempted, successfully, to recentralize power in the schools away from the Local School Councils backed by Obama and Ayers. Today, Mayor Daley praises Ayers but in the heat of battle I am sure he had other views of the former Weather Underground leader who once brought havoc to the city's streets.
Saturday, August 23
Hamid Karzai signs his death warrant
July 2008
A word of advice or readers who roll their eyes when they note the publication venue for the above-mentioned article. Maitra has written for a number of publications in addition to EIR, including Asia Times and Indian Defence Review.
[...] There is yet another "meeting of minds" between MI6 and the ISI in recent days: their mutual hatred of Afghan President Karzai. The ISI rejected Karzai out of hand because the Afghan President is close to India, and even Russia—but cool toward Pakistan. So, the ISI feels it necessary to replace Karzai with someone who will be pro-Pakistan and anti-India.--from The British Plan to Recolonize the [Indian] Subcontinent is Gaining Ground by Ramtanu Maitra
Nor does MI6 like Karzai, and has joined with the ISI to remove him, because he is controlled from Washington, and has become openly anti-British: Last December, when Karzai learned that two British MI6 agents were working under cover of the United Nations and the European Union, and behind his back, to finance and negotiate with the Taliban, he expelled them from Afghanistan. One of them, a Briton, Michael Semple, was working as the acting head of the EU mission in Afghanistan, and is widely known as a close confidant of Britain's ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. The second, an Irishman, Mervin Patterson, is the third-ranking UN official in Afghanistan.
These MI6 agents were entrusted by London with the task of using Britain's 7,700 troops in the opium-infested, Pushtun-dominated southern Afghanistan province of Helmand to train 2,000 Afghan militants, ostensibly to "infiltrate" the enemy and "seek intelligence" about the lethal arms of the real Taliban. Karzai rightly saw it as Britain's efforts to develop a lethal group within Afghanistan.
In addition, around the same time, Karzai was under pressure from Britain, the U.S., and the UN, to appoint Lord Paddy Ashdown, a British Liberal Democrat, as the UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan. Ashdown had left his "viceregal" mark while serving as the High Representative of the United Nations for Bosnia a few years ago.
Anticipating that Ashdown, true to his reputation in the Balkans, would function like a colonial viceroy under orders from London, Karzai summarily called off the appointment. This decision raised quite a few hackles in London, and elsewhere. [...]
A word of advice or readers who roll their eyes when they note the publication venue for the above-mentioned article. Maitra has written for a number of publications in addition to EIR, including Asia Times and Indian Defence Review.
Russia signs its death warrant
2006
"Indicating its heightened concern over the [Afghanistan] drug trade, Moscow dedicated one of its reconnaissance satellites to the issue."
February 26, 2008
Eurasia Daily Monitor
"Indicating its heightened concern over the [Afghanistan] drug trade, Moscow dedicated one of its reconnaissance satellites to the issue."
February 26, 2008
Eurasia Daily Monitor
RUSSIA, AFGHANISTAN AND THE DRUG TRADE
By John C. K. Daly
Alarmed by the rise of opium cultivation in Afghanistan, Russia’s Federal Drug Enforcement Service has opened a permanent office in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Federal Drug Enforcement Service Director Alexei Milovanov said of the move, “Russia advances cooperation and interaction with Afghanistan in the war on drug production and proliferation…As for the office in Kabul, our representative there will be in charge of efficient interaction between Russian and Afghani structures dealing with trafficking. With an emphasis, needless to say, on what channels lead to Russia. All of that will be carried out in close cooperation with our Central Asian colleagues.”
Milovanov also suggested that Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan establish border checkpoints and customs offices and make a joint effort to draw up an international agreement to track and confiscate drug trafficking profits (Ferghana.ru, February 20).
Russia’s interest in eradicating Afghanistan’s thriving drug trade is hardly academic. Not only did the Soviet Union suffer more than 20,000 fatalities and thousands more wounded while occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s, returning soldiers brought home a new problem from the war zone – drug addiction. The Afghan occupation and the ensuing years have left Russia with an estimated 4-6 million drug addicts. According to official figures, some 10,000 Russians die every year from drug overdoses and another 70,000 from drug-related health conditions (RFE/RL, January 9).
Concurrently with the Soviet occupation, Afghan opium production rose from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1991. Production has now more than quadrupled, with no end in sight.
During a February 6 press conference in Kabul, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa discussed his office’s latest Afghanistan Opium Winter Survey. According to Costa, Afghanistan is now the biggest supplier of opium in the world. In 2007 it had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru combined, producing 8,200 tons of opium, a 34% increase from 2006 (Agence France Presse, February 6). Even more unsettling, Costa noted that a 10% “tax” paid by most farmers in the Taliban-dominated south would generate close to $100 million for the insurgency.
There is no question that the drug trade has now become an integral element of the Afghan economy, with the estimated incomes of Afghan drug barons calculated at more than $3 billion, which, according to many estimates, comprises approximately 40% of Afghanistan’s official GDP (Kommersant, February 1).
Moscow began to notice a significant rise in drug seizures from Central Asia after Russian border guards ceded control of the Afghan–Tajik border to their Tajik counterparts in December 2004.
Indicating its heightened concern over the drug trade, Moscow dedicated one of its reconnaissance satellites to the issue. On April 20, 2006, Anatoly Safonov, presidential envoy for international anti-terrorist cooperation, told a press conference in Moscow that Russia would monitor poppy-growing areas in Afghanistan from space and share the data with the Afghan government under bilateral agreements, telling reporters, “Space control over Afghan areas under drug cultivation is one of the projects” (Interfax, April 20, 2006).
Russia also reached out for foreign assistance. Two years ago Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer concluded an agreement with NATO to undertake a joint project to train Afghan and other Central Asian anti-narcotics officers to counter the booming regional drug trade (Agence France Presse, April 28, 2006).
Russia’s involvement in attempting to stanch the drug trade has interested Kabul for several years; in May 2006 Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed to Russia to help convert opium fields to other crops (RBC, August 28, 2007).
One of Russia’s southern neighbors is reporting success in battling the drug trade. Turkey’s Security Directorate reported that in 2007 security forces carried out 10,128 drug operations throughout the country. Operations along the country’s eastern frontier, often as part of military operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), forced smugglers to develop alternative routes traversing the Black Sea. The news was not good for Russia, however, as former Intelligence Office Chief Bulent Orakoglu pointed out that smugglers merely switched to using the Russia-Ukraine- Poland and Iran-Azerbaijan-Armenia-Georgia-Russia-Europe routes (Zaman, February 15).
Further complicating the international picture, the Afghan drug trade issue has now become fused with the Kremlin’s unhappiness over the West’s promotion of Kosova’s independence. On February 10 Russia’s state-controlled Channel 1 television aired an explosive report that claimed that Kosova “is a major link for drug trafficking” from Afghanistan to Europe, adding that there are “close links between the Kosova Albanians and the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
Further fanning the flames, the report quoted Geydar Dzhemal, chair of the Islamic Committee of Russia, who averred, “Without the control and connivance on the part of the special services none of these things are possible. For example in Afghanistan, the CIA and the special services are quite brazen. Under the protection of the American army they meet the necessary people. They collect the stuff, go to the Bagram airbase and they hand in a large consignment of narcotics, which is then taken away” (“Voskresnoe Vremya,” Channel 1 News, February 10).
While the issue undeniably deserves international attention, it is combating the drug trade. For the moment however, the common program remains vulnerable to divergent political agendas, which in the end only benefit the traffickers.
Well, there goes the Indian American and African American votes
[Joseph Biden] has a long history of making statements that get him in trouble. He was forced to apologize to Mr. Obama almost the moment he entered the race for president after he was quoted as describing Mr. Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” a remark that drew criticism for being racially insensitive.Trust a New York Times reporter to drape gauze over any fact that suggests Barack Obama is an idiot. "Racially insensitive?" Uh, no, it's called "flagrantly displaying bigotry."
While campaigning in New Hampshire, Mr. Biden said that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
Why didn't Mr Obama just go the whole hog and pick Don Imus as his running mate? Or is he saving Imus for the position of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations?
Strike up the band! MSM discovers the true Obama-Ayers relationship; university backs down and releases $160 million Annenberg Challenge records
Reminder: Steve Diamond will be on John Batchelor's Sunday radio show again on the KFI-640 AM portion at 10:20 PM Eastern time. The KFI portion can be heard online at this link. KFI and John's website also have podcasts of the show.
************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond deserves many thanks for all the research and writing he's done on the William Ayers-Barack Obama issue and the CAC. Here are details of the good news, republished here from Steve's latest post at his Global Labor and Politics blog.
I note that he manages to work in a plug for Ralph Nader's run for President. Bless his heart; Steve's done such a great service to his fellow Americans by sounding the alarm about the true Obama-Ayers relationship, and Ayers's education theories, that I'd let him plug Donald Duck for President on this site if he wanted.
MSM Notices Obama-Ayers Issue and Ayers' University Frees $160 Million Annenberg Records
************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond deserves many thanks for all the research and writing he's done on the William Ayers-Barack Obama issue and the CAC. Here are details of the good news, republished here from Steve's latest post at his Global Labor and Politics blog.
I note that he manages to work in a plug for Ralph Nader's run for President. Bless his heart; Steve's done such a great service to his fellow Americans by sounding the alarm about the true Obama-Ayers relationship, and Ayers's education theories, that I'd let him plug Donald Duck for President on this site if he wanted.
MSM Notices Obama-Ayers Issue and Ayers' University Frees $160 Million Annenberg Records
The MSM finally seems willing to shine a bright light onto the political alliance between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama that, for obvious reasons, the Obama campaign has been trying to keep in a dark closet.
Mentions of Global Labor and our work on the Ayers/Obama alliance this week in:
The New York Times (albeit only their oddly titled blog, The Opinionator).
And in Michael Barone's column in US News and World Report.
I think Barone makes the right point:
"...most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers's past or of Ayers's beliefs. It's something voters might reasonably want to take into account."
My concern all along about this evolving story is that the relationship with Ayers tells us something important about Obama - he obviously saw Ayers as someone who could help him politically. Yet, Ayers' authoritarian politics are irrelevant to the problems Obama would face as President.
What can Ayers' celebration of the authoritarian government of Hugo Chavez tell Obama about how to respond to global poverty, inequality, or terrorism?
Indeed, that may explain why Obama is now jettisoning many of his mildly progressive concerns about U.S. foreign policy for a viewpoint remarkably close to the views of John McCain, who apparently thinks that a new Cold War with Russia is on the cards. His long association with a certain strand of "left" authoritarianism represented by people like Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, another ex-Weather Underground terrorist, and Ayers' buddy the maoist Mike Klonsky leaves him completely unprepared to develop a genuinely progressive and independent path for U.S. foreign policy.
Of course, nature abhors a vacuum - politics, too. So as Obama attempts to (ever so politely) disentangle himself from his past authoritarian left associations he is grabbing on to mainstream Democratic Party policies that, particularly in foreign affairs, are hard to differentiate from the positions of John McCain.
Ralph Nader, at least, offers a starting point for a new progressive direction for America. Nothing in his past but heroic service to American consumers and workers for fifty years.
Voters should have the chance to sort this out for themselves. All the more reason, then, for Obama to explain his long time alliance with Ayers. Full disclosure of the material facts is at the heart of what I teach my business law students - it is the starting point for socially responsible corporations.
Should we demand any less of our politicians?
UPDATE: University of Illinois at Chicago appears to have done the right thing and liberated its holdings of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's records. They will be available to the public and presumably will now be reviewed closely by the MSM. It's about time. In the meantime, go here and here to see the CAC records I was able to obtain several months ago and here for my analysis of those documents and what they say about the long standing relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers.
Friday, August 22
Steve Diamond: The Obama Ayers Alliance: Inside the $160 Million Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Here is part five of law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond's investigative reports on documents associated with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Visit Steve's blog Global Labor and Politics for the earlier installments or scroll down this page to find them.
The Obama Ayers Alliance: Inside the $160 Million Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Here is a second group of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"), the education reform project founded by Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001. The Challenge spent some $160 million in the Chicago Public School system during that time period with the explicit goal of improving educational outcomes for students. The Challenge failed in that attempt.
The Obama Ayers Alliance: Inside the $160 Million Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Here is a second group of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"), the education reform project founded by Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001. The Challenge spent some $160 million in the Chicago Public School system during that time period with the explicit goal of improving educational outcomes for students. The Challenge failed in that attempt.
These documents were provided to me by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. They include the original grant application submitted by Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett to Brown which hosted the national Annenberg Challenge.
In addition these documents include the program reports and annual and semi-annual reports prepared on a regular basis by the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Ken Rolling. Rolling had been recruited to head the CAC from a position at the Woods Fund where he had been active in support for the controversial 1988 reform of Chicago schools. Obama's Developing Communities Project received more than $27,000 from the Woods Fund during that period.
I have posted the documents in the precise form that they were provided to me. There are some missing pages. Within the annual reports are included financial statements and minutes of the Board of Directors, which was chaired by Obama.
My analysis of the history of the CAC can be found here. The key to understanding the CAC is its political context. The CAC was established to shore up support for the Local School Councils established in 1988. The LSCs were a new power center set up to watchdog teachers, principals and school administrators. While Ayers celebrates it as a form of battling "bureaucracies" and as a democratic reform, in fact it has disturbing authoritarian overtones and was the source of resistance by union teachers and professional administrators and was not actively supported by major black organizations like Operation Push.
One example of the political firestorm that the CAC helped fuel was its effort to spend millions of dollars through a Leadership Development Initiative to recruit and train candidates for the LSCs. This proposal from the CAC Collaborative, co-chaired by Bill Ayers, was sent to the Board of Directors, chaired by Barack Obama, where it ran into objections from Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and a representative from the business community.
At about this same time, Mayor Daley was leading the charge to gut the entire LSC structure that Ayers, Obama, Mike Klonsky* and others had fought to create and build. The CAC was seen by Ayers as a way to protect and sustain the LSCs against the attempt to re-centralize power over the troubled schools in the hands of the Mayor.
Obama led the effort on behalf of the CAC board to reach an accomodation with the Ayers-led CAC Collaborative to shape the Leadership Development Initiative. After Obama's intervention, Weber's objections ceased (as far as I can tell from the records I have been provided) and the proposal went forward.
*Mike Klonsky was a former SDS comrade of Ayers and later helped found a maoist party in the United States, travelling to meet with Chinese leaders in 1977 for their endorsement of his effort here. Klonsky's Small Schools Workshop received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CAC headed by Obama and Ayers.
The Documents
Thursday, August 21
This makes sense: Revive Dark Ages to help America's underprivileged schoolchildren learn
More on the William Ayers-Barack Obama relationship and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) --
The education theories of former terrorist William Ayers and his fellow travelers cry out for a Monty Python skit. Unfortunately neither side of the Pond is currently producing TV comics brave and smart enough to satirize the kind of dangerous nonsense preached by Ayers and those who support his theories. Yet even a deadpan discussion of any part of the theories can be funny.
As an example, consider this academic's manful struggle to avoid sarcasm while analyzing the argument that it's perfectly possible to abandon all scientific measures when determining what works and doesn't work in the public education field. One can almost hear the question behind Nathan Glazer's painfully polite request for an alternative measure: 'Pig entrails and Ouija boards, anyone?'
The laughter tends to die in your throat when you realize that Glazer is touching on ideas held by an old and close associate of the presumptive Democrat nominee for the office of U.S. President.
Law professor Stephen Diamond's latest post, which links to Glazer's discussion, reminds us of the frightening realities connected with the relationship between William Ayers and Barack Obama when they worked for the CAC.
Before turning to Diamond's latest, republished below, you might want to check out The Real Barack Obama, which has published a great list of resource documents and opinion related to "Annenberg-gate."
(The term refers to attempts to block Steve Diamond and NRO's Stanley Kurtz from accessing documents connected with the CAC.)
I'm glad to see that RBO has also collected in the same post Sol Stern's writings on Ayers's education theories. It's vital to understand that no matter which candidate becomes U.S. President, Mr Ayers and his "social justice" ideas will continue to march onward in the field of public education. Stern's writings, particularly when coupled with Diamond's essays on the topic, are the best introduction to the ideas.
For additional background, go to April 22 in the archives at Diamond's Global Labor and Politics blog and read forward.
Also, Diamond will be a guest again on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday. He will discuss Annenberg-gate and the work of Ayers and Obama for the CAC. Diamond will appear on the KFI-640 AM portion of the show at 10:20 PM Eastern time. Here is the link to the online streaming for the show. KFI also provides podcasts of the show the day after the broadcast.
Now to Diamond's latest:
Behind the Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Politics and Ideology
The selection of Barack Obama as Chairman of the Board of the Bill Ayers-designed and founded Chicago Annenberg Challenge in early 1995 did not happen in a vacuum.
It happened within the context of a “radical” (Ayers’ word) school reform effort begun in Chicago in the late 1980s. Both Ayers and Obama were active together in that effort through the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs).
Here are links to some helpful research reports on the school reform effort as well as two pieces that take two very different views on the question of education reform.
Philanthropy’s Paradox: Chicago School Reform (The Role of Chicago Foundations in Reform, 1987-1990).
This research paper by one participant in the reform describes the important role of Chicago foundations in allying themselves with Saul Alinsky influenced community organizations including Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP) during that reform process.
Key in this effort were the Joyce Foundation and the Woods Fund. Joyce provided the DCP with $60,000 during this period. Obama would later join its board. Woods provided more than $27,000 to the DCP during this period. Woods had funded the hiring of Obama by the DCP in 1985. Ken Rolling, one of the Woods Fund’s key program officers, would be hired by Obama and Ayers as the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Obama would later join the Woods Fund board and Ayers would join and chair the board.
School Reform Chicago Style – How Citizens Organized to Change Public Policy
This pamphlet describes the unusual alliance that came together to push for the legislation that established the Local School Councils as a new power center in Chicago schools in 1988. The LSC’s were to be a watchdog over teachers, principals and school administrators in Chicago. Barack Obama (through the Developing Communities Project) and Bill Ayers (through the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, which he later chaired) were both active in the push for the establishment of the LSC’s. A chart at the end of this pamphlet indicates Ayers’ and the DCP’s role.
The Shifting Ground of Curriculum Thought and Everyday Practice by William Ayers
This is a fascinating short essay by Bill Ayers published in 1992 just after the Chicago School Reform was put in place and while Ayers was chair of the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, which had led the charge to put the Reform in place. The following year Ayers would conceive and draft the proposal for the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge and recruit Barack Obama to chair its board.
Ayers writes “in a sense, all education is about power.” His greatest concern is to use politics to shake up what he sees as the “bureaucratization” of the schools by school boards and unions. He celebrates the “upheaval” that the Reform caused in the Chicago schools. He wants schools to tackle the question of how students can be “empowered to attain greater liberation, equity, and social justice through schooling?”
The “Crits” Capture Presidential Power: Top education researchers denounce scientific research. A book review by Nathan Glazer of Education Research in the Public Interest: Social Justice, Action, and Policy edited by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate (Teachers’ College Press 2006)
This review serves as an intellectual antidote to the Ayers worldview. Glazer slays the “politically correct” absurdities that appear to have taken hold in America’s Schools of Education. Unfortunately they have begun flowing into the political arena during this year’s presidential campaign. Bill Ayers is the author of one chapter in the book. The co-editor Gloria Ladson-Billings is the inventor of a proposal to make repayment of centuries of “education debt” owed to people of color the top priority of the next President, an idea shared by Ayers and also strongly backed by Barack Obama’s education advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond.
The education theories of former terrorist William Ayers and his fellow travelers cry out for a Monty Python skit. Unfortunately neither side of the Pond is currently producing TV comics brave and smart enough to satirize the kind of dangerous nonsense preached by Ayers and those who support his theories. Yet even a deadpan discussion of any part of the theories can be funny.
As an example, consider this academic's manful struggle to avoid sarcasm while analyzing the argument that it's perfectly possible to abandon all scientific measures when determining what works and doesn't work in the public education field. One can almost hear the question behind Nathan Glazer's painfully polite request for an alternative measure: 'Pig entrails and Ouija boards, anyone?'
The laughter tends to die in your throat when you realize that Glazer is touching on ideas held by an old and close associate of the presumptive Democrat nominee for the office of U.S. President.
Law professor Stephen Diamond's latest post, which links to Glazer's discussion, reminds us of the frightening realities connected with the relationship between William Ayers and Barack Obama when they worked for the CAC.
Before turning to Diamond's latest, republished below, you might want to check out The Real Barack Obama, which has published a great list of resource documents and opinion related to "Annenberg-gate."
(The term refers to attempts to block Steve Diamond and NRO's Stanley Kurtz from accessing documents connected with the CAC.)
I'm glad to see that RBO has also collected in the same post Sol Stern's writings on Ayers's education theories. It's vital to understand that no matter which candidate becomes U.S. President, Mr Ayers and his "social justice" ideas will continue to march onward in the field of public education. Stern's writings, particularly when coupled with Diamond's essays on the topic, are the best introduction to the ideas.
For additional background, go to April 22 in the archives at Diamond's Global Labor and Politics blog and read forward.
Also, Diamond will be a guest again on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday. He will discuss Annenberg-gate and the work of Ayers and Obama for the CAC. Diamond will appear on the KFI-640 AM portion of the show at 10:20 PM Eastern time. Here is the link to the online streaming for the show. KFI also provides podcasts of the show the day after the broadcast.
Now to Diamond's latest:
Behind the Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Politics and Ideology
The selection of Barack Obama as Chairman of the Board of the Bill Ayers-designed and founded Chicago Annenberg Challenge in early 1995 did not happen in a vacuum.
It happened within the context of a “radical” (Ayers’ word) school reform effort begun in Chicago in the late 1980s. Both Ayers and Obama were active together in that effort through the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs).
Here are links to some helpful research reports on the school reform effort as well as two pieces that take two very different views on the question of education reform.
Philanthropy’s Paradox: Chicago School Reform (The Role of Chicago Foundations in Reform, 1987-1990).
This research paper by one participant in the reform describes the important role of Chicago foundations in allying themselves with Saul Alinsky influenced community organizations including Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP) during that reform process.
Key in this effort were the Joyce Foundation and the Woods Fund. Joyce provided the DCP with $60,000 during this period. Obama would later join its board. Woods provided more than $27,000 to the DCP during this period. Woods had funded the hiring of Obama by the DCP in 1985. Ken Rolling, one of the Woods Fund’s key program officers, would be hired by Obama and Ayers as the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Obama would later join the Woods Fund board and Ayers would join and chair the board.
School Reform Chicago Style – How Citizens Organized to Change Public Policy
This pamphlet describes the unusual alliance that came together to push for the legislation that established the Local School Councils as a new power center in Chicago schools in 1988. The LSC’s were to be a watchdog over teachers, principals and school administrators in Chicago. Barack Obama (through the Developing Communities Project) and Bill Ayers (through the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, which he later chaired) were both active in the push for the establishment of the LSC’s. A chart at the end of this pamphlet indicates Ayers’ and the DCP’s role.
The Shifting Ground of Curriculum Thought and Everyday Practice by William Ayers
This is a fascinating short essay by Bill Ayers published in 1992 just after the Chicago School Reform was put in place and while Ayers was chair of the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, which had led the charge to put the Reform in place. The following year Ayers would conceive and draft the proposal for the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge and recruit Barack Obama to chair its board.
Ayers writes “in a sense, all education is about power.” His greatest concern is to use politics to shake up what he sees as the “bureaucratization” of the schools by school boards and unions. He celebrates the “upheaval” that the Reform caused in the Chicago schools. He wants schools to tackle the question of how students can be “empowered to attain greater liberation, equity, and social justice through schooling?”
The “Crits” Capture Presidential Power: Top education researchers denounce scientific research. A book review by Nathan Glazer of Education Research in the Public Interest: Social Justice, Action, and Policy edited by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate (Teachers’ College Press 2006)
This review serves as an intellectual antidote to the Ayers worldview. Glazer slays the “politically correct” absurdities that appear to have taken hold in America’s Schools of Education. Unfortunately they have begun flowing into the political arena during this year’s presidential campaign. Bill Ayers is the author of one chapter in the book. The co-editor Gloria Ladson-Billings is the inventor of a proposal to make repayment of centuries of “education debt” owed to people of color the top priority of the next President, an idea shared by Ayers and also strongly backed by Barack Obama’s education advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond.
Wednesday, August 20
Steve Diamond begins to publish key documents related to Barack Obama-William Ayers work for Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond is fighting back against two libraries that are suppressing documents generated by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge .
In the following report, originally published last night at Diamond's Global Labor and Politics blog, he publishes links to some of the CAC documents he received from Brown University library before they stopped responding to his requests for the documents.
See yesterday's entries for Diamond's first and second reports on the libraries that slammed the door in his face, and that of National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz -- and the implications.
For an overview of the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers see Diamond's August 10 post The Obama-Ayers Top Ten: Highlights of the 20 year Obama-Ayers Connection.
For readers who are new to the issue, look through the posts linked on his blog's sidebar. The importance of Steve Diamond's writings on the Ayers-Obama relationship and Ayers's education theories can hardly be overstated.
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss "Annenberg-gate." Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
Now to Diamond's Key Chicago Annenberg Challenge Documents:
I will post over the next few days the key Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents that I was able to obtain prior to the door being slammed in the face of NRO writer Stanley Kurtz by the University of Illinois
In the following report, originally published last night at Diamond's Global Labor and Politics blog, he publishes links to some of the CAC documents he received from Brown University library before they stopped responding to his requests for the documents.
See yesterday's entries for Diamond's first and second reports on the libraries that slammed the door in his face, and that of National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz -- and the implications.
For an overview of the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers see Diamond's August 10 post The Obama-Ayers Top Ten: Highlights of the 20 year Obama-Ayers Connection.
For readers who are new to the issue, look through the posts linked on his blog's sidebar. The importance of Steve Diamond's writings on the Ayers-Obama relationship and Ayers's education theories can hardly be overstated.
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss "Annenberg-gate." Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
Now to Diamond's Key Chicago Annenberg Challenge Documents:
I will post over the next few days the key Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents that I was able to obtain prior to the door being slammed in the face of NRO writer Stanley Kurtz by the University of Illinois
While the records I have, including board minutes, financial records and annual reports, are no substitute for the material apparently held by the University, they do help explain the close links between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers as I explored here.
Chicago Annenberg Challenge Documents:
Tax Returns on Form 990PF:
These returns provide details about the grant recipients of the CAC including former Maoist and Bill Ayers's SDS comrade Mike Klonsky's Small Schools Workshop and the Developing Communities Project, once headed by Barack Obama.
2000 (to come)
Independent Assessments of Impact of Chicago Annenberg Challenge:
The 2003 report concludes that the Challenge had no effect on student outcomes.
Note (Updated 5:00 PM)
For readers who saw Steve Diamond's second post before 3:35 PM, the updated version published below replaces it.
*****************
5:00 PM Update
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
*****************
5:00 PM Update
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
Steve Diamond on leading roles of William Ayers and Barack Obama in Chicago Annenberg Challenge, plus more about "Annenberg-gate" (UPDATED 3:35 PM)
5:00 PM Update
Steve will guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
******************************************************
See today's earlier entry for law professor Stephen Diamond's first post on Annenberg-gate.
For an overview of the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers see Diamond's August 10 post The Obama-Ayers Top Ten: Highlights of the 20 year Obama-Ayers Connection at his blog Global Labor and Politics.
And, for readers who are new to the issue and Diamond's writings, look through the reports linked on his blog's sidebar. The importance of Diamond's writings on the Ayers-Obama relationship and Ayers's education theories can hardly be overstated.
Now to Diamond's Inside the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for a Closer Look
Steve will guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
******************************************************
See today's earlier entry for law professor Stephen Diamond's first post on Annenberg-gate.
For an overview of the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers see Diamond's August 10 post The Obama-Ayers Top Ten: Highlights of the 20 year Obama-Ayers Connection at his blog Global Labor and Politics.
And, for readers who are new to the issue and Diamond's writings, look through the reports linked on his blog's sidebar. The importance of Diamond's writings on the Ayers-Obama relationship and Ayers's education theories can hardly be overstated.
Now to Diamond's Inside the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for a Closer Look
As Global Labor readers are now aware, the University of Illinois is blocking access to the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an Illinois non profit corporation, established in 1995.
However, several months ago I was able to obtain certain key records of the Challenge - including board minutes, annual and semi-annual reports and financial records - from Brown University's Annenberg Institute, which housed the national Annenberg Challenge program that was set up in 1993 by a gift of $500 million from Walter Annenberg.
While the material I was provided is helpful it is no substitute for the complete documentary record that is apparently housed at the University of Illinois (some 70 linear feet of documents according to the library's public records) and thus that public University should immediately make available to the public those records.
Below is an analysis of what I found in the documents I was able to obtain.
They evidence:
- the leading role that Bill Ayers played in the Annenberg Challenge;
- the equally important role played by Barack Obama; and
- the intensely political nature of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Introduction
The CAC was established in 1995 as a result of a $49.2 million grant from Walter Annenberg to support education reform in Chicago. Bill Ayers and Anne C. Hallett co-signed a letter submitting the grant proposal to Brown University President Vartan Gregorian on November 8, 1994 where the national Challenge office would be headquartered.
The CAC was established in 1995 as a result of a $49.2 million grant from Walter Annenberg to support education reform in Chicago. Bill Ayers and Anne C. Hallett co-signed a letter submitting the grant proposal to Brown University President Vartan Gregorian on November 8, 1994 where the national Challenge office would be headquartered.
The letter was on the letterhead of the University of Illinois at Chicago (“UIC”). Ayers identified himself as representing the UIC and the “Chicago Forum for School Change.” Ms. Hallett is identified as the Executive Director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform. At the bottom of the letter, a parenthetical states: “On behalf of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative.”
The letter and the attached detailed proposal grew out of a process that began in December 1993 when a small group led by Ayers, Hallett and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation “met to discuss a proposal to the Annenberg Challenge for support of this city’s public school reform efforts.” This group became the nucleus of the larger Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC, which Ayers would co-chair and on which Hallett and Chapman would serve. (Program Report, CAC, Jan. 1, 1995 through Mar. 31, 1996 at 1).
The letter makes the goal of the grant proposal explicit:
“Chicago is six years into the most radical systemwide urban school reform effort in the country. The Annenberg Challenge provides an unprecedented opportunity to concentrate the energy of this reform into an educational renaissance in the classroom.”
The attached proposal is titled: “Smart Schools/Smart Kids: A proposal to the Annenberg Challenge to Create the Chicago School Reform Collaborative.”
The six year old “radical reform effort” that Ayers/Hallett refer to, of course, was the establishment of local school councils (“LSC”) as a new center of power in the Chicago Public Schools (“CPS”) in 1988, in the wake of a 1987 teachers’ strike that proved unpopular to parents and reform activists in both community groups and business groups.
The Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (“ABCs”) was formed then to push for the LSC idea in the Illinois state legislature. Active in the ABCs was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project, and Chicago United, a group of businessmen concerned about race and education issues founded by Bill Ayers’ father, Tom Ayers, once CEO of the large Chicago utility, Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon).
By the early 1990s there was controversy about the LSC idea from many directions. At one point the 1988 law was actually declared unconstitutional and it had to be restructured. Another effort was underway to re-centralize control over the schools in the hands of the mayor’s office when the possibility of the Annenberg grant arose. This counter-reform effort, if you will, partially succeeded in new laws passed in 1995 and 1999.
But in 1993 the CAC grant proposal was seen by Ayers as an attempt, in part, to rescue the LSC’s. The grant proposal states,
“We envision a process to unleash at the school site the initiative and courage of LSC’s….” Later, it states “[t]he Local Schools Councils…are important both for guiding educational improvement and as a means of strengthening America’s democratic traditions.”
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.”
The letter and the attached detailed proposal grew out of a process that began in December 1993 when a small group led by Ayers, Hallett and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation “met to discuss a proposal to the Annenberg Challenge for support of this city’s public school reform efforts.” This group became the nucleus of the larger Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC, which Ayers would co-chair and on which Hallett and Chapman would serve. (Program Report, CAC, Jan. 1, 1995 through Mar. 31, 1996 at 1).
The letter makes the goal of the grant proposal explicit:
“Chicago is six years into the most radical systemwide urban school reform effort in the country. The Annenberg Challenge provides an unprecedented opportunity to concentrate the energy of this reform into an educational renaissance in the classroom.”
The attached proposal is titled: “Smart Schools/Smart Kids: A proposal to the Annenberg Challenge to Create the Chicago School Reform Collaborative.”
The six year old “radical reform effort” that Ayers/Hallett refer to, of course, was the establishment of local school councils (“LSC”) as a new center of power in the Chicago Public Schools (“CPS”) in 1988, in the wake of a 1987 teachers’ strike that proved unpopular to parents and reform activists in both community groups and business groups.
The Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (“ABCs”) was formed then to push for the LSC idea in the Illinois state legislature. Active in the ABCs was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project, and Chicago United, a group of businessmen concerned about race and education issues founded by Bill Ayers’ father, Tom Ayers, once CEO of the large Chicago utility, Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon).
By the early 1990s there was controversy about the LSC idea from many directions. At one point the 1988 law was actually declared unconstitutional and it had to be restructured. Another effort was underway to re-centralize control over the schools in the hands of the mayor’s office when the possibility of the Annenberg grant arose. This counter-reform effort, if you will, partially succeeded in new laws passed in 1995 and 1999.
But in 1993 the CAC grant proposal was seen by Ayers as an attempt, in part, to rescue the LSC’s. The grant proposal states,
“We envision a process to unleash at the school site the initiative and courage of LSC’s….” Later, it states “[t]he Local Schools Councils…are important both for guiding educational improvement and as a means of strengthening America’s democratic traditions.”
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.”
When the LSC reform was put in place Bill Ayers wrote an opinion piece for the Chicago newspapers that spoke of combatting the "bureaucracies" that he felt blocked true reform in the school system. I believe he meant by this both the Chicago school board and the Chicago Teachers' Union. This use of the word "bureaucracies" as his target is, again, evocative of the attempts of figures like Mao Tse Tung to combat "bureaucracy" in the Chinese cultural revolution.
It is interesting to note that very few black Chicago organizations were willing to back the LSC reforms precisely because they targeted the Teachers' Union and the School Board - two of the few places in Chicago life at the time where blacks could pursue a secure middle class profession.
Thus, in the midst of an intense political battle in Chicago over the LSC role in the schools, securing the CAC money was very important to the LSC reform effort backed by Ayers and Obama from the late 1980s. The Ayers/Hallett proposal stated that the money would provide
“a powerful catalyst for Chicago educators and parents to build on this base toward a sustained and serious advance….This is the critical step, that must be taken now, and the time is now.”
Indeed, the CAC proposal effort led by Ayers and Hallett was a critical part of what the Project Director of the CAC, Ken Rolling, described as the “political wars” being waged over schools in Chicago at that time. Ken Rolling was a veteran of those wars because in his previous role he had been a program officer of the Woods Fund, which supported the school reform effort through its grants, including grants to Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project.
Other groups in other cities were competing for the same pool of funds (a total of $500 million made available by philanthropist Walter Annenberg) and, perhaps even more importantly, other groups in the city of Chicago with different policy views were applying to receive funds.
Thus, in the midst of an intense political battle in Chicago over the LSC role in the schools, securing the CAC money was very important to the LSC reform effort backed by Ayers and Obama from the late 1980s. The Ayers/Hallett proposal stated that the money would provide
“a powerful catalyst for Chicago educators and parents to build on this base toward a sustained and serious advance….This is the critical step, that must be taken now, and the time is now.”
Indeed, the CAC proposal effort led by Ayers and Hallett was a critical part of what the Project Director of the CAC, Ken Rolling, described as the “political wars” being waged over schools in Chicago at that time. Ken Rolling was a veteran of those wars because in his previous role he had been a program officer of the Woods Fund, which supported the school reform effort through its grants, including grants to Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project.
Other groups in other cities were competing for the same pool of funds (a total of $500 million made available by philanthropist Walter Annenberg) and, perhaps even more importantly, other groups in the city of Chicago with different policy views were applying to receive funds.
(I have read but not confirmed that Mayor Richard Daley himself attempted to secure a grant from Annenberg in competition with the Ayers/Hallett proposal. My inquiry about this to the Annenberg Institute at Brown was never answered.)
However, the Ayers/Hallett proposal was successful in the end with the decision made in late 1994. In January of 1995 the formal announcement of a grant of $49.2 million was made. That money would have to be matched by contributions from the private and public sector 2:1 for a total amount over the life of the project of approximately $150 million dollars to be disbursed in Chicago. (Apparently the actual amount raised was an additional $60 million for a total of $110 million.) The CAC set up an office in rent-free space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the same Department of Education building where Bill Ayers taught.
The CAC Structure: The Board and the Collaborative work hand in glove
The Ayers/Hallett proposal described a three-piece structure established to carry out the CAC. The three “over-lapping entities each of which has clear tasks and responsibilities” included:
“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board (the Board); the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (the Collaborative); and the Consortium of Chicago Schools Research (CCSR).”
The Board would handle “all fiscal matters” including raising the required 2:1 matching funds (nearly $100 million required in a five year period) and “creating a grant-making system to disperse monies to schools and networks.” The Board would hire the Project Director, a full time professional staff position.
The first chairman of the CAC Board was Barack Obama, at that point, 33 years old and a third year associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm.
Obama took over the reins of the Board in early 1995 and stepped down from the chairmanship in late 1999, though he remained on the Board until the CAC phased itself out of existence and handed off its remaining assets to a permanent new institution, the Chicago Public Education Fund, in 2001. The Board began to meet in March of 1995 and formally incorporated the CAC as a non-profit entity in April 1995.
Other board members included numerous already prominent Chicagoans: Susan Crown, Vice President of the Henry Crown Company; Patricia A. Graham, President of The Spencer Foundation; Stanley Ikenberry, President-emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Handy Lindsey, Executive Director of the Field Foundation; Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and then President of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White, Executive Director of the Community Workshop on Economic Development. Some of these individuals would resign and be replaced by other equally prominent Chicagoans.
The second operating entity of the CAC would be the Collaborative that would represent various constituencies in the Chicago schools and wider community. It would be:
“A clearing-house for ideas, for resources, for information – the place where strategies are created, successes and failures analyzed, and plans made and shared. The Collaborative under the leadership of the [Project] Director will publicize the Challenge, develop the RFP [Requests for Proposals] and application criteria, host seminars to inform and assist schools through the process, select participating schools, establish working groups, oversee program evaluation, develop the metropolitan strategy, broker waivers and resources, and provide services for networks. In other words, the Collaborative is the place where the Challenge digs its deepest roots into the community and the schools – and it is the heart of the operational work.”
The co-chair of the CAC’s Collaborative from 1995 until 2000 was Bill Ayers. In 1997 Ayers was named Chicago's "Citizen of the Year" for his work on the CAC.
Thus, the leaders of the two operative arms of the CAC from its inception until 2000 were Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
What Happened: The political battle that CAC waged
A review of the annual and semi-annual reports submitted to the Annenberg Foundation indicates the close working relationship between the Board and the Collaborative throughout its entire five-year life.
I. 1995
Some examples from the 1995-96 Program Report (prepared in May 1996) include the following:
1) The Collaborative developed the first Request for Proposals (RFP) form for the CAC “which was widely circulated and they held a series of informational meetings throughout the city to acquaint public school staff, school reformers and potential ‘external partners’ with the mission and goals of the CAC."
2) In the first year, the Collaborative “read each of the letters-of-intent” at least three times and rated them and then made recommendations to the CAC board on the disposition of the applications.
3) The Collaborative and the Board worked together on a job description for CAC staff.
4) The Collaborative and the Board worked together on a “process for reviewing planning and implementation networks” which had received grants.
One critical project of the Collaborative and Board in 1996 demonstrates the closely aligned political views of the two operational arms of the CAC:
5) The Collaborative and the Board became direct players in the Chicago LSC elections held in 1996. According to the CAC Report:
“In 1996 the Chicago Public Schools were scheduled to hold the fourth election of Local School Council (LSC) representatives since the school reform of act [sic] of 1988 was passed. As in the past two elections support from the central office of the Chicago Public Schools appeared to be minimal.
"Until, that is, members of the Collaborative coalesced with school reform groups around the city and began to put pressure on the Chicago Public Schools’ central office to promote the elections both by recruiting enough candidates for the open seats so that contested elections would be held and by urging parents and community members to vote. Members of the CAC Collaborative began their work on the LSC elections in late Fall 1995.
"Part of their effort was to seek funding to support efforts at the school level to locate and elect active LSC members. The CAC board was asked in early 1996 to approve funds for a citywide coalition of local organizations who agreed to work on both candidate and voter turnout for the 1996 elections.”
The Board approved a grant of $125,000 for this effort.
6) 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.
II. 1996
A second Program Report was filed for the period ending 12/31/1996. Among its relevant comments were the following that indicate the inherently political nature of the CAC Board and Collaborative’s activities:
The Collaborative (still co-chaired by Bill Ayers) and the CAC Staff (now headed by Ken Rolling) prepared an RFP for potential grantees for $2 million allocated by the Board (still chaired by Barack Obama) for “Leadership Development.” Its aim was “to make clear the connection between organizing a base of supporters for school reform with local schools, and a training program on educational issues to assist parents and community members participate in their schools.”
At the May 1996 Board meeting a proposed $2 million Leadership Development Initiative RFP was discussed. This program was a centerpiece of the CAC's early efforts aimed at supporting the recruitment and training of candidates and members of the controversial Local School Councils in Chicago. Barack Obama chaired the meeting. The minutes state:
However, the Ayers/Hallett proposal was successful in the end with the decision made in late 1994. In January of 1995 the formal announcement of a grant of $49.2 million was made. That money would have to be matched by contributions from the private and public sector 2:1 for a total amount over the life of the project of approximately $150 million dollars to be disbursed in Chicago. (Apparently the actual amount raised was an additional $60 million for a total of $110 million.) The CAC set up an office in rent-free space at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the same Department of Education building where Bill Ayers taught.
The CAC Structure: The Board and the Collaborative work hand in glove
The Ayers/Hallett proposal described a three-piece structure established to carry out the CAC. The three “over-lapping entities each of which has clear tasks and responsibilities” included:
“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board (the Board); the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (the Collaborative); and the Consortium of Chicago Schools Research (CCSR).”
The Board would handle “all fiscal matters” including raising the required 2:1 matching funds (nearly $100 million required in a five year period) and “creating a grant-making system to disperse monies to schools and networks.” The Board would hire the Project Director, a full time professional staff position.
The first chairman of the CAC Board was Barack Obama, at that point, 33 years old and a third year associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm.
Obama took over the reins of the Board in early 1995 and stepped down from the chairmanship in late 1999, though he remained on the Board until the CAC phased itself out of existence and handed off its remaining assets to a permanent new institution, the Chicago Public Education Fund, in 2001. The Board began to meet in March of 1995 and formally incorporated the CAC as a non-profit entity in April 1995.
Other board members included numerous already prominent Chicagoans: Susan Crown, Vice President of the Henry Crown Company; Patricia A. Graham, President of The Spencer Foundation; Stanley Ikenberry, President-emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Handy Lindsey, Executive Director of the Field Foundation; Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and then President of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White, Executive Director of the Community Workshop on Economic Development. Some of these individuals would resign and be replaced by other equally prominent Chicagoans.
The second operating entity of the CAC would be the Collaborative that would represent various constituencies in the Chicago schools and wider community. It would be:
“A clearing-house for ideas, for resources, for information – the place where strategies are created, successes and failures analyzed, and plans made and shared. The Collaborative under the leadership of the [Project] Director will publicize the Challenge, develop the RFP [Requests for Proposals] and application criteria, host seminars to inform and assist schools through the process, select participating schools, establish working groups, oversee program evaluation, develop the metropolitan strategy, broker waivers and resources, and provide services for networks. In other words, the Collaborative is the place where the Challenge digs its deepest roots into the community and the schools – and it is the heart of the operational work.”
The co-chair of the CAC’s Collaborative from 1995 until 2000 was Bill Ayers. In 1997 Ayers was named Chicago's "Citizen of the Year" for his work on the CAC.
Thus, the leaders of the two operative arms of the CAC from its inception until 2000 were Bill Ayers and Barack Obama.
What Happened: The political battle that CAC waged
A review of the annual and semi-annual reports submitted to the Annenberg Foundation indicates the close working relationship between the Board and the Collaborative throughout its entire five-year life.
I. 1995
Some examples from the 1995-96 Program Report (prepared in May 1996) include the following:
1) The Collaborative developed the first Request for Proposals (RFP) form for the CAC “which was widely circulated and they held a series of informational meetings throughout the city to acquaint public school staff, school reformers and potential ‘external partners’ with the mission and goals of the CAC."
2) In the first year, the Collaborative “read each of the letters-of-intent” at least three times and rated them and then made recommendations to the CAC board on the disposition of the applications.
3) The Collaborative and the Board worked together on a job description for CAC staff.
4) The Collaborative and the Board worked together on a “process for reviewing planning and implementation networks” which had received grants.
One critical project of the Collaborative and Board in 1996 demonstrates the closely aligned political views of the two operational arms of the CAC:
5) The Collaborative and the Board became direct players in the Chicago LSC elections held in 1996. According to the CAC Report:
“In 1996 the Chicago Public Schools were scheduled to hold the fourth election of Local School Council (LSC) representatives since the school reform of act [sic] of 1988 was passed. As in the past two elections support from the central office of the Chicago Public Schools appeared to be minimal.
"Until, that is, members of the Collaborative coalesced with school reform groups around the city and began to put pressure on the Chicago Public Schools’ central office to promote the elections both by recruiting enough candidates for the open seats so that contested elections would be held and by urging parents and community members to vote. Members of the CAC Collaborative began their work on the LSC elections in late Fall 1995.
"Part of their effort was to seek funding to support efforts at the school level to locate and elect active LSC members. The CAC board was asked in early 1996 to approve funds for a citywide coalition of local organizations who agreed to work on both candidate and voter turnout for the 1996 elections.”
The Board approved a grant of $125,000 for this effort.
6) 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.
II. 1996
A second Program Report was filed for the period ending 12/31/1996. Among its relevant comments were the following that indicate the inherently political nature of the CAC Board and Collaborative’s activities:
The Collaborative (still co-chaired by Bill Ayers) and the CAC Staff (now headed by Ken Rolling) prepared an RFP for potential grantees for $2 million allocated by the Board (still chaired by Barack Obama) for “Leadership Development.” Its aim was “to make clear the connection between organizing a base of supporters for school reform with local schools, and a training program on educational issues to assist parents and community members participate in their schools.”
At the May 1996 Board meeting a proposed $2 million Leadership Development Initiative RFP was discussed. This program was a centerpiece of the CAC's early efforts aimed at supporting the recruitment and training of candidates and members of the controversial Local School Councils in Chicago. Barack Obama chaired the meeting. The minutes state:
“After some expression of concern for how the RFP and the Initiative itself would directly support the criteria used by the Challenge in its general grant program Chairman Obama volunteered to meet with representatives of the Collaborative to clarify the purpose of the RFP and to request another draft which would be more carefully tailored to meet the criteria and program of the Challenge.”
At the December 1996 Board meeting former Northwestern University president and business community representative Arnold Weber asked for clarification on a number of issues related to the Leadership Development Initiative RFP for $2 million. According to the Board minutes he was concerned about the relationship of this planned effort to recruit and train new leaders to the existing LSC structure.
At the December 1996 Board meeting former Northwestern University president and business community representative Arnold Weber asked for clarification on a number of issues related to the Leadership Development Initiative RFP for $2 million. According to the Board minutes he was concerned about the relationship of this planned effort to recruit and train new leaders to the existing LSC structure.
He also was concerned about the relationship between groups organized with CAC money to school principals. The minutes state: “Principals may view their presence as a political threat.”
Barack Obama was absent from this meeting
III. 1997
Following the Board level discussion and then the Barack Obama-led discussion with the Collaborative, according to an Interim Report filed by Ken Rolling in October 1997:
III. 1997
Following the Board level discussion and then the Barack Obama-led discussion with the Collaborative, according to an Interim Report filed by Ken Rolling in October 1997:
“a new RFP [for Leadership Development] was issued in June 1997 to address the Challenge’s interest in organizing an informed constituency of parents and community residents who will actively support and participate in educational changes in their local schools. The RFP went through a number of revisions as both the Board and Collaborative discussed its goals and implementation….[The Initiative] is a critical aspect of the work of the Challenge as it seeks to increase not only numbers of parents and community residents who are actively engaged in changing their schools but also participants who are knowledgeable of promising and successful educational/academic practices in schools.”
Presumably this represented a compromise that Board Chair Obama was able to work out with the Bill Ayers-led Collaborative in the wake of the concerns raised by business community representative Arnold Weber about the CAC backed leaders becoming a “political threat.”
The annual report for 1997 made special mention of the surrounding political context of the CAC’s work. Director Ken Rolling noted that a goal of the CAC was “seeking a changed policy environment” but that this “has been the most elusive to date with no major progress to report at this time."
Presumably this represented a compromise that Board Chair Obama was able to work out with the Bill Ayers-led Collaborative in the wake of the concerns raised by business community representative Arnold Weber about the CAC backed leaders becoming a “political threat.”
The annual report for 1997 made special mention of the surrounding political context of the CAC’s work. Director Ken Rolling noted that a goal of the CAC was “seeking a changed policy environment” but that this “has been the most elusive to date with no major progress to report at this time."
He explained further:
“The Challenge began its work in 1995 at the same time a dramatic change in the leadership and management of the Chicago Public Schools took place. The Illinois state legislature awarded complete control of the…Schools to the Mayor of Chicago in 1995. A new management team and Reform Board of Trustees was installed and a major emphasis began on administration, financial stability and accountability measures that are tied to specific test scores. The Challenge began its program at the time the central administration of the public schools took off in a different direction.”
Indeed, the 1995 law gave the Mayor and the Board the power to dissolve LSC’s – the very bodies that the CAC was trying to bolster.
IV. 1998
The 1998 Annual Report notes that the Collaborative (still co-chaired by Ayers) “continued to meet throughout 1998 and provided advice and outreach” while its members “regularly participated in site visits and proposal reviews, assisted schools and their networks in developing leadership programs, and assisted in raising funds for the 1998 Local School Council elections to support a wide range of community organizations who worked to recruit both candidates and voters for the Spring 1998 elections.”
V. 1999
According to the Mid-Year Report for 1999 the $2 million for the Leadership Development Initiative was “now fully committed.” The funds “supported efforts to recruit candidates and build turnout for the [LSC] elections in both 1996 and 1998 and provide support” for efforts to improve the “academic life of local schools.”
By the end of this year Board member Arnold Weber would resign and Barack Obama would step down from the role of Board Chair as he anticipated an upcoming run for Congress.
VI. 2000
The CAC Interim Report for 2000 noted that the CAC was “completing funding of seven Leadership Development Initiative projects by June 30, 2001…focused on organizing parents and Local School Councils into more effective relationships with school personnel to affect curriculum and other academic changes in schools.”
Anticipating the end of the CAC the following year, the CAC was “also in the midst of creating a special fund to support future work of the [LSC’s] including ongoing training and development of [LSC] members as well as to assist in recruiting and electing members for the Councils in future years.”
The matching money: big corporations and foundations pitch in
A report on the matching funds raised by the CAC indicates that by the end of 1999 approximately $60 million had been raised from a wide range of corporations and foundations. Among the largest contributors were:
Bank of America $1.6 million
DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund $3 million
IBM $2.3 million
Polk Bros. Foundation $6.8 million
Prince Charitable Trusts $1.1 million
Pritzker Foundation $100,000.00
MacArthur Foundation $17.1 million
Joyce Foundation $11 million
Woods Fund $1 million
What about the “bottom line”?
The CAC also funded a third arm, the Consortium of Chicago School Research (CCSR), in parallel with the two operational arms, the Board and the Collaborative. This arm was to conduct research on the impact of the CAC’s funding.
In 2003 the final technical report of the CCSR on the CAC was published. The results were not pretty. The “bottom line” according to the report was that the CAC did not achieve its goal of improvement in student academic achievement and nonacademic outcomes. While student test scores improved in the so-called Annenberg Schools that received some of the $150 million disbursed in the six years from 1995 to 2001,
“This was similar to improvement across the system….There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.”
The report identified the political conflict between the Local School Council promotion efforts of the CAC – such as the $2 million Leadership Development Initiative - as a possible factor hindering a positive impact on student achievement.
Conclusion: an academic failure but political success?
The Challenge allowed Barack Obama and Bill Ayers to work together, no doubt closely, in the heat of political battle to help disburse more than $100 million to allies, particularly in the LSCs, in the Chicago School system.
“The Challenge began its work in 1995 at the same time a dramatic change in the leadership and management of the Chicago Public Schools took place. The Illinois state legislature awarded complete control of the…Schools to the Mayor of Chicago in 1995. A new management team and Reform Board of Trustees was installed and a major emphasis began on administration, financial stability and accountability measures that are tied to specific test scores. The Challenge began its program at the time the central administration of the public schools took off in a different direction.”
Indeed, the 1995 law gave the Mayor and the Board the power to dissolve LSC’s – the very bodies that the CAC was trying to bolster.
IV. 1998
The 1998 Annual Report notes that the Collaborative (still co-chaired by Ayers) “continued to meet throughout 1998 and provided advice and outreach” while its members “regularly participated in site visits and proposal reviews, assisted schools and their networks in developing leadership programs, and assisted in raising funds for the 1998 Local School Council elections to support a wide range of community organizations who worked to recruit both candidates and voters for the Spring 1998 elections.”
V. 1999
According to the Mid-Year Report for 1999 the $2 million for the Leadership Development Initiative was “now fully committed.” The funds “supported efforts to recruit candidates and build turnout for the [LSC] elections in both 1996 and 1998 and provide support” for efforts to improve the “academic life of local schools.”
By the end of this year Board member Arnold Weber would resign and Barack Obama would step down from the role of Board Chair as he anticipated an upcoming run for Congress.
VI. 2000
The CAC Interim Report for 2000 noted that the CAC was “completing funding of seven Leadership Development Initiative projects by June 30, 2001…focused on organizing parents and Local School Councils into more effective relationships with school personnel to affect curriculum and other academic changes in schools.”
Anticipating the end of the CAC the following year, the CAC was “also in the midst of creating a special fund to support future work of the [LSC’s] including ongoing training and development of [LSC] members as well as to assist in recruiting and electing members for the Councils in future years.”
The matching money: big corporations and foundations pitch in
A report on the matching funds raised by the CAC indicates that by the end of 1999 approximately $60 million had been raised from a wide range of corporations and foundations. Among the largest contributors were:
Bank of America $1.6 million
DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund $3 million
IBM $2.3 million
Polk Bros. Foundation $6.8 million
Prince Charitable Trusts $1.1 million
Pritzker Foundation $100,000.00
MacArthur Foundation $17.1 million
Joyce Foundation $11 million
Woods Fund $1 million
What about the “bottom line”?
The CAC also funded a third arm, the Consortium of Chicago School Research (CCSR), in parallel with the two operational arms, the Board and the Collaborative. This arm was to conduct research on the impact of the CAC’s funding.
In 2003 the final technical report of the CCSR on the CAC was published. The results were not pretty. The “bottom line” according to the report was that the CAC did not achieve its goal of improvement in student academic achievement and nonacademic outcomes. While student test scores improved in the so-called Annenberg Schools that received some of the $150 million disbursed in the six years from 1995 to 2001,
“This was similar to improvement across the system….There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.”
The report identified the political conflict between the Local School Council promotion efforts of the CAC – such as the $2 million Leadership Development Initiative - as a possible factor hindering a positive impact on student achievement.
Conclusion: an academic failure but political success?
The Challenge allowed Barack Obama and Bill Ayers to work together, no doubt closely, in the heat of political battle to help disburse more than $100 million to allies, particularly in the LSCs, in the Chicago School system.
Under the circumstances, it seems more than a bit disingenuous of Senator Obama to dismiss Bill Ayers as “some guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
The tangled tale of Barack Obama, William Ayers, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge
5:00 PM Update
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
******************************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond at Global Labor and Politics blog guest posts on "Annenberg-Gate:" It's not the crime, it's the cover up
Stanley Kurtz on Barack Obama, Bill Ayers & Chicago Annenberg Challenge on National Review Online
Steve will be a guest on John Batchelor's radio show this Sunday on the KFI 640-AM portion, at 10:20 PM Eastern time, to discuss Annenberg-gate. Here is the link for the KFI online broadcast.
******************************************************
Law professor and political scientist Steve Diamond at Global Labor and Politics blog guest posts on "Annenberg-Gate:" It's not the crime, it's the cover up
Yesterday there was some very interesting blogosphere discussion in reaction to the National Review piece on the blocking of access to research material on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
One comment noted: it's not the crime, it's the cover up and now the University of Illinois has provided the cover up.
Ironic, that a public university would attempt to prevent a legitimate author and journalist - with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard to boot - from accessing documents legitimately housed in their library. Ironic, and possibly illegal.
The flimsy manufactured excuse - most likely provided to the library by the University's general counsel - is that the University does not have a "deed of gift" which the university contends is required for it to, legitimately, claim possession of the archived material.
Unfortunately, this is a bad reading of the law. The only question to be answered, really, is what was the intent of the donor? Did the donor intend to give the University the thousands of pages of material related to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge? If so, then the gift is perfectly valid, the material belongs to the University and should be made available to researchers (including both journalists and academics). And, the donor could legitimately claim a tax deduction for the donation of the archives.
In other words, the real question here is one of tax law: would the IRS or the Illinois Department of Revenue have grounds to claim that any tax deduction claimed as a result of the donor's gift was invalid? The absence of a deed of gift, no matter what the University library now says, would not invalidate the gift. All that the IRS cares about is whether the donated material is related to the University's tax exempt purpose - in other words, education and research.
In fact, the deed of gift is really for the protection of the University, and usually is drafted by them in a standardized form (and that's why courts can construe ambiguities against the drafter of such a contract - the drafter usually is in a position to draft the contract to protect their interests.)
(Here is how the University of California, for example, explains the process.)
There are several important unanswered questions here.
1) On what basis would a public university, after agreeing to allow Dr. Kurtz access to the Annenberg Challenge archives in its possession, alert the donor of the documents?
The only possible answer is that somewhere along the chain of command someone set off an alarm bell because of the conservative affiliations of Dr. Kurtz.
2) Is it merely coincidence that one of the board members of the Annenberg Challenge was Stanley Ikenberry, a former University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) President and currently Regent Professor and President Emeritus of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) College of Education?
3) Did the general counsel of the university invent the excuse that absent a "deed of gift" the university could not claim possession of the archives?
4) How could the University make a detailed "finding aid" available to Dr. Kurtz for a collection that it did not legally possess?
Finding aids are detailed outlines of the archival material prepared by a library staff to aid researchers in their work. They are prepared only at the end of the "process" by which donated materials come into the legitimate possession of the library. There would be no reason to prepare a finding aid, now fortunately in the possession of Dr. Kurtz, unless the material was legitimately in the library's possession.
In fact the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the sister campus to the University of Illinois at Circle Campus Chicago, makes it explicit that it will not invest time in preparing donated material without a valid gift. Its online guidelines state: "The University cannot invest materials and labor in the care of collections which it does not own." Those guidelines make it clear that the "deed of gift" is for the protection of the University, as I suggested above.
5) What is the role of the successor organization to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Chicago Public Education Fund?
Legally, a non profit corporation like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) has a responsibility to its beneficiaries, the Illinois public. Ultimately it must serve their interests in order to have claimed tax exempt status. Thus, its records must be maintained throughout its life and then handed to its successor. The Attorney General of Illinois has ultimate authority over those records.
When the CAC went out of business it handed its assets, and presumably its records, to the Chicago Public Education Fund (CPEF). Perhaps Susan Crown, who sits on the CPEF board and sat on the board of the CAC with Barack Obama, can explain where the records of the CAC are?
Perhaps Penny Pritzker, whose family foundation donated $100,000 to the CAC and who now also sits on the board of the CPEF, and who also chairs the finance committee of the Obama campaign can explain what has happened to the missing records?
Like Dr. Kurtz, I have conducted archival research on several continents and in dozens of libraries, from London to Managua to Berkeley to Palo Alto, even in Chicago itself, at several of its libraries. I have conducted research on issues as sensitive as the origins of the Manhattan Project to the police state set up by the Sandinistas. And not once have I found a library door closed in my face like this. Not even by the FSLN in Managua itself.
This may explain why I ran into a smaller version of the door in the face from a university recently. As Global Labor readers know I laid out the basic trajectory of the CAC through a review of the CAC's financial statements, board minutes and annual and semi-annual reports, provided to me by Brown University, which housed the original national Annenberg Challenge. Once I posted my first discussion of what I found in these records, I sent additional requests for information to Brown.
However, while the representative from the university I originally corresponded with had been quite friendly and accommodating prior to my June 23 post, afterwards my additional requests for further information went unanswered. I did not pursue it at the time because I felt I had told a significant part of the story already. Thanks to the diligent work of Dr. Kurtz, however, we now know there is much more to know.
Of course, the larger question here is - why the concern? why the alarm bells? why the cover-up? is it simply because Dr. Kurtz is with National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley?
One remaining possibility, of course, is that somehow word that there was interest in the materials was leaked to Bill Ayers, who conceived of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, co-authored the original successful $49.2 million grant proposal, and then co-chaired the key operative body of the CAC, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. The original CAC offices were housed in the same building as Ayers' office, rent free courtesy of the University. That was also where Ayers housed his Small Schools Workshop, headed by his old SDS buddy, the Maoist Mike Klonsky, which received a $175,000 grant from, you guessed it, the CAC, whose board was chaired by Barack Obama.
Ayers has been pretty mum of late and maybe quite nervous about the possibility that a close look at the day to day records of the CAC will reveal more about what I have already found out: that he and Barack Obama had a close working relationship during the life of the CAC. The CAC actively and aggressively intervened in a major political war going on in Chicago in the mid 90s over school reform - against the goals of the powerful Chicago mayor, Richard Daley.
Obama's aim at the time was likely to "make his bones" politically and to establish a relationship with well heeled liberals, all as part of a potential challenge to Daley himself, as a second Harold Washington, one of Obama's heroes. The cards broke in another direction for Obama, of course, and now he finds himself trying for a slightly more powerful political role.
Unfortunately for Senator Obama, what might only stink in Chicago - a relationship with an ex-terrorist who had an authoritarian agenda in mind for Chicago school kids - is far more damaging on the national political scene.
Tuesday, August 19
Steve Cohen's Aug 17 interview with John Batchelor about Russia
KFI portion of the show; last two segments during the second hour. Crucially important information about Russia's viewpoint.
Also, if you're unfamiliar with Britain's BP problems with Russia's government, I suggest you learn something about them because they play into the mess involving Russia, Georgia, NATO, and the U.S.
What's the best course for the U.S. in this crisis? The best is not do-able. But the best course would be for Washington to tell London that after decades of being manipulated by the British government, the U.S. has finally wised up. And that if London doesn't stop screwing around, Washington will break off diplomatic relations with them.
That would end the crisis favorably within 72 hours.
Except it would be a lie that Washington has wised up; that process will take several more completely stupid and unnecessary crises.
Also, if you're unfamiliar with Britain's BP problems with Russia's government, I suggest you learn something about them because they play into the mess involving Russia, Georgia, NATO, and the U.S.
What's the best course for the U.S. in this crisis? The best is not do-able. But the best course would be for Washington to tell London that after decades of being manipulated by the British government, the U.S. has finally wised up. And that if London doesn't stop screwing around, Washington will break off diplomatic relations with them.
That would end the crisis favorably within 72 hours.
Except it would be a lie that Washington has wised up; that process will take several more completely stupid and unnecessary crises.
Tuesday, August 12
Russia-Georgia rumble
Here is latest on developments from India's Russia toady newspaper The Hindu. Also take a gander at the Wikipedia article on the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Also here is Germany's Spiegel magazine's spin on the Georgia-Russia "truce." Note how they are carefully setting up the USA to take the fall. Our dear NATO allies. What we would do without them? With that off my chest, here is the Hindu piece:
Also here is Germany's Spiegel magazine's spin on the Georgia-Russia "truce." Note how they are carefully setting up the USA to take the fall. Our dear NATO allies. What we would do without them? With that off my chest, here is the Hindu piece:
(August 13)
Russia: Status quo not possible. Russian peacekeepers an occupational force: Georgia
by Vladimir Radyuhin
MOSCOW: “The status quo in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is no longer possible,” said Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who brokered peace settlement in the Caucasus crisis, will now go to Tbilisi to secure President Mikheil Saakashvili’s agreement to the peace terms negotiated in Moscow.
As the peace plan was presented in Moscow Mr. Saakashvili in Tbilisi announced Georgia’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Independent States and repudiation of peacekeeping agreements with Russia regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia signed in the 1990s. He declared the Russian peacekeepers an “occupational force.”
Russia sent troops to South Ossetia last Friday to stop Georgia’s massive offensive against its breakaway territory in which some 2,000 civilians and about 20 Russian peacekeepers were killed. In five days of fighting the Russian forces recaptured the regional capital Tskhinvali, pushed back Georgian troops, and largely destroyed Georgia’s military infrastructure in air raids deep inside its territory.
In Abkhazia, the other breakaway territory of Georgia, separatist forces launched a military offensive on Tuesday to oust Georgian troops out of a demilitarized zone on the border with Georgia.
On Monday night Russian paratroopers deployed in Abkhazia a day earlier carried out raids deep inside Georgian territory to destroy military bases from where Georgia could sent reinforcements to its troops sealed off in Abkhazia. The Russian military said they were not taking part in the Abkhaz assault on the Georgian forces.
U.S. criticised
Russia has accused the U.S. of inspiring Georgia’s foiled offensive in the breakaway territory of South Ossetia and helping prepare for it.
“The invasion plan was rehearsed and perfected during Georgian-American war games in Georgia,” said Deputy Chief of Staff of Russia’s Armed Forces, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, at a press conference on Tuesday.
About 1,000 U.S. troops took part in large-scale military exercises with the Georgian military held recently in the area from where Georgia began its offensive to regain control over South Ossetia last Thursday, he said. Earlier, Russia’s envoy to the U.N. accused Washington of giving a go-ahead for Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia.
“It is hard to imagine that Georgia could dare to launch its aggression against South Ossetia without a nod from abroad,” said Vitaly Churkin, adding: “We hate to think that the U.S. gave a green light for the assault.”
Monday, August 11
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)