Birth Certificate controversy

Finally the word is getting out as the elections close in - just eleven days away. Every day has brought more and more questions as to BO's eligibility to run for POTUS and no wonder.

Many of the questions arise out of bo's own mouth, should I say writings. Dreams of my father, he quotes or refers to a "Frank". This brings into question if Frank is actually his father, a 60's civil rights activist, and close friends of his grandfather. Questions of his grandfather's affiliation with the communist party, his mother's marriage to a Indonesian muslim, Lolo Soetoro, who adopted "Barry"...there's just too many questions that remain unanswered.

Then this week, bo's granny, becomes deathly ill...on Monday...and he waits until Thursday to visit her. She is the only remaining soul who knows bo's true heritage, and yet he's kept her in hiding since announcing his run for POTUS.

As many have mentioned, she has osteoporosis, which, under normal care, is not a life threatening condition. Being 85 is considered young by many standards and then the latest pictures, or only pictures shown by the networks, are more than twenty years old.

Jay Schreiber, at America's Right has been on the frontlines since Berg filed his lawsuit. He has access to the court in which the suit was filed and will provide the latest information, when Judge Surrick gives his decision. Some have already mentioned the suit has been decided and references a site and 38 page decision.

However, I will wait until I see it on AR, as should everyone else.

News of this and many other suits have been filed across the nation. Berg was interviewed by Michael Savage on the entire show Thursday night. Newsmax, along with World Net Daily blogs are finally giving this information traction.

Newsmax.com

Obama Refuses to Answer Birth Certificate Lawsuit
Friday, October 24, 2008 4:16 PM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman


A Pennsylvania lawsuit alleging that Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen” of the United States took an unusual twist this week, after a federally mandated deadline requiring Obama’s lawyers to produce a “vault” copy of his birth certificate expired with no response from Obama or his lawyers.

The lawsuit, filed by former Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Philip J. Berg — a self-avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton — alleges that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus “ineligible” to run for president of the United States. It demands that Obama’s lawyers produce a copy of his original birth certificate to prove that he is a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Berg's suit and allegations have set off a wave of Internet buzz and rumors, though Obama could easily have put the matter to rest by providing the federal court with the basic documentation proving he is eligible to take the oath of a president. But Obama has apparently decided to deny the court and the public that documentation.

The Constitution provides that any U.S. citizen is eligible to become president if the person is 35 years of age or older and is a natural-born citizen; that is, born in the territorial United States.

By failing to respond to the Request for Admissions and Request for the Production of Documents within 30 days, Obama has “admitted” that he was born in Kenya, Berg stated this week in new court filings.

Berg released a long list of “admissions” he submitted to Obama’s lawyers on Sept. 15, and asked that they produce documents relating to Obama’s place of birth and citizenship.

Instead of responding, lawyers for Obama and the DNC asked the court to dismiss the case. But Judge R. Barclay Surrick of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has issued no ruling in the case that would have given Obama’s lawyers more time.

“There are lots of legal ways to stonewall,” a well-placed Republican attorney told Newsmax, who was not authorized to comment officially on the case. “But failing to respond is not one of them.”

“The first thing they teach you in law school,” he added, “is don’t put a complaint like this in a drawer. That’s how a nuisance case can become a problem.”

The 30-day deadline for defendants to comply with a discovery request is set forth in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures.

“It all comes down to the fact that there's nothing from the other side,” Berg said after he filed a motion on Thursday for summary judgment.

“The admissions are there. By not filing the answers or objections, the defense has admitted everything. [Obama] admits he was born in Kenya. He admits he was adopted in Indonesia. He admits that the documentation posted online is a phony. And he admits that he is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president of the United States.”

In a contentious case, lawyers on both sides will haggle over the production of documents, and will frequently go beyond the deadlines, several lawyers told Newsmax.

“The rules are more often complied with in the breech rather than the observance,” a senior trial attorney who has close ties to the Democrat Party, but is not involved in the current case, told Newsmax.

“Lawyers frequently do not return telephone calls or meet discovery deadlines because of sheer inadvertence. Therefore, we do not consider a failure to respond as a ‘violation,’” he said.

Allegations surrounding Obama’s place of birth have been swirling for months. Earlier this year, the Obama campaign sought to put down the rumors by making available a computer-generated Certification of Live Birth, issued in 2007 by the State of Hawaii. [See the Certification of Live Birth — Click Here.]

Respected conservative blogger Ed Morrissey called the Berg lawsuit a “conspiracy theory” that had been put to rest by the Obama campaign over the summer but ”has arisen like a zombie yet again to suck the credibility out of the conservative blogosphere.”

However, the 2007 document produced by the Obama campaign omits key information that normally appears on birth certificates in the United States, including the name of the hospital where he was born, the size and weight of the baby, and sometimes the name of the doctor who delivered him.

In addition, the critics of the 2007 document note that Obama's father is described as “African,” a term used today. The formal language in official documents at the time — 1961 — would have identified his race as “Negro” or “Colored.”

The Web site snarkybytes.com has produced a vault copy of a Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth from 1963, issued by the Hawaii Department of Health. [See the vault copy — Click Here.]

In addition to naming the hospital and more details about the baby, the 1963 vault copy also includes the “usual residence of the mother,” and the “usual occupation” of the father. None of this information appears on the 2007 Live Birth certificate produced by the Obama campaign.

Berg has been a perennial political candidate in Pennsylvania, having run in Democrat primaries for attorney general, lieutenant governor, governor, and other offices without success. He served as deputy attorney general of the State of Pennsylvania from 1972-1980.

His credibility was tarnished by work he did for the far-left “9/11 for the Truth” campaign, which alleged in a federal lawsuit that the collapse of the twin towers in New York was caused by “controlled demolition” ordered by the president of the United States.

Nevertheless, in recent weeks, lawsuits have been filed in seven additional states demanding that Barack Obama produce an original vault copy of his birth certificate, to dispel the rumors that he is not a natural-born United States citizen.

The latest suits have been filed in state and federal courts in Hawaii, Washington, California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Connecticut to compel Obama to release his birth records.

Lawsuits in Washington and Georgia are seeking state superior courts to force the states’ secretary of state, as the chief state elections officer, to require Obama to produce original birth records from Hawaii, or else decertify him as a candidate for the presidency.

Ironically, Obama mentions his birth certificate in passing on Page 26 of his 1995 memoir, “Dreams of My Father.” “I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school,” he wrote.

Lawyers for Obama and the DNC did not return calls for comment on the current status of the case, or explain why the Obama campaign did not simply put to rest the whole controversy by releasing the birth certificate that Obama apparently cherished as a teenager.

In the past, questions about Sen. John McCain's legal status have arisen. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone at a U.S. Army hospital. McCain had legal experts vet his constitutional qualifications, and he also disclosed a copy of his birth certificate.

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

It is not over yet, but we all need to pray that no blood is shed on our sacred soil should bo is not eligible to run for POTUS.

It is Federal Rule 36

Because they only filed Motions to Dismiss and did not answer within the thirty-day period of time, they "Admitted" All Allegations of Federal Court lawsuit filed by plaintiff, Philip J. Berg, whereby Obama is not qualified to be POTUS.

Obama & DNC Admit All Allegations of Federal Court Lawsuit - Obama’s “Not” Qualified to be President
Obama Should Immediately Withdraw his Candidacy for President

For Immediate Release: - 10/21/08 - Complete contact details and pdfs of this press release and motions filed by plaintiff Berg today are at the end of this article

(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 10/21/08) - Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s lack of “qualifications” to serve as President of the United States, announced today that Obama and tbe DNC “ADMITTED”, by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the Federal lawsuit. Obama is “NOT QUALIFIED” to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate. The case is Berg v. Obama, No. 08-cv-04083.

Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed “ADMITTED.” Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.

OBAMA - Admitted:

1. I was born in Kenya.

2. I am a Kenya “natural born” citizen.
3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.

4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me.
5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya.

6. My mother’s maiden name is Stanley Ann Dunham a/k/a Ann Dunham.
7. The COLB [Certification of Live Birth] posted on the website “Fightthesmears.com” is a forgery.

8. I was adopted by a Foreign Citizen.
9. I was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, M.A. a citizen of Indonesia.

10. I was not born in Hawaii.
11. I was not born at the Queens Medical Center in Hawaii.

12. I was not born at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Hawaii.
13. I was not born in a Hospital in Hawaii.

14. I am a citizen of Indonesia.
15. I never took the “Oath of Allegiance” to regain my U.S. Citizenship status.

16. I am not a “natural born” United States citizen.
17. My date of birth is August 4, 1961.

18. I traveled to Pakistan in 1981 with my Pakistan friends.
19. In 1981, I went to Indonesia on my way to Pakistan.

20. Pakistan was a no travel zone in 1981 for American Citizens.
21. In 1981, Pakistan was not allowing American Citizens to enter their country.

22. I traveled on my Indonesian Passport to Pakistan.
23. I renewed my Indonesian Passport on my way to Pakistan.

24. My senior campaign staff is aware I am not a “natural born” United States Citizen.
25. I am proud of my Kenya Heritage.

26. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.
27. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.

28. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.
29. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.

30. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.
31. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.

32. The document identified as my Indonesian School record from Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, Indonesia is genuine.
33. I went to a Judge in Hawaii to have my name changed.

34. I went to a Senator and/or Congressman or other public official in Hawaii to have my name changed.
35. I had a passport issued to me from the Government of Indonesia.

36. The United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.
37. I am ineligible pursuant to the United States Constitution to serve as President and/or Vice President of the United States.

38. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Indonesia.
39. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Kenya.

40. I am an Attorney who specializes in Constitutional Law.
41. Kenya was a part of the British Colonies at the time of my birth.

42. Kenya did not become its own Republic until 1963.
43. I am not a “Naturalized” United States Citizen.

44. I obtained $200 Million dollars in campaign funds by fraudulent means.
45. I cannot produce a “vault” (original) long version of a birth certificate showing my birth in Hawaii.

46. My “vault” (original) long version birth certificate shows my birth in Kenya.
47. The only times I was to a Hospital in Hawaii was for check-ups or medical treatments for illnesses.

48. Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.
49. Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.

50. I was born in the Coast Province Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.
51. I represented on my State Bar application in Illinois that I never used any other name other than Barack Hussein Obama.

52. I went by the name Barry Soetoro in Indonesia.
53. My Indonesian school records are under the name of Barry Soetoro.

54. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when admitted to the State Bar of Illinois to practice Law.
55. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when I was Sworn into my United States Senate Office.

56. I hold dual citizenship with at least one other Country besides the United States of America.

DNC - Admitted:

1. The DNC nominated Barrack Hussein Obama as the Democratic Nominee for President.

2. The DNC has not vetted Barrack Hussein Obama.
3. The DNC did not have a background check performed on Barrack Hussein Obama.

4.The DNC did not verify Barrack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States.
5. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.

6. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama is not a “natural born” United States citizen.
7. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii.

8.The DNC admits they have not inquired into Barrack Hussein Obama’s citizenship status.
9. The DNC admits they have a duty to properly vette the Democratic Nominee for President.

10.The DNC admits Lolo Soetoro, M.A., an Indonesian citizen adopted Barrack Hussein Obama.
11. The DNC admits the Credentials Committee has been aware of this lawsuit since August 22, 2008 as the lawsuit was faxed to our Washington D.C. Office on August 22, 2008.

12. The DNC admits their Credentials Committee failed to verify and/or inquire into the credentials of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as the President of the United States.
13. The DNC admits their Credential Committee’s Report failed to address the issues of Barack Hussein Obama’s ineligibility to serve as President of the United States.

14.The DNC admits Howard Dean, Chair Person has and had knowledge Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as the President of the United States.
15. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all Democratic citizens of the United States have been personally injured as a result of not having a qualified Democratic Presidential Nominee to cast their votes upon.

16. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional Right to vote for the President of the United States and to have two (2) qualified candidates of which to choose from.
17. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional right to have a properly vetted Democratic Presidential Nominee of which to cast their vote.

18. The DNC admits an FBI background check is not performed on the Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidates.
19. The DNC admits the United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.

20. The DNC admits they collected donations on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama for his Presidential campaign.
21. The DNC admits Plaintiff and Democratic citizens donated money based on false representations that Barack Hussein Obama was qualified to serve as the President of the United States.

22. The DNC admits if Barack Hussein Obama is elected as President and allowed to serve as President of the United States in violation of our Constitution, it will create a Constitutional crisis.
23. The DNC admits Barack Hussein Obama took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution.

24. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to due process of law in violation of the United States Constitution.
25. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to Equal Protection of the laws in violation of the United States Constitution.

26. The DNC admits the function of the DNC is to secure a Democratic Presidential Candidate who will protect Democratic citizen’s interests, fight for their equal opportunities and fight for justice for all Americans.
27. The DNC admits the Democratic National Committee has been promoting Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential election knowing he was ineligible to serve as President of the United States.

Our website obamacrimes.com now has 50.7 + million hits. We are urging all to spread the word of our website – and forward to your local newspapers, radio and TV stations. Berg again stressed his position regarding the urgency of this case as, “we” the people, are heading to a “Constitutional Crisis” if this case is not resolved forthwith.

Philip J. Berg, Esquire
555 Andorra Glen Court, Suite 12
Lafayette Hill, PA 19444-2531
Cell (610) 662-3005
(610) 825-3134
(800) 993-PHIL [7445]
Fax (610) 834-7659
philjberg@obamacrimes.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sol Stein's 2006 interview with Bill Ayers

While researching earlier information on Barack Obama's bestest bud, William Ayers, I came across Sol Stein's 2006 Ayers interview at The City Journal.

When you hear Ayers is unrepentant about his past, and those out there in the mainstream tell you Ayer's isn't important, just remember what "Mama always taught you about the company you keep".

The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug
Sol Stern

Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.

In 1980, Bill Ayers and his partner Bernardine Dohrn came up from the underground—the Weather Underground, that is. It had been a wild ride for the Bonnie and Clyde of the sixties New Left. They first went into combat during the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago, smashing storefront windows and assaulting police officers and city officials in the fantasy that they were aiding their Vietnamese allies by “bringing the war back home.” They spent the next few years planting bombs at government buildings around the country, including in restrooms at the Pentagon and the Capitol. When their little war against America sputtered to a halt, the revolutionary couple rationalized that at least they had not caused any deaths. But three of their comrades had blown themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse while preparing a bomb to detonate at a dance at the Fort Dix army base.

Ayers has acknowledged committing crimes during his underground days—crimes that arguably amounted to treason. Yet thanks to procedural complications and a lack of witnesses, he never went to trial or to jail. A few years after stepping out of the shadows, Ayers reflected on his odyssey in a conversation with journalists Peter Collier and David Horowitz: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted.

But that was just half the wonder of it. Ayers would soon go on to disprove thoroughly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous though mistaken aphorism that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical. “There are vast dislocations in industrial towns, erosions of trade unions; there is little sign of class consciousness today,” Greene had proclaimed in the Harvard Education Review. “Our great cities are burnished on the surfaces, building high technologies, displaying astonishing consumer goods. And on the side streets, in the crevices, in the burnt-out neighborhoods, there are the rootless, the dependent, the sick, the permanently unemployed. There is little sense of agency, even among the brightly successful; there is little capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise.”

Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.

In record time Ayers acquired an Ed.D. with a dissertation titled “The Discerning ‘I’: Accounts of Teacher Self-Construction Through the Use of Co-Biography, Metaphor, and Image.” There wasn’t much biography, metaphor, or image in the 180-page text. Ayers’s research consisted solely of a few days spent interviewing and observing the classroom practices of three nursery school teachers he knew personally. (In Ayers’s own autobiographical section of the text—de rigueur for Teachers College dissertations—he reminisced about growing up in a wealthy Chicago suburb, about his warm family, and about having been arrested in campus antiwar demonstrations. Of his bomb-making skills or his ten years in the underground he said not a word.)

With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism. But now, instead of planting bombs in bathrooms, he has been planting the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers, who will then pass on the lessons to the students in their classrooms.

Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:

“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”

“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”

“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”

For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

The readings that Ayers assigns are as intellectually stimulating and diverse as a political commissar’s indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The reading list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; two books by Ayers himself; another by bell hooks, a radical black feminist writer and critical race theorist; and a “Freedom School” curriculum. That’s the entire spectrum of debate.

For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.”

Ayers makes clear that his political views haven’t changed much since those glory days. He cites a letter he recently wrote: “I’ve been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your ‘youthful idealism’ is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out.”

America’s historical ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Now Ayers and his social justice movement, by dismissing the civic culture ideal as nothing more than “capitalist hegemony,” subvert the public schools even further—while subsidized by the taxpayers, including the capitalists who supposedly control the schools.

And it’s not just from his government-funded outpost at the University of Illinois that Ayers is spreading the word about radical social justice teaching. He maintains a busy lecture schedule at other ed schools around the country, and he does teacher training and professional development for the Chicago public schools. All that still leaves him enough time to give nostalgic lectures on college campuses about his Weather Underground experiences.

He also turns up from time to time as a guest lecturer at Teachers College, where he gets a hero’s welcome. In describing one of those events, the official college publication, Inside TC, turned as ecstatic as a groupie at a rock concert: “A man sporting sunglasses, an earring in each earlobe, khaki pants, a sweater and tweed jacket strode purposefully past the entry and down the hallway toward the auditorium. . . . His intensity and passion were tangible in the way he walked through the crowd. He was the speaker for the evening, William Ayers. . . . A former leader of the radical Weathermen organization in the 1960s, Ayers not only believes in the obligation to assist people on the bottom, he acts on it.”

In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.

Teaching science for social justice? Let Teachers College professor Angela Calabrese Barton, the volume’s principal author, try to explain: “The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.” If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities.

The series doesn’t yet have a text on mathematics, but it’s sure to come, since the pedagogy for teaching social justice through math is even more fully developed than for science. One of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s new book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines critical pedagogy theory and real live math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students.

Like Ayers, Gutstein reveres Paolo Freire. He approvingly quotes Freire’s dictum that “there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” Gutstein takes this to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, “does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.”

Accordingly, Gutstein has relentlessly politicized his math classes for years, claiming that this approach has improved his students’ math skills while making them more aware of the injustices built in to capitalist society. One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich. After the class does the mathematical calculations, Gutstein asks: “How does all this make you feel?” He triumphantly reports that 19 of 21 students described wealth distribution in America as “bad,” “unfair,” or “shocking,” and he proudly quotes the comments of a child named Rosa: “Well I see that all the wealth in the United States is mostly the wealth of a couple people not the whole nation.”

Gutstein’s book will likely sell very well, not because all math teachers will thrill to his Freirian dialectics or Chomskyite denunciations of American foreign policy, but because they may find his lesson plans and classroom projects useful. After all, they are under intense pressure from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to move away from the traditional emphasis on computational skills like multiplication tables and algorithms—a teaching method that university mathematicians still favor but that many K–12 math teachers dismiss as “drill and kill.” Teachers (particularly liberal and left-leaning teachers) who instead use a “constructivist” or “discovery-based” pedagogy, sometimes called “fuzzy math,” in which students learn mathematical concepts by trying to solve real-life problems, will see Gutstein’s social justice lessons on how military budgets for the war in Iraq deny poor Americans their fair share of resources as an advance beyond problems about baseball statistics, shopping, or building.

Even more important, Gutstein’s book comes with the imprimatur of two of the nation’s most influential ed profs, Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin and William F. Tate of Washington University in St. Louis—the outgoing and incoming presidents of the American Education Research Association. The 25,000-member AERA is the umbrella organization of the ed-school professoriate, and over the past two decades it has moved steadily left, becoming more multicultural, postmodernist, feminist, and enamored of critical race theory and queer theory.

And now the organization has just hired its first national Director of Social Justice. In fact, Ladson-Billings and Tate have coedited their own volume of essays on educational research and social justice, wherein they argue for a critical race theory approach, based on the idea that institutionalized “white supremacy” remains pervasive in American public education. Left unexplained is how these two particular critical race theorists, both black, could have been elected by their overwhelmingly white peers to preside over the education establishment’s premier organization.

One by one, the education schools are lining up behind social justice teaching and enforcing it on their students—especially since they expect aspiring teachers to possess the approved liberal “dispositions,” or individual character traits, that will qualify them to teach in the public schools. The National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the main accreditor of education schools, now monitors how well the schools comply with their own social justice requirements.

With the caveat that not all education schools have yet joined the trend, here is a sampler, going from east to west.

Brooklyn College of the City University of New York recently declared: “Because democracy requires a substantive concern for equity, the faculty of the School of Education is committed, in theory and practice, to social justice. . . . We believe that an education centered on social justice prepares the highest quality of future teachers. . . . Our teacher candidates and other school personnel are prepared to demonstrate a knowledge of, language for, and the ability to create educational environments based on various theories of social justice.”

The teacher education program at Marquette University in Milwaukee proclaims that it “has a commitment to social justice in schools and society” and to using education “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.” It requires that all education degree candidates demonstrate a “desire to work for social justice, particularly in an urban environment.” Similarly, the University of Kansas ed school declares that “addressing issues of diversity includes being more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.”

On the West Coast, the highly regarded Claremont Graduate University not only requires teacher candidates to commit to social justice teaching but screens applicants to make sure they have that essential “disposition.” According to a recent university publication, “CGU’s recruitment efforts focus upon individuals who have an understanding of societal inequities. . . . By reflecting the cultures and languages of the student populations in area K–12 schools and by caring about issues of social justice, CGU’s teachers are role models to their students in a variety of ways.”

At Humboldt State University in northern California, the social studies methods class required for prospective high school history and social studies teachers best demonstrates the school’s commitment to social justice teaching. The professor, Gayle Olson-Raymer, states the course’s purpose right up front in her syllabus: “It is not an option for history teachers to teach social justice and social responsibility; it is a mandate. History teachers do their best work when they use their knowledge, their commitment, and their courage to help the students grapple with the important issues of social responsibility and when they encourage them to direct their lives towards creating a just society.”

How does your average, traditional-minded future teacher cope in an education class taught from a social justice or critical race theory perspective? Such students are well-advised to bite their tongues or risk career-threatening penalties. For all their talk about teaching for “freedom and democracy,” the professors often run their own classes like leftist political indoctrination sessions.

Brooklyn College and Washington State University, according to recent published reports, have denied students the right to become teachers after they ran afoul of their ed schools’ social justice dispositions requirements. Then there’s the notorious case of Steve Head, a 50-year-old Silicon Valley software engineer who decided to make a career switch a few years ago and obtain a high school math teaching credential. In a rational world, Head would be the poster boy for the federal government’s new initiatives to recruit more math and science teachers for our high schools. Instead, his story sends the message that education professors would rather continue molding future teachers’ attitudes on race and social justice issues than help the U.S. close the math and science achievement gap with other industrialized nations.

Head was smoothly completing all his math-related course work at taxpayer-supported San Jose State University. Then in the fall of 2003, he enrolled in the required “Social, Philosophical, and Multicultural Foundations of Education,” taught by Helen Kress, whose main scholarly interest appears to be “critical whiteness studies,” a noxious branch of critical race theory that posits that white racial identity is a socially constructed characteristic and must be confronted and purged to overcome America’s institutionalized system of white supremacy. The foundations course functions as a sort of military checkpoint to guarantee that every student who passes through toward a teaching credential has properly imbibed the pedagogies of multiculturalism, critical race theory, feminism, and, of course, social justice teaching.

The easy way out would have been for Head to spew back the expected answers on racial and gender oppression and move on, as most traditional-minded education students do. But something about Steve Head—a Christian and a libertarian—made him gag at the big lies and logical absurdities about American race relations and immigration issues that he was being asked to regurgitate. So he turned the tables and deconstructed the hegemony of anti-Americanism in the classroom.

In a sworn legal document, Head recounted that when his professor showed the class a videotape purporting to reveal institutional racism against immigrants, he responded by suggesting that most immigrants actually came here because they realized they would be better off, including benefiting from healthier race relations. Professor Kress responded that anyone holding such opinions was clearly “unfit to teach.” Head further infuriated the professor by suggesting that the class be allowed to read black social scientists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams to provide some intellectual balance on the issues of race and education.

After turning down Kress’s offer to reeducate him on these issues personally, Head received an F for the class, even though a grade below B for a student who has completed all assignments is almost as rare in ed schools as serious intellectual debate. The school wouldn’t let Head enroll in the student teaching class, and so, for the time being, it has blocked him from getting his teaching certificate. After exhausting his appeals to the university, he filed suit earlier this year, charging that the school was applying a political litmus test to become a teacher and had violated his First Amendment rights.

“I could have lied about my beliefs in class, but what is the point of that in America?” Head told me. “We are not free unless we choose to exercise our freedoms without fear of reprisals. I choose freedom, and I choose to defend my beliefs against state indoctrination.”

Though no one has as yet surveyed how far social justice teaching has pervaded America’s 1,500 ed schools, education researchers David Steiner (now Hunter College ed-school dean) and Susan Rozen did a study two years ago on the syllabi of the basic “foundations of education” and “methods” courses in 16 of the nation’s most prestigious ed schools. The mainstays of the foundations courses were works by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux (a leading critical pedagogy theorist), and the radical education writer Jonathan Kozol (“America’s Most Influential—and Wrongest—School Reformer,” Winter 2000). For the methods courses, Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher tops the bestseller list. Neither list included advocates of a knowledge-based and politically neutral curriculum, such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. or Diane Ravitch.

An ed-school system that bars math teachers like Steve Head, who want to teach without bringing politics into the classroom, while celebrating Eric Gutstein’s Marxist indoctrination of future math teachers, is fundamentally corrupt. And this travesty is now reaching beyond the ed schools to local school boards and district superintendents, who are setting up entire schools dedicated to social justice. Not only do these schools infuse social justice throughout the curriculum, but they also often require students to engage in “community activism” outside of school hours.

New York City teems with many more of these schools than any other district in the country. A handful have been around for years, including El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, with its wacky hip-hop curriculum (“An F for Hip-Hop 101,” Summer 1998). But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein’s project to break up many of the system’s dysfunctional large high schools and replace them with new small schools has spawned many more. The Department of Education’s website lists at least 15 of the new small high schools that either are explicitly named as social justice schools or whose mission statements declare that their curricula center on social justice concerns. Curiously, while left-wing community organizations, including ultraradical Acorn, helped create some of these schools, some have also received funding from über-capitalist Bill Gates’s charitable foundation. Lenin quipped that “a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.” Now it seems he just gives it to you.

Chancellor Klein sees no problem with social justice schools. “Giving schools ‘leadership’ or ‘social justice’ themes is fine with me, as long as the teachers and principals do not bring politics and ideologies into our classrooms,” he told me—though of course that’s just what ed schools instruct social justice teachers to do. “Themes don’t drive school programs; state standards do. Our small secondary schools are academically rigorous. We cannot afford to vilify schools that help us accomplish our top goal as a school system: boosting our students’ achievement and academic success.”

Of course, the social justice schools have hardly been “vilified,” or even scrutinized. They’re worth a close look. With Chancellor Klein’s approval, for example, Héctor Calderón recently became the new principal of El Puente Academy. Calderón immediately told an interviewer from the leftist education publication Rethinking Schools that he is a dedicated follower of—you guessed it—arch-anticapitalist Paolo Freire. His school, he says, now fully incorporates “the Freirian idea of education for liberation” through a comprehensive social justice curriculum that embraces all academic subjects, including math and science. Calderón declined to invite me to visit to see how his school teaches those subjects.

Another Freirian, Nancy Gannon, was recently recruited from the Leadership Academy, the city’s training program for new principals, to start up the School for Democracy and Leadership, a Gates-funded school in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section. In announcing the school’s opening in September 2004, Gannon declared that it “fulfills a long held belief that empowerment is the foundation of democracy. . . . In the words of Paolo Freire, an internationally acclaimed author and educational thought-leader, our goal is to create a ‘pedagogy of hope.’ ”

Gannon, a Williams graduate in her late thirties, told me that she had seen the relevance of Freire’s theories of a “liberating education” during her Peace Corps experience teaching in a poor village in northern Thailand and then later in a Baltimore school for former dropouts. All the members of Gannon’s school-planning committee—parents, some prospective teachers, and community activists—read Freire’s books on pedagogy during their deliberations about the school’s mission and then decided to infuse the school with social justice projects. “We are incredibly steeped in activism,” she says. “We encourage the students to pick something in the world or the community they want to change and then act on it together.” She gave prospective teachers the same message. “Stop sitting on the sidelines feeling nauseous about the state of our world,” she urged in a recruiting e-mail. “Jump in. Make a difference. . . . We’re political, we’re smart, we believe in the voice of youth and the power of activism and the need for us all to be the change we want to see in the world.”

Accordingly, students in the school’s Education Activism group have put out a brochure saying that they are “committed to fighting against the injustice and inequality within our education system.” They therefore support the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit against the state to secure more funding for New York City schools, and they call for “mandatory African-American history classes in all New York City public schools.” And ninth-grade science teacher Jhumki Basu, inspired by Freire and by the teaching science for social justice approach of Teachers College’s Calabrese Barton, told me that, as one way of making her students attentive to political and social justice issues around the world, she devised a three-week project in her physics class on the international controversy over Iran’s nuclear program.

Another Gates-funded social justice high school, the Leadership Institute on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, illustrates some of the perils inherent in turning over schools to community groups with a political agenda. Three years in the making, the school is the brainchild of the radical Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and its youth branch, Sistas and Brothas United. Almost inevitably, the school’s mission statement is thoroughly Freirian in its pedagogy, assuming that teachers can enhance the academic achievement of disadvantaged children by giving them a voice through “leadership, community action and social justice.” The school opened last September with 100 poor minority students and great hopes. When I visited recently, though, it was already clear that the idea of democratic empowerment for the students was subverting any hope for a rigorous education.

Principal Ron Gonzalez told me that the students learned at their first weekly Town Hall meeting this year that they could pick some policy or institution in the community that they believed should be changed and then work together on a “social action” project to bring about the change. Using the school’s democratic decision-making process, the students decided that the most oppressive thing they could think of was the school’s dress code (students initially had to wear brown or black slacks and a shirt with a collar) and other classroom regulations, and they quickly achieved the goal of changing the code. The school, having established that student democracy and engagement was its prime mission, was instantly hoist with its own petard.

The street culture of the students’ tough Bronx neighborhoods seemed to pervade almost every class I visited. Kids wore ghetto garb, chewed gum, ate potato chips and drank soda pop, talked whenever they wanted to. Girls and boys sometimes snuggled up to each other. Students addressed one teacher as “hey mistah.” The sense of order and decorum necessary for any serious academic effort had unraveled, and teachers and administrators seemed powerless to repair it. But students did engage in one other major social action this year, thus partially fulfilling the school’s mission. They were bused up to Albany to participate in a day of lobbying organized by the teachers’ union to persuade the legislature to appropriate the additional billions in school funds ordered by the courts in the CFE school finance case.

These schools are a perversion of an already misguided idea. Paolo Freire developed his liberation pedagogy out of his experiences teaching illiterate peasants in northeastern Brazil, whom he saw, understandably, as victims of an oppressive, semifeudal society. The traditional “banking” approach to education, as he called it, in which the teacher “deposits” socially approved knowledge into the minds of the oppressed but passive students, is the mechanism that “reproduces” that oppression. In response, Freire proposed instead a liberatory pedagogy, in which the poor students become democratic participants with their teachers as they learn a critical literacy that enables them to analyze the causes of their own oppression.

Whatever might be said about this theory in the context of rural Brazil in the 1950s, it is educational malpractice to apply it to the problem of educating minority children in New York City schools in the twenty-first century. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bad and oppressive “banking” approach that the city’s public schools used somehow managed to lift millions of children out of poverty—something the social justice schools of today seem unlikely to do.

It cannot be repeated often enough: ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. The Freirian theories that carry over to social justice teaching are incapable of “liberating” the children of America’s so-called oppressed. As E. D. Hirsch has exhaustively shown, the scientific evidence about which classroom methods produce the best results for poor children point conclusively to the very methods that the critical pedagogy and social justice theorists denounce as oppressive and racist. By contrast, not one shred of hard evidence suggests that the pedagogy behind teaching for social justice works to lift the academic achievement of poor and minority students.

Social justice teaching is a frivolous waste of precious school hours, grievously harmful to poor children, who start out with a disadvantage. School is the only place where they are likely to obtain the academic knowledge that could make up for the educational deprivation they suffer in their homes. The last thing they need is a wild-eyed experiment in education through social action.

So why do education professors who claim to care for the poor continue to agitate for instruction that holds back poor children? Either the professors are stupid (possible), or (more likely) they care more about their own anti-American, anticapitalist agendas than they do about the actual education of children. The literature of social justice education is obsessed with the allegedly “dark” side of American political, social, and economic life. Thus in a book about teaching for social justice, Arizona State University ed prof Carole Edelsky whines that she “thinks a lot about dark times—the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the period of the Third Reich, the McCarthy years. Times when certain knowledge was banned and certain knowers were banished, persecuted, incarcerated, even killed.” In one essay alone Maxine Greene writes that “We live after all in dark times,” that this is a “peculiar and menacing time,” and that “These are dark and shadowed times.” A collection of essays edited by Bill Ayers and dedicated to Greene is called A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation. In their ideologically induced paranoia about America, the radical education theorists, like most ideologues, cannot see what is right in front of their eyes—that America and democratic capitalism are actually doing very well, thank you, but that the children of the minority poor are getting a lousy education because of the education establishment, and that teaching for social justice provides no solutions.

Unfortunately, there is little chance that the hegemony of social justice teaching in the education schools can be challenged from within that hopelessly closed thought world. That being the case, elected officials will have to address the issue. After all, state legislatures are constitutionally empowered to regulate and oversee almost every aspect of K–12 education, including curriculum and the professional standards for teachers. At the very least, legislatures should be holding hearings to determine the extent to which the radical ideology of the education professors is leading to political indoctrination in public school classrooms and undermining the rights of all children to a solid academic and politics-free education.

They then ought to do something the critical pedagogy theorists accuse them of doing anyhow—reestablishing the hegemony of our open democratic society in the classroom. Bill Ayers has the academic freedom to say and write anything he wants about America and its schools. But academic freedom protects neither him nor the teachers he trains when they bring their leftist version of social justice into the schools. Legislators should ask their state education boards to write a new set of guidelines that discourage teaching for social justice and social justice schools and that forbid teachers from indoctrinating students with their own politics, whether left or right. This ought to be the teacher’s Hippocratic Oath: to do no harm

Thank you Sol Stein for enlightening us about how we got here today, with teachers like Ayers, no wonder we are experiencing the encroachment of socialism.

Love me I'm a liberal...ayers

From the MrZine,08/31/06, blurb written by bo's bestest buddy...in his own words, he lets us know where his heart and mind is...check out the site that on the right, promotes socialism.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/ayers310806.html

Love Me, I'm a Liberal
by William Ayers

Upon returning from summer break, I found a surprising letter awaiting me written by three colleagues from another university, two of whom I'd known and worked with for decades. The letter simultaneously informed me about a conference my friends were organizing and explained -- with some anguish I think -- that I would not be welcome there.

They note that we're living in troubled times, that calculated appeals to fear rule the day, and that they hope to counter all of that. Ironically, fear is stamped all over the letter.

I'm reminded of when Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were hauled before the fearsome House Committee on Un-American Activities, refused to bow, and helped to laugh it out of existence. Or when the universities were cowed by a bullying government into banning the DuBois Clubs -- a handful of students in the youth-wing of the CP who were attacked by Richard Nixon for intentionally creating a front group that would dupe people because it rhymed with the Boys Clubs -- and we members of Students for a Democratic Society signed up en masse and swelled their membership a hundredfold.

I find myself sitting here humming Phil Ochs' brilliant "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

Different times demand different responses, of course, but to claim the mantle of "social justice" while practicing this kind of exclusion is unacceptable.

Their letter to me and my response to them are reproduced below. I've edited out identifiable references to my colleagues in order to protect the . . . well, you decide, let's just say their privacy. I can be reached at billayers.org, or bayers@uic.edu. Onward!

William Ayers
Distinguished Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago

Dear Bill,

This is an unusual letter for us to be writing and for you to receive. We count you among the most noted progressive educators in the country with a deep commitment to teaching for social justice. Yet, after extended deliberation and discussion, we find ourselves in a real quandary. Because of current . . . times, we cannot invite you to an event we are planning for progressive educators. Because we know and deeply respect you and your commitment to teaching for social justice, we felt that an explanation was in order.

Next spring, we will host an event . . . to honor Bob Moses and progressive education. Bob is to receive the . . . John Dewey Prize for Progressive Education. This prize is . . . "to honor significant achievement in progressive education for the purpose of making society more just." In an era of increasing standardization and heightened inequities, we want to shine a bright light on the ideals of progressive education and remind the public that there is another model for education that attends well to the needs of every child. It is our intention to invite other progressive educators to this convening and to create a significant news and media event honoring the ideals of progressive education [and] the work of Bob Moses. . . .

It is because of our commitment to educate the public and to undertake what is primarily a symbolic project that we cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past. We believe, of course, in your right to express your views, then and now. This is not about curtailing your expression. Rather, in this age when Google summarizes instantly, and often shallowly, who we are, it is about trying to say as clearly as possible what we are arguing for. If we, as educators, want to engage the learner, in this case the public, where they are, then we have to find ways for the public to see progressive education not as radical or threatening but as nurturing and familiar, connected to the very best aspects of their own learning experiences. For the last five years local and regional news organizations have taken the "liberal" . . . faculty . . . to task. It is an environment that we have challenged when key principles were involved, defending and maintaining our . . . commitment to social justice against the state bureaucracy. This event, however, is a celebration honoring two educators' accomplishments and positively promoting progressive education. We don't want a shallow press to prevail. We want to engage the public with as little interference as possible.

One major reason for presenting a prize at this time is that progressivism, and progressive education in particular, have been greatly weakened by a broad and calculated appeal to our fears in this changing world. We want to reinsert into the civil dialogue that progressive education stands upon its proven record and can be a viable alternative when our mood turns away from fears and towards hopes. First, we need to get ourselves back to the table, and then position ourselves as polite in our discourse before celebrating the breadth of expression within progressive education. Coming from behind may well demand such strategic thinking, whether is satisfies all of our passion or not.

We hope this letter finds you well and that you understand and possibly appreciate this decision.

Sincerely,

"Lauren" and the organizers

August 29, 2006

Dear Lauren,

You have, of course, no obligation to include me in the progressive education conference you're organizing, certainly not in your deliberations about my suitability to attend. I'm tempted to say, with apologies to Groucho Marx, that I wouldn't want to attend any progressive education conference that would have me.

Chances are I'd have never heard of the conference had you not written, and in any case wouldn't have given a second thought to my presence on or absence from the guest list. But since you've opened this in the way you have, since you've outlined your thinking on the matter and invited me to understand and possibly appreciate your decision, I feel I must respond.

Your hope to position progressive education "not as radical or threatening but as nurturing and familiar" is in some ways a fool's errand. Of course, no one argues that the progressive movement should threaten students or teachers or citizens -- progressive education does indeed hold the hope of realizing a humane and decent education for all within a revitalized politics and a more authentically democratic society. But progressive education, if it means anything at all, must embody a profound threat to the status quo. It is a direct challenge, for example, to all the policy initiatives that deskill and hammer teachers into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy, all the pressure to reduce teaching to a set of manageable and easily monitored tasks, all the imposition of labels and all the simple-minded metrics employed to describe student learning and rank youngsters in a hierarchy of winners and losers. It's a threat to all that, and more.

But here we face a contradiction at the heart of our efforts: the humanistic ideal and the democratic injunction tell us that every person is an entire universe, that each can develop as a full and autonomous person engaged with others in a common polity and an equality of power; the capitalist imperative insists that profit is at the center of economic, political, and social progress, and develops, then, a culture of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education for democracy fails as an adjunct to capitalism just as an education for capitalism fails to build either a democratic ethos or a participatory practice. We must engage, then, in the arena of school and education reform as we struggle toward a world fit for all children -- a place of peace and justice, joy and balance. The two are inseparable.

And so I believe that progressive education must be part of a radical movement if it is to be worthy of the hopes and dreams of those who fight to bring humanistic alternatives to life. I mean radical in the sense that Ella Baker, one of the unsung mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, used the word. She called herself a radical, and she explained that radical meant "going to the root." Little reforms here and there never add up unless we get to the core of the problems we face, she argued, analyze our situations, connect the struggles as we work for more fundamental change.

Charlie Cobb, who co-wrote Radical Equations, was also the author of the original proposal for Freedom Schools in the South more than forty years ago. The brief he wrote claimed that while Black children were denied many things -- decent school facilities, honest and forward-looking curriculum, fully qualified teachers -- the fundamental injury was "a complete absence of academic freedom, and students are forced to live in an environment that is geared to squashing intellectual curiosity, and different thinking." Cobb called the classrooms of Mississippi "intellectual wastelands," and he challenged himself and others "to fill an intellectual and creative vacuum," and to encourage people "to articulate their own desires, demands and questions." He was urging students to confront the circumstances of their lives, to wonder about how they got to where they were, and to think of how they might change things. He was crossing hard lines of propriety and tradition, convention and common sense, of course, poised to break the law and overthrow a system. His proposal was designed to plow a deep and promising furrow toward the new -- more than radical, this was insurrection itself, progressive education linked to radical politics.

Of course, we are required now to make our own contributions in our own time and place; the pathway, the content, and the curriculum must be of, by, and for this moment and this community. We might take inspiration and attitude, sustenance and stance from the Mississippi experience, but only as an orientation toward launch, toward imagining and trying to bring to life something entirely new.

Finally, you refer to "the violent aspects" of my past. As you know I've written extensively about politics and protest as well as my own involvements, about the dual responsibilities to act and to doubt, and about the impossibility of claiming a high moral stance while sitting on the sidelines. I've accounted for my actions during the US assaults on Vietnam and against the Black Freedom Movement -- which is what I assume you're referring to -- and paid the price asked of me by the legal system. And I've said often that our society ought to engage in a truth-and-reconciliation process concerning those terrible and wondrous times; in other words, I'm happy to stand up, tell my story, admit my mistakes, and take responsibility -- shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else, including war criminals, politicians, soldiers, officers, frat boys, students, scholars, citizens. Absent that, you seem to say that I have some uniquely dreadful behavior to account for, and I politely disagree.

I worry that you're imagining a progressivism divorced from politics, the larger world, and any real hope of transformation -- a timid, tepid, soft and servile thing. And I worry that your attempt to cleanse your conference of the likes of me has no end: you'll have to cut out the Marxists and the socialists, of course, anyone who writes critically about capitalism and education, then the militants, the noisy anti-racists, the pushy feminists, the gays and lesbians, anyone who refers to "social justice" -- a term under steady attack from the powerful just now. I'm reminded of the last presidential election when several presumably well-meaning liberals asked, in effect, if women would please stop talking so loudly about (or getting) abortions, if gays would please get back in the closet, and if Black people and Mexicans might stay out of sight for a few months so that "we" can win this thing, and then everything will somehow be alright. It's not only unprincipled, deeply cynical and cowardly, it's suicidal, a slippery slope with lots of miserable historical precedent.

So, while I think I understand what you've said, no, I don't appreciate it. I don't rationalize it. I don't endorse it. And I refuse to participate in portraying myself as a pariah. So invite me.

Sincerely,

Bill
Bill Ayers William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of Teaching Toward Freedom:Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon) and Teaching the Personal and the Political (Teachers College Press).

Now you tell me...is this the kind of friends you have hanging around you? You need to really look at who the little o has held hands with...and if you think this is something...you ain't seen nothing yet...

What does he mean?

If you think for one moment Obambi doesn't mean what he said...

A direct quote from his book, audacity of hope, obambi states,

“I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

And just to think, this man wants to be President of the United States and "change the world"...FOREVER!

How did we get here, but more importantly, where are we going?

Whatever you do today, please pass this information around...do your part and wake up America, or at the very least, get them to thinking of where they are headed, because things are changing

Again, I reference this post with many thanks to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs blog. I am so moved by each of her posts, they are thoroughly researched and vetted, which I do rely on. She and I think alike, and what is rather interesting, thinking the same thing at the same time.

Pausing to ask "How did we get here"? Is this point in time that our way of life will be changing forever?

Go to Atlas Shrugs through link in right column, to get the links to Bezmenov's you tube videos, that my faulty little dial-up can't access...duh!

YURI BEZMENOV: Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes.... It has nothing to do with espionage.

I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic.... That's probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.



It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first stage being "demoralization". It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least 3 generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism.



The result? The result you can see -- most of the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get through to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.



In other words [for] these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 15 or 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

I you possibly think your grandchildren and great-grandchildren won't see America become the new Russia, think again.

Obambi has bought and sold the White House to the highest bidder, and if you don't believe it, just WATCH. Answer this question, how do you buy the Presidency? Try raising $160,000,000 in one month, for what? The infiltration and saturation of the sheeple's mindset to PROVE "The One" is the "The One"...NOT!

Do yourself a favor, the next movie you should rent from Netflix is "Wild In The Streets", a sixties cult classic that now, makes me shudder. Your reading list should include Mein Kampf; The Coming Age of Barbarianism, by Constance Cumby (written in the 80's and can probably found at Abebooks.com; Google her for videos); George Orwell's, "1984" and Aldous Huxley's, "Brave New World".