Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing. Pass the Vitamin C. For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every… return to article
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Reader Comments (34)Page 1 of 1 pagesAsGeorge Santyana wrote in “The voice of Reason” in 1905,
“Those who do not learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it.”I say: “Show me someone who never makes a mistake, and I’ll show you someone who never does anything.”
Posted by frank67 on Nov 7, 2008 at 9:13 PM Thank you, thank you THANK YOU Mr. Ayers for your words and thoughts. ;)
I have been hoping to hear your pov on the election and you did not disappoint.
Posted by Dusty on Nov 7, 2008 at 9:30 PM Mr. Ayers:
I’ve been waiting for your rebuttal of all this crap. Thanks. And perfect timing, by the way.
It’s been a long, strange, McCarthyist trip, indeed. But this byway is over. Now, onward, openly and optimistic. Until the next time. And it will be sooner than America needs. But what do they know about the “real America” or what She needs?
The best to you, your family and your associates, whatever their inclinations.
Posted by GalapagoLarry on Nov 7, 2008 at 10:25 PM Mr Ayers
You state that this “was a long strange trip”.
It still is and has just begun.
You profess to celebrate democracy, egalitarianism (whatever that means), human rights and your opposition to so called “illegal wars”.
Then how does that reconcile with your past as a terrorist with a group which wanted to submit the USA to Communist rule and one which choose violent means to achieving this aim.
How does that match with human rights and democracy?
How democratic is to support communism which is an antithesis of democracy.
People do evolve and as such the label “terrorist” may not apply to you today.
Who knows.
Who cares.
What does stand is what you have stood for all those years and the revolution you desired to bring upon America by pitting black against white knowing that had the blacks followed your desires, they would have been hurt in ways you would never have, having been a middle class white boy bored into radicalism spiked by Acid and foreign revolutionary propaganda.
Your views during the 60s differed only in details from those of Charles Manson, a sadistic insane murderer.
Revolution via race war.You dedicated your book to Sirhan Sirhan, among others, a coward who murdered Bobby Kennedy and surely Bobby was no Nixon and opposed the VN war. So what was it about Sirhan you so admired that you dedicated a piece of your work to him?
So now in your 60s, reminiscing of the 60s, you claim that somehow painting you to be Obama s friend may have backfired on the Republicans or even Hilary.
Again, who knows. It seems Americans gave the benefit of doubt to Obama and entrusted him to be their president regardless of what, whom, where he associated with in his past.
His past. Not yours. Yours is not washed. Obamas past was just not soiled enough by yours in the minds of Americans, Mr Ayers.
Whatever Obama s past with you, few will learn the extent now that rhetoric has given way to facts.
But you will fade back into the shade as Obama will hopefully try to do what he will swear to do.
Defend the USA from all enemies foreign and domestic.
You will feel used as will many others in your camp and I bet in time you will re-emerge to reclaim your wounded ego only to tarnish Obama who will again ask for the benefit of doubt in 4 years.
He has taken your movement politics approach and used it to take office while you await the changes you think he will bring.But Obama s first objective is Obama. The change is what Obama needs to change when Obama needs changing. The hope is that the change will change Obama again for Obama.
But as you said, none of us know the future and it seems few of us, or too few of us know the past enough to even try to predict it.
So your need to keep the lid on the past, re-write it, blacking out the moments and people you yourself witnessed during the “struggle” but must feel weird about today, is understandable. Better to be remembered as a friend of Obama than a criminal claiming to be a revolutionary.
Your repeating of the lie that Palin caused chants of “Kill Him” betrays those memories as I suspect you had your moments when someone supporting you called out to commit a grave insane act making you wonder;
-is this a struggle or just a senseless crime.
Or when someone around you praised the Tate murders as “Wild”.
At the end of the day, there are no revolutions, only thugs who sometimes find the right time and declare grandiose plans along their desire to take revenge, lynch or worse. When they succeed and are taken up by larger forces, we call them revolutions. When they do not, then we call them mass murders, robberies or riots.
The moments when probably even you realized your movements only grace was its incompetence as otherwise your would have even more ghosts haunting you than your own comrades’ who died by their own nail bomb.
Posted by armaros on Nov 11, 2008 at 12:50 AM Hi, y’all!
Mr. Ayers, I’m quite surprised at you. Didn’t you know that the Republican party is led by dastardly power players who will do and say anything to keep their power? Weren’t you aware that the Republican base is comprised of hateful, gullible nimrods who will believe anything if it gives their unappreciative team a chance of winning, meaning they too win vicariously even though they don’t really?
I wouldn’t feel too special, though. If they couldn’t use you to discredit Obama, they would’ve found something else.
Caught a light sneeze. Dreamed a little dream.Made my own pretty hate machine.
Tori Amos or Rupert Murdoch?
Ta-ta!
Posted by Aunty Rightwing on Nov 11, 2008 at 1:29 AM Thank you Mr. Ayers. I appreciate your post.
The brevity to weight ratio of your post indicates that your own personal copy of Strunk and White lost it’s cover many years ago.
I have asked my own twenty-something children to read your post but I can only hope for them, I cannot compel them.
Again, Thank You!
Posted by twmcneil on Nov 11, 2008 at 6:10 AM Armaros,
I disagree with your contention that communism is the antithesis of democracy, at least in theory. This is from Wikipedia: “According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom.” I don’t think that any of the attempts so far to set up pure communistic societies have been faithful to this ideal, largely because of how they were brought about, and therefore have failed. But to say that Communism, per se, and Democracy are incompatible is false. Communism is largely a socio-economic structure that is classless, and gives all workers equal access to information, capital and power, and would inherently be democratic. I disagree with Marx on the point of how this system would be realized. As far as I understand, he thought it could only be brought about by upheaval and revolution. This clearly hasn’t worked. I think it needs to come about gradually, starting in places like worker-owned companies, which already exist. (like Dykes Lumber, a chain of construction material supply stores here in the northeast U.S.) People need to see and experience examples of this kind of system in action before they can accept it as a viable way of life: it can’t be forced down anyone’s throat. That’s when totalitarianism arises. And, that’s where I think the confusion comes in, and people associate communism with anti-democratic ideals. It’s not the system itself, but the methods that have so far been utilized for bringing it about.
Posted by jaybee73 on Nov 11, 2008 at 3:34 PM I will try to be nice, but I don’t really care if you don’t post this…
I can’t believe someone would let you post on their website, yes, I do think this person here thinks like you do! You are just like OJ Simpson, got away with it, did ya? Well, sir, I do hate you and everything you have done! I think you are scum of the Earth, your wife too. I can’t believe anyone would send their kids to a school with you or wife! I can’t even believe you got where you are today. I hope you loose your jobs and income, you don’t deserve any of it! Please shut up and go away!
PS I hope this was nice enough because it doesn’t even come close to the anger about these people that I and thousands of others feel.
Posted by tracy2 on Nov 11, 2008 at 3:43 PM I continue to be confused by the amount hate that some people show toward others. I do not and would never condone using violence to the point of killing people to get my point across, but iI do believe that protest and nonviolent revolution are necessary sometimes. Just like our own Revolution, sometime even war is required to change things.
Are they argry and hateful because of the violent act he planned and almost executed? Do they disagree with his left of center point of view? Do they think that people should not be actively involved in the workings of their government and they should not be allowed to protest if they are outraged? Do they believe that we should just shut up and accept the status quo? Do they always follow a Republican president and always hate a Democratic president? Do they believe in a true form of democracy, or would they prefer a monarchy with a king to rule over them, or maybe a fascist dictatorship in which their views are violently enforced, or maybe a theocracy? Are they not able to believe that someone could repent for a past offense? Do they believe that anyone who is politically to the left of GW Bush is a liberal or even a communist and must be hated?
On the other hand, do they believe that GWB has been a good president? Do they agree with everything he has done? Do they believe that we has implemented policies that are good for them and their family? Have they been paying attention? Do they get all their news and information from Fox news and right wing radio? Do they believe everything they hear from these sources?
Ok, now I understand better.
Posted by enviroman47 on Nov 11, 2008 at 7:08 PM jaybee
the reason communist societies failed is because they denied human nature.
They cannot exist in democracy because as soon as one among the collective dis-believes in communism, the concept of egalitarianism falls.
So to maintaining that egalitarianism dictatorship is required.Only one country/place ever voted for communists to power, San Marino, tiny land inside Italy, smaller than Rhode Island.
They were governed as a social democracy.Communism is just another form of fascism disguised in the people power directive.
Posted by armaros on Nov 11, 2008 at 9:19 PM armaros,
Again, I have to disagree with your contention that egalitarianism goes against human nature. What about tribal societies? They’re human, their societies are egalitarian, and they don’t need a dictatorship to enforce their way of life. As people living in a relatively new culture where all the food is locked up we tend to forget that there are other ways of living, ways that have been around for millions of years.
Also, Communism is antithetical to Fascism. Any good fascist will tell you that, and distance himself as much as possible from any association with Communism. Fascism is an ideology which exalts nationalism and racial purity, two things Communism seeks to eradicate. Communism sees things pretty much in terms of access to capital, i.e. labor relationships.
Posted by jaybee73 on Nov 11, 2008 at 10:12 PM Jaybe
Tribal societies are not egalitarian and certainly not multi cultural or multi faceted.
Fascism is not always racist or nationalistic.
It is collectivism thrust upon the population by the state.Mussolini was a socialist btw as was Hitler.
Communism is universal and in that differs from fascism. However their methods are the same. Cohersion, dictatorship and suppression of liberty.How can you impose tribalism on large societies anyway. Tribes are the most dictatorial structures.
Posted by armaros on Nov 11, 2008 at 11:24 PM armaros,
Tribes by definition are not multi-cultural, and I never suggested they were. I’m not sure what you mean by multi-faceted, but I’m sure that tribal life has different aspects to it that make life interesting, in the same way we have holidays, hobbies, games, social activities, etc. And tribal societies are egalitarian in that everyone participates equally in the feeding of the tribe, and everyone benefits equally from it. Of course, there are people who have more say in tribal affairs than others, and this function would vary greatly from tribe to tribe, but tribal societies are dictated primarily by the laws of nature more than anything else. As for imposing tribalism on large societies, that’s a silly idea. Furthermore, as I said in my first post, I don’t advocate the imposition of anything on anyone.
What fascist regimes haven’t been nationalistic or racist? As far as I’m aware, the fascist regimes I’m familiar with were highly nationalistic and racist, namely, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. And how were these regimes collectivist? I’m also not sure what you mean by “Communism is universal and in that differs from fascism.”
Posted by jaybee73 on Nov 11, 2008 at 11:56 PM The Republican attempt to smear Barack Obama’s character because of his insignificant relationship with Bill Ayers was pathetic. Nonetheless, Ayers is an unrepentant screwball who is still rationalizing his reckless and criminal acts as “radical acts against property.” That is reasoning worthy of Osama bin Ladin, George Bush, Dick Cheney and David Addington. When you set off a bomb, you have to assume that someone is going to get hurt or killed and you are morally and legally responsible for anything that happens as a result. The only reason Ayers has been permitted back into respectable society is his Daddy’s money and influence. Unless he wants to apologize for his egregious misconduct he should just shut his big yapper. He has absolutely nothing to say which would interest me in any way.
Posted by irishlaw on Nov 12, 2008 at 4:20 AM Okey-doke, Bill, you’re not a radical. You never were. Stop beguiling yourself.
I’m far less interested in your political philosophy than in the fact that someone as trite and banal as you has reached such a lofty position in the education racket.
“Pass me the Vitamin C, dude.”
Vitamin C has never been shown to attenuate the toxic narcissism that you and so many of your fellow Boomers suffer from. You guys tried to copyright ‘revolution’ and demand payment from subsequent generations.
If you had read the Situationists, a weak current may have passed through the insipid farina inside your skull. The Spectacle is dependent on hack actors like you playing dress-up in shopworn costumes.
Posted by rhizome on Nov 12, 2008 at 11:51 AM Communism has only killed 100 million people in the twentieth century. Lets give it the old college try again and win one for the Obammer. Those old white guys were rookies. Their main problem was they just weren’t as smart as Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. We’ll show them how it’s done.
First shut down any dissenting opinions with the fairness doctrine. Second, nationalize the auto industry, energy industry, medical care and banking. Convince the sheeple to trade their retirement investments for a guaranteed pension. Convert private housing to collective housing to bring about social justice and equality.
That ought to keep us busy for the first four years.
Birds will be singing, the oceans will recede, the global warming will fade. We will go to work for the collective each day with a song in our hearts praising our dear leader and praying for his continued steady hand on the tiller of America. Guiding us to the promised land of egalitarian nirvana.
No one will ever have to pay their mortgage.(Because you no longer own your house)
No one will ever have to worry about paying for gasoline for your car. (Because you won’t have private property and only leaders ride in cars.)
Two legs good, four legs bad!
Posted by Carlos1962 on Nov 13, 2008 at 3:53 AM Communism didn’t kill anyone- Stalin did. Kind of like guns, right? They don’t kill- people kill.
I think a better way of shutting down dissenting opinions has already been found right here by the Bush administration- fire anyone in the Justice Dept. who is not in ideological lockstep with the neo-cons. Or perhaps the more blatant McCarthyism of the 1950’s.
And isn’t it too bad that social security wasn’t privatized four years ago as Bush would’ve liked- I’m sure we all would’ve enjoyed watching our futures go down the drain alongside the Dow and the major lending institutions.
The Brave New World can sometimes be found right here.
Posted by jaybee73 on Nov 13, 2008 at 4:29 AM Part 1
What a vain unscrupulous guy this Ayers is. Surrounded by the fawning sycophants of academia, who join him in his arrogant disdain for the people who support him pay his wages, build the office he pontificates in and etc.
Listen, I vote for Obama right? and…..
A review of his book Fugitive Days published in 2001
“All that was more than thirty years ago, but Bill Ayers still looks back with fondness on the violence of what was called in those days the “New Left.” Indeed, in Fugitive Days, he attempts to bring his readers to share his reasoning. He and his comrades were moved, he insists, by the most decent of motives to undertake, not terrorism, but a restrained and purposeful form of “resistance.” Terrorists seek to harm average people—men, women, and children—without regard to the target. For the Weather Underground, “the symbolic nature of the target” was paramount. They were only trying to prove “that a homegrown guerrilla movement was afoot in America,” and thus they bombed police stations, statues to those they considered oppressors, ROTC buildings, draft offices, and corporate headquarters.
OF COURSE, THEIR DECISION TO MOVE to bombing came at a cost. On March 6, 1970, a bomb they were constructing in their Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally exploded, killing Ayers’s girlfriend Diana Oughton and his Weatherman comrades Ted Gold and Terry Robbins. Ayers begins his book with a portrait of how he heard the news, waiting by an isolated phone booth for his weekly report to be phoned in. Shattered, Ayers realized that they were destroying themselves and the time had come to quit.
What Ayers does not mention is that the bomb that killed his friends was an antipersonnel bomb meant for an army dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Had it exploded at its chosen target, thousands of soldiers and their dates would have been killed. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” he writes, “while our actions bore…the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Somehow, the GIs his comrades aimed to kill—or the policemen he might have murdered had a bomb he planted in a Chicago station gone off—do not count. And the GIs’ dates, and the civilians working at the police station, also do not count. Their deaths would simply have been a way of educating people—as Bill Ayers continues to educate them at the University of Illinois, Chicago.”
Now, if someone called O.J. Simpson a murderer, you might say, “Hey, he just slit his wife’s throat when I was 10 years old, that was then, this is now”
He is still a murderer even if he hasn’t killed anybody since you were a kid.
Posted by doncurry on Nov 13, 2008 at 11:54 PM part2
CHRONOLOGY OF BOMBINGS AND ACTIONS CARRIED OUT BY THE
WEATHER UNDERGROUND ORGANIZATION• 1969: October, Chicago. Bombing of Haymarket police statue to remember the Martyrs.
• 1969: December, Chicago. Bombing of Chicago police cars in retaliation for the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
• 1970: March, San Luis Obispo. Liberation of Timothy Leary from the California Men’s Colony Prison.
• 1970: May, Washington D.C. Bombing of National Guard Headquarters. In retaliation for the killings of anti-war protesters at
Jackson and Kent State Universities.
• 1970: June, New York City. Bombing of New York City Police Headquarters.
• 1970: July, San Francisco. Bombing of Presidio Army Base and Military Police Headquarters.
• 1970: August, Marin County. Bombing of Marin County Courthouse in retaliation for the murder of Jonathan Jackson, William
Christmas, and James McClain.
• 1970: October, Long Island. Bombing of Long Island City Courthouse in solidarity with the current New York prison revolts.
• 1970: October, Harvard. Bombing of the Harvard College war research Center for International Affairs. ( W.U. Women’s Brigade)
• 1971: March, Washington D.C. Bombing of the US Capitol in retaliation for the U.S. invasion of Laos.
• 1971: August, San Francisco. Bombing of the Department of Corrections in retaliation for the assassination of George Jackson.
• 1971: August, Sacramento. Bombing of the Office of California Prisons in retaliation for the assassination of George Jackson.
• 1971: September, Albany. Bombing of the Department of Corrections offices in retaliation for the brutal assault against the Attica
Prison uprising.
• 1971: October, Michigan. Bombing of William Bundy’s office in the MIT research center.
• 1972: May, Washington D.C. Bombing of the Pentagon in retaliation for new U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi.
• 1973: May, New York. Bombing of the 103rd precinct of the New York City police in retaliation against the murder of Clifford
Clover.
• 1973: September. Bombing of the ITT Latin America Headquarters in retaliation for the U.S. backed coup against the socialist
government of Chile.
• 1974: March, San Francisco. Bombing of the Federal Office of Health, Education, and Welfare. ” In the accompanying
communiqué the Women’s Brigade argues for the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other
aspects of women’s daily lives.”
• 1974: July, Pittsburgh. Bombing of the executive headquarters of Gulf Oil for its brutality and greed in areas such as Angola and
Vietnam.
• 1974: September, 11. Bombing of the Anaconda Corporation ( part of the Rockefeller corporation). This bombing was
retribution for Anacondas involvement in the coup that put Pinochet in power in Chile.
• 1975: January, Washington D.C. Bombing of the U.S. State Department.
• 1975: June. Bombing of Banco de Ponce ( a Puerto Rican bank) in support of the Puerto Rican struggle for self determination.
• 1975: September, Salt Lake City. Bombing of the Kennecott Corporation for its connections to Pinochet in Chile.
The hyperbole of the campaign trail makes it acceptable to say McCain will be 4 more years of Bush.And yet not acceptable to call someone who attended a coffee social launching his Senatorial Campaign hosted by a person who admits to committing terrorist acts as “Pallin’ around with a terrorist.”
Oh calm down!
His anus tightens with indignation when someone in an audience thinks he should be killed after he committed remarkable list of attacks above. I imagine he chuckles pleasantly at the guy who hung the effigy of Sarah.
Posted by doncurry on Nov 13, 2008 at 11:55 PM part 3
He is such a solipsist that he thinks that McCain lost points every time someone called him a terrorist.
McCain did pretty good until the economic crisis, that’s what really brought him down to the level he was at the end.What caused him to do so well, even at the end of such an unpopular presidency, was the reasonable question about what the core beliefs of Obama considering the soil of inner city Chicago he was planted and
first grew in and his associations from that time.
I was reassured enough to vote for him. But, I think it’s a shame and comic insult that Ayer’s was able to sail through the whole thing without having his credentials, beliefs, finances and associations examined,
when certainly it was more worthy of being explored than than the licensing, finances, taxes, business, personal relationships and ethics of Joe the Plumber, and the nattering nabob elites of the media were all
over him.The only media person I saw was an ambush by a sole FOX reporter who tried to get answers from him who tried to get answers from him when he was walking from his car to his house. Ayers called the police,
and an officer (probably who was only six when Ayers bombed the headquarters where he now worked) escorted the reporter away.Ayers gets all huffy about this description of him:
“Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. …He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “
Here is a quote from the WIKI article on Ayers:
“Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since 2000 stems from an interview he gave to
The New York Times on the occasion of the memoir’s publication.[25] The reporter quoted him as saying
“I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”, and, when asked if he would
“do it all again,” as saying “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”[20] Ayers has not denied the quotes”Certainly, you can parse and explain away the intent and purpose of those comments, but jesus christ is he so ethically numb and egotistical that he can generate indignation?
I guess so.
But, I would fire his ass just for being an annoying mother fucker and make him live off his royalties.
Posted by doncurry on Nov 13, 2008 at 11:55 PM My hope is that Mr. Ayers represents a movement whose time has gone, a radical chic counterculture that is fading away with the Baby Boomers. Since 1968, the Right has been running against it, and very successfully most of the time. Basically, they ran in every election with a flag in one hand and a Bible in the other, which made life very unpleasant indeed for politicians like McGovern, Clinton, and Kerry, etc, etc.
This didn’t work very well aginst Obama, though, partly because he’s not of that generation, and partly because the Republican free marketeer ideology has collapsed with the economy. For that reason alone, this reform wave is more likely to resemble the New Deal or the Progressive Era than the 1960s—and thank God for it.
Not that condemn the entire decade, only what happened after 1965. Up to that point, there were some useful reforms such as the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid and so on. Afterwards, all hell broke loose: Vietnam, riots, assassinations, right wing backlash.
We have been living with the consequences of that nightmare for decades, although it looks like we’re finally escaping from it.
Michael C. McHugh
Posted by mcmchugh99 on Nov 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM McCain and Palin badly fumbled the Ayers issue, which could have been used to powerful and wholly legitimate effect. His terrorist past had already been exposed .... with Obama cleverly distancing himself simply by saying he was only eight years old. However, the real issue that would have resonated with parents everywhere had to do with education.
Ayers’ view on education is that the classroom is a place not to teach reading, writing, math and perhaps even say the Pledge, but to indoctrinate students from an early age into hating traditional American institutions that made and keep the country great, strong and free—oh, silly little things like capitalism and the military. Ayers thinks that students should be guided down a path of leftist “social justice” thinking, which of course is just another way of saying socialism. It’s all about “hating the man”, but in a much more insidious manner than the young Ayers and the hippies of the 60’s employed.
There’s plenty of evidence that Obama is down with this view. He wrote a positive “blurb” for one of Ayers’ books on the subject, and he served atop the “Chicago Annenberg Challenge” (CAC) dispensing millions to Ayers’ pet leftist projects and causes. He clearly is devoted to ACORN and all its affiliate organizations, promising to give them a seat next to him at the helm of power. ACORN is at the heart of the Ayers’ plan for hijacking the American mind.
There’s much to be learned here. And here.
Initially, Ayers came after our physical institutions of defense and government. Now, he’s coming after our minds, and the minds of our children. God help us if Obama, as I suspect, is on the same wavelength.
“The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn)”.
None of this is technically criminal of course, but most average ordinary parents—who think quite highly of free market capitalism and want their kids prepared to compete in it, not trained to destroy it—would find it highly offensive and wholly inappropriate. Just as the stealth injection of Christian religion into the classroom would be to many others, Ayers included no doubt. Much of Ayers’ agenda is already going on in schools today, with likely much more on the way with Obama’s help and cooperation.
Posted by Natalie on Nov 15, 2008 at 6:21 AM I really doubt that Obama is a 1960s-stle radical—or self-styled “radical”. To me, the late-1960s had a lot of revolutionary posturing by children of the privileged classes like Mr. Ayers. They never really changed anything and their historical legacy and influence will likley be nil.
I know that Obama is not in favor of free market capitalism of the Reagan-Thatcher type, but that system isn’t looking too healthy these days. Personally, I’m still a Keynesian, and believe in a mixed economy. We should have a state-owned sector without trying to run everything from cetral headquarters, as well as a regulated capitalist secot, and a cooperative sector of employee-owned firms.
Posted by mcmchugh99 on Nov 17, 2008 at 11:30 AM What free market capitalism? The one where Freddy and Fanny both government sponsored entities backed up by the US treasury agree to buy up any crap mortgages and liar loans that banks can scrape up? The loans to illegal aliens and other people with food stamps and welfare benefits for income? Liar loans. Freddy and Fanny said, bring them on. Free money, dive in.
The rating companies seeing the bottomless pocket of the US taxpayer backing the mortgages of course rated the crap they were peddling as AA securities. Investors worldwide were taken for a ride due to the US government’s pushing the idea that owning a house is a right.
Or the free market capitalism in the medical industry where no one is turned away at the emergency center regardless of the ability to pay?
Government IS the problem. Creating endless problems with their interventions and then rushing in to fix what they destroyed in the first place.
Ayers and Obama both worship at the alter of Statism and promote that agenda relentlessly. As long as they have control of the state of course.
Posted by Carlos1962 on Nov 17, 2008 at 1:58 PM I do think we’re headed in a more state capitlist direction—although Bush and the Republicans mistakenly call it “socialism”. It’s more like a mercantilist system, where the state invests in busines and guides the economy, nationalizes some things.
Bush and his Treasury Secretary are already doing all this, more than the Democrats would have dared. They are statists, too, but still calling themselves free marketeers. Obama will probably continue these policies, even expand them.
Does he even have a choice? He can’t let his own voters in the auto industry lost their jobs. He’s a northern man, elected mostly by votes from the north and west. Look at the elctoral map. It might as well be the election of 1860.
I don’t think Ayers has anything to do with it. His as much a symbol of Joe the Plumber. Ayers is a cardboard cutout, a cartoon character, of everything you love to hate about the 1960s and the Baby Boomers.
Posted by mcmchugh99 on Nov 17, 2008 at 2:54 PM Obama is going to grow the government.
600,000 union members in government. What will that figure be in 2012? 1.8 Million union members all voting Democrat?
How long before we all work for the government?
Posted by Carlos1962 on Nov 17, 2008 at 4:29 PM To sarcastically say things like “that free market thing sure worked out well, didn’t it?” is like Tonya Harding sending in her thug (who would represent unions, onerous environmental regulations, high corporate taxes, lending mandates, etc) to whack Nancy Kerrigan’s leg, and then wondering why she didn’t do so well with her next performance.
Our economic system needs to have maximum freedom, with some obvious basic guidelines, and not be messed with at every turn by the ulterior-motivated leeches of government and labor unions. Until then, it will be incapable of turning in what otherwise would be an excellent performance, just as was the case with Nancy.
This is not the view of Ayers, Obama or the leadership of the D party. They are firmly in the camp of continuing and increasing this hobbling of our economy, which, if not for their destructive interference, way above and beyond reasonable basic parameter setting and oversight, would be in stellar form.
Posted by Natalie on Nov 17, 2008 at 11:40 PM A free market economist told me recently that the economy had been going along beautifully for last 30 years, but now we were having a little “glitch”.
I told him thata “glitch” is what you call it when a light bulb goes out. What’s happening now is a little bit worse than that.
Have you noticed that all over the world, even “conservative” governments are pumping hundreds of billions into the “capitalist” economy? What are they scared of? More than a glitch, I think.
Posted by mcmchugh99 on Nov 18, 2008 at 10:01 AM Just a kindly college professor* I see around the neighborhood once in a while, who used to be against the Vietnam war I think, like lots of people were. I wave to him when I’m getting my paper.
* Ayers was not simply protesting “against” the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn’t against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn’t against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings—their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.
Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers’ list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”
Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given at the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers’ contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.
Posted by Natalie on Nov 18, 2008 at 6:19 PM Hi, y’all!
Jee-e-e-ez, Louise!
Talk about saying the name of the demon and having it show up! Festival of Hate ‘08! A keyboard punching smackdown!
I’m too young to remember the sixties. I was a toddler when they ended. Still, when I heard of hippie radicals in my history classes, my first thought was “What made them do the things they did? What was going on to make them do such terrible things?”. It certainly wasn’t “KILL THE TRAITOROUS SCUM!!!” I let Ann Coulter have that thought, which she later shared with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity at recess.Apparently, that thought can shared in a way that makes the biblical loaves and fishes look paltry and miserly.
Curiously, right-wing behavior has proven Darwin wrong. Sheep can be docile yet bloodthirsty.
Ta-ta!
Posted by Aunty Rightwing on Dec 2, 2008 at 1:52 AM Your average “hippie radical” back then detested Ayers and his counterproductive actions.
And I doubt most of them really wanted a communist nation, although some of them probably did. They just wanted the war to end, like most people.
But Ayers desired much more ...... and still does.
It’s not “a festival of hate” to expose and oppose this ideology, it’s just common sense. If someone came up to your house and insisted he was going to paint it another color, and you didn’t like his choice, would you be hateful for telling him he had no right to impose his decorative desires upon your private property against your will?
Posted by Natalie on Jan 22, 2009 at 5:44 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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