A Few Facts on the Ayers Connection
A Few Facts on the Ayers Connection: “FACT:’ Obama served on a board, the Woods Foundation, with former Weather Underground member William Ayers and that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11.’
FACT: ‘William Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a leftist fringe of the 1960s antiwar movement. Known as the Weathermen, the group was responsible for bombings of the New York City police headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971 and of the Pentagon in 1972.’
FACT:’ Deborah Harrington, president of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic organization in Chicago, said Obama was a director from 1994 through 2001. That overlaps Ayers’ time as a director by three years. It also means Obama served with Ayers for the final months of 2001, after Ayers made his comments to the New York Times.’
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/440/
FACT: ‘Ayers Was on Woods Fund Board with Obama When He Stepped on Flag. In fact, at the same time Ayers was in a Chicago alley desecrating the flag, he and Barack Obama were serving on the board of the Woods Fund together.’
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31476_Ayers_Was_on_Woods_Fund_Board_with_Obama_When_He_Stepped_on_Flag
FACT: Obama says he met Ayers the first time in 1995 – a year before – which would be when he was appointed as Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
The CAC structure is adeptly explained in full by Steve Diamond, and I suggest you read all from the horse’s mouth. But to summarize, the CAC had three divisions in it’s structure – the Board, the Collaborative, and Consortium of Chicago Schools Research (CCSR).
Obama chaired the money arm of the CAC structure – the Board. Everything fiscal including fund raising, fund matching and the grants. In other words, Obama oversaw the original grant funds, and the ensuing funds raised which ultimately totalled $160 million.
Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative arm, which was the ‘clearing house’ for ideas, strategies, plans etal all for the CAC. This arm also represented the ‘various constituencies in the Chicago schools and wider community’.
Together, they controlled the money, and the decisions where the money went.
The failure? The third arm, the Consortium of Chicago School Research, was charged with monitoring the impact of the projects. Apparently it was a lot of money down the drain. There was no statistical difference between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools.
It needs to be also mentioned that a more than healthy bulk of that money actually went to political purposes, electing local officials friendly with Ayers and Obama’s approach to education. The CCSR report specifically mentioned this political conflict of the CAC’s political promotions as a possible factor in the lack of impact in student achievement.
CONCLUSION? Obama, in control of a hefty sum of cash, funneled *most* of it to his and Ayers’ political allies… not to the schools. Additionally, in order for the schools to receive the CAC funds, they were required to ally with particular organizations.
Bottom line? He made his and Ayers’ political friends powerful, but did nothing to achieve the educational improvement that was the object of Annenberg’s national challenges.
McCain should be pointing out that Obama’s leadership for educational reform, and his control over the budget, was politically oriented/influenced, and the student beneficiaries were left in the lurch. Bad leadership for both handling money, and for educational reform.
FACT: Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (not English as Obama stated), is still on the seven-member Woods Fund board.
FACT: In 2001, Ayers wrote a book, ”Fugitive Days” — he called it a memoir — in which he wrote that he participated in the bombings of New York City police headquarters, the Capitol building and the Pentagon. ‘
FACT: I will be shocked if this issue is portrayed accurately by the media.”
(Via NO-Bama.)
Dirtydems, I don’t place much stock in Wikipedia. But according to them, Obama was on the Board of the Woods Foundation from 1993 to 2004.
Ayers was a member of the Woods Board starting in 1999. Ayers, however, could be no stranger to the Woods Foundation. The supposed “donor” of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge docs to the U of IL library was Ken Rolling, former Executive Director of the CAC and a former staff member of the Woods Fund in the 1980s when the Woods Fund provided financial support to the Developing Communities Project which was then headed up by Barack Obama.
I suspect that Ayers and the Woods Foundation folk go back some ways. And Woods was funding OBama’s community organization, Developing Communities Project.
The threads in common are hard to ignore. Do I believe Obama only met Ayers in 1995? No. But I haven’t seen documentation that shows them coming together thru Woods-Developing Communities-New Party yet. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t surface.
Prior to election would certainly be in America’s best interests as a whole.
MataHarley
October 12, 2008 at 9:23 pm