[Rhodes22-list] Political reply to Ben C. and David B

[Brad Haslett]

Ed,

A few days ago I posted that Bill Ayers, Michael Klonsky, and Obama
shared office space at 115 South Sangamon in Chicago. We know this
from their respective foundations tax returns.  Klonsky came out with
denial yesterday stating that they actually worked out of different
locations.  The MSM has taken their regular "oh, that explains it,
nothing to see here folks, keep moving" approach.

Who is Michael Klonsky? (see below)

Brad

---------------------

Another Communist in Obama's Orb
Meet Michael Klonsky, Obama's "social justice" education expert.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama's
radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with
self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers.
The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the
whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue's least important aspect:
Obama's abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with
committed Leftists — e.g., the portrayal of Ayers as just "a guy who
lives in my neighborhood."

(Petrified of being smeared as a racist, McCain has never mentioned
Davis, whom Obama identifies only as "Frank" in his memoir. And, of
course, utterance of Jeremiah Wright's name is verboten in McCain
circles, notwithstanding that his Trinity Church, where Obama was a
20-year member, is a font of Marxist Black Liberation Theology and
thus critical to our understanding of Obama's invocations of "change"
and "spreading the wealth.")

With what little media oxygen there has been sucked out by the largely
uninformative discussion of Ayers (and his wife and Weather
Underground ally, Bernadine Dohrn) — in which the mantra "unrepentant
terrorist" has been a pale substitute for the critical matter of the
Ayers's ideology that Obama plainly shares — much has been missed.
Significantly, that includes another key Obama contact, Mike Klonsky.

Here's what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose
current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American
classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama,
moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a
"social justice" blog on the official Obama campaign website.

To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs,
in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition: This
is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows
Klonsky … or Ayers … or Dohrn … or Wright … or Rashid Khalidi …

The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these
anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology.

Klonsky's communist pedigree could not be clearer. His father, Robert
Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the
mid-Fifties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the United States
government — a violation of the Smith Act, anti-communist legislation
ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court. In the Sixties, Klonsky the
younger teamed with Ayers, Dohrn, and other young radicals to form the
Students for a Democratic Society. It was out of the SDS that Ayers
and Dohrn helped found the Weatherman terrorist group.

Klonsky took a different path, albeit one that led inexorably to a new
partnership with Ayers, which Obama mightily helped underwrite. Upon
splitting off from the SDS, Klonsky formed a Maoist organization,
first known as the "October League," which ultimately became the
"Communist Party (Marxist Leninist)."



Klonsky was CP(ML)'s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao's
regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit
Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao's
death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky's party as "reflecting
the aspirations of the proletariat and working people."

Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the
relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership's free-market
reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than
China's own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without
platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college
professor specializing in education.

After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to
Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed
"small 'c' communist") Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small
Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made
clear, most prominently in a 2006 speech before Hugo Chavez at an
education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution
that has always galvanized them into the classroom.

The concept may be called small schools, but Klonsky and Ayers
uniquely grasp the force-multiplier effect. In a small class, the
teacher preaching the "social justice" gospel that American capitalism
is a racist, materialist, imperialist cauldron of injustice can have
greater impact on the students he seeks to mold into his conception of
the "good citizen" — and on the teachers he is teaching to be
preachers. Writing trenchantly about how this system of "critical
pedagogy" short-changes the basic education needs of disadvantaged
children, the City Journal's Sol Stern observes that theorists like
Klonsky and Ayers:

    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 …
teachers [are urged] 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.

Klonsky himself confirms that this is precisely the goal (italics mine):

    [S]uccessful social justice education ensures that teachers strike
a balance between debating sociopolitical problems that affect
children's lives and teaching them academic basics on which they will
be tested. A science teacher can plant an urban garden, allowing
students to learn about plant biology, the imbalance in how fresh
produce is distributed and how that affects the health of community
residents. An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in
American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or as Rico
Gutstein, a professor of mathematics education at the University of
Illinois, Chicago, suggests, a math teacher can run probability
simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income
inequality or racial profiling. These are "examples of lessons where
you can really learn the math basics," he says, "but the purpose of
learning the math actually becomes an entree into, and a deeper
understanding of, the political ramifications of the issue."

When Obama and Ayers collaborated together on the Chicago Annenberg
Challenge (CAC) education-reform project, with Obama chairing the
board that oversaw funding decisions, CAC underwrote the Klonsky/Ayers
Small Schools Workshop with a whopping $1,056,162. And that's not all.
Nearly another million dollars was steered to the Small Schools
Workshop by the Joyce and Woods Funds when Obama sat on their boards.
The grand total comes to $1,968,718.

Furthermore, as education remains one of Obama's core areas of concern
— a fact that should frighten you — he gave Klonsky a microphone
during the campaign. On the Obama campaign's official website, Klonsky
ran a blog for the candidate, as Klonsky put it, on "education
politics and teaching for social justice." He ran it, that is, until
blogger Steve Diamond called attention to it back in June. A that
point, the campaign scrubbed the site of all Klonsky traces — a
fitting Stalinesque purge, described by Diamond here (and reminiscent
of similar efforts to erase the campaign's false claims about Obama's
relationship with ACORN).

Of course, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be
done again; there is nothing new under the sun." John Stuart Mill
called conservatives "the stupid party." For countless American
intellectuals, including many eventual giants of the Right, disdain
for bourgeois values led to a ruinous infatuation with the Soviet
Union — the audacity of their hope for perfecting mankind blinding
them to the unremitting misery wrought by communist ideology.

In 1951, the legendary liberal Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas insisted that, though communism might be a threat abroad, the
movement in this country was a mere "bogeyman" that had been
"thoroughly exposed" and "crippled as a political force." We now know
that even as he wrote those words, communists had covertly infiltrated
the U.S. government at high levels and that, as a political force, the
movement was just getting started. The Klonskys and Ayers were still
on the horizon.

Now today's elites, including some prominent conservative
intellectuals, thumb their noses once again at the stupid party. They
look longingly at the putatively cerebral Obama, a fit more to their
liking even if his politics are, they hope, just a tad wayward. But
the Leftist revolutionaries are under no such illusions. In Obama,
they see the fulfillment of their dreams to remake America. As Klonsky
has explained, "My own support for Obama is … a recognition that the
Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and
offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions
that have potential to become a real critical force in society."

So get ready for Klonsky's "social justice." It's what Barack Obama
calls "change."

— National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies's Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the
author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books
2008).



On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 7:17 AM, Tootle <ekroposki at charter.net> wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> Your analysis of my comments is O.K.  Part of the issue is that I think what
> I want to say much faster than I type.  Even when I proof read what I say, I
> often read what I say as what I was thinking and miss needed corrections and
> whole phrases.
>
> Secondly, the way you and I use certain terms is not the same.  You apply
> specific meanings with historical perspective and I apply more general
> meanings than are being used in current circulation on the street.  The
> terms used in the 1930's and 1950's have evolved to different usage in
> current literature and discussion.
>
> Often, those changed meanings have been intentional by the authors or
> speakers to obscure their intent.  Often the terms used today are just
> evolutionary usage of a term.  I will have to try to keep to historical
> generic terms rather that the pointed ones used elsewhere on the street to
> describe concepts.
>
> David said, "Ed, et al., a question for you.  What do you call it today when
> we have a progressive tax rate?  Are we living in a Socialist system
> already, by your definition?"  The answer is yes. I say yes because of the
> intent, see below.
>
> David said, "I do not view a marginal shift in the progressive tax rates as
> Socialist…"  But it is.  It uses the power of government to collect money (a
> form of property) to give to others, again see intent of use below.
>
> Are there legitimate reasons to have a progressive tax or taxes at all?  Of
> course, the Constitution says, "provide for the common defense, promote
> general welfare," and it further states that "Congress shall have power:  To
> lay and collect taxes..."  It originally set method and limits, but that was
> changed thru amendments and court interpretations of that amendment.
>
> A contemporary definition of socialism is "a theory of social organization
> based on government ownership, management, and control of the means of
> production and the distribution of exchange."  I suggest aspects of that
> definition are not accurate in today's world. The definition was written by
> a contemporary media person.  As such it obscures or fails to recognize
> other aspects of the term such as economic, political and common usage.
>
> Socialism is a term developed from Marx, Engels and others writings on
> 'political economy'.  A contemporary definition is, "The form of government
> was one where there was no separation between civil society and the state
> and which directly corresponded to the 'essence of socialized man."  And the
> definition continues, "Work is shared equally throughout the nation
> according to ability, and everyone has equal rights, standard of living and
> class."
>
> The equalizing of 'standard of living and class' thru means of taxation and
> government programs is where the use of the term 'socialist policies' is
> being derived from in the current political debate.  The above definitions
> are on the street being used to interchangeably to describe Socialist,
> Progressives, M'ist, C'ist and other fallows.
>
> Current journalist, writers and commentators have comingled the terms.  That
> is the way it is on the street.  The listeners or readers have to apply
> current generic definitions to understand what is said.
>
> The intent of the taxation and distribution today has become to 'equally
> share the standard of living", without regard to contribution, risk, etc.
> This is called Socialism, etc., on the street in 2008.
>
> Ed K
> Greenville, SC, USA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Political-reply-to-Ben-C.-and-David-B-tp20129731p20129731.html
> Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
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