168 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographySteve Diamond sums up the situation, noting that Obama’s backers are heavily committed to the
idea of reparations, specifically in the educational sphere: ‘If you believe the rhetoric of the “social
justice” crowd influencing the Obama camp’s approach to education policy - the authoritarian
leftists Bill Ayers and his sidekick Mike Klonsky as well as ed school professors like Linda
Darling-Hammond and Gloria Ladson-Billings - only reparations for 400 years of oppression of
non-whites will allow us to close the “achievement gap” between the oppressors, whites, and the
oppressed, minority kids....Lying behind this argument is a pernicious concept - that white workers
benefit at the expense of black workers and that more widely American workers live off the backs
of workers in the third world. This is at the heart of the authoritarian and anti-union politics of the
Ayers/Klonsky crowd.’ (http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/06/26/white-guilt-politics-of-Obama-
crowd-undermined/) Better than call Ayers an authoritarian, we should dub him a totalitarian liberal
who has already reached stormtroop junction.
Very large sums of money were involved in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and it is well
worth our while to follow them: ‘The CAC was established in 1995 as a result of a $49.2 million
grant from Walter Annenberg to support education reform in Chicago. Bill Ayers and Anne C.
Hallett co-signed a letter submitting the grant proposal to Brown University President Vartan
Gregorian on November 8, 1994 where the national Challenge office would be headquartered. The
letter was on the letterhead of the University of Illinois at Chicago (“UIC”). Ayers identified
himself as representing the UIC and the “Chicago Forum for School Change.” Ms. Hallett is
identified as the Executive Director of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform. At the
bottom of the letter, a parenthetical states: “On behalf of the Chicago School Reform
Collaborative.”’ (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-
Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008) ‘The letter and the attached detailed
proposal grew out of a process that began in December 1993 when a small group led by Ayers,
Hallett and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation ‘met to discuss a proposal to the Annenberg
Challenge for support of this city’s public school reform efforts.” ‘This group became the nucleus
of the larger Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC,
which Ayers would co-chair and on which Hallett and Chapman would serve.’ (Program Report,
CAC, Jan. 1, 1995 through Mar. 31, 1996 at 1). (Steve Diamond, ‘That “Guy Who Lives in My
Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net, June 19, 2008)
The Chicago banking and finance elite includes the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, critical parts of the modern
derivatives bubble. Did these ruling interests fear that Chicago was on the verge of a mass strike, in
which white and black, employed and jobless, would demand economic concessions from the
parasites that ran the city? There is some evidence that this fear might at least have dawned on the
more far-sighted of them, especially after the Stevenson debacle of 1986 and the teachers’ strikes
leading up to 1987. Perhaps we can feel some of the ruling class fear in their bombastic prose when
they write: “Chicago is six years into the most radical system-wide urban school reform effort in the
country. The Annenberg Challenge provides an unprecedented opportunity to concentrate the
energy of this reform into an educational renaissance in the classroom.” (Steve Diamond, ‘That
“Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship,’ noquarterusa.net,
June 19, 2008)
In reality, even before Bill Ayers became engaged in the CAC, patriarch Thomas Ayers of
General Dynamics had already started the ball rolling: ‘The Alliance for Better Chicago Schools
(“ABCs”) was formed then to push for the LSC idea in the Illinois state legislature. Active in the
ABCs was Bill Ayers, Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project, and Chicago United, a