IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 165apartheid education, something anemic, inferior, inadequate, and oppressive. Over decades and
centuries the debt has accumulated and is passed from generation to generation, and it continues to
grow and pile up.” (Emphasis added.)^54
In April 2008 Sol Stern of the neocon Manhattan Institute gave a series of interviews seeking to
show that Ayers’ politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. According to Stern,
‘Ayers still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism, but
he does this now from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University
of Illinois, Chicago.^55 Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to
indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons
to their public school students. [...] ‘In late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was
probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge....’^56 This was initially a $50 million grant program to funnel money into
social engineering, manipulation, and divide-and-conquer efforts at Chicago schools. ‘It turns out
that the architect of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the grant
proposal and shepherded it to success.’ (Pundita, noquarterusa.net)^57 Naturally, this must be
considered a true elective affinity between Ayers and Obama, but it also reflects the network which
was supporting them both: the left CIA foundation network was promoting the careers of its
stalwarts, even as it carried out its appointed tasks for the banking elite.
Steve Diamond pointed out on Noquarterusa.net that ‘the link between Obama and Ayers had to
pre-date the November 1995 event because [by 1995] Obama was already Chairman of the Board
of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant program. The Annenberg Challenge was a $50 million
grant (to be matched by additional donors 2:1) to a new Chicago non-profit entity to make grants to
schools in Chicago. The grant proposal was conceived of and written by Bill Ayers. Ayers was
named Chicago’s “Citizen of the Year” for his efforts. He was featured on the PBS News Hour to
discuss the grant. In every assessment of the program Ayers was given credit for leading the charge
on the program. He began the design of the proposal in late 1993 and the grant was awarded in
January 1995.’ Steve Diamond goes on to elaborate that ‘the Annenberg Challenge was not a
random school improvement effort. The purpose of the Challenge was to help shore up the ongoing
reform effort then underway in the Chicago public schools. It was a counter-attack by Ayers in what
some commentators called the “Chicago school wars.” The reform effort was floundering and
facing increasing opposition from business groups and others. The reform was built on a 1988 law
that imposed “local school councils” (LSCs) on the school system to create a new power center that
would challenge both the Chicago teachers’ unions and the school system administration. Both
Ayers and Obama were supporters of these 1988 reforms. (One little discussed fact about the reform
effort - when it targeted the union and the school administration, it was taking on two institutions
that had been a new and important source of attractive professional jobs for black Chicagoans.)”’
Diamond’s suspicions are more than confirmed: since the New York City teachers’ strike was
broken in 1968-69, the stock in trade of the Ford Foundation and its co-thinkers has been to
organize black parents into community control councils which can then be used to attack the
teachers’ unions, while also tearing down the school system itself. The goal is the financiers’ aim of
destroying free universal public education of any sort in this country, to facilitate the reduction of
America into serfdom. So Ayers is doing his job as an affirmative action foundation provocateur
eager to play black parents against teachers, many of them also black or Hispanic. The name of the
game is always divide and conquer, playing one group of little people and victims of the system
against another, to keep Wall Street and the financier elite above the fray. Caught between the top-
down privatized business model, with private interests bilking the system, the voucher-school