Name Names — The People Behind the Largest Progressive Indoctrination Movement in the U.S.

A Name Names page has been added to highlight some of the people behind the Coalition of Essential Schools.

A new radical will be added each week. Below is a preview.

RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Cornel West

Cornel West, a Princeton professor and marxist-socialist, participated as a featured speaker at the 2000 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum.

West, who served as an advisor to President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, has supported and participated in several communist party projects and spoken out against Israel for its “occupation of the Palestinian territories”.

The Coalition of Essential Schools recommends Cornel West’s books on racism to educators.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, participated as a featured speaker at the 2006 Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Chicago, IL.

Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, made headlines during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign for his anti-American rantings and racially charged comments.

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RADICAL OF THE WEEK

President Barack Obama

As admitted to in the video above, Obama served as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, through which $50 million dollars went to school reform efforts. As I’ve written several times in What Are They Learning?, that money went to Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). The stated purpose of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, was to nationally expand the model and principles of CES schools.

Obama still pushes the same progressive education reform movement today through publicized visits to CES schools and CES affiliated schools, and through federal funding and the creation of new education initiatives.

Read more about the Coaltion of Essential Schools at What Are They Learning?.

Part 5 – The Reparation Agenda: Obama’s Race Rhetoric Literally Scripted by Reparations Movement and International Law

By Danette Clark    October, 2012

Find final post in this series here – Part 6 – The Derrick Bell/Obama Cover-Up

“But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

The above quote comes from Obama’s March 18, 2008 speech on race, and it confirms that President Obama completely supports the reparation agenda. As I will explain below, in order for the reparations movement to succeed, there must be a perception among the majority that there are disparities that exist in the African-American community today that are a direct result of slavery. This is the crux of the reparations movement.

This portion of The Reparation Agenda series shows the legal barriers faced by advocates and reveals how President Obama is walking in step with the appointees, friends and colleagues mentioned previously in this series to ensure that those barriers are removed. For example, the very language used by the president and so many others is crucial to shaping the movement’s claim to fit the rule of law and vice versa (gradually change the law for the benefit of the movement).

In the most recent article in this series, The Reparation Agenda: Obama Friend Sponsored City Ordinance Used to Extort Millions from Corporations with ‘Ties to Slavery’, I mentioned that reparation activists have learned from past failures that courts require the naming of specific plaintiffs in a lawsuit, as opposed to demanding reparation for a broad unspecified group of people who may or may not be the descendants of slaves.

There are other legal or procedural hurdles faced by reparation activists as well, including, ‘standing’, ‘statute of limitations’, and ‘sovereign immunity’.

Adjoa Aiyetoro is co-chair of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, alongside Charles Ogletree, President Obama’s close friend, mentor and advisor to his 2008 presidential campaign.

In a 2003 paper, Formulating Reparations Litigation Through the Eyes of the Movement, Aiyetoro addresses the ‘procedural hurdles’ faced by the reparations movement and the strategies being developed to overcome them.

1. STANDING

Standing means that a person seeking reparation must show that their legal rights have been violated and that the violation resulted in a concrete injury or “injury in fact”.

Obviously, plaintiffs to reparation lawsuits today weren’t alive during the slave era so they seek reparation due to the enslavement of their ancestors.

Now that several of President Obama’s appointees and friends have succeeded in obtaining the names of many slaves and their descendants, as explained here, they must show that the descendants themselves have suffered a concrete injury.

Aiyetoro asks the question, “How can an individual be injured in the legal sense by institutions and practices abolished over a hundred years ago?” The answer, she writes, is that the 13th Amendment allows African descendants to seek reparation when the United States fails to eliminate the badges and incidents of slavery.

In other words, America must be viewed as a racist, oppressive country that does not offer the same opportunities to African-Americans as it does to whites. If America is given credit for any of the great strides and efforts it has made in the last century to offer equity and opportunity to all people, then the reparations movement has no case because there is no continuing injury.

Aiyetoro mentions disparities in prison sentencing as one badge of slavery, claiming that African-Americans still receive harsher punishment for crimes than their white counterparts.

She refers to the Sentencing Project and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as two of several organizations that support the view, and claim to have proof, that African-Americans are subjected to harsher prison sentences than whites.

Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, received an award in 2009 at a benefit held by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression for his work in “the fight against racism and efforts to help victims of the prison industrial complex.”

Other badges of slavery (continued injuries) alleged by reparation activists include disparities in income, education, housing, and health care. Refer back to President Obama’s quote at the head of this article –- that there are many disparities that exist in the African-American community today that can be directly traced to the inequalities passed on from slavery and the Jim Crow era.

How many times have we heard the president mention inequalities in education, housing, and health care? Why does he, his administration, and the media that resides in his back pocket, constantly cry ‘racism’, even where there is none? Because there has to be a perception that the rights of African-Americans are still being violated today: standing.

2. STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS

Aiyetoro addresses the statute of limitations as another hurdle for reparation claims. Statute of limitations is a time limit. Under federal law, depending on the type of crime or injury sustained, a lawsuit must be filed within one to six years after the injury occurred.

The statute of limitations for the atrocities inflicted on slaves has long expired. However, the same strategy for overcoming standing can be used to overcome statute of limitations. As Aiyetoro explains, “If an African descendant plaintiff alleges an injury in fact that is occurring to him or her today because of the badges and incidents of slavery, the statute of limitations poses little problem.”

Aiyetoro offers another possibility around this hurdle suggesting that the United States should establish that the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery were crimes against humanity and there are continuing injuries from these crimes. This is key because there is no statute of limitations (time limit) for crimes against humanity under international law.

As of the date of her writing on these legal hurdles, the United States had not yet admitted that slavery was a crime against humanity. However, our government has done so since. In 2008, USA Today reported that then Senator Barack Obama and thirteen other senators were backing a proposal that called for Congress to apologize for slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws.

As I discussed in previous articles in this series, several people surrounding Obama have succeeded in pulling public apologies out of corporations and universities. Several states and the house of representatives have issued formal apologies for slavery as well. The congressional apology that was originally backed by Obama came on June 18, 2009, shortly after he took office as president.

Just as Aiyetoro had hoped, the United States adopted a resolution declaring that slavery was a crime against humanity. Oddly enough, portions of the resolution appear to have been meticulously worded to perfectly fit the reparation agenda. For example, “Whereas African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws–long after both systems were formally abolished–through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty.”

3. SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY

The third hurdle Aiyetoro discusses is sovereign immunity. Many reparation activists, including Aiyetoro and Ogletree, have said they intend to pursue claims against the federal government, in addition to corporations, universities, and state governments. However, the United States government currently has sovereign immunity from lawsuits seeking monetary damages.

This was a tough one in 2003 when Aiyetoro wrote about the problem of sovereign immunity. In fact, she offered no possible solution other than to locate a specific waiver that could be used to have the government waive its immunity. No president in the history of our nation has ever waived our sovereign immunity for claims like these. So why would Aiyetoro, or anyone else for that matter, think that a waiver would be of any use? Perhaps she knew Barack Obama might one day be in the White House.

A waiver with regard to reparation claims would open the door for millions of African-American citizens to sue the government for slavery. But it appears President Obama is willing to go even further by completely relinquishing our national sovereignty.

Today, the Obama administration is dangerously close to ratifying the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ratification would make the U.S. a member to the ICC, thereby relinquishing our sovereignty to the United Nations.

Under international law, members of our government and military could be prosecuted for going to war without U.N. approval and for actions during wartime, including alleged ‘torture’ crimes like waterboarding. United States government agencies, corporations, and citizens could be tried for crimes against humanity and made to pay reparation to African slave descendants both here and around the world.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was established to investigate and prosecute international crimes of genocide, aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Shortly after its creation, the Clinton administration signed the statute but stopped short at calling on Congress to ratify it.

Recognizing the inherent dangers, former President George W. Bush unsigned the Rome Statute during his term only to have President Obama sign it again in 2010 on behalf of the U.S.

Although the ICC is limited to only prosecuting crimes that occurred after the court was established in 2002, many reparation activists are looking to the ICC because it does have the ability to prosecute crimes committed before it was established if the crime or injury continues today.

The same year the United Nations established the ICC to rule on crimes against humanity, it also adopted a declaration submitted at the World Conference Against Racism that very specifically identifies the trans-atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity and the cause of the continued suffering of African-Americans.

This is the fifth article in this series and so far it has shown a great deal of effort on the part of many within the government, churches, schools, and the media. In fact, there is a literal re-shaping of society taking place that just so happens to fit perfectly into the framework of what the reparations movement needs it to be.

It’s unclear whether the end game would be checks drafted to the descendants of slaves, land rights, the redistribution of wealth, or the complete destruction of capitalism for the sake of globalization.  Many reparation activists express completely different goals from others within the movement.

So why are they working together?  In the next and final article in this series, I will explain one reason for the joining of forces, and also talk about ‘unjust enrichment’ — another claim being made in reparation suits. I will also explain the reason, I believe, Charles Ogletree tried to hide Obama’s relationship with Derrick Bell.

Find final post in this series here – Part 6 – The Derrick Bell/Obama Cover-Up

Part 3 – The Reparation Agenda: More Obama Appointees Conspiring for a Massive Payout

By Danette Clark    July, 2012

In previous articles in this Reparation Agenda series, I named several religious appointees to President Obama whose work it is to guilt white America into believing it is our moral obligation to pay reparations for slavery. There is also a great deal of pressure being placed on churches across the country to make reparation for their ‘complicity in slaveholding’ more than 200 years ago.

I had originally planned to discuss, among other things, the push for reparations through the social justice education that our president is so fond of — a form of education that teaches our kids to loathe their country and promotes the idea that white supremacy is the cause of ‘achievement gaps’ between whites and minorities. However, there are more immediate issues surrounding this agenda that should be brought to light before it’s too late.

In addition to those chosen by Obama to White House appointments, several others very close to our president have conspired to squeeze billions out of universities, corporations, and even the government because of their supposed ‘ties to slavery’. I will discuss those pit bulls next in the series and then move into the meat of this agenda by showing the work being done to twist previously failed reparation lawsuits into claims that will better fit the rule of law. This work includes attempts to change history, selling lies as the truth, and bullying corporations and government entities into submitting formal apologies.

I will also reveal steps President Obama has taken as well as those he appears dangerously close to taking that could ensure future reparation claims will be successful.

But first, here is a rundown of a few more appointees, White House fellows and/or nominations and their connection to the reparations movement:

. Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and chair ex officio of the Annenberg Institute’s Board of Overseers. As president of Brown University, Simmons created a Committee on Slavery and Justice to investigate “Brown’s historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.”

. James Wagner, president of Emory University. Last year Wagner issued a formal ‘statement of regret’ over Emory’s historical involvement with slavery and hosted a national conference titled Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies.

Emory University, under Wagner’s leadership, is home to and participated in the creation and launching of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and The African Origins Project. These projects are used to track slave trade voyages, “trace the geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade”, and to locate the names of slaves. President Obama’s friend, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (think White House beer summit) was instrumental in obtaining initial funding for Voyages. The relevance and importance of these projects to the reparations movement will be discussed later in the series.

. Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League and former Mayor of New Orleans, is a regular participant of the State of the Black World Conference. The conference is held annually to push further discussion on the issue of reparations and other issues relevant to the black community. Participants and speakers include Louis Farrakhan, Rev. Jessie Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Obama friends Conrad Worrill and Charles Ogletree. The conference is sponsored by the Institute of the Black World 21st Century, an organization founded by reparations activist Ron Daniels.

Although it has been said the group avoids the word “reparations” as too vague and highly charged, the National Urban League has always been a strong advocate for reparations.

The National Urban League publishes an annual report titled The State of Black America, which measures disparities between blacks and whites in areas of economics, education, health and social justice. With regard to those disparities or gaps outlined in it’s 2008 report, Marc Morial stated that he “expects his members to press Obama on how he intends to close those gaps….”.

. Rahm Emmanuel, Mayor of Chicago and former Chief of Staff to President Obama, stated last year that he would support slavery reparations.

. Cynthia Hale, founding and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church, was chosen by then-Senator Barack Obama and the Democratic Party to give the opening invocation at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Hale’s Ray of Hope Christian Church is a “partner in ministry” with President Obama’s church of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

Hale is chair of the 21st Century Vision Team of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which is an anti-racist/pro-reconciliation ministry. See the first article in this series for more about Disciples of Christ.

Hale also served as co-chair of a social justice organization, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference. The conference, which was co-founded by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is led by Dr. Iva Carruthers, a long-time reparations activist. A current trustee of the conference is Father Michael Pfleger, who, along with Rev. Wright, made headlines in 2008 for his outlandish and crude racial comments against whites and America. Conference partners include George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Gamaliel Foundation, where Obama worked in community organizing.

. Goodwin Liu, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California, believes in constitutional welfare rights, including affirmative rights to “education, shelter, subsistence, health care and the like, or to the money these things cost”. In other words, reparations should be made part of the Constitution.

In 2008, while discussing the issues of racial justice and reparations at the screening of Traces of the Trade, a PBS documentary on the transatlantic slave trade, Liu said he believes every person who inherits this nation has “a personal responsibility” and “a moral obligation to make things right” and that “it’s going to require giving up something”.

Every person mentioned in this series should be taken very seriously. They are all pieces of a puzzle, each doing his or her part to fulfill an agenda, that if successful, could bring down hundreds of American corporations, result in the loss of land, and even threaten our national sovereignty.

Where #OccupyWallStreet Really Began — Obama’s Hand in the Movement

By Danette Clark    May 3, 2012

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly,
‘Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your
descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.”– Adolf Hitler

Since protesters first began setting up their drug dens, love shacks, and hippie huts in downtown Manhattan on September 17th, we began questioning whether Occupy Wall Street is really a grassroots movement, as it claims to be, or a movement manufactured and orchestrated by communist and socialist organizations.

We know now that OWS has received financial support from George Soros, Louis Farrakhan, and SEIU, among others. But where did it really begin? How do people living in a country with more freedoms and opportunity than any other place in the world develop a mindset of entitlement and come to believe that we are a racist, imperialist nation whose free market system is oppressive?

I believe Occupy Wall Street is both a grassroots movement and a movement manufactured by communists, socialists, and progressives — and most certainly with the help of Barack Obama.

This movement began decades ago. While we were busy building homes, pursuing careers, and planning for retirement, OWS was being incubated in classrooms across the country. There are thousands of social justice schools in America that have, for decades, brainwashed youth with a distorted view of history and reality, and a general hatred for America, its founders, and its capitalist economic system.

Although education reformers like John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall led the way in secularist indoctrination in America’s schools as far back as the 1800s, the most successful push came in the 1990s, with the help of our president.

When Obama worked with William Ayers through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 1999, they funneled large sums of money to an education reform movement that Ayers had already worked with for some time, Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools.

In fact, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created by the Annenberg Institute, whose stated mission was to build upon the work of Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools and to support sustained focused efforts to expand education reform to youth across the country.

The work of Ayers and Obama through the CAC, combined with the work of Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, literally parlayed a group of approximately 200 progressive schools into a network of over 1,000 in a little over a decade. When you consider that CES has dozens of partner organizations and affiliates working within various school districts across the country, the number of radical schools in America is actually much greater than 1,000 and almost impossible to count.

Although financial backing is crucial to the survival of a movement like OWS, the movement would not exist without the many years of groundwork. After all, to quote William Ayers, “education is the motor-force of revolution” and “Teaching . . . urges revolutions large and small”.

So, in all fairness, we should give credit where credit is due. As re-writers of history, developers of curriculum, designers of “smaller learning communities”, teachers, organizers, promoters, and guest speakers in these schools of social justice, these are some of the real people behind the OWS movement:

• Communist, domestic terrorist and former co-founder of the Weather Underground Organization, William Ayers

• Communist, domestic terrorist and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Bernardine Dohrn

• Communist, Maoist, and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Mike Klonsky

• Communist and former member of the Weather Underground Organization, Howard Machtinger

• Ex-prisoner, communist, and former member of the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis

• Communist, the late Howard Zinn

• Communist and former “green jobs czar”, Van Jones

• Socialist and developer of critical race theory, Derrick Bell

• Socialist and admirer of the Black Panther Party, Cornel West

• Champion of Black Liberation Theology, Rev. Jeremiah Wright

• Top education advisor to Obama’s presidential campaign, Linda Darling Hammond

• And last, but not least, President of the United States, Barack Obama

As president, Obama has continued to boost social justice education, specifically CES schools and its affiliates. During his first two weeks in office, he publicized a visit to CES’s Capital City Charter School in Washington, D.C., praising it as innovative and stating “this is how schools should be”.

The president has held several town hall meetings at CES schools, visited countless others, and awarded billions in grants to progressive schools and education initiatives.

Obama’s education plan calls for small schools and smaller learning communities and makes specific reference to TRIO and Upward Bound, which are federally-funded programs that were instituted for the benefit of underprivileged students but have since been overtaken by social justice educators and used for the indoctrination of children through after school and summer programs.

CES has partnered with both TRIO and Upward Bound in the creation of new schools.

President Obama’s education plan also specifically touts the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program which was, until recent years, directed by Howard Machtinger, former Weather Underground member and bomb-making buddy of William Ayers.

Other notable mentions for their “contributions” to social justice education and the birth of the OWS movement:

• Dolores Huerta (now head of the US Department of Labor) for her memorable speech at Tuscon High Magnet School wherein she told students the theme of the day is “Republicans hate Latinos…Republicans hate Latinos.”

• Poway Unified School District which allows an annual school sponsored National Day of Silence in conjunction with the Gay Lesbian and Straight Alliance (GLSEN – led by Obama’s ‘safe schools czar’, Kevin Jennings), but does not allow students to wear t-shirts with bible scripture on them expressing their opposition to homosexuality.

• St. Paul Public Schools for promoting the White Privilege Conference to students and Seattle Public Schools for going so far as to transport students to another state to attend the conference (on the tax payer’s dime).

• Methuen Public Schools and Marblehead Public Schools for transporting students in two public school buses to a GLSEN and Planned Parenthood sponsored conference about how to practice homosexual sex. At the conference, students were given “fisting kits” for use in oral sex.

And who can forget all those videos of children being led by their teachers to sing praises to Obama? The North Sore Tea Party provides an extensive list of indoctrination videos here.

Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott’s latest book, Red Army: The Radical Network that Must be Defeated to Save America, devotes two chapters to social justice education and provides the names of several schools, organizations, and curriculums to keep an eye on.

Michelle Malkin also has some great articles on indoctrination. Look for those on the web.

Please find out where these schools are in your area and contact your local representatives, school board members, and even your governor. Look at your children’s history books and ask questions about what they are learning.