Bill Ayers

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HEADLINE:
As NATO Meets in Chicago, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Condemn “Militarized Arm of the 1 Percent”

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/as_nato_meets_in_chicago_activists

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HEADLINE:
“What Have We Been Doing?”: Decorated Veteran Aaron Hughes to Return War Medals at Anti-NATO Protest

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/what_have_we_been_doing_decorated

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HEADLINE:
FBI Crackdown on Anti-War Groups Targets Chicano, Brown Beret Activist Carlos Montes

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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/16/fbi_crackdown_on_anti_war_groups

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By Rick Ayers/ Bill Ayers

Let’s stop the hype and the hypocrisy: a nice note, a flower, a Starbucks card, and a week when we all go smooshy over Miss Brody or Mr. Escalante can’t possibly counter 51 weeks of official disdain and a continuing frontal assault from the powerful. Lots of cynical similes are filling teachers’ in-boxes this week: Teacher Appreciation Week feels a lot  like Turkey Appreciation Week at Thanksgiving, or Deer Appreciation Week during hunting season—and we’re the turkeys!

Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving problems, making connections, putting in 70 hour weeks and spending our own money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do, and attack us shamelessly every day.

Want to appreciate teachers?

Don’t allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition:  nation against nations, state against state, school against school, classroom against classroom, and child against child. Education, like love, is one of the fundamentals of life—give it away generously and lose nothing—and school is where we can work out the meaning and the texture of democracy—coming together to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in harmony with each other.  Good teaching deals with the real—honor teachers for that.

Reframe the debate: We are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screw driver—something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity. The controlling metaphor for  the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads; it’s rather easy to think within this model that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and privatizing a space that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the  “outcomes,” is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled “standards” for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that “accountability,” that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on law-makers, foundations, corporations, or high officials—is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what a range of wealthy “reformers,” noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call “school reform.”

Oppose the “reform” policies that will add up to the end of education in and for democracy: replacing the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from the losers—test, test, TEST! (and then punish), and destroying teachers’ ability to speak with any sustained and unified voice. The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss—the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn’t leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

Note that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and that teachers independent and collective voice is essential in determining these conditions.

Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable financing, and a strong teachers contract that protects intellectual freedom, due process of law, benefits (from pensions to health care) negotiated in good faith, and encourages collegiality and collaboration.

Throw in a note or a flower if you like.

****

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s open letter to teachers, his idea of a public appreciation, missed the mark badly even as it regurgitated every silly cliché  rehearsed by opportunist politicians everywhere: my mom wuzza teacher, my sister wuzza teacher, my wife wuzza teacher—all the wuzzas feel our pain. He went on:  

• “I have worked in education for much of my life.” (And some of his best friends are…you know).
• “I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” (Thanks, boss).
•  “Many of the teachers I have met object to the imposition of curriculum that reduces teaching to little more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. I agree.” (And your “Race to the Top” program is paint-by-the-numbers on steroids).
• “You have told me you believe that ‘No Child Left Behind’ has prompted some schools—especially low-performing ones—to teach to the test, rather than focus on the educational needs of students…[it] has narrowed the curriculum.” (So now you’re telling us what we’ve been telling you?).
• “You deserve to be respected, valued, and supported.” (Just do it!).

Arne Duncan acts like a junior foundation officer dispensing grants, rather than someone whose responsibility is the education of every child in a democracy.

On the bright side, Duncan recently announced that he supports same-sex marriage—perhaps we should all gay-marry immediately, and hope that at last he’ll show us some love.

Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald’s, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there’s still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC’s model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC’s ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It’s the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC’s policy agenda. Common Cause posted the agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.

A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.

ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.

Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush’s foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a “charity” by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a “whistleblower” complaint with the IRS about ALEC’s status.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war.

The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.

Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.

First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.

Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent, experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.

Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential astronomical.

This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking, telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, housing. Nowhere.

Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools, and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.

But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13 TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you thought it was his altruism.

Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual, inquisitive, aspiring student.

That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddeningly difficult things to create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized educational systems.

If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is faltering?

But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy, painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.

This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works. That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the cause.

The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools, by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than 2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!

If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed, would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers, special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.

The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers, the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true here, in education.

Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education, boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about. The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well, that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?

Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.

So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy, and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/04/protest-race

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

May 4, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation
the US had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving
120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each. But in the common
doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy
forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will
withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the
US opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned. The
next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the
campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue…you name it, get rid
of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to
press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students
formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black Student Unions, even
at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the war-mongers, and
themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 national guardsmen amassed on the Kent
State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed
students—four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on
Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State
University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college
students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned.
Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their
resistance to the pervasive US war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and
Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the
lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa. Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation

and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily
created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty
and callousness at home, the shredding of Constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing
of armed violence on its own citizens. The ten year war against Viet Nam and the murderous
(secret) assault on the Black Freedom Movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its
offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the US military and its NATO spawn bring home
their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide
rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their
fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among
ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed
weapons to work and play. Add to that the quiet violence of a 20%, child poverty rate in
the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2 ½ million
people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education,
health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home—all of it hitting people of color
disproportionally. Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and
directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national
security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively
at the Black and Latino Freedom Movements. In response, 80% of US colleges and universities
called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face
being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and
universities, five hundred campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not re-open until the fall. In
Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the
long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon and
inevitable resistance will surely follow.

This article is part of The Port Huron Statement at 50, a forum on the document that sparked a generation of activism. From the Boston Review

As the 1960s dawned, appeals, manifestos, and statements poured from the pens and typewriters of a new generation burning with the need to trumpet a new morning. These writings have in common a wild impatience, a brassiness required to speak out and act up, a fierce vision of human dignity, the daring to address the nation and world with the language of human rights, and the willingness to tear away blindfolds. The Port Huron Statement was neither the first nor the last such declaration, but echoing from and through David Walker’s Appeal, Walt Whitman and Seneca Falls, Ginsberg and Fannie Lou Hamer, it became, in many respects, a keystone of this pamphleteering era.

When four black, adolescent college students sat down at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, their defiance ignited similar actions across the South. Their confrontational acts, flouting immoral laws through non-violent direct action, served as a catalyst for similar group rebelliousness in city after city, and spread campus to campus. Just five weeks later, students at Atlanta’s six historically Black colleges (Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Spelman Colleges, Atlanta University, and the Interdenominational Theological Center) wrote “An Appeal for Human Rights” to explain their planned sit-in campaign:

We do not intend to wait placidly for those which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us at a time. Today’s youth will not sit by submissively, while being denied all of the rights, privileges, and joys of life. . . . Every normal human being wants to walk the earth with dignity and abhors any and all proscriptions placed upon him because of race or color. [Emphasis added.]

The statement ran as a paid advertisement in three Atlanta daily newspapers. The Atlanta sit-ins began six days later.

Just weeks later, on April 16–18, Ella Jo Baker, whom I consider the mother of the Port Huron Statement, convened the Southwide Student Leadership Conference for Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to which 200 participants flocked. In preparation, Miss Baker, who was then working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), prepared a 10-page, handwritten report based on interviews with the first wave of sit-in participants that paid special attention to what we today might call their “horizontal” (non-hierarchical) leadership structure:

This inclination toward group-centered leadership, rather than toward a leader-centered group pattern of organization, was refreshing indeed to those of the older group who bear the scars of the battle, the frustrations and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.

Those directly involved in the protests exchanged stories, brainstormed, and discussed strategy in the presence of Martin Luther King (then 31 years old), Howard Zinn, and Miss Baker. Southern black students were given the time and space to meet separately and to develop their leadership. By the end of the weekend, the participants established the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as an independent, new organization. Baker soon published her remarks to the gathering within weeks in the Southern Patriot.

In that spring of 1960, white students at the University of Michigan, at the instigation of Al Haber, announced a conference called “Human Rights in the North.” The event spawned picket lines across northern campuses, in solidarity with their Southern peers. After a year of organizing in Ann Arbor and a retreat in the winter of 1961, several University of Michigan students saw the need for a moral and strategic framework.

In 1962, SNCC dispatched two experienced staff organizers, Chuck McDew and Tim Jenkins, to a labor union camp in Michigan called Port Huron, where a group of white students were meeting to write a vision statement for their new organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). McDew and Jenkins had already witnessed the murders and beatings of sharecroppers who joined SNCC to organize the black vote in rural Mississippi and Alabama. They came to recruit Northern white students to give SNCC fieldworkers and rural sharecroppers some measure of cover, protection, and national visibility.

The Statement was a clarion call for people to take control of key social institutions and of their own lives.

The pair arrived in Port Huron to find white male students in coats and ties, as well as a handful of female students in dresses, debating and re-writing a draft document by Tom Hayden from dusk until dawn. The participants broke into small groups to discuss the draft section by section and ultimately formed a writing committee that would address the “bones & widgets”—the various drafts and re-writes that required smoothing out and integration. The Northern students favored redistribution of wealth, rejected anti-communist and anti-Cold War rhetoric, and promoted democratic control over public policy. McDew and Jenkins departed two days later without any Port Huron volunteers, although their efforts would later bear fruit during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.

The key phrase from the Port Huron Statement, participatory democracy, still resonates, as demonstrated by the global uprisings of 2011. The concept was being used by Michigan Professor Arnold Kaufman to distinguish engaged and direct democracy, on the one hand, from the episodic two-party voting system Americans call democracy, on the other. To the Port Huron participants, it was democracy by activism, an everyday, decentralized affair and a clarion call for people to take control of key social institutions and of their own lives. Some 45 students began with a dozen-page draft and crafted it into a sweeping statement, announcing that

We offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining and determining influence over his circumstances of life.

SDS would be a diverse, multi-issue organization united by participatory democracy and direct action. It would target racism, poverty, corporate domination, and the arms race. It viewed existing democracy, which excluded African Americans and did not include economic rights, as a failure, and saw both political parties and labor unions as bureaucratic, Cold War–obsessed, and consumed by their own power.

More manifestos soon followed, announcing the new left and the domestic liberation movements, sounding in various rhythmic chords and trills the intoxicating notes of freedom. They included:

• In August 1962, Reis Tijerina drafted the first plan of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, an activist group that sought land rights for New Mexican Chicanos. A letter calling for La Alianza de Pueblos y Pobladores (Alliance of Towns and Settlers) followed in October. La Alianza, as it became known, was officially incorporated on February 2, 1963, the 115th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It sought “to organize and acquaint the heirs of all Spanish land-grants covered by the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty” of their rights, to honor the heritage of the Native New Mexicans, and to command Anglo respect. In June 1963, La Alianza sent letters to the governments of the United States and Mexico reminding them of their obligations under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

• In 1963, James Boggs, a Chrysler auto-plant worker from Marian Junction, Alabama, published The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. This short volume includes chapters on “The Rise and Fall of the Union,” “The Classless Society,” “Peace and War,” “The Decline of the United States Empire,” and “Rebels with a Cause.” Boggs wrote: “The struggle for black political power is a revolutionary struggle because, unlike the struggle for white power, it is the climax of a ceaseless struggle on the part of Negroes for human rights.”

• The Black Panther Party published its Ten Point Program in October 1966. Like SNCC and SDS before it, the Program appeals to international human rights: “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace . . . and a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony . . . for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”

• In 1969, The Redstockings Manifesto was published by radical feminist activists, followed by “The Politics of Housework” (1970) and the launching of the journal Feminist Revolution. Known for their street theatre, Redstockings dramatized the right to abortion and demanded that men give up male supremacy.

• In 1967, Valerie Solanas self-published the Scum Manifesto, which began in 1960 as a list of grievances. The Manifesto sliced open patriarchy with parody, anger, and uncompromising language. The opening declaration, for example, begins: “‘Life’ in this ‘society’ being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civil-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”

• The Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization in East Harlem, New York drafted a 10-Point Health Program at the end of the decade, calling for an end to discrimination, poverty, and lack of fundamental rights.

The Port Huron Statement was thus one of many manifestos from the era to frame the moment: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” The Statement endures, however, not only because it nailed our country’s systemic racism and global military domination, but also because it lit up the ideal of participatory democracy. The Statement’s authors didn’t simply call for participatory democracy; by carefully articulating their reasons and sharing them publicly, they showed what participatory democracy is. Their lasting legacy is the engaged form of democratic politics through direct action, reason, and open discourse that continues to reveal the ever-surprising power of the people.

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/04/25/bill-ayers-teaching-comic-books/?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl29|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D156019