Bill Ayers

First 6 episodes of this PODCAST available now:

1. Let’s Talk About Freedom

This inaugural episode dives directly into the wreckage: What do we talk about when we talk about freedom? “Under the Tree” references the Freedom Schools created in Mississippi and throughout the South during the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960’s—fugitive spaces where folks gathered to organize an insurgency against Jim Crow and white supremacy. We begin our ongoing reflection on the challenge, the demand, and the meaning of freedom, and then we’re joined by Chesa Boudin, long-time public defender and recently elected District Attorney of San Francisco.

2) We Are Each Other’s Magnitude and Bond

Freedom is a layered, complex, and dynamic concept that defies a Webster’s Dictionary-type definition, and so we continue to explore the meaning of freedom, and we follow it as it makes its twisty way through our lives and our consciousness. We’re joined by Crystal Laura, author of Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School to Prison Pipeline, and we explore in detail how educators can disrupt the march toward mass incarceration by deploying a pedagogy of joy, love, and justice.

3) In Your Dream of Dreams, What Would Schools for Free People Look Like?

Schools are both window and mirror into any society: authoritarian schools serve repressive regimes; segregated schools mirror  severed societies; a free society builds schools anchored in enlightenment and liberation. David Omotoso Stovall lights up this episode with a conversation about the school to prison nexus, and the provocative possibility that the call for prison abolition link up with a demand to abolish the schools we have in favor of an education for freedom. Professor Stovall is an activist, a scholar, and the author or editor of several texts, including Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption; From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline; Handbook of Social Justice in Education; Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation; Teaching Toward Democracy; and Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education.

4) Imagine the Angels of Bread.

When Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she ought to go, the Cat responds, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Alice says she doesn’t much care where she goes, to which the Cat says, “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.” We spend this episode exploring our radical dreams, and imagining where we’d like to go, accompanied by the radical poet, Martin Espada, and legendary activist, Bernardine Dohrn.

5) Defund the Police

Malik Alim and Bill Ayers open with a spirited dialogue on the link between defunding the police, abolition, and a vision of a society free of prisons and armed agents of the state. We then turn to a conversation with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Usual Cruelty a powerful unmasking and reframing of the myths of “the rule of law” and “law enforcement.”

6) Where in the World Are We?

Americans are known across the globe for a singular lack of knowledge about who we are and where we’re located; we collectively have a thin knowledge of both history and geography. Making up less than 5% of the world’s people, we tend toward an exaggerated and narcissistic sense of our place in the larger scheme of things. In this episode we take a closer look at the link between freedom and patriotism, and note the retarding quality of an anemic flag-waving nationalistic loyalty. We’re joined by Prexy Nesbitt, a spirited internationalist and freedom fighter whose efforts over many decades have focused on labor and human rights, Black Freedom and the liberation of Southern Africa.

Police violence and white militia killings in Kenosha.

Episode 6, Under the Tree: A seminar on Freedom

From Peter C:

Whenever I read about QAnon, I think of “Foucault’s Pendulum,” Umberto Eco’s great novel. If you know the story, you know what I mean. Three publishing-company friends decide to invent an occult philosophy, called the “Plan” and loosely based on the Knights Templar, the Cathars, Opus Dei, the Kabbalah, etc., etc. As the Plan gets more detailed and elaborate, it attracts followers (some deranged) as well as attacks (some violent) from already-established cults.

Could QAnon be the same? Some guy decides to start posting as “Q,” a pro-T, high-level, DC insider, to tell people what’s “really” going on – which is that you can understand all recent US history only as the manipulations of an elite, deep-state cabal of Satan-worshipping child molesters, led by the Clintons. If that’s how it began, IMHO, Q could not possibly have imagined how successful he’d be.

I’ve thought of joining one of the Q groups and posting some of my own theories. For instance, I’m convinced that it was an overdose of cocaine and hookers that killed Antonin Scalia in that so-called Arizona “resort.” Also, I’m pretty sure that T and his pal Alan Dershowitz conspired to have Jeremy Epstein killed, to keep him quiet about their involvement with Epstein. Dershowitz called in a favor from OJ, who used his inmate connections to carry out the hit.

Or maybe we could start a new group – “XAnon” – and create our own bats–t crazy analysis of the world today that could compete with QAnon, like the crazy competing cults in Eco’s novel.

…No government was ever overthrown by the poor, and we have nothing to fear from that source. It is the greedy and powerful that pull down the pillars of the state. Greed, corruption and pharisseeism are today sapping the foundations of government. It is the criminal rich and their hangers-on who are the real anarchists of our time. They rely on fraud and brute force. They use government as a convenience and make justice the handmaid of wrong…

https://www.lsna.net/remote-learning

Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom (wherever you get podcasts)

Malik Alim and Bill Ayers open with a spirited dialogue on the link between defunding the police, abolition, and a vision of a society free of prisons and armed agents of the state. We then turn to a conversation with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Usual Cruelty a powerful unmasking and reframing of the myths of “the rule of law” and “law enforcement.”

By Robert C. Koehler

“There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear . . .”

Or is it?

Day one of the Democratic National (virtual) Convention. Bernie Sanders had just told his supporters: “Together we have moved this country in a bold new direction,” pointing out that “all of us . . .yearn for a nation based on the principles of justice, love and compassion.”

Then Michelle Obama spoke: “Empathy: that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes; the recognition that someone else’s experience has value, too. . . .” But now our children “see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protestors for a photo-op.”

And then day one concludes with a Billy Porter rendition of the Buffalo Springfield classic, “For What It’s Worth,” with Stephen Stills himself on the guitar. And instantly, as the first notes fill the air, the ’60s leap into the present moment . . . my God, that time of hope and change (at least for the boomers watching all this)! As Porter sings, background images of chaos and unrest swirl — and then a peace symbol pops up, hovers for ten seconds for all the world to see.

Huh? A peace symbol? Suddenly the orchestrated nonsense pulled me back to reality. This was the DNC, apparently “reaching out” to the former hippies (and Bernie voters), the ones who marched against the Vietnam War, acknowledging with a quick shrug, yeah, you were right then. That was a hellish disaster. But c’mon, we’re the new Democrats: progressives and centrists and independents. We embrace empathy and compassion, and we all hate Trump.

The point, so it seemed, was to reduce the peace symbol to an icon of nostalgia for the good old days — the days of weed and Woodstock and dancing naked in the streets. After five-plus decades, it’s finally safe to welcome those good old days into the party. But what was missing — from the national convention, from the halls of Congress, from the party as a whole — was any official stance against war. By which I mean, today’s wars.

“There’s a man with a gun over there/Telling me I got to beware/I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound/Everybody look what’s going down . . .”

Yes, there are progressive, antiwar Democrats out there, gaining power, getting elected to office, almost winning presidential primaries — scaring the bejesus out of the Democratic establishment — but the party itself still stands firmly in the middle of nowhere, fully in favor of empathy and compassion and yet, somehow, fully supportive of the endless wars most of its own voters hate and utterly unwilling to challenge the bloated and ever-expanding defense budget.

Citing the analysis of William Hartung and Many Smithberger, the Milwaukee Independent described that budget thus: “As of 2019, the annual Pentagon base budget, plus war budget, plus nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy, plus military spending by the Department of Homeland Security, plus interest on deficit military spending, and other military spending totaled $1.25 trillion . . .”

This is untouchable money — not just to Trump and the Republicans but to most congressional Democrats.

Indeed, as Alexander Sammon points out in the American Prospect, Democratic majorities were crucial this summer to the defeat of three separate bills, introduced by progressive Democrats, to reduce military spending and/or undo the militarization of police departments. These included amendments in both the Senate and the House to the National Defense Authorization Act, diverting 10 percent of the Department of Defense budget to health care, education and jobs; as well as a Senate proposal to end the 1033 Program, which allows the Pentagon to transfer military gear to the police. The amendment’s defeat in the House was especially an outrage, Sammon notes, in that the Dems hold a majority in the House and could have passed it.

“If Democrats are going to enact anything that resembles their own agenda,” Sammon writes, “they’re going to have to aim way higher than cutting defense to near Obama-era highs. Taking military spending not to pre-Trump but to pre-9/11 levels should be a starting point. Democratic voters abhor the War on Terror; it’s what helped deliver Obama the presidency back in 2008. It’s incumbent on Joe Biden to deliver on that preference, not just to end engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan but to bring an end to the bloated defense budgets of the War on Terror era. His silence on the proposal even in the thick of a campaign against Trump sends a troubling message.”

War, militarism and the insanely bloated defense budget are never — never! — addressed with serious political pragmatism. Thus to see a peace symbol, the icon of a world beyond war, flicker meaninglessly for ten titillating seconds at the Democratic convention, was . . . well, discombobulating.

The world is slowly changing, but there’s nothing here to celebrate. Consider another piece of related news: As Common Dreams recently reported, 11 Democratic senators are demanding accountability from the Pentagon for refusing to specify what measures it’s taking to ensure the safety, from Covid-19, of the 40 men still indefinitely detained at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon’s refusal to give any details bolsters the case for shutting the place down, according to the senators.

All of which throws me into a frenzy of, once again, discombobulation. There was zero national debate about opening Gitmo — an American torture site for detainees with no rights whatsoever — but the national discussion about whether or not to shut it down has been going on, pathetically and absurdly, for two decades. Maybe the place is cruel and pointless, but, well, we can’t just shut it down because of logic and morality.

Why not?

If only the Democratic Party — not just a few outliers, but the party as a whole, acting with the full force of the voters it represents — were capable of asking that question. And demanding an answer.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

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