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2008/10/7-9 [Politics/Domestic/911, Politics/Domestic/Crime] UID:51417 Activity:low |
10/7 To the idiots who think the Ayers story is interesting: What Ayers did was a generation ago. He went to jail for a long ass time. He payed his debt and understands that when he was a kid he was wrong. Now he is a respected Chicago professor who worked with a legitimate group whose mission was to get money to try to improve Chicago schools. Maybe you don't think Ayers should have been able to rehabilitate himself, but isn't that the point of justice. People do wrong, we punish them and make them understand why it was wrong. Then if those people come back to society and do the right thing we are supposed to accept them back as valuable members of our community. That's what makes the justice system work. \_ He's never recanted. AFAICT he's never spent a day in jail for the bombings. He has no regrets, thinks he should have done more. "So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? 'I don't want to discount the possibility,' he said." http://tinyurl.com/4tb7wd [nytimes] Note that this nytimes article appeared on 9/11/2001. \_ He did turn himself in. I was wrong, charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct. And you need to read his rebuttal to that article. http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/clarifying-the-facts-a-letter-to-the-new-york-times-9-15-2001 \- look even if guilt by association isnt 1/r^2 but 1/r, CKEATING is so much closer to JMCCAIN, not to mention his crimes so much more contemporary to their involvement and the nature of the relationship directly involves what he was on the hook for, the strength of the guilt by assn charge is a whole lot stronger in this case ... not to mention its relevance to the current financial mess [regulation, moral hazard, regulatory arbitrage, lobbying-for- loopholes, money influence in politics etc]. "thanks hillary". \_ ob why do you love the terrerists? \- CKEATING is a financial terrorist ... that's what he was doing w.r.t. to the FSLIC. might be good to execute a few finance people to "find new ways to motivate them" against MORAL HAZARD. since it is highly likely you were "young" during this episode, spend the <5min to read http://tinyurl.com/yypk4l [wikipedia on CKEATING]. \_ ob sarcasm++ |
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tinyurl.com/4tb7wd -> query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all Save By DINITIA SMITH Published: September 11, 2001 ''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement. Now he has written a book, ''Fugitive Days'' (Beacon Press, September). Mr Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted. Mr Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive. Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail. Today, Mr Ayers and Ms Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome. Their son, Malik, 21, is at the University of California, San Diego; They have also brought up Chesa Boudin, 21, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who are serving prison terms for a 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, NY, that left four people dead. Last month, Ms Boudin's application for parole was rejected. When someone mentions his father's prominence, Mr Ayers is quick to say that his father did not become wealthy until the son was a teenager. He says that he got some of his interest in social activism from his father. He notes that his father promoted racial equality in Chicago and was acceptable as a mediator to Mayor Richard Daley and the Rev. All in all, Mr Ayers had ''a golden childhood,'' he said, though he did have a love affair with explosives. Even today, he finds ''a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,'' he writes. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms Dohrn told an SDS audience: ''Dig it! In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr Ayers. During his fugitive years, Mr Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century. He was ''embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way,'' he writes. One faction, including Ms Boudin, wanted to join the Black Liberation Army. Others, including Ms Dohrn and Mr Ayers, favored surrendering. Ms Boudin and Ms Dohrn had had an intense friendship but broke apart. After the birth of Malik, in 1980, they decided to surface. Ms Dohrn pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined $1,500. The Federal charges against Mr Ayers and Ms Dohrn had already been dropped. Mr Ayers and Ms Dohrn tried to persuade Ms Boudin to surrender because she was pregnant. But she refused, and went on to participate in the Brink's robbery. When she was arrested, Ms Dohrn and Mr Ayers volunteered to care for Chesa, then 14 months old, and became his legal guardians. A few months later Ms Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. Ms Dohrn had not seen Ms Boudin for a year, she said, and knew nothing of it. Ms Dohrn was asked to give a handwriting sample, and refused, she said, because the FBI already had one in its possession. For refusing to testify, she was jailed for seven months, and she and Mr Ayers married during a furlough. After the couple surfaced, Ms Dohrn tried to practice law, taking the bar exam in New York. But she was turned down by the Bar Association's character committee because of her political activities. Ms Dohrn said she was aware of the contradictions between her radical past and the comforts of her present existence. Mr Ayers said he had some of the same conflicts about marriage. He would like to see a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about Vietnam, he said, like South Africa's. And if there were another Vietnam, he is asked, would he participate again in the Weathermen bombings? But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. Thinking back on his life , Mr Ayers said, ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. |
billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/clarifying-the-facts-a-letter-to-the-new-york-times-9-15-2001 -> billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/clarifying-the-facts-a-letter-to-the-new-york-times-9-15-2001/ Clarifying the Facts-- a letter to the New York Times, 9-15-2001 September 15, 2001 To The Editors-- In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960's about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times. Smith's angle is captured in the Times headline: "No regrets for a love of explosives" (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one's life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn't do enough to stop the war. Smith writes of me: "Even today, he finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,' he writes." This fragment seems to support her "love affair with bombs" thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote: We'll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general... each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Three million--each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever. I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government's love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or "taken out of context," but of deliberate distortion. Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the US dying and suffering in response. All that we witnessed September 11--the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people--may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever. April 21, 2008 at 5:30 pm Bill, My support for you is unflinching. Those of us who really know your work, know you to care deeply about social justice and that you teach toward freedom. April 21, 2008 at 5:40 pm What a lousy America-hating communist terrorist you are, Ayers. "My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. " Excuse me but do you even have a clue about what you are talking about? In a post the other day, you dared to call Sherman's March to the Sea an "act of terrorism". Do you actually understand what Sherman tried to accomplish? Do you have any idea how many lives were saved using the atom bomb to end the war? By the way, I don't know when you wrote the above letter, but I don't see it anywhere on the New York Times site. As far as I know, you wrote it yesterday and put the 9/15/2001 date on it. So I don't believe you wrote what wrote above on 9/15/2001. Here's what you said in the other "Letter": "To the Editor: Re a Sept. I'm filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed, for their families and for all affected forever. "Fugitive Days," the memoir I've written about my participation in the Weather Underground and the antiwar movement and the events of 30 years ago, is now receiving attention in a radically changed context. My book is a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms. The intent of my book was and is to understand, to tell the truth and to heal. That adds the word "hypocrite" to the communist terrorist. The New York Times misused the power of one headline and one opening sentence, and the reverberations continue today. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, even when wielded by someone like Dinitia Smith. btw - is there a statute of limitations on the NYT issuing a retraction and/or apology? April 21, 2008 at 5:49 pm Hey Tamarika, Apparently your buddy Billy Ayers doesn't give a shit about the lack of personal freedoms suffered by the people of what was South Vietnam not to mention the murder and re-education camps set up by the communists. April 21, 2008 at 8:37 pm Dear Mr Ayers, Thank you for posting this. I respect your courage in opening yourself up to the usual anonymous bashing. What we mean when we say we must use war to stop war is that we, our children, our mother and father, our dog deserve to live but they and theirs don't. A few posters here justify killing masses of people to save masses of other people and give them "freedom." In this scenario, mass murder is actually an act of compassion. At least the hijackers proclaimed no such lofty purpose. I had hoped that if there were anything good to come out of the horror of 9/11, it would be that for once, America could begin to imagine what it is like, viscerally, to be blown up. And the suffering of survivors is another toll, not necessarily a better fate. Whether Islamic hijackers bring you your 9/11 morning because they hate you, or the United States brings it in order to save you, your suffering is the same. From a civilian standpoint, none of us who have always lived in America can fully imagine a 9/11 morning multiplied by thousands and thousands of WTC explosions, going on day and night, for five years. Or the added horrors when water supplies, hospitals, whole infrastructures are destroyed, the environment is poisoned, and we watch another million or so of our own die, or worse, from that. It is also probably no comfort to be be raped and murdered and watch your elderly grandfather be shot by those who are trying to bring you freedom. If you can even begin to imagine the condition of war for masses of civilians, you would probably conclude that no reason is sufficient for it. Now if you believe that these OTHER civilian are not as HUMAN as we are... If I could have not been born, my own beloved child not born, in order that Hiroshima and Nagasaki not be bombed, I would make that happen. I do not think that all the war, the d... |
tinyurl.com/yypk4l -> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Keating He subsequently went back to college and received a law degree in 1948 from the University of Cincinnati. He became a founding partner of the Cincinnati law firm Keating, Muething & Klekamp. Together with his wife Marie Elaine, he has five daughters and a son. edit Anti-pornography crusading In the late 1950s, Keating founded the Cincinnati-based, self-described anti-pornography organization Citizens for Decent Literature, later Citizens for Decency through Law. It was a survey of then-available pornography, and presented an assertion that linked pornography to an alleged decline of culture and to what it claimed was the depravity of youth. deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them the opportunity to make highly risky investments with their depositors' money, an opportunity of which Keating took advantage. Specifically, Keating directed the violation is the direct investment rule, regulating the amount of investments that can be owned by savings and loans. Keating had accounting violations to the tune of $650 million dollars, the largest in the history of the FTC, and greatly leading the banks to peril. Keating's contributions, by his own admissions, were to immunize the violations of the direct investment rule. They later met twice with regulators who were investigating American Continental Corporation, in an attempt to end the investigation. Alan Greenspan as an economic consultant, in an unsuccessful effort to convince an oversight agency to exempt Lincoln Savings from certain regulations. Greenspan delivered a favorable report, writing that Lincoln Savings was "a financially strong institution that presents no foreseeable risk to depositors or the government." American Continental Corporation, the parent of Lincoln Savings, went bankrupt. The federal government covered almost $3 billion of Lincoln's losses when it seized the institution. Resolution Trust Corporation, often at pennies on the dollar compared to what the property had allegedly been worth and the valuation at which loans against it had been made. edit Legal consequences Keating blamed government regulators for the failure of Lincoln Savings and filed suit in order to regain control over the bank. The suit was dismissed in August 1990, with the judge calling the seizure fully justified because of the looting of the institution by Keating and his associates. In January 1993, a federal conviction followed, with a 12-and-a-half year sentence. He spent four-and-a-half years in prison, but convictions were eventually overturned. Thereafter, on the eve of the retrial on the federal charges, Keating pleaded guilty to several felony charges in return for a sentence of time served. Lance Ito, saying that she had not been informed about his business, but she knew him as a man who was generous toward the poor. Various government agencies and private parties initiated civil lawsuits against Keating. bankruptcy fraud by extracting $1 million from American Continental Corp. while already anticipating the collapse that happened weeks later. In return, the federal prosecutors dropped all other charges against him and his son, Charles Keating III. edit Keating Family Profited from the RTC Disposition of Real EstateIn 1995 & later Real estate properties to be liquidated by Congressional mandate through the Resolution Trust Corporation from the thrift and savings & loan failures were seized and sold in 1989 at a loss incurred by the US government and ultimately borne by American taxpayers. However, Charles Keatings' daughter Mary and his then 18-year old grandson Gary Jr. purchased luxury real estate properties located within a 24-hour guarded and gated golf course development from properties seized by the Resolution Trust Corporation. Two Arizona Biltmore Estates Village Association luxury condominiums were purchased by the Hall family at depressed market prices for 50 cents on the dollar. |