From the back cover:

The victory of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 opened up a major new battleground in the Cold War between east and west. That larger conflict caused many to ignore or misjudge the domestic battle for democratic rights carried out by ordinary Nicaraguans, first against the Somoza dictatorship, and then against the Frente Sandinista, which led the Revolution. In Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement, political scientist and legal scholar Stephen F. Diamond examines the conflict inside Nicaragua from a viewpoint that is critical of the FSLN, which was allied closely with Cuba and the Soviet Union, and of the United States, which formed a proxy army to overthrow the FSLN regime. Such an independent viewpoint yields important and original insights into the complex relationship between authoritarianism and democracy in the developing world.

Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement: Stephen F. Diamond: 9781600421860: Amazon.com: Books.

The fact that UN Ambassador Susan Rice has not been struck from the short list to replace Hillary Clinton despite Rice’s active role in misleading the American people about the nature of the Benghazi debacle is a sign that the chaos that has consumed US foreign policy over the last several years will likely continue.

Rice is considered a self-centered opportunist who has set her course as a hard core Obama loyalist. She has no coherent world view or any independently developed rational basis for understanding how to wield US power. Thus, if appointed, she will likely attempt to continue the “relativist” approach that has stamped the Obama approach to international issues.

That “relativism” is a viewpoint that Obama developed in his long association with the authoritarian and neo-stalinist left. It led to his dangerous call for “engagement” without preconditions with dictatorial regimes such as that of Assad in Syria and of the mullahs in Iran. The result of that approach in the middle east and north Africa is now clear: the U.S. missed an opportunity to support the Green movement in Iran and the nascent uprising in Syria. Had we sided instead with the movements and individuals attempting to establish American-style values such as human rights and democracy we might have helped avoid the violent tragedy now unfolding in Syria and we might also have helped alter the course Iran is taking today.

With Clinton as Secretary of State there was at least some modicum of debate within the Obama regime over the direction of US policy. Despite Obama pressure, for example, to appease the Chinese over human rights issues, Clinton started to push back when she supported the effort of human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng to seek asylum in the United States.  My law school will be honoring Guangcheng with an award for his brave advocacy of human rights in China this spring. Clinton was also said to be concerned that Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama – sending his aide Valerie Jarrett to India to persuade His Holiness to delay a long planned visit to the Washington.

But Rice has been a part of the Obama inner circle and was even named to the Cabinet while nominally serving under Clinton. It seems now that she, instead of being forced into retirement for her clear misstatements about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, is set to be rewarded with a promotion.

UN Envoy Susan Rice Is Top Candidate to Succeed Clinton – Businessweek.

I received the sad news this evening from the midwest that Jerry Tucker, a lifelong progressive and democratic union activist and UAW leader, passed away.

Jerry and I began to work together five years ago when he joined with other UAW activists to oppose the imposition of another wave of cutbacks in wages and benefits of auto workers at the Big Three.

Like Jerry I began to speak out about the attempt to set up a VEBA that would force the UAW to manage a massively underfunded and badly structured health care plan and relieving the Big Three of that responsibility, a benefit fought and won by auto workers over many decades. Eventually I filed a petition with the SEC on behalf of auto workers arguing that the UAW and GM were ignoring their obligation under federal law to provide full disclosure of the impact of the proposed VEBA on union members.

Just as we argued then, the VEBA has indeed proved a disastrous turn for the UAW as a recent Reuters story noted. If the union and GM had disclosed the actual risks that it implied it may never have been imposed. As he was many times before Jerry was right then, too.

Below is a video of a tribute to Jerry at a Labor Notes conference. In addition, take note that there will be a panel discussion of the State of the UAW at UM-Flint on October 28 with Dr. Tom Adams and Gregg Shotwell. Gregg was one of my clients in the petition to the SEC. It would honor Jerry’s memory and lifelong efforts on behalf of the UAW and workers everywhere to attend that meeting and discuss the future of one of our most important labor unions.

Tribute to Jerry Tucker for his contribution to the Labor Movement at the Labor Notes Conference.

New evidence that the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers reaches back to the 1980s surfaced today. 

In 2008 I was one of the first to blog (Who “sent” Obama?) about the important and longstanding relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, a founding member of the terrorist organization known as Weather Underground. I pointed out then that Ayers appointed Obama as Chairman of the board of directors of the education reform group known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) in 1995. David Remnick of The New Yorker later confirmed this fact in his biography of Obama. This appointment was a critical step in the career of Obama who went on later that year to run for state senator, his first political office, a campaign that he launched at an event held at the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and Ayers’ wife and Weather Underground comrade Bernardine Dohrn.

I also noted that given the importance of the Annenberg appointment that Ayers would never have appointed Obama unless he knew Obama was an ally in the ongoing “Chicago School Wars.” Those Wars were taking place between three key groups: the Daley Administration which wanted to centralize control of the Chicago schools in the Mayor’s office, the Chicago Teachers Union which wanted to protect the wages, job security and working conditions of its members, and a loose coalition of reform groups of which Obama, and three members of Ayers’ family, including Bill, his brother John and, earlier in his life, their father Tom, were a part.

Each of these three groups jockeyed for position and for for the nearly $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation. (A fuller description of the three way conflict can be found here.) Ayers led the reformers’ successful effort to secure that grant and set up the Annenberg Challenge in late 1994 and early 1995. Ayers (together with Anne Hallett) exchanged letters in 1994 with the Annenberg Foundation’s representative, Vartan Gregorian of Brown University, confirming that Ayers was working to assemble a board of directors for the Challenge. Obama joined the Challenge board in the spring of 1995.

Only if Obama had proven himself to Ayers would Ayers have appointed Obama to the board. The latest evidence confirms that, despite the denials by The Times and the Obama campaign, the relationship between Ayers and Obama reaches back as far as 1987 when education reform burst into a major political issue in Chicago. In the spring of 1987 Barack Obama lobbied the mayor of Chicago at that time, Harold Washington, to set up a “local control” education reform effort that would include Bill Ayers’ brother John on its advisory board.  Obama wrote the mayor as Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP) a position Obama held for three years prior to attending Harvard Law School.

The Daily Caller has obtained copies of two letters written by Obama, one to Washington and one to an aide of the mayor, as well as an attachment to the second letter listing the proposed board members. The list includes the name of John Ayers, as well as that of the black nationalist minister Jeremiah Wright and the controversial and radical white Chicago priest Michael Pfleger. Also on the 1987 list is Anne Hallett, then with the Wieboldt Foundation, who would co-author with Bill Ayers the proposal to form the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1994.

John Ayers, now head of the Cowen Institute at Tulane, shares the same passion for education reform as his brother and his late father.  He became a participant on behalf of business groups in the push for local control and later for the charter school movement, which was a natural evolution from the local control and small schools approach advocated by Bill Ayers and his former SDS comrade Mike Klonsky.

Despite this background, Obama supporters, including The New York Times, maintained that Ayers had no serious connection, if any, with Obama and that Ayers played no role in the selection of Obama to chair the Annenberg Challenge. Although I was interviewed 5 times by The Times and provided them this background, they ignored this information and published a long page one story by Scott Shane that repeated the Obama campaign position that Ayers had no role in the appointment of Obama to the Annenberg entity.

At the time I also reported that a senior and longtime Democratic Party activist said that the Ayers relationship with Obama went back to the mid-1980s. This same source also said that Ayers and Dohrn played a significant role in the Obama campaign including helping devise lists of individuals for appointments in the new Administration. The appointment of former marxist-leninist Van Jones to the Obama White House would seem to be evidence of this.

This same source also said in 2008 that a senior campaign operative, who is still today a senior member of the Obama campaign, was aware of conversations between David Axelrod and Bill Ayers aimed at blocking access by conservative writer Stanley Kurtz to records of the Annenberg Challenge held at the University of Illinois. More on the CAC records flap here.

I also interviewed and reported on the fact that the mailman who delivered mail to the home of Bill Ayers’ parents had met Obama outside that home in the 1980s.  That mailman also spoke to me about a conversation he had during the 2008 campaign with Tim Ayers who vigorously defended his brother Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn.

It made sense to me that the relationship with Ayers would reach back that far because in 1987 the DCP played a very active role in the loose coalition of groups referred to above interested in pressuring the Teachers Union and the Mayor’s office to institute reform of Chicago schools.  The primary goal of the DCP and many in this coalition was a variation on the theme of “local control” – an attempt to involve parents and surrounding communities in local schools.

“Local control” is widely viewed as hostile to teachers’ unions because it can become an easily manipulated source of pressure on teachers and principals without any rational basis in education policy.  In fact, Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky were explicit about their interest in influencing schools through this method and the Annenberg Challenge money was used to do this. Some education policy figures, such as Dorothy Shipps, view “local control” as undemocratic because it prevents district wide transparent and accountable reforms.

Local control first emerged as a part of the ideology of black nationalists and elements within the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in the 1960s.  SDS was the left wing antiwar student group that fell apart in the late 60s and gave rise to, among other sects, the terror group Weather Underground. SDS and black nationalists advocated local control and opposed the teachers union in a bitter strike in New York City in 1968.  Some SDS members went so far as to scab during the strike.

Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky were leading members of SDS then.  Ayers later helped found the Weather Underground and Klonsky became a hard core Maoist.  Klonsky along with Ayers became an active backer of Obama. Klonsky hosted a blog on educational issues on the official Obama campaign website in 2008 that was deleted once the maoist background of Klonsky was discussed during the campaign.

In 1980, Ayers and his wife Dohrn surfaced from hiding during their Weather Underground days and turned themselves into authorities. They avoided jail time for their terrorist activity but Dohrn was refused admission to the bar despite graduating from the University of Chicago law school. She was able to reinvent herself as a “law professor” of sorts and is now a member of the law school faculty at Northwestern University. Bill Ayers entered graduate school in education in New York and then returned to Chicago in 1987 to join the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, then known as the “Chicago Circle” campus.

In the fall of 1987 a strike of the Chicago Teachers’ Union took place just a few months after Obama asked the mayor to support the DCP’s community based education effort that would include John Ayers. The strike angered many in the city and led to a lobbying effort in the Illinois legislature to institute local control in the Chicago schools through elected “local school councils” (LSCs). Over union opposition and opposition from groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, which feared (correctly) the LSC’s would undermine teachers many of whom were black, the state legislature backed the LSC idea.

Bill Ayers was active during the strike as well in this reform effort, as was his brother John. Bill rose to chair the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, a key group in the LSC lobbying campaign. although precisely when Ayers became chair is not known. Obama’s DCP was also a member of ABCs, the only black community organization to join. Another member was Chicago United, a business group that had been founded many years earlier by Thomas Ayers, the father of Bill and a powerful Chicago business leader who was active in education reform on behalf of the business community. Chicago United played a key role in organizing ABCs.

John Ayers, Bill Ayers, Tom Ayers, Mike Klonsky and Barack Obama shared a commitment  to “local control” ideology from at least the late 1980s through the Chicago School Wars of the 1990s. Obama brought his DCP into the local control movement and thus proved himself a valuable ally of the Ayers family in that battle.  Bill Ayers rewarded Obama for that commitment by appointing Obama to chair the Annenberg Challenge in 1995.  Obama, in turn, steered millions of dollars from the CAC to multicultural curriculum programs and local control efforts led by Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky, among others. Ayers, in turn, supported Obama’s effort to enter electoral politics as part of the “long march” tactics favored by Bill Ayers after the failed effort to stoke a “revolution” through violence and terror. There is also evidence that Ayers, and his allies in the education reform movement, continue to influence education policy of the President. It is no surprise that the Obama campaign, including its media team at The New York Times, has done everything it can to bury this story.

As the implications of Mitt Romney’s nomination of Paul Ryan sink in, surely one factor must have been overlooked by his team: the political calculus of American workers. Apparently his team drew the wrong lesson from the recent Wisconsin experience.

Recall that in Wisconsin the Obama team and the AFL-CIO thought they could coopt a grass roots movement by Wisconsin workers to defend their unions and turn it into an arm of the flagging Obama campaign. They overreached and alienated the center by trying to recall a duly elected Governor in mid-term while alienating the left by re-running a boring candidate who had not beaten Governor Walker the first time around.

The defeat in the recall sent a shock wave of demoralization through labor not just in Wisconsin but nationally because on the same day voters in San Diego and San Jose voted to cut pension benefits for public sector workers.

The effect was to knock the last puff of wind out of the Obama campaign and the result was small crowds and a tough time in fundraising for the President. Obama’s response was to go negative with attacks on Romney’s taxes and experience running Bain Capital. These certainly had an impact but would not likely have lasted as they lacked real depth.

In the face of these attacks Romney panicked and walked off a cliff.

Had he had the confidence to rely on his own instincts, the natural pick for Romney would have been Marco Rubio. Rubio’s life story should have fit easily the “city on a hill” vision that the Mormon Romney ought to have naturally gravitated towards. Rubio would have also been a home run with the conservative base.

Rubio sends the message that the American Dream for immigrants is alive and well. His nomination would have sent a subtle but clearly optimistic economic message as well. This would have clashed with the listlessness of Obama’s efforts to deal with the economic malaise.

It would have put a Jimmy Carter gloss over Obama and allowed Romney to claim the Reagan mantle, if not explicitly then implicitly. That worked for Reagan because it created a sense of hope for American workers, however odd that may seem in the wake of Reagan’s attack on unions like the air controllers.

Thus, perhaps most critically, a Rubio pick would have avoided a senseless head on battle with labor and the beneficiaries of our social safety net, such as it is, in the heart of a crisis of demand in the macroeconomy.

Instead, likely pressured by his financial backers freaking out over the polls, Romney turned 180 degrees to the right not 90. In picking Ryan and not Rubio he is now committed to taking the Wisconsin recall story national. It’s a direct attack on the public sector and the unions that people like Ryan and his fellow Ayn Randians think are the source of all evil in modern society.

This is coupled with an attack on the client base of public employees: medicare and medicaid patients, welfare and early childhood education benefits recipients. These are the beneficiaries of the “new property,” as legal scholar Charles Reich famously called it, a mainstay of American society for a half century.

Ryan represents that wing of capitalism that responds to economic crisis by repeating in one way or another the infamous advice of Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon: ”liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”

That was in 1929. We all know what happened next. Keynes warned the Mellons of the world: you can cut high labor costs (known as the “rigidity of wages”) if you want and there is a model available, actually two models – one is called Stalinism and the other is Fascism. Take your pick if you think you can impose one of those systems in England or the US.

Keynes offered an alternative – the deft use of public finance, the bond markets and the tax structure to avoid economic collapse, instead of authoritarianism to revive capitalism.

We are all Keynesians now, Nixon once quipped and no one ran on austerity again until, well, Jimmy Carter. And we all know what happened to him.

Instead of Reaganizing the campaign, Romney has insisted on Carterizing it. He has thrown his lot in with the same slash and burn milieu.

In doing so, he leaves behind his comfort zone developed while growing up in a Michigan dominated by the UAW and by winning the governship of a liberal pro-labor Massachusetts.

He gives Obama a natural target and instead of letting the labor movement and other constituencies of the Democratic Party drift off during the campaign sidelined emotionally by the Wisconsin defeat, he has blown a loud horn in their ears.

He may soon realize he would have been better off letting sleeping dogs lie.