Some people say Barack Obama never would have been elected president without him. Others call him a flat-out terrorist. Regardless, William (Bill) Ayers has been polarizing public opinion for most of his adult life. Gather ‘round the laptop or iPod as host Jason Hartman interviews the famous and infamous Professor Ayers on episode #358 of The Creating Wealth Show.
As co-founder of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers first made news with his violent opposition to the Vietnam War. He refers to the organization as a communist revolutionary group, though thanks to their tactics of bombing public buildings in the 1960s and 1970s, many consider him to be nothing more than a garden variety terrorist. Ayers is now retired from his position as Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but stays busy writing extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise.
Ayers latest book is “Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident.”
In describing his political beliefs, Mr. Ayers says, “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist. Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. We have always been small ‘c’ communists in the sense that we were never in the Communist party and never Stalinists. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as early Marx.”
In This Episode:
– Why Ayers calls himself a radical
– Stop wasting money on wars and put it into schools
– What was the real goal of the Weather Underground?
– Why he was denied Emeritus status by the University of Chicago
– The truth about Martin Luther King’s path to socialism
– American style capitalism is a failed experiment
– And much more…
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