In mid-September, I wrote about Barack Obama’s leadership of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and why it that experiment was a phenominal waste of taxpayer and foundation resources.
I say taxpayer resources, because the Annenberg funds were tax free, and the matching funds given to the Chicago Better Schools Foundation were tax free. Tax revenues for $110M were removed from the public treasury for failed ideas about reforming education. If most of that cash came from top tier earners at a 28% rate, then Obama’s experiement cost you and me $30M.
The records of what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge funded were hidden until just recently. It says that during his 7 years running that fund, Obama funded a number of questionable initiatives.
- In 2001, he had The Woods Fund of Chicago give $75k to ACORN.
- In 2001, the fund gave $6k to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ “for special purposes”
- The fund gave $60k to the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, which was founded and run by Bernardine Dohrn, the wife of 70s radical William Ayers.
- That year they gave $50k to the Small Schools Network, which was also founded by Ayers, and run by Michael Klonsky, a friend of Ayers’ and the former chairman of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), an offshoot of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society
- It gave $40,000 to the Arab American Action Network, which critics have accused of being anti-Semitic.
My concern is that Obama has a history of taking public funds to try questionable proposals, often with negligible or even onerous results. If he makes it to the Presidency, I hope we won’t see the same there, but I don’t believe he can change that pattern.
Is this a “better history”?
Background: FoxNews
Posted by OldGuy 