Glen Ford's Irreplaceable Journalism --- I put Glen Ford on the same level of journalism as I do Robert Parry. Ford, from the Marxist sense however.

I was very proud to write the preface to Glen Ford's book, The Black Agenda , which was published posthumously by OR Books. As we approach the first anniversary of Glen's passing, I endeavored to explain why his journalism was truly irreplaceable.

In the best sense of the word a journalist is someone who brings to the public sphere accurate, well sourced information, and rigorous analysis. Those individuals speak for the marginalized, who can’t speak for themselves, and they expose the privileged, who are always given opportunities for expression. They point out the faults of those deemed too authoritative to be questioned. If an outlet claims to write all the news that is fit to print or declares that democracy dies in darkness, their work should be given more scrutiny than credibility. The journalist should be truly independent and skeptical of official narratives. Glen Ford was such a person. His decades of work provide a blueprint for anyone who wants that word to have real meaning and integrity.

I began working with Glen Ford in 2003 when he was co-publisher of Black Commentator. At his urging I began writing there weekly, and we later co-founded Black Agenda Report with the late Bruce Dixon in 2006. In all of those years Glen was a mentor and a teacher. I saw him open up new worlds of information for thousands of people searching for what is often called alternative news. They are just searching for information that ought to be easily discovered, but is instead disappeared by media outlets and personalities who collude with corporate interests and with the state. Ford came to his career through an interesting set of life circumstances.

Glen Ford is irreplaceable not just because his writing was so sharp and so clear, but also because his politics were so clearly of the left. He was not a liberal, or a Democrat, or a progressive. He was a Marxist, and he brought that ideology to all that he did. In so doing he revealed important information that is regularly disregarded or disappeared. He also had a talent for making every issue understandable and making connections with the reality of people’s lives. When he spoke of the political duopoly, the Republicans and Democrats who provide political theater as they do the work of the ruling classes, no one was confused about what they were witnessing as large numbers lost their homes in the financial crash of 2008 or were forced to take low wage work or even “gig” work, the culmination of capitalist intent for everyone else in the world.

[blackagendareport.com]

{While the corporate media reported the story of Detroit’s bankruptcy with non-subtle narratives that the majority-Black city was badly governed, Glen was among the few who reported that banks pushed the city to financial ruin. He blamed the Black politicians who went along with derivative schemes which drove Detroit over the edge to complete insolvency. Michiganders had approved a referendum opposing the use of emergency financial managers who took control of cities and subjected them to brutal austerity measures such as cutting workers’ pensions. But a Republican governor ignored the will of the voters, and in the pages of Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford exposed the heist carried out by banks who pushed the city into bankruptcy and then were first in line to be paid.}

Glen had spent his career exposing the corruptness of capitalism and what he referred to as the black elite politician, including Obama, black lives matter, and the likes of politicians like John Lewis who betrayed every aspect of MLK's revolutionary era who became compliant to that capitalist system.

{Ford often said that Obama and the Democrats were not the lesser evil, they were just the more effective evil; effective at carrying out the will of the wealthy and the corporations and the military industrial complex while giving the appearance of opposing the people they in fact catered to.}

Ford's journalism should be highlighted for reading throughout the US, not suppressed like it is. The African American community must start recognizing how they are deceptively herded into the democratic party against their own interest! Including the likes of fake socialist like Sanders and the "squad" or any claiming to be progressive. In which their end game is also to benefit the ruling class.

{We rely on documented history passed on by the relentless truth tellers. That is what Glen Ford did. He told the truth about the history of the Thanksgiving holiday, segregation, imperialism, and billionaire rule. We rely on real journalists to help us understand the world. No one did that better than Glen Ford.}

Glen Ford: Clarence Thomas, the “Anti-Black,” 2007

Glen Ford’s biographical essay on Clarence Thomas is as devastating now as it was when it was first written in 2007. But it is perhaps more disturbingly relevant fifteen years later, given Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center, and as Thomas’s wife, Donald Trump supporter Virginia “Ginny” Thomas, attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Ford eviscerates Thomas – “the most hated Black Man in Black America” – showing him to be a cruel, vengeful figure, a liar who has lost track of his own lies, a nightmarish, malignant, and poisonous byproduct of affirmative action whose unhinged hatred of Black people is mirrored by his unembarrassed and slavish love for his white masters. Ford writes that “...this essay is about the American pathology that creates a freak like Clarence Thomas, from which tragedy a host of judicial abominations has flowed.” “The stream of bile, Ford warned us, “may continue another 30 or more years.”

To mark the one-year anniversary of Ford’s death, we reprint his remarkable, uncompromising analysis of Thomas below. It is also a reminder of how great a writer he was, and how great a loss he is to the movement. We miss you, brother.

[blackagendareport.com]

Clarence Thomas is a deeply troubled man - a grotesquely twisted, “Down Home”-grown Black personality at war with the demons of his dark-skinned, dirt poor youth. Although Thomas has accumulated many “enemies” - earned and imagined - since his entrance to the white world in the 10th grade in Savannah, Georgia, his core pathology is Black-directed - a trait so obvious it was immediately perceived by a succession of white Republican racists who rocketed him to the U.S. Supreme Court with obscene haste to become a hit-man against his own people.

Thomas is a perverse right-wing joke played on Blacks and, being of above average intelligence despite his mental illness, he knows it. But it is a knowledge he cannot endure, a burden that has made him a pathological liar, who blurts out contradictions so antithetical to each other that they cannot possibly coexist in the same brain without a constant roiling and crashing that puts him at flight from himself and all those who remind him of his now hopelessly entangled torments and tormentors.

If African Americans had our own insane asylum, Thomas would be welcomed in and cared for, with proper compassion for the sorely afflicted. But there are no such facilities available to treat a man who forgives whites for Jim Crow and every other aspect of past and present discrimination - indeed, embraces the most racist among them - but can never forgive Blacks for the way they treated him in Savannah, Georgia and the outlying shanty town of Pin Point.

Most often, like most crazy people, Clarence's utterances have no connection to his own circumstances. He doesn't know where he is, or what he has done. “There is nothing you can do to get past black skin,” Thomas told reporter Juan Williams, back in 1987. “I don't care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do - you'll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you'll never be seen as equal to whites.”

Unless, of course, you serve the interests of those whites you believe are in charge of your destiny. But that's too rational a thought to put in Thomas’ head; he just glides along on pure hatred of himself and his own. Thomas has been enabled in his crazed leap to the pinnacles of power by forces that are arrayed against the masses of all people, but especially African Americans. Clearly, this includes CBS Television, as evidenced by the recent 60 Minutes charade.

Possibly the most pathologically illuminating portion of the network PR job came at the end of the interview. Thomas, asked where he feels he is in life, responds: “I’m Home.” Home is what Clarence has been running from all along - although he can't escape the formative environment in which he sickened so early in life. He’s really in Purgatory, and trying to put the rest of us in Hell.