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 Ford was the first person to call attention to Cory Booker’s astonishing rise to prominence. In Booker’s first campaign for mayor of Newark, New Jersey it was Ford who revealed his ties to right-wing organizations such as the Manhattan Institute and the Bradley Foundation. His reporting was so good that Booker’s opponent distributed the Black Commentator articles which exposed the effort to groom a Black politician willing to carry out austerity, school privatization, and other right-wing initiatives that would ordinarily be anathema to Black voters.
Booker was not the only member of what Black Agenda Report referred
to as the “Black misleadership class.” The politicians and others
thought of as leaders are not independent actors, instead they are given
money, positions, and some degree of access to the world of the elites
in order to influence Black people and get buy-in for the neo-liberal
consensus. Glen Ford had a keen eye for their activities, and as a
result Black Agenda Report did not succumb to the imperative to elevate and protect the Black face in a high place.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in his coverage of Barack Obama’s campaign and his presidential administration. While other Black leftists changed their political religion in the wake of Obama’s 2008 success, Glen Ford consistently maintained an independent political stance. He called Obama and Hillary Clinton “political twins” who would offer up the same policies which had so badly failed Black people.
Ford saw what was coming when he described Obama’s ascendancy as the favorite of the 1 percent and marketing which made him appear to be progressive, as “Goldman Sachs and the anti-war movement being on the same page.” Ford regularly exposed the corrupting influence that Obama’s presidency had on Black Americans and their long history of radical politics.
-- Margaret Kimberley, "Glen Ford's Irreplaceable Journalism" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).