By Barry Grey, Senior Political Observer, WSWS
18 April 2011

C. Levin

The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a voluminous report last Wednesday on the Wall Street crash of 2008 that documents the fraud and criminality that pervade the entire financial system and its relations with the government.

The 650-page report is the outcome of a two-year investigation that involved over 150 interviews and depositions as well as the examination of subpoenaed emails and internal documents of major banks, government regulatory agencies and credit rating firms. The report, entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” establishes that the financial crash and ensuing recession were the result of systemic fraud and deception on the part of the mortgage lenders and banks, carried out with the collusion of the credit rating corporations and the complicity of the government and its bank regulatory agencies.

The World Socialist Web Site will analyze the contents of this important document in detail in the coming days. However, its basic thrust is clear. As the executive summary states: “The investigation found that the crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high-risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”

At a press conference Wednesday and in subsequent interviews, Senator Carl Levin (Democrat from Michigan), the chairman of the subcommittee, was even more explicit. “Using emails, memos and other internal documents,” he said, “this report tells the inside story of an economic assault that cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes, while wiping out investors, good businesses and markets. High-risk lending, regulatory failures, inflated credit ratings and Wall Street firms engaging in massive conflicts of interest contaminated the US financial system with toxic mortgages and undermined public trust in US markets.

“Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high-risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”

Levin went on to say that the investigation had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.” He told the New York Times: “The overwhelming evidence is that those institutions deceived their clients and deceived the public, and they were aided and abetted by deferential regulators and credit ratings agencies who had conflicts of interest.”

The report is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different contributor to the network of fraud and abuse: the mortgage lenders, the regulators, the credit rating firms and the Wall Street investment banks. The first section takes Washington Mutual (WaMu) as its case history, detailing the predatory and deceptive lending practices and accounting and reporting subterfuges that led, following the implosion of the subprime mortgage market, to the bank’s collapse and takeover by JPMorgan Chase in September of 2008.

The second examines the corrupt role of the federal Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), which oversaw three of the biggest financial failures in US history—Washington Mutual, IndyMac and Countrywide Financial. “Over a five-year period from 2004 to 2008,” the report states, “OTS identified over 500 serious deficiencies at WaMu, yet failed to take action to force the bank to improve its lending operations and even impeded oversight by the bank’s backup regulator, the FDIC.”

The third section documents the systematic manner in which the rating firms Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s gave top credit ratings to collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other complex securities backed by subprime and other toxic mortgages, enabling the banks to make billions of dollars by palming off these junk securities as top-grade investments. In return, the rating companies raked in huge profits for their services.

As the report states: “Credit rating agencies were paid by Wall Street firms that sought their ratings and profited from the financial products being rated… The ratings agencies weakened their standards as each competed to provide the most favorable rating to win business and greater market share. The result was a race to the bottom.”

The final section examines the fraud and deception perpetrated by the major investment banks as they profited first from the inflation of the US housing market and then from its implosion. It takes as its examples Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. Goldman began betting heavily in 2007 that the housing market would collapse, packaging and selling subprime mortgage-backed CDOs even as it secretly bet that the same securities would plummet in value.

The report cites emails by Deutsche Bank’s top global CDO trader, Gregg Lippman, calling risky mortgage securities marketed by the bank “crap” and “pigs” and the bank’s operations a “CDO machine,” which he characterized as a “Ponzi scheme.”

The document points to the central role of the big Wall Street banks in promulgating the fraud, stating: “Investment banks were the driving force behind the structured finance products that provided a steady stream of funding for lenders originating high-risk, poor-quality loans and that magnified risk throughout the US financial system. The investment banks that engineered, sold, traded and profited from mortgage-related structured finance products were a major cause of the financial crisis.”

The overall picture is one of criminality on the part of the entire financial establishment that, with all levels of government serving as its co-conspirator, systematically looted the economy in order to further enrich itself. The result is a social tragedy for tens of millions of people in the US and many millions more around the world. And yet, the result of this historic crime is that the bankers and speculators are richer and more powerful than ever.

Not a single senior executive at a major US bank, hedge fund, mortgage firm or insurance company has gone to jail. Not one has even been prosecuted.

There is every indication that none will be criminally indicted in the future. As with the similarly damning report released in January by the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Senate report has been largely buried by the mass media. It was reported perfunctorily on the inside pages of some of the major newspapers and barely mentioned by the broadcast and cable networks, and then dropped.

One day after the release of the Senate report, the New York Times published a long article on the failure to prosecute any of the Wall Street criminals. It recounted a private meeting between the then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (now Obama’s treasury secretary) Timothy Geithner and then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in October 2008 at which Geithner urged Cuomo to back off on investigations of the banks and rating agencies.

The article contrasted the absence of criminal charges against bankers today with the aftermath of the savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s, when government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors and more than 800 bank officials went to jail. It noted the precipitous decline in referrals by bank regulators to the FBI, from 1,837 cases in 1995 to 75 in 2006. Over the ensuing four years, at the height of the financial crisis, an average of only 72 a year have been for criminal prosecution.

The Office of Thrift Supervision has not referred a single case to the Justice Department since 2000, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a unit of the Treasury Department, has referred only three in the last decade.

How is this to be explained? Why are Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, the former CEO of Washington Mutual, Kerry Killinger, as well as Treasury Secretary Geithner and his predecessor, Henry Paulson (previously CEO of Goldman), not in prison?

Such financial manipulators are being shielded while workers are being stripped of their jobs, wages, homes and basic social services to pay for the debts resulting from the transfer of trillions in public funds to the banks. Collective resistance to this attack is being criminalized in the form of anti-strike laws, imposing fines and jail terms for workers who fight back.

One reason for the absence of prosecutions is the power of the individuals involved, all of whom wield immense influence over politicians, the media and the legal system. But it goes deeper than the status of individuals, just as the sordid state of affairs as a whole arises not from individual greed, but rather from a profound crisis of the entire system.

The criminalization of the American ruling class is the outcome of more than three decades in which the accumulation of wealth by the corporate-financial elite has become increasingly separated from real production. In its pursuit of profit, the ruling class has dismantled huge sections of industry and turned ever more decisively to financial manipulation and speculation.

The ascendancy of the most parasitic sections of the capitalist class has been accompanied by a sharp decline in the living standards of the working class. The richest and most powerful layers have acquired staggering levels of wealth by plundering society.

The ruling class itself senses that to prosecute any of the leading figures in the defrauding of the American people (and the rest of humankind) would rapidly expose the criminality of the entire system. It would mean putting the capitalist system itself on trial.

Barry Grey often examines the political situation in the US and the world for the World Socialist Web Site.

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By Ralph Nader – Apr 27, 2011

Bloomberg Opinion

The wave of workers protests may soon abate, leaving—as in Egypt—the system basically untouched.

The stars are aligned for Barack Obama’s re-election in November 2012. He won’t join Jimmy Carter to be the second Democrat in 120 years to lose a second term.

Five things are playing in Obama’s favor.

First, the Republicans — driven by their most conservative members in Congress — will face a primary with many candidates who will advance harsh ideological positions. Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump and others might as well be on the Democratic National Committee payroll. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s reverse Robin Hood plan to cut more than $6 trillion in spending over a decade will provide the outrage, stoked by a sitting president possessed of verbal discipline.

The field of Republican weaklings is already getting smaller. This week, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour dropped out of the race for the presidency.

Second, the Republican governors’ attacks on unions are turning off the swing voters and Reagan Democrats in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Imagine the voter reaction if millions of workers lose their right to collective bargaining, and the impact that cuts in benefits and wages will have on their lives.

Democratic governors, such as Jerry Brown of California, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew Cuomo of New York, are cutting — but not taking away — workers’ bargaining rights. This is a politically useful contrast for Obama. Reagan Democrats, who have won many elections for the Republicans, are a big plus for Obama in the contested states.

No Challenge

Third, no candidates are emerging to challenge Obama in the primaries. A discussion of Obama’s forgotten campaign promises and record would have public support among Democrats. Even so, the liberal base has nowhere to go to send a message about war, free-trade agreements, raising the minimum wage or union membership.

Nor does a third party or independent candidacy pose a threat, given the winner-take-all, two-party system.

Fourth, Obama has neutered much of the big corporate lobby’s zeal to defeat him. He decided from the beginning not to prosecute executives from Wall Street banking, brokerage and rating firms. Multinational companies are pleased with Obama’s position on trade, on not disturbing the many corporate subsidies, handouts and giveaways, such as the corn-ethanol subsidy.

Shelters for Wealthy

By 2014, Obamacare will deliver some 30 million subsidized customers to health-insurance companies. The auto industry is forever grateful for its bailout. Obama hasn’t moved on corporate-tax reform, tax shelters for the wealthy, or the preferential capital-gains tax treatment on the 20 percent service fees of hedge fund managers. Don’t forget last December when Obama agreed to extended tax cuts for the rich while the budget deficit gets larger.

The military-industrial complex about which President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address 50 years ago, is still uncontrollable, leading departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates to express serious concerns. Obama has even surprised George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and his cohort of neocons, who can scarcely believe how militarily aggressive Obama has been on just about every move that liberals used to call impeachable offenses by former President George W. Bush.

Big Business

Then there’s Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric Co., who can attest to Obama’s outreach to big business. GE Capital was bailed out. The company effectively paid no federal income taxes on $14.2 billion in 2010 profit and received a $3.2 billion benefit. Immelt got a $15.5 million pay raise. And in January, Obama appointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while letting him stay as head of a company receiving many government contracts and having regulation problems with the federal authorities. The corporate state doesn’t get much better than that.

Fifth, since the Republicans have little to offer by way of creating jobs, Obama need only show improvement in macroeconomic indicators, as Ronald Reagan did in 1983-1984, and proceed to showcase all the tax breaks he has signed into law for big and small businesses. Poor Americans who continue to bear the brunt of the recession are hardly going to vote Republican. It will be easy for Obama, with his oratorical skills, to paint the Republican-controlled House of Representatives as obstructionist, especially as he develops an economic plan for his second term.

Black Swans

There remain the Black Swans, events that defy prediction as those in Japan and the Middle East have shown. Handling them with firmness and calmness from the White House is what most people expect of a president. Obama will surely not repeat Bush’s mistakes after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Obama is averse to conflict with corporate power and disarmingly expedient in compromising with Republicans, leaving the latter to argue largely among themselves. The political duopoly lets the tactical Obama use the Bully Pulpit to his political advantage, even if his principles perish. Obama can look forward to four more years in 2012.

(Ralph Nader is the founder of Public Citizen and author of the book “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the author of this column: Ralph Nader at info@nader.org

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Looking for answers to the flood of excuses offered for the betrayals and failures of the Obama presidency. We offer our gentle readers this handy list of ten of the most frequently encountered excuses for the misfeasance, malfeasance, non-feasance and disappointments of the Obama presidency.

One of America’s top radical Black intellectuals and activists demolishes the carefully constructed image of Obama as a champion of popular interests.

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon | 04/27/2011

QUICK ANSWER: This excuse supposes Barack Obama really is dedicated to undoing the horrible damage of the Bush-Cheney crime wave. There is no evidence of this. You have to look mighty long and hard to find any Bush era crime that Obama has reversed. But you can find plenty of Bush era crimes and atrocities President Obama has doubled down on.

Whatever “doing the best he can means, it does not include undoing the Bush-Cheney crime wave.

QUICK ANSWER: Like excuses 7 and 8, this one is designed to deflect blame not just from the president, but from Democrats in Congress. The president and his party passed their 2009 health care bill, which was really a bailout of health insurance companies through the Senate with a simple majority. Congressional Democrats can sweep aside the super majority rule any time they choose. They choose not to. But the excuse is too valuable to lose.

EXCUSE NUMBER 2: “Only the most naïve souls among us believe a president can or should work for justice at home and peace abroad. Wise up. Do for self, and be content with the symbolic value of a pretty brown family in that big White House.

QUICK ANSWER: This excuse is based on an apocryphal tale about a 1940s meeting between black socialist and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the first lady and President Franklin Roosevelt. After hearing a litany of black demands, Roosevelt is supposed to have said he agreed with everything Randolph told him, but that he must compel the president to do those worthy things.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA, where he is a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party, and one of the principals of a technology and consulting firm. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford | 04/27/2011

“Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”

In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has presented us with an opportunity to reignite the debate over the meaning of Black self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle that effectively ended when the Black Freedom Movement became no longer worthy of the name. Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is largely an attempt to render useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. Essential terms such as “self-determination,” “Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and “empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and misused in order to portray the great Black nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a “race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.

This article does not address the complaints of those angered by Marable’s insistence that Malcolm X had a youthful homosexual relationship with an affluent white man, although it is shocking that Marable would throw this in the mix based on wholly inferential evidence and the author’s own psychological speculations. Our overarching concern is that Malcolm’s politics have been distorted by often clumsy, sometimes clever manipulation of the language of struggle, so that the politics of today’s left-reformers and Obama supporters, like Marable, appear vindicated.

Marable’s interventions in Malcolm’s mental processes begin in earnest on page 285, in the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” chapter. It is early 1964, and Malcolm is contemplating a final break with the Nation of Islam. Marable takes over as the Black icon’s muse, deconstructing Black Muslim theological doctrine, as he speculates Malcolm must have struggled to do, and concluding that “a new religious remapping of the world based on orthodox Islam would not necessarily stigmatize or isolate the United States because of its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Instead of a bloody jihad, a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution.”

“Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody.”

While Malcolm was certainly questioning the catechism of inevitable, white man-scorching, Allah-directed Armageddon, it is another thing entirely to have Malcolm pondering a “bloodless revolution” in America. Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody, and he was speaking in secular, not religious, terms. His best-known speech on the subject is “Message to the Grassroots,” October 10, 1963 [7].

Malcolm never did accept the notion of revolution as bloodless, nor did he recognize the fight against segregated public accommodations as revolutionary. But Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice. This is William Styron-style biography, as Morgan State University’s Dr. Jared Ball has suggested, with Malcolm forced to play Styron’s Nat Turner.

By 1964 Malcolm had made a strategic decision to support Black integrationist efforts, at least rhetorically, but there is nothing that leads us to think that integration had become his end-goal, or that he believed integration was revolutionary. He had decided to become part of the broad “movement,” in order to both influence and benefit from it. Marable would have us believe (page 298) that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations, or that he thought voting equals or leads to African American self-determination –some very faulty logic. Revolutionary Marxists have also seen the value in electoral politics at certain junctures, but that didn’t mean they stopped preparing for the forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marable tells us that Malcolm’s movement activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.”

“Marable would have us believe that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations.”

The clear inference is that Malcolm was wilting in his desire to wipe “the existing system” off the map. What existing system does Marable refer to, precisely? White supremacy? Capitalism? Bourgeois electoral pay-for-play democracy? Marable keeps Malcolm’s mind vague and cloudy, although in his actual historical voice the “evolving” Malcolm hates capitalism and U.S. imperialism more intensely than did the “old,” Nation Of Islam Malcolm. Marable also introduces his trick word “empowered,” which he will use repeatedly in the book to confuse, rather than clarify. Blacks “could someday become empowered within the existing system” – to do what? To determine their collective destinies? To defy white majorities? To push aside the rule of capital? Marable tries to cage Malcolm, while assuring us that the revolutionary Black nationalist was “tentatively” becoming a liberal reformer.

What kind of violence was Malcolm rejecting? Certainly, not defensive violence. And Malcolm had never publicly urged Blacks to commit unprovoked aggressions against whites. The purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of non-volatility, which we are expected to associate with political moderation: reform.

Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become “race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 1,500 people, “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-America, nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end – respect as a human being.” Malcolm went on the say: “Unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated that. (wink)

“Obamites cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are.”

Three days before he was assassinated, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has the vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm had “made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago….” There is no rational basis for Marable’s amazing interpretation, other than he thought it moved his political story line on Malcolm’s evolution (or race-neutralization) forward.

The opposite of race-neutral, Malcolm lived and died a Race-Man, meaning simply that he put the Race first. As he wrote to an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was disappointed that Malcolm was so decidedly non-race-neutral, “As a black American, I do feel that my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” (page 368)

In the final “Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision” chapter, Marable speaks for himself – in the process confirming that he has been sneaking his own words, thoughts and politics into Malcolm’s head for four hundred pages. The Columbia University professor of African American Studies claims to know what Malcolm really, really wanted: “What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States – not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.”

Although the description is so vague, wishy-washy and – damnit!! – so soft and noncommittal as to bear no resemblance to any incarnation or developmental stage of Malcolm X, it fits the self-image of Manning Marable and his circle perfectly. They are the left Black Obamites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power. Such people cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are, and are eager to graft their own vacillations and corruptions onto others, by rhetorical hook or literary crook.

If this assessment seems harsh, it is certainly not as outrageous as Marable’s gall in superimposing his politics on Malcolm X. Even when Marable speaks in his own voice, he manages to intimate that Malcolm would agree with him. “If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past,” wrote Marable on page 486, “Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be ‘post-racial.’”

“Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power.”

Marable appears to think these are heavy questions, but they’re actually products of an unfocused, but deeply biased, mind. First of all, legal segregation was defeated before Malcolm’s death, and no sane person at the time thought it would be brought back. Malcolm had time to find out what life was like for Black southerners without state-sanctioned Jim Crow. Marable’s question is badly put. If he means, What would Malcolm think about today’s levels of segregation, then the answer would be that the northern cities would remain very familiar to him in their racial composition, and are in fact blacker than in Malcolm’s day – which might tend to indicate to Malcolm that self-determination was an even more critical concern.

Still, Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power. But self-determination, as a foundational principle of relations among peoples, requires no redefinition. Marable understands it as “the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures,” and he agrees that Malcolm “never abandoned” the “ideal.” Why then, would Malcolm in 2011 have to “redefine” self-determination and the “meaning of black power?” Because the political environment “appeared to many to be post-racial?” Who is it that thinks the environment appears post-racial? If Marable is speaking of white people, or any non-African American people, their opinions cannot be cause for “redefinition” of another people’s right. If he meant that Black people in the mass believe we live in a post-racial nation, he was a damn fool. But even if such Black folks existed, that would not require a redefinition of self-determination. African Americans would simply “determine” that they love post-racialism and want to do nothing to change it, as is their self-determinationist right.

Marable risks making himself look stupid simply to make the intended point that Malcolm and his Black Nationalism and self-determination talk are passé and should be dismissed except as historical artifacts. For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists. This is the purpose put to Malcolm by Peniel Joseph [8], the Tufts University professor of history and author of Dark Days, Bright Nights [9]: From Black Power to Barack Obama, which attempts to draw a straight-line historical connection between Malcolm X and the corporate politician in the White House.

“For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists.”

Manning Marable was up to the same trick. “Given the election of Barack Obama,” Marable writes on page 486, “it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens.” He does not explain why Black destinies have changed just because a Black Democrat who raised more corporate money than the Republican won a presidential election. How did that electoral fact entwine Black/white destinies in ways that did not previously exist? How were the Black masses empowered by Obama’s victory, and if they were somehow empowered, why would that draw them closer to whites?

It would have been better for Marable to have left out his last chapter of Reflections – it reflected badly on his powers of reasoning.

Finally, Marable attempts to create artificial space between Malcolm X and his direct political progeny, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:

“Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s.”

It is nearly impossible to conceive of a Black Panther Party had there not been a Malcolm X. Marable insults a generation of Blacks that came into political consciousness in the Sixties – a cohort to which he chronologically belonged. He substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing called forth and virtually sculpted the youthful Party that debuted in the year following his death. Marable projects Malcolm as if he would be a stranger to the Panthers, with whom he would have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s life tells us it is far more likely that the emergence of a militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement that spoke his language – because they learned it largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take the struggle to an even “higher level.”

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [10].

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[7] http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1145
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