By Sara Salimi
Glen Ford, a journalist and executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, says there isn’t.
The Black Male Initiative (BMI) program held an event Wednesday at the Nyumburu Cultural Center featuring Glen Ford and his lecture on the similarities between the United States’ two major political parties.
Ford built his lecture on the premise that there is no lesser evil in the United States government, and that the Republican and Democratic parties are both feeding into what he called a “corporate consensus.”
The corporate consensus involves all the ruling class members in government who agree on the general direction of public policy. Ford explained that following the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has been plagued with endless war and austerity that has been furthered by both the Democratic and Republican agendas.
“Our political environment is in such flux because the actual rulers feel a crisis of legitimacy and they want to reassert themselves, and so big things are coming down on us when the rulers feel this way,” Ford said.
He explained that following the 2016 elections, the ruling class, which he referred to as the two major political parties, faced a crisis of legitimacy focused on reasserting their own power in government to accomplish their goals.
Reestablishing the corporate center, Ford said, is about keeping the population under control through censorship and controlled political activity enforced by the police, intelligence agencies, and the incarceration regime. “They want to work their way out of the system they created,” Ford explained.
“That’s why corporate Democrats are only about diversity and social issues, and nothing that touches the basic structures of society. That means the continued weakening of working people’s power to demand higher wages as the rich become exponentially richer,” Ford said.
The solution Ford proposed was for people to intervene in the creation of this corporate center by organizing against it. After expressing his support for several minority groups facing similar hardships, Ford ended by expressing hope for the unification of blacks to counter the injustice facing them.
Miranda, a senior environmental science major, found the event helpful. “It’s always a good idea for students to come out and challenge the things they believe and look into other sides of the conversation,” she said.
Featured Photo Credit: Photo courtesy of Sara Karlovitch/ Bloc Editor
Sara Salimi is a senior multiplatform journalism major and can be reached at ssara.775@gmail.com.
