Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka told a year-end conference of the Black Is Back Coalition that “the US settler state is facing the most serious crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy” in the Great Depression. Betty Davis, of the Coalition’s Community Control of Schools Working Group, said: “The federal budget that comes down to New York City is the 23rd biggest budget in the world, but you don’t control that money and that’s why you are not having the same services as your white counterparts.”