Yearly Archives: 2008

The longshoremen of the West Coast are demonstrating that it is possible to oppose the war-mongering corporate politicians and prevent them from dividing and conquering the movements of the workers and peoples.

The logic of the market leads to mass starvation.

Short term exposures to particles can, within hours or days, aggravate lung disease, cause asthma attacks and acute bronchitis and increase susceptibility to respiratory infections.

“More confrontational works tended to be ignored,” Azzi said. “But now institutions and collectors are a bit more comfortable looking back and taking note.”

As the struggle to defend Black-owned land in San Francisco has hit a fevered pitch in Bayview Hunters Point through the work of resident activists, popular support for Proposition F – the “Truly Affordable Housing Initiative” – and the Stop Lennar Action Movement, shareholding residents of Freedom West Homes are bracing for a similar fight in one of the last vestiges of affordable housing in the Fillmore/Western Addition. This article honors their requests for anonymity.

He stressed the need for people to buy property collectively and develop plans that would work as safety nets when people can’t afford to pay their mortgages.

As the foreclosure crisis worsens, the Federal Reserve Board (the Fed) is proposing rules to restrict abusive mortgage lending practices. While this is a good step, 32 California groups assert that not enough is being done to help working families and their neighborhoods, encouraging stronger rules to protect families from being sold loans they cannot afford.

Due to the toxicity of the land, Lennar is able to acquire land in poor areas, such as the Bayview, for next to nothing. Lennar then develops the area, building market value homes that current residents cannot afford, driving them out of their neighborhood.

I have a body of work that really looks at race relations and the dynamics of race – the pains, the problems and the frustrations between Black and white Amerikkkans – and in this one I thought that there was a possibility to look at perspective solutions.

We have all heard the tales about how racist Amerikkka is, but it is nothing like seeing it in interviews with the white beneficiaries.

It has often been said that prevention is the best medicine. But there are many obstacles in life which prevent this age-old truism from being put into practice – ignorance, laziness and something of an entirely different order – budget cuts.

Carpenters, community members, union organizers and human rights activists packed Hearing Room 263 at City Hall on Feb. 28 to testify to the Board of Supervisors in support of a lawsuit that 27 Black and Latino carpenters have filed against AIMCO (American Investment and Management Co.) for acts of sabotage, race-baiting and extortion at construction sites in Bayview Hunters Point. AIMCO was granted $73 million in revenue bond financing by the city to repair four subsidized housing complexes in Hunters Point – Bayview, Shoreview, All Hallows and LaSalle – even after the city had to sue the corporation in 2003 for damages it refused to repair.

Between the late 1860s and the 1920s, Black people were subjected to a form of ethnic cleansing that Hitler would later use as a precursor for the Holocaust.

“What Mayor Newsom, Lennar and its surrogates wanted me to do was leave the community exposed, and they hoped that this whole issue of their poisoning our babies and community would go with me.”

“We’re under domestic insurgency. If we don’t get it, it will get us.” – California Attorney General Jerry Brown, Anti-Gang Conference, Riverside, Calif., December 2007 “We’re mounting a coordinated, aggressive suppression strategy that targets the worst offenders and the most violent gangs. We’re converging local, state, federal and even international efforts … coming at them with everything we have.” – Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Feb. 8, 2007, press conference

The subprime mortgage crisis will cause African-Americans to experience wealth losses of between $71 billion and $122 billion over its duration.