News & Views

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.

“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.

Since 1963 West Papua, a land whose rich natural resources are being exploited by multi-national corporations, has been occupied by the Indonesian armed forces. The people of West Papua have been subjected to gross human rights violations including rape, torture, cultural genocide, murder and massacre.

Efforts to “dirty transfer” uncleaned shipyard parcels as proposed in the conceptual plan and the June 2008 ballot measure represent a direct violation of a city ordinance.

Despite Lennar’s claims that grading was completed in September in 2007, community air monitors continue to document elevations in asbestos levels.

The Common Ground Health Clinic arose in the New Orleans west bank community of Algiers above the apocalyptic flood waters in the fall of ‘05. The founders' visions, fueled by endorphins of kindness and adrenalin of desperation, were a beautiful thing to behold.

Now that we know how that negligence has endangered an upscale white neighborhood in Florida, will anyone in Hunters Point stand up in Lennar’s defense?

On Oct. 15, Daniel Landry, a long-time resident of the Fillmore’s Martin Luther King-Marcus Garvey Co-op, sent a letter to the co-op’s management agent, John Stewart Co., requesting information that, according to the co-op’s by-laws, all shareholders have a right to see. This information included minutes from board meetings and details of the contract that the King Garvey Co-op has with John Stewart Co. Little did he know the turmoil that would follow.

George D. Porter dedicated his career to the International Longshoremen’s Workers Union Local 34. He died in the care of his loving family on the morning of Feb. 19, 1992. His immediate cause of death was dehydration. His final cause of death was pulmonary asbestosis.

This is to let you know how thoroughly disgusted I was by the Board of Supervisors' vote today to plant three more fossil fuel power plants - natural gas turbine combustion power plants - in Bayview Hunters Point.

The disturbing trend of the public display of nooses that has gained momentum since the events in Jena, Louisiana, continues. The latest incident occurred on Tuesday, Nov. 5, at a worksite in San Jose, California.

On Wednesday, Oct. 31, a coalition of Black and Brown groups and individuals gathered at City Hall to express their opposition to San Francisco’s gang injunctions. Several themes emerged from those who addressed the crowd, including gentrification, racial profiling and the misuse of city money. During the course of the rally, it became clear that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, the political force behind the injunctions, has become an extremely unpopular figure in Bayview Hunters Point, the Mission and the Western Addition – neighborhoods in which the gang injunctions are now in place.

In Part 3 of this exclusive interview with Oakland Post Publisher Paul Cobb and Post Attorney Walter Riley, they discuss some of the tribulations that the newspaper was going through prior to the murder of Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, as well as what Paul told the police hours after Chauncey was murdered.