Facing Foreclosure: Brooklyn Retiree on Verge of Losing Home as Subprime Lenders Target Cash-Poor Black Seniors

There was a time when Simeon Ferguson grew tomatoes and callaloo leaves in the garden behind his three-story brownstone in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the home he has owned since 1975. He would give out the excess harvest to friends and neighbors, according to his daughter, and cook up the rest. Ferguson, 86, is now retired, [...] Read more »

From the IndyBlog

National

• Labor Lobby Melee
  By Bennet Baumer, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Up to six busloads of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizers and members started a scrum inside the lobby of a hotel holding the Labor Notes Conference in Dearborn, Mich., on April 12.
• Obama’s Race Against Race
  By Nicolas Powers, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  A black man runs from a howling crowd. If he’s caught he’ll be torn apart. If he reaches sanctuary he’ll be loved. This ritual is the Sacred Lynching.
• A Hard Truth to Swallow
  By Ruth Kelton, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  An East Village resident discusses her struggle for health and well-being in a medical system that often neglects and over-medicates seniors
• Overmedicating Seniors: By the Numbers
  By Jessica Lee, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  While millions of Americans are unable to afford vitally important prescription drugs, many others find themselves dangerously overmedicated due to pill-pushing doctors and pharmaceutical companies.
• WEB EXCLUSIVE: An Interview with Bill Fletcher Jr.
  By Nicholas Powers, in the Apr 14, 2008 issue
  Bill Fletcher Jr. is one of the Left's intellectual elders. A long time union activist and former president of TransAfrica forum, Fletcher is a fixture at Leftist gatherings and his articles fill pages of internet. I first saw him at the Left Forum hand on chin, busily making notes for his presentation. We talked and kept in touch. Over the years, with each conversation I saw how his words make a clear line to the core of the question. As the 40th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr's assassination and the now mythic year of "68" approached, I interviewed him on the state of black radicalism.

Local

• Three NYPD Detectives Acquitted on All Counts in Bell Shooting
  By Indypendent Staff, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Three detectives were acquitted of all charges Friday in the 50-shot killing of an unarmed groom-to-be on his wedding day, a case that put the NYPD at the center of another dispute involving allegations of excessive firepower.
• Facing Foreclosure: Brooklyn Retiree on Verge of Losing Home as Subprime Lenders Target Cash-Poor Black Seniors
  By Joseph Huff-Hannon, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  In New York, the subprime crisis has also brought the racial disparity into stark relief. By the fall of 2007, one in four homeowners with subprime mortgages in the historically black neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant were in foreclosure, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. These northern Brooklyn communities have a subprime mortgage foreclosure rate almost four times the national average.
• Foreclosure Patterns: What is [not] Being Done
  By Chris Anderson, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Bloomberg backed banks in 2002; What other cities are doing; From New Deal to raw deal.
• Domestic Workers Demand Fair Labor Laws
  By Jessica Lee, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  It is estimated that more than 200,000 domestic workers are employed in New York state. Domestic workers say they are the “invisible backbone” of New York City’s economy, that without their work as nannies, caretakers and housekeepers, thousands of accountants, doctors, architects, bankers and those in the entertainment industry would be unable to work.
• Vacancy Reversal: Legislation Seeks to Ban Warehousing
  By Alex Kane, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  The borough of Manhattan alone, if warehoused buildings were put back in use, could house New York City’s entire homeless population.

Culture

• Discoverer Delusions: A Review of Pagans in the Promised Land
  By Jessica Lee, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  In a well-argued book, Shawnee/Lenape lawyer and scholar Steven T. Newcomb outlines how the doctrine of Christian discovery and dominion was used by European monarchs and colonists, and eventually the U.S. courts, to justify the taking of Native American land, through both physical and psychological warfare, and to refuse to grant complete Indian sovereignty today.
• Decoding Our Minds: An Interview with Steven T. Newcomb
  By Jessica Lee, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  The Indypendent’s Jessica Lee discusses current events with Shawnee/Lenape lawyer and scholar Steven T. Newcomb who’s new book, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, reveals how tales from the Old Testament provided justification for European occupation of North America and future U.S. Indian policy and property laws.
• In Your Face: Dread Scott “Welcome to America”
  By Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  “Welcome to America” is worth seeing not simply because of the controversy it has raised but because Scott has thoughtfully used art to push viewers to consider the “polarization, exploitation, and suffering” caused by the United States across the globe.
• Union Scrapper: A Review of The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor
  By Eleanor J. Bader, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Activist educator Les Leopold’s The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor solidly establishes union activist Tony Mazzocchi as a hero for our time.
• Luxury Slums: A Review of Planet of Slums and Evil Paradises
  By Matthew Wasserman, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  From Times Square’s transformation into Disneyland East and the gated housing complexes of Johannesburg to faux So-Cal suburbs in China and built-to-order private islands in Dubai, playgrounds of the privileged have been popping up at a dizzying rate across the globe.

International

• Indigenous Voices Demand Climate Justice
  By Jessica Lee, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  More than 2,500 delegates have gathered in New York from April 21 to May 2 for the Seventh Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to discuss not only how climate change is affecting indigenous populations from the Arctic to Oceania, but also to highlight that real solutions to the problem will come from these very communities.
• Drought Spurs Resource Wars
  By Ernest Waititu, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  In Ethiopia, water turns to sand as climate change takes hold. "What is happening in Africa today is a warning to the world," says one observer.
• Free-Market Food Follies
  By Raj Patel, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  The reason for the price rise is a perfect storm of high oil prices, an increasing demand for meat in developing countries, poor harvests, population growth, financial speculation and bio-fuels. But prices have fluctuated before. The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.
• World Briefs
  By Indypendent Staff, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Red Flag on Mount Everest; "Bishop of the Poor" Elected President in Paraguay; Ecuador Prez Purges CIA-Connected Security Forces; Canadian Logging Threatens Massive Release of Carbon; Gut Check
• Power Politics Trumps Democracy in U.S.-backed Ethiopia
  By Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville, in the Apr 14, 2008 issue
  Accounts of iron-fisted censorship emerge not only from the notoriously repressive regimes that often make the news such as North Korea, Burma or Iran. Just as often they come from the political darlings of the United States’ foreign policy; places like Pakistan, Egypt and more recently Ethiopia.

Film

• Sanctioned Evil: A Review of “Standard Operating Procedure”
  By Sam Alcoff, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  Iraq, the crime of our time, has made lawlessness a national pastime. The Democrats have taken impeachment off the table and no one else is looking to hand out arrest warrants anytime soon. Despite this prosecutorial vacuum, the documentary filmmakers of the world have been compiling the evidence and the latest is no other than Errol Morris.
• From Childhood War to Hip-Hop: A Review of “War Child”
  By Kenneth Crab, in the Apr 25, 2008 issue
  A must-see at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, "War Child" documents the unlikely, awe-inspiring odyssey of Sudanese hip-hop star and former child soldier Emmanuel Jal, who has translated his experience into a powerful advocacy of renaissance for his home country and a voice of redemption for the generation of ‘lost boys’ he became part of.
• From Lebanon’s Frontlines
  By Freddy Deknatel, in the Apr 14, 2008 issue
  The film accomplishes in 35 jarring minutes what hours of news coverage nearly two years ago did not: to convey the weight of civilian suffering in this war through the personal narrative of Salman herself, a mother trying to survive bombardment.
• Stop-Loss: The War Within
  By Sam Alcoff, in the Apr 14, 2008 issue
  If one wanted to argue Truffaut’s point that it is impossible to make an antiwar film, the first 10 minutes of Kimberly Peirce’s new film Stop-Loss would serve as fine fodder. Kinetic Iraqi alleyway battles (with rocket launchers!) are dutifully employed alongside earnest expressions of American soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.
• Grandma’s War: A review of “Alexandra”
  By Kenneth Crab, in the May 9, 2008 issue
  Alexandra directed by Alexander Sokurov Cinema Guild, 2007 Muted, blank colors give the universe of Alexandra an aura of fading immanence equivalent to the timeworn spirit of its title character, Alexandra Nikolaevna (opera icon Galina Vishnevskaya), whose large-as-life-itself presence envelops the three-day visit she pays her grandson Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), a captain stationed at an army [...]