Ready to rumble

Occasionally, the doom and gloomers here at News Hits witness something that actually gives us hope.

Friday evening at Central United Methodist Church in downtown Detroit was one of those times. What we saw was a room full of people ready to fight.

Actually, most in the crowd have been engaged in the good fight for a long time now. What's changing are the conditions around them, with the attacks on working people and the poor gaining steam — from the efforts to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's plan to tax pensions and slash school funding at the same time he wants to cut taxes on businesses.

Complacency is a hard thing to shake. As long as the threat is to others instead of ourselves, a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to problems and go along with the program. But when it is your job that has been lost, or your home that is being foreclosed on, then the motivation to fight back becomes intense.

A lack of intensity wasn't an issue at the landmark church last week, where several dozen people attended a fundraising event for Vanessa Fluker, a local attorney who has long been focused on the fight to keep people from losing their homes to foreclosure.

Now, it might strike many as odd that any attorney is in need of funds. But Fluker's clients aren't typically the well-heeled. As she told a congressional committee not long ago, the majority of the people coming to her for help are the working poor, minorities and the elderly.

Fluker, in fact, twice testified before a congressional committee last year to help the lawmakers on Capitol Hill better understand the ongoing foreclosure crisis, and why their attempts to stem it aren't working.

Especially in this region. In 2010, metro Detroit had third highest foreclosure rate in the United States. A total of more than 43,000 homes in the region were taken from their owners by lenders, an increase of 19 percent over 2009.

Which makes people like Vanessa Fluker indispensable.

But now she is struggling to deal with a $12,200 penalty imposed on her by Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Robert Colombo (insert appropriate booing and hissing here).

A foreclosure case that Fluker took on was bouncing back and forth between district and circuit court as she fought to keep her client from becoming homeless. The client, who at first represented herself in court, faced eviction but continued to put her monthly mortgage payment into an escrow account as she disputed the terms of her loan. Colombo had already heard the case once, but it came before him again when Fluker found a new avenue to pursue. The Center for Community Justice and Advocacy, a nonprofit community organization based in Detroit, had filed a Fair Housing Act complaint against her client's lender, RBS Services. That complaint cited Fluker's client as an example of the bank's alleged discrimination.

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