Friday, March 27, 2009

Modern-Day Hoovervilles

The New York Times has an article and slideshow on the new shanty towns:

Photobucket

Tina Garland, an out-of-work truck driver, in the kitchen area of the tent she shares with her husband in Sacramento. Homeless enclaves have grown in places such as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla., but the situation in Sacramento has received extra attention following a visit from Oprah Winfrey.

Be sure to read the whole thing, here.

Many of the shanty-dwellers are in Fresno, where I lived from 1989 to 1992. Unemployment is there is generally twice the national average. That's why I don't think the notion of "Hoovervilles" is media propaganda. You get the "Grapes of Wrath" feeling living up there for a while, even during boom times.

18 comments:

Dave said...

If somebody doesn't jump up very soon and throw a big, hairy monkey wrench into the gears of the Marxist coup that is now well underway, Mrs. Garland and family are going to have a lot more company come next Christmas.

-Dave

happyfeet said...

By "Marxist coup" you mean the Obama Administration, don't you? How they want to use the recession as a fulcrum to redistribute wealth while creating a polity in which the majority of voters pay no income taxes at all. A Marxist coup. In our little country. Damn.

John said...

Hooverville? How about Obamaville?

Anonymous said...

Obamaville? How about the BarryO.

Anonymous said...

Barack-burgs or Obama-burbia.

Or Hope-and-Change-Villes.

Don't pin this on Hoover. The man has been dead a while, last I checked.

A Jacksonian said...

Incumbistanian Changevilles.

Soon everyone can afford to be helped just like this as we will all be equally poor, save for the Emirs of Incumbistan upon the shores of the Potomac.

Anonymous said...

Go to any construction site, most restaurants/fast food places in the US and see why these people can't find work!

Stop the hiring of illegals and our unemployment rate would drop dramatically.

Michael said...

Obamavilles.

Depression era misery will be a national phenomenon more and more under this idiot-tyrant and those who support him.

If ANY people in those tents are Dems who voted for the Monster-in-Chief they deserve everything they now have - and as many more years of it as he is in office.

They have only themselves to blame.

There should be no sympathy for them since they got what they asked for.

When the see the error of their ways, there will be hope for them. Hope and change baby!! Ha ha ha!

Anonymous said...

Not to add anything meaningful to the comment section, but since many of the people who end up living in the shantytowns will have been Obama supporter/voters; I believe we should call the places where Obamatons live "Obamatowns". I think it has a nice ring to it and puts the blame directly where it belongs.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps just 'refugee camps'?

Anonymous said...

O-Towns

Unknown said...

How about BOvilles? I bet they stink just like his ideas!

LonewackoDotCom said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
LonewackoDotCom said...

MattYglesias recently linked to the NYT article, and I sent his employer - a think tank closely linked to the BHO admin - an open letter describing how they could help get some of those described in the article back to work.

The person I sent it to won't be back until Monday, but if anyone else knows someone at CAP feel free to send them the link.

Brian Richard Allen said...

Obama's fascist corporatism is already costing my neighbor, Fred's, small business and extra 15-20% and Fred anticipates his costs and overheads will increase by at least another 50% again. But times are tough all around so he cannot raise his prices and charges.

After much deliberation, though, much of it spent pacing the employees' parking lot, Fred came to the realization that he had to lower his overhead by firing a bunch of folks. No small task for Fred as he and his wife and five sons have long thought of their several hundred employees and their families as extended family.

But once his descision was made, choosing which ones to fire was the easiest part of the deal. For while walking up and down the rows of cars in the staff lot Fred'd noticed that several scores of his workers' cars had OBAMA bumper stickers on them.

So he simply made note of who owned them and fired them all.

Reckoned they'd likely voted for "change" and hoped they'd appreciate he'd delivered it.

Way to go Fred!

Brian Richard Allen
Los Angeles CalifOZEROcated -- and the Far Abroad

Anonymous said...

Nibblin' on tofu
Can't find no real food.
Environmental wackos are banning it all.
My last job was taken
By an illegal alien
Now my home has canvas walls.

Wastin' my time here in an Obamaville.
Waiting for my slice of hope and change.
Some people claim that George Bush is to blame.
But I know...
It's big government's fault.

I don't know the reason
they all believed him
When Obama promised us the sun and the moon.
It must have been magic
But now it's turned tragic
And the media still doesn't have a clue.

Wastin' my time here in an Obamaville.
Waiting for my slice of hope and change.
Some people claim that George Bush is to blame.
But I know...
It's big government's fault.

Al Gore keeps warning
about global warning
He wants me to pay for the damage I've done.
With my tofu burrito
and my flaming hot nachos
I'll blow him a tune to keep him on the run.


Wastin' my time here in an Obamaville.
Waiting for my slice of hope and change.
Some people claim that George Bush is to blame.
But I know...
It's big government's fault.

Anonymous said...

Government may have had some blame. But what about jobs that have been increasingly going to other countries than our own? Corporate greed, looking for cheaper labor, thus increasing their profits. As the jobs went, so did the USA buying power. How can people with no jobs continue to buy goods and services from the corporates? The capitalism is broken here. We can't continue to make that wheel spin with the people out of work and the jobs going away from here. Shortsightedness has gotten us into trouble through greed by many corporations. Now corporations are asking to be kept afloat by the government, to make up for their greed. The government is falling for it too. Giving the big corporations money so they stay open. They are expecting a trickle down effect. Nonsense! How can the unemployed or under-employed go to a bank or dealership and say, loan me money so I can buy something.??? Where is the sense in that???

Why not try the trickle up effect? Give the citizen the bailout. We certainly can invest it better than the corporations. They will feel the money coming up through the pipelines. We advert the depression or at least make it less for awhile. If each citizen got $300,000- think of how many small businesses could happen and put people in jobs. That amount is nothing to corporate America, but a Whole lot of potentail to an average Joe earning $27,000 a year. Or a Joe earning nothing now.

Brian Richard Allen said...

"Anonymous" said that government may have had "some" blame.

How about all of it: Rheems of insane regulations requiring Billions of Dollars worth of corporate and lawyers hours to never quite understand nor be able to comply with, stand-over and shakedown tactics on behalf of mobbed-up unions and Earth-worshiping Pantheist environMental-nazi whackos --and almost the highest corporate taxes in the Free World?

The jobs that have been increasingly going to other countries than our own are not the consequence of greed looking for cheaper labor to increase profits. Rather, their shift offshore signals their (let's not forget, American!) owners' last desperate effort to escape being among the millions of bankrupts created by insane regulations and by the imposition of such ignoramusly-imposed strictures as those flogged about by the world's second-most-dangerous dullard, triple college drop-out Al-Fredo Goreleone the Gormless, the self-appointed promulgator and profiteer in-chief of the Goebbbels-warming fraud.

(The kowtowing to Saudi "royalty" mobbed-up fascistic "apostate" wahhabi, at present so squalidly squatting in and bemanuring our once white house, takes first prize in the Stupid Stakes -- although they're tied for "Most Evil 'American'")

Americans' buying power was and continues - horrendously - to be destroyed by the government's drunken-sailor spending on itself, on its squalid cronies and by its legions of permenantly parasitical politicians and bureaucrats. And by its cohort RICO-racketeering Federal Reserve counterfieters whose ongoing running of the printing presses and from thin air creation of credits has laid our beloved fraternal republic at the threshold of the Weimar Republic-like inflation we are about to experience and that will soon see chicken at $50.00 per pound!

"How can people with no jobs continue to buy goods and services ..., indeed!

But it ain't "the Capitalism" that "is broken here."

Nope!

It's the un-and-anti-American fascists in Washington DC, who are not themselves so much "broken" as they are either evil and/or are stupid and/or are both evil and stupid.

Beginning with the moronic mobbed-up "murtadd" muslim empty galabia, ol' O'Zero, it is they that continue to make that wheel spin with the people out of work and the jobs going away from here. It is by their design and not by shortsightedness they have gotten us into trouble through their hatred of all and any who love life and are free and in the pursuit of happiness!

The appearance of the big corporations being "kept afloat by the government," is but smoke and mirrors designed by fascistic government to fool the likes of you and me. While we, for instance, were being made to look at the payment by AIG of a few well-earned and well-desereved Dollars to the hard working men and women who owned those few Dollars, AIG's political activists sent more than One Hundred Billion US Taxpayer-owned Dollars to political cronies all over the world.
The government is falling for nothing!

You are.

The "big corporations" are being brought under government control while you are being sold the delusion there might ever be a "trickle-up" effect. Nonsense! How can the unemployed or under-employed ever provide the unemployed or under-employed a job? When was the last time you ever went to the "homeless" for a handout? Where is any evidence -- in all of Human history that bums can better invest than can the corporations?


And if every American -- and if you like even every criminal alien, dead person, felon, moron and crypto-fascist -- and every other member of the "Democratic" party's "base" -- got $300,000.00?


In three months from that date the government would have re-stolen about 65% of that amount -- and all of the rest would be in the hands of those who created it and who own it today! And would be put to the best possible use, by that group which represents America's -- and therefor the world's -- most innovative, creative, industrious, entrepreneurial and productive!


Who would, just like they already do, put their wealth and their intellect to the best of use and would create inumerable small businesses and put people in jobs. And would pay those who are worth it the $27,000.00 a year you talk of. And, if government would just stay the Hell away, would pay every one of those worth less than $27K whatever he was worth, too.


Which might be very handy to a Joe who is earning nothing now.

Cordially

Brian Richard Allen
Los Angeles CalifO'ZEROcated 90028 -- and the Far Abroad