Sprawling Homeless Camps -- Modern 'Hoovervilles' -- Vex California

[Dulcinea]

Charles Gibson pushes a shopping cart toward his soggy tent on a tenuous patch of a grassy drainage ditch along a bike trail in Santa Rosa, Calif. He's one of nearly 200 people living in a sprawling camp here that has sprung up along a popular recreation corridor. It's a community, Gibson says, that often feels caught between opposing forces who aren't always listening.

"I mean, they [local officials] want us to be able to govern ourselves, but they are not giving us the tools we need," Gibson says. "They don't want you hiding, but they don't want you in their face, you know?"

Across California and other parts of the country, these growing homeless encampments evoke shantytown "Hoovervilles," where hundreds of thousands of destitute Americans lived during the Great Depression. The encampments are frustrating residents, raising health and safety fears and fueling a debate over poverty and inequality in one of the nation's wealthiest states.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795439405/sprawling-homeless-camps-modern-hoovervilles-vex-california

[Newest Reality]

1. A depression...

So, the Simulation we call America has become so precise and effective that it can manage increasing numbers of people bleeding out of the mainstream into abject like that and still proclaim a booming economy along side a muted, de facto Depression.

Will it be so resilient and insulated that those who benefit from the "boom" greatly will be able to continue accruing more wealth while vast numbers of people succumb to abject poverty with no chance of a recovery or an escape route? What do we call that, necessary economic collateral damage? Is it proof that capitalism actually requires this kind of poverty to function normally as per vulture capitalism that is always poised to profit from poverty and pick the bones of those on the brink of economic devastation clean until they lay in neat piles, shiny white and ready to be recycled for the greater purpose of an oligarchy?

In that case, the Second Great Depression will, like our penchant for war, be an ongoing debacle that simply swallows and slowly kills the unwanted dregs of the society who are not considered worthy or fit to enter the Shrines of the Booming, bedecked with platinum, gold and massive diamonds. Perhaps America now has its solution to destitution, poverty and homelessness and another purpose for the ensuing authoritarian dictator is perhaps, to cleanup the mess they leave and sweep them them out of the way of those for whom this country is made? The worthy shall prevail, in that case. The useless eaters will be allowed to die off quickly and fade away in the Simulation.

[BlueWI]

2. These stories don't get enough traction.

I'm visiting California now, as I have done occasionally for decades. Tent cities are a relatively recent and permanent addition to the landscape. To my eyes, the explosion goes back at least to the early 2000s. Sad to see.