Foreclosures up, tent cities spread

Despite talk of recovery and revival of the housing market, foreclosures are on the rise and getting worse as the unemployment crisis deepens. There were 360,000 foreclosures in July, a 7 percent increase over June and 32 percent above the year before. A record 13.6 percent of households are either in foreclosure or behind in their mortgage payments. More and more foreclosures are on prime mortgages of workers who have lost their jobs.

As workers lose their jobs, homelessness and tent cities are sprouting up around the country. Fearing mass rebellion, many municipalities are moving to legalize tent cities around the country. Examples are Nashville, Tenn.; Ontario (near Los Angeles), Ventura and Sacramento in California; Lacy, Wash.; and Champaign, Ill. These are among the many localities either providing services to the homeless or allowing charitable institutions to do so.

New York City and Seattle, on the other hand, have moved sharply to repress the growing homeless movement.

In Nashville, on any given night there are 4,000 homeless people, according to city authorities, and 785 shelter beds. There are now at least 30 known tent encampments in Nashville.

David Olson, 47 years old, is typical of the new homeless population. He and his spouse wound up living under a Nashville overpass after he lost his job making cement pipes in Iowa. They came to Nashville for a construction job that did not exist. “I’ve got five years experience in carpentry and 10 years roofing and I can’t find a job.” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11) The city and nonprofit organizations found housing for 25 people. David Olson was not one of them.

www.workers.org...

Things are just getting much worse. Where is the recovery?
Why are the banks and the mega corps getting bailouts of the peoples money but the people don't get any help?

The article offers a solution...

The only way to overcome this crisis is for the working class and all the oppressed to unite in struggle. The time of waiting for the Democratic Party leadership to reverse the fortunes of the workers must be ended. The time of waiting for capitalism to revive itself and bring back boom times is over.

and I have to say that, moving forward; it is the only choice we have

it started like this:

the cold war incited the influx of socialist professors, who schooled an entire generation of new workers to go into politics, the media, law and finance, with the idea that local communities didn't have the right or incentive to help their own and that this particular problem should be handled at the federal level. initially it was true due to human bias, but eventually it was no longer a bias problem as much as it was a matter of survival.

this came about because the federal government's social programs were demanding more and more taxes to pay for the rise in social programs. if an outright tax was too unpopular in any given president's term, they would get creative and tax the business owners via permits and licensing fees and higher federal taxes, with the excuse that the more you made the less you would suffer without some of it. this essentially made sense on the surface, but didn't materialize as a benefit in actual practice. the reason being that if you make it so no businessees can provide jobs because the taxes and such are more than the profits gleaned, then everyone suffers. which is what you are seeing now.