Possibly with tents numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. And that became such a halting thought that I forgot to rinse the shampoo out of my hair.
In the UK they sometimes just confiscate their tents to make the problem go away
Confiscate? They are getting it back at some point? Because in Montreal and North America in general, the police just treat homeless people’s stuff like radioactive trash. They just clear the place with machinery and put all the stuff in a trash container.
Some homeless people here have lost ID cards and important documents because once the police decides the camp is gone, the homeless can’t go back to get their stuff. It’s just all going to the dump, with everything inside.
A man in Atlanta was recently killed because he was inside a tent as a front end loader ran over him while the city was clearing the encampment which was in a parking lot near MLK’s church. They were clearing because of expected crowds on MLK day.
Fucks sake, not surprising and it’s even worse because it is not surprising.
They definitely do this in the US as well… problem solved! 🙃
Good. But not for the reason you think.
White collar workers are workers. They just don’t realize it. Yet.
American Federation of Government Employees membership has increased dramatically. Fucking with every federal employee makes for a stronger union.
Unions fight back.
AFGE does not fight back unless there is a political statement to be made. I was hired as a federal employee in 2023 and endured 6 months of rights violations, gaslighting from management, and incompetence from HR. When I made complaints, I was shitcanned. When I went to the union, I was told that they had no representation since the last president of the local resigned in 2022. I was told “arbitrations are expensive” when I filed grievances that the union refused to back. I was told “probationary employees have no rights” despite my union contract very much specifying otherwise. The ONLY reason AFGE is getting off its ass now is because AFGE as an organization is being threatened. They don’t care about their union members. They only care about their own fucking paycheck.
Sounds like you have exactly the type of experience needed to get elected as the AFGE president. I believe you said there was an opening?
Members only. All AFGE local positions are volunteer (unpaid) positions. While you are allowed some time during working hours to conduct union business as a federal employee, its like 2 hours 2 or 3 times a week. And the system for hiring and retaining federal employees is designed to weed out firecrackers like me who both understand their rights and have the spine to stand up and say something about them. Good luck building a revolution out of a population specifically selected to be meek and obedient.
Take a minute to look through all the photos of hoovervilles. Tens of thousands of people in tents, often with the apartments they were evicted from and the factories closed or running at a fraction of capacity within a few hundred yards in the background.
How would you explain to aliens why tens of thousands of people in every city were driven from their homes, which were left empty, to live in squalor while being prevented from doing anything productive?
@alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
@wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
The thing about history is if you don’t want your name associated with homeless Trump Towns in every city in America, maybe don’t take a healthy economy and run it into the ground. Maybe don’t let a PE hack who has never built anything like Tom Krause near the institutions the American people rely on.
https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/hoovervilles
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/
maybe don’t take a healthy economy and run it into the ground
Does a healthy economy look like people choosing between food and rent? The stock markets are doing better than ever, but wages have been outpaced by rent and food since the 80s. To call an economy on a trajectory that ends in hoovervilles healthy because the capitalists are getting even richer is some neoliberal horseshit.
@alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
@wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io fair point. The Biden recovery wasn’t raising all boats equally, but effort was being made to stimulate job creation in many parts of the economy. Not only have programs and grants that created jobs had their funding disrupted, we are now “potentially” paying 65K of the 2.1 million federal employees not to work for 7 months? I stress “potentially” as Elon made the same offer at Twitter and then just didn’t pay.
Nobody is arguing that Trump is better, I am stating that the working class’s boats were continuing to sink under Biden. This isn’t a turn around, this is a downwards acceleration.
They will care more about making sure he doesn’t get the “Hooverville” (i.e. naming shantytowns after Trump) treatment than actually fixing the problem.
Ah yes, 2025: the year that the shantytown returned to the US
This is my tent
and this is my investment tent
I also have a vacation tent down by the (polluted) river.
I better invest in Coleman and the North face, I hear they are due for a boon soon
I don’t think North face tents are in the price bracket for homeless folks…
i don’t understand. why?
Isnt the point of these things to get people to quit?
