In this chilling BBC clip, a newsteam ventures to one of LA's new shantytowns made up of people who've lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It's the contemporary Hooverville...

Nearly 80 years later and we're moving right back to the same disaster we were looking at then. There are differences. We don't yet have the midwestern drought that destroyed agriculture for years, we have a southern one where Atlanta is in danger of turning into Las Vegas, and may get that midwestern one, but no one is sure. We don't have brokers jumping from the ledges is New York, many of those buildings were torn down and replaced with buildings that don't have ledges, or windows that open. We don't have 25% unemployment, we don't know what it actually is because the "new unemployment" doesn't count people who, after months of trying, gave up searching for work.

When the BBC is showing us the new Hoovervilles but our own media isn't. When they're also talking about the possibility that we're looking at 1929, but our media isn't. When CNNI is showing the real on the ground cost of the Iraq war across the world, but not here. Our government and our media is giving us a bill of goods.

America's new subprime shanty-towns - Boing Boing