Homeless Exploited and Helped

Two Interesting Homeless News Items

Cleveland Heights arrested two homeless people for passing bad checks according to the Plain Dealer. It seems that a group of criminals recruited homeless people to go to Wal-Mart to pass bad checks. People are always praying on this fragile population, and trolling the front of the shelters to basically enslave people for bad purposes. From the exploitative temporary labor agents who put people to work in the most difficult jobs and pay less than minimum wage, or the drug boys who employ homeless people as runners, or the men who patrol the women's shelters looking for women to become prostitutes. I saw the owner of Minute Men temp. services over at the bank the other day driving a Cadillac Escalade SUV with those spinning wheel rims, and was disgusted that he was making a nice living off the backs of mostly African American homeless people. Who says that slavery ended in America? Did you ever wonder why all the Minute Men staff enter in the Carnegie entrance and homeless people are fenced off and forced to enter the Cedar Road side? Reminds me of the slave entrance to the Master's house in the 1820's Deep South.

The other interesting story comes from Lorain County and the bloggers at Word of Mouth. Henery Hawk and his friends went out in the cold to a group of homeless people to provide a little help. Lorain County is a rough place for homeless people with the human services absolutely overwhelmed, very little advocacy activities, and a total disregard for the problem by elected officials. They really need help out there. NEOCH would love to try to put in place a strong network of advocates in Lorain County, but the providers are so overwhelmed that they can barely keep their head above the water. So, we salute Henery, Buck, Larry, and Brian (not me) for their efforts on such a cold day.

By the way, inspired by Word of Mouth, Wendell Robinson has decided to try to do something for others everyday and write about it. Here is his new blog. Sounds like a great idea for the rest of us to follow.

Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.