"With business owners sounding increasingly worried about the threat they believe the homeless pose to Columbia’s economic surge, the City Council approved a plan this month that will essentially evict them from downtown streets. “People are afraid to get out of their cars when they see a homeless person,” said Richard Balser, who owns a luggage store downtown. “They haven’t been a problem. They just scare people.” The city is also planning to impose limits on meal service for the homeless on public property. And it plans to station a police officer at a strategic location between the city’s shelter and downtown to “monitor and control foot traffic.”
What, there are NO CRIMES like RAPE, ROBBERY, or MURDER, in South Carolina? Gotta have cops on the beat and manning a post to watch those homeless now, huh? Talk about total corporate tools dre$$ed all in blue! This nation and its governments are acting more and more like their Israeli controllers every day!
Good Lord, the homeless are now akin to TERRORISTS! They SCARE PEOPLE! They THREATEN what is a "a sustainable business model” and "giant risk to business.”
That's odd, because I see them around here and aside from giving them a few bucks in the past, I never felt endangered. I felt pity and fear, thinking that could one day be me.
Oh, and you know, if the economy is so great why are the numbers of homeless rising? Job losses? Fraudulent foreclosures? Crap corporate media lies? How can crime be down and up at the same time? It's whatever version is needed for that moment, huh?
You know what I hate, readers?
"South Carolina city to get tough on homeless; Some say needy hurting economy" by Alan Blinder | New York Times, August 26, 2013
There is one of them, yeah.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — In South Carolina’s capital, officials declare that their tree-lined Main Street, clogged with shops, banks, restaurants, and hotels, is evidence that a long-sought economic revival has arrived.
But mere blocks north, a dozen or so of the county’s approximately 1,500 homeless people sit on a short wall near an empty parking lot, waiting for private shelters to open. They sporadically shout curses at passersby while they smoke cigarettes and endure the summer humidity.
I wonder how many of them are veterans and female.
With business owners sounding increasingly worried about the threat they believe the homeless pose to Columbia’s economic surge, the City Council approved a plan this month that will essentially evict them from downtown streets.
The unanimous vote epitomized how Columbia’s dueling realities — a rush of self-confidence among political and business leaders and continuing poverty for others — have become driving forces of public policy here.
Among metropolitan areas in the South, the nation’s fastest-growing region, Columbia is late to a boom period....
Speculation is rampant that a minor-league baseball team will relocate to Columbia.
Yeah, you aren't a city in AmeriKa unless you have a $ports team.
Less flashy projects also abound, but business owners are warning that rising homelessness in Richland County — up 43 percent in two years, according to the South Carolina Coalition for the Homeless, an increase many blame on an absence of affordable housing options and a sluggish national economy — is imperiling the area’s prospects.
Why don't you just kill them and eat them then? That solves a couple problems right there.
“People are afraid to get out of their cars when they see a homeless person,” said Richard Balser, who owns a luggage store downtown. “They haven’t been a problem. They just scare people.”
But one executive cautioned the City Council in an e-mail that “our staff members and our guests no longer feel safe” and that it is “virtually impossible for us, or anybody, to create a sustainable business model.”
$ieg Heil!
Of course, that is unfair to the Nazis because they put the kibosh on the private central banking enslavement model. That's what happens when the Jewish narrative of history is taught in schools and blared through the media levers they control. You get a totally distorted view of the world, past and present.
Comments like those have galvanized city officials, whose controversial plan was widely supported by business leaders.
That's the first I've seen of any "controversy" in this piece.
Under the new strategy, the authorities will increase enforcement of existing vagrancy laws and offer the homeless three options: accept help at a shelter, go to jail, or leave Columbia.
The city is also planning to impose limits on meal service for the homeless on public property.
Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention you can also STARVE!
Of course, this is the GOVERNMENT that SO LOVES and CARES ABOUT YOU that it LIES and STEALS from you to PROTECT and SERVE YOU!
And it plans to station a police officer at a strategic location between the city’s shelter and downtown to “monitor and control foot traffic.”
“If we don’t take care of this big piece of our community and our society, it will erode the entire foundation of what we’re trying to build in this city,” said Councilman Cameron Runyan, who wrote the proposal and has suggested moving Columbia’s homeless shelter as far as 15 miles from downtown. “What I see is a giant risk to business.”
He has also cited a report from the police that showed increases in crime last year among the homeless, including assault and trespassing.
Opponents of Runyan’s plan, which will also keep the city’s 240-bed shelter open two months longer than the previous November-to-March schedule, have said it would do little more than degrade Columbia’s neediest.
“You’ve got to get to the root of the problem: why we’re homeless,” said Jaja Akair, a homeless man who spoke to lawmakers during a City Council session that stretched past 3 a.m. “You can’t just knock us to the side like we’re a piece of meat or a piece of paper.”
Our societal masters and controllers view us all that way.
Other critics have warned that they are considering court challenges to the plan, which will take effect in September.
--more--"
Also see:
Homeless man turns in cash-filled bag
Police honor homeless man’s good deed
Donations pour in for homeless man who returned cash
Someone else who can't find a home:
"Cherokee father loses adoption battle" Associated Press, July 18, 2013
COLUMBIA, S.C. — An American Indian child at the center of a custody suit that went to the US Supreme Court should be returned to the Charleston-area couple seeking to adopt her, South Carolina’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.
In a 3-2 decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that Matt and Melanie Capobianco are the only party properly seeking to adopt the 3-year-old girl named Veronica in South Carolina and ordered a Family Court to finalize the couple’s adoption.
‘‘We are thrilled that after 18 long months, our daughter finally will be coming home,’’ the couple said in a statement Wednesday.
South Carolina courts originally said the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act — a federal law intended to keep Indian children from being taken from their homes and typically placed with non-Indian adoptive or foster parents — favored her living with her biological father, Dusten Brown.
A member of the Cherokee Nation, Brown had never met his daughter and, after the girl’s non-Indian mother rebuffed his marriage proposal, played no role during the pregnancy and paid no child support. But when Brown found out Veronica was going to be adopted, he objected.
Brown took custody in 2011 and has been living with his daughter in Oklahoma since then.
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"SC orders Cherokee girl transferred from Okla." Associated Press, August 08, 2013
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A Cherokee girl living in Oklahoma should be immediately turned over to her adoptive parents in South Carolina after her biological father missed a scheduled meeting with them accompanied by the girl, a judge has ordered.
Matt and Melanie Capobianco have been trying to adopt 3-year-old Veronica since her birth in 2009 and raised the girl for two years. She has been living with her biological father, Dusten Brown, in Oklahoma since 2011, when South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled that federal law governing the placement of American Indian children favored him as her custodian.
The Capobiancos, a couple living in the Charleston area, appealed to the US Supreme Court, which ruled the state should determine the girl’s placement. The state’s highest court subsequently ordered Martin to finalize the couple’s adoption of the girl, which he did last week.
According to the court, Brown failed to show up, with the girl, on Aug. 4 for the first of several scheduled gatherings as part of a transition process to gradually reintroduce the girl to the Capobiancos.
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"Okla. gov. signs order for Cherokee girl’s dad" Associated Press, September 05, 2013
OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed an extradition order on Wednesday to send the father of a Cherokee girl in the middle of a custody dispute to South Carolina to face a criminal charge for refusing to hand his 3-year-old daughter over to her adoptive parents.
But a lawyer for Dusten Brown said he doesn’t believe his client will be extradited because he has not committed a crime.
Brown and Matt and Melanie Capobianco, of James Island, S.C., have been fighting for years over Veronica. The Capobiancos were finalized as her adoptive parents in July, but Brown did not turn over the 3-year-old girl, who has been staying with her grandparents on Cherokee land.
--more--"
Also see: