Dereliction of Duty

Dear Mr. President,

Today is Kill List Tuesday and that’ll probably take an hour or more of your time to decide who you want assassinated this week but you should spend five minutes reading an editorial in today’s New York Times called “Homeless Veterans: Whose Responsibility?” and correct a gross injustice to those you and your predecessors—Democrats and Republicans alike—have sent off to war and then neglected when they return damaged by the horrors they have witnessed and participated in. The editorial is about the 400 acre campus of the VA in West LA that was deeded to the federal government in 1888 for the specific purpose of permanently housing disabled veterans. I happened to drive by that site some months ago and a friend explained its history and misuse by the VA. Originally, the site did contain permanent housing for war veterans but in the 1960s and 70s the buildings were closed and today, except for the VA hospital and clinic, a third of the property is leased out and used as a storage yard for buses, a car rental agency, hotel laundry facilities, a park for Brentwood, sports facilities for UCLA and other commercial interests while the rest stands empty. It generates revenue for the VA but its intended purpose is disregarded completely and 8,000 homeless veterans sleep on the streets of LA every night. Mr. President, you promised to take care of veterans, empty promises at best, lies at worst. There are plans to renovate a single building on the property to house 65 disabled vets sometime in late 2014 but no contract for construction has even been let yet. If that one building ever does open to veterans it stands in stark contrast to building and dismantling 505 bases in Iraq and another 400 in Afghanistan over the past 11 years. How easy it is to send people off to war and toss them on the street like garbage when they return. We can spend more than $1 billion on the presidential campaigns, $700 billion to bail out the Banksters of Wall Street and $70 billion a year on Homeland Security—an agency without purpose or value to our security—but we can’t find the money to take care of our homeless veterans. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit charging the VA of dereliction of duty. As commander-in-chief you are responsible for these 8,000 homeless veterans in LA and the countless others in cities and towns across the country. You focus on the killing part of war and neglect its aftermath. This is Dereliction of Duty, Mr. President, an impeachable offense.