Homeless, Disabled Veterans Don't Make a Profit for VA

That's the real issue in Los Angeles, where a judge just cancelled nine contracts the VA has with private entities paying to rent space that is supposed to be used to house disabled veterans.

The land was donated in 1888 explicitly for housing homeless vets, and for the next eighty years, tens of thousands of vets lived there, at the Pacific Branch soldiers’ home. But for the past several decades, the dormitories have been empty, and over the years the VA has leased parts of the site for other purposes. Meanwhile, homeless veterans have been sleeping on the street outside the locked gates. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of the ACLU-SC Foundation.)

Particularly in need of help are vets with severe mental disabilities and those suffering from PTSD, brain injuries and other disorders. Housing is key to treating their medical problems, and there’s a regional VA medical center across the street from the empty dorms in Brentwood. The VA, however, argues that it has no legal or other obligation to provide housing for mentally disabled vets. It has acknowledged in court that it is required to provide medical services, but it argues that it has no responsibility to provide housing, even though these vets are too disabled to get to the hospital’s outpatient clinic on their own.

Under the order, nine leases are void, including Twentieth Century Fox Television and UCLA and the private Brentwood School, which have sports facilities on VA land. The judge gave the lessees and the VA six months to terminate the leases—or appeal his decision. The ACLU is urging the VA not to appeal: “Every day an appeal is pending the VA is putting the needs of private school students and college students over our veterans,” Rosenbaum said.

I'm actually going to cut the VA some slack on this one, as disgusting as its behavior is here.  And that's because the VA - like all government agencies and institutions federal state and local - is being starved of public funding and forced to grub for money like a corporation.

The problem is corporations are pure profit-making machines that reject all activity that does not make money.

Are you turning a profit, you homeless disabled veterans?  Then fuck you.

That's what austerity and tax cuts for the rich and lying about the deficit and bailouts for Wall Street but foreclosure and bankruptcy for Main Street and "running government like a business" will get you:

Disabled veterans sleeping in the streets.  And the equivalent in every other government service.

If you ran a corporation as if it were a public service, you fail to make a profit. And when you run public services like a corporation, you fail to provide public service.

Businesses aren't public services, and government agencies aren't businesses. Profit-making has no more place in government than a social safety net has in a corporation.