Yeah...I know the right wing is always accusing the Obama administration of crony capitalism,
pitifully failing in their efforts.
What follows is the
tale of the Republican front-runner for the Presidential nomination and the
sickening, disgusting trick he pulled on American Veterans.
With the help of the Catholic Church!Like any good presidential candidate, Rick Santorum heaps praise on America's soldiers and veterans. He's pledged to "make veterans a high priority" if elected president, adding, "This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democratic issue, it is an American issue."
That's nice, Rick. But you're lying.
You couldn't care less about our veterans.
But with the rise of the smaller all-volunteer military, the Home began to run into serious financial problems. It was clear that one of its primary sources of revenue—a 50-cent deduction from the paychecks of active-duty servicemembers—wasn't enough to keep the Home operating fully. In the 1990s, the Home scrambled to find ways to avoid insolvency, trimming its staff by 24 percent and reducing its vet population by 800. Still, the money problems began to show, with its older historic facilities slipping into disrepair and decay...
Now, I'm sure our Republican counterparts will accuse the Home of overreaching and taking on too much of a mortgage just like all the rest of the nation's deadbeat homeowners they view with disdain...
But there was a solution!
To grapple with its worsening shortfall, officials running the Home eyed a valuable, 49-acre piece of land worth $49 million as a potential financial lifeline
Under one scenario, by leasing the parcel of land and letting it be developed, the Home could pocket $105 million in income over 35 years for its trust fund, David Lacy, then-chairman of the Home's board of directors, told Congress in 1999. Lacy stressed that the Home wanted to keep the property, and not offload it to a buyer. "Once land is sold," he said, "it is lost forever as an asset."
What a great idea! I'm sure the Republicans in Congress were bending over backwards to help our nation's Veterans, especially one Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. You know...the guy who said "
This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democratic issue, it is an American issue."
Not so.
You see,
Santorum answers to a higher power than our Constitution: The Catholic Church.But as a US senator, Santorum engineered a controversial land deal that robbed the military's top veterans' home of tens of millions of dollars and worsened the deteriorating conditions at the facility...
How did he do this?
...Enter Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). At the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, and unbeknownst to the Home, Santorum slipped an amendment into the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act handcuffing how the home could cash in on those 49 acres. The amendment forced the Home to sell—and not lease—the land to its next-door neighbor, the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, the Catholic Church bought 46 acres of the tract for $22 million. The Home lost the land for good, and by its own estimates, pocketed $27 million less than the land's value and $83 million less than what it could've made under the lease plan. Santorum's amendment sparked an outcry from veterans' groups and fellow US senators, who barraged his office with complaints.
Laurence Branch, then the executive director of the Home's board, says Santorum's amendment was "a travesty" and the Church's lobbying for the land a case of "coveting thy neighborhood's goods." To this day, Branch says he blames Santorum for the Home not receiving more money for the 49-acre parcel of land. "I'm convinced Sen. Santorum is no friend of veterans," Branch says. (A spokesman for Catholic University did not respond to a request for comment.)
As I said above, Santorum answers to a higher power than the Constitution. It's sad that he doesn't give a damn about our Constitution; and the Bill of Rights that calls for a Separation of Church and State. And mostly our veterans.
Santorum's advocacy for Catholic University isn't at all surprising. A practicing Catholic, Santorum embodies the church's anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage positions as well as its support for charities and alleviating poverty. While in Congress, he was a fierce advocate for the Catholic Church. A former Santorum aide told New York Times Magazine in 2005 that the senator was "a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate.'' That same year, Time magazine named him one of America's ''25 Most Influential Evangelicals.''
Now...years later, how's the Armed Forces Retirement Home doing? Not so good.
Financial records, court documents, and government reports from the 2000s show how the Home cut back on the services it provided veterans as it grappled with funding problems. The slashing of services got so bad that in 2003 veterans living at the Home filed a class-action suit against the Home and its director, Timothy Cox, alleging shoddy health care and less access to that care. As a result of cutbacks and declining quality in care, the suit claimed, the suicide rate at the Home spiked from 59 in 2000 to 131 in 2003...
In 2007, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office came to similarly troubling conclusions. The watchdog's head, David Walker, reported that one Home resident had been admitted to the hospital with maggots in a wound. Other vets were admitted with bad pressure sores, suggesting they'd been left unattended for dangerously long stretches of time by the Home's health care employees.
...despite some improvement in the Home's financial health, its campus is pocked with boarded-up, decrepit buildings. All but one of the Home's gatehouses is shuttered, as are some of the Home's more elegant buildings, including the historic Grant building (named after the Civil War general) and the red-brick hospital that now sits empty, bearing a sign warning off trespassers. Some veterans believe the Home's constant financial struggles have led to a slow-motion decline of the Home. As longtime resident and Navy vet Robert Devaney says, ."I like to call it demolition by neglect."
Thanks, Former Senator Santorum!
