Choosing a fast buck over help for veterans

http://vawatchdog.org/07/nf07/nfMAY07/nf053107-4.htm

Choosing a fast buck over help for veterans


Coming soon, perhaps, to a bottleneck near you:

More skyscrapers, more condos, more retail.

Where? At one of the busiest intersections in Southern California — Wilshire Boulevard and the 405.

Yes, it's the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs property.

What, you thought the VA might expand services to accommodate the legions of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with medical and mental maladies?

That would make sense, especially given the fact that bomb-rattled veterans now sleep on the street and in parks just a few miles from long-abandoned buildings on the shamefully under-utilized property. But VA administrators appear to be headed in another direction, and their long-secret intentions have never been more clear than they were over Memorial Day weekend — of all weekends.

That's when local officials learned that a ban on private development of the Wilshire site didn't make it into a war-spending bill, at the behest of the Bush administration.

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