Posted by
Dr. Charles W. Heckman on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 11:00:00 AM
The article by Chuck Norris reflects the best qualities of Americans concerned with helping others. However, there is another side to the problem. Veterans, who have accounted for more than 40% of the homeless in some cities during the period since the Vietnam War, should not be homeless at all. The Department of Veterans Affairs has always been responsible for caring for those with both physical and psychological war wounds and, when necessary, providing them with food and shelter. The majority of veterans, who are able and ready to work, are supposed to be promptly placed in a job or training program through any of several Department of Labor programs, usually administered by the states. That the federal government is failing miserably in accounting for the tax money earmarked for the transition of veterans to civilian employment cannot be doubted. Why the press is ignoring this scandal or, worse, trying to put the blame on the veterans themselves for the extreme financial difficulties many of them face indicates that veterans are confronted by a formidable coalition of hostile forces arrayed against them.
The biggest lie about homeless veterans is that they are homeless because of some personal deficiency, including substance abuse, laziness, lack of all qualifications, psychoses caused by killing too many babies, and every other sort of personal weakness that the news and entertainment media can think up. The real reason is that employment discrimination against veterans is so common that many cannot find jobs that pay enough to cover both rent and food. Years ago, the Department of Labor decided to classify only those jobs paying less than $25,000 per year as “suitable for veterans,” and many of these jobs at the lower end of the pay scale simply to not provide someone with enough money to both eat and pay rent in a big city. Many vets have to try to get along doing odd jobs for people, but during bad weather or economic downturns, their income disappears.
I know about these problems because I served two combat tours in Vietnam, and after I received my honorable discharge, I had to leave the United States to find employment. I was fortunate to have done this because I was able to support my wife and three children without any problem for almost 25 years. It also gave me a chance as a veteran to notice the difference between foreign and American employers. Abroad, I was treated courteously and succeeded in obtaining many research grants. Usually, I was offered jobs before I had to look for them. In the United States, I was not interviewed for any job until 1997, and that interview is about to be described. During the 1980s, three New York State employment specialists told me that I would not be hired by a university or research institute because they believed that every search committee included at least one person who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and would “feel uncomfortable working with a veteran.”
After earning a doctoral degree in Germany and working successfully as a scientist there and in Brazil, I thought that the hostility against veterans might have abated, so I applied for a vacancy with the United States Forest Service in 1997. I was invited to Alaska for my very first job interview in the United States, where I was told by a Forest Service employee and a professor at the University of Alaska that I would not be hired but that I could have $20,000 paid to me over two years if I would "voluntarily" withdraw from the selection so that a less qualified non-veteran could be hired, allegedly because she had influence with the National Science Foundation and could assist their research group of state and federal "scientists" have their $6,000,000 grant renewed. Renewal was in danger because the productivity of the group had been so poor while using up the money from the last grant.
When I reported this offer, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) had a Forest Service employee punished with a one-week suspension without pay, and her supervisor received a letter of reprimand. These did not seem suitable punishments for the misappropriation of $20,000 and bribery, but in a press release on its website in 1998, the OSC downgraded their action to a "prohibited personnel practice."
I had now become both a veteran and a whistleblower, making me a special target of government reprisal. Although the OSC forced the Forest Service to hire me, it did nothing when I was subjected to harassment and fired one working day before the end of the probationary year.
To make a long story short, Forest Service personnel phoned at least one agency of the State of Washington to make sure that I would not be hired by the state. During a subsequent appeal and lawsuit, I obtained a transcript of the telephone call and sworn statements from both parties. Another Forest Service employee let the U.S. Geological Service know that it should not hire me, and this other agency followed this advice in spite of the fact that I received the highest examination score on at least 35 examinations.
This brought me into contact with agencies heavily funded by Congress to protect the employment rights of veterans. The Veterans Employment and Training Service (VETS) gives assistance to fewer than 1 in 1000 veterans who file complaints, and it never assists a veteran who has been discriminated against by another Federal agency. After the inevitable dismissal of the complaint by VETS, the veteran can file a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which is also supposed to provide legal assistance to whistleblowers. Between 2002 and 2005, the OSC received about 6000 complaints from veterans and whistleblowers and investigated none of them. My case remains one of the few in which it claims to have provided a "favorable settlement" for a veteran. Through this "favorable settlement," I have been blacklisted for all employment since 1999. Several weeks ago, the FBI raided the office of Special Counsel Scot Bloch to seize his computers and records because a grand jury is deciding whether or not to indict him for obstruction of justice in another matter. This is the kind of lawyer on which veterans must depend to defend their basic right to exist in this country.
The reason I did not become homeless is that relatives have been helping my wife and me survive. I have had four appeals before the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), and all four have been decided through fraud by the administrative judge. I have the documents and recorded testimonies, but no Justice Department investigator would even consider investigating my complaints. Any jury would immediately recognize the fraud from the evidence, but I have learned that no federal judge would ever allow this matter to come before a jury. Since USERRA was passed in 1994, the MSPB has never provided relief for a veteran, and its protection of whistleblowers is a national scandal. Only one appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, is permitted to review decisions by the Merit System Protection Board, and in 2007, Congress clearly stated that this court has consistently ignored the stated intent of Congress and set precedents that have made the laws it is supposed to uphold completely ineffective.
Congress has appropriated billions of dollars over the years to administrative agencies responsible for seeing to it that veterans receive a fair chance on the employment market. Members of Congress frequently affirm that veterans face extreme difficulties finding decent jobs. Nevertheless, on looking over official records, I can find no ruling by any agency responsible for protecting the employment rights of veterans which clearly states that a veteran's rights were violated or that a veteran was discriminated against by any government agency, except for the report of my own case by the OSC. It is therefore fair to ask why Congress continues to waste tax money on these agencies. If there really are no agencies that discriminate against veterans, why not abolish VETS, the OSC, and the MSPB? If, however, discrimination is as common as I have observed it to be, Congress should see to it that all leading employees of these agencies are prosecuted for criminal malfeasance. After all, most of these civil servants are lawyers or experienced investigators, and they therefore know better than ordinary citizens when they themselves are breaking the law.
It is obvious to me that veterans are homeless because of the incredible malice of civil servants working for the government they served. Those few with psychological problems demonstrate the incompetence of the Department of Veterans' Affairs, which is required by law to give them adequate care, sufficient to keep them from sleeping on the street. The majority of homeless veterans, however, are sleeping in the streets because of the malice of the employees of the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Office of Special Counsel, and Merit System Protection Board, as well as the federal courts, which always fail to give veterans due process when they seek relief from persecution by the government for which they risked their lives.
To any reader who is on the side of veterans in this conflict: please call your congressman and protest. If you are a veteran, please run for public office or support other veterans who do so, as well. If you succeed, please do not sell the rest of us out to powerful gangs of non-veteran civil servants and rich federal contractors.