Paris Hilton Takes Steak Out of the Mouths of Veterans!!

I don't know whether the folks who run Fran O'Brien's vote left or right--or straight down the center. I do know that Hilton Hotels is a huge contributor to Republican campaigns.

Regardless of the political bent of Fran O'Brien's, I support this cause:

Fran O'Brien's Loses It's Lease: For the past 2 1/2 years, O'Brien and business partner Hal Koster have made their thick steak dinners and a night of bottomless drinks one of the rites of passage for the soldiers who are steeling themselves for their postwar lives in wheelchairs or with prosthetic limbs.

They come to the subterranean restaurant, at the corner of 16th and L streets NW in the basement of the Capital Hilton, in volunteer's vans and trucks. They're carefully wheeled down the stairs or slowly negotiate the steps on crutches. It has become a tradition so beloved among veterans that Garry Trudeau featured the dinners in his Doonesbury comic strip.

Jim Mayer, a veteran who works at the Department of Veterans Affairs and who helped start the steak dinner tradition, is concerned that the hotel wants to eliminate the spectacle of hundreds of severely disabled soldiers coming in and out of its building or that the restaurant's repeated requests for a new elevator or escalator to accommodate them was too much.

What You Can Do

Lisa Hoffman's Letter on this in Capital Blue

Save Fran's Letter you can send Hilton

Save Fran's Website

Other than the patriotic nature of the good work Fran's owners are doing is the broader question of how corporations undo that work, without compunction, at their whim.

And yes, it is whim, when the question at hand is an escalator or a chair lift, especially when the owners of the corporation support a party that would gut the very legislation requiring corporations to accommodate those in need of them!!

And I'm convinced that it is not the good voters of either persuasion who are hurting this country. It is the moral-free zone we agree to support and in which we allow corporations to operate--for the one and only good of profit!

Argue my position on this all that you want, but at least answer me this: how can the population--people--who must move in increments of time dictated by children in school, the price of a home, a raise in 6 months or an elderly parent dying at home, be served by corporations that can operate with concern that is touched by none of these? That can pull up roots in a year and dump assets, workers and an entire regional economy just to ship their profit motivations overseas?

Without people, there is no profit.