But the biggest difference between then and now, as the great Washington journalist Bob Kaiser titled a book not too long ago, is that there’s “So Damn Much Money,” with lobbyists spending almost three times what they did a dozen years ago and an ever-increasing number of ex-members of Congress, staffers and regulators running full tilt through the revolving door and joining the ranks of the extravagantly paid. “People talk about the size of the federal government,” my brother noted, “and yet that hasn’t changed enormously. Instead, it’s the emergence of all the ancillaries to government — law firms, lobbyists, communications companies, government service providers — that have flooded the city with people and money.” What’s more, there’s “the explosion of the permanent military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned about and the Cold War made real. The post 9/11 world has just mushroomed this corporate impact, aided and abetted by the penchant for outsourcing that has essentially created contractor-led defense and security establishments that parallel/shadow (and profit from) their government counterparts.” Washington has become the most affluent metropolitan area in the country. A 2012 Gallup poll rated it the most economically confident region of the United States. And with so damn much money has come a building boom: a once dying downtown has turned into office buildings, restaurants, stores and luxury apartments, forcing others out of the way. African Americans were as much as 71 percent of the District’s population when I lived there in the seventies; today that number has fallen to a little less than half, with many having to move outside the city.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 05:54:58 +0000
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