Department of Duh: Washington Examiner edition

[Councilman Vincent] Orange lobbied zoning board on behalf of donor. From the article:

Ward 5 Councilman and mayoral candidate Vincent Orange wrote a letter of support to the District Zoning board chairwoman on behalf of the Maryland owner of a disputed Capitol Hill building who, along with his son and attorney, contributed $6,000 to Orange's campaign for mayor, campaign finance records show. In addition, Orange last year disclosed that the building's owner, Peter Shin, had given $5,500 to Orange's Mayoral Exploratory Committee, bringing the total amount given by Shin and his associates to more than $10,000.

If journalists and citizens don't understand how things work, then we are doomed. Only "people power" can trump (on occasion) money.

The only thing that's seemingly surprising about this is that people are surprised. I can understand people not taking the time to find and read Urban Fortunes. But there is no excuse for Washingtonians or the people who cover it to not read Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994. Any journalist covering DC issues who has not read this book should be suspended, without pay, until s/he does so.

Book review by Mark Feldstein, Washington Monthly, April 1994. Excerpt:

Barry didn't forget it--nor did he forget the rest of the white business community. "In return for financing his campaigns, for withholding most criticisms of his government, and for including Barry's friends in their deals," Jaffe and Sherwood write, "Barry would give the businessmen almost a free hand in developing Washington's downtown business district."

One developer, Jeffrey Cohen, godfather to Barry's son, got millions in tax breaks and deals from the Barry administration. In February 1985, for example, the city paid Cohen $11 million for land it valued at only $6.7 million. And Cohen set up a dummy corporation to give Barry a secret 10 percent partnership in a million-dollar office building in Massachusetts.

It was much the same when it came to awarding city contracts. Here, Barry sold out for mere pennies on the dollar--"crumbs," as one former city official put it, of women and drugs. As a lobbyist for the Greater Washington Board of Trade said, "a little sleaze will never stand in the way of economic development." ...

Under Barry's mayoral regime, infant mortality was up, welfare checks were late, emergency ambulances never showed up at all. It's not that there wasn't enough money; Washington's taxes are among the highest per capita in the country. Rather, too much money went to too many cronies, and the money that did get into the system was wildly mismanaged.

For example, the aptly named Pitts welfare motel charged taxpayers more to rent a room to a homeless person than it would have cost to rent a suite at the Watergate. Millions of dollars that Barry could have collected from the federal government to build public housing was lost because his administration failed to file the proper paperwork. This all happened in the mid-eighties, when public housing waiting lists were double what they were in 1974 and a HUD audit found that apartments remained vacant for an average of a year and a half--plenty of time for vandals to destroy the chance that one of those 13,000 people waiting (some for as long as 10 years) might get a decent home.

Just as bad, according to the book, was the way Barry corrupted the city's police, promoting officers based on their willingness to ignore or cover up his own drug crimes. Time after time, honest cops were punished for trying to investigate the numerous reports of the mayor's drug use. Some police, acting as bodyguards, even accompanied Barry on his nocturnal prowling; "the dog is running" was the code-phrase they used over the police radio. At the same time, Barry slashed the number of officers and lowered minimum standards to the point where convicted felons were being hired as cops.

Also see the New York Times book review by Tom Wicker, "Shame Along the Potomac."

How much do you think things have really changed?

Yesterday's themail editorializes about increasing corruption within the DC elections process:

And for more than two decades that reform held, our elections were held efficiently and effectively, and elections in DC became a national model. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that reform, or any reform so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. Our elections are being confronted with their greatest challenges in decades, as more and more money is being thrown into both candidate and initiative races and as unscrupulous professional petition companies are hired to gather petition signatures. It is a serious question whether the Board of Elections is capable of facing that challenge and of continuing to ensure the integrity of our elections.

What themail calls the "Civil War" I call but one more skirmish in the "Uncivil War" that we face today in Washington, DC. See these blog entries:

-- E(l)ectile Dysfunction
-- Tom Sherwood, Duncan Spencer, Anwar Amal, and thinking about what I call the "Uncivil War".

Index Keywords: growth-machine; civic-engagement