'The Bitch Set Me Up' - The Endemic Corruption Of Municipal Government

Marion Barry, Mayor for Life, was mayor of DC for many years, and won reelection again and again despite the lowest socio-economic indictors of any major city, endemic crime, the dysfunctional inner city, and Third World poverty level. 

 

He was popular because of his generosity, his walkin' around money, his embrace of entitlement, reparations, and giving away the store to his black constituents.  During his reign, the black population in DC was 70 percent, mostly poor and living in ghettoes across the Anacostia River, and in crowded city centers near Prince George's County. 

He was dismissive of the white population concentrated in Wards 2 and 3 despite the fact that they contributed the lion's share of municipal taxes.  He knew that as much as these white residents hated him and every elected voted in a bloc for any candidate but him, he had electoral democracy on his side. 

The white professionals who lived in these wards were liberal to a man, progressive in outlook and political preference, and most had never once in their lives voted Republican, but Barry was too much.  The city was known as The Murder Capital of the US during the crack epidemic when ghetto drug lords in consort with Jamaican crewes fought bloody battles for distribution rights, turf, and hegemony.  Despite the harshest gun laws in the country, the city was awash with illegal guns, and drive-by shootings, executions, and street corner shootouts were so common they never made the news.  

DC was a miserable place, tough to abide, and tougher to live in; and yet because of Barry's civil rights credentials, a coffers-open policy for entitlement money, a no-show job patronage for his most ardent supporters across the River, he was beloved by his black constituents.  His was a city hall which governed in name only but as long as the patronage and walkin' around money continued, and as long as he stuck it to the white man, he was King of DC. 

Among the white population of DC Barry was remembered for three things he said.  First, when the city was covered with over a foot of snow and the white wards never saw a plow, Barry said, 'It'll melt', putting the complainers in their place, a roundhouse punch which said, 'Nothing doing', the city is mine. 

Second, when he won another resounding electoral victory with not one vote from either Ward 2 or 3, he said, 'Get over it'.  He would be mayor for life despite the whining Karens of upper Northwest. 

Third, when he had been caught in an FBI sting smoking crack with local hookers, Barry said, 'The bitch set me up'; but his arrest was simply something he could not undo.  He was finished, done for, and a new hardline, tough balance sheet mayor was appointed to head a Congress-appointed government.  Anthony Williams was eventually elected, and the Barry days were over. 

When news of his arrest hit the streets, white DC residents cheered, but his black supporters agreed with him.  Besides, crack, ho's, and crack ho's were nothing new to the ghetto, commonplace, and a part of the inner city fabric.  His arrest was no more than the white man putting an uppity black man in his place. 

However, DC remains the same.  Despite hundreds of millions of federal and local grants said to improve the abysmal conditions in the slums of the nation's capital, there has been only desultory progress.  The truancy rate is well over fifty percent, murder, assault, and rape are still atop the leader board up there with Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, and the ghetto is still a nasty, no-go place. 

DC City Council members have been Barry clones ever since his departure and DC's return to Home Rule. Under the aegis and protection of the Biden Administration and a complaisant Congress DC passed many give-way, de facto reparations, and entitlement laws.  They were among many municipal governments which after George Floyd defunded the police, decriminalized all but the most violent crimes.  DC was once again the carnival of corruption it was under Barry  

Now a new 'Democratic Socialist' Mayor will take office next year, and she promises to empty the treasury 'to make DC a welcoming home for all'.  All public services will be free or available at nominal cost, community policing will replace enforced discipline and crime surveillance, and welfare rather than opportunity will become the ethos. 

Of course DC is not alone in its corruption, mismanagement, and misrule.  Chicago, the home of dead-man voter, 'Vote Early and Often' elections, the Al Capone era of Mafia-coopted governance and jurisprudence, and the ward politics of Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin, has never budged from its sinkhole political reputation.  Minneapolis gave away millions to fraudulent Somalis out of concern for 'inclusivity' and 'doing the right thing' for needy asylees, and the true cost of the deal is yet to be uncovered.  Without a doubt someone in power bought a new Mercedes. 

The mayors of cities with significant black populations have ridden the progressive tide and given way taxpayer money with impunity, all in the name of inclusivity, diversity, equity and reparations for slavery. 

Smaller cities across the US have not been exempted, and they too regardless of racial composition have seen a windfall in kickbacks, unnecessary public works, donor patronage, and insider deals.  Millions have been spent on unneeded curb and sidewalk repair, park 'improvements' and unnecessary 'renovations'. 

How could this happen? 

When a longtime resident of New York City was asked how the current Socialist Mayor of the city could have been elected, and in a few short months has gone far to bankrupt the city and force hundreds of high tax-paying investment and high-tech firms and wealthy individuals to flee, he said that Mamdami simply looks like the thousands of immigrants in Queens and Brooklyn and his promise to give them everything for nothing was the best campaign strategy ever. 

The conservative economist Thomas Sowell has been a critic of government, both federal and local for taking money from those who earned it and giving it to those who have not - all with no accountability. With no such accountability, the tendency to take money and give it away for political and personal financial rewards is irresistible.  

  

It is easy to revile the rich for their greed and racist insensitivity and the need to redistribute their wealth to those who deserve it - as Sen. Bernie Sanders has done - and to be a millionaire with three homes and a luxurious life style.  No one is holding his feet to the fire.  No one who has bought his progressive cant hook, line, and sinker has bothered to look at consequences, rate of return, risk, compromise, or the bottom line.  

Municipal governments' accountability is even less. Those like DC's are uniformly democratic socialist, so there is no 'other side of the aisle', no inquisitive press, no high stakes.  Municipal governments tend to be progressive because there is more in it for them to be 'generous'.  It is easy to get elected if you can actually take from the rich and give it to the poor as DC has done with its venal transfers of wealth from Wards 2 and 3 to Wards 7 and 8.  The Washington Post before Bezos ownership was in lockstep with the redistributive, reparations mindset of the DC city council and rarely came down hard on its profligate no-accountability spending. 

Residents of one Ward 3 neighborhood watched as a perfectly good service alley was torn up and replaced by a new one at a cost of millions.  Who benefited?  Not the garbage trucks who picked up the trash without issue, not the rare car which had mistakenly turned into the alley.  Not the homeowners for whom the alley was nothing more than a service route.  

Or the new sidewalks in one of the area's wealthiest neighborhoods were people drove, never walked; or the universal handicapped curb cuts when residents had not seen a wheelchair in decades and Uber rides would have been far more cost-effective. 

Inefficiency, mismanagement, and self-interested dispensing of taxpayer money is par for the governmental course, getting worse as one descends the scale.  Montgomery County, a wealthy jurisdiction adjacent to DC built bike lanes along a well-travelled commuter route and in so doing closed two lanes of traffic increasing congestion and pollution; and to this day not one bike has been seen on the new lanes.  The dedicated lanes go no more than one block and then dead end.  It is the bike lane to nowhere, and yet the county built it because it felt good to do something for the environment. 

It is no surprise that the Unites States is always halfway down the international corruption list.  Americans have been cheating and conning since the days of itinerant snake oil salesmen and Elmer Gantry preachers.  We came kicking and screaming to civic order and the restrictions of laws and regulations but quickly figured out ways to make money from it all. 

So, you get what you deserve. Vote your conscience and still get screwed; but that is the American way.