The Great Power of Washington

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

The sun has set, the shadows crawling up and down the grid of America’s first truly planned city. There was a time when it was thought that the Potomac extended across the continent and the city of government would lie at the intersection of an interstate aquatic highway. That was not to be. And like so many other dreams of government, the Washington City Canal has seen better days.

Washington D.C. is America, as many of the men and women who work in government envision it. It is a place of great wealth and great poverty. Incomes continue to rise for those in government. D.C. and its bedroom communities hold some of the greatest reserves of wealth in the country, but its poverty level hovers just below 20 percent. And nearly a third of the children of the capital of our government live in poverty.

 

 

Gun control is very much on the minds of the government elite these days, and it should be, working in a city with a higher murder rate than Mexico City. African-Americans only make up half the population of D.C. but black males account for 80 percent of its homicide victims. The black murder rate in D.C. is 37.7 per 100,000 people. The white murder rate however is less than most of the rest of the country. Guns are used in the vast majority of these killings.

1 in 8 households in D.C. struggle with hunger. D.C. public schools have a 56 percent graduation rate for students in general and 41 percent for black males. This is what the city that runs the country that runs the world looks like. This is where the great planners make their plans while just out of sight lies another great urban failure where plans go to die.