"a new wave of well-heeled insiders”

The St Louis Post Dispatch, describing Washington DC and environs, the fastest growing concentration of 1%’rs in the USA.

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

During the past decade, the region added 21,000 households in the nation’s top 1 percent. No other metro area came close.

Public service was NEVER intended to be the center of VAMPIRES OF THE USA.

companies based in Rep. James Moran’s congressional district in Northern Virginia reaped $43 billion in federal contracts — roughly as much as the state of Texas.

I’d swap THAT growth for what occurred in Detroit ANYTIME. And they are not disconnected.

Growth of greed and corruption have no ‘ism’ attached. 

At Cafe Joe, near the National Security Agency in suburban Maryland, software engineers with top-secret clearances merely have to look at the place mats under their fried eggs to find federal contractors trying to entice them away from their government jobs with six-figure salaries and stock options. The place-mat ads cost $250 a week. They are sold out through 2014.

Washington has been the beneficiary of a decade-long, taxpayer-funded stimulus package