There are now about 2.6 million federal employees in the United States, including postal workers. Of these, 302,000 work in the D.C. area. With these employees earning over $100,000 a year, that’s more than enough to make metropolitan Washington, D.C., the most prosperous boom town in the United States.
According to the Washington Post’s Federal Eye:
Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.
The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.
The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above nine percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.
“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.”
Apparently, “Wall Street has moved to K Street,” notes Barbara Long, President and CEO of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. That famous Washington street that’s home to many prominent lobbying firms. Considering that Washington has the highest median income in the country because of all of the lawyers, lobbyists, and federal employees, it would seem that the Occupy Wall Street mobs are occupying the wrong street.
Wall Street is no longer the center of American financial decision-making. It is now Washington where regulators determine who gets bailed out, where Boeing is told it can or cannot build a factory, where banks are told what they can and can’t do. Washington determines which companies are worthy of taxpayer financing, whether it be General Motors or Solyndra. And it was Washington’s housing policies that contributed more to the housing bubble, mortgage meltdown, financial crisis, and economic recession than any greed on Wall Street.
Wall Street is really a shell of what it once was. Under socialism it takes a back seat to what goes on in the White House, Congress, and the ever powerful bureaucracy. The wealthiest people in America, such as Bill Gates, earned their riches by building great companies that are providing America with the most efficient and low-cost computers and software ever produced. The Internet is a result of their “greed.” The founders of Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and a dozen other great computer enterprises have all earned their billions legally by giving Americans the products and services they wanted. In fact, the late Steve Jobs’ of Apple was worth more than the nation’s largest oil company. And all of these companies required investment by venture capitalists to get started. They went to Wall Street when they were big enough to go public so that the general American investor could benefit from their success. And if Wall Street made a buck or two, or even three, that was “greed.”
But despite these great triumphs of free enterprise, which has put America in the technological lead in the 21st century, the OWS mobs want to destroy capitalism and saddle us with a 19th-century utopian ideology of equality of poverty. Their hatred of capitalism is pathological. Yet they don’t mind making free use of YouTube, or Google, or the Internet, which could never have been created without capitalism. They want socialism and Barack Obama is giving it to them.
In essence, the OWS mobs are merely part of Obama’s reelection campaign. Their man is already in the White House, so their job is to convince dumbed-down Americans to keep him there. They will wage the dirtiest election campaign in American history, accusing conservatives of every evil possible. And their puppet-master, George Soros, will laugh all the way to his hedge fund. Apparently, most of the OWS idiots are those who can be fooled all of the time. But, thank God, Mr. Soros can’t fool all the people all of the time.
We should be reminded that it was George Soros who chose Obama for the presidency. I guess he had something against Hillary. But we now know that Soros became interested in Obama when he was still only running for the Illinois Senate. Steven Brill writes in Class Warfare (p.115): “June 7, 2004 George Soros had a fund-raising cocktail party in his New York Fifth Avenue apartment for Barack Obama, guest of honor, who was running for the senate in Illinois who was black and had roots in Kenya.”
So the Soros-Obama connection is quite intimate, goes back to 2004, and explains why Obama’s presidential campaign was so well organized and successful despite his left-wing connections. And now Soros is pulling out all the stops to make this present campaign a winner by bringing out the mobs. This is just the beginning of an extraordinary election that will decide the future of America. Soros is determined to shape it in his own peculiar image.
Washington is now the new seat of total power. But since Soros cannot become dictator, he is content to work behind the scenes. But America is too big and too varied to be governed by Washington. And the concept of federalism outlined in our Constitution has still not been totally eradicated. There are 50 states that are not exactly potted plants and have a thing or two to say about how their affairs are to be run. There will be lawsuits galore if Obama is reelected.
Incidentally, if you want information on federal employees, their number and occupations, you can go to Chief Human Capital Officers for information. This strange-sounding bureaucracy was created by the Chief Human Capital Officers Act of 2002, enacted as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 on November 25, 2002. It required the heads of 24 Executive Departments and agencies to appoint or designate Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs). Each CHCO serves as his or her agency’s chief policy advisor on all human resources management issues and is charged with selecting, developing, training, and managing a high-quality, productive workforce.
The CHCO also appointed a 25-member Council, composed of the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), who serves as chairman; the Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who acts as vice chairman; the CHCOs of the 15 Executive departments; and the CHCOs of 8 additional agencies designated by the OPM Director. Additionally, the Council has an Executive Director who coordinates and oversees the activities of the Council.
This is probably the bureaucracy in charge of all the other bureaucracies, something badly needed in Washington. When in doubt, create a new bureaucracy. For a view inside the bureaucracy by a bureaucrat, here is a commentary that appeared under the Washington Post article cited above:
I’ve been a fed for more than 17 years. I do think the bureaucracy is too big and that the USG could easily shave off a few hundred thousand employees. I work in an office of about 30 people. We have about 5 employees who do very little (as in most federal offices I bet) and could be let go. We wouldn’t miss a beat. Too bad managers don’t have the ability to make decisions like this. Part of the problem is the inability to fire federal employees. Unions have a share of the blame along with far too many civil service protections. We’ve been trying to fire an employee for 2 years now. He’ll end up outlasting many of our managers who seem to move on and up. The system needs some fixing.
At least somebody in the bureaucracy is willing to tell it like it is. The unionization of federal employees is the worst thing that Congress ever approved of.
Meanwhile, we’ve all been fixated on the Republican candidate debates, which are becoming less and less edifying. Perry damaged himself greatly by bickering with Romney; criticism of Herman Cain’s tax plan raised more questions about its viability; but at least Ron Paul held steady on his pro-Constitution stand. There was too little criticism of Obama and too much criticism of each other from most of the candidates.
But a new Gallup Poll indicates that most Americans blame Washington more for our troubles than they do Wall Street. So all is not lost. The American people have a backbone after all. They know that things have gone very badly. The Tea Partiers now know what the editors and contributing writers at The New American knew years ago — that Americas let Washington lead the country to ruin too long before they decided to do something about it. Finally, enough is enough.
Related article: Washington, D.C. Surpasses San Jose as Wealthiest Metro Area
