Dateline DC: This city of swamprats in custom suits is a limbo, a purgatory occassionally slipping into hell. It is the capitol and first city of the Wild East, edging out New York with baroque corruption more obscene than hundred dollar parking if only because the scales of loot and depravity are orders of magnitude larger. Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, rather than lemonade stands. It’s where the money is.

Cornell Jones is no villain, or at least not here. Lifetime criminal though he be, he is at least an honest one, hijacking his hoard with an iron fist and an open gun instead of a soothing word and a hidden dagger. Still, even he was not above getting his hands dirty in Washington politics, sullying his own reputation by rubbing elbows with Marion Barry and his patrons under the Capitol Dome. One might wonder why a pillar of his community, inventor and entrepreneur like Jones would risk his hard-won legacy as the importer of drugs, exporter of thugs and dispenser of neighborly hugs? Even the man flush with cash from innovations like Butt Naked can be turned from his path by the lure of still easier riches dripping from the point of that greasy funnel whose mouth draws from the North American contintent and drains out not far from his blighted Georgetown neighborhood.

So what happened? How did Cornell Jones go wrong? Jones was known as a benefactor to his neighborhood, in Robin-hood style he would drop off groceries, Air Jordans and even medicinal drugs to those with conspicuous need in shitholes like Hanover Place. So it was only natural when DC do-gooders were looking to dump some cash on a fashionable cause like urban AIDS that Mr. Jones’ name would come up. As it happened, a third of a mil of that lucre earmarked for “jobs training” programs went to fund a ghetto fabulous gentlemen’s club in the ‘hood.

It must be said that as jobs programs go, this was not so bad. Inarguably he DID create a dozen and a half jobs paying greater than the prevailing legal wage. Jones’ was creating, not saving jobs and certainly not destroying them. Compared to the Green Jobs Fiasco the Flesh Jobs Initiative was wildly successful, setting up a new enterprise in a mature industry drawing hard cash from a business environment as hostile as one could imagine. So why is this fellow not getting a plum seat and Honorable Mention in the desparate hunt for beneficial results from recent government spending? The obvious reason might be the real one. Jones’ career was a product of the Bush Disaster, not the Obama Miracle. Secondly though, we must recognize that the club created by Miracle Hands (the corny euphemism for the Jones Gang) was the most helpful project to come from the $4.5 mil showered upon it. The details of neglect and death are in the links, hit them at your peril, but HIV positive bodies littering playgrounds was not the open goal of this particular trenchant of spending. It was the result by anyone’s reckoning as attached news bits reveal but can anyone think the soft-hearted yuppies at the Washington Post are interested in discrediting government charity? No no, of course not. Neither were the Bushies or Congresses of whatever party throughout the last couple decades. But the facts speak for themselves and it’s a good thing, since no child born of woman has any hope of helpfully doing so.

Who could ever speak against the limitless funding of Miracle Hands? No one, brothers and sisters. NO one. Some tried, for sure. Mostly these were the victims of the helping hands; AIDS ridden street people who scratched together the wherewithal for a desperate phone call to a number plastered on a bus bench only to have it ring and ring and ring without even the dignity of getting a runaround from living, breathing people. But who cares about them?

The urban AIDS initiatives were as above real scrutiny as the Mother of God, moreso in the swankiest precincts. At a Georgetown cocktail party where the apparatchiks who funded these disasters and the city wardheelers who administer them hobnob with the press watchdogs who are supposed to police them, can you imagine anyone saying a word in protest? It would be their last cocktail party, that is for sure and could well presage their last paycheck. Miracle Hands enjoyed a powerfully alloyed shield. The first layer, plain as day, is race. The wretches who were to be helped by these projects were almost all black. You aren’t a racist, are you? That’s what I thought. But this is no ordinary Race Card. Not in DC. For in attacking Miracle Hands with whatever truth and necessity the REAL beneficiaries would snap and snarl against you like their lifestyles depend on it. These are the purely black city officials, employees and retainers. If you wonder how a program to house and clothe beggars can rip through millions and still not help a soul, this is it. Six-figure salaries and unexamined expense accounts are the genuine and intended outcome. Any improvement at the street level is cool but incidental and there is a strong case to be made that the incentives are AGAINST any ammelioration of conditions; we have to keep the funding you know and really, we would like to expand it. Then we have the AIDS angle so complainers are not only racist but forthrightly homophobic. If you observe that a federally funded Ba-Da Bing Club is not what reformers at the School of Public Policy had in mind you are, what? Against women in the workplace? Are you laughing? You should stop.

And now from the same precincts comes the shrieking question…. How? How can we spend TRILLIONS and reap only destruction? There is only one explanation. We did not spend ENOUGH! Wasn’t our original project double or triple what we actually got? Right there’s your trouble. We have to catch up; it is only good sense and common decency. What we need is MORE largesse, MORE private-public partnership to make sure it goes where it should and LESS oversight but paradoxically MORE administration. And all the while no one has the temerity to say that, hey, maybe we should curtail this crap to a limited extent, stop drawing those trillions from the pockets of working Americans and maybe, just maybe they will do something about it that is… crazy idea… more efficient, more effective, more compassionate, more penetrating and gosh darn it, perhaps a bit less corrupt than a job training program for gunmen, whores and drug slingers. Ya think? And perhaps we could even get Mr. Jones on board. He must be tired of government meddling in his affairs. Aren’t you?

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