Nice rant. Neighborhood I grew up in has lost almost all its trees & almost no new trees (other than the usual crappy, small, poofy stuff) replanted. Decline of culture/civilization. OTOH, rather high-scale neighborhoods that have large oaks, Norway spruces, sugar maples, white pines, etc still look magnificent.

Suburb of DC ... it is our tax money making elite beaurocrats into princes with palaces. We vote for this!

Suggest self-editing of the profanity as it is unlikely to be accepted once it is picked up on.

Gee .... who ultimately pays for lobbyists and executives? Who pays for everything .... the good, bad & ugly? It is John Q. Public, AKA taxpayer. All of this prospers in D.C. because of him.

Too late for editing. It's an adult-oriented and mostly adult-populated forum...surely we can handle the S word where appropriate? Moderators - you are free to mod it LOL.

Yes Yardvaark is basically correct, DC is the world's largest company town, HOWEVER, a lot of the ones with ridiculous money are not directly involved in government lobbying but instead with some some loosely associated function like media, or 'obscure media'. like Bloomberg BNA, or 'companies that happened to think DC was a good place to relocate to', like AOL. That started in Ohio IIRC. Or more pertinent to the continued price spikes of late, Amazon. Or they were in industries that could skim off the top of all of this - one of my parent's wealthiest friends was a veterinarian. Easy to build up a large successful practice when the suburbs of DC were some of the countries fastest growing for several decades, with a large population of people with stable jobs and money to pamper their pets. Also from what I observed both growing up where I did and stories I hear through the grapevine now, while the PNW has many wealthy Asian immigrants, the suburbs of DC are where a lot of Middle Eastern and Europe monied choose to "anchor" their babies, to put it bluntly. For example, at my high school I knew a second cousin of the Shah. And another kid associated with middle-eastern 'royalty' the details of which I can't even remember. Possibly related to Anwar Sadat. (conversely, some friends of my parents knew the erstwhile Lisa Halabi!)

funny, in confirming I'd mixed up AOL with compuserve, I found out that AOL's first predecessor was originally founded by a German count! Kind of illustrating my last point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_von_Meister

Nevertheless, Amazon was not the first company to shift a portion of the HQ operations to the DC area. CSC and Northrop Grumman come to mind. No surprise there as they are big defense contractors. NYC businesses poach DC area ones as appropriate, as with the Bloomberg BNA I cited. BNA was an obscure but profitable publisher of regulatory and professional media, bought by Bloomberg for 1 billion in 2011.

Back to the matter at hand though, glad people appreciated my rant!

David, are you talking about Great Falls, where I spent five of the Clinton yesrs? Will never forget the shock of seeing the edifices going up everywhere putting to shabby shame my home state of ny, financial capital of the country.

The landscaping I did like there were rolling lawns and black stained fences (not split rail but low and open) and even the occasional horse. Windy wooded back roads were pretty to drive but impossible to bike or walk. The house I rented had hundreds of azaleas, all propagated by the owner. There seemed to no deer problem yet, which is the reason for a lot of the worst effects on landscaping back here in ny.

Had an office in McLean for 5 years. Terminating that lease and focusing out here has been one of my better decisions.