Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of
incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only
helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.
The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened
observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into the
ground bemused, involves a real estate firm which gave the felonious mayor
massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets and other perks as this enemy
of the people went about his hypocritical business of pretending to care about
the poor while robbing them blind. The firm, apparently run by a sleazy low
class crook named by the reprehensible Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what
was left of Detroit’s finances, used Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of
California strip malls. Title to the properties was never transferred to the
pension funds, and they seem to be out $3.1 million.
Kilpatrick’s partner in slime is his ex-college frat brother Jeffrey Beasley, who is accused of taking bribes and kickbacks as he made bad investments that cost pension funds $84 million. Overall, aDetroit Free Press investigation estimates that corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.
I honestly don’t know why there is so little national
outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. The
ultimate victims of the crime are Detroit’s poor and the middle class and lower
middle class, mostly African-American municipal workers who may face serious
financial losses in old age.
The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst
and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of
Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied
history of American municipal corruption. Now under federal indictment for,
essentially, running Detroit City Hall as a criminal enterprise, Kilpatrick
reportedly turned down a plea bargain that included a 15 year prison term.
Insiders say that since the maximum time for the charges he faces was 18 years,
the offer from the prosecutors indicates strong confidence in their case.
Indicted with him was his father; it’s nice to think that father and son will
have some quality time in the can.
We must all hope for mercy in this world and the next
and VM doesn’t exactly wish the worst on these people, but if between the civil
penalties, fines and lawsuits from those they have wronged Kilpatrick and
company are picked so clean that they have to depend on their prison earnings
for snack money in jail, helping them out won’t be at the top of our charitable
giving list. And one thing Michigan legislators should check is whether the
state has a nice harsh pension forfeiture law.
These judgments are always subjective, but it seems to
me that there is not nearly enough national publicity about and outrage over
the crimes of Kwame Kilpatrick. If a white or Asian Republican pol had looted
fire and police pension funds, blighted the lives of a generation of minority
kids and helped do more damage to a great American city than Hurricane Katrina,
I don’t think this would be primarily a local news story. I would expect that
the scandal would grip the nation, and there would be wall to wall national
media coverage.
As there should be.
As it is, an eerie silence envelopes the subject.
Outside the Michigan area, only the most dedicated news hounds and political
junkies follow this story.
Three factors seem to be at work. One is quite simply
financial; falling newsroom budgets in the MSM mean that it is harder for
national papers and legacy networks to cover the country.
The second factor is more disturbing: there is a
pervasive national sense of ennui and despair about urban areas in which African
Americans are the majority. ‘We’ expect decline, decay and corruption in these
places, so the Kilpatrick story strikes many editors and journalists as just
another ‘dog bites man’ story: not news. Cory Booker is news; Kwame Kilpatrick
isn’t.
That ennui and despair intensify when the subject is
Detroit. Frankly, while the genteel world hates the thought of being racist, in
reality there is a widespread belief in even the most liberal and well educated
portions of the white upper middle class that nothing much better can happen in
Detroit. I don’t believe that, and this is one of the reasons the city’s
decline makes me angry as well as sad. Lax law enforcement and oversight from
federal and state authorities allowed a climate of unrestrained corruption to
grow up in Detroit over many years.
Putting a lot more people in jail much earlier in
their careers, and instilling a healthy fear of the law in Detroit’s political
class would have slowed the decline at least, and might well have created
openings for better politicians to emerge. The failure of Detroit’s political
class must also be seen as a dramatic failure of national and state law
enforcement. The horses had been out of this stable for a long time before the
authorities showed up with padlocks in hand. One hopes that the Department of
Justice will move aggressively to target big city machines for investigation
before more Detroits pop up. Similarly, state governors might want to suggest
to their attorneys general that corruption bears watching. Michigan taxpayers
are going to be stuck with huge bills as the state struggles to cope with the
consequences of misrule in Detroit; smart governors might not want to wait
until their cities collapse.
Finally, there is a disconnect between important local
news and our national news culture today. The New York Times does
a lousy job covering New York city and New York State; in the rarefied world of Times readers,
local news is dull. Many of our national news editors and writers see
themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, interested in much more
exciting and important things than the grubby realities of local and municipal
life.
In this, the journalists faithfully reflect the
thinking of many members of the genteel upper middle class; it is a kind of
weird Platonic vision of reality in which the ‘lower’, grubby levels of
politics and national life count for less than the ‘higher’, ‘nobler’ levels.
Call it the gentrification of news; before Ivy Leaguers filled the newsrooms,
American papers focused on the nuts and bolts of life. Now, they are much too
highfalutin and hoity-toity for crime and city hall reporters to be the cocks
of the walk.
Thus, even as interest in and reporting on the
economic and social meltdown of so many once prosperous American cities and
states ebbs, the ‘aristocracy’ of the press corps intensifies its endless and
endlessly overdone coverage of the national election cycle. Very little that is
said or done in either the Romney or Obama campaigns right now has much to do
with what voters will be thinking about and voting on six months from now. But
that doesn’t stop the legacy press from obsessing about it while ignoring far
more consequential developments taking place on every side.
Detroit doesn’t matter all that much to the New
York Times and many of its readers for the same reasons that Albany,
Queens, Buffalo and Schenectady don’t matter. The new American elite wants to
live and think as if it has transcended all that dreary provincial mess
and lives on high in a world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is
much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of
Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are well dressed and well
cared for.
There is something profoundly wrong with an American
political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It
is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats
and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions
place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.
American cities have been festering pits of graft and
bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference
between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction
practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some
city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the
host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our
society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest
ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and
grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs
and no opportunity for the young.
How is it anything but racist not to care about that —
and not to burn with the desire to put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our
cities and waste our social funds in prison where they belong?
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