The worst.
I have been following the tribulations of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick since he was the subject of a civil suit by a bodyguard who claimed that he had been dismissed for uncovering an illicit sexual relationship between the mayor and his aide. Then Mayor, Kilpatrick fought the lawsuit with perjury and by managing to corrupt about a dozen lawyers, including those who worked for the city, many of whom ended up with their licenses suspended. In the end, he was forced to resign and sent to jail for obstructing justice, but the affair with his subordinate turned out to be a tiny tip of a very ugly iceberg. Once the golden glow was removed from Kilpatrick, who had been regarded as Detroit’s savior, other transgressions came into view, far more serious ones. Now he has been convicted of racketeering, and will probably be in prison for decades.
Yet even if he gets the maximum sentence for the 26 charges, including racketeering, fraud and extortion, a Detroit jury convicted him of yesterday, Kilpatrick will be getting off easy. There isn’t a crime on the books, you see, for accepting the trust of a community, a vulnerable, desperate community, yearning for a hero, and then using that trust to satisfy greed, personal gain and selfish motives, while those who put their welfare in your hands suffer and a city dies. That is what Kwame Kilpatrick did to his home town. His sentence, whatever it is, will not render justice for the unpunishable crime of accepting responsibility for the fate of a city, and murdering it while its back was turned.
Kilpatrick’s defenders—isn’t it amazing that such people can always find defenders?—-argue that Detroit was already in bad shape when Kilpatrick took office in 2002, and that is certainly true. Three years later, however, the city was running 100 million dollar a year deficits, and one reason, we now know, was that Kilpatrick was more concerned with lining his pockets with kickbacks and bribes than doing his job. Taxes weren’t being collected; fines weren’t being paid; incompetence in the city government was widespread and tolerated. The mayor’s solution for the city’s growing debt was to take out more and more loans, postponing a financial reckoning for as long as possible to mask the pain, a process equivalent to drugging a cancer patient so he won’t notice his growing tumor. The really tragic and infuriating part of all this is that Kilpatrick could have been the real thing, a rescuer, a transformative leader. He had the skills and leadership ability to turn Detroit around. He was charismatic, motivating, inspiring: he gave his city hope; he was a role model for the young black youth, and young white youth too, whose future he held in his hands. What nobody knew until it was too late was that Kilpatrick didn’t give a damn about his city and those who trusted him to be their champion. They were all just marks to him. As Detroit Times columnist Nolan Finley wrote, looking back on how Kilpatrick charmed him as well, “That was Kwame Kilpatrick in a nutshell: Natural born leader, natural born con man. A man who could one minute thrill an audience with the rich future he painted of his city, and the next be angling how to cut himself in on a payoff.”
Kilpatrick isn’t the first corrupt leader to misuse his gifts for his or her own benefit rather than that of the community that elected him, of course. Jesse Jackson, whose son is one such leader, just led a delegation to Venezuela to honor the legacy another, Hugo Chavez. Many such leaders never get caught, and many of those who do, like Boston’s infamous James Michael Curley and Washington, D.C.’s Marion Barry, are re-elected to office even after any clear-eyed observer would recognize them as predators. Some, like Chicago’s legendary Mayor James Daley, even manage to do some good while they are spreading corruption.Few, however, do as much damage with their ethics-free ways, when they were capable of doing so much good, as Kilpatrick. He took a sick city into his care, fed it poison and squandered the money that was supposed to pay the medical bills. He used precious time, trust and resources to turn hope into despair. He made a whole generation in his city distrustful of authority and democracy.
Rotten ethics can do as much harm as any crime. The betrayal of Detroit by Kwame Kilpatrick is vivid, nauseating proof.
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Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
“Yet even if he gets the maximum sentence for the 26 charges, including racketeering, fraud and extortion, a Detroit jury convicted him of yesterday, Kilpatrick will be getting off easy. “
Not to mention the Greek city-states again, but they had pretty final and swift solutions to leaders who defrauded and corrupted the city.
“The mayor’s solution for the city’s growing debt was to take out more and more loans, postponing a financial reckoning for as long as possible to mask the pain, a process equivalent to drugging a cancer patient so he won’t notice his growing tumor.”
Replace “…to drugging a cancer patient so he won’t notice his growing tumor.” with “…to what the national level of government is doing to us now.“. All very interchangeable.
Your remark about the Greek Method for dealing with such miscreants is well taken. Too bad Greece itself has forgetten this. If Boss Tweed had gotten this treatment many moons ago, American municipal governments might not be in the shape they’re in. Kilpatrick is only following in the long established tradition of Tammany Hall. He just went a “little” too far… and thus became expendible. No honor among thieves.
I think the mention of Hugo Chavez inspires an apt comparison. It’s more common than most people think for “cults of personality” to develop at the local level in the United States, and it’s nothing all that new, we’re coming up on a century since Huey “The Kingfish” Long turned Louisiana into his personal realm with all his own rules and a century since the election of supreme political boss Frank Hague in Jersey City is only four years away. The fact is that most of America’s cities are or have certain populations who have very little hope for doing better on their own without very sustained efforts. It’s VERY easy for a charismatic leader with the “gift for gab” paticularly if he shares the same ethnicity or background with these people, to offer them something resembling a “quick fix” and thereby purchase what amounts to “king’s privilege” and a lifelong loyalty from those he gives some scrap of hope to. Frank Hague was never touched, although he did retire when he saw the writing on the wall, and Sharpe James, who went to jail for two years, is still celebrated as something like a god by his followers. Let’s not even speak of how the curent President, no mater what happens, will be celebrated as a god for generations to come. I have SOME sympathy for would-be reformers who get caught up in the political machine and bend their principles, sometimes it is better to take half a loaf when the whole loaf cannot be had, but it’s pretty clear here that Kilpatrick went in intending to use his message to get a license to stuff his own pockets. As long as the hopeless can be bought for scraps of hope, though, we are going to have leaders like him.
Huh… The NYT doesn’t mention the party affiliation of a single person in the entire affair… Not once.
I wonder why that might be?
I’m tired of flagging that habit of the MSM…of course, Kwame is black, meaning that the odds of him being what he is, a Democrat, are about 99-1, especially in Detroit. His affiliation doesn’t matter anyway—he’d be an unethical Druid.
Druids, however, can’t provide the backup that established Democrat urban political machines can.
No one is, of course. I only like to point out that habit because it seems to me to be an easy example of how subtle and pernicious the media can be – that and they’re so reliable that they can’t help but do it. It’s brainwashing.
It is pernicious—I wonder if it’s always intentional, subconscious cognitive dissonance at work, or innocent. So much else is omitted by incompetence, that I am reluctant to see malice. Then again, every new report was sure to note that Mark Sanford is a Republican.
The obvious first result of such a tactic, intentional or not, is to create a perception that Republicans (or conservatives) are more prone to doing wrong than their opponents. But even when the stories are neutral in tone, the Republican is still more likely to be labelled. That points to the second, more subtle result – the creation of the ‘other.’ If a liberal senator is merely a ‘senator’ and a conservative senator is a ‘conservative senator,’ that creates the appearance that the norm for a senator is liberal. Conservatives are different from the norm.
Said once, no problem. Said consistently, across every form of media, for 40+ years… it has a conditioning effect. Liberals are normal. Conservatives are not. Republicans misbehave, Democrats do not. The studies on this are not new, nor are they hidden. Most of the major media outlets have been scolded for behavior like this, and that scolding has had plenty of time to make its way into academia and then back into the media as graduates join the ranks of the professionals. And yet we still have the fact that Sanford, Craig, and Vitter are Republican nearly 100% of the time. Jackson, Menendez, and Kilpatrick… they’re just Senators and Mayors. Even if it is unintentional, the possible outcomes of having just that little bit bias is so massive that they should be taught to watch out for it. The fact that they still haven’t taken their thumb off the scale when they’ve been called on it tells me they mean to have it there.
Of course, Detroit was in the position that it was because of its previous, charismatic savior and civil rights leader, Coleman Young, who actually does make Kilpatrick look honest by comparison.
The scary thing about this article is how much it applies to all of America now. If I just blank out the names…
” The [leader’s] solution for the [government’s] growing debt was to take out more and more loans, postponing a financial reckoning for as long as possible to mask the pain, a process equivalent to drugging a cancer patient so he won’t notice his growing tumor. The really tragic and infuriating part of all this is that [the leader] could have been the real thing, a rescuer, a transformative leader. He had the skills and leadership ability to turn [the government] around. He was charismatic, motivating, inspiring: he gave his [constituents] hope…”
This is not surprising since our current President and Kilpatrick were often mentioned in the same breath as examples of the new up-and-coming Democratic leaders. One has been unmasked for the crook he is to all except the Democratic faithful (and he has many supporters). If the same is true of the other, I am afraid today’s Detroit is the model for tomorrow’s USA.
This did occur to me.
I wondered if it did or if you wrote it at 3 AM and it slipped by.
No, I really considered whether to mention it. But the comparison would politicize (to some) a post that otherwise is universal. If the parallel is obvious and unavoidable, the only ones who don’t see it are those who will deny it if its brought to their attention. I could, for example, have cited the President’s recent statement that he won’t balance the budget “just for the sake of it,” which is irresponsible on its face. If you are in debt, you do balance the budget just to balance the budget, because otherwise the debt just gets larger. This means, to my ear, I’ll only balance the budget if it suits my political agenda. That’s the way Kwami would think about it, and Hugo too.
You give Hugo too much credit – he wouldn’t even acknowledge there was an issue with the budget, leave alone try to balance it.
Corrected: Today’s Detroit model is the model for *today’s* USA.
Sorry, Jack, but let’s do politicize this. Obama, for example, has NOT reduced the debt, has not kept his promises, but spends $175,000 PER HOUR taking vacations on Air Force One, while “they” can’t afford to have White House tours anymore. We should tighten our belts when he spends Administration funds on any enjoyment he desires? Why isn’t HE called to task on this? Michelle’s bangs notwithstanding, he is a fraud and a cheat as well.