One reason why there aren’t any news stories about political corruption by Blacks is due to the influence of groups like the National Association of Black Journalists. This group, along with other like-minded ones like the one for Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, etc (you get the idea). As I understand it, these groups can kill any sort of story that reflects adversely on their “people”.

The author forgot to mention the fact that kwami was the biggest drug dealer in the city, or talk about his gang-member personal protection detail. I was once in Eastern Market when Kwami and his posse pulled in to do a meet and greet with the commoners of Detroit, I stood in line to shake his hand, just out of courtesy, and he walked right past me as if I wasn’t even there, I asked his chief of staff why he wouldn’t shake my hand and she told me that the mayor did not shake hands or converse with white people unless they are willing to contribute to his campaign. That is the overt kind of racism one finds throughout Detroit. As far as I am concerned Detroit should be bulldozed and sprinked with lime so nothing can ever grow there again.

There is not national outrage because these people that committed these crimes were fairly elected by the people to represent them. The nation is not responsible for this the localities are. What is the nation supposed to do about the stupidity of the electorate electing corrupt democrats over and over again.

Maybe the mainstream media don’t cover stories like Detroit for the same reason they don’t cover a wave of serious black-on-white hate crimes around the country — yet go overboard on one highly questionable and in any case isolated alleged case of white-on-black crime.

Instead of bending over backwards intitutions like NYT should stand straight and tell it like it is. With integrity. Without fear or favor.

It’s time to stop treating the American people like children and instead treat them like full-grown adults, the overwhelming majority of whom are responsible citizens who need to be informed. To do less is yellow journalism in a double sense.

Great insights by WRM. I agree strongly with his explanation about what lies behind the lack of coverage of KK’s abuses. Thomas Sowell summed it up nicely with the phrase “…soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I lived in Detroit during the Coleman A. Young years.

I have no sympathy for the blacks of Detroit, neither for the white guilty liberals. You get what you get when you lay down with dogs! Fleas and disease.

They are ultimately responsible! So go cry to someone else about how the lower and middle income blacks will suffer! They need to suffer for their foolishness in continuing democRAT leadership of what was a once proud and fine city.

Walter, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?

Seriously, a passionate and articulate piece, revealing one more, if particularly egregious, example of the disconnect between the political and cultural “elite” and the rest of the country.

Mr. Mead, it’s not just big cities that have corruption problems. Any time the city clerk of a town of 500 or 50,000 or 500,000 charges a personal expense to a city account, it’s the first step of a culture of corruption that can easily end up like Detroit. And it’s so darn easy to prevent it from happening, too.

“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.”
This is exactly what has happened to our country through the manipulation of laws and regulations which allowed corporations, banks and other financial institutions to gut the wealth of this country through the housing bubble and liar loans, the speculation on commodities by the investment houses and the offshoring of jobs and profits. All facilitated by primarily white republicans, yet there is obfuscation and disinformation by the corporate owned main stream media. The banks have stolen trillions from the tax paying American people, primarily working class which is becoming smaller and smaller in this country.

The pension funds all over the country bought so called mortgage backed securities which were blocks of “sub-prime”, read liar loans, which will end up with many people finding out too late that their pension funds are insolvent due to the ponzi scheme facilitated by our bought off government and the bankers.

Kwames biggest mistake was not realizing that he should have had laws passed which would have allowed him to steal legally. That is what the white republicans do.

Where is the wall to wall coverage of how the rich white republicans have declared a class war on the working class in this country and have manipulated the regulatory and legal systems in this country to their advantage at the expense of the great majority/

As long as the residents of these dysfunctional cities remain loyal to the Democrats, this will continue.

If only Barry the organizer had cleaned up any part of Chicago before he went on to clean up America. But, alas, I have heard of none of the success stories of little Barry’s escapades in Chicago, and if his organizing of America is any indication, he left Chicago worse than when he found it…To quote, Barry: Can I get an Amen?

This is tragic. But the most perplexing thing to me is the citizens of Detroit will still vote for the people who have destroyed their city, ruined their future and condemned them to a life of poverty. In theory, people should vote their self interest, but this is not happening. In California a similar thing is occurring. The Democrats have ruined the state and yet there is little concern they will be voted out of office. Until that happens, nothing will change. It is not clear what it would take to get people to vote these people out. Apparently having your future looted and destroyed is not enough.

Come on Mr. Mead you know the answer, you even admit you know it.

It’s not news room budgets or the uselessness of the NY Times. It seems to me the Detroit Free Press fights the good fight, but it’s to no avail. It’s not because elites see themselves as detached from ordinary Americans. These things may all be very true, but they have just about nothing to do with how Kwame Kilpatrick has been given a pass for so long.

It’s because the corrupt Pols in Detroit are Democrats and African-Americans.

The press won’t criticize Dems and we all know it is racist to criticize blacks, any black, anywhere, for any thing.

If we want things to change for the better the Democrats must be driven from power.

However, since the tea partiers are ready to rend the Republican party into shreds (and I AM a tea partier, keep that in mind) the Dems will probably be able to hold on and keep destroying this country a job they’ve been earnestly working at for hundreds of years.

As for the African-American angle, blacks are going to have to confront their own intra-group problems head on. Until that happens, nothing will improve for them.

Hell will freeze over before the Obama administration goes after graft and corruption in America’s cities. The “people of color” who run these cities — and have their hands in the till up to their armpits — are given free rein to continue their plunder unimpeded. Any effort to intervene in this dynamic will immediately trigger stentorian cries of “racism.”

Meantime, as Charles Murray points out, the bien-pensant, who live in gated communities far from all this and imagine themselves insulated from such unseemly goings-on, leave such matters to the Democratic Party apparatus to deal with. They simply assuage their self-imposed white guilt with platitudes and donations.

The kicker is that, as African-American “communities” (I use the word advisedly) become progressively less well educated (by design), inner-city residents become ever more content to vote for Democrats — as long as their check is in the mail.

The whole paradigm is a corrupt bargain of brodingnagian proportions, and it’s not going to change untill the well runs dry.

“I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew.”

@WRM
Didn’t spend a lot of time reading about Washington DC under Marion Barry’s kleptocracy, did you? Survivors of same have come to expect that sort of thing when the old civil rights warriors (or their children in Detroit’s case) are elected to mayoralties. Their idea of running the show is to do what they think mayors in the first part of the 20th century did. The latter may have done the same things, but at least they knew how to deliver the services required by cities, at least for the most part. The Barrys and the Kilpatricks got the stealing part down; they just didn’t know how to master the service delivery part.

“Where’s the outrage?” you ask? “Where’s the media coverage,” I ask. You and I both know the media ain’t gonna cover this – it wrecks their frames. I’m reminded of something actor and director Robert Hooks said back in the 70s, that blacks would never be truly equal until they were allowed to fail. The media and the federal government collectively don’t get the wisdom of that insight.

The myriad pathologies of Detroit are what we get when we have too much government and too much pathetic, knee-jerk whacko thinking like #57’s. Come to think of it, we get too much government because of the likes of #57’s thinking.

“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.”

Facts is facts. What angers me is when people attribute noticing facts to racism. The facts about black leadership of large, predominantly black cities like Washington DC and Detroit are not pretty. Before I left the DC area, a reporter analyzed the shabby Barry tenure and his refusal to disappear quietly. The report attributed it to Barry’s long apprenticeship in the civil rights movement. Both he and his ex-wife were movers and shakers in the movement, esp. locally. Their world view was that only the government could make blacks equal and economically viable. Okay. I give ’em that excuse. But when the facts changed, they didn’t. And it doesn’t explain their making sure that #1 got rich into the bargain. Suddenly, 3rd world dictatorships became the model, at least as far as skimming from the top, kick-backs, padding the payrolls with relatives and friend, all the unsavory practices one associates with democratically unsophisticated nations. Why did this happen? Why wasn’t more it more widely reported by the media? David Brinkley’s Washington Goest To War contains ample evidence that even under the 3 commissioners that ran DC before 1967, the place was pretty screwed up in the 30s when it was still a sleepy little southern town. And as I recall from having lived there during the mayoralty of Walter Washington, the first elected DC mayor in 100 years and a black, the government was reasonably effective and not a collection of conscienceless crooks. What happened to send DC down the crapper so fast once Barry was elected?

I resent being called racist when I would love to show my interest in the fate of Detroit by telling the innercity residents to stay in school, stop having kids out of wedlock, stop excusing your kids crime, stop being anti-authority, stop embracing the thug culture, do something about your drug taking and illiteracy, marry your baby mommas, stop living off the state, stop feeling ‘victimized’ and whipping up grievances, and stop voting in corrupt black Democrats as your leaders.

However, if I said all that, I’d be called racist after every single piece of that advice. If I don’t think about Detroit I only get called racist once.

Why do you people refuse to print the whole story? Kwamme’s mommie is Congressman Kilpatrick, a long, long time member of Congress and former head of the No-Whites-Allowed Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Kwamme’s former colleague on the Detroit City Council (and now serving time at a club fed) is Congressman Conyers wife.
It isn’t that Kwamme is a rogue criminal. He is part of a broad criminal activity that no will mention because they are all/mostly blacks.
The whole CBC (there may be a few exceptions) is crooked. They are protected by the government and the media. If they were Republicans, we’d know about them. You have not helped a whole lot.

Maybe a more pertinent question would be “Why don’t blacks demand better out of governments they control?” Do they think it’s better to be screwed by people they know than people they don’t? Is competency considered “acting white?”

In point of fact, most big city governments are ethical cesspools of corruption and don’t improve until the citizens rise up to demand reforms. Corey Booker is the beneficiary of citizen revolts and reform movements that took place in Philly after the 70s. He inherits apparatus that is already purged of the more egregious corrupt practices. All he has to do is not let it backslide. That is a lot easier than reforming a system, but it is still important.

“Rogue” Democrats?

Detroit’s story is like something from the Late Roman Empire. Most of the city is abandoned, and if there were any Goths they’d surely have moved into the ruins by now.

It really is disturbing that America’s second city has completely collapsed in only a few decades.

“Hardcore Pawn” is the correct choice for a reality show set in Detroit.

I’m used to analysing the politics of places like PNG and other failing states, so politicans ripping off a pension fund isn’t new to me. The only difference is they didn’t take the whole lot and they are getting punished for it.

This post is dripping with moral outrage, and quite rightly so. But many of the posts on this site drip with moral outrage, so i have to apply a bit of a filter. I don’t read this site as much any more because the langauge isn’t calibrated, so i often have to second guess what you’re saying.

The other point is that while detroit lost half a billion in bad investments, most pension funds lost a bunch of money in the past few years. I don’t doubt that a bunch of incompetent friends were appointed and did a bad job. But i would like a ball park figure or a caveat of the difference between losses from a normal operation and those of detroit. I haven’t read the sources you’re drawing upon, so apologies if that is included in the original figure, but i doubt it.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Ben Franklin

Any question about where we are on the spectrum of virtue?

While I feel for the these people and certainly the children that will pay for this the rest of their lives, I can’t feel too sorry. After all, it is these same victims that continue to vote these same criminals into office. they turn their back on other options because they have an “R” after their name, or because the criminal they ultimately vote for promises them more then they could possibly deliver. the victims vote in the criminal and then are surprised that the criminal steals?????? I think places like Detroit, Chicago & Baltimore are getting EXACTLY WHAT THEY ASKED FOR. This Mayors scummy behavior was known before he was elected the first time, certainly before he was re-elected. and if he ran again against God himself (and if God had an R after his name) this same dirt bag mayor would be re-elected. you know what,,,,,I just realized I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

There is no saving Detroit let it die so the people of America can see what happens when Democrats remain in control.

I don’t think the most interesting angle on the decline of Detroit is about race, any more than the Bernie Madoff story is about race. What I find interesting is that an individual or small group of individuals can influence a larger group of individuals to look the other way as they perform acts that are clearly counter to main stream acceptability. The lack of action on the part of people that would otherwise object and react to illegal acts serves as an endorsement to the wrong-doers. It not only allows them to expand their activity but undoubtedly gives them an assurance that in some way what they are doing is legitimate.

Sure the media helps expose criminals and corruption, which in turn prompts action against them. But most events are diverted by everyday people and never get to the level of a news story. There can be a cost to a whistle blower; they can be shunned, lose their job, or be excluded in many ways from societal events. Still in the natural process of protecting our system of rules and regulations there are people that take on the role of regulator and pursue wrong doers.

There must be a trade-off of some sort in play for the majority citizens of a municipality to not only look the other way but even vote back in a corrupt mayor. The trade in the Bernie Madoff case is perhaps easier to accept. Workers are employed by a corporation in exchange for a salary. The large circle of employees who most probably suspected a scheme of some sort in Madoff’s investment plan could simply tell themselves that they were not getting paid to police their boss. As long as hard facts didn’t cross their computer screens they could justify to themselves that the ability to support their families and their lifestyles with their salaries somehow out-weighed the natural inclination to stop the theft of millions from investment accounts.

So to understand the perspective of the citizens of Detroit, one must understand their needs, and I suspect they are of the most basic nature. If a politician is adept at increasing the federal support for an impoverished electorate, than he is fulfilling his obligation of prioritizing their demands. Hence, in the same way a battered wife returns to an abusive husband in order to shelter and feed her children, a constituency could be persuaded to support a corrupt politician.

Corruption or not, the question remains as to who (if anyone) will make up for the unfunded liability. The workers want the taxpayers to pay, with all the routine justifications … mostly summarized as “we were promised”.

Well, before taxpayers even think of paying, we need to ask whether it’s “fair” that (with “cash pay” no less in the PUBLIC sector than in the Private Sector) that Public sector workers also get greater pensions and better benefits.

As BOTH of these lead UNFAIRLY to greater “Total Compensation” (cash pay + pensions + benefits), clearly the answer is NO, and clearly these excessive pensions and benefits resulted from the fraudulent relationship between the Public Sector Unions and our elected representatives.

So step one is to renege on any pensions (and retiree healthcare promises) greater (as a percent of pay) than Private Sector workers get from their employers.

The public sector unions thought they were colluding with politicians to rip off taxpayers. Turns out they themselves were also marks.

Rank and file trust their union leadership to score them a great deal at the expense of, depending on type of union, businesses, stockholders, taxpayers. Time and again rank and file finds they hold an empty bag full of expired promises. They don’t mind screwing the other guy, but they demand justice when it happens to them.

They feel sorry for themselves, not sorry for what they did to others. harrumph.

Can anyone now seriously argue that all cultures are created equal?

Kwame was simply imitating the culture of his ancestral Africa.

If he had instead chosen to adopt the culture of his Ulsterman surname — and this choice is open to everyone, regardless of color — Detroit might actually be in good financial shape these days.

The Bell Curve.

This is what happens when you repeatedly vote for the affirmative action candidate. History shows us the horrible results. Most of these people do this because they feel it’s owed to them. The entire United States is headed in the same direction with the so called educated elite in leadership now. And I’m not going to apologize for anything I stated.

Funny… all these politically savvy people and no one once mentioned the name Mayor Coleman Young. He is the architect of Detroit’s final nose-dive, and Kilpatrick was just carrying on the “family tradition”. I spent a chunk of my childhood up near Detroit. It is heart breaking to see that old city go.

Also, the so-called “White Flight” wasn’t what killed Detroit. What killed Detroit is that the black middle classes fled, too.
Detroit could have thrived, even without her white people.

“If your neighbor is just going to take what you worked hard for… why bother working?”
Detroit was also strapped by insane laws favoring the Big Three to the detriment of all other industry. Between that and the ‘race’ riots the center could not hold. Another uncomfortable truth: those riots were targeting mostly middle class black businesses. My father was a National Guardsman in that time and place, and he said that pot shots were taken more at the black national guardsmen than at the white. Go figure that one out!

I only hope they are able to sell off all that great old architecture to people who can actually afford to use and maintain it. Perhaps that section of Michigan would be better managed if we sold it back to the Natives.

I now live near Chicago. Obama is a Chicago-machine reject. We all know this because he was doing downstate politics. Likely, after his stint at the presidency, the only job he’ll be able to get is as an Illinois state rep. Maybe he will finally have the experience to do a job he’s being paid for. We can hope that one day he will join the former Governor in prison.

I argue that there *were/are* African cultures that had a more successful outcome. Mozambique was, at one time, a very prosperous place. The problem is, there were so many other cultures who were less successful and had no qualms about acting out their envy and squandering her riches. We shouldn’t blame all of Africa and Africans for all this process. Africa IS starting to take care of herself, and is doing an impressive job of it, to be honest. Now that we aren’t force feeding it money, things have come to a balancing point. Charities now know that incentives for starting businesses makes for a more prosperous Africa, than giving the gangs a cash incentive to rob and starve his neighbor.

I agree that the problem is a cultural phenomenon. I’m not calling anyone racist, but getting into hangups about people’s backgrounds will only convince those not acquainted with fine distinctions that your argument has no merit. BTW, I am not offended, I just want the correct offenders to be targeted. 😛

The immediate problem (here in the USA) is, the “easy way out” is financed by our “liberal” left consciousness. Their “charity” short-circuits most healthy incentives. So, those who would otherwise build up society in modest ways are encouraged to get paid to vote democrat and watch TV all day. Whereas the ambitious can over-turn the poisonous system by joining gangs and selling street drugs.

This is not a black phenomenon. We invented the system with the faulty incentives in place because we did not know what we were doing. We thought that we could reform human nature and create Heaven on Earth. Instead, we just created our own Hell for those without the wit or education to see the pit trap that was there and waiting.

The same Christian consciousness that killed slavery (with considerable help from the Industrial Revolution) poured charity from fountains in the street, and erected the Liberal Left monstrosity we have today, as well as financed the rampant poverty of spirit we see every day.

However, the son has rejected the father without a nod to the values the father started with. This means that the whole edifice is spinning out of control. The net result is that you are either a nice, law abiding welfare recipient, or you are a crook.

If you go to England, you will find that what Americans are used to thinking of as “Black Culture” is being driven by four generations of white Englishmen/women. The same Labour Party nonsense has created the same results on an accelerated time table.

This pity party politics is western in origin, and folks like Kilpatrick only do these things because they have been told that the only way that they can get the treatment they deserve is to take it. And the ambitious and amoral will do that, even from their own people. Who else turns up to do business in politics? What better way to spend money that isn’t yours? His problem was that his pie wasn’t big enough for his eyes. Considering Detroit’s finances for the past 40 years, no one is surprised. Most of the country just thinks the place is cursed, and that nothing can be done.

The Left has convinced everyone that there is nothing that can be done, except by the experts. And if the experts appear to have feet of clay, these events never happened. They have conditioned everyone around them, even those who aren’t aware of being in on the conspiracy. They would rather live in ignorance than despair.

Frankly, I think our “charity” has done more damage than Kilpatrick’s avarice. The path to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

Thank you for your article and your readers for the many excellent responses. You are absolutely correct – I live in the Pacific NW and the Detroit problem has had only a brief paragraph in the financial section of the paper. One former Detroit resident who now lives in my area but regularly communicates with friends in Detroit tells me to read an inner city activist website called “Voice of Detroit” to understand the mentality of the residents. Every ill in the city has been caused by the white rich 1% who wish to forcibly take over their city with the financial agreement, and control their destiny. None of their city governmental agency deficiencies are caused by their own actions, but are all caused by others. If you hadn’t read the many opinions and comments on this site, you wouldn’t actually belive it.

Don

Don

“I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done.”

Because Detroit voters did this to themselves, and it’s not the responsibility of the rest of us, nor within our power, to rescue Detroit from itself.

“…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…not news.”

I think rather it’s the reluctance of the national media to report on Blacks Behaving Badly, to protect the image of African Americans as virtuous and victimized. Black-on-black crime doesn’t get the attention it deserves either.

Also, Detroit is a slow-moving train wreck. It’s been in the process of imploding for years. The number of stories outsiders wish to read about it — we who have neither the ability nor the responsibility to save it — is limited.