End of Kwame Kilpatrick?

[QueEx]

Kwame Kilpatrick guilty: For destitute
Detroit, downfall of ex-mayor complete

Kwame Kilpatrick, once seen as a fresh hopeful face for Detroit
when he became the financially troubled city's youngest mayor,
was found guilty of enriching himself while in office.​

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick leaves federal court
after being convicted Monday, in Detroit, of corruption
charges, ensuring a return to prison for a man once among
the nation's youngest big-city leaders. Ryan Garza/Detroit
Free Press/AP

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was found guilty Monday under federal corruption charges of scheming to enrich himself and his close confidants during his tenure in public office.

The verdict, which was announced after 15 days of jury deliberations, concludes a saga that has gripped the destitute city for over two years and represents the staggering downfall of Mr. Kilpatrick.

Kilpatrick, the youngest mayor in Detroit’s history, was once heralded as a fresh face to politics in the city, which is saddled with a staggering debt and has seen its industry, population, and tax revenues plummet and its crime rate soar.

The tales of personal excess resulting from systemic graft arrives one day before the city tries to make a last-ditch attempt to fight the takeover of its troubled finances by an emergency financial manager. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder says that decades of corruption and mismanagement have created a financial burden for the city it cannot handle on its own and that the only way out is to cede temporary control to the state, which will allow it to create structural changes that would lead it to solvency.

The five-month trial dates back to December 2010 when Kilpatrick, his father Bernard Kilpatrick, his childhood friend Bobby Ferguson, and former water department director Victor Mercado were charged with 45 counts of racketeering conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax evasion.

Kilpatrick was convicted on 24 of 30 counts. On three counts, he was found not guilty, and on three no verdict was reached. Mr. Ferguson was convicted of 9 of 11 counts. Bernard Kilpatrick received a conviction of a lessor tax charge. Mr. Mercado struck a plea deal in November and awaits sentencing.

The primary thrust of the government’s case, which resulted from a six-year investigation, was that all four conspired in what prosecutors described as “the Kilpatrick enterprise,” a multi-year extortion scheme to strong-arm city contractors working for the city’s water and sewerage department to funnel a total of $84 million in city contracts to shell companies operated by Mr. Ferguson.

Prosecutors described Bernard Kilpatrick as the middleman who contractors were forced to hire as a consultant in order to secure city contracts, some of which were for the biggest public work projects during Kilpatrick’s tenure, such as the demolition of Tiger Stadium and the partial demolition of the Book Cadillac Hotel.

Kwame Kilpatrick, who was charged with the majority of the counts, was portrayed as the ringleader who wielded influence to reap millions of dollars in kickbacks. Kilpatrick served as mayor of Detroit between 2002 and 2008 after serving as a state representative between 1996 and 2001. Prosecutors said his wrongdoing spanned the tenure of both offices.

The case made in the trial against Kilpatrick and his cohorts was overwhelming. Prosecutors rested after four months of testimony. Witnesses included a roll call of former Kilpatrick friends or aides. In total, 90 witnesses took the stand in the trial for both sides.
​

REST OF THE STORY

 

[Cruise]

It's funny how Federal prosecutors can magically find the time and resources to go after the black man, but not after the banks.

It's been 5 years since the financial collapse, and yet not a single investigation.

I wonder... is it because they are controlled by whites and the Federal government is just white supremacy in public form?

 

[QueEx]

Does Michigan's Emergency-Manager
Law Disenfranchise Black Citizens?

A state law provides for takeover of cities with troubled finances. It
just happens that the worst-hit places are also the poorest and blackest.

In Michigan, emergency skews black.

State-appointed emergency managers currently run Detroit along with five other Michigan cities and three school districts. While the cities under emergency management together contain just nine percent of Michigan's population, they contain, notably, about half of the state's African-American residents.

Michigan's Public Act 436 allows the governor to appoint emergency managers with near-absolute power in cash-strapped cities, towns, and school districts. Emergency managers can supersede local ordinances, sell city assets, and break union contracts -- leaving local elected officials without real authority.

"It totally decimates democracy," Detroit resident Catherine Phillips says of state takeover. "We have the right by federal law to allow us to go and choose by way of voting who we want to represent us in municipalities and school districts. By implementation of this dictator law, they have taken that right away."

Phillips is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in March against the state. She and a group of politicians, unions, activists, and residents from affected districts argue that PA 436 violates their constitutional right to equal protection.

The suit highlights the paradox of American municipal governance.

Local government is deeply ingrained in the ethos
of American democracy, from colonial-era New
England town hall meetings to New York City's
experiment with people-powered budgeting. ​

But it is not an inalienable right. The U.S. Constitution guarantees all states a "republican government," but gives states power to grant -- or not grant -- home rule to municipalities.

Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, contends that the state has an obligation to make sure local governments are on solid fiscal footing. Despite the demographic disproportions in the affected cities, it's unlikely that discrimination has motivated the governor's EM appointments. The areas under emergency management are some of Michigan's largest clusters of concentrated poverty, ravaged by decades of deindustrialization.

Discrimination aside, the Michigan appointments -- whether constitutional or not -- set a troubling precedent by curtailing local representation in the state's most chronically impoverished cities.

* * * *​

PA 436 passed late last year shortly after a statewide referendum overturned a previous version -- PA 4, signed into law by Snyder in 2011. Before PA 4 and PA 436, emergency managers existed in Michigan but with narrower authority; the governor and his supporters argued the existing law didn't give emergency managers the tools needed to do their job effectively.

Under PA 436, Michigan can conduct a financial review of any locality that meets one of more than a dozen criteria, such as a poor long-term debt rating, a missed payment to a pension fund, or evidence of "probable financial stress" in the estimation of the state treasurer. Based on the review, the governor decides whether there is a financial emergency. A locality can try to evade emergency management through several mechanisms, but the state gets the final word.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against PA 436 are from Detroit, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, Flint, and the Detroit Public Schools, but if the law is found unconstitutional, it will affect all Michigan districts under emergency management. The suit makes 11 claims against PA 436. Among them, it says the law violates the due process right to collectively bargain and elect officials with legislative power; that it violates the Voting Rights Act; and that it violates citizens' right to petition government.

Most importantly, they argue that the law violates the constitutional right to equal protection. Since they can't vote for officials who have real power, citizens living under emergency management have their votes diluted.

"The provisions of PA 436 and the powers granted thereby, are not necessary, narrowly tailored, rationally, or otherwise lawfully related to achieving the asserted government interests of achieving local government financial stability," the plaintiffs' complaint reads.

State officials said that they are unable to comment on the specifics of pending litigation, but maintain that the law is constitutional.

"Local governments are subdivisions of the state, and the governor -- an elected official -- has a clear constitutional role and responsibility in addressing these financial emergencies and protecting the health, safety and welfare of residents," Snyder spokeswoman Sara Wurfel said in a statement.

Robert Sedler, distinguished professor of law at Wayne State University, says the most compelling of plaintiffs' charges is that PA 436 violates their right to self-governance.

"It raises a question of equal protection," Sedler says. "Has the state improperly discriminated between voters in places -- like say Southfield where I live -- where they have complete control over their local government ... and cities like Detroit?"

To win the case, though, plaintiffs will have to do more than prove that PA 436 disproportionately impacts certain groups. The government doesn't have to treat all of its citizens exactly the same; the question is whether the government's interest (financial stability, in this case) is important enough to justify treating citizens differently, and whether the law is an appropriate way of protecting that interest.

"It is a question of whether the state has a sufficiently important interest to override self-governance," Sedler says.

A federal court will decide. Defendants turn in their pleading to U.S. district court on May 14. But even if the law is upheld, it doesn't mean all is well in Michigan.

* * * * ​

There's a long precedent for state intervention in cities with busted budgets. The state takeover of near-bankrupt New York in the 1970s might be the best-known example. Right now, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Nassau County, New York, are also under state control.

Michigan stands out not just for the number of cities with emergency managers, but also for the scope of takeover. State control is traditionally limited to finances, but in Michigan emergency managers have the authority to handle all city affairs, and they have exercised it. In Benton Harbor, former EM Joe Harris issued an order stating that without his approval, city officials weren't allowed to do anything more than call a meeting and approve minutes.

Whether in Harrisburg or Benton Harbor, the logic of state intervention is that local officials are culpable for a city's budget crisis -- or at least incapable of solving it. If your captain is sailing your ship toward the rocks, you better get a new captain.

"Making difficult political decisions can be very trying for elected officials," says Terry Stanton, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Treasury. In most cases, emergency managers have taken the reins from local officials who had "the inability and in some cases the unwillingness ... to address the problem they face," he says.

The change can be productive for cities in crisis, says Mark Funkhouser, director of the Governing Institute, citing New York in the 1970s and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in the 1990s.

"Those are all cases where I think some sort of state intervention -- or in the case of D.C., federal intervention -- some sort of control board or oversight agency actually contributed to a turnaround for the city," he said.

In each case, local sovereignty was infringed -- but Funkhouser argues it was inescapable. "If you screw up your finances bad enough, you are going to lose your sovereignty for awhile," he says. "If you stop paying the rent, you're going be out on the street, and you're not going be able to say 'Well I want to live here, I want to live there, I want to do this, I want to buy a pizza.'"

But much like Funkhouser's delinquent renters, cities can fall victim to events beyond their control.

"To understand Detroit requires going back to the immediate post-World War II years," says Thomas Sugrue, professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. That's when industry began to leave the city for lower-wage areas, and metro Detroit saw "rapid and almost galactic suburbanization."

Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, and discrimination determined who was able to follow them out. "The vast majority of the people who moved out of Detroit were white," Sugrue says. "So what you see left behind is a population that is poorer, more likely to be underemployed or working class, and more subject to the vagaries of the economy."

While the process was especially stark in Detroit, deindustrialization hammered most Northern and Midwestern manufacturing cities. On top of that, Michigan cities have lost income from local taxes and state revenue sharing during the recession -- making it nearly impossible to stanch the decline for now.

It all suggests that financial health depends upon more than the captain who is steering the ship.

Terry Stanton, the treasury spokesman, seems to agree. "You've got, in many cases, local units that have seen a loss of residents, a loss of tax base, a drop in property values. Those are the big drivers," he says. Despite these structural issues, Stanton argues that state intervention is justified.

"Local units are components of the state, and the state has a responsibility to ensure that they are financially stable," he says.

Legally speaking he may not be wrong, but that's precisely the problem. Plaintiffs point out that all but one of the Michigan cities under state control have poverty rates at least double the state average.

If population loss and a depleted tax base can prompt
emergency management, does that mean local
government is a luxury poor people can't afford?​

* * * ​

If so, it would be a big loss for places like Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and Benton Harbor.

"The overall health of a community depends on people's sense of having a stake in it," said David Bullock, pastor of two Detroit area churches and founder of the civic group Change Agent Consortium. "Emergency management just works against long-term stability and health for communities, because the people on the ground feel like they don't have any voice or value."

So should there never be any state intervention anywhere? That's a timeless and thorny philosophical dilemma: should autonomy be respected even if it leads to self-harm?

Opinions will always vary but regardless of the answer, it seems unfair for the autonomy question to be so sharply correlated with income. Coming in the wake of deindustrialization, recession, and persistent poverty, state intervention has disproportionately impacted the people who -- because of race and class -- have been given the least opportunity to succeed in America.

States have intervened when crises are especially acute, but in many ways the crisis is chronic. For example, although a state control board (and federal loans worth $10 billion in today's dollars) brought New York back from the brink in the 1970s, the city still has a 21 percent poverty rate -- same as it had in 1980.

Some of the Michigan cities under state control are even repeat offenders. Ecorse went into state receivership in the 1980s, Flint had an emergency manager from 2002 to 2004, and the state is currently reviewing the finances of Hamtramck, under state control from 2000 to 2007.

It would be one thing if emergency managers were effective at fixing the disinvestment at the root of cities' struggles. But since they aren't, state takeover is more a symptom of hardship than solution to it, balancing budgets but increasing the disenfranchisement of the people who -- again because of race and class -- have experienced the most of it.

"I'm old enough to remember the struggle for voting rights for African Americans," said Phillips, 55, the Detroit resident. "And still within my lifetime, I'm fighting the same battle again."
​

SOURCE

 

[muckraker10021]

DOWNLOAD the Full Length Film

https://www.rapidshare.com/files/824521881/detropia2012-xvid.rar

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Channel(s) : 2 channels



by Daniel Denvir

In the opening scene of Detropia, a new documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, a house is demolished with an excavator, the bucket crashing through a roof that once provided a family's shelter. A television news correspondent out front, speaking with his medium's disconcertingly positive tone, provides a bleak synopsis. “This is the downsizing of Detroit. You're watching it live. These are houses that are never coming back. It's going back to the prairie.”

Detropia is devastating. But it's populated by the sorts of characters that have made Detroit irresistible to me: hilarious, persistent, angry, upbeat. Take Tommy Stephens, a retired schoolteacher and owner of The Raven blues club who works his deep fryer in a business suit. Walking his block, he points out a house gutted by fire, blaming pyromaniacs responsible for some portion of Detroit's ubiquitous arsons. They get off on it, he suggests. Like, masturbate. “You got some sick people in America,” he ruminates. And you do get the sense that he's not just talking about the masturbating pyromaniacs.

The filmmakers arrive in the early stages of Detroit's next big plan: Former Pistons star and Mayor David Bing is going to downsize Detroit. The plan is called Detroit Works, and it has an entirely sensible premise. A city that boasted a population of 1.8 million in 1950, with a landmass large enough to fit San Francisco, Manhattan, Boston and more inside, is now home to 700,000 residents. Or fewer. Detroit lost 25 percent of its remaining population in just one decade, according to the 2010 census. From America's fastest growing city in 1930 to its fastest shrinking one today. And it shrinks every day.

The plan is to consolidate the population in the city's most viable neighborhoods, which makes a lot of sense except for the people who don't live in them. People scream at Bing: The plan, one woman attending a community forum yells, is to “burn us out.” Public transit, in a metropolis that is already painfully difficult to traverse without a car but where nearly a quarter of people do not have one, is cut too. “What am I to do if all I have is a bus,” asks one woman who leaves home every day at 7:30 AM to make it to work by ten. Another man tells officials that God will be their judge.

During my last visit in May, the Detroit Free Press described the rollout of the mayor's plan, which includes a cut-off of funds to assist low-income people with home repairs in areas declared “distressed.” It's triage. But the plan is cruel: It includes no money to help residents who have stood by Detroit―and who have invested years of their lives and thousands of dollars―move elsewhere.

The sad fact is that Mayor Bing is likely the most powerful person in the country who has any sort of plan for Detroit. The forces in control are out-of-town: the Republican governor taking over city and school management, the bookends of opaque financial transactions in distant New York office towers, or national politicians who only propose cuts. In Detropia, the wealth that built up the industrial middle class is gone, and the people left behind scavenge through its refuse for scrap metal like copper or steel. In one remarkable scene, a group of unemployed young men standing amidst ruins use a rope tied to a pickup truck to pull down an abandoned building. One scrapper, hypothesizing over the steel's ultimate destination, correctly notes that it is likely going to China, “so they can make shit and send it back here and sell it for more.” Actually, as it turns out, for cheaper.


In the New York Times style section and similar pages, Detroit is often on the verge of a comeback forged by young artists opening coffee shops and maybe urban farms. Take last July: “An influx of young creative types is turning Detroit into a Midwestern TriBeCa.” Everything wrong with this article and others like it is summed up by a single telling correction: “An article last Sunday about revitalization in downtown Detroit referred incorrectly to the Detroit Party Marching Band. They received their uniforms from a high school band director in Iowa; the uniforms were not found in an abandoned Detroit public school.”

It was some variant of this popular Detroit comeback story that the filmmakers initially planned to tell. Spending a lot of time in Detroit disabused them of the idea―as it did me. The new coffee shops and crêperies are great and certainly met my niche consumer demands. And the film by no means bashes them. But unless coffee shop owners plan to train and hire hundreds of thousands of baristas, frontier hipsterdom seems relatively insignificant next to, say, the federal government creating an industrial policy.

The film has some blind spots that could be remedied to good cinematic effect. Mostly ignored is the critical role that racism played in the construction of Detroit, a suburban city of modest single-family homes. There are black and white people everywhere in Detropia. But the fact that Detroit is 83 percent black, when it was 83 percent white in 1950, is unmentioned. Footage of the 1967 riots is shown, but without context. White Detroit often points to the riot as the moment when black people destroyed their city and forced them to flee to suburbs. But Detroit's core problems, including sky-high structural black unemployment and the relocation of industry, preceded the burning and looting. It took place during a time when violent white neighborhood organizations fought to maintain segregated housing.

Also missing: the area's Arab population, the nation's largest, or Mexicantown, one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods. Or Detroit's three enormous casinos, filled with people who look like they cannot afford to be gambling, shiny vacuums of global capitalism sucking out what little wealth remains from the ruins. Bleak.

The co-directors also pipe in audio from talk radio and cable news without identifying the names or affiliations of talking heads. This is jarring. But this documentary, which focuses in on the neglected subject of the city's black middle class, can't be about everything.

Detroiters are also a notoriously tough crowd. Locals are particularly critical of a genre of photography derided as “ruin porn,” the picturesque shots of magnificently abandoned buildings―like the vaulting, crumbling heights of the 18-story Michigan Central Station―that have proliferated across the internet. And for good reason. Ruin porn engages a post-human pastoralism that celebrates the city's collapse. Yet ruins are an inescapable reality. It's hard to take a photo of the city that doesn't include something abandoned or just plain absent. The film's impressionist, poetic approach captures the eerie calm of a big emptied out place. It's the same sort of silence I've heard in Cleveland and Youngstown. The ruin captured in Detropia is visually beautiful, but relentlessly not romantic. The shots hit hard and hurt. Like they should.

Similarly, Detropia catapults over charges of parachute journalism by putting the decay in context and by allowing Detroiters to be their guide. Crystal Starr, a Detroit video blogger, is a recurrent chaperone through the city's abandoned wonders.

“Can you imagine like having breakfast right here? Look at your view, look at your view in the morning.” The abandoned kitchen looks over a smattering of houses and a deep sea of green trees, out to the downtown skyscrapers. “Like yeah, I'm going to go out and conquer the world because I can damn near see it from right here.” She channels Detroit like a medium. “I feel like I was maybe here a little while back. Or I'm older than I really am but I just have this young body, and spirit and mind. But I have the memory of this place when it was banging.”

The film nurtures the sort of existential crisis in American national identity that Detroit should have long since provoked. Instead, America's political class is in total denial of decline and refuses to diagnose the political-economic disease rotting out the core. Detropia is an antidote to that Thomas Friedman version of reality.

The camera follows the United Auto Workers Local 22's surreal negotiations with management at American Axle, which demand another round of humiliating pay cuts backed by a threat to move the last bit of work overseas. “This is what we need to keep Detroit vibrant,” the company tells union president George McGregor.

Workers already at the bottom of the factory rung, making $14.35 per hour, would go down to $11.

“After the plant left, shit, the neighborhood left. It just went. Kapoo,” says McGregor, behind the wheel of his Cadillac, describing where the Cadillac assembly plant once stood. The lot, where McGregor held his first job, now stores dumpsters. “They built a new plant in Mexico, and all the work's in Mexico. That's where it's at.”

Autoworkers picket the North American International Auto Show, protesting plant closures. Inside, Chevrolet unveils the electric-powered Volt accompanied by a hopeful modern dance troupe celebrating the power of nature. But Raven owner Tommy Stephens is troubled by a Chinese electric car across the showroom that costs half the price. The GM plant down the street once signed his customers' paychecks. The Raven used to have a cook.

At this point in the review, you should see this point coming: Detroit is where 20th century industrial America reached its zenith, and its decline is both prelude and prophecy.

The Sun Belt cities and the suburbs were supposed to be a triumph of the market's creative destruction: people choose where they live, and good places win over bad. But Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Orlando, once thought to prove Detroit unnecessary, have gone bust. “Disney World ain't what it used to be,” says Stephens. The gaping maw of the new American century that swallowed Detroit has an unrequited hunger. Watch Detropia and you've been warned. The film is beset by a foreboding sense that the status quo leaves no option but mass unrest. I can only hope that's not wishful thinking.

“No buffer between the rich and the poor? Only thing left is revolution,” says Stephens, a most reluctant revolutionary. “This is coming to you.”



<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="8"></hr>

 

[QueEx]

"I’m ready to go" - Ex-Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick
sentenced to 28 years in prison for corruption

Paul Sancya, File/Associated Press - FILE - In this May 25, 2010, file photo, former
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick sits at his sentencing in Wayne County Circuit Court on
an obstruction-of-justice conviction. Kilpatrick has been sentenced to 28 years in prison
for corruption that turned city hall into a pay-to-play parlor

DETROIT — A former Detroit mayor was sent to federal prison for nearly three decades Thursday, after offering little remorse for the widespread corruption under his watch but acknowledging he let down the troubled city during a critical period before it landed in bankruptcy.

Prosecutors argued that Kwame Kilpatrick’s “corrupt administration exacerbated the crisis” that Detroit now finds itself in. A judge agreed with the government’s recommendation that 28 years in prison was appropriate for rigging contracts, taking bribes and putting his own price on public business.

It is one of the toughest penalties doled out for public corruption in recent U.S. history and seals a dramatic fall for Kilpatrick, who was elected mayor in 2001 at age 31 and is the son of a former senior member of Congress.

While Detroit’s finances were eroding, he was getting bags of cash from city contractors, kickbacks hidden in the bra of his political fundraiser and private cross-country travel from businessmen, according to trial evidence.

Kilpatrick, 43, said he was sorry if he let down his hometown but denied ever stealing from the citizens of Detroit.

“I’m ready to go so the city can move on,” Kilpatrick said, speaking softly with a few pages of notes before U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds ordered the sentence.

“The people here are suffering, they’re hurting. A great deal of that hurt I accept responsibility for,” he said.

In March, he was convicted of racketeering conspiracy, fraud, extortion and tax crimes. The government called it the “Kilpatrick enterprise,” a yearslong scheme to shake down contractors and reward allies. He was doomed by his own text messages, which revealed efforts to fix deals for a pal, Bobby Ferguson, an excavator.

Prosecutors said $73 million of Ferguson’s $127 million in revenue from city work came through extortion. The government alleged that he in turn shared cash with Kilpatrick.

Agents who pored over bank accounts and credit cards said Kilpatrick spent $840,000 beyond his salary during his time as mayor, from 2002 to fall 2008. Defense attorneys tried to portray the money as generous gifts from political supporters who opened their wallets for birthdays or holidays.

“It is difficult to quantify the total cost of the devastating corruption instigated by Kilpatrick. ... But one thing was certain: It was the citizens of Detroit who suffered when they turned over their hard-earned tax dollars but failed to receive the best services,” the judge said.

Kilpatrick was convicted in March, just days before Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder sent an emergency manager to Detroit to take control of city operations. The city filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July, overloaded with at least $18 billion in long-term debt.

Edmunds said Kilpatrick can’t be blamed for the bankruptcy — he’s been out of office for five years — but “corruption has its own cost.”

“We’re demanding transparency and accountability in our government. We expect it,” the judge said. “If there has been corruption in the past, there will be corruption no more. We’re done. It’s over.”
​

FULL STORY

 

[pookie]

He did what he was programmed to do. We have black mayors and black governors. And if they do not promote a white reality. If he had did a good job but was still not promoting a white reality they still would have got rid of him. I am not condoning what he did. Much worse has went on and is still going on and there is nothing blacks can do about the real corruption.
He is a pawn in a game going on. And we are pawns in that game also.


http://oneblacknation.webs.com/

http://blacknation.vpweb.com/default.html

 

[BoyJupiter]

He did what he was programmed to do. We have black mayors and black governors. And if they do not promote a white reality. If he had did a good job but was still not promoting a white reality they still would have got rid of him. I am not condoning what he did. Much worse has went on and is still going on and there is nothing blacks can do about the real corruption.
He is a pawn in a game going on. And we are pawns in that game also.


http://oneblacknation.webs.com/

http://blacknation.vpweb.com/default.html

And that's the truth

 

[michigantoga]

A gun wasn't put to his head. Just doing what most of us do when we get in a good position. DON'T APPRECIATE IT

 

[QueEx]

Celebrity Crime Files: Kwame Kilpatrick
The full story of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's fall.

​

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​

 

[COINTELPRO]

Celebrity Crime Files: Kwame Kilpatrick
The full story of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's fall.

​

<iframe src="http://player.theplatform.com/p/L9TCEC/J0IPZlt_pU0y/embed/select/lTCphouwQudv" width="480" height="270" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe>

​

Yeah he was too inexperienced, they jumped all over him the minute he took office. He drew too much attention to himself, which was his downfall.

It seems like the white reporters were all over him. They wanted to discredit black leadership, and 'take' back the city.

I like that play about having his mistress on his staff, that way you can say that you was 'working' together. It was none of the public business about their relationship, the plaintiffs extorted the mayor to get a settlement.


<iframe width="640" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eb85PLhudIo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[muckraker10021]

Yeah he was too inexperienced, they jumped all over him the minute he took office....

He was 32 years old & had no idea what the fuck he was doing. He could of overcome that by having experienced seasoned handlers; but, he didn't do that. Look at young Zuckerberg at Facebook or the young Russian and American who started Google at age 25. The all brought in experienced people and installed them as as CEO or COO and let these experienced people interface with the 'sharks' and break down and interpret proposals $$$$$$ to the young major stockholders (owners). Kilpatrick didn't follow this proven & tested model.

Kwame failed!
Say it again; Kwame failed! His failure has nothing to do with the ancillary issues of outsourcing auto jobs to Mexico, inept management at GM, etc. White capital flight was due to their correct assessment (in my studied opinion) that Kwame had no interest in working with them to create an intelligent plan to revitalize downtown Detroit. Kwame and his crew acted like a gang — insisting that members of his crew be placed in key positions in these deals, regardless of their obvious lack of qualifications. You might argue that this is the way the municipal political game is played — and therefore why should the game change when a young (32 years old) Black guy is the mayor. You could make that argument but you would be Dead Wrong. Turning around the ‘city of Detroit’ was akin to a startup business not an old-line prosperous company where you can pad the payroll with place-holder functionaries who just collect a 6 figure check. Kwame and his crew saw Detroit as their piggybank to exploit. They were inept, presumptuous and couldn’t forward think. The white business community from all-over-the-nation initially reached out to him when he was elected. He became a national figure when he was elected. Youthful and the so-called “hip-hop” mayor he was on the morning breakfast shows “Today”, “Good Morning America” often. However when people and businesses with deals went to Detroit with proposals they found out he actually knew little and as we know now he was preoccupied with being the party mayor. Unlike real hip-hop shot-callers like Jay-Z, Diddy, Russell, Dr. Dre, there was no business team behind the “throne” who could look at the excel spreadsheets and negotiate intelligently. Kwame could have been Denver’s Wellington Webb, or Seattle’s Norm Rice, but he was interested in G’s up Hoes Down.

<img src="http://i.minus.com/iD0c6RPn9m9U8.jpg" width="500">

 

[Cruise]

He was 32 years old & had no idea what the fuck he was doing. He could of overcome that by having experienced seasoned handlers; but, he didn't do that. Look at young Zuckerberg at Facebook or the young Russian and American who started Google at age 25. The all brought in experienced people and installed them as as CEO or COO and let these experienced people interface with the 'sharks' and break down and interpret proposals $$$$$$ to the young major stockholders (owners). Kilpatrick didn't follow this proven & tested model.

You've made some insightful and well-considered posts about what it was like with Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit.

Are you from Detroit? Because, these are the types of conclusions Detroiters have reached about Kwame Kilpatrick.

I knew not everyone was a boot-licking, white wannabe in the Politics forum, ready to piss on black leadership because they were so eager to believe the white narrative.

Kwame Kilpatrick was targeted by the whites, the way whites have always done with black people, and anything the whites could find, they exaggerated it into the greatest injustice to white-kind. Nothing new. But, Kwame Kilpatrick definitely couldn't see it coming. Once he became Mayor, he thought he was invincible. If he had older leadership around, they would have warned him that the whites were coming and would never stop.

He was just too young and surrounded himself with his classmates, who were clueless as well. I should know, since my brother went to school with Kwame Kilpatrick.

I admire that Kwame Kilpatrick took care of his buddies and did not become a sell-out, but he really needed someone there who had some experience.

 

[MASTERBAKER]

People Are Hiring Private Police Squads in Detroit


VICE News Tonight

3 hours ago ·
People in Detroit are hiring paramilitary guards because they’ve lost faith in the government.