Teflon brothers: Barack and Kwame

Today, I want to return to the issue of Detroit and write about what I consider to be a vulgar double standard local political leadership and activist demagogues use either to prevent a substantive, comprehensive critique of the town or avert real solutions to seemingly intractable big-city problems.

For instance, I contend in this column that current city governance and existing public policy in Detroit would have never been tolerated to this degree in any other city or by any other majority race of people in modern times.

Many honest, industrious Detroiters daily struggle to survive in the face of rampant political corruption, religious leaders on the take, inefficient or non-existent city services, vicious gangs running wild, worst schools in America, the worst quality of life in America, "the most miserable city in America" (according to a recent survey by Forbes.com), and to top it off: unbridled pathology, promiscuity, ignorance and endemic crime.

With the great resources we have here in Michigan – five great lakes, abundant natural resources, dozens of top-tier academic institutions, the auto industry, the business and legal communities, the high-tech, economic sectors and public policy organizations – why with all this human capital is Michigan in general and Detroit in particular currently the worst run state and city in the Union?

The problems

Let's begin with the Detroit City Council. There are new allegations as a result of a federal probe that several members of the council and their staffs have taken bribes from the Houston-based Synagro company, which has an annual $47 million dollar contract with the city for waste treatment.

Implicated so far include Councilwomen Talabi, Collins and Conyers, the latter of which is the wife of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. Last Friday, John Clark, the chief of staff for Council President Ken Cockrel, submitted his resignation when he was videotaped by the feds taking bribes on two occasions for $2,000 each time. The Synagro investigation seems to be just one of several ongoing probes into systemic corruption by numerous political officials in Detroit.

The grass-roots campaign to recall Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick seems to be gaining momentum. The group circulating petitions for Detroit residents to sign to remove Kilpatrick from office has already had several recall rallies. The most recent was on June 28, and two more rallies to solicit signatures are planned for July 12 and July 26.

Of course, there are allegations that the mayor has sent his minions out to these recall events to disrupt and undermine them with typical Kilpatrick thuggish tactics including telling people to purposely write false signatures in an effort to render the recall petitions void. Let's hope Detroit's grass-roots recall efforts are swift and successful. They only need a little over 59,000 signatures in a city of 850,000. That's way below 10 percent of the population.

It has been a year since Dr. Connie Calloway left Missouri to become the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) on July 1, 2007. She has guided a school district with the lowest MEAP scores and the highest dropout rates in America history. Furthermore, she has plunged this mismanaged school district even further into the abyss than anyone could have ever imagined.

For instance, recent reports show that the DPS currently has a $408 million deficit due largely to mismanagement, naked cronyism in the bidding procedures and political payoffs involving the mayor and his cronies, but most notably, accounting incompetence by people Calloway brought with her from Missouri. Such ineptitude by educated people who should know better seems to me like outright thievery of taxpayers funds.

If public education continues to devolve here the dwindling student population left will have diplomas that won't be worth the paper they are written on.

Kwame's mafia tactics and political strategy follow this pattern: Detroiters are too stupid and unorganized to recall him, the City Council too compromised to impeach him, and most so-called "political activists" and "community workers," including a large percentage of the black preachers and black churches, are either afraid to speak out or are to some degree beholden to King Kwame's "Friends & Family First" payola programs.

Let the trumpets sound, KKK (King Kwame Kilpatrick) will win a third term as mayor of Detroit in January 2009 by crook or by crook, even if he has to run the city from the federal penitentiary as mobster Al Capone did for a time while incarcerated at the Atlanta Penitentiary in the early 1930s.

Michigan vs. New York

When I write of Detroit, I always try to place this city in context with how other better-run cities handle their business. Take New York, for example. On March 10 when New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was found to be involved with a prostitution ring cavorting with hookers across state lines on taxpayers' time and money for over 10 years, what happened? No, he didn't remain in office and win another term as Kilpatrick did in Detroit, but within 48 hours Gov. Spitzer was shamefully and summarily forced out of office. The Empire State did the right thing.

However, the dirty little secret demonstrated by Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, a black man, was that he had a much more licentious past than the man whom he replaced. How could this be? The double standard liberal whites demand be given to liberal black leaders is beyond the pale. This policy is disgusting and it should be stopped immediately, beginning with the propaganda press, who are the primary enablers of this de facto rule.

Even Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama has been painted with this Teflon coating of being a messiah, as being beyond criticism. If you're white and your criticize Obama, you're castigated a racist; if you're black and you criticize Obama, you are ignored or dismissed as an "Uncle Tom."

Conservative intellectual Rush Limbaugh has often remarked you can't criticize presidential candidate Obama. Some of the amusing things Rush says we can't mention about Obama are his big ears, his middle name (Hussein), his mother, his father, his grandmother, his outspoken wife, voting record, pastor, people who shaped his political career, etc.

All these things are out of bounds regarding Obama, just like with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Could anyone imagine these two political figures being more untouchable than white party bosses of a bygone era – Chicago mayors Richard J. Daly (and his son, Richard M. Daly), the political hucksters of New York's Tammany Hall particularly during the late 1800s and early 1900s era, Huey Long, the infamous governor of Louisiana and later senator in the late 1920s and early 1930s – even doing a fraction of political crimes Detroit's Kilpatrick has done and still be in office seven years later?

And what of Sen. B. Hussein Obama, who, though he has the most "audacious" voting record in the history of Congress, is only one step from the U.S. presidency. If you think that is outrageous, KKK is the front runner for a third term! Only in Detroit … only in America!

That's why in many respects, the double standards of affirmative action increasingly denote to me a double portion of affirmative corruption and incompetence.