Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie Leduff

Author:Charlie Leduff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594205347
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2013-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

MAMA’S BOY

WITH GENERAL MOTORS stock trading at levels not seen since the Great Depression, Kwame Kilpatrick walked out of jail shortly after midnight on February 2, 2009.

Kilpatrick had done ninety-nine days.

By the look of things, incarceration had been good to him. Although his fingernails were in need of their customary manicure, he was twenty-five pounds lighter, and the Afro and shaggy beard he had grown in the Wayne County Hilton made his head and ears appear larger—and so his padded shoulders less ridiculous.

As he emerged through the revolving doors of the concrete jailhouse, he was swallowed in a weird scrum of television cameras and thick-necked Nation of Islam bodyguards who threatened to pulp any reporter who got too close. The police only smirked at the complaining reporters, who did not get too close. I stood far on the fringe.

It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader plundered, pillaged and lied, all the while presenting himself as its guardian angel against the White Devil.

Kilpatrick, who walked into that jailhouse as a quivering-lipped pretender, walked out as the creature he always claimed to be, the preening Hip Hop Mayor. Kilpatrick ducked into an SUV and was chauffeured to the house of his mother, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, where she reportedly made him eggs for breakfast.

He probably would have benefited from a few hours spent working in a factory. Factory work tends to give you perspective on the importance of things. Of course in the hip-hop world, work was for suckers.

Not that the automobile executives were much better at running things. Turns out our masters of the universe couldn’t manage a grocery store.

Steve Rattner, the Obama car czar, walked into the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors located on the Detroit River, and made this assessment:

“Everyone knew Detroit’s reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.”

The weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen.

Christ, it didn’t seem to matter. Black or White. Liberal or Conservative. White collar or Blue. Nobody could run shit. And it wasn’t just Detroit. Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Wall Street. The entire country was being run into the ground by a generation infected with incompetence and greed.

Consider that Rattner himself was being sued by the attorney general of New York and investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his involvement in a kickback scheme involving the state’s pension fund and his investment firm.

Corruption and ineptitude was a national sickness and it was killing us. But Detroit, it cannot be denied, had a certain flair.

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