The removal of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick

On Sept. 4 Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pled guilty to two felony charges and resigned from office. The criminal case against Kilpatrick flowed from testimony delivered by him and his former chief-of-staff, Christine Beatty, during a civil suit that went to trial in 2007.

Protest at Mayor’s Conference on Foreclosures, November 2007 in Detroit. Writer Abayomi Azikiwe is fourth from left. WW photo: Cheryl LaBash

In the civil trial the city was found guilty of dismissing two high-ranking police officers who claimed they were terminated after investigating alleged wrongdoings by the mayor, Beatty and others within his Executive Protection Unit. A $8.4-million settlement was approved by the Detroit City Council as “damages” to the fired cops.

This past January, the Detroit Free Press obtained text messages from the mayor’s communication provider suggesting that Kilpatrick and Beatty had lied under oath during the civil trial.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy filed criminal charges against Kilpatrick and Beatty. Consequently, the entire political establishment—the City Council, the state attorney general and the governor of Michigan—became involved.

The mayor has been sentenced to 120 days in the Wayne County Jail and five years probation and ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to the city of Detroit. Detroit City Council President Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr. will assume Kilpatrick’s duties on Sept. 18 until a special election can be held in 2009.

The corporate-controlled media have made it appear that the major reason for Detroit’s worsening economic and social conditions was Kwame Kilpatrick. This could not be further from the truth.

Detroit, southeastern Michigan and the entire state have been suffering for years from capitalist economic restructuring. Before the current crisis, the city’s growth was fueled by the emergence of the automotive industry during the early and middle decades of the 20th century.

Detroit played a major role in the rise of industrial unions, setting trends for many other struggles against the bosses. The efforts of the trade union movement developed alongside, and in conjunction with, the national struggles of the African-American population who fought segregation and institutional racism for decades.

In 1967 the African-American working class in Detroit rose up in rebellion. In the aftermath of that rebellion, African Americans, under largely working-class leadership, fought to gain access to employment, housing, education and various political offices and structures. Since the 1970s the owners of capital have strategically relocated outside the region into areas where a higher rate of profit could be accrued through the super-exploitation of labor.

Detroit’s population was nearly 2 million at the beginning of the 1950s. The census bureau now predicts that approximately 800,000 people reside in the city. Vast areas of land are vacant as a result of razed homes, commercial structures, former industrial facilities and apartments. Many of the former city-owned institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Historical Museum, Detroit Receiving Hospital and Detroit Zoo have been turned over to private interests.

Detroit’s first African-American mayor, Coleman A. Young, who governed from 1974 to 1993, built his political reputation through grassroots involvement as a left-wing trade union organizer with the National Negro Labor Councils during the 1940s and early 1950s.

Young was brought before the Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities during the early 1950s. He stood up to right-wing Congressional members, challenging their racist remarks and refusing to answer questions related to his membership and ties with the communist left.

Deepening economic depression

In 1973 Young, with support from a broad alliance of African-American political forces, along with progressive and liberal whites, became the first Black mayor of Detroit. He immediately set out to rid the city of racist cops and other municipal employees, instituting an affirmative action program that was challenged by law-enforcement and other reactionary political forces.

However, compromises were necessary to maintain capitalist investments in Detroit. At the close of the Young administration, the city was suffering from massive job losses, an inadequate and declining public transportation system and the collapse of the municipal infrastructure.

The second African-American mayor, Dennis W. Archer, pursued a more moderate line and instituted policies that reversed some of the gains made under Young, especially affirmative action programs.

After Kilpatrick took office in 2002, investments were made in downtown Detroit, including the construction of permanent casino hotels, tourists and entertainment attractions and the emergence of high-priced real estate developments. The city hosted the All-Star Baseball game in 2005 and the Super Bowl in 2006.

However, the surrounding neighborhoods continued to decline. In recent years, the foreclosure crisis struck Detroit with devastating impact. In fact the overall economic conditions throughout the entire metropolitan area, including both city and suburbs, have been in constant decline. It has been reported that approximately half a million jobs have been loss in Michigan since the beginning of this decade.

A recent economic report released by the U.S. Census Bureau indicated that in 2007 incomes fell for the third year in a row. The state poverty rate is officially designated as 14 percent, one percentage point higher than the national level. It is estimated that one in three people living in Detroit are impoverished, making it the poorest large U.S. city. Flint and Kalamazoo, Mich., each have a poverty rate of 35.5 percent, higher than that in Detroit.

Michigan’s income level has fallen to 27th in the country. It had been 19th in 2003. “Michigan was the only state that saw both a rise in poverty and a decline in income.” (Detroit News, Aug. 27)

As a result of the surge in the poverty level in Michigan, it is estimated that 48.8 percent of children in Detroit live below the official poverty line, which is $21,027 for a family of four with two children. In 2006 the city’s child poverty rate was 43.9 percent. The proportion of children living in poverty statewide rose to 19.4 percent, above the national level of 18 percent.

The massive downsizing in the automobile industry has contributed immensely to the increasing poverty rate. In a Sept. 5 Detroit Free Press article, Justin Hyde writes, “Automakers and parts suppliers shed 38,000 jobs in the past 30 days, and the industry has lost 127,800 jobs over the past year, losses that powered the national unemployment rate higher according to federal data released.

“The job cuts in auto manufacturing, combined with 14,000 job cuts from car dealers and auto parts vendors, were the largest contributors to the 6.1 percent unemployment rate for August, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The rate is the highest since September 2003.”

Michigan’s current official unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent in July, the highest in the country, though the real rate is actually much higher.

Fightback movement much needed

Although the deepening capitalist crisis is clear in Detroit and throughout the state of Michigan, working class and oppressed people know these enormous difficulties can in no way be placed solely at the doorsteps of outgoing Mayor Kilpatrick.

Nonetheless, the spokespeople for the interests of capital are seeking to blame Detroit’s political leadership and the city’s population for the economic failures of the ruling class. A recent editorial written by Michigan Chronicle Publisher Sam Logan reprinted in the Detroit Free Press attempted not only to blame the African-American masses for the current crisis but to call for the removal of the current leadership in order to replace them with white middle- and upper-class elements from outside the city.

In a fierce response to Logan’s editorial, Andrea Egypt, a leading member of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice and a long-time municipal employee, published a rebuttal in the Aug. 10 Michigan Citizen which exposed the real agenda behind the advocacy for the mass relocation of African Americans from Detroit.

Egypt says in the editorial entitled “Sam Logan’s Recipe Will Breed a Worse Disaster,” “He [Logan] forgets the key ingredients—that if left out—would not describe accurately the real reasons for the city’s decline.

“The billions spent to date on targeting Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan in the so-called war on terror. This military spending has stripped federal funding from the City of Detroit.”

Egypt also points to the “trickle-down economic seasonings of the Bush-Cheney administration and Congress that continues to appropriate more war funding until we win, whatever that really means.”

She continues, “The criminal banking subprime lending crisis has caused massive foreclosures in Detroit and throughout the metropolitan region, putting working families and property taxpayers out of their homes, which gives them no choice but to leave the City and further erode the tax base.”

On Sept. 6 the Moratorium Now! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures and Evictions wrote an open letter to incoming Mayor Cockrel and the Detroit City Council as a whole, challenging City officials to petition Governor Granholm.

The letter reads in part: “During the past year, while city government has been consumed with the mayoral crisis, thousands of Detroiters have lost their homes due to the foreclosure epidemic that has hit our city. Our neighborhoods are being destroyed. Property values have plummeted. Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that 18 percent of Detroit’s homes are empty, the highest percentage of any city except New Orleans.

“The people of Detroit cannot stand to wait one more day for the imposition of an Emergency Moratorium to stop foreclosures. ... We are formally requesting that as your first acts of this new period, Mayor Cockrel and Detroit City Council both formally apply to Governor Granholm to declare a State of Emergency in Detroit and demand she use her police powers to place a two-year Moratorium on Foreclosures in the city.

“This action will spur passage of Senate Bill 1306 by the Michigan Legislature, which would place a two-year Moratorium on Foreclosures throughout the state.”

The letter concludes with a request to support the Sept. 17 mass demonstration at the State Capitol in Lansing to demand passage of SB 1306.

Efforts aimed at ending the wars abroad, resulting in the mass removal and slaughter of people in the so-called developing countries, must be linked with building a strong fightback movement aimed at ending the continuing cycle of poverty and oppression that is affecting growing numbers of people in the U.S.