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Money Fueled Evil in Detroit

In the end, it’s all about the money and getting more of it.

Money is the reason Monica Conyers, the former City Council president, is headed for 37 months in a federal prison, convicted of taking bribes from Synagro Technologies Inc. in exchange for her vote. She wanted more of it, her “loot.”

Money is the reason that Detroit’s disgraced former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is furiously trying to keep from going back to jail for violating probation, chiefly for hiding money he could have used to repay $1 million in restitution to the city he claims to love. His ardor has limits when weighed against the prospect of losing the good life and being indicted by the feds.

Like so much else in the rotten political culture that helped lead Detroit to the brink of collapse, it was all about them. It was about enriching them, about power for them, about perks and prestige for them, as watching Conyers preside over a council budget hearing could attest.

Seldom if ever was it about the people who elected them to represent the public, a quaint notion largely out of fashion in modern politics. The deepening plight of their city, or the fiscal wreck, or the structural rot, or the unpredictability of it all to business leaders and regional political players? Not so much, even though both of them, in their own ways, helped to foster it all.

The falls of Conyers and Kilpatrick, each endowed with powerful names in Detroit political circles, are only just beginning to reverberate. But if they pave the way for more responsible, more competent, leadership, they each will have performed at least one valuable public service.