City Ethics
Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

What It Takes to Bring Down Government Leaders -- Thailand and Detroit

Robert Wechsler
City Related
When U.S. presidents, or even mayors, are brought down by ethics violations, it takes some pretty hefty skullduggery and covering up to do it. But according to a Christian Science Monitor article this week, with the great title "As a TV chef, Thai P.M. cooked his own goose," Thailand's Constitutional Court ordered the prime minister to quit because he moonlighted as a television chef, with all the covering up coming in the form of sauces.

Speaking of cover-ups, the day after I left for vacation, Detroit's mayor Kwame Kilpatrick finally resigned, as part of a plea deal (he pled guilty only to obstruction of justice), as I predicted in a recent blog entry. He will serve four months in prison. To read all about it, check out the Detroit Free Press's "Mayor in Crisis" page.

Here's an excerpt from a September 7 column by Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie and Free Press columnist:

Keep walking, Kwame. Out the door, off the stage and into a jail cell. You had a chance, on what could have been the most honest night of your life, to truly stand up, to change the image of who you are and perhaps begin to change yourself. Instead, you put cops at the door, blocked reporters you didn't like from coming in, then bathed in sycophantic applause before leaving in a gush of phony bravado, like an ego-mad athlete being tossed from the game.

"You done set me up for a comeback" were your final words, because you couldn't resist, as the curtain came down, one more grab of the spotlight. Instead of fessing up to a series of lies that paralyzed this city, cost it millions and turned it into an international embarrassment, you exited like a poor victim, swinging at some vast, invisible conspiracy, as if people in this state had nothing better to do than to mount an exhausting, eight-month campaign against you -- full of your own text messages. As if it were other people who had extramarital sex in hotel rooms, fired cops, traded city money for silence and lied under oath, while you stood innocently on the sidelines.

If only Kilpatrick had done nothing more than moonlight as a chef ...

Update: The new Thai prime minister is a brother-in-law of a prime minister who fled the country in 2006 due to corruption charges. It appears that in Thai government circles, All in the Family is preferred over The Iron Chef.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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