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In the previous article, danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> wrote:

(commentary deleted...)

https://apnews.com/article/jesse-jackson-dies-43abb84d2ffc76d967f9a5596ebd0be1

Here is some commentary from Rod Dreher at The Free Press:

It's hard to explain to younger people what a force Jesse Jackson,
who died last Tuesday at 84, once was in American politics. He
rose to national prominence as part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
entourage, and was present at King's assassination. For days after
that 1968 killing, young Jackson sported the turtleneck he wore
that night, stained with King's blood. For years, Jackson
associates and political enemies, including the Reverend Al
Sharpton, accused Jackson of intentionally smearing the slain
civil rights leader's blood on his garment, in a self-anointing as
King's successor. Jackson repeatedly denied the charge.

He ran for the presidency twice in the 1980s, and established
himself as a Democratic Party power broker in the 1990s and early
2000s. But his most durable legacy is as an avatar of racial
identity politics, which, with brilliant cunning, he brought from
the streets to corporate boardrooms and university
administrations. We are still dealing with this illiberal cancer
today, which has broken containment on the left, and has now been
embraced by young white activists of the right.

Much has been said in the days since his death about Jackson's
role in the post-King civil rights movement, particularly his
trailblazing campaigns for the White House. Though one is
reluctant to speak ill of the dead so soon after their passing,
the Chicago operator's corrupt racializing of American politics,
for the profit of himself and his allies, must not go unnoticed.
There is a straight line from the kind of lucrative racial
activism Jackson pioneered to the same profiteering practiced at a
far grander scale by the founders of Black Lives Matter.

Jackson's chief organizational base was Rainbow/PUSH, formed in
1996 by the merger of his two activist groups, Operation PUSH and
the Rainbow Coalition. In early 1997, Rainbow/PUSH founded the
Wall Street Project, a nonprofit initiative designed to promote
"inclusion" of racial minorities in leading financial firms, and
to fight "economic apartheid" in the elite financial sector.
Jackson was a particularly important channel for Wall Street
elites to the Clinton White House. Jackson started another
nonprofit group, the Citizenship Education Fund (CEF), closely
aligned with Rainbow/PUSH; CEF generally handled Wall Street
Project contributions.

Around this time, Jackson was separately involved in a deal with
Anheuser-Busch, the giant brewery, which he had targeted in the
early 1980s in a high-profile boycott campaign to shame it as
racist, to sell one of its lucrative Chicago distribution
franchises to a group of investors led by his sons Yusef and
Jonathan. The Jackson family withstood criticism (a Chicago
Tribune columnist mocked the reverend as the "King of Beers"), and
the franchise brought in tens of millions in annual revenue until
Yusef Jackson sold it in 2013.

The Anheuser-Busch deal was a classic Jesse Jackson operation. His
method was to accuse a business of racism, and then, after bad
press and further consultations, announce that the target had
agreed to Jackson's demands. With this usually came a generous
donation to Rainbow/PUSH.

The real money poured in when Jackson applied this strategy
systematically, to top investment banks and financial brokerages.
Jackson's Wall Street Project was embraced by financial industry
titans, including Sanford Weill, then the chairman of Citigroup,
and Arthur Levitt Jr., who at the time was chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The Wall Street Project kicked
off in 1998 by asking financial firms for a $50,000 contribution
to support its lobbying efforts, landing $500,000 in donations
from Wall Street firms for its coming-out. Also that year, the
federal housing lender Freddie Mac contributed $1 million to
Rainbow/PUSH, earmarking at least some of it for Wall Street
Project purposes.

Jackson struck gold on Wall Street, and by tapping the U.S.
business community more broadly. Millions began pouring into
Rainbow/PUSH enterprises. In 2001, The New Yorker reported that in
the previous year, the organizations operating under the Rainbow/
PUSH Coalition umbrella brought in $17 million, noting that
"almost all of it came from American business."

A key Jackson role was to leverage his Clinton administration
connections and civil rights reputation on behalf of corporations
seeking federal approval for mergers. For example, despite the
opposition of lesser-known civil rights organizations, Jackson
backed the 1998 merger of two banks, Citicorp and Travelers, after
which Citicorp sent $50,000 to the Citizenship Education Fund;
Travelers followed up with a $100,000 gift.

On behalf of Rainbow/PUSH, Jackson came out against the proposed
$81 billion merger of telecommunications giants SBC and Ameritech,
calling it "anti-democratic." Jackson had particular pull at the
time with the Federal Communications Commission, whose approval
was necessary for the merger to go through. Its then-chairman,
Clinton appointee William Kennard, was the first black man to head
the FCC, and was a close friend of Jackson's, once publicly
calling Jackson his "hero."

A year later, the civil rights leader was on the opposite side of
the SBC-Ameritech deal, which sailed through FCC approval.
Rainbow/PUSH emerged $500,000 richer from donations from the two
companies. Jackson also brought into the deal investment firm
Georgetown Partners, which had never done telecom deals, but which
was owned by Chester Davenport, a key Jackson ally.

A year later, when GTE and Bell Atlantic were in talks to merge as
Verizon, Jackson endorsed the deal. Lo, the Citizenship Education
Fund received a combined $1 million from the companies, with
Verizon agreeing to a further $300,000 contribution to fund
Rainbow/PUSH conventions through 2002.

It didn't always work. In 2001, when Jackson tried it with Silicon
Valley firms, T.J. Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor,
refused to play ball. "We can now officially describe Cypress
Semiconductor as a white supremacist hate group," a Jackson ally
declaimed. For his part, Rodgers denounced Jackson in my New York
Post column for "running a scam for his own benefit."

That same year, personal scandal put Jackson's activist
profiteering in jeopardy. On the eve of the annual Wall Street
Project meeting in New York, the National Enquirer reported that
Jackson had a love child with Karin Stanford, a Rainbow/PUSH
staffer. The man seen at the time as the leader of black America
acknowledged the child's existence, and carried on with that
year's Wall Street event, which brought in $2.1 million.

It was difficult at the time to find out how much money Jackson
really made from his nonprofits. As a New York Post columnist, I
examined the tax filings of CEF, which were publicly available by
law. I found that the tax-exempt CEF nearly quintupled its revenue
in a single year, increasing its charitable harvest from $2
million in 1998 to $9.7 million in 1999. But the tax forms were a
total mess.

For example, CEF claimed on its federal tax forms to have received
donations from firms that say they did not donate. Spokespersons
for Compaq, the computer company, and Coors Brewing told me that
they had indeed given to one of Jackson's organizations, but not
the ones CEF listed.

It might sound like small potatoes, but back then, when I asked
Cleta Mitchell, a Washington lawyer who specialized in nonprofit
tax law, to take a look at the CEF filings, she said, "There are
red flags all over this."

"You can't help but be struck by the fact that, reading those tax
returns, there's a lot of money being spent in ways that aren't
clear," said Mitchell at the time.

Of course it didn't matter. As Washington sources told me back
then, the IRS doesn't like going after religious organizations,
and certainly would not relish auditing ones headed by the
nation's top black leader. Corporations didn't seem to mind
either. The Wall Street Project is still around, though Jackson's
withdrawal from the public square a decade ago amid health
problems diminished its visibility.

In a sense, Jackson never fully recovered from his love child
scandal. With Democrats out of the White House through most of the
2000s, he had much less influence. The next Democrat to take the
presidency was Barack Obama, who, as the first black president, de
facto diminished Jackson's unique role.

Then again, it could be argued that in the Obama era and beyond
there was no need for Jesse Jackson, because his worldview--one
based on leveraging identity politics for political and corporate
power--had broadly triumphed in elite culture.

In 1987, Jackson joined a student protest at Stanford University,
demanding an end to its mandatory "Western Culture" humanities
course. "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go!" protesters
chanted. The students won. In the next academic year, Stanford
introduced a multicultural replacement, including non-Western
perspectives and those from women and people of color.

That protest, and Jackson's role in nationalizing its anti-Western
goals, drew considerable comment at the time. Within 30 years,
though, what was then seen as a radical demand had become the
establishment position within all academia, and remains so today.

Similarly, the ideological impetus behind the Wall Street Project
eventually encompassed all of corporate America. By 2015, major
corporations were all-in on "diversity" hiring and education.

An aging Jackson was outhustled, in both senses of the word, by
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of
Black Lives Matter. In 2014, BLM launched itself as a formal
organization, after the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric
Garner. After the George Floyd killing in 2020, the Black Lives
Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) raised a staggering $90
million in donations from corporations and foundations, in a
single year beggaring Jackson's lifetime honeypot.

And, as with Jackson's own entities, BLMGNF faced accusations of
corruption and mismanagement of funds. Cullors's brother, for
example, took in $1.6 million for "security services," and the
organization bought a $6 million luxury southern California
mansion as a "campus" for the organization and its leadership.

In October 2025, the Associated Press reported that the Trump
Justice Department had begun a federal fraud investigation into
BLMGNF--a dramatic turn of affairs that Jackson and his
organizations never faced.

Though Jesse Jackson was only a shadow of his former activist self
at the time of his passing, his significance should not be
overlooked. Though the Great Awokening had many sources, the canny
and entrepreneurial Reverend Jackson was its godfather. If you
seek his monument, look to every corporate HR department and major
media institution, and to university programming, and patterns of
foundation grant-making over the last 20 years or so.

And, more darkly, look to the rise of identity politics in the
younger generation of whites, who are not intimidated by Jackson-
style moralizing. A growing number of them openly embrace pro-
white racism, violating a taboo on which Jackson's moral power
depended. What was good, financially and politically, for Jesse
Jackson, his allies, and his activist descendants may yet prove
disastrous for American democracy.
--
jd
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