CORRECTION, PLEASE!(Jesse Jackson vs. Toyota)(Brief Article)

Jackson's Shakedown Utility Vehicle

ITEM: Jim Press, chief operating officer of Toyota, announced on August 9th a "breakthrough" strategy. The company will make, as noted in a press release, "an $8 billion investment in diversity." Said the auto executive: "I want to acknowledge the work of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in moving these issues to the forefront at Toyota. The Coalition was a true catalyst...."

CORRECTION: The wrath Rev. Jesse Jackson unleashed on Toyota stemmed from a commercial that showed a black man with a gold Toyota SUV carved on his tooth. That was all that was needed to charge the company with racism and to justify a shakedown. Never mind that Toyota, a Japanese company, is "minority"-owned. In fact, the company had doubled the number of its minority employees between 1974 and 1992.

Even the New York Times has noted that Jackson has been criticized for having "mounted pressure campaigns against large corporations and then extracting donations to his Rainbow/Push organization or favors and jobs for friends and relatives...."

Though Jackson denies such charges, they are self-evident. As pointed out by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney with the American Conservative Union, in an Associated Press report, "He [Jackson] gets away with things that nobody else can get away with." The ACU has filed a suit with the Federal Election Commission against PUSH, notes the AP, "alleging improprieties surrounding campaign cash from the Democratic Party. The group has also urged an Internal Revenue Service audit of Jackson's group."

The modus operandi is a recurrent one, said AP: "Make allegations of racism and threaten boycott until a deal is struck.... 'If what you do is threaten commercial injury, financial injury, which is what he does, I don't know how that doesn't constitute extortion,' Mitchell said." Yet, as columnist Paul Craig Roberts writes, the U.S. government obviously no longer regards "extortion as a crime if it is an activity practiced on behalf of preferred minorities in the name of civil rights."

Too Much Spending, Not Too Much Cutting