CHICAGO, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- UPI senior Midwest Correspondent Al Swanson spent a Saturday morning at Rainbow/PUSH headquarters with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. During a walking tour of the modernized PUSH facility, which includes new offices and a state-of-the-art television studio, Jackson talked about President Bush and his State of the Union speech, Enron and Martin Luther King's legacy, black leadership, reparations, the media and life in the post-Sept. 11 world for more than an hour. Here is the wide-ranging interview.
On Enron
Q. One year ago. Enron was the nation's seventh largest corporation. A year later: bankruptcy, scandal and congressional investigations. You met with former CEO Kenneth Lay, took a bus ride from Houston to Washington with Enron employees who lost jobs and pension funds. Is Enron a case study for corporate greed?
A. Yeah, It's a metaphor for bad public policy. Just as Rosa Parks was arrested, legally, for sitting in the front of the bus -- under the law the bus driver was right legally and so was the policeman. It was immoral and wrong, but it was legal. It was bad public policy. Much of the stealing, much of the abuse should I say, "It was legal." I mean, people didn't know, very bright people didn't know the difference between defined benefits and defined contributions. They did not know that. They had not been told that, they had been told half the truth, which is a whole lie.
Q. They were told, "We're fine," buy more stock, buy more, buy more.
A. While executives were taking out, taking out, taking out. Sure, there's where corporate deceit comes in. Separate that which is the legal part, the deceitful part, and the illegal part.
Q. Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) has called the Enron executives who have taken the Fifth Amendment corporate criminals. Do you think someone should go to jail for this?
A. The results will determine the penalty. We're early into that. Due process is in process. But I'm trying to say something to you. There's a legal dimension of the exploitation, then there is the illegal part of it and then there's the deception. Deception is that leadership misled people and so you've kind of got all three. But my point is that the overabundance of pensions (funds) in a given company, like 80 or 90 percent without diversification, are without caps. Or not knowing the difference between defined contributions and defined benefits. All that's in that, and the great fear, is that given what's happened at Global Crossing, is that Enron may be the tip of the iceberg on corporate greed and anti-union, anti-workers at the table. And in the case of Enron they bought auditors, they bought government and they bought media. So they bought up everything in their path. The (Texas) State Supreme Court, they invested several hundred thousand in that so out of six rulings in the state supreme court they won five of them.
Q. Did Rainbow/PUSH get any Enron money?
A. The bureau down there (in Houston) may have over a period of time. Maybe, $10,000 or $15,000. Except, that face of Enron was the face that gave Colin Powell an award.
Q. Well, they also funded the ballet, the symphony, they put their name on the new ballpark in Houston the Ken Lay YMCA.
A. Ken Lay was the leading force for affirmative action and so his reputation among the churches, among the civic organizations, among the institutions, among the hospitals was an outstanding one. People who were participating with Enron, they helped with the NAACP Convention when it came there, and the Republican convention. Enron as corporate good citizen was part of their image and in some sense substance. The stuff coming out now -- only God knows who knew that -- but this manipulation of monies is apparently fairly widespread. That's why Enron may be a metaphor for public policy out of control. See, at best you have management, labor, consumers, environment and government as the balancing mechanism. When government is bought up by the corporate it leaves workers, consumers and the environmentalists outdoors.
Q. Can anything be done to make the workers who lost jobs and pension funds whole?
A. Yeah.
On Bush
Q. President Bush's popularity is running between 80 percent and 83 percent in the latest Washington Post/Newsweek poll. In his speech, he hit on issues like prescription drug care for seniors. Weren't those remarks designed to bring him more to the center?
A. Well, of course. But you look at gestures and you look at budgets, resources, and you have to distinguish between what's a gesture. If you're going to raise the military budget way up there and you're going to cut taxes -- the point is what you didn't say. (Former Treasury) Secretary (Donald) Regan said to President Reagan that if corporations are paying no taxes, there must be some minimum taxes, so what Bush sought to do is remove the alternative minimum tax so corporations could get a tax rebate retroactive 15 years. So Enron would get another $500 million, IBM would get $1.5 billion.
Q. But he also fully funded Food Stamps and nutrition programs for Women and Children. Is he trying to have a guns and butter economy?
A. That's what he's trying to do. But the fact is unemployment is on the rise. Among the poorer people it is.
On politics
Q. I talked to your son (Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., D-Ill.) a couple of weeks ago. He wrote his book on the Constitution and civil rights, "A Delicate Balance." What kind of political hopes do you have for him?
A. The congressman in that book has taken on the unfinished business of the civil rights agenda. For example, I told the (Chicago) Sun-Times yesterday (Friday, Feb. 8) that in '54 (in Little Rock, Ark.) you had your white and black -- (there was) Central High (a white school) and Booker Washington school was a step or two behind. That finally was determined to be illegal based on race. Now the schools are funded on the real estate tax base. The gap between New Trier (in affluent Wilmette, Ill.,) and DuSable (on Chicago's poor South Side) is greater than the old '54 gap was. His (Representative Jackson's) point is only a constitutional amendment will address education as an equal right. At the end of 12 months the kids take the same exam and they're not on an equal playing field. Our kids can compete at the basketball court at the state tournament if the court is even. If the circumference of the rim is the same, the height (of the basket) is the same.
Q. Do you have any political ambitions for yourself?
A. I have no plans to run for office. I'm trying to put forth, frankly, an agenda, which is what we do. Our mission at Rainbow/PUSH is to defend, protect and gain civil rights. Our mission is to even the playing field in education, in health care, in access to capital. That's what we're doing. Yesterday, you saw Puff Daddy at Wall Street ringing the bell. One of conferences last month was taking Hip-Hop to Wall Street. These guys are living with a new sense of entrepreneurship. Last year Wall Street had $8.5 billion in fees for managing funds. Blacks and browns got less than $20 million.
Q. What to you say to people who say that your LaSalle Street Project or your Wall Street Project is tantamount to racial corporate extortion, and that it's geared to benefit your friends?
A. First of all that term. Extortion is illegal. Any attempt (at economic advancement) that we seek -- when we broke out of slavery was because we broke the law. It was a bad law. Dr. (Martin Luther) King boycotted the buses in Montgomery (Ala.). It was not extortion because he broke the law. Such cheap language is not rooted in substance. It's just a false accusation. What we do with corporations is we leverage our labor and consumer strength for trade relations, mutually beneficial, legal trade relations. The best in corporate America by red-lining black and brown communities, by limiting their investment in those areas, they have missed market, money, talent and location. Our argument is you did not know how good baseball could be till everybody could play. You don't know how good corporate America can be until everybody can play. So the corporations that relate to us they do so willingly because they see growth.
On Black Power
Q. A couple of weeks ago Newsweek had a cover with three Fortune 500 black executives on and they called it "The New Black Power." They said your model of black power from the church and the community is the old model and that the new model is going to come from business schools and Ivy league schools
A. Why such a juxtaposition? Why such a playoff? You look for leadership. Some white leaders are politicians, some are ministers, some are business leaders, some are professors, some are military people, some are athletes. So why the notion of always setting one group against another? It's really kind of insulting but it's also stupid. These three guys have jobs. And their job is not to redirect the flow of pension funds in America. It's to run their companies at a profit. These guys have three good jobs, three challenging jobs. We want more guys and ladies in those positions so they can use their influence to expand the marketplace and contribute to growth. What those three guys do. Like we took three busloads of ex-Enron workers to Washington from Houston to get relief for the workers. The weekend of the bankruptcy declaration in anticipation of that, company executives took out $105 million in retainer bonuses. The workers' severance was not allowed and it dropped under the bankruptcy hatch so those workers cannot get the relief of severance, which is their own money whether they get it from the bankruptcy court or whether they get that money from Enron. That's not what (Stanley) O'Neal and (Richard) Parsons (two top black chief executive officers at Merrill Lynch and AOL Time Warner) do. That's another part of work.
Q. I was here a year ago when you announced your child out of wedlock and you at that time announced you were going to take a sabbatical, take some time off, and then you changed your mind. Why did you change your mind?
A. First of all I never made a decision to take off much from my work. I altered my work slightly. Let's stay on the point. Don't miss the substance of my point. The idea of three African-Americans heading a corporation affects the broad base social justice agenda, the new leaders. That doesn't mean we don't have nearly 9,000 black and brown elected officials in state legislatures or leaders of cities or congress people. So to somehow assume we have some new model -- we have progress from the old model. These guys are the results of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act (of 1964) gave us the ability, the opportunity to run cities, and we began to put in managers of city funds, and managers of port authorities and had to learn how to run budgets and (it) gave room for blacks in finance and gave us the ability to negotiate to build airports, and out of that came a new generation of opportunities that people could imagine. So Wall Street is the exclusion of the voting rights right act.
So for example we were at a meeting out in L.A. last year of a thousand black and brown business people and they said, "Jesse, be careful how you talk tonight because some of these people are Republican and some are Democrat and it's a mixed audience." So I said, "How many of you in this room had a business before 1965?" and nobody stood. "How many of you benefited from, EEOC?" Hands went up. "Or from affirmative action?" Hands went up. "How many of you feel you were denied access to capital based on race?" All hands went up. "I thought ya'll were different?" So it's the same agenda from the right to vote, the right to govern politically, the right to govern city budgets the right to influence state budgets, the right to influence the national budget, the right to penetrate the Wall Street market, the logical conclusion is these guys are there just like Jackie Robinson. So once we got Jackie, we didn't have new leaders, we had new voices in new places. That's a silly perspective. It trivializes the breath and depth or our challenges. It is a wonderful thing as we celebrate black history month to have these three guys there. But the notion that somehow that is new is absurd.
Q. Now back to last year. You had some conflicts with your budget. Have you cleared that up?
A. No real conflicts with our budget. That fact of the matter is we've never had, always made our payroll, we're not in any FICA tax problems. Our organization grew last year. We grew. We go through audits every year. We have reports and when they go through all the books there are no inconsistencies. Our books are in good shape.
Q. You changed your mind about the sabbatical last year?
A. That was partly misinterpreted. In the first place our work never stopped. Our quest to fight for workers, the unorganized. There was a bus strike in L.A. Five-hundred thousand people were dislocated for a month. I negotiated a settlement to that strike. Just part of what we did last year. We expanded our work into Silicon Valley and the dot-com industry. Last year was our biggest Wall Street Project. Last year I worked with labor unions in securing more workers. Our work in voter registration. We took a tour across Georgia, 25-cities, 7 days last year so that our work has not been altered -- it has been expanded.
On the Mideast
Q. You've embraced Yasser Arafat. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon says he wishes Israel had eliminated Arafat back during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Do you feel that Arafat still has something to contribute to the peace process in the Middle East?
A. Of course I do and so does President Bush. So does the U.S. government think that and so do most Israelis think that too. In 1979, it was clear to me then the Israelis and the Palestinians had to pursue a policy of co-existence rather than co-annihilation. The idea of them talking to each other at that time -- America had made it illegal to talk -- which was absurd because no talk no action. There was this huge battle with the Israelis and Palestinians talking. But finally they began to talk to each other because our policy prohibited our mediating the talk. But in time not only did they talk, they signed agreements. Arafat's in Lebanon, (then) Syria, back to the West Bank. So in 23 years what I advocated back in 1979 -- the key is he is in the West Bank and Gaza today.
Q. But he's under virtual house arrest.
A. He is because there are unresolved conflicts. But the evolution from no talk, from the U.S. not talking with them to the U.S. protecting him in the West Bank and Gaza is a 23-year journey. Put this thing in some kind of perspective. And so the U.S. policy in the end was to fight, however difficult, for co-existence and mutual recognition over co-annihilation. The statement Sharon made does not represent U.S. government policy.
Q. Did you read Arafat's op-ed editorial in the New York Times?
A. I did, and without getting into details of that. Hamas. There's an element to the right of Arafat that every time there's a peace deal they sabotage it because they don't support his idea of co-existence. They support eliminating Israel; he does not. And so that's why the U.S. has seen him as a more acceptable relative in the process. Even this week when Sharon came here, the Bush position was that we had to recognize Arafat and try to work through their mutual fears. Rather, the policy right now is driven by fear, hatred, violence and distrust. Those cycles must to broken. International law, human rights, self-determination and co-existence must triumph over co-annihilation and fear. And I might add, the position I took in 1979 was the correct one. That is now U.S. policy.
On post-Sept. 11
Q. You've always been a risk taker. Have you tightened up your security since Sept. 11?
A. I mean, not unreasonably so. I'm sensitive to it. I went to jail in September 1963. I've been living in danger for a long time.
Q. This year for the first time the Chicago police department is going to book reporters. In order to get a police media credential you will have to be photographed and fingerprinted and they expect only about half the reporters will go along with it. Just this week, America West Airlines was accused of allowing security personnel to grope single women. There have been all kinds of reports of ethnic and racial profiling of Arab and Middle Eastern-looking people at airports and bus stations and so on. Where is this going?
A. I don't know. There's been some abuses of it. There have been some exaggerations. We're still so fresh from the attack that there are some real fears and there is some panic peddling. You've got both going on. The last 21 times I've been at the airport I've been stopped and searched 18 times. I mean totally searched. Bags opened, held up. Yet, I've not reacted publicly because I know we're in that stage. I think some of those kinks will be worked out in time. It's a matter of time. So we're still in a stage of trauma. This is like a post-traumatic syndrome that we're going through now and people should not overreact. Obviously we've got to work through the profiling issue.
When I was in Washington this week at the Enron hearing, there were these five white guys pleading the Fifth (Amendment) and there were like 25 lawyers sitting with them on three rows, all white lawyers and all white defendants. We're not profiling white men. There have been corrupt, dishonest and abusive (practices) by those guys. You don't profile all white men who look like (former Enron Financial Officer Andrew) Fastow, who look like Ken Lay, and so the idea of stereotyping or profiling a group based on the acts of some is absurd. You know they aren't afraid to drive behind Ryder trucks driven by white men because a Ryder truck driven by a white was responsible for Oklahoma City. So we have to get through the post-traumatic syndrome period.
On Asia and Africa
Q. How long should the United States remain in Afghanistan?
A. You know it's premature to say this particular war is over because terrorists by their nature fight in cells. They're not uniformed soldiers sponsored by a government. So we do not know about the cells that hit us in our own country. We may have eliminated them (al Qaida) there. We may have not eliminated them here.
Q. What about the "axis of evil" that President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union Speech.
A. That is dangerous language for a head of state to use -- the evil and good. It's heavy theologically. A country that is as great as our country is on its best days (we) also for 200 years engaged in the slave trade and lived 100 years of legal segregation and persistent racial submission. We had to fight to make lynching a federal crime. So the burden of our own development should lessen any sin or righteousness or revelry as we fight adversaries that are threatening.We must for the most part reduce the alienation. (Secretary of State) Colin Powell also said, which was prohibitive language three months ago, in New York at the Davos conference that the root of this alienation is poverty. We have to address root causes. That was prohibitive language in October. So my point is the issue, you got 5 million people dying each year from lack of drinkable water. Bush did not mention the Congo in his address, did not mention Asia in his address, he did not make any commitment to fighting global poverty, illiteracy and disease whose alienation lends itself to a lot of these countries.
Q. The World Bank just authorized $500 million to fight AIDS in Africa. Estimates are Africa needs at least $3 billion a year to even begin to deal with the problem. Should the United States be filling in some of that gap?
A. Of course it has to. And of course, not only did Mr. Bush remove the AIDS office from the White House, he did not mention AIDS in his address. The No. 1 killer disease in the world today. That's why I said to you so often that the civil rights agenda is outside of the narrowly focused lens of a State of the Union. A State of the Union address is never at its heart, except in right instances, the social justice agenda. So it was just another night when Africa was ignored and another night when the educational gap, the health care gap and the access to capital gap among people of color was omitted.
On reparations
Q. Does Operation PUSH have a policy on reparations for descendants of former slaves?
A. Of course. Of course we do.
Q. N'Cobra (a frontline African-American reparations group) is going to have a reparations march on Washington in August. Would it be something you would take part in?
A. We certainly support the idea. We must come to grips with a fight to repair the damages been done. The nation has not at this point agreed to apologize for slavery, which itself is unchristian. People should apologize for evil deeds done to people and that was an evil deed. But what we are also fighting is predatory exploitation. A cousin to the slavery issue is segregation and the skin tax: Why blacks and browns pay more for automobile insurance and mortgage insurance because now we are working to sue insurance companies that had two sets of books -- race-based premiums. New York Met set aside $20 million just yesterday. My grandmother had one of those policies. My grandmother had one of those policies and I have that letter here someplace from New York Met. And so suing those companies to repair that damage done is a concrete thing happening.
Q. But this could be tied up in the courts for another generation.
A. Well not necessarily, that's not necessarily true. American General made a $250 million settlement last March of last year. Unitran here in Chicago did one last week. We're winning those suits fairly rapidly because those companies cannot take the pressure of the exposure.
Q. Is there any sort of time limit on this because according to census figures sometime this decade Hispanics are going to become the largest minority in America and by 2050 this will be a so-called minority-majority society. California already is in that demographic position. Will that make any difference?
A. No. Hispanics coming or Asians coming does not address the slave trade. Those are two different issues. I don't even see what the point is. That two-thirds of our hemisphere speaks Spanish. Only a river separates us. We share 2,000 miles of border with Mexico and so you're going to have a heavier (Spanish) speaking population because we're in the same hemisphere. We're next door neighbors unlike Africa which is long way off.
Q. I mean as a matter of public policy. Would there be more reluctance among new immigrants, to say that (slavery) was in the past. We really don't have to deal with that issue. It wasn't us?
A. The fact is that those who've been locked out, we people of color, need each other for growth. Because while we've grown in numbers we have not necessarily grown proportionally in wealth and/or power.
Q. So you're glad you stayed active and that you took your hit and kept on running?
A. My point is in that sense leaders of substance must function with pain. You must have a disposition about how to turn crisis into opportunity. If you fall down you get back up again because the ground is no place for a champion and hits coming in various ways. In 1957, Dr. King was hit with income tax evasion. (Former Chicago Mayor) Harold Washington went to jail for late tax filing. We seek forgiveness, redemption, renewal, and then we move on. You can't surrender. You have to work and serve because in the end you're measured by service.
On Martin Luther King Day
Q. Only about 25 percent of the companies in this country give their workers the day off. A poll showed that a lot of workers would celebrate the holiday if it were moved to the summer, then they could combine it with their regular summer vacations. Is America missing the point of the King holiday?
A. Yes. Dr. King lived and died to make America better. Not just black people better off. When the cotton curtain came down, he put a bridge between the Mason-Dixon Line where there had been a wall. When the cotton curtain came down, you could not have had the Dallas Cowboys or CNN or the Atlanta Olympics or the Atlanta Braves, you couldn't have had the Super Bowl behind the cotton curtain. That's King too. Title IX for women, women's equality, that came down too. The right to vote for all Americans, that came down too. There's a new America. There's Jeffersonian Democracy, which is a very limited democracy that had to co-exist with slavery, and there's King Democracy, which is the inclusive one. The world is not looking for Jefferson's Democracy; it's looking for King's Democracy. And so he fundamentally changed democracy. We couldn't be in South Africa talking about the evil of apartheid if we still had it (segregation). We couldn't be speaking against terrorism with moral authority if terrorism is still our official policy. So he fundamentally changed the character of the country's legal structure. He changed its legal structure so that there are still those who honor him as if he were a black hero. He may be hero to blacks, and browns but he represented tremendous salvation for the whole of the country."
Well if the first stage of our struggle was to end legal slavery, the second stage to end legal segregation or apartheid, the third stage to secure to the right to vote, the fourth stage is access to capital, industry and technology. This is next phase of our struggle. All this talking about trade, and entrepreneurship and three guys on Wall Street and pension funds all this is another phase of the ongoing struggle. It's a broad-based struggle. We are a much broader deeper people than that.
On the media
Q. Is the corporate consolidation of media limiting access to people who have dissenting views?
A. It limits the voices. There is much more control of the media and far less competition. It makes it somewhat undemocratic. The kind of role that Fox plays, kind of a tabloid TV journalism, where too few people control too much media and they can influence policy. And it makes the press less free, it makes the press less credible, it makes it less believable. Because when you go to the big events and you see the owners of media and their top journalists sitting at the same tables you have to know that their relationship influences policy. Enron in some sense is that issue writ large, where one company in effect determines (state) supreme court rulings, one company determines national policy, one company hires media, hires auditors, hires politicians. The reason I support a special prosecutor is the same reason (South Carolina Sen. Fritz) Hollings does: because two or three Justice Department people have had to recuse themselves, including Attorney General John Ashcroft. And then you've got (Vice President Dick) Cheney stretching the limit (on executive privilege). Executive privilege is for the president but certainly not the vice president. And so you see in some sense the logical conclusion of this kind of unlimited greed manifesting itself in these situations.
Q. The King family is selling the rights to Martin Luther King's likeness and speeches for commercials. How do you feel about that?
A. The family has undergone tremendous strain, the traumatic loss of the tallest tree in the forest. I just hope the family would gain the security that they need and the respect and privacy they need.
On the prison-industrial complex
Q. A quarter of young blacks are involved in the criminal justice system as prisoners or on probation. You have communities fighting to get prisons to produce jobs. What does the privatization of prisons mean for blacks, Hispanics and poor people?
A. It's a blot on America's face today. It's first class jails and second-class citizens. We have not known since slavery such a system that has impacted on our lives. In Illinois, prisons make over 500 products, for example, and these small towns are fighting to get them -- an 800-cell jail. And then the property value goes up replacing an outmoded farm. When they get the 800-cell jail, they get a road built in front of the prison, they get a McDonald's or Burger King and a Popeye's and then they get the real estate brokers in town to do subdivisions. And they begin to build more towns around. Tamms, Ill. (the site of Illinois' supermax prison in Southern Illinois) is a classic case. I think through all of this we remain hopeful because there's a lot of battles to fight but we have a lot to fight with. We have more votes, more elected officials, more people positioned in higher places. We must always take the position that we've come a long ways with less. Even when we go down sometimes we get back up again because the ground is no place for a champion. We have that championship spirit and that's why we continue fight back.
