Jesse Shakes Down Wall Street

...It will be, ahem, "a wake-up call to the corporate world...

...You know how it sounds: it sings...

...But all of a sudden Jackson slips into a whole other groove, opening the sluices of his great syllabic stream...

...Trump has purchased the world-famous Empire State Building...

...In America, he is telling us, you only get "ham-and-egg justice...

...And naturally everybody was very pleased to be there, extremely enthusiastic about the great strides we are making but duly mindful of the difficult road ahead...

...After some bad publicity about alleged discrimination at Denny's restaurants, Jackson extracted a promise from Flagstar to spend almost $6o million annually with minority businesses, as well as a hefty cash contribution to Jackson's network of supporters...

...The title had enough of the mumbo-jumbo about it to sound almost plausible, but it didn't take an Alan Greenspan to figure out the main thing Jackson is interested in expanding...

...Hawg, that's how he says it in That Voice, a hawg and a chicken...

...Indeed, in many ways it is the most critical part of the entire conference, the one phase of his ceaseless money-shaking campaign likely to have the longest term effects...

...The chrome starts flaking off the Donald's tycoon image faster than you can say diversity conference...

...In recent actions against Flagstar, the company that owns the Denny's restaurant chain, and Texaco, Jackson hardly had to fire a single shot...

...and suddenly there he is genuflecting before his tenant, looking almost, well, servile...

...He has run two failed presidential campaigns, been a "Statehood Senator" in Washington, D.C.'s failed bid for statehood, and failed to deliver to the Democratic Party the massive voting power both he and it once thought he would...

...So when Trump first steps onto the dais, with his electric hair and his electric tie and his extremely electric personal fortune, you can feel all that voltage, almost hear it sizzling through the crowd...

...Among the superstars that dropped by to pay their respects over the three days: Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Donald Trump, publishing mogul John Johnson, Greenspan, SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, techno-guru Esther Dyson, and dozens of other Very Important Personages...

...And that was before "requesting" corporations to purchase $5oo-per-head fundraiser tickets, conference registrations at $350 each, and $1,295 annual subscriptions to his monthly, three-and-a-half-page newsletter...

...With an entire legal code full of anti-discrimination statutes just waiting to be brought to litigation, Jackson has an arsenal full of new weapons that weren't available to him in the heydays of the Black Power rally and Operation PUSH...

...Hep cha wo fust...

...He has created and overseen a number of high-visibility "empowerment" organizations —Operation PUSH, the Rainbow Coalition—some of which have faced charges of less than perfect bookkeeping and money gone missing...

...One can easily enough imagine some poor sap at the office water cooler, innocently parodying Jackson's ridiculous speech, as has been done in this very magazine article...

...The Wall Street Journal estimated that Jackson raked in nearly a half-million dollars in the weeks before the three-day session began, a figure large enough to make everybody sit up and take notice...

...And deal they did...

...Naturally...

...But as Trump sleepwalks through his remarks, a curious thing begins to happen...

...With the possible exception of Rodney King, Jackson is the most famous unemployed person in America...

...He has clearly been waiting, with the exquisitely sensitive timing that would shame a Swiss watch, for just the right moment to lay this rap on everyone...

...The unacceptable joke will be recited, the wrong language used...

...Preach it, Jesse, preach it...

...They are such powerful weapons, indeed, that Jackson has already scored two of his most stunning successes...

...That moment is now...

...But then Reverend Jackson surely has God on his side...

...In the brave new world where none of us thinks about race, though, because we have spent so many conferences and discussions and workshops resolving our various race pre-occupations, Jesse Jackson knows that someone is going to make a mistake...

...Instead of chasing money down hither and thither, it occurred to him —and it is not difficult to imagine him smiling at himself in the mirror in recognition of his brilliance, maybe even working up a couple rhyming couplets on the spot—that most of the money was in one place all along, the place Jackson now likes to refer to as "the capitol of capital...

...The oil giant agreed to pay out more than Sao° million in bonus compensation to its minority employees, as well as spend $865 million annually with minority firms...

...It lets everyone know that Jesse Jackson has finally arrived...

...To help sound the alarm, Jackson organized a three-day chin-wag on top of the World Trade Center entitled "Expanding the Marketplace: Inclusion, the Key to Economic Growth...

...But now, after decades of breast-beating and tree-shaking and sound-biting, Jackson has finally hit upon one true stroke of genius...

...Even though a supposed racist discussion recorded among Texaco executives later turned out to be false, the company was so eager to avoid continuing bad publicity about the story that it gave in to Jackson's somewhat outrageous demands...

...And woe to that man, for it will be a very costly mistake indeed—the Reverend Jackson will see to that...

...And, like unemployed people everywhere, he finds ways to fill up the days, most of them to do with figuring out how to get money out of the people who are actually working...

...Preach it, Jesse, preach it...

...It swings...

...Thus the birth of the Wall Street Project, which Jackson says will use "research, education and negotiation to persuade companies" to see the world his way...

...This is a guy they would like to be like, the guy who has actually made it to the mountain top, the guy who's so rich he owns the mountain in the first place...

...By Marc Carnegie The thing about Jesse Jackson is That Voice—that amazing butterbean biscuits-and-gravy fried catfish upliftthe-people twang...

...This is Jesse Jackson's landlord...

...But now they have to deal with us...

...Then, as Trump goes on, paying homage to other black leaders with whom he has wheeled and wheedled over the years, and rather obviously giving off the impression that there are several other places he would prefer to be than sitting on top of the world making kissy-face with Jesse Jackson—perhaps getting some dental work done, or signing off on his alimony payments —the realization begins to sink in among the audience...

...Even the guys with the F--k-You Money can't tell Jesse Jackson to go pound rocks anymore...

...and then he really floors it, really punches the verbiage throttle, sending pronouns and pronouncements and perorations flying fast enough to lift his little parable out of Meaning's orbit...

...The Donald is one of the few guys who have what's known (and revered) on the Street as F--k-You Money, the immense wealth that allows them to tell anyone, at any time, to go pound rocks...

...Start him off with a few nonsense words— hep cha wo fust, say, or down with dope, up with hope—and in two minutes he will have his audience smiling and clapping and waving and rocking and nodding and humming and grunting and exclaiming, just like in church, cheering Jackson on as he piles up the syllables, rhymes them, elides and glides and rides them, building the fever until his listeners are awash in a torrent of cornbread rhythms and churchified feeling, so caught up in the moment they don't even notice that the Reverend has just gone ahead and broken the language barrier, that he has erased any distinction between meaning and pure noise, that he's even gotten them ecstatically mouthing those same incredible, wondrous, absolutely meaningless sounds: Hep cha wo fust...

...Having evolved from dashiki-clad activist to Italian-suit shakedown specialist, re-inventing his persona with regularity and ease, the circumstances are finally right for the man whose prodigious gift for oratory and sloganeering—that brilliant Voice, and the uncanny knack for getting the media to listen to it—have always kept him failing upwards, always garnering enough attention to build a high-profile career without ever actually bothering to have a job...

...The chicken is faw it, the hawg's aginst it"—but what's it, Jesse...

...Over three days Jackson paraded them on and off platforms, the VIPs and CEOs and finance chiefs and super-lobbyists...

...Not even those legendary "Acts of God" that appear in corporate disclaimers are supposed to screw up business for four days, let alone take in a half million dollars cash for doing absolutely nothing...

...Next thing you know, the ham and egg have become the hawg and chicken, and they are walking across some kind of cosmic dining table...

...PRIVATIZATION LIVES...

...He is a man whose dealdom is the stuff of Wall Street legend, whose official conference biography is jam-packed with incredible facts, really outrageous whoppers like: "Mr...

...in mid-January, in front of some of the busiest and wealthiest and Most Important People in America, gathered on top of the World Trade Center, one hun-dred-some-thing stories above the surface of 30 the earth—so high the Statue of Liberty is nothing but a tiny key-chain trinket floating in the pond below us —who else but Jackson would drag these people through a meandering and incomprehensible anecdote about a hog...

...Making something out of absolutely nothing: it is a Jesse Jackson trademark...

...There are some other heavy hitters up on the dais with them—most notably John Johnson, one of the highest profile black business tycoons in the country—but you can tell that it's Trump that the up-and-comers in the audience have some feeling for...

...The timing is ideal...

...That was nicely done—but it was the Texaco deal that really must have opened his eyes to the cash motherlode waiting for him on Wall Street, and the immense power of his media weaponry...

...They can have all the Mar-a-I agos and Trump Pares and Towers and Plazas and Empire State Buildings they want...

...In touching and perhaps even tragicomic fashion, this hawg performance comes at the crowning moment of Jesse Jackson's colorful career...

...But the words sound so good spilling over in that red-beans-and-rice accent, he can't stop himself now...

...Throughout his career he has rhymed and rambled and promised and preached about expanding opportunities for black youth, and he is savvy enough to realize that starting things off with a bold demonstration—showing young black Wall Street from the get-go just how to make the money men bend to their will, how to get the Donald Trumps of the world to come hustling when the Mau Mau artists tell them to—sets the right moral tone for the affair...

...The realization seeps in slowly but inexorably, gradually filling the room with its terrible clarity: If Donald Trump will come and dance for us, then so will everyone else...

...Who else but Jackson, on a chilly evening MARC CARNEGIE is correspondent-at-large for TAS...

...Once a somewhat marginalized figure given to preposterous 32 April 9 9 8 • The American Spectator adventures with language, Jackson had quickly become a heavy hitter given to preposterous adventures with language...

...Jackson's chosen target is Donald Trump, a truly delicious and inspired choice...

...his opening night of the confab, at which Jackson will deliver his hawg-and-chicken masterpiece, is shrewdly given over to "young Wall Street," which means young minority Wall Street...

...Jackson knows well that it is one thing to get a Bill Clinton or Robert Rubin to pop by with a stock speech about breaking walls and building bridges and crossing barriers, and quite another thing altogether to put some Fat Cat on the stage next to you, and make him bow and scrape and show his fealty in public...

...With that kind of capital available merely by making a few well-chosen phone calls, Jackson reckoned it was time to ride his grievance horse to the biggest pool of water there is, and take a nice long cool drink...

...First he says in a kind of world-weary voice that Jackson is "a tough negotiator," a not-so-veiled reference to the rumor going around that the Wall Street Project's offices in the Trump Building are being provided free-of-charge...

...what is it...

...THERE'S LOTS OF MONEY TO BE MADE, AND WALL STREET IS LIKELY TO BE EVEN MORE GENEROUS TO JESSE THAN GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN...

...Maybe he doesn't even know for sure...

...Jesse Jackson is going to give these young black Wall Streeters a master class in how it's done, an expert performance in how to play the new and improved race card, a textbook example of how he expects them to be doing business in the future...

...It rolls and rumbles, ebbs and flows, shucks and jives...

...No one's ready for it...

...So Jesse Jackson decided to set up an office on Wall Street...

...No one can be sure what it's all about now, because the Reverend is speeding up and slurring down, preparing to make another pass at the language barrier...

...Indeed, as an unmistakable sign of his new clout—or at least of how terrified everyone is of appearing not fully on board for the shakedown cruise — Jackson amassed an all-star lineup with which to wow the audience, an assemblage of A-list pols and Super Gekkos by which he is making it known that, after years of searching, he has finally found the weak spot in the old boys' network, and that he will be hitting hard and hitting often...

...But with so much firepower on hand for the conference, which took place over the three business days before the holiday, Jackson effectively disrupted Wall Street's affairs for four business days...

...Yet another sign of Jackson's newfound Street credibility is that, for the first time in the dozen years since Martin Luther King was honored with a national holiday, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for the day...

...What does it mean...

...And that's when we get the intergalactic payload, the distant cryptic signal from somewhere in the far beyond: "The chicken drops a egg and moves on, the hawg gotta drop a leg, and caint go any futha...

...He could read the phone book and make it soulful, turn a shopping list into a Duke Ellington rhapsody...

...we had after all been listening to a discussion of how to get more money invested in the inner city...

...Ever since the 1960's, when as an assistant to Martin Luther King he emerged as an Authentic Voice of the Negro, Jesse Jackson has been setting himself up for the moment when he might stand up in front of the creme de la creme of the White Power Structure, lay some ham-and-egg mumbo-jumbo on them, and force them to open up the bank vaults...

...The American Spectator • April 19 9 8 33...

...Before the conference even got under way, he had dragooned several of the Street's largest firms—Prudential Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Travelers Group, Goldman Sachs—into coughing up $5o,000 each to help get the Wall Street Project off the ground...