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The Life Work of Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson in 1983. Public Domain.

His life work was mobilizing members of an underclass that was presumed not to exist where the “American Dream” reigned. In his second run at the presidency in 1988, he found them by the millions.

His Rainbow Coalition spanned the whole of society: farmers, white unionists, feminists, Hispanics, students, environmentalists, and a full 95% of black people.

Jackson flatly rejected the notion that Americans had any common cause with the likes of Batista, Diem, Pinochet, the Shah, Somoza, and Marcos. He called for a freeze on nuclear weapons, large cuts in Pentagon spending, withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe, the elimination of first-strike MX, Cruise, and Trident D-5 missiles, as well as the canceling of Reagan’s first-strike enabling Star Wars delusion. Alone among candidates, he held that Palestinians were a people deserving of national rights and a homeland.

Billed by the capitalist media as a non-viable regional candidate in the race merely to “lend color to the campaign,” he attracted huge crowds that turned out to cheer his denunciation of wage-slashing, pension-busting, job-exporting capital for its lack of conscience. They roared delighted approval when he waxed indignant at “American multinationals firing free labor at home to hire repressed labor abroad.”

Trumpeting a “Worker’s Bill of Rights,” he promised everyone the right to a job, membership in a democratic union, a living wage, a healthy life and safe workplace, pension security, fair play, education, respect, and freedom from discrimination.

For catering to the needs of the majority, Jackson was dismissed as a captive of “special interests.” A series of primary elections on “Super Tuesday” was said to be his political Waterloo, the day his ephemeral popularity would reveal itself as confined to the Deep South.

The American people missed their cue. Laid off auto workers flocked to Jackson’s banner, awarding him 55% of the Michigan Democratic vote, including 20% of the white vote, four times his portion in the 1984 race. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis trailed him by 27 points. After thirty-one primaries and caucuses, Jackson was ahead in the popular vote, was nearly even in delegates, and was indisputably the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

Israel fanatics organized a counter-mobilization. Photos of Jackson with Yasir Arafat circulated widely in the press. Bankrupt charges of anti-Semitism were endlessly re-hashed. Panicked Democratic Party leaders launched an Anybody-But-Jackson campaign to bury the emergent threat of real democracy.

With hunger, homelessness, AIDS, and tuberculosis thriving, Ronald Reagan’s vice-president (and former Director of the CIA) George Herbert Walker Bush won the White House in the fall.

Vicious class war continued.

Expressing a fairly common business consensus, chief economist David Hale of Kemper Financial Services, estimated that the Reagan years had bled the U.S. of one trillion dollars, an unprecedented financial hemorrhage at the time.

Frady, Marshall, “Jesse – The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson,” (Random House, 1996) pps. 380, 385, 387, 391-2

Colton, Elizabeth, “The Jackson Phenomenon – The Man, The Power, The Message,” (Doubleday, 1989) pps. 180-1

Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy, (Hill and Wang, 1991), p. 82

Michael K. Smith is the author of  The Madness of King George, and Portraits of Empire

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