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NEWS DISSECTOR December 10, 2007

With Jesse Jackson In Chicago Preparing the March On Wall Street

No Room at the manger: 2 Dead, 8 shot shot in suburban Denver church mission after a man reportedly was upset that they would not provide him with overnight lodging.

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DAY, THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS. IT IS ALSO THE DAY OF THE FIRST MARCH ON WALL STREET FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE
(in NY: Exchange and Broad at High Noon, Rain or Shine, Lasalle Steet, Chicago.)

WITH JESSE JACKON IN CHICAGO
THE JACKSON 4: THE NEXT GENERATION
THE UNFOLDING CRISIS

When you read about Jesse Jackson, it's often in the context of an appearance here or there or as a high profile individual, controversial or not, depending on your point of view. He's thought of as a "black leader" but its rarely made clear who or what he is leading. So when you read that he is organizing a March at noon today on Wall Street against the foreclosures of millions of homeowners, some shrug dismissively, ' there he goes again," as if he's just a professional protester.

You'd lose that contemptuous stereotype fast if you had been with me this past Saturday, on his home turf in Chicago where he founded and runs the RainbowPush Coalition out of a former synagogue turned church, community center, school, and TV station on Chicago's South Side. This is the Reverend's base, an organization that goes back 42 years from when he as a young man joined Martin Luther King Jr. crusade for freedom. King appointed him to head up "Operation Breadbasket," an economic empowerment arm of the civil rights movement.

After King was murdered—and he was there with him in Memphis-he left the Southern Christian Leadershio Council (SCLC) to form Operation Push (People United To Save Humanity.) When he later ran as a presidential candidate with the multi-cultural Rainbow theme, The pressure tactics of PUSH fused with the the non-racial mroe expansive Rainbow spirit.

On Saturdays—a day chosen not to conflict with Sunday church services—Jackson holds forth in the huge building on Drexell and East 50th Street on the South Side. . He invited me out to speak and show a clip of my film IN DEBT WE TRUST. The day started at 6 AM—which is when he gets cranking—with the taping of his TV show, an hour-long discussion program that airs at 9 Saturday Nights worldwide on the WORD network, a globally distributed religious broadcasting outlet. He wanted me on to explain the predatory lending and subprime menace which I explore in my film and new book, SQUEEZED: America As The Bubble Bursts (ColdType.Net).

The program was not rhetorical but analytical with an emphasis on context and solutions. It has no sponsors perhaps because it is a freewheeling exchange of views. Jackson is not just talking to his base or the victims of predatory lending, On Friday, he had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with proposals for what can be done. He called for a Marshall Plan and an agency like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation used in the depression or like the Resolution Trust Corporation set up to resolve the Savings and Loan (S&L) scandal to provide relief to people who lost homes and savings. He told me that Sandy Weil, the former Wall Street CEO and mogul called him at 5 in the morning to discuss it with him.

After the show broadcast from the basement ended, I went upstairs to the community hall for a breakfast of eggs, grits and a biscuit and a conversation with folks waiting for a panel of the "Entrepreneurs University," an empowerment and educational program for small businessmen which meets there. Foreclosure lawyers and lenders, including representatives of state agencies, were in another oom discussing ways to restructure mortgages with troubled homeowners. (Chicago has an almost 30% foreclosure rate.)

(Nearby Detroit is harder hit. Yesterday, residents of the Detroit area who opened their paper were greeted with 122 pages of the 2008 Tax Foreclosure list for Wayne County. The current figure for Wayne county reports that a staggering 1/4 homeowners are in default on their mortgage.) This is worse than Katrina, a disaster in the making. Motown may soon be notown.

At ten A.M, the service begins. It is also broadcast live on WORD and a local outlet. The place was a beehive of activity, packed, energized, maybe even sanctified. This was a weekend to remember the civil rights struggle. There was a fabulous gospel choir,a band and amazing soloists including some local pastors who dropped in to sing and testify. He has built an important and internationally respected institution which carrying on the momentum of the civil rights struggle from protest to politics to economic survival. He is, as we said in the Civil Rights days, "keeping on, keeping on." And I say this as someone who is mindful of all the criticisms of Jesse's flaws, failings and disappointments. Who among us is perfect? But who among us has his stature and history?

The room was rocking and I thought of my lanzmen who used to live in this onetime Jewish neighborhood and who once worshipped in this very building and how they would feel about the energy and love so visible in a hall, filled with passionate and classic church ladies but with a sprinkling of younger people. Jesse's son, Jonathan, now a businessman and RainbowPush spokesman talked about ongoing police abuse in Chicago and appealed for people to sign a petition to stop it.. There were also educators present who sdescribed their efforts to improve the education of black boys and young men.

And then, it was my turn. Jessie brought me up to the platform and I was so electrified that I did some preaching of my own about the white collar crime wave behind the subprime crisis. I as on fire. I think he was as amazed as I was.There was a call and response from the crowd….people applauded and I felt real good after so many months of writing about all this and feeling like I was on my own p***t with few listening or realizing the extent of the calamity. He showed a clip of the film and the response to that was entusiastic too. Many bought DVDs afterwards and I have a feeling it will be shown again all around town. (To order a copy visit InDebtWeTrust.com)

I realized that what a novice I was as a preacher when Jackson did his signature thing. I would like to think I inspired him to go higher, because he went from speaking to sermonizing with eloquent and electrified, teaching, getting the congregation to repeat his words—"restructure, don't repossess." They all later sang GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and they meant it.

I flashed back to the churches I visited during the civil rights movement back in the South in the 60's where politics and religion became one in a blend of inspiration and resistance. It seemed like that movement may be on the verge of being reignited, This will be a movement for economic justice, not just civil rights. (Although remember that the March on Washington in 963 was for JOBS and justice and Dr. King was supporting a strike by garbagemen when he was struck down.)

We'll see what happens in New York later today (There is also a March on the Federal Reserve Bank on LaSalle Street in Chicago.) Both will probably be small because there wasn't much time to organize. Think of it as a start of an ongoing campaign, a way to put the issue on the larger agenda.

Watch Out Wall Street: the Samaritans are coming to confront the Scrooges.

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THE NEW JACKSON 4: THE NEXT GENERATION

Sometimes it's very hard for the children of well known "name" personalties to find their own way, and shape their own identities outside the shadow cast by their parents. In hanging out with Jesse Jackson over the years, I came to meet his kids and came away very impressed withhow each is handling this larger than life legacy and making it on their own.

The thing I noticed was that they really function as a family, with many of the kids living in the same neighborhood they grew up in close to their pareny's home. They are close but each is doing his or her own thing.

Jesse Jr. is a member of Congress, quieter and less flamboyant than his dad and may maybe more scholarly. He has written several books and investigated the way our own Constitution legitimized slavey and even today undermines voting rights. He has written brilliantly on the legacy of the civil war and is a thoughtful and admired speaker.

His brother Jonathan, mentioned above, studied business and finance, worked in the markets and then went into business. My conversations with him indicated that he ha a very sophisticated understanding of finance and the current credit crisis. At the same as he runs a business, he is leading a fight against police abuse in Chicago but without condemning all of its officers or using inflammatory rhetoric.

His other borther Yusef runs a media company that publishes the pop culture magazine RADAR. I haven't seen him for awhile but the publication is very hip, slick and trendy and is not tied in advancing any political agendas. It even has a ha;f naked Hillary and Obama on the cover of its issue on politics.

And finally of the family members I know and really admire is the daughter Santita who is an accomplished singer and artist who now anchors a radio show in Chicago. She is very aticulate, personable, engaging and quite a draw. She also exec produces her dad's Sunday morning talk show that I was pleased to be on. It originates at a clear Channel facility in corporate tower. Being there creeped me out on one level because the floor of look alike station after station graphically illustrates the corporate takeover of radio and what media consolidation looks like up close. The only thing on the walls that I saw were corporate memos. It had a cold feeling, not like the station I used to work for back in the day where improvisation and creativity was encouraged. Here its all controlled play lists and imposed formats.

Everything seems to be run there in a top down manner although it is the black community oriented stations (yes radio is still segregated in America) that make the big money. Santita ran her show professionally, barking orders at her dad to try to get him to be more conscious of the format and tighter in his approach. It was frustrating at times because Jesse is Jesse, not some radio clone and is used to doing things his way. However, she knows what listeners respond to because she is on the air daily on WVON and is as smart as she is talented. I hope this KEEP HOPE ALIVE program gets bigger distribution. Right now, it is confined in the early morning Sunday ghetto of talk shows. (I used to co-host the Boston Sunday Review on WBCN in Boston. We had a four hour block and actually built a big audience. It was rated #1 in the Boston Globe Readers Poll for several years running. But BCN's new owners cut it back and downgraded its ability to serve the community. Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar story in commercial radio nationwide.)

I was impressed by Santita's commitment to "good radio" and not just the issues The Air America and Pacifica crowd could learn something from her style and dedication. You will hear more from this multi-talented personality. Also kudos to her team, engineer Ed Gordon and the super-efficient producer/coordinator Stacy Wright. Whata find!

AND LISTEN TO THIS: THIS WAS FROM A CALLER "MARY FROM CHICAGO" ON THE SHOW YESTERDAY: something about mary-1.mp3

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Background Briefing on the Subprime/SubCrime Crisis/Collapse

ECONOMY TO BECOME CAMPAIGN ISSUE

Last night on NBC, mainstream political pundit Ted Russert said he believes that on the basis of surveys of voter concerns, the economy will become the main issue in 2008. It is not clear what this will mean for Iraq etc. It has aleady dropped out of the news.

And speaking of the economy….

INFORM YOURSELF

Inform yourself: Here is a snapshot on Subprime Issues from the Center For Responsible Lending.

BLACK COMMUNITIES ARE BEING HIT HARD

Glenn Ford comments in the Black Agenda Report:

Trading in speculative derivatives amounted to more
than ten times the yearly value of all goods and
services on Earth!"

The crisis in sub-prime housing lending is bad enough -
it threatens to utterly derail the hopes and dreams of
a huge chunk of what passes for the Black "middle
class" in the United States. More than half of all
Blacks that refinanced their homes last year were given
high-cost loans, and African Americans are three times
as likely as whites to have been sucked into the sub-
prime, predatory loan zone.

The racial aspect of the current crisis is quite clear - j
ust as it has long been evident to any objective observer that much of
today's - or should we call it, yesterday's - vaunted
Black upward mobility is built on shifting sands of
unsecured borrowing. But of course, to say so made one
a party-pooper, a gloom-and-doom monger - and few
people wanted to spoil the party even if they knew it
would soon be unhappily over.

BANKS ARE ABOUT TO TARGET CREDIT CARD DEBTORS

THE CRISIS HITTING MUNICIPALITIES

Pam Maartens writes on Counterpunch about "banksters" gone wild:

Nothing more dramatically illustrates the criminal
contagion than the fact that for the second time in 13
years, Orange County, California has found Wall Street
toxic sludge threatening its public funds.

Here's what happened the first time around: a Merrill
Lynch stockbroker, Michael Stamenson, sold billions of
dollars of complex securities to Orange County, which
ran a pooled investment fund for close to 200 cities
and school districts in the county. The county lost
$1.7 billion when the highly leveraged fund imploded,
the county filed bankruptcy, resulting in serious job
losses and cutbacks in social services to the poor. In
all, Merrill made approximately $100 million in fees
with Stamenson collecting $4.3 million in just the
two-year period of '93 and '94.

Stamenson was immortalized in evidence produced in
court as the star of a Merrill Lynch training tape for
rookie brokers where he maps out the road to success on
Wall Street: " the tenacity of a rattlesnake, the
heart of a black widow spider and the hide of an
alligator."

As the evidence against Stamenson and higher ups at
Merrill played out in court, Merrill Lynch continued
to pay annual compensation of $750,000 to Stamenson and
eventually settled the case for $400 million and
sealed the documents. It also paid $30 million to the
county to settle and abruptly end a grand jury
investigation, leading to loud cries of foul play.
Once again, the documents and testimony were sealed
from public view. This is what consistently happens on
settlement when a customer or employee attempts to sue
a Wall Street firm and is ushered instead into a Wall
Street Star Chamber called mandatory arbitration.

Today, Orange County is hardly an isolated case of
banksters gone wild. The same type of sludge sits in
public funds for schools, cities and pensions from
coast to coast."

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NEWS DISSECTOR: With Jesse Jackson In Chicago Preparing the March On Wall Street