GREENVILLE - There is one thing about spinning falsehoods. The dysfunctional enterprise forces one into perpetual cover-up, denial and ultimate disgrace.
It is especially true for public officials and the so-called, self-anointed leaders - people who have cavalierly misused the public trust. In recent years we have had a president, several congressmen and Jesse Jackson Sr., all who have sullied their public persona.
Jackson is most interesting because he has crowned himself "the black leader" for those who cannot figure it out for themselves.
The founder of the Chicago-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition brought his racial bile to Mississippi two years ago, charging that a Marion County teenager - found hanging from a pecan tree - had been lynched.
Jackson's racial bombast inflamed an already tense situation by charging that a terrible crime had been committed solely because the teenager was of a darker hue who had dated white women.
As we now know, Jackson's charges were proven to be baseless. He produced no evidence to support his outrageous claims. All he succeeded in doing was to keep the racial pot boiling in Mississippi. Race merchants will do that.
Jackson is the same man who went in front of the national media saying that he had cradled a mortally wounded Martin Luther King Jr. in his arms on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis 34 years ago. Again, it never happened, and Jackson knows it.
Over the years, Jackson has polished the practice of misinformation, racial rhetoric, intimidation and extortion into an art form. In a civil rights career that began at the elbow of King, Jackson skillfully positioned himself as an icon.
However, in more than three decades as the so-called black leader, Jackson has done nothing more than pimp the black community and corporate America to the aggrandizement of his family and cadre of cronies. Very little economic gain from the Jackson economic largess has trickled down to common folks.
The recent revelations about Jackson's sexual transgressions and peccadilloes are no big secret within the black community; many of his so-called supporters simply refrained from exposing his dirty laundry in public.
Journalists - especially those of color - are ridiculed, rebuked, referred to as someone's uncle or aunt, for daring to be critical of the "Reverend." However, there comes a time when truth trumps deceit.
Last month the real unadulterated truth began to emerge in a thoroughly researched book titled "Shakedown" (Regnery) by veteran investigative reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman.
"Jackson's lies about Dr. King's assassination were not his first," Timmerman writes. "He has consistently embellished his own upbringing and his early days in the civil rights movement."
No one can ever accuse Jackson of letting a fact get in the way of a mission to rip off corporate America under the guise of racial diversity and empowerment.
Timmerman reveals in painstaking detail Jackson's coziness with the ruthless Chicago street gang Black P Stone Nation; how he played the race card to shame U.S. corporations to give "tithes" to his civil rights organization, while these entities were encouraged to funnel contracts worth millions to Jackson cronies; gross misuse of taxpayer money by his myriad nonprofits; his snuggling up to African despots as a special envoy under the Clinton administration; how he became a "minister" by circumventing the traditional Baptist ordination process.
One of Jackson's crown jewels, the Wall Street Project, Timmerman says, was nothing but a shell game to extort money from U.S. corporations, which were more than willing to pony up, because executives did not want to be viewed as racist.
In his book, Timmerman notes with sarcasm that Jackson came to Wall Street to collect because that is where the money is. Jackson even intimidated the New York Stock Exchange to suspend trading in honor of the King holiday - something that had never happened before.
"Under the guise of minority empowerment, Jackson sought legislation to require a percentage of the nation's pension funds to be brokered or managed by minority-run funds," Timmerman writes. "The problem was that few black pension fund managers were professionally qualified to manage such vast sums of money."
Several state legislatures had the gall to pass a measure supporting the scheme.
What Jackson is doing, according to Timmerman, is lining his pockets and the coffers of his cronies. Greed has no bounds. What black America has received is largely an empty agenda of victimization and racism from Jackson.
Timmerman exposes Jackson as the race-based powerbroker who cares little about the welfare of blacks. It's a story worth reading, if you are interested in knowing the truth. Because Jackson certainly won't tell you. Few bigots do.
