Can You Hear Me Now Jesse Jackson?

Today in Pittsburgh at the Verizon annual meeting, Carl Horowitz of theNational Legal and Policy Center will be making some compelling andcontroversial remarks. Excerpts from his remarks are below.
Remarks of Carl F. Horowitz
Verizon Annual Meeting
Westin Convention Center Hotel, Pittsburgh
May 3, 2007

Good morning. My name is Carl Horowitz. I'm affiliated with the NationalLegal and Policy Center, a nonprofit organization in Falls Church, Va. dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in public life.

A keyfocus of ours is the Corporate Integrity Project.In the name of integrity, I'm urging fellow shareholders to pass aresolution requiring an annual report spelling out all company charitablegiving and the business rationale for it. No doubt much of Verizon'sphilanthropy has been beneficial. But at least some of it has gone tohighly questionable persons and causes.Case in point: Jesse Jackson.

More than once this decade, Verizon has been listed as a Platinum Sponsor ofJackson's annual Rainbow/Push Coalition & Citizenship Education Annual FundConference. That means it gave at least $100,000. What has this moneybought?Among other things, it helped pay for Jackson's racially-chargedpublic-relations machine in the phony rape case against three white DukeUniversity lacrosse players. He tried to whip up public sentiment against the accused athletes, dismissing suggestions that they were entitled to apresumption of innocence.

To add insult to injury, he announced thatRainbow/PUSH would provide a college scholarship to the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, a woman with a long and documented history of mental instability. When pressed by the media as to whether this was a good idea, Jackson replied, "There's more evidence that violence occurred to her than she's thelead of a hoax."As it turned out, the allegations were a hoax from the start!

This past April, in dismissing all outstanding charges, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper called the case "a tragic rush to accuse and a failure toverify serious allegations." Michael Nifong, the county prosecutor whobrought forth the case, faces ethics charges and possible disbarment.You'd think Jesse Jackson at this point would have apologized to the defendants and their families. But he hasn't.

Jackson also has promoted anti-Semitism, if in an underhanded way. For decades, he's been a close ally of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has referred to Jews as "bloodsuckers" and Judaism as a"gutter religion." Last year, Farrakhan blamed the Jews for the war in Iraq. Jackson has remained silent the whole time. And at his Citizenship Education Fund conference in Chicago two years ago, Jackson voiced no objections to the complaint by invited guest speaker Harry Belafonte that"only a Jew has a right to the word Holocaust."

Jackson also has used donations to reshape U.S. foreign policy to promotethe interests of sub-Saharan African dictatorships. Recently, he demanded that the nation of Zambia be absolved of repaying its foreign debt. The U.S. State Department has given low marks to the current regime's human-rights record. And it's no wonder. Arbitrary arrest and torture are common; freedom of speech and freedom of the press aren't.

Cozying up to such tyrants is nothing new for Jackson. For years, he allied himself with Liberian strongman Charles Taylor, who eventually fled the country in 2003, under enormous pressure to resign from human-rights activists and domestic insurrectionists. Taylor, to say the least, had apersuasive style. His "Small Boys Unit" terrorized the countryside,chopping off opponents' limbs.You get the picture.

Jesse Jackson doesn't really care about the consequences, here or abroad, of his organizational spending.Unfortunately, many of his corporate benefactors are scared of him,especially of his ability to mount a boycott on short notice. They might not agree with him, but think they can buy peace by giving him money. Some companies have learned the hard way that timidity doesn't pay. In 2006, at a conference sponsored by his Citizenship Education Fund, Jackson called for a boycott of British Petroleum. Here's the rub: BP helped bankroll the event. It might be too much to expect Verizon to report to shareholders that some of its contributions have amounted to shakedowns.The best way to deal with someone like Jesse Jackson is courage.

In January2005, for example, partly in response to repeated National Legal and PolicyCenter requests, the New York Stock Exchange ended its annual subsidy to Jackson's Wall Street Project. Verizon has been a sponsor of that project.We can't stop Jesse Jackson from engaging in bad habits. But we don't haveto indulge those habits either.

I therefore urge Verizon shareholders to pass a resolution mandating the preparation of a detailed annual report on company charitable giving. That way, we'll have a better idea of the uses to which our money is being put.