CORRECTION, PLEASE!

Jackson's Shakedown Utility Vehicle

ITEM: Jim Press, chief operating officer of Toyota, announced on August 9th a "breakthrough" strategy. The company will make, as noted in a press release, "an $8 billion investment in diversity." Said the auto executive: "I want to acknowledge the work of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in moving these issues to the forefront at Toyota. The Coalition was a true catalyst...."

CORRECTION: The wrath Rev. Jesse Jackson unleashed on Toyota stemmed from a commercial that showed a black man with a gold Toyota SUV carved on his tooth. That was all that was needed to charge the company with racism and to justify a shakedown. Never mind that Toyota, a Japanese company, is "minority"-owned. In fact, the company had doubled the number of its minority employees between 1974 and 1992.

Even the New York Times has noted that Jackson has been criticized for having "mounted pressure campaigns against large corporations and then extracting donations to his Rainbow/Push organization or favors and jobs for friends and relatives...."

Though Jackson denies such charges, they are self-evident. As pointed out by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney with the American Conservative Union, in an Associated Press report, "He [Jackson] gets away with things that nobody else can get away with." The ACU has filed a suit with the Federal Election Commission against PUSH, notes the AP, "alleging improprieties surrounding campaign cash from the Democratic Party. The group has also urged an Internal Revenue Service audit of Jackson's group."

The modus operandi is a recurrent one, said AP: "Make allegations of racism and threaten boycott until a deal is struck.... 'If what you do is threaten commercial injury, financial injury, which is what he does, I don't know how that doesn't constitute extortion,' Mitchell said." Yet, as columnist Paul Craig Roberts writes, the U.S. government obviously no longer regards "extortion as a crime if it is an activity practiced on behalf of preferred minorities in the name of civil rights."

Too Much Spending, Not Too Much Cutting

ITEM: U.S. Representative Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told the National Conference of State Legislatures that Congress might have to "revisit the tax cut," as reported in the San Antonio Express-News for August 16th. "The continued economic slowdown and a shrinking federal budget surplus will make it difficult for Congress to boost education and defense funding without rethinking President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut, a leading congressional Democrat told a national group.... [Frost] said lawmakers are facing a tough choice between returning to the 'old days of deficit spending' and dipping into Social Security or Medicare...."

CORRECTION: Frost is simply echoing talking points of other Democratic congressional leaders apparently angered that workers might get to keep a bit more of their money. For example, in May, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) denounced the reductions about to be signed into law, calling them "tax frauds in more ways than one," and threatening that "we will revisit this issue."

Similarly, the following month, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) claimed that the tax cut was "weakening our economy, not strengthening" it. Said Gephardt: "It is causing us to start to go into deficits [and] to start invading the Medicare and Social Security trust funds." The Minority Leader even told the Des Moines Register that he was glad his party had raised taxes in 1993 because that was the "right" thing to do. "And I'll do it again because I believe in being fiscally responsible with taxpayers' money."

Murder as Family Planning 

ITEM: A 33-year-old Chinese woman told Time she doesn't want any children. Such an attitude, concludes the magazine in its August 6th issue, "should hearten China's womb police, who have spent two decades attempting to control the nation's population. They have succeeded remarkably well.... 'For all the bad press, China has achieved the impossible,' says Sven Burmester, the U.N. Population Fund representative in Beijing. 'The country has solved its population problem.'"

CORRECTION: Indeed, Time and others continue to praise Communist China for its "family planning" programs of forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.

The Huaiji region, which is small and poor, has recently been given a particularly draconian quota by Communists in Guangdong (Canton), being ordered to perform 20,000 abortions by year-end, as reported by London's Daily Telegraph in early August. Many abortions will be performed "forcibly on peasant women to meet the quota. As part of the campaign, country officials are buying expensive ultrasound equipment that can be carried to remote villages by car. By detecting which women are pregnant, the machines will allow government doctors to order terminations on the spot." If women are allowed to give birth, they face immediate sterilization.

The Beijing dictatorship isn't solving a population problem; it is eradicating inconvenient people.