LET’S FINALLY TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT JESSE AND SANDI JACKSON

2/16/13

Former 2^nd District Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and his wife, former 7^th Ward absentee Alderman Sandi Jackson will plead guilty to federal charges, he of misusing $750,000 in campaign funds and she to “filing incorrect tax returns.”   Mrs. Jackson is also believed to be the “Co-conspirator 1” referred to by the feds in the criminal charges against her husband.  Mr. Jackson will probably do some time, maybe two or three years; Mrs. Jackson will in all likelihood walk with a slap on the wrist.   Monetary restitution will also have to be made; good luck with that.

I have written extensively on the travails of the Jacksons, most recently in my February 7 post JUST HOW DID SANDI JACKSON END UP UNDER THAT BUS?, which will in turn direct you to earlier commentaries on this disgraced couple.   The dual admissions of guilt have led to further observations on their defenestration:

--Buried in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times stories is the $473,000 in payments made by campaign funds for Jesse Jackson, Jr. (affectionately or otherwise known as “Triple J”) to “a consulting firm run by his wife,” as the Tribune put it.   Neither paper mentioned the name of the firm, Donatella & Associates, as I did in my February 7 post.   As I mentioned then, it seems to this admitted non-lawyer that it is those payments that hold the key to the case.  As far as I can tell, those payments are not a subject of the guilty plea; the charges against Triple J are for spending campaign funds on personal items not even remotely related to campaigning.

Is there more to come as the feds dig deeper into the Donatella payments?  I doubt it, and that’s a shame; it seems like that is where the real meat of this case is.   One wonders why the feds aren’t delving more deeply into Donatella, which leads to my next point.

--Why did it take so long for this case to develop?   Most people even remotely in touch with Chicago politics have known of, or had strong suspicions about, Jesse and Sandi’s financial finagling for years.  Triple J routinely raised hundred of thousands of dollars in campaign funds even though he could not possibly lose in his district; he won his last election while undergoing inpatient treatment for his mysterious malady, the intensity of which increased with the intensity of the feds’ probing, and without making a single campaign appearance.   He wasn’t spending the money on his own campaign and he wasn’t excessively generous in his support of his colleagues’ campaigns.

As the Tribune said

“Long before charges were filed, some raised questions about eh congressman’s use of campaign funds.”

This contention would be true if the Tribune has substituted “many” or “most” for “some,” but I digress.  

These machinations had been going on for years and, as the local papers said in today’s articles, they were “egregious,” “stunning,” and “staggering.”  So why did it take so long to throw the book at the Jacksons?

There has long been an unwritten rule around Chicago, and the country, that you don’t touch the Jacksons.  In fact, there are some who would argue that the Blagojevich investigation was stopped when it was stopped because it was getting too close to Triple J, though I don’t subscribe to that argument.   It seems that too many people, including

• naïve, just want to believe, liberals,
• the local, and especially the national press.
• local and national pols looking for votes who assume that to offend the Jacksons will cost them black votes, and, especially,
• corporate America, which finds it much easier to deal with Triple J, his wife, and his father than to actually get to understand the average black man in the street.  After all, the Jacksons, and especially Jesse Jackson, Sr., will come up to see them in Lake Forest; they don’t even have to go down into “those neighborhoods” to assuage their usually, but not always, misplaced sense of guilt.   Corporate America has too much invested in the Jacksons to throw it all away just because two of them are criminals.

It is this “don’t touch the Jacksons” rule that has kept the feds away from the Jacksons until Sandi and Triple J’s ineptness made doing so impossible.

--The list of things that Triple J spent the pilfered funds on would be comical if it weren’t so pathetic…

·        Mink reversible parka                          $1,500

·        Bruce Lee memorabilia                        $10,105

·        Michael Jackson memorabilia               $22,700

·        Wristwatch                                          $43,000

And that is only a partial list.  

Even if young Jackson had spent his own money on such items, it would show, in this writer’s opinion, a serious lack of character or at least an egregious lack of judgment.   Why in the world would anyone spent $43,000 on a watch even if he "had the money"?   What kind of fop would spend anything on a mink reversible parka?   Who needs either senseless bauble?   What kind of popinjay wants either senseless bauble?   How empty must one’s life be if one tries to fill its gaping void with such silliness?

--Triple J continues to insist that he is guilty of “mistakes,” “errors in judgment,” and “improper decisions.”  As I said in my 11/22/12 post on the now defunct Rant Political, JESSE JACKSON, JR. RESIGNS:  DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE KEISTER ON THE WAY OUT, to which the aforementioned link will lead you

Taking a left turn when one meant to take a right turn is a mistake.   Cheating on one’s wife with comely cocktail waitresses who moonlights as bikini models, using campaign funds for personal reasons, and dealing with corrupt governors for Senatorial seats are moral failings and ethical transgressions.  But our society seems to see no differences between mere mental oversights and horrendous violations of long established and well grounded moral codes.  Then we wonder why people commit so many of the latter.

Now that the Congressman is about to plead guilty, we can add to those moral failings and ethical transgressions admitted crimes.  But in Jesse Jackson’s world, and, sadly, in our modern world, these are only “mistakes” or, at worst “errors in judgment.”  O temporal, o mores!

--One would hope that the admission of guilt by Mr. and Mrs. Jackson would put an end to the campaign by the local and national media to portray Sandi Jackson as the poor, put upon spouse and Triple J as a character in a modern Greek tragedy, an Olympian who fell from the sky.   One would be foolish to harbor such a hope.

While yours truly don’t like to make predictions, it is not difficult to see a story line developing that poor, poor Sandi was guilty, really, only of signing as an innocent co-filer Triple J’s fictitious tax returns.   As for Triple J, the press just can’t get over the heat induced swooning this utter fraud seems to spark in their hearts.   For example, in the Chicago Sun-Times editorial in the wake of the guilty pleas, the paper, while pointing out Mr. Jackson’s obvious “misplaced sense of entitlement,” just had to tell us

He was smart and charismatic.  He worked hard.

Triple J was and is not smart.  Smart people don’t spend other people’s money on $43,000 watches and do little to cover their tracks.  Smart people don’t engage in corruption so naked that, even with the untouchability conferred on him by his father, prosecution of Congressman Jackson became inevitable.

Triple J didn’t work hard; he took his duties lightly and did only the minimum to get by, preferring to spend his time attending to such vital matters as buying Michael Jackson’s fedoras and Eddie Van Halen’s guitars and pursuing a quixotic, yet headline grabbing, quest for a “third Chicago airport” that no one seems to want, let alone need.  As I said in the aforementioned 11/22/12 post  JESSE JACKSON, JR. RESIGNS:  DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE KEISTER ON THE WAY OUT

Jesse Jackson, Jr. was a Congressman of little accomplishment.  In his seventeen years in Congress, he did little more than make an occasional decent speech, accept undeserved congratulations, and plot to gain his next political office.   This made him no different from most politicians, but young Mr. Jackson didn’t even manage to gain a committee chairmanship or a seat on the Appropriations committee for his otherwise pointless and unproductive efforts.   Perhaps this was because Mr. Jackson was so focused, or some might say obsessed, with the notion of a “third” Chicago airport in the far southern reaches of his district, the merits of which were very limited at best and a reflection of the corruption that pervades Chicago politics at worst.

As I said before, the unwritten rule that one doesn’t criticize the Jacksons continues to pervade coverage of this nonentity.

--According to the Sun-Times, when Jesse Jackson, Sr. was asked whether he was embarrassed or surprised by his son’s “lavish (Yours truly would say idiotic.) spending,”

He cut off the conversation, telling the Sun-Times “I can’t comment on any of that.  I could not and should not.  I don’t know enough about it.”

This sounds like the Reverend Jackson’s version of Ralph Cramden’s “Huminahuminahumina.”   One wonders why the elder Jackson has so little to say about the spending propensities of his son.   Could this be a case of the apple’s not falling far from the tree?

--Finally, while organized labor has been very generous to Triple J, contributing over $1 million to his admitted personal piggy bank, er, sorry, campaign funds, over the years, Congressman Jackson’s largest single contributor has been Exelon, the holding company for, among other things, Chicago’s local electric utility.  Exelon’s PAC and employees have contributed more than $85 thousand to young Mr. Jackson.

Exelon’s generosity reinforces my earlier point about corporate America’s large investment in the Jackson family as a convenient way to make it look like it “cares” about the average black consumer.  

Exelon’s munificence also tells a story as old as Chicago politics, and it is doubtless not unique to these parts.   The local utilities in this town have always been cozy with the political powers that be; after all, it is the politicians who ultimately decide what the utilities can charge their customers and thus the profits they can remit to their shareholders.   It has long been routine for the local utilities to make room on their payrolls for people who were “recommended” for jobs by various ward bosses; the utilities were mere extensions of the city, county, and state payrolls as patronage havens.   As an example, when I was in my teens, the Ward Secretary (after the Ward Committeeman, the most powerful political official in the Ward) in my home 19^th Ward was one Tom Ryan…who worked for what everyone called “the gas company,” perhaps due to its unfortunate name at the time “People’s Gas.”  (I have at least one great story about the 1975 19^th Ward aldermanic race to succeed Silent Tommy Fitz, Ryan’s boss; I’ll have to save it for later in the interests of time and relevance.)   Tom Ryan was far from alone.   The point is that the coziness of the utilities with the pols goes on to this day, but nowadays the pols are apparently more expensive than a few spots on the payroll for political hangers-on.

The truth about the Jacksons has long been known but rarely been spoken.   One wonders if even the guilty pleas of Triple J and his wife will finally permit the truth to come out anywhere but at Mighty Quinn on Politics and Money.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.