“There’s no talent shortage. There’s an opportunity shortage,” he said, calling Silicon Valley “far worse” than many others such as car makers that have been pressured by unions. He said tech behemoths have largely escaped scrutiny by a public dazzled with their cutting-edge gadgets.

I wrote about Jackson’s campaign for Cal Watchdog in February. My basic point was that he has a history of doing this with big companies, then leaving them alone after he gets paid off in some way. I noted that especially in his current case, he had no evidence of overt bias at all, just a statistical case.

I cited the paucity of black, Latino and women graduates in hard sciences and said a case could be made that this was a societal failing — but not one of Silicon Valley and the information technology industry in general, which is the greatest meritocracy that I have ever seen.

Read one of the peerless Michael Lewis’ lesser-known books for ample evidence of the Darwinian work culture in the IT world. (Or just read it because it is another example of Lewis’ brilliance.)

He shows over and over again how talent and results are what is rewarded, not Ivy League pedigrees and/or family connections. Some of the biggest companies in the world were started by college dropouts — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and many more — and many of the biggest programming stars have far from elite educations.

On Wednesday, I was guest on Mitch Albom’s Detroit radio show on News/Talk 760 WJR. Yes, the guy of “Tuesdays with Morrie” fame. He wanted to talk about the issues Jackson raised.

It you want to listen to the lively 10-minute conversation, here’s the link. Scroll down and look for the third segment on the July 30 show.

Don’t miss the end, in which I cite a Larry Summers theory about math and gender after first being careful to make clear it’s his theory. It got him fired as president of Harvard.

Profile in courage!

African-American students are less likely to graduate college with degrees in high-tech fields. This is not because of a lack of interest in these fields. It appears to be due to  higher rates of attrition:

“A new report from the U.S. Department of Education shows that more than one half of all African Americans who enter bachelor’s degree programs in STEM-related disciplines either drop out of college or change majors and graduate with a degree in a non-STEM field.”

The reasons for these facts can be endlessly debated. It’s easy to see why someone would look at this and say it’s a shame. It’s also easy to see why people of a certain mind-set would look at this and say it’s a failing of society.

But if you know these facts, it is preposterous to look at the paucity of African-Americans working in Silicon Valley tech jobs and cry “apartheid.” That, of course, is just what Jesse Jackson is doing:

“’This valley is driving the industrial growth of America – in fact, it’s driving global growth,’ Jackson said. But while people of color constitute a huge part of the marketplace for tech products and services, he said, they’re woefully underrepresented in the sector’s executive offices and boardrooms. …

“Jackson on Thursday contended minorities still are being shut out of many of Silicon Valley’s opportunities. He scoffed at the idea that there aren’t enough minorities entering the industry with appropriate training: ‘It’s almost insulting to suggest they can’t be found.’”

That’s from a Bay Area News Group political blog. It noted that the first time Jackson depicted Silicon Valley as a hotbed of racism for not hiring African-American techies, Cypress Semiconductors CEO T.J. Rodgers gave him grief.

The Silicon Valley CEO who stood up to Jackson

I dug up some of the coverage. This is from an amazing L.A. Times article on March 13, 2001:

“T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductors in San Jose, has a different view after Jackson’s recent efforts to promote diversity and raise money in Silicon Valley.

“‘It’s a shakedown,’ Rodgers said. ‘The basic shakedown mechanism is, he declares racism based on dubious statistics. Then he gives you a chance to repent–and the basic way is to give Jesse money. The threat is you’ll be labeled a racist if you don’t. That scares business leaders.’

“Rodgers and Jackson squared off last spring during Jackson’s first concerted effort to promote minority hiring and raise money in Silicon Valley. Rodgers argued that the high-tech industry was much more racially diverse than Jackson was suggesting. After the two traded barbs in the local paper, Jackson’s local office dubbed Rodgers a racist and Cypress Semiconductors a ‘white supremacist hate group.'”

As the article chronicled, Rodgers had a far better case that Jackson was a shakedown artist than Jackson’s case that the Silicon Valley was akin to the Jim Crow South.

“… corporations have paid handsomely to get Jackson off their backs.

“In February 1997, Viacom sought permission to sell 10 radio stations for $ 1.1 billion to two other companies. Rainbow/PUSH filed a petition to block the transfer, contending that Viacom had reneged on a prior commitment to sell some broadcast properties to minorities.

“Following negotiations with Rainbow/PUSH, Viacom and the two buyers donated $ 2 million to create a fund to promote minority ownership of broadcast properties. About a third of the money was overseen by a trustee, David Dinkins, former mayor of New York and a longtime Jackson associate. Dinkins later was replaced by the Washington lawyer and lobbyist Warner H. Session.

“None of the money went to Rainbow/PUSH, per se. Such a payment might have violated the FCC’s ‘greenmail’ rule, which prohibits an opponent of a license transfer from receiving money, even indirectly, in exchange for withdrawing the complaint. Nevertheless, Session later awarded $ 680,000 to [Jackson’s] Citizenship Education Fund to run two conferences.

“Jackson’s group ended its opposition, and the FCC approved the deal. …”

Still more corporations who paid Jesse to quiet down

Wait, there’s more!

“What concerns some critics is the appearance of a connection between corporate donations to Jackson’s organizations and a change in Jackson’s position.

“In February 1999, attorneys for about 13,000 minority Boeing employees had been trying for nearly a year to negotiate a settlement in a racial discrimination lawsuit. Jackson flew to Seattle, met with Boeing head Phil Condit and performed the task in a couple of days.

“But 1,700 of the plaintiffs later formally opposed the settlement as too soft, and some questioned the company’s relationship with Jackson.

“Within days of the settlement Jackson negotiated, Boeing made the first of several contributions to the Citizenship Education Fund, a donation of $ 50,000. That was nothing compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars in pension funds that, a few months later, Boeing sent to be managed by a handful of minority investment banks, at least some of which have supported Jackson’s charities.”

Wait, there’s even more!

“Later in 1999, Jackson criticized the merger of AT&T and TCI. Jackson reversed his position after the companies pledged to hire a minority investment bank to help handle a massive $ 8-billion bond offer. Blaylock & Partners, headed by Jackson friend Ronald Blaylock, got the contract.

“Soon after, AT&T donated $ 425,000 to Jackson’s Citizenship Education Fund. Blaylock & Partners donated $ 30,000 to the same fund in 1999.”

It’s pretty amazing that Jesse Jackson’s modus operandi is so flagrant, but that he’s still taken seriously. Good for T.J. Rodgers for standing up to him.

And, no, Jesse didn’t stop the shakedowns after the negative coverage in 2001. This is from two months ago. When you’ve got a lucrative gig going, why stop?

By John Seiler

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (YouTube below), Jesse Jackson said of defenders of the Second Amendment, “They’re fighting the government. This is a Confederate ideology. This is like serious [unintelligible] power with something to do with how they feel.”

For the record, I’m a Michigan Yankee living in California.

And he has the history of gun control exactly backward — during Black History Month, no less. The first gun control in America occurred after the Civil War when the Ku Klux Klan used the governments of the South to seize the guns of blacks, leaving the blacks defenseless against lynchings and other violence.

White racist gun controllers

UCLA constitutional law professor Irwin Winkler, although a liberal, concedes:

“It was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt. The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first time — either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there’s hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So they arm up because they know who they’re dealing with in the South. White racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that’s not really going to work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were disarmed, they couldn’t fight back.”

It’s also worth mentioning that the much-demonized group the National Rifle Association was formed in 1871 after the Civil War by former Union Army officers to help the marksmanship of soldiers. In 1871, the Union Army still was occupying the South as part of Reconstruction. That is, the Army was insisting that the South continue is abandonment of slavery mandated by the 13th Amendment.

And the Union Army enforced the 14th Amendment, Section 1 of which reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That means that anyone who’s a “citizen” of the United States, which included blacks after manumission, is entitled to “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” mainly meaning the Bill of Rights.

And the Bill of Rights includes the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms.”

But when Reconstruction ended in 1877, the U.S. government no longer enforced many of the rights the 14th Amendment had granted to blacks. The Ku Klux Klan arose to deny blacks their rights, including the Second Amendment, meaning the Klan got governments to take away the blacks’ guns.

If Jackson wants to help blacks, he’ll instead encourage them to arm themselves, get some training by the NRA and fight the hoodlums in Chicago and elsewhere that he rightly has attacked for the increase in murders.

As in the South after the Civil War, the way for blacks to protect themselves, from murderous local hoodlums as well as against Jackson’s imaginary neo-Confederate terrorists, is to arm themselves.