Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Al Sharpton: King Rat
09 Apr 2014
🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The fact that Al Sharpton is the administration’s “made man” tells us a great deal about what President Obama’s team really thinks about Black people. The White House seems drawn to Sharpton’s amorality and infinite capacity for corruption – his usefulness as pit bull and King Rat.

Al Sharpton: King Rat

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“Everything he does is an act of prostitution.”

Al Sharpton is a crook who is always for sale. This is not an opinion, but a fact that is known in great detail to scores of movement activists whose paths have intersected with this talented but totally amoral hustler over the past 40 years. I personally watched him sell out the campaign to elect Jersey City, New Jersey’s first Black mayor, whom Sharpton had pledged to support, in 2001. Sharpton’s price to sow confusion among Black voters was a mere $5,000.

This was only one of countless career transactions by a man whose self-proclaimed role models are the entertainer James Brown and the boxing racketeer Don King. Sharpton has sold out Black New York City many times over through his well-compensated service to billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. He sold out Black children and the institution of public education in a bizarre multi-city, salt-and-pepper tour with arch-racist Newt Gingrich on behalf of school charterization. The 2009 Sharpton-Gingrich traveling show, chaperoned by Education Secretary and Obama basketball buddy Arne Duncan, marked Sharpton’s rise to “made man” in the Obama organization – a pit bull primed to maul any political dissenters from the First Black President’s corporate agenda.

MSNBC, the corporate megaphone for the Democratic Party brand, provides Sharpton the kind of media platform that substitutes for independent Black leadership in the 21st century. Rev. Al is what he always wanted to be: a celebrity locked in the embrace of the rich and powerful.

“Top of the political garbage heap.”

Sharpton will reach what will probably be the pinnacle of his phenomenally corrupt career on Friday, in New York, when the annual convention of his National Action Network will host President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Sharpton’s traveling companion Arne Duncan and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. If Sharpton were part of a genuine, independent Black political movement, the occasion would be an opportunity to confront the president on his global offensive against peace and world order, his militarization and destabilization of Africa, and his plans to step up the pace of the global economic Race to the Bottom through a new wave of NAFTA-like trade treaties. The convention might challenge the Attorney General to explain why Wall Street banks are too big to jail, but Americans can be imprisoned without charge or trial under a system in which the law, itself, is a secret. The National Action Network delegates would be allowed to ask why Black people in Detroit have been disenfranchised with the acquiescence of the Democrat in the White House, and how did it come to pass that President Obama became the greatest deporter of immigrants in U.S. history? The Agriculture Secretary could explain why the administration seemed positively happy to sign a bill that wipes out billions in food stamp benefits to the poor. But, none of this will happen at Sharpton’s convention, because everything he does is an act of prostitution.

In the presence of such monstrous corruption, recent confirmation that Sharpton was an informant for the FBI’s campaign against Italian mobsters in the early Eighties seems very tame, indeed – except that it also tends to confirm other allegations that he tried to rat on Black radicals during the same period. But today, Al Sharpton is at the top of the political garbage heap, the administration’s go-to guy in the sewers. He is King Rat.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to Black Agenda Report.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20140409_gf_Sharpton.mp3

More Stories


  • Austin Cole
    Attica Lives and Shares Lessons on Abolitionist Internationalism & Anti-Imperialist Solidarity
    09 Sep 2026
    The Attica rebellion was not only about prison "reform." The prison is the most intense expression of a system of imperialist domination that operates at every scale.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    In the same boat?
    09 Sep 2026
    "In the same boat?" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Dhoruba bin-Wahad
    Guardian Foray: All That's Not Real Is Camouflage
    09 Sep 2026
    An Open Letter from the American "Left" allegedly on behalf of unnamed persons said to be Iranian political prisoners has provided cover for U.S. imperial aggression against Iran by refusing to…
  • Imani Nile
    Don't Bring None of Your Anti Anti-Imperialist Bullshit to Cuba
    09 Sep 2026
    Empire taught us what to believe about the Global South. It also taught us how to move through it, and being colonized here does not exempt us from carrying those beliefs with us.
  • Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
    9/11 and the Great American Decline
    09 Sep 2026
    The Bush administration had long planned a global war for U.S. hegemony, and the attacks of September 11 provided the perfect pretext to put those plans into motion.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us