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


  • EXCERPT: Pentagonism, A Substitute for Imperialism, Juan Bosch, 1967
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    EXCERPT: Pentagonism, A Substitute for Imperialism, Juan Bosch, 1967
    23 Nov 2022
    A book by Dominican politician and historian Juan Bosch explains the connections between U.S. foreign policy, permanent war, and the defense industries.
  • The US Is Determined to Drive a Wedge between Ethiopia and Eritrea
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    The US Is Determined to Drive a Wedge between Ethiopia and Eritrea
    23 Nov 2022
    The US seems willing to accept Ethiopia’s defeat of its former puppet, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), if it can just drive a wedge between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
  • Music in Montreal: Our song, “The Internationale!”
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Music in Montreal: Our song, “The Internationale!”
    23 Nov 2022
    Music in Montreal: Our song, “The Internationale!”
  • BAR Book Forum: Cristina M. Visperas’s Book, “Skin Theory”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Cristina M. Visperas’s Book, “Skin Theory”
    23 Nov 2022
    This week’s featured author is Cristina Mejia Visperas. Visperas is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California. Her book is Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the…
  •  Haiti in the Caribbean: A Political Economy Perspective on the Urgent Crisis of Imperialism
    Tamanisha John
    Haiti in the Caribbean: A Political Economy Perspective on the Urgent Crisis of Imperialism
    23 Nov 2022
    If Haiti is "the poorest country in the hemisphere" it is because imperialist policies continue to impoverish and destabilize that nation. 
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us