Shake 'em On Down

“Sharpton’s #1 Rule: No Palm Greasing — No Peace,” Jeff Dunetz writes at his Yid With Lid blog:

Its not just corporations; politicians bow to the throne of Sharpton the hater. On October 1, Sharpton held a 60th birthday celebration at Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant.  All the big shots of New York Democratic Party politics were in attendance, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Rep. Charles Rangel and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (there are unconfirmed reports that Chuck Schumer was there also. “Sharpton raised $1 million for NAN at his 60th birthday bash in October, with donations rolling in from unions and a corporate roster of contributors including AT&T, McDonald’s, Verizon and Walmart.”

Back in 2011 there were reports that Sharpton got his Job at MSNBC for helping push through the Comcast/MSNBC merger.  The Daily Caller reported:

It’s gone remarkably unnoticed that Sharpton was the first major black leader to endorse the Comcast merger, which met fierce resistance. Michael Copps, a Democrat who’d served on the FCC since 2001, declared, when he ultimately voted against it, that the merger “erodes diversity, localism and competition” and was “a huge boost for media industry (and digital industry) consolidation” as well as “a stake in the heart of independent content production,” charges that were echoed in a New York Times editorial. But Mignon Clyburn, the daughter of South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn and the only minority member on the FCC, threw her decisive support behind the deal, citing a comprehensive diversity memorandum of agreement (MOU) signed by Sharpton as a mechanism that “will serve to keep the new entity honest in promoting diversity.”

But Sharpton got more than a job:

A Comcast spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Comcast has given $140,000 to Sharpton’s National Action Network since 2009—the same year the merger was first proposed. Though MSNBC president Phil Griffin was honored with a top prize at the April 2011 annual conference of NAN—and he, Chris Mathews, and other NBC notables had a table at NAN’s dinner—NBC would not answer questions about how much it’s given Sharpton.

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Read the whole thing. As Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe, “Racial tensions obviously haven’t vanished entirely from American life, but for all intents and purposes, racism as a political factor has. As the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act approaches, Jim Crow is dead in its grave, while black electoral vitality in America is alive and well.” But if the left were to acknowledge those facts, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Rev. Wright and their ilk would be seen as antediluvian charlatans, hence the elaborate performance art of all concerned.

Related, sadly enough: “Selma still works because filmmaker Ava DuVernay was able to construct phrases that conveyed King’s oratory without using his actual words. King, Inc., is controlled by King’s surviving children and holds the copyright to King’s speeches. It has so aggressively enforced its legal rights as to make it almost impossible to use those speeches without paying a hefty fee.”

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