Recently the Néw York Post ran an article about Al Sharpton, saying that he received money from corporations in return for not campaigning against them as racist. The story said that the firm of former Chancellor Harold Levy paid Sharpton $500,000 to help a client who was competing to manage a gambling franchise.
Leonie Haimson, CEO of Néw Tork City’s most activist group Class Size Matters, writes that the NY Post left out the key details of that transaction.
She writes:
“Left out of this account is the most interesting part of the story. It’s not just that the money for Sharpton was ostensibly for “equity” and funneled through Education Reform Now, the non-profit arm of Joe William’s pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform. The larger context is that ERN was merely a pass-through, and the money was directed to Sharpton through the Education Equity Project, founded by then-Chancellor Joel Klein, in exchange for Sharpton agreeing to co-chair the group and adopt Klein’s aggressive anti-teacher, pro-charter stance.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Everything that Sharpton gets demonized for is exactly the opposite of what he should be demonized for. Rather than being some radical, race-baiting crusader, he’s just another corporatist race sell-out.
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Although surely people can find common ground in the view that Al is all about Al, no?
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Absolutely.
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This is way off-topic, but I just remembered something very odd I read about Sharpton (odd even for Sharpton) years ago in a book about Don King. In the late 70s or early 80s, and as usual, the FBI was investigating the NYC-area mafia. One arm of the investigation morphed into a sting operation targeting Don King. At some point the undercover agent went to Sharpton to try to set up a meet with King (with whom Sharpton worked on behalf of James Brown). The agent was wired and Al was being Al: hilarious, charming, a big-mouth. When the FBI played the tape later for Sharpton, he agreed to work as an informant. Sharpton disputes some of this, but my recollection is that the accounts of his work with the feds were much more compelling than his denials.
Anyway, the very odd thing that I just remembered is that one of the things Sharpton was blabbing about on the wire was how he had bigtime connections with people in high places, both legit and mob. And one of the people was Strom Thurmond. This was 25 years before Sharpton was famously “shocked” to learn that DNA tests connected his family and Thurmond’s.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this story, and I don’t know if anyone ever followed up on it after the DNA-link story. “Only in America,” I guess.
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Facinating.
I remember Sharpton and the Tawana Braley scam.
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Aha, thank you, Internet. James Brown was the connection.
http://library.clemson.edu/depts/specialcollections/2014/07/29/james-brown-and-strom-thurmond/
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Sad, but probably true. He was a bundle of fun to watch when he ran for President, though.
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Flerp, Sharpton’s reference to ties to Strom Thurmond could easily have been more than bluster, since he has a history of helping Republicans at strategic moments.
In 1986, Sharpton endorsed Al D’amato for the US Senate in a close race against Mark Green.
In 1994, he aggressively attacked Mario Cuomo right before Cuomo’s election loss to the cipher George Pataki.
That same year, Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice reported that Sharpton had a long history of working with Republican operative and uber-sleazebag Roger Stone.
In 2001, Sharpton again went after Green in the mayoral race that was narrowly won by Bloomberg.
In 2005, he attacked Freddy Ferrer right before election day. Ferrer’s campaign may have been hopeless, but I guess for Al it’s the thought that counts.
That’s to say nothing of his utterly disgraceful behavior in the Brawley case, which he has never taken responsibility for, and his long history as a tax and business deadbeat. I personally knew someone who almost lost the building they owned and lived in, because they had the great misfortune and poor judgement to rent the building’s other apartment to him. Once ensconced, he never paid another month’s rent.
The man is not a representative of the Civil Rights movement, but of its afterlife, and the profits and political capital to be made therefrom, political capital that has mostly been accrued by interests that benefit from Black oppression. In that sense, it’s more than just Al being about Al.
While that money and political capital has greatly benefitted him, it has done incalculable damage to the struggle for Black rights. He should be challenged and repudiated wherever he goes.
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Yes, I was hedging when I wrote the initial comment, but it appears highly likely that he had a working political relationship with Thurmond as early as the early-80s. James Brown, whose own politics could charitably have been described as eclectic, may have been the initial connection. Thurmond and Brown had a close relationship for much of Brown’s life, partly out of their backgrounds in South Carolina, perhaps partly out of genuine affinity, and probably partly out of overlapping commercial and political interests.
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I taught in NYC as Anthony Alverado, then Ramon Cortines (now in LA doing his thing), then Rudy Crew and finally that critter from the business world — who ended public education… Joel Klein.
I have no words to express the travesty that this evil, soulless man perpetrated on NYC, but in his wake came this:
https://vimeo.com/4199476
And it comes a no surprise that the ethically compromised, self-promoter Al Sharpton was in his aura.
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The video is not there.
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Florence, thank you.
The address changed. Here it is…
it IS the travesty and the tragedy of NYC. I cried when the teachers spoke about their love of teaching as they saw everything slip away. The assault on NYC was traumatic for thousands of us. In the last few of Diane’s posts, I revealed my experience a the very moment I had gained fame as an educator. The lawlessness directed at me , to prove I was not fit to teach in the school I helped to make famous,
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
shows what happens when there is not a shred of accountability for the actions of principals and superintendents.
They never, for a moment, considered that they could not take me out.
They owned the system. They still do. Cuomo is intent on ensuring that this bonanza for the corporations is monetarized permanently.
Until THAT changes, NYC public education is OVER!
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That sounds like blackmail. Sharpton gets paid to not rat out corporations for racism—corporations that might be racist in their policies..
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Bribery, maybe. Not really blackmail.
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Paying someone a bribe so they don’t scream corporate racism is the same as buying protection from the mob to leave your business alone. And when the mob threatens a small business with wreck and ruin if they don’t pay up, that is blackmail.
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Okay, but that’s an awful lot of information you’re adding that wasn’t in your first post.
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Lloyd, it’s not just companies that Al shakes down: the UFT pays him $25,000 a year, twice what it donates to the NAACP, to keep him off their backs.
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“The $500,000 from the Connecticut firm did not go directly to National Action Network. Levy funneled the cash to another nonprofit, Education Reform Now, which allowed his company to claim the donation as a charitable tax deduction.
The money was then transferred in several payments to Sharpton’s group, which does not have tax-deductible status because it is a lobbying organization.
Sharpton and Levy confirmed the contribution.
“The money went mostly to pay for Charlie King’s salary [National Action Network’s outgoing director] and for promoting the new initiative with Klein,” Sharpton said. ”
Why do we even bother with these contribution/lobbying rules? They’re a joke. This is why I don’t accept assertions of “it’s a nonprofit!” or “we’re not lobbyists!” What does that mean, as a practical matter? Nothing.
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This post was started with a report about one incident bearing on rhetoric about educational policy, who gets paid to have what kind of voice, and how voice matters.
Well, the reauthorization of NCLB is expected to happen before summer, and the outcome of that will be shaped by who has voice and how that matters. The voices of those in the anti-testing movement are being heard, but…..
Most of the testing requirements in NCLB are expected to remain in place because Obama, Arne et al claim that these scores reveal the extent to which differences in performance (students, teachers, schools) were suppressed by not disaggregating test scores by race, special ed, and so on.
So the Democrats spin on this disclosure–of differences in test scores– as a civil rights issue. And many in organized political groups of minorities agree with this view—whether or not they have received money from Gates and his friends to beat the drum about being left behind—and many have.
Meanwhile, Republicans have their own reasons for wanting the tests to continue, not only to expand market-based schooling by hammering at the failures of public schools, but also to open the doors for parental choice in schools, including those segregated by race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, etc.
Here is part of the story from Politico (one that briefly mentions Diane Ravitch).
“Lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill in December to sway lawmakers’ positions in chaotic education debates over how often to test students and what role — if any — school vouchers should have in the law. These debates are set to erupt in January, though some groups have put themselves ahead of the curve: The National Education Association, the country’s largest teacher’s union, has been pushing to roll back testing requirements for years and is seizing on recent anti-testing sentiment in the states to make a fresh case for getting rid of annual tests on Capitol Hill.”
“Part of the difficulty in rewriting the law is that the most hated parts of the bill are deeply intertwined with its heralded civil rights provisions: The testing requirements, for example, allowed the government for the first time to spotlight the achievement gaps between white students from higher-income families and their peers when those test results were broken down by race and socioeconomic status. NCLB put a public spotlight on schools and districts that were falling flat when it comes to helping disadvantaged students — and pressed them to improve when no one else would.”
This account suggests that the rewrite will be minor and move out of committee by the end of February so that Obama must veto it, or sign it, before the electioneering for 2016 ramps up.
Either way, the rewrite and reauthorization of NCLB will provide another opportunity to witness a game of political football with not much concern for the end game beyond making political points.
As one more absurdity, the threat of not getting a steady diet of NCLB test scores is really troubling at least one person who cares more about being able to munch on NCLB data than anything else likely to flow from this legislation.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/the-plot-to-overhaul-no-child-left-behind-113857.html#ixzz3NzrRGFyg
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The fact that the mainstream media identifies Sharpton as a “civil rights leader” is appalling given his shameless self-promoting and refusal to acknowledge how his actions and baseless accusations ruined the lives of innocent hardworking public servants in Duchess County NY where he “made his name” in the Tawana Bradley case. I look forward to the day when someone of stature calls him out on his self-proclaimed status as a leader in the civil rights movement.
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