http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/leona-sharpton/article/2556410Leona Sharpton
By Washington Examiner | November 20, 2014 | 5:00 am
The Rev. Al Sharpton is perhaps best known these days for his MSNBC show. This provides viewers with a daily diet of its host misreading his teleprompter and egregiously overusing the phrase, “I mean, what is he talking about?”
But there is much more to Sharpton than his left-leaning political worldview and unimpressive TV skills. He rose to national prominence in the 1980s when he falsely accused white law enforcement officials of raping a teenage African-American girl. After that, he moved on to incite anti-Semitic violence in Brooklyn and Harlem. This was his preparation for a later bid for the Democratic nomination for president. And now he is, as Politico described him, “Obama’s go-to man on race.”
That’s quite a climb.
And from his high perch he routinely condemns “people with private jets and all kinds of corporate loopholes” for not paying more taxes. He evinces particular distaste for what he calls the “Republican tax giveaway to millionaires.” In 2012, Sharpton attacked Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for paying a mere 15 percent effective federal tax rate. Tsk, tsk — those millionaires who don’t pay their fair share!
But here’s the irony. Sharpton doesn’t pay a rate nearly as high as Romney. Sharpton has decided that the proper rate for himself is zero. To get away with that rate, it probably doesn’t hurt to be president’s go-to guy. The New York Times on Tuesday updated a long-running story about Sharpton’s arcane finances and those of his organizations, reporting that there are $4.5 million in state and federal tax liens against him personally and against his business interests.
The lurid financial tale goes back at least as far as the 1987 Tawana Brawley rape hoax. After one of Sharpton’s victims won a defamation judgment against him, the pastor used financial chicanery for two years to avoid paying what he owed. He claimed, for example, to have no worldly possessions, not even the clothes he was wearing. Everything he “had” was hidden in plain sight, the legal possessions of his friends and corporate entities that paid all of his personal expenses.
The Times also noted that Sharpton’s nonprofit organization, the National Action Network, was sustained for years by what its own accountants characterized as the knowing, willful omission of required employer contributions to the Social Security and Medicare systems. The Times consulted experts who said his organization’s failure to pay would have put it among the biggest nonprofit payroll tax scofflaws in America at the time. This was when Sharpton was condemning “the Republican attack on Medicare.”
Sharpton’s Wednesday press conference, in which he denied nearly everything in the Times story, was characteristically evasive. He denied allegations that the Times article never made, and, as usual, slyly played the race card by arguing that “a lot of people don’t like the fact that President Obama’s the president.”
The truth, though, is surely that a lot of people don’t like their president pandering to a character as odious as Sharpton. The reverend, for all his demagoguery on wealth and poverty, lives by Leona Helmsley’s creed that “only the little people pay taxes.”
