Maybe you haven’t noticed it–I know it was a big surprise to me, but since I get my news from the radio everybody in the news looks like the back of the car in front of me–but both of them are, brace yourself, NEGROES! Uppity ones, too.
Why Jesse got crowned the Voice of the Negro (that’s what the call letters of Chicago’s WVON stand for) by American media: Handsome, well-spoken, and always available for a quote. Laugh at how he’s always Johnny on the spot, but he knows how to get airplay. A masterful politician, usually.
Sharpton tries it, and has done well without Jesse’s (no belittling intended by calling him by his first name–the dude worked long and hard to get to be the Cher of civil rights) budget or his looks. (I like him because us fat, sweaty, homely guys need to stick together.) Yeah, he says some stupid things, but he’s right a fair percentage of the time.
Because of where I live and work I know how the less thoughtful conservatives, from Joe Sixpack to Charles Countryclub, feel about those two. They are considered troublemakers, always trying to rile people up, preferably with some self-aggrandizement thown in. And there’s more than a grain of truth in it; they are showboats. Liberal ones. Add Black, liberal, and showboat together and the same guys who worship Limbaugh and O’Reilly, White, conservative showboats, hate Jesse and Sharpton with the fire of a thousand suns.
Others have already made many of the points I would make. I have more respect for Jackson because I feel that he has addressed some real problems - people can argue about how many feet he was standing away when Martin Luther King was murdered but the reality is that Jackson worked alongside King - and this was at a time when people were being killed for being civil rights leaders. And, as others have mentioned, Jackson has spoken on issues like the problem of black crime and “gangsta” culture where he doesn’t just jump on to the “black” side. I’ll agree that Jackson has said and done some things that were stupid and/or morally questionable - but some of what he’s said and done was noble and true and he should get credit for that as well.
Not to hijack, but did something happen to Jesse Jackson in the last few years. I remember him from his quasi-run at the presidency in the late 80s as being a fantastic speaker. I’ve heard him on the news in the last year or so, and I can’t understand him half the time. Am I misremembering him as a great speaker, or did something happen to him?
Fiscally conservative American. The not-so-Reverend Jackson uses corporate shakedown money (under the guise of an unaudited charity) to finance his concubines in a lifestyle most people would find luxurious. The self-appointed Mayor of racism gets his shakedown money by threatening businesses with boycotts if they don’t respond to his racial audits.
He tried to pull his song and dance routine in my area and backed out at the last minute. He was going to protest the death of a drunken elderly man who stumbled into the path of a police car responding to an emergency at 2AM.
Al Sharpton is a poorly educated preacherman who is has PC immunity for any and all racial bigotry.
dropzone your post got me thinking … and I think that as a liberal leaning kind of guy liberal showboating bothers me more than conservative showboating. Which I hear is often worse. Why is that?
I don’t generally listen to conservative radio so don’t hear these twits too often, but Jackson has usually gotten mainstream press airtime.
His extremity of views and demagoguary forces me to take the other side in a particular issue and places me against people with whom I share the same overall goals. It places me, for that issue at least, in the same camp as Joe Six-pack and Charles Countyclub. And I resent that. (Whereas I like being able to ridicule conservative views as expressed by the idiot mouthpieces on their side.) It is the same way that Michael Moore annoys me: I agree with his ends but his means are so propagandist and unbalanced that I am forced to argue against him. No hijack intended.
This claim makes the rest of your post more than suspect.
I have dealt with 501(c)(3)s and a host of related groups and every one of them is subject to audit. If you can’t get that right, why should we accept the rest of your claims?
http://www.strangecosmos.com/content/item/23284.html This is the story that had me wondering. It occurred about 20 years ago and seems to have disappeared.
When Sharpton was given a seat at the presidential debates ,I liked it. He had an interesting take and was able to speak more honestly than the front runners.
Yes, and you’re subject to audit as a private citizen. What’s your point? The last “audit” my 501(c)(3) got was a letter in the mail that was answered in kind.
I tried to hunt down Jackson’s flow of money before I posted. I lost it in a maze of corporations and organizations. He has a history of strong-arming companies for personal gain. If he’s been fully audited I couldn’t find it. Seems like he would be a good candidate for one. Maybe you’ll have better luck finding it.
That was not difficult.
Rainbow Coalition PUSH is a charity that actually has been audited (with bad results).
Jackson’s salary is provided by People United to Save Humanity (not PUSH), which does keep its books private as a religious, not a charitable, organization.
Here’s the thing: Jackson is at the center of several charities, The Rainbow Coalition, which is a profit-making enterprise, and PUSH, which is a religious organization. This makes it next to impossible to track the money, because they all operate under different rules. He can do things like solicit money from black-owned companies to be represented to large corporations for profit, and legally accept the cash. He can then turn those lists over to corporations and negotiate to have them hire companies on the list or face a huge PR hit that Jackson will engineer by organizing protests, using his personality to talk negatively about them on camera in front of big audiences, etc. But then he can tell these corporations that if they were to give to the right charity as a show of faith, perhaps he could turn down the heat a little. Wrap it in a little religion, and Jackson can draw his own salary from a tax-exempt organization and keep himself at arm’s length from all of it.
When the Rainbow Coalition merged with PUSH in 1996, I was under the impression that a People United to Save Humanity entity was kept separate. The People United to Save Humanity entity is a church (or resembles one) while Rainbow Coalition/PUSH is the non-profit charity and it is the separate People United to Save Humanity church from which Jackson receives a paycheck. (I am not asserting that none of this was done with no consideration for hiding assets or disbursements, but my memory was that the church was separate. Has the People United to Save Humanity church been disbanded or rolled into PUSH?)
NITPICK: been over a hundred years now since he’s had any influence, but Booker Taliaferro Washington, from 1895-until his death in 1915, was probably black America’s only widely accepted leader in the white mainstream… of course, he had virulent detracters within black America, starting with W.E.B. Du Bois but the mainstream white power structure of the era loved them some “Mr. Accomodationist” Booker T. “In all things purely social we can be seperate as the fingers,” indeed.
Hypothesis I: It’s because we’re supposed to be better than that. Liberals are the ones with intelligent, well-reasoned viewpoints while conservatives are the foam-flecked mouth breathers. Liberals don’t need to go to extremes to sway people because we are right. Or that’s how we like to think of ourselves.
Hypothesis II: Northern Europeans, and, because of centuries of living in that environment, I include most Jews in that group, are culturally indisposed to loudmouth showoffs. They are often socially liberal but personally conservative and they like their politicians the same way. There are abberations, like Hitler, but most are like those models of tedium and decorum, Walter Mondale and Joseph Lieberman.
The vitriol is primarily the result of White people generally not respecting Black people due to historical reasons i.e. slavery and the notion that Black people were not human which is why they could be bought and sold like commodities. The white psyche has been affected by the legacy of slavery as has the Black psyche. Black men or women asserting power are viewed as “dangerous” where their White counterparts are viewed as “powerful” or “assertive”. When you have a Black person speaking out against things that happen AND also indicate that there is a racial component to it, you can expect that a number of Whites will be uncomfortable and if it were the “good-ole” days, they would have lynched these two guys long ago. Fortunately illegal activity such as lynching and bombing is now actively prosecuted unlike during the “good-ole” days.
The vitriol is simply because they are Black and they are pointing out the racist component present in events that happen. White’s in generally don’t like talking about race and they don’t like dealing with race, it makes them uncomfortable and consequently they will on the mild side shy away from anyone that brings it up or on the strong side violently address the issue. It’s predictable that most if not all of the White’s in this thread don’t like Jackson or Sharpton. Not because they know them or because they have done something to them mind you, but primarily because they view them as “trouble makers”, people who bring up that race issue that they don’t want to deal with because after all, it(racism) doesn’t exist.
