The New York Times on Tuesday exposed Al Sharpton’s 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 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.”
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Some pay taxes, some don't
FrontPage Magazine ^ | November 20, 2014 | Ronn Torossian |
