Hey, if shakedowns work for Al Sharpton, why not try it on a grander scale befitting a former president?

As has been reported (though not by MSNBC), Al Sharpton has made millions shaking down corporations by intimating that he will charge them with racism if they do not pay him off.  (See this New York Post column by Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein: "How Sharpton gets paid to not cry racism at corporations.")

He, of course, is a tax deadbeat whose records are for some reason kept on very flammable material, since they always seem to go up in smoke.

Sharpton was just following a successful scam pioneered by Jesse Jackson.  (Kenneth Timmerman’s Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson is an excellent exposé regarding the myriad ways the Jackson family has benefited by playing the best card game in town, the race card game.)

One can expect to see more of the same – albeit in a more refined, less blunt way – led by the president Obama after he leaves office.

Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post reports on the president’s plan for the future:

Like their recent predecessors, the Obamas are quietly devoting some of their final months in the White House to laying the groundwork for a very busy life after it: a free-form career that is expected to be very public, very active and — owing to their relative youth — very long. [snip]

“I’ll go back to doing the kinds of work that I was doing before — just trying to find ways to help people, help young people get educations, help people get jobs, help bring businesses into neighborhoods that don’t have enough businesses,” Obama recently told a group of middle school students. “That’s the kind of work that I really love to do.” [snip]

The president recently announced that My Brother’s Keeper, the White House program he established to help young men of color, will form an independent nonprofit organization that will raise money from corporations.

He actually has a ready-made list of people who will eagerly donate to his new efforts – in many cases (such as Comcast, the cable-opoly that owns the nation’s largest cable network, MSNBC, Universal, etc.), they overlap with those companies that have supported Sharpton.

But his efforts will of course make Sharpton’s look amateurish.

The Obama efforts will challenge the Clinton Foundation as a source of personal wealth for the Obama family and will have the added benefit of being able to accumulate many millions from foreign sources.  The Obamas can do this with little shame or consequence since, as Obama is wont to inform us, he will not be on the ballot anywhere ever again.

But an enriched foundation will be a springboard for his desire to continue to work his best to fundamentally transform America.  Indeed, as I have suggested before in “Obama’s Grand Plan,” his strategy will be to form a coalition of like-minded people (certainly African-Americans and Latinos will be a core focus – that explains his many actions to shower benefits on them during his presidency).

He will use his followers to intimidate corporations and politicians to do his bidding.  He is a young man whose great desire is to “fundamentally transform America.”  He will not be done with us after he leaves office.