He’s a criminal. It’s undeniable.

A transcript, via IsThatBaloney.com…

There are no blacks on 30% of Fortune 500 Board of Directors. Apple, where we spend a lot of money on Apple, they have a new I-phone coming out today. No blacks in Board of Apple. We buying up all this Apple stuff and can’t get a bite.

REV. AL SHARPTON : Ah now today the I-Phone comes out ah that is of course produced by Apple and Apple is one of those companies I mean we do a tremendous amount of business in our community with Apple, yet were not on their Boards and there is no evidence they’d a lot of advertising or a lot of contracting in our community, is that correct?

EARL GRAVES JR: That’s correct and I think you know it’s one thing to have the measurement being the people who are on the Board, but once a person’s on the Board then it’s really measuring four different things. And the key is what is the percentage of money that they spend in procurement that they’re spending with minority owned businesses, or African American firms? The second it what percentage of senior managers or direct reports are people of color? The third is what percentage of money that you spend are you spending with or directed to African American media. Of course the last is the Board of Directors. The part that is so shocking is that Apple, which is probably the best know of the companies basically strikes out against all four.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Really!

EARL GRAVES JR: They have no African American Directors in the company. They do little to no spending in African American media. They do little to no spending with in procurement with African American firms. And as you, as I quote you all the time, the corporate board not corporate board, but the ah corporation in the executive rank looks like the Himalayas.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Right

EARL GRAVES JR: because the higher you go the whiter it gets.

What’s being discussed here is how to put Apple on the spot for the lack of black executives.

It’s a standard game for Sharpton and his pal Jesse Jackson, who is a professional extortionist exposed as such on multiple occasions but perhaps most vividly in a lawsuit and subsequent report by Judicial Watch. The game is actually fleshed out in surprisingly accurate spirit by Eddie Murphy in his 1992 Washington spoof film The Distinguished Gentleman…

Murphy plays a con man who manages to trick his way into Congress, and, impersonating an NAACP official, manages to extort a powerful committee chairman into putting him onto a lush assignment.

The principle is the same with Jackson and Sharpton’s schemes. Find a corporation with lots of money and not quite so many black executives, threaten to expose them as racists and then offer them “indulgences” in the form of bought-and-paid-for free passes for prior racial sins disguised as “diversity programs” Jackson or Sharpton administer through their various non-profit rackets. For Jackson, scams such as these have proven quite lucrative; Sharpton lacks his skill but not his ambition.

You’d never hear Jesse Jackson talking shop like this on the radio, but then again Jackson has always been a lot more intelligent and refined than the gutter-dweller from Harlem.

It’s not as though any of this is a secret. What makes it worth passing along is the embarrassing disclosure earlier this week by the New York Post that it had come by a copy of the diary of left-wing luminary and political ne’er-do-well Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and in that diary RFK Jr. passes along some quite unflattering opinions of Jackson and Sharpton…

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton “give me the creeps,” Kennedy writes in a July 5 entry.

“Al Sharpton has done more damage to the black cause than [segregationist Alabama Gov.] George Wallace. He has suffocated the decent black leaders in New York,” he says. “His transparent venal blackmail and extortion schemes taint all black leadership.”

Rev. Al Sharpton gave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “the creeps,” he wrote in his diary.

He goes on to call Sharpton a “buffoon” who has never escaped the “stench” of his advocacy for Tawana Brawley, the black Dutchess County teen who fabricated a story about six white men raping her in 1987.

He writes that Jesse Jackson has “a desperate and destructive addiction to publicity.” He recalls that Jackson, at labor leader Cesar Chavez’s funeral, pushed “Cesar’s friends and family out of the way to make himself lead pall bearer.”

“His love affair with [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan and his Jewish xenophobia are also unforgivable,” Kennedy adds.

“I feel dirty around him, and I feel like I’m being used. I feel like with Jesse, it’s all about Jesse.”

Kennedy was furious at the disclosure, and subsequently described Sharpton and Jackson as “extraordinary national leaders,” but the damage was certainly done.

All of which points up the importance of elevating and developing a cadre of black leaders who personify not the selfish demagogic greed of a Jackson and Sharpton, but instead the selfless pursuit of harmony, justice and freedom of a Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy Jackson and Sharpton have so badly perverted.

When that can be done the extortion schemes Sharpton is brazen enough to advertise on the radio can be replaced by real, honest efforts to elevate the black community and give its members real opportunities to prosper. Which of course Sharpton and Jackson aren’t interested in, because that would marginalize them.