Megabucks for BLM: Another Left-wing Cause with Capitalist Sponsors

August 6, 2016

Oligarchs have a long history of promoting racial and cultural turmoil since Jacob Schiff came up with the idea for the NAACP in 1909. BLM is markedly more extreme than the Uncle Toms of the NAACP and Martin Luther King and suggests the same dialectal strategy as that used by the oligarchs who funded the New Left of the 1960s, to shift the political centre leftward in the guise of “moderation.”

In Baltimore a leading Black Lives Matterⁱ activist DeRay Mckesson, raised $222,000 for his mayoralty campaign,ⁱⁱ which included $6,0000 each donated by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Twitter Executive Chairman Omid Kordestani. Another corporate donor was Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack.ⁱⁱⁱ
BLM has been compared with the “Arab Spring” and other movements of the “color revolutions” with the pivotal use made of social media for mobilization. David Z Morris writing for Fortune commented on this:

“Technology has played a major role in McKesson’s career as an activist. He first rose to prominence in 2014, when he began live-tweeting events in Furgeson, Missouri following the police shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown. He now has more than 323,000 followers on Twitter.”^iv

Morris also points out what is apparent when one looks at the sponsoring of sundry “social justice” and “human rights” movements by the likes of Walmart whose own treatment of non-White workers leaves a lot to be desired. The sponsorship can be seen as a PR gimmick, or as a means of expanding their own markets via the promotion of “ethnic diversity”:

“Aside from execs’ personal politics, tech company support for Mckesson makes sense for two reasons. First, he’s a sterling example of the influence of platforms like Twitter, which benefits from serving as the home of any important national conversations. And second, Silicon Valley has a widely-discussed and continuing diversity problem. Support for minority influencers like Mckesson could help shore up those shortcomings, at least from a PR perspective.”^v

George Soros and the Democracy Alliance

Of significance is the omnipresent hand of George Soros, via the Democracy Alliance, a “club” of plutocrats, aligned with the Democratic Party, who fund leftist causes. In November 2015 BLM leaders met with the billionaire leftists at the DA annual conference. The DA states that it was formed in 2005 to

“play a leading role in fostering the infrastructure necessary to advance a progressive agenda for America. We invest in every aspect of progressive power-building – from policymaking to organizing grassroots communities to winning state and national issue and electoral campaigns. We address the most pressing challenges of our day through investments in three connected areas: a just democracy, a fair economy and an environmentally sustainable future. … In our collaborative giving strategy, an informed and engaged body of donors comes together to aggregate resources for focused investment, for which we have marshaled as much as $60 million per year.”^vi

$60,000,000 per year granted to colored, feminist and immigrant groups constitutes a formidable movement of change towards what DA and its oligarchs call “progressive”. Something of the elitist and secretive character of the DA was seen at its annual conference in 2014 when several journalists got roughed up by the humanitarians:

“Security was tight at the Democracy Alliance conference last week at the chic Ritz Carlton in Chicago. Politico reporter Ken Vogel was manhandled by security when he tried to interview an attendee. Other conference-goers ripped off their nametags when a Washington Free Beacon reporter approached.”^vii

While the involvement of labor unions with a left-wing cause is hardly surprising, only those unfamiliar with the alliance that has often existed between oligarchs and the Left would also be surprised by the association between unions and big money at DA. Oswald Spengler pointed that phenomenon out nearly a century ago:

“There is no proletarian, not even a communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money – and that without the idealists amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.”^viii

The Washington Post among others reported that George Soros was among those who initiated DA, and it would be surprising if he hadn’t. Others include insurance magnate Peter Lewis, San Francisco hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and software entrepreneur Tim Gill.^ix
What was discussed between BLM leaders and their oligarchic friends at the DA 2015 conference does not seem to have been reported. However, George Soros had already given a staggering $33,000,000 to Black radical groups in Ferguson, Missouri, during 2014, coalescing into the BLM movement. The Washington Times reported:

“Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times. In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his non-profit Open Society Foundations. The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.”^x

The WT report stated also: “Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign.”^xi This is the same scenario and the same strategy that was used to instigate “color revolutions” or “regime change” by Soros, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, and a myriad of other NGOs, across the former Soviet bloc and North Africa, prompting Putin to give them their marching orders out of Russia. One might conclude that Soros, et al also want “regime change” for the USA. The scenario is explained in further detail, similar to the tactics used in the “color revolutions”:

“Buses of activists from the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference in Chicago; from the Drug Policy Alliance, Make the Road New York and Equal Justice USA from New York; from Sojourners, the Advancement Project and Center for Community Change in Washington; and networks from the Gamaliel Foundation — all funded in part by Mr. Soros — descended on Ferguson starting in August and later organized protests and gatherings in the city until late last month.”^xii

Groundwork from Soros funded lobbies

Among the throng was Kassandra Frederique, policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance. DPA is yet another organization initiated by Soros. What this has to do with BLM might be explained by Soros’ drug reform movement being part of an international movement to reshape the world in Soros’ image. Frederique provided the rationalization:

“We recognized this movement is similar to the work we’re doing at DPA. The war on drugs has always been to operationalize, institutionalize and criminalize people of color. Protecting personal sovereignty is a cornerstone of the work we do and what this movement is all about.”^xiii

The DPA is a lobby for marijuana legalization. Why is Soros interested in this, along with other plutocrats? As Frederique explained it is part of a broader front, and each aspect happens to be directed at undermining the foundations of cultural, national and ethnic cohesion, ultimately in the interests of economic globalization, behind the façade of “human rights.” We’ve seen this process leading to “privatization” of hitherto state owned or directed economies in Serbia (Kosovo) and a list of ex-Soviet and North African states (and post-apartheid South Africa), in the name of “color revolution.” Hence, DPA lauds the BLM rampage, headlining at its “blogsite” in an article by Asha Bandele, “I am stunned. And grieving. And enrage at the recent police killings of Black men.” Bandele is the senior director of Grants, Partnerships and Special Projects of DPA.^xiv The Board includes Soros, former secretary of state George P Shultz, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, Richard Branson, and the late Václav Havel, who was elevated to the presidency of the Czech Republic thanks to the “velvet revolution.” In 2014 Forbes described Soros as the biggest drug reformer in the USA, giving $200,000,000 for drug reform lobbying since 1994, of which the DPA has been the largest recipient.^xv
BLM was co-founded by Opal Tometi,^xvi executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), a group to which Soros’ Open Society Foundation gave $100,000 in 2011.^xvii Feted by Cosmopolitan and The Los Angeles Times, invited to the White House, Dr Tometi is an example of what life is like for a Left-wing radical in a plutocratic state, where capitalism and Leftism converge. Another patron of BAJI is Unbound Philanthropy, established by William Reeves.^xviii Reeves is director and founder of BlueCrest Capital Management (London). Previously Reeves had been with J P Morgan in London and New York, and Salomon Brothers Asset Management.^xix
Alicia Garza, another of three BLM co-founders, is director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, also funded by Unbound Philanthropy.^xx NDWA has also been funded by the Open Society Foundation.^xxi
A scholarly basis for BLM was provide by the Open Society Foundation, which sponsored via the Center for Policing Equity a conference of “the nation’s top law enforcement executives, researchers, civil rights advocates, and community groups to discuss accountability, transparency, data collection,” at the US Department of Justice. Two reports with Soros funding were prepared by the National Justice Database, a branch of the Center for Policing Equity, and the Urban Institute.^xxii The Center for Policing Equity works with law enforcement agencies to emasculate the police in the face of non-white violence, or in their words “we use data to create levers for social, cultural and policy change.”^xxiii The founder of the Center, Dr Philip Atiba Goff, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at UCLA, was sponsored in this initiative by the Open Society Institutes, and the Ford Foundation, among others.^xxiv
The Urban Institute was founded in 1968 at the initiative of President Lyndon Johnson. This Establishment think tank includes a board of trustees drawn from those who have served with the World Bank, J P Morgan, Charlotte investment bank, National Security Council, CityView investments, Hudson Institute, J P Morgan Chase Institute, Bank of America, Promontory Financial Group LLC, Federal Reserve, et al. The Brookings Institution is particularly evident.^xxv As one would expect for a Left-wing think tank the funding is provided by the Ford Foundation, J P Morgan Chase, Rockefeller Foundation, Bank of America, Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors, Open Society Foundations, World Bank, Packard Foundation, PepsiCo., Heinz Endowments, along with many others and sundry US state agencies.^xxvi These Establishment revolutionists at the UI, have jumped on the BLM bandwagon, headlining with “What can we do to prevent the next killing?”^xxvii
Another justification for BLM is provided by The Sentencing Project. This is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, David Rockefeller Fund, et al.^xxviii However, rampaging, screaming Blacks and Reds notwithstanding, a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “which examined thousands of incidents at 10 large police departments in California, Florida and Texas, concluded that police were no more likely to shoot non-whites than whites after factoring in extenuating circumstances.” “On the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” according to Harvard economics professor Roland G Fryer Jr.^xxix Presumably a liberal, Prof. Fryer was surprised with the findings. There was a disproportionate interaction physically between police and Blacks and Latinos, but the study suggests this could be the result of the attitudes among Blacks and Latinos, rather than police.
Stephen E Broden, a Black pastor who had worked among poor Blacks in Dallas for thirty years, comments:

“Whatever legitimacy the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) movement may have is lost in its funding from one George Soros. Mr. Soros is the major financial source responsible for funding the leftist movement in America. … These left-wing groups supported by Soros have one thing in common: to transform America.”^xxx

However, as is well known the outreach of Soros, Rockefeller and other such oligarchs is not merely concerned with the transforming of the USA. Their outreach is global: they want to establish a global order, which is why the funds expended by Soros et al, and augmented by State-connected agencies such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, are poured across the world to instigate “regime change” and “color revolutions,” and none more so than in the former Soviet bloc and the Islamic states. In the post-Soviet East European states and Russia and the Islamic states the focus is on feminism and secularising disaffected youth.^xxxi They substitute for Blacks and Latinos. Whether it is BLM, feminism, “woman health” (abortion) issues, the common factor is to target whatever element in a society that can be utilised for the destruction or repression of tradition and order. Soros, after Karl Popper, had adopted the banner slogan of the “open society,” to fund a world revolution that undermines the traditional religious, moral and cultural values of peoples whether Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Islamic. Behind the façade of “human rights” the aim is for the free flow of capital, labor and technology. The real “open society” is one where there are no constraints that are maintained by tradition, custom, heritage, race, ethnos, language. The aim is integration in the creation of mass produce-and consume markets, which harry Oppenheimer was quite candid about in stating the reasons for opposing apartheid.^xxxii
Soros et al are using the same tactic that was used during the 1960s with the backing of the New Left. What would normally be unacceptable by the majority was considered “moderate” when compared with the demands of the rampaging SDS, Black Panthers and Weather Underground.^xxxiii The centre of political gravity was radically shifted while seeming to be only moderately so, which is why for example one will here basically conservative people laud Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela as “great leaders” who thwarted violence with “reason,” and how President Obama can present himself in the same mode. Given the escalation of BLM rioting and the presidential campaigns, one might wonder in this respect whether the billionaires behind the Democracy Alliance also see BLM as a convenient dialectic in presenting Hilary Clinton as a moderating influence who can diffuse Black anger?

Role of Social Media

Social media kick-started BLM, just as it has played a prominent role in instigating and co-coordinating the “color revolutions” across the former Soviet bloc and North Africa. Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of BLM, commented, “Twitter can be a vehicle that connects us and helps bring us together to strategize around how we’re going to build the kind of power that we need to transform the world that we live in.”^xxxiv
It is via Twitter that BLM started.^xxxv As stated at the beginning, Twitter Chairman Kordestani donated to BLM mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson’ fringe campaign. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, claiming personal friendship with Mckeeson shared a question-and-answer platform. While both agreed very broadmindedly that all views should get a hearing, this contradicts Twitter’s avid censorship of anything regarded as illiberal and conservative.^xxxvi
A BLM sign was painted on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, and also at the Facebook headquarters. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called employees who had replaced BLM with a sign reading “all lives matter,” “unacceptable” and “malicious.”^xxxvii Google Twittered “Black lives matter”^xxxviii in revolutionary solidarity. This is more than rhetorical: Facebook and Google were among the founders of an international movement promoting “color revolutions” by mobilizing youth through social media. The Alliance of Youth Movements, also called Movements.org was founded by Howcast CEO Jason Liebman and Google director Jared Cohen. Movements.org played a vital role in the “Arab Spring” across North Africa. Liebman said of social media and Movements.org:

“We tell people, you can use Tweet-to-Speak, which Google rolled out during the Egypt uprising, to dial in from a landline and tweet. We’re trying to provide the resources for activists to do what they’ve been doing for a while, but more effectively and faster.”^xxxix

But Liebman when he conceived the idea was with the US State Department, so the character of the revolutions he and his comrades are advocating should be in no doubt. Among the “partners” of the corporate revolutionaries is “Free Russia,” which aims to bring down the hated Putin; and the US Government-funded Establishment neo-Bolsheviks of the National Endowment for Democracy, and Huffington Post.^xl Sponsors in addition to Google and Facebook include MTV, CBS News, Pepsi, Youtube, the US State Department, and others.^xli The same and similar interests, with US Government backing, are pushing a multicultural agenda with a particular zeal for promoting corporate manufactured ghetto culture such as Rap and Hip Hop among migrant youth and disaffected, unassimilated minorities throughout the world, with a particular focus on “xenophobic” nations such as France. Oligarchs have a long history of promoting racial and cultural turmoil since Jacob Schiff came up with the idea for the NAACP in 1909.^xlii BLM is markedly more extreme than the Uncle Toms of the NAACP and Martin Luther King and suggests the same dialectal strategy as that used by the oligarchs who funded the New Left of the 1960s, to shift the political centre leftward in the guise of “moderation.”