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How To Steal From Progressives

Lawsuit alleges that top BLM leader siphoned $10 million from racial justice charity
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One of the top three leaders of Black Lives Matter has been accused in a lawsuit by colleagues of stealing $10 million from the group. Excerpt:

Shalomyah Bowers was called in the court filing as a “rogue administrator, a middle man turned usurper” who siphoned contributions to the nonprofit activist group to use as a “personal piggy bank,” according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday.

Bowers’ actions led the foundation into investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and various state attorneys general, “blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM in less than eighteen months,” the suit claims. “While BLM leaders and movement workers were on the street risking their lives, Mr. Bowers remained in his cushy offices devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation to break the implied-in-fact contract between donors and BLM.”

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Bowers, though, didn't grift his way to the top without learning a few things. He accused his accusers of Acting White:

Bowers and his group denied all claims of financial misconduct and chastised those suing him for “falling victim to the carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system” in taking legal action against him.

“They would rather take the same steps of our white oppressors and utilize the criminal legal system which is propped up by white supremacy (the same system they say they want to dismantle) to solve movement disputes,” the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s board of directors said in a joint statement.

Here's a link to the statement. It begins:

Today, we should be talking about Biden’s “Safer America Plan,” which funds the police and enables and encourages state-sanctioned violence against our communities. We should be talking about the water crisis in Jackson, where white supremacist leaders have allowed the city’s water system to fail, which is endangering and killing our people. 

For the record, as terrible as the situation in Jackson, Miss., is, the city is 82 percent black and its elected leadership is black. It has had black mayors since 1997. It is also one of the most violent cities in America, with a homicide rate 15 times the US average.

How violent is Jackson? The yearly homicide rate there in 2021 was 97.6 per 100,000 residents. By contrast, here is a list of the most violent countries in the world. The worst? El Salvador, whose homicide rate is 52 per 100,000 residents. That's right: the capital of Mississippi is almost twice as deadly as the world's most violent country.

Whatever BLM's leadership says, majority-black Jackson does not suffer from a lack of police presence.

Tax filings earlier this year showed that BLM spent $12 million on luxury properties. The self-described "Marxist" co-founder of the group, Patrice Khan-Cullors, bought four luxury homes. Grift, grift, grift: getting rich off of promoting racial hatred. I think the people and corporations who threw money at this dodgy outfit deserve what they get. This was 100 percent predictable.

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