For BLM, it’s all in the family. Radical leftist, Marxist organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) reportedly “bled cash” amid “blistering investment losses” last year. Which didn’t stop the organization from giving leaders’ family and friends some very lucrative contracts.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on BLM’s losses on May 23, citing tax documents the outlet obtained.
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ran an $8.5 million deficit and saw the value of its investment accounts plummet by nearly $10 million in the most recent tax year, financial disclosures show. The group logged a $961,000 loss on a securities sale of $172,000, suggesting the charity weathered a staggering 85 percent loss on the transaction. These troubles didn’t stop BLM from doling out seven-figure contracts to friends and family of its former executive director Patrisse Cullors, who once said charity financial disclosures were “triggering” and “deeply unsafe.”
Unsafe for her questionable activities, anyway.
BLM co-founder Cullors previously described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.” And, in true Marxist fashion, BLM has apparently been spending largely not on helping black Americans but on enriching themselves. Washington Free Beacon said BLM’s latest Form 990 shows “the group is on the fast track to financial insolvency,” and that Cullors’ chosen successor, Shalomyah Bowers, hasn’t reformed BLM’s spending practices. Donations just haven’t kept up with spending, it seems.
Last year, Cullors was infamously exposed for using donor funds to buy her $6 million mansion. Also last year, according to the Free Beacon, BLM raised $9.3 million for the fiscal year. That’s an 88% drop from 2021. Then “compliance and transparency issues in several liberal states” also forced BLM’s shut down of its online fundraising streams early last year and BLM “has blown through two-thirds of the $90 million it raised in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020.” But don’t you dare question them, you racist.
Washington Free Beacon explained that Cullors’ brother Paul, a graffiti artist without previous bodyguard experience, earned $1.6 million for giving BLM “professional security services” in 2022. Not only that, but Paul was one of only two paid BLM employees. So, as “head of security,” he raked in a $126,000 salary besides the consulting fees. Ah, to be systemically oppressed in America. As for how BLM has spent the rest of its $90 million haul:
BLM spent about $12 million of those funds on luxury homes in Los Angeles and Toronto. That profligacy did not abate in the 2022 fiscal year, when the charity dropped more than $10.5 million on contractors, much of which went to companies linked to Cullors’s friends and family…Black Lives Matter disclosed last May it had paid Paul Cullors a comparatively meager $841,000 to protect the charity’s swanky $6 million Los Angeles mansion in its 2021 tax year, which Patrisse Cullors used to film herself baking peach cobblers.
As for Cullors’ successor, Shalomyah Bowers, he has been accused of “blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM” by likewise using the group for his own personal enrichment. “It’s unclear if Black Lives Matter paid out lucrative contracting fees to Cullors’s friends and family past June 2022,” Free Beacon noted, but Bowers seems equally questionable. The IRS and state attorneys general have investigated BLM due to Bowers’ activities, the Free Beacon stated. The L.A. Times reported last September that Bowers was accused of stealing a whopping $10 million from BLM.
So BLM continues to blather about injustice while simply enriching its leaders and their cronies. How truly and typically Marxist.
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