Maybe if the people who ran Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) had not been so profligate, the bank wouldn’t have failed. As Catherine Salgado reported Tuesday, according to the Claremont Institute, SVB gave a staggering $70,650,000 to Black Lives Matter (BLM) and like-minded entities, and according to a report in The Daily Beast, BLM’s leadership took the largesse it had received from guilty corporations hoping to avoid charges of racism and squandered much of it on “high-end real estate, familiar consultants, ambitious grants, and more.” For the BLM leadership, it was time to let the good times roll.
It wasn’t just BLM, either. Just The News reported Friday that SVB had promised to fork over no less than $5 billion to various organizations in order to help companies that were endeavoring to assist with “the transition to a sustainable, low carbon, net zero emissions economy.” Then, after the bank collapsed, it was criticized for “prioritizing eco-conscious environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing over sound investment principles while also focusing on diversity and social justice in hiring over strict merit.” And not just in hiring, as the massive payout to BLM indicates.
But for all the money it gave to Black Lives Matter, did Silicon Valley Bank get diversity and social justice? Not quite. The Daily Beast’s May 2022 report notes that BLM co-founder and former sole voting director Patrisse Cullors “authorized a six-figure payout to be given to her child’s father for various services, paid $1.8 million to companies owned by her relatives, and ensured that her brother, Paul Cullors, was one of the highest-paid employees of BLM.”
Even worse, “tax documents not only proved that Cullors lied about misusing some of the funds (such as hosting a birthday party for her son and throwing a private Biden inauguration celebration in the multimillion dollar property intended for activists and creators), but that she did so repeatedly.” Ah, racial justice at last!
What did you expect? Patrisse Cullors herself said in 2015: “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” In practice, Marxism doesn’t mean actually spreading the wealth around. It means that the wealth of those who have no political power is confiscated for the benefit of those who do have political power. That’s the way Leftists always rule.
In the old Soviet Union, while all the rhetoric was about how the workers had thrown off their oppressors and were now in charge, the common people were actually more impoverished than ever, as well as more powerless. Those who really had the political power, and were supposedly running this “dictatorship of the proletariat,” meanwhile, lived it up in sumptuous dachas and feasted on gourmet meals served on the finest china. They deserved reward, after all, for all their efforts for The People, and so does Black Lives Matter today.
Related: Woke Silicon Valley Bank Gave $73.45 Million to BLM and Related Entities
SVB was, of course, by no means alone in financing the luxury lifestyle of Patrisse Cullors and other Marxist BLM leaders. Just The News reports that “other big-name corporations listed in the BLM donor database included: CitiGroup and Facebook, which each gave over $1 billion, Amazon (almost $170 million), Apple ($100 million), and American Express ($50 million), among dozens of others.”
What did they all get for their money? In a certain sense, it was akin to the protection money that the Mafia would collect from small businesses: you got a real nice picture window here in your shop. It would be a shame if it were broken. For $100 a week, I can make sure that doesn’t happen. After Antifa and BLM rioted all over the country in the summer of 2020, the point was made to the big corporations: demonstrate your commitment to “social justice,” or else.
When asked about the donations bonanza it received and the possible connection of SVB’s failure to its massive donation to BLM, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (you guessed it) charged racism: “Associating a multi-billion dollar bank failure to supposed donations made to Black organizations is quite literally the definition of white supremacy — especially when it’s a bank that has been and continues to be largely run by white people.” It added in a sly pitch for Marxism: “We need to be demanding real accountability both from the private sector and the government, which leads to immediate policy change, including public banking options. Until we stop protecting the interests of tech executives, shareholders, and billionaires, and start protecting Black people from their gruesome exploitation, then we will unfortunately witness many more big bank bailouts.”
As everyone should know by now, “real accountability” doesn’t really mean that everyone should be held accountable. It just means that the people who are left unaccountable should change. But the BLM leadership is already in that category.
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