Russo-Ukrainian War: What Zaluzhnyi Actually Wrote

William Walter Kay Nov 15, 2023

The clearest, most authoritative, and comprehensive depiction of the current state of the Russo-Ukrainian War is Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s recent 4,500-word treatise: Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win in It. Here’s a high-fidelity abridgement of that document. (Western military equipment, endorsed by Zaluzhnyi, are hyperlinked to their corporate brochures.)

Mid-2023 the Russo-Ukrainian War assumed positional (non-maneuverable) forms reminiscent of 1914-18 trench warfare. Positional forms favor Russia. Ukraine must implement FIVE non-trivial transformations to overcome the positional crisis.  

1. Gain Air Superiority.................
2. Breaching Mine Barriers.................
3. Build-up Electronic Warfare (EW) Capabilities...............
4. Improve Counter-Artillery Effectiveness ...................
5. Create and Train Necessary Reserves..............

Recommendations:..............Finally, high rates of fire drain Ukraine’s already inadequate munition stocks. Russia spends lavishly on munitions, and benefits from pre-war preparation. Russia maintains munition superiority by expanding production capacity. Partners’ munition production increases require a year or two to reach needed scales. Ukraine could mitigate munitions inferiority by destroying Russian warehouses (thereby lengthening Russian trucking distances) with long-range missiles...........To Read More...

Gasman's The Scientific Origins of National Socialism

By William Walter Kay Originally published on December 12, 2013

Few scholars have influenced culture as much as Prussian-born Professor Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). In the 1860s he hatched the scientific discipline of “Ecology” and the philosophical doctrine of “Monism.” In 1906 Haeckel launched the Monist League, which within a few years recruited several thousand members including many prominent intellectuals.

By 1914, within German-speaking academia, Monists dominated the biological, zoological, and anthropological faculties. In addition to an impressive involvement in the life sciences, Monism shared other similarities with modern environmentalism.

Monists believed their superior knowledge of nature and evolutionary biology afforded them unique insights into social problems.

Monists disparaged “Western Civilization” for the inflated importance it extended to humanity and for invidiously separating Man from Nature.

Monists romanticised primitive cultures and disparaged urban-industrial society.

While Monists cannot be considered leftist, they did oppose capitalism and were particularly militant in their desire to rid the land-use system of the “scourge of capitalist speculation.”

Monists fixated on an elitist and racist population-control/eugenics agenda. While posturing as hard-headed scientists, Monists described “Nature” in mystical, pantheistic terms. They attributed living qualities, even souls, to inanimate objects and to the world itself. Phrases like “Mother Earth” and “World Soul” appear ubiquitously in their writings.

Believing Christianity to be both an antiquated religion and an impediment to their political agenda, Monists sought to replace it with forms of neo-pagan Nature worship.

Professor Gasman is adamant that:

The modern theory of the totalitarian fascist state was adumbrated by the political and social ideology advanced by Haeckel and his followers. Its (Monism’s) major assumptions and proposals were in all important respects identical with the political and social program of later 20th century National Socialism.

The Scientific Origins of National Socialism came out in 1971 and was re-issued in 2004 with a lengthy new introduction. The original text was written without Gasman, having access to the Haeckel Archives. Two trips to these archives in 1991 to peruse hitherto unseen materials reinforced the connection between Haeckel and fascist ideology and provided grist for a separate text (Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology). Gasman recommends the two texts be studied together.

A condensation of the latter book has already been posted on this website (book review number 31). What follows is a condensation of the 2004 re-issue of the earlier book........To Read More....

 

Black Lives Matters, the Ford Foundation, and the Black Movement Oligarchy Part Three: The Ford Foundation and the Black Movement

William Walter Kay

Post-WWII an anathematized Ford family listened in horror to calls for their attainder just as inheritance taxes loomed. The Fords retained control of their Ford Motor Company by transferring the bulk of company stock to the Ford Foundation: a genuinely independent entity. 

For years Fords dominated the Foundation by dint of having selected the original Trustees. After the initial crew departed, however; and, after the Foundation exchanged its Ford shares for vaults of other blue-chip stock; the Fords’ influence waned. A tiff between the Fords and President Bundy over funding for the family’s favorite hospital foreshadowed Henry Ford II’s 1976 resignation from what had become a titular Chairmanship.

Foundations must disperse 5% of their assets annually. Foundations were supposed to spend themselves out of existence with tangible gifts; not create permanent bureaucracies. Fund managers now consistently hit higher than 5% returns, hence many foundations have become perpetuities acting at odds with original donor intent.

In 2019 the Ford Foundation declared assets of $13 billion and income of $800 million. Windfall profits are made selling shares that the Foundation purchased a half-century ago. As a charity, the Foundation pays no capital gains. Most of their holdings are now overseas and managed through their Cayman Island bank. The Foundation enjoys an autonomy unseen in a non-state actor since the religious orders of the Middle Ages.  

   

Ford’s 14 Trustees usually serve six-year terms. Vacancies are filled by sitting Trustees. The current Board has 6 Blacks, 5 Whites, 2 Latinos and 1 Asian. The Foundation’s first Black President, Franklin Thomas (r. 1979-1996) plotted Ford’s present trajectory and composition. 

The Board’s tokens are Chuck Robbins (Cisco), Lourdes Lopez (ballet aficionado), Francisco Cigarroa (Board Chairman, and a surgeon with minimal attachment to Ford) and Henry Ford III (the first Ford on Board since 1976). One financial wonk on Board might be a token. The other, Amy Falls, is a titan in her own right and a devoted Black Movement sympathiser. 

Trustees Ai-jen Poo, Cecile Richards and Bryan Stevenson are the field marshals.

Taiwanese-American Ms. Poo rides herd on a collection of societies moiling the grievances of immigrant women of color through her National Domestic Workers Association which receives million dollar dollops from Ford. 

Cecile Richards, daughter of Texas Governor Ann Richards, and former long-serving Planned Parenthood boss, is the driving force behind Supermajority – a political action group dedicated to mobilizing two million women for the 2020 election. 

Bryan Stevenson may be the richest Black Trustee and, aside from Walker, the most influential figure within the Black Movement Oligarchy. Stevenson Chairs Equal Justice Institute. The son of a Federal Government diversity enforcement officer, Stevenson joined Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) straight out of law school (1985); then fronted their Montgomery operations after 1989. When the 1994 Clinton Anti-Crime Bill cut SCHR’s funding, the MacArthur Foundation rescued Stevenson allowing him to rename and sustain the Montgomery office. 

Other notable Black Ford Trustees:

Gabrielle Sulzberger (JD MBA Princeton/Harvard) Chairs Ford’s governance and nomination committees. Sulzberger ran Whole Foods Inc for years, and now co-owns a Pasadena-based venture capital firm. Her MasterCard Directorship nets her another $346,000 a year. She serves on several non-profits; including the anti-sexual harassment powerhouse Time’s Up where Sulzberger sits as Treasurer. She married New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in 2014. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art accepted her as a Trustee in 2019.  

Ursula Burns worked for XEROX for 37 years concluding with a decade as CEO/Chair. Burns is currently a Director of Exxon, American Express, Nestle and Uber. She is engaged in several youth-focussed charities and is herself a donor.   

Foundation President (and Trustee) Darren Walker rules at the sufferance of his fellow Black Trustees. In their good graces Walker disburses over $500 million a year in arts, cultural, and political activism grants. 

Walker is a 60-year-old openly gay Black man who flogs his roots in small-town Texas poverty, and his reliance on government during an extended education, as a modern American Dream. Intriguingly, upon graduating (without distinction) from a Texas law school, Walker got snapped-up by a white-shoe New York firm. A year later he was working, intriguingly, in UBS’s capital markets division. 

Walker fell to Earth in the mid-1990s finding himself volunteering, then working, for the Abyssinian Development Corp – a Black housing charity in Harlem. In 2002 he landed a gig at the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined Ford in 2010; becoming President in 2013. He is on the Board of the National Gallery and of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Walker belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Walker’s $1.1 million-a-year salary is not Ford’s highest. The Chief Investment Officer makes $2.6 million and has three subordinates earning $1.3 million per year. Walker’s seven VPs earn between $500,000 and $650,000. (Walker catches an additional $301,667 as a PepsiCo Director.)

Ford promotes: abortion, land conservation, LGBT rights, immigration liberalization, and climate protection.

Ford’s annual USA Black Movement budget, broadly defined, hovered around $125 million going into 2020; or, about half the total philanthropic contribution to this Movement.

For context, in 2015 Walker gave $125 million to City of Detroit creditors to spare the City’s museum the embarrassment of having to auction off some of their collection.

* Part of Ford’s contribution to the Black Movement comes through their documentary film operations (which may be America’s largest). By express design Ford docs spur viewers onto activism.

Ford’s current Form 990 lists 78 grants, ranging from $50,000 to $2.5 million, to documentary producers. Ford also funds documentary training institutes like Brave New Films which received $600,000 to “increase youth involvement in social issues.” Another $225,000 went to the Union Docs fellowship program.

Ford docs are must-sees at major film festivals. Ford funds the: Detroit Film Festival, Hot Docs Film Festival, Hip Hop Theatre Fest; and has a strong relationship with Sundance. Ford docs have won countless Emmys and Oscars (yet “Ford Foundation” is seldom heard in acceptance speeches).

Ford’s Just Films subsidiary pioneered the slick, emotive Black-Police-Conflict genre. Sample trailers:

Whose Streets, The Force, K-Town 1992, Always in Season, and Crime and Punishment.

Black Student Unions and Black-led non-profits host screenings of these docs. Discussions and pitches follow each showing. Doc producers tour to attend post-show Q&A sessions; and Ford pays for that too.

* Ford gives as much to “flow-throughs” to groom and mother its Black Movement grantees as it gives to those grantees themselves.

Originally deployed by the environmental movement, “flow-throughs” are registered charities that are used as conduits between philanthropies and upstart groups. Flow-throughs launder money such that philanthropies are shielded from liability for damages arising from the upstarts’ “civil disobedience.”

Today’s flow-throughs micro-manage frontline advocacy networks. Minneapolis-based Borealis Philanthropy, a 25-emloyee charity, received $7.7 million from Ford to provide techno-training to Ford’s fleet of activist non-profits. Borealis also coaches activists on how to “strengthen communication skills” and “develop consistent narratives.”

Inside Borealis’ clinic we find: BLM LA, (Colin Kaepernick’s) Know Your Rights, Afrikan Black Coalition, Assata’s Daughters, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Black Futures Lab, Organization for Black Struggle, and Black Workers for Justice et al.

Neo Philanthropy received $10 million from Ford for similar activist mentoring. The 50-employee, Bethesda-headquartered, Burness Communications is using $7.1 million of Ford money to provide digital communications training to Ford-funded non-profits. Ford gave the octopine Tides Foundation $6.9 million to nurture prison reform advocacy. People’s Action ($1.85 million in Ford grants) is an activist training institute; as is Leadership Conference Education Fund ($4.6 million). New America got $1.75 million to provide “cross-sectional leadership training.”

Ford’s “BUILD” plan envisions an armada of social justice orgs, no longer sustained by responses to short-term individual non-profit solicitations, but rather through long-term block grants entrusted to flow-throughs mandated to do: “much more extensive due diligence at the front end.”

* Ford spends millions analysing and courting other foundations. Into this expense category falls their funding of the Association of Black Foundation Executives’ annual confab. ABFE is a 50-year-old venue for Black philanthropy wonks. ABFE’s 16 all-Black Directors all support the Black Movement.

ABFE Chair Karen McNiel-Miller, is CEO of Colorado Health Foundation (assets $2.6 billion, annual grants: $80 million). McNiel-Miller’s “Health Equity” team cooperates with fellow ABFE Board member, Lauren Casteel’s Colorado Women’s Foundation.

ABFE Director James Head is CEO of Oakland’s East Bay Community Foundation (ECBF, assets: $251 million; annual grants: $50 million). Head has been in the philanthropic/non-profit biz for 35 years; as has his wife. ECBF pays Head $321,000 a year.

Head’s failure to shunt substantial coin to Black Movement groups indicates limited discretion. Nevertheless, ECBF’s 2018 grants included: Prison Radio Project ($10,000), Freedom Inc. ($12,500), Blackout Collective ($7,500), Brothers on the Rise ($20,000), Oakland Rising/Movement Strategy Centre ($70,000), Ryse Center ($103,050), Time for Change ($70,000), Dignity and Power Now ($15,000), and Black Organizing Project ($25,000). 

Eight ABFE Directors are “VPs” or “Managing Directors” from foundations; notably: Cory S. Anderson (Winthrop Rockefeller), Kenneth Jones (MacArthur) Wendy Lewis Jackson (Kresge) and Antoinette Malveaux (Casey).

Enlivening ABFE get-togethers are Directors Stephanie Bell-Rose whose TIAA employs five to study academic trends; and Melissa Deshields whose 15-employee Frontline Solutions coaches activists and advises philanthropies.

Ford, Casey et al also participate in Race and Equity in Philanthropy, a project of Marga Inc. – a 12-employee, 800-member networking enterprise piloted by Movement Oligarch, David Maurrasse. Walker recently shot Maurrasse another $100,000.

Ford and Kellogg co-fund Borealis’ Racial Equity in Philanthropy Fund which last year paid $1.5 million to 17 non-profits to: “educate and equip funders to integrate racial equity and practises into their grantmaking.”

Shaming and badgering foundations works. In addition to the 9 abovementioned, the following 14 foundations funded the Black Movement before the Floyd riots (more have joined since):  California Endowment, Edward Hazen Foundation, Seattle Foundation, California Wellness Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, NoVo Foundation, Woods Fund Chicago, Jacob Langeloth, Lumina, James Irvine, Ben and Jerry, Rockefeller, Nathan Cummings, and Open Society.

Black Lives Matter, the Ford Foundation, and the Black Movement Oligarchy Part Two: Black Lives Matter July 2013 to July 2020

William Walter Kay
 

“Black Lives Matter” is the main slogan, and touchstone affirmation, of the Black Movement-led police reform campaign. 

“Black Lives Matters” also appears in the names of dozens of newly minted non-profit societies and other corporations. 

While ownership of “Black Lives Matters” remains contested, a clique attached to the Oakland-based non-profit, Thousand Currents, have effectively monopolized the brand.

The July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the Trayvon Martin shooting sparked protests in several cities; with some escalating into mini-riots. Soon after, Alicia Garza used “Black lives matter” in a Facebook post. Patrisse Cullors created the hashtag. Opal Tometi registered the domain name. 

All three members of this BLM Troika were Black Movement professionals. As of July 2013: Cullors was a 30-year-old, Queer, prison abolitionist touring California with a one-woman play retelling her brother’s deterioration during bouts of incarceration.  Tometi was a 28-year-old employee of the foundation-funded, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). She had been employed non-stop by non-profits since attaining her M.A. (Advocacy). 
 
The 34-year-old Garza (B.A. Sociology) had 10 years’ experience as a professional organizer/activist with San Francisco/Oakland groups agitating around: LGBT issues, gentrification and police brutality against Blacks.  In July 2014 New York’s BLM milieu rallied 2,500 people to protest the killing of Eric Garner.
 
In August 2014 buses and caravans transported up to 500 BLM/Freedom Riders to the Ferguson/St. Louis area during the Michael Brown riots. Many Freedom Riders formed BLM Chapters upon returning home. 
 
By July 2016 thirty-two BLM chapters had blossomed. Local protests publicised police wrongdoing but none setoff riots nor attracted sustained media attention. 
 
During this time the Black Movement Oligarchy staked its claim on the BLM brand and fully co-opted the BLM Troika. The Ford Foundation, in December 2014, launched the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) “Coalition” comprised from forty loyal grantees.  Meanwhile back on the streets, in mid-July 2016:

a) Baton Rouge BLM-affiliates responded to the killing of Alton Sterling by blocking a highway near a police station. During the ensuing riot a gun-store was looted, allegedly by the NBPP;

b) In Dallas a Black man steeped in BLM discourse (albeit inclined toward the NBPP) went on a cop-shooting spree, killing five wounding eleven;

c) Minneapolis BLM incited a riot in retaliation for the killing of Philando Castile. A busy highway was blocked at nightfall. Masked protestors openly drank alcohol. Speakers lionised those willing to get arrested. Projectiles, including improvised firecrackers, were thrown at police and motorists;

d) In Baton Rouge another Black Separatist went on a cop-shooting spree, killing three, wounding seven.  

On July 19, 2016 the Ford Foundation and several other philanthropies kicked-off the Black-led Movement Fund with a collective multi-year pledge to give M4BL $100 million. 
 
On September 7, 2016, the BLM Troika surrendered the BLM brand to the international aid charity, Thousand Currents (TC, est. in 1984 as IDEX, changed name in 2016). Under this agreement:

“…IDEX provides fiduciary oversight, financial management, and other administrative services to Black Lives Matter. As a 501 c 3 public charity IDEX can receive grants and tax deductible donations on behalf of BLM.”

TC had not hitherto been an important Black Movement actor; even its’ Black-led creds are debatable. Previously, TC had promoted eco-agriculture in Africa and Asia. (Little money ever left Oakland.) 

TC’s budgets doubled post-2016. TC’s overall operations raised $5.9 million in 2019 from scores of foundations (Packard, MacArthur, and UBS). The 2016 Agreement lifted TC’s Black board members up to the Black Movement’s Mount Olympus; albeit on the tailfins of the BLM Troika.   
 
As of June 30, 2017 TC had $2.4 million in its BLM fund; and, had by that time released $2 million from said fund. Over the next year they released another $1.9 million from this fund, yet raised enough to end with $2.6 million. Another $1.8 million was released in 2019. On the eve of the George Floyd riots TC’s BLM fund stood at $3.6 million. Monies disbursed from TC’s BLM fund went 83% to head office salaries and consultants etc. Only 6% went to BLM Chapters. 
 
On February 2018 TC hired Kailee Scales to run their BLM operations at $140,000 per year. (Scales still lists herself as Senior Managing Director at Teach America – another $100,000 per year.) 
 
In the 1990s Scales was a Brooklyn-based Democratic Party fundraiser. From 2000 to 2020 she worked in senior capacities at 8 different non-profits including one led by Swedish Royalty. As a former professional climate activist, Scales dreams of “paving the way for sustainable legacy building” at BLM. Scales launched a BLM-funded Fine Arts program. She uses the word “global” a lot. 
 
Scales is Managing Director of: Black Lives Matter Network Action Fund and Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc. Both entities were incorporated in Delaware after the 2016 Agreement with Thousand Currents; the latter at the curiously late date of October 16, 2017. Neither has tax exempt charitable status.
 
Between February 2018 and May 2020 (under Scales’ command) functioning BLM Chapters shrank from 32 to 10. Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis and Philadelphia remained stalwarts although the latter was all-volunteer. BLM New York, BLM St. Louis and BLM Cincinnati quit in protest of Head Office manipulations and appropriations. The closest a BLM demo came to a riot during this period was the March 2018 Stephon Clark protest in Sacramento where a highway was blocked and fighting broke out after a vehicle hit a protestor.
 
Then after a two-year abeyance, in May 2020 BLM demos spiked in ferocity and number; and, relocated to retail districts. Protests over the killings of Ahmaud Arbery (d. February 23) and Breonna Taylor (d. March 13) were muted by the pandemic but then popped like flash-mobs prior to May 26. On that date, the George Floyd video ignited a nation-wide riot wave featuring much organised looting of retail shops. 
 
Between May and July 2020 TC/BLM raked-in over $20 million. Details remain sketchy in part because the reportage often conflates donations to the overall Black Movement’s “Racial Justice” campaign with donations made specifically to the TC/BLM partnership.  Apple, Google, Microsoft and Walmart et al have collectively made hundreds of millions of dollars in pledges but established Movement orgs like NAACP and EJI will reap most of this money; not TC/BLM. On the hand TC/BLM is harvesting millions in small donations. As well, the Korean boyband, BTS, and their fan army, have given them over $2 million.  On June 11, BLM Head Office offered $500,000 grants to each of thirteen BLM Chapters. On June 17 they unveiled a $12 million fund (apparently incorporating the $500,000 grants announced earlier in the week). 
 
As for the BLM Troika:  Cullors and Garza are now both millionaires; Tometi can’t be far behind. Post-July 2013: Cullors assumed prominent Movement roles mainly in and around BLM Los Angeles – an organization tutored by the Ford Foundation. Her 2017 memoir was a media-stoked instant bestseller. 
 
Tometi became BAJI’s Executive Director under shower of awards. Post-Floyd she stepped away from BAJI to write and to serve as a BLM spokeswoman. 
 
Garza’s writings have been published in leading news outlets. She founded the seven-employee Black Futures Lab which in 2019 completed: “an online and direct outreach survey of 30,000 of the most politically engaged Black people in the United States.”  Garza is also now Special Projects Coordinator for Ai-jen Poo’s National Domestic Workers Association. In 2019 Garza, along with Poo and Cecile Richards, co-founded Supermajority - a massive womanist get-out-the-vote group. Poo and Richards are Ford Foundation Trustees. 

Black Lives Matters, the Ford Foundation, and the Black Movement Oligarchy Part One: The Black Movement Oligarchy and the Tactical Riot

William Walter Kay

Racists presume the Black Movement must be the puppet of some non-Black eminence. Ignoramuses blame Black Movement activism on foreign powers or on diablos like Antifa or Soros. No, the Black Movement is as American as baseball. A more fruitful hypothesis might be that the Black Movement seems to be perfecting, and profiting from, the incitement of riots.    

“Black Movement” is not the sum of all politico-cultural activity undertaken by America’s 40 million Blacks.

The Black Movement is a solidarity community of people emphatically proclaiming Black identity whilst engaging in political activity specifically directed at advancing the interests of Black people. The Movement’s radical wing self-defines as: Black Separatist, Black Nationalist or Black Liberationist. All Movement members deploy modern civil/human rights rhetoric. Many participate in Affirmative Action, Environmental Justice and/or Health Equity initiatives.

Black Movement organizations range from exclusive cabals to open associations. Duly incorporated, formally-structured, professionally-staffed non-profit societies have supplanted the all-volunteer bootstrap affairs of yesteryear. A flotilla of Black-orientated non-profits rafts down a $250-million-per-year philanthropic river.

Some Movement orgs have grown ivy. 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which sprang from the 1908 Springfield Riot, boasts 500,000 members across 2,200 Chapters. CEO Derrick Johnson earns $318,000 a year overseeing NAACP’s $35 million budget. NAACP Chair Leon Russell is a former top Affirmative Action enforcement official. NAACP membership overlaps with memberships of multiple Black professional, business and religious associations. 

Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) began as the Montgomery branch of an Atlanta-based prisoners’ rights law firm that was neither Black-led nor Black-focussed. EJI gradually re-focussed onto the legal and economic plight of Blacks after its independence (1995).

Long the darling of philanthropists, EJI attracted great beneficence at the dawn of the Black Lives Matter era. Between 2013 and 2016 annual donations rose from $3.2 million to $38 million. In 2018 EJI opened two Black history museums with funding from Google, Ford Foundation and Jon Stryker. EJI owns over $85 million in assets.

NAACP and EJI soar above thousands of aspiring Black Movement enterprises. In this ecosystem resource scarcity equals inactivity equals death. Failure to secure financial backing results in a venture disbanding with its core activists moving to other projects.

Thus, Black Movement orgs embrace multi-level marketing. Cookie-cutter websites sport prominent “donate” boxes. Internet fundraising prevails but mail-outs and phone banks are still deployed. Most orgs sell logo-laden t-shirts, hats and mugs. Other fundraising options include documentary film showings and cause-focussed artistic performances etc.

Enduring success hinges on foundation grants. Hundreds of Black Movement non-profits receive annual grants in the $50,000 to $500,000 range. Grants pay for rent, equipment and salaries – including those of the ubiquitous fundraising staff. (EJI spends $350,000 a year fundraising.) Groups can earn extra dollars working on foundation-funded “Get out the (Democratic) Vote” campaigns.

To mobilise resources struggling Movement orgs produce spectacles fashioned from time-honoured symbolic and tactical repertoires. One 1960s New Left scholar whimsically recounts his movement’s repertoire thusly:

“…petitioning, rock-throwing, canvassing, letter-writing, vigils, sit-ins, freedom rides, lobbying, arson, draft resistance, assault, hair growing, non-violent civil disobedience, operating a free store, rioting, confrontations with cops, consciousness raising, screaming obscenities, singing, hurling shit, marching, raising a clenched fist, bodily assault, tax refusal, guerrilla theatre, campaigning, looting, sniping, living theatre, rallies, smoking pot, destroying draft records, blowing up ROTC buildings, court trials, murder, immolation, strikes and writing various manifestos or platforms.” (1)

 Black Movement non-profit staffers endure daily meetings aimed at building support for changing this or that law or decision. They contact officials and journalists. They stuff envelopes, send tweets, hang posters, chauffeur volunteers, and staff tables where Movement literature is displayed. They organise demonstrations, sit-ins, marches and occupations. The amount of cash available to frontline orgs determines the speed and scale of their protest mobilization.

Movement oligarchs step on the accelerator; protestors pour onto the streets.

A well-woven coven of a few dozen Black Movement Oligarchs control hundreds of non-profits (cumulative workforce: 2,500ish). Oligarchs sculpt Movement ideology. They select and frame grievances. They forge coalitions with internal and external elites. They garner money, goodwill and symbolic gestures from parties, businesses and philanthropies. They articulate Black people’s interests in speeches and debates before key audiences; and, they negotiate directly with media bosses.

This Oligarchy fights a two-front war.

In the boardrooms they jostle with Environmentalists, the Arts Community et al – agencies seeking access to the same philanthropic purses.

In the streets they struggle to maintain creds in the face of rival Black Movement mobilizations led by:

Not Fucking Around Coalition, New Black Panther Party (NBPP), NBPP-Self-Defense, Revolutionary BPP, Black Women’s Self Defense, Black O.P.T.s/BLM-NYC, Black Riders Liberation Party, Mass Action For Black Liberation, Socialist Rifle Association, Hands Up Don’t Shoot, the 73-mosque Nation of Islam, and 137 Black Israelite congregations.

Oligarchs lure marginalised Blacks back from the brink; a service appreciated in the boardrooms.

Movement leaders interact with government officials and address their demands to government. They demand greater control over government. “Defund Police” is an effort to transfer portions of City Police budgets to Movement-controlled “Community Policing” groups. 

Sections of the Black Movement operate inside government. Variously-labeled “Black Studies” faculties grace 75 government-funded universities and colleges. A revolving door separates Profs in these faculties from the academic legion employed by Black-led foundations. This campus milieu mingles furtively with Movement non-profit staff. Black Student Unions are great conference organisers and deliver needed protest fodder.  

The selective championing of simmering grievances provides capacity-building opportunities. Non-profits are tailored to suit distinct collective action arenas. The “Health Equity” sub-movement agitates around the ways in which Blacks are discriminated against and/or underserved by the medical system. “Environmental Justice” explores how environmental policies inflict inordinate toxicity onto Black neighborhoods. “Racial Justice” is a nation-wide sub-movement deploying scores of localised criminal justice reform groups.

Within the Racial Justice sub-movement a further subset specialize in politicizing specific allegations of excessive force used by white cops on Blacks. Groups active, in whole or in part, within this specialised police-abuse protest subsidiary include the likes of:

Race Forward, Color of Change, Assata’s Daughters, Colorlines, Reclaim the Block, Campaign Zero, Black Futures Lab, Organization for Black Struggle, L.A. Community Action Network, BLD PWR, One Love Global, New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice, Justice Teams Network, We the People of Detroit, Still She Rises Tulsa, Forward Together/Echoing Ida, Sister Song Inc, Detention Watch Network, and Power Coalition et al.

Despite radical veneers such groups receive millions of dollars in foundation grants. Between July 2013 and January 2020 funding to this police-abuse protest subsidiary increased tenfold.

The “grassroots-radical” and “funded-moderate” wings of the frontline Black Movement march arm-in-arm at demonstrations. Some non-profit staff secretly belong to insurrectionary groups. Radical sympathisers lurk within the Oligarchy; …details unknown.

Both Movement wings facilitate the same riots.

Both Movement wings have chapters, cells and offices scattered across the same two dozen cities, which like cities everywhere, are bedevilled with: shoplifting, smash-and-grabs, truck-and-chains, second-story jobs i.e. stealing from stores.

Every city has a thieves’ market. Dealers accepting loot for payment soon hook-up with used-goods store-owners. A thousand micro-mafias spirit purloined merchandise from city to city through invisible chains of pawn-shops and second-hand stores. This goes around in every town with many a mastermind morphing into a jailbird.

Foundation-funded Racial Justice groups stalk poor neighborhoods; their Target Cohort: Blacks entangled in the criminal justice system; many of whom have been convicted of shoplifting and other forms of stealing from stores.

Racial Justice staff routinely interact with their Target Cohort. They gather them unto catered meetings. They file applications on their behalf. They counsel them. They politicise them. They publish academic papers about them.

When Racial Justice groups heed a Black Lives Matters call to rally troops for a demo they are, at the same time, amassing plenty of people convicted of stealing from stores.

BLM’s May 2020 venue switch, from highways to uptown, brought protestors within a stones-throw of ill-fortified shops with valuable merchandise dangling inside.

Standard Anarchist ‘Booze-up-and-Riot’ Recipe:

1. Early evening: picketers block downtown street;  
2. Provocative speakers harangue cops and trapped motorists;
3. As night falls, and protestors numbers swell: distribute masks, whiskey and missiles; then: 
4. Deface monuments: light fires, break windows and steal from stores.       

Every social movement is a shadow dance of formal and informal organization. Black Movement Oligarchs hold countless meetings; on-record and off. Oligarchs are in daily formal and informal contact with the Brainiac’s inside the sit-rooms at their “flow-throughs” (intermediaries); and with their frontline non-profit managers. Non-profit staff socialise freely with their street-involved clientele. Orders to incite riots grapevine from Head Office to sidewalk without hitting a keystroke. 

The Movement’s B-side consists of militants with legit roots in the hoods. They need no intros to their local underworlds. They too put out the word. Whether or not they capitalize on these looting bonanzas to mobilize significant resources posits a beckoning question.

Footnote

Snow, David (Ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements; Blackwell Publishing, 2007, page 264. (Emphasis added to tactics currently used by the Black Movement.) For a condensed version of this groundbreaking textbook click here.