May 20, 2015
FrontPage Mag: by
ACORN’s successor group in Missouri has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to generate civil unrest in Ferguson, the troubled St. Louis suburb where black youth Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer last August.
We know this because some of the protesters haven’t been paid and, now, they are demanding what they were promised. They held a sit-in at the offices of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and posted a demand letter online.
MORE is the rebranded Missouri branch of the former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) which filed for bankruptcy in late 2010. That ACORN state chapter reconstituted itself in December 2009 as MORE under orders from ACORN’s national headquarters. President Obama used to work for ACORN and he represented it in court as a lawyer. (See my previous article on MORE.)
MORE has been active in the Ferguson protests and in efforts to free jailed demonstrators so they can continue vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing projectiles and human waste at cops, and engaging in the Left’s usual modes of so-called nonviolent protest. MORE believes that protesters should be given a blank check to inflict whatever harm they wish on the community in pursuit of social justice.
The unpaid rent-a-mob operatives complain that MORE stiffed them the same way ACORN did to hired protesters throughout its 40 years of radical left-wing rabble-rousing. The ACORN network’s leadership was always predominantly white while its foot soldiers were mostly non-white, a fact that caused tension within the criminal community organizing outfit.
Blogger Kristinn Taylor reported at St. Louis-based blogger Jim Hoft’s website, Gateway Pundit, that “[b]lack activists held a sit-in at the office of MORE … on Thursday to press their claim that groups led by whites have collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations off of the Black Lives Matter movement without paying the Black participants their fair share.”
One of the angry protesters can be observed threatening MORE executive director Jeff Ordower, a bald white man, in a video posted to the Twitter account of @search4swag on May 14 with the hashtag #CutTheCheck.
(Screenshot credit, Twitter)
“We gonna just fuck you up,” she said to Ordower from across a boardroom-style table.
Ordower, an outspoken vote fraud apologist, previously ran Missouri ACORN and oversaw ACORN’s Midwest operations. He was also an SEIU organizer in Texas.
In his online biography, Ordower boasts that he was “one of a group of founders of the Chicago based organization Gender Just, which merged queer, class and racial justice.” The bio states that he “is welcoming co-conspirators in attempts to scale up numbers of radical organizers who can financially support themselves in the work.”
In other words, Ordower admits that paying organizers isn’t exactly a priority for him.
But a group called Millennial Activists United posted a demand for payment online. MAU describes itself in its Twitter profile as an “[a]ctivist collective for youth organization. Created by young, queer, Black women. Education, grassroots power & leadership.”
Immediately below is the statement MAU posted:
On May 14, 2015 many individuals and organizations of the protest movement that began in Ferguson, Missouri organized a sit-in in the office of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE). The demand was simple: Cut the checks.
Early in the movement, non-profit organization MORE, formerly known as the St. Louis chapter of ACORN, and local St. Louis organization Organization for Black Struggle created a joint account in which national donors from all over the world have donated over $150,000 to sustain the movement. Since then, the poor black [sic] of this movement who served as cash generators to bring money into St. Louis have seen little to none of that money. Furthermore, since the influx of funding has started, poor black people continue to take to the streets all the while losing their homes, vehicles, ability to feed themselves and their families, and suffering from trauma and mental illness with no ability to afford quality mental health services. Questions have been raised as to how the movement is to sustain when white non-profits are hoarding monies collected of off [sic] black bodies? When we will [sic] hold the industry of black suffering accountable? The people of the community are fed up and the accountability begins here and now.
This isn’t about MORE. This is about black lives in the Black Lives Matter movement who are literally broke and starving. There is an insidious strand of racism and white supremacy that exists in this movement and it is called the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. As a by-product, it provides decent salaries and comfort to many people who are not affected by the disparities that they are trying to address. This money is typically in the hands of white people who oversee the types of services that the non-profit provides, while having select token black people to spearhead the conversations within and to the community.
We NEED to be thinking about justice for black people. This means white people must renounce their loyalty to the social normalcy that maintains white power and control. If black lives really matter, justice and self-determination for black people would mean the black community would control it’s [sic] own political and economic resources.
It is asinine to believe that black people can continue to organize and take to the street when they can barely meet their basic needs. In St. Louis, organizers and protesters depleted $50,000 of the available funds and dispersed it among the people in the movement in no particular order. Jeff Ordower, executive director of MORE, stated that another $57,000 is expected in the next one to two weeks in which those funds will also be dispersed to the black people in the movement.
Moving forward, we are building a board of accountability within this movement. We must funnel economic into this movement through the hands of black people who are fighting with and for black life. More on this board will be discussed as we develop.
So MORE doesn’t seem to be strapped for cash.
MORE and other groups supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have received millions of dollars from radical America-hating financier George Soros (net worth: $24 billion). In the fall MORE even created an Amazon wedding registry so supporters could donate rioting supplies. And yesterday it was reported that hip hop performer Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé (combined net worth: over $1 billion) wired tens of thousands of dollars to help bail out protesters jailed in the Black Lives Matter riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. Perhaps that money went to MORE.
More at FrontPage Mag
Disclaimer: This article was not written by Lorra B.
The Silent Soldier 