Far from being a grassroots movement, Black Lives Matter is a pawn for high-powered, wealthy left-wing foundations, intent on altering the politics of the United States.  Valerie Richardson reports in the Washington Times that the puppet-masters have invested and pledged a hundred million dollars to the movement.

For all its talk of being a street uprising, Black Lives Matter is increasingly awash in cash, raking in pledges of more than $100 million from liberal foundations and others eager to contribute to what has become the grant-making cause du jour.

The Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy recently announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund [BLMF], a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition.

That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.

"The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America," said the Borealis announcement.

In doing so, however, the foundations have aligned themselves with the staunch left-wing platform of the Movement for Black Lives, which unveiled a policy agenda shortly after the fund was announced accusing Israel of being an "apartheid state" guilty of "genocide."

One of the stealth triumphs of the American left is the hijacking of vast wealth bequeathed to tax-exempt foundations, usually by entrepreneurs who wished to leave a benevolent legacy.  By placing ideological comrades in the bureaucracies and on the boards, the wealth has been channeled to left-wing causes, where it is often deceptively masked behind a façade of citizen activism.  Because the boards of directors of these foundations are self-perpetuating, they are accountable to no one outside their sphere of associations.  Often, the foundations veer into activity that was not a priority for the donor.  The Ford Foundation, it should never be forgotten, created La Raza.

I was disappointed that the tax reform bills under consideration leave these unaccountable bodies with their tax privileges intact.  I suppose that on a practical level, the opposition that could be ginned up (starving babies in Africa!) was not worth taking on.  Taxing the endowments of the richest universities less than 2% a year is a start, I suppose.

But it is time to plant the seeds of change and build a public consensus that an immortal, wealthy, unaccountable body meddling in politics is not in the public interest.  We must energetically point out the stealthy political operations of these plutocrats and demand tax reforms that limit a foundation to 20 years, after which it must either have spent its resources or forward them to the Treasury, since the donor's intent cannot be secure longer than that period.