Earlier this month the anti-cop protests, which certainly contain a lot of genuinely upset people, took a bit of a blow to their collective reputation when the #CutTheCheck movement broke out on social media. It highlighted the fact that at least some of the protesters in Ferguson, Baltimore and other locales were not only bussed in, but were being paid for their social activism.

Hired protesters with the Black Lives Matter movement have started a #CutTheCheck hashtag and held a sit-in at the offices for the successor group to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Missouri after the group allegedly stopped paying them.

FrontPage Magazine reports that Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to demonstrate in Ferguson. Last week, hired protesters who haven’t been paid held a sit-in at MORE’s offices and posted a demand letter online.

MORE is the re-branded Missouri branch of ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2010, FrontPage reported. MORE and other groups supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have received millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros.

The initial reports were a bit generic, but since then there have been additional details coming forth. Weasel Zippers blog has a very thorough roundup of the Soros funded activities and the key players involved.

MORE and OBS, two groups funded by George Soros, advertised money available for people willing to travel to protest (@organizemo is the twitter account of MORE)

After protesters protested not getting their checks from MORE on May 14th, MORE allegedly distributed the following list as to who was paid to protest in Ferguson and elsewhere, to show where the money had been going.

Follow the link for the photographic evidence. The amounts of money involved and the numbers of recipients are not trivial, though they obviously don’t account for the entire throngs showing up at some of these marches and related events. When you’re handing out that kind of money, you can’t just have hundreds of people showing up individually looking for their pay. The cash had to be doled out through a couple of central disbursing activities and those are the ones who seem to have drawn the ire of the hired actors when payday never rolled around. One example was former SEIU and ACORN organizer Jeff Ordower. He was caught on video, as shared on Twitter, trying to answer to the employees who were still waiting for their checks.

WCC hot seat pic.twitter.com/Uo65IC2Uuz

— Search4Swag (@search4swag) May 14, 2015

There are more cash handlers listed, and the outcry from the paid actors forced them out into the open on Twitter and Facebook when I’m sure their financiers would have preferred they remain in the shadows. They include Brittany Ferrell and Ashley Yates, who distributed (or failed to distribute) thousands of dollars through the agency of not only MORE, but Millenial Activists United (MAU).

In a way, this is yet another of the many wonderful aspects of capitalism. If you can get an acting job which pays the bills – even as a street artist / protester – then you have every right to do so. But you also deserve to get paid for your labors. And when that part of the system broke down, the actors went public. If it weren’t for this marvelous system of employment we might never have found out the details of precisely who was ginning up the residents in the streets and, perhaps more importantly, who was funding the entire shindig.