They want funding the paychecks for the informants who they probably want to have running the whole thing. Seen it again and again. Certain elements of the leadership are all subsidized, usually from some academic institutions. Then the DOJ wants their piece of the action in the scene, so they want some of their people in it. Another thing is a bunch of the protest organizers in different stuff run their leadership meetings through those crowds.
The infighting on that in California, when it really boils down to the politics (as explained by politically connected University Proffs) the real money as in percentages of the state budget and real campaigning, is argued between the interests of the prison guards unions and their subsidiaries, and the teachers unions and their subsidiaries. Due to the numbers of students, teachers, construction and necessary non-negotiable funding, all others are secondary. For example, they will close down entire divisions and operations of the DOJ, decriminalizing or no longer prosecuting some particular class of crime, but all hell breaks loose when someone talks about shuttering a prison. Likewise, shuttering a high school is a big deal, heads roll over that, but university stuff always goes back and forth over outside grants. What the university profs always resent is high school administrators somehow always getting their mitts into money meant to go to University professors to transfer skills and knowledge to students, when it ends up being for political indoctrination among school system administrators. They infiltrate other people's stuff all the time to find dirt on each other and jockey for one-upmanship in extorting someone on funding.
Considering both factions are Democratic aligned, when it does split, the prison system goes "conservative" while the schools go "liberal", but the major funding transfers to DHS and related spy agencies, that's a bit of a different animal since they are not necessarily just in the business of filling prison beds to get bigger prison bonds. Recruitment is often from the spy agencies and the military, but we get the strong impression that a lot of those people lay their in-between operations holding patterns in the prison system, which is established turf for a lot of people, and then we saw those conflicts a few years ago decrying the woes of a "profit based" (read market accountable) private prison system. The real offense; non public worker union prison system.
What you then have is an "inner circle" trying to figure out which government organizations to hustle for income and funding. It's another breed of tax parasite.
My dad has been into the weirdo stuff a long time, but competes with the likes of this chick "Starhawk" who claims to have "founded" Neopaganism, (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starhawk) she is just as full of shit and jive as everyone else in her scene but had this really slick way of creating well thought out Democrat party line narratives that would go with their whole invented religion sort of thing, and that ex-FBI guy who converted to Native American spirituality and became a bigshot at AIM for a while. Apparently a guilt ridden VN era SF guy who had been on the government side at Wounded Knee then at some point switched sides or infiltrated, nobody really knows for sure. I keep forgetting the name, but the AIM people all bitch back and forth about him as others bitch back and forth about the tribal disenrollment issue if someone does not meet bloodline requirements in tribes that get gambling payouts. Nasty stuff, they have some pretty serious mafia type wars over it.