Time’s reporter writes of the movement:
It all started in Canada, of all places. The editors of the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters called for a Tahrir Square "moment" on Sept. 17 in lower Manhattan to protest what they called the disproportionate power of the U.S. corporate elite.
That’s the only mention of Adbusters in the article. But what kind of power does an obscure magazine in Vancouver have to be able to mobilize the entire left in the United States into a revolutionary force? It doesn’t take much sleuthing to find out. As every reader knows, everything is now on the Internet, including Adbusters. And of course, Adbusters has been a recipient of funding from the Tides Foundation, one of Soros' channels for getting money to organizations he likes.
It turns out that the Adbusters Media Foundation, which publishes Adbusters, was founded in 1989 by two radicals, Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz. Lasn, the intellectual driving force behind the magazine, was born in Estonia in 1942. He spent his childhood in a German refugee camp and in Australia. In the 1960s, he founded a market research company in Toyko, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver. For 20 years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board.
But then, somewhere along the line he developed an intense hatred of the American consumer economy and became an anti-capitalist revolutionary. The magazine has fostered the development of an international anti-consumerist movement described in this way:
We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.
In his first book, Culture Jam, Lasn argues that consumerism is the fundamental evil of the modern era. He calls the "meme war" a battle of ideas to shift Western society away from consumer capitalism toward eco-communalism.
His second book, Design Anarchy, calls on graphic designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals to turn from working in service to corporate and political pollution of both the planet and "the mental environment," and instead embrace a radical new aesthetic devoted to social and environmental responsibility.
Lasn has been accused of anti-Semitism by members of the media for his self-published 2004 article, "Why won't anyone admit they're Jewish?" establishing a link between Jewish groups who do not explicitly announce their religion and ultimate control of the U.S. financial community. In 2010, Lasn's magazine published a photo montage featuring spurious comparisons of the WWII Warsaw ghetto to the current day Gaza Strip. This has drawn the ire of historians and Holocaust survivors. It may also explain why some of the OWS participants have made anti-Semitic remarks,and are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
So far Adbusters has successfully launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week, and Occupy Wall Street. The magazine is also known for its "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements. In English, Adbusters has bi-monthly American, Canadian, Australian, UK, and international editions of each issue. The sister organizations of Adbusters include Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire and Casseurs de Pub in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway, Adbusters Sverige in Sweden, and Culture Jammers in Japan.
Lawrence Morley writes in Adbusters:
Revolt, if it is to be successful, must come from the mind; a growing unease and dissatisfaction with things as they are. Revolt may be leaderless, but it cannot be idea-less. … It could be said that any society has vested interests in the status quo which could not be unseated by argument. I disagree. For any revolution to succeed, even those interests must be shown to gain, or to lose less by cooperation than they would otherwise.
I, as a Progressive Anarchist, want the complete overthrow of present societies, but not now, not immediately, not violently, but gradually and peacefully as ideas gradually seep through one’s mind. The intention of this revolutionary is to assault your mind and destroy your beliefs.
So this is a revolution but, so far, a non-violent one. Morley continues,
The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.
It is obvious that the OWS movement was inspired by the success of the Tea Party movement. Time writes,
Like the Tea Party, however, their unifying idea is simple enough. The anger they express has a clear target: not the government but the wealthy. Talk has already turned to launching a consumer boycott of the big banks in favor of credit unions. On e-mail listservs and in person to person meetings, more weekend protests are being planned, and Nov. 17 has been chosen by a coalition of progressive groups for a major show of force in city squares around the country.
“Politically it looks like we are heading into a very different reality,” says Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, which has been supporting the Occupy effort. “Inequality is suddenly a topic of conversation in politics.”
MoveOn.org is one of the organizations of leftist billionaire George Soros. Does Soros also support the Adbusters Media Foundation?
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who writes for Adbusters, turned up at Zuccotti Park to address the Occupy Wall Street demonstration on Sunday, offering up a seminar on Radicalism 101 for an appreciative crowd.
Noting that he supports George Soros, he compared him to a chocolate laxative. Since chocolate is said to be constipating, he explained — a controversial point — Soros is similarly exhibiting an internal contradiction. “First they take billions from you, then they give back half,” he said. “And that makes them the world’s greatest humanitarians.” Take the money, sure, he advised, but don’t stop fighting to overturn a system that makes it necessary.
Another writer for Adbusters is Michael Hardt. He is an American literary theorist and post-Marxist philosopher perhaps best known for the book Empire, written with Antonio Negri and published in 2000. It has been called the Communist Manifesto of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, the White House went out of its way to praise the protesters and present them as mainstream. Vice President Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have all offered words of sympathy, as have the heads of the nation’s labor unions. Time notes,
Behind the scenes, the embrace has been even more dramatic. Former Obama official Van Jones has been organizing established liberal interest groups into a protest network called Rebuild the Dream, which he hopes will dovetail with the Occupy demonstrations.
No mention by Time that former Obama administration czar Van Jones is an avowed communist. According to Kevin “Coach” Collins on the Internet, Jones became a communist while in jail. Collins writes,
The East Bay Express, an Oakland area Black on line magazine reported Comrade Czar Jones, the man who will put the final nail in our coffin, became a communist when he became enchanted with “these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, … I need to be a part of[them].” He met them in jail, how inspiring!
Jones proudly says he spent the next ten years working with the people he met in jail in April, and “by August I was a Communist.” His website “Green for all” carries this telling quote from Comrade Jones on his new position, “… [W]e’re going to be in an economic slowdown for a couple of years. So to take three months, four months, six months to spend this money the right way — we’re not going to get a chance to spend a trillion dollars again! Ever. So let’s do it the right way!”
Obviously, Van Jones feels very much at home with the socialists, communists, and anarchists among the Occupy Wall Streeters. They speak the same language.
