Who's behind the Wall St. protests? (Billionaire Soros busted!)

Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men.

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

http://usdayofrage.org/
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"Gleeful about the raging riots that held England captive this week, the tweet has gone out to activists and ‘disaffected’ youth to “occupy wall street Sept 17” today. Social Networks FaceBook and Twitter are abuzz with plans for coming anarchy on U.S. soil.

The Days of Rage will continue beyond the ‘occupation’ of Wall Street with activists being told “bring your tent”.

http://www.black-and-right.com/2011/08/14/the-us-day-of-rage-is-coming/
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The original "Day(s) of Rage"

Days of Rage riots (1969)
The Days of Rage riots in Chicago took place over a 4-day period beginning October 8, 1969, after members of the Weathermen, a militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, converged on the city to confront police in the streets in response to the trial of the group of anti-Vietnam War activists known as the "Chicago Eight".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Rage
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January 12, 2009:
Revolutionary ferment in Greece – a taste of what is to come for the whole of Europe
http://www.marxist.com/revolutionary-ferment-greece-taste-for-europe.htm
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Anarcho-syndicalism

A common Anarcho-Syndicalist flag.

In the early 20th century, anarcho-syndicalism arose as a distinct school of thought within anarchism.[78] With greater focus on the labour movement than previous forms of anarchism, syndicalism posits radical trade unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society, democratically self-managed by the workers.

Anarcho-syndicalists seek to abolish the wage system and private ownership of the means of production, which they believe lead to class divisions. Important principles include workers' solidarity, direct action (such as general strikes and workplace recuperations), and workers' self-management. This is compatible with other branches of anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalists often subscribe to anarchist communist or collectivist anarchist economic systems.[79] Its advocates propose labour organization as a means to create the foundations of a non-hierarchical anarchist society within the current system and bring about social revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at"
--Bill Ayers (1970), quoted in New York Times, September 11, 2001:

Article: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
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"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"
-Weather Underground leader and wife of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, referring to the Manson murders

Article: Allies in War -by David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=63512670-BF7C-42A0-B41D-5D0FB9E09C09
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Undercover agent Larry Grathwohl discusses the Weather Underground's post-revolution governing plans for the United States:

Larry Grathwohl:

"I asked, 'well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?' and the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say 'eliminate,' I mean 'kill.' Twenty-five million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. And they were dead serious."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWMIwziGrAQ
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"It was at the Chicago home of [Bill] Ayers and [Bernardine] Dohrn that Obama, then an up-and-coming 'community organizer,' had his political coming out party in 1995. Not content with this rite of passage in Lefty World — where unrepentant terrorists are regarded as progressive luminaries, still working 'only to educate' — both Obamas tended to the relationship with the Ayers."
Article: The Company He Keeps:
Meet Obama’s circle: The same old America-hating Left
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YThjYTU1ZDBjNmQ2YzcwNzU1MmYwN2JiMWY0ZGI0NDA=&w=MA==
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Exclusive: Bill Ayers Talks About Election Night in Grant Park

From NBC Chicago, Jan 21, 2009:

Bill Ayers was "overflowing with happiness, relief, love" when he and his wife went to Grant Park with tens of thousands of Chicagoans to celebrate the election of President Barack Obama.

Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, spoke exclusively with NBC Chicago's Dick Johnson about why they joined the Election Night celebration in the park, where 40 years before they helped stage the Days of Rage riots.

The couple said they got last-minute tickets from a friend to be in Grant Park that night.

"I couldn't stop crying a couple of times. I found the exact spot where I was beaten 40 years ago," Ayers said. "But I've never been in a crowd that large that wasn't edged with either anger or drunkenness or gluttony, and it was really an extraordinary feeling."

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Exclusive-Bill-Ayers-Talks-About-Election-Night-in-Grant-Park.html
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Michelle Obama on the night of the 2008 election victory:

Source: TIME Magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1857184,00.html
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"The raised fist (also known as the clenched fist) is a salute and logo most often used by left-wing activists, such as: Marxists, anarchists, socialists, communists, pacifists, trade unionists, and black nationalists. The raised fist is usually regarded as an expression of solidarity, strength or defiance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_fist
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"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English..."
--B.H. Obama

YouTube Video:
The O'Reilly Factor confronts Bill Ayers:
October 24, 2008:
(note the red communist star, and anarcho-syndicalist red and black, on his shirt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP3uvK9gTIY
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Bill Ayers: "I considered myself partly an anarchist then and I consider myself partly an anarchist now. I mean, I'm as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist which is to say I find a lot of the ideas in anarchism appealing."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443241,00.html

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros’ Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

******

http://magazines.humber.ca/magworld2006/trends/pics/adbuster.jpg

http://ironicsurrealism.com/files/2011/10/Adbusters-Kalle-Lasn.jpg

Kalle Lasn (born March 24, 1942) is a Canadian author, magazine editor and activist. Near the end of World War II his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent his childhood in a German refugee camp. He was then resettled in Australia. In the 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, Canada. For twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy and is the co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which owns the magazine. Lasn currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

His “epiphany” that there was something profoundly wrong with consumerism happened in a supermarket parking lot.

Frustrated that he had to insert a quarter to use a shopping cart, he jammed the coin in so that the machine became inoperable. This act of vandalism was the first (quite literal) “culture jam” — defined as an act designed to subvert mainstream society.

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 towards eco-communalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalle_Lasn

Discover the Networks on Adbusters role in the inception of Occupy Wall Street:

AMF (Adbusters Media Foundation) was a key organizer—along with such groups as Occupy Wall Street, USDayOfRage, NYC General Assembly, Take The Square, and Anonymous—of a September 17, 2011 “Day of Rage” protest which was staged in the vicinity of New York’s Wall Street financial center, which AMF viewed as the very emblem of the capitalist system which it so despised—“the financial Gomorrah of America” and “the greatest corrupter of our democracy.”

Seeking to build on the anti-globalization movement and striving to promote “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” AMF called for “20,000 people [to] flood into lower Manhattan [on September 17], set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

In its communiques to the “radicals and utopian dreamers” who were planning to participate in the September 17 demonstrations, AMF warned that: “Strategically speaking, there is a very real danger that if we naively put our cards on the table and rally around the ‘overthrow of capitalism’ or some equally outworn utopian slogan, then our Tahrir moment [i.e., opportunity for revolutionary change] will quickly fizzle into another inconsequential ultra-lefty spectacle soon forgotten.” To guard against this possibility, AMF called for “a deceptively simple Trojan Horse demand” that was “so specific and doable” that it would be “impossible for President Obama to ignore.” Thus, under the slogan “Democracy Not Corporatocracy,” AMF issued a demand for Obama to “ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.” [...]

******

1243 West 7th Avenue
Vancouver, BC
V6H 1B7 Canada
Phone :604-736-9401
Fax :604-737-6021
URL: Website

Anti-capitalist collective that derides American consumerism
Said in 2011: “Now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path.”
Condemns Israel for allegedly expropriating Palestinian land and instituting a discriminatory system of laws reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid regime
Warns that pollution created by human industrial activity will lead to “catastrophic climate change”

The Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1989 by author/activist Kalle Lasn and wilderness cinematographer Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Foundation describes itself as “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.” Boasting a membership of more than 91,000 as of September 2011, AMF refers to its activist supporters as “culture jammers,”—a term denoting efforts to challenge and discredit the dominant advertising messages disseminated in the mainstream media. By AMF’s reckoning, advertising invariably corrupts American culture by creating and perpetuating a societal obsession with materialism and consumption.

AMF publishes Adbusters, a not-for-profit, reader-supported, advertising-free “ecological magazine” that rejects consumerism, condemns “the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces,” and seeks to eliminate “injustices in the global economy” as well as “any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.” Notable past and present contributors to this periodical include The Nation Institute senior fellow Christopher Hedges, polemical journalist Matt Taibbi, environmentalist Bill McKibben, science-fiction author Jim Munroe, and documentarian and media-studies instructor Douglas Rushkoff.

Among AMF’s most prominent campaigns have been the following:

* Buy Nothing Day: Typically celebrated on the Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. (and the following day elsewhere in the world), this initiative emphasizes that “with catastrophic climate change looming, we the rich one billion people on the planet have to consume less!” An outgrowth of this tradition is “Buy Nothing Christmas,” which urges people not to purchase Christman presents but instead “give your friends and family a ‘gift-exemption’ card; go to stores and ask holiday shoppers, “What would Jesus buy?”; and “dress as Santa and meditate in the middle of a busy shopping mall.”

* Blackspot Shoes: As an “affront to the consciousness of hyper-capitalism and profit-dominated boardroom policies,” AMF promotes and markets a line of shoes—produced in so-called “fair-trade” factories and made from hemp, recycled tires, and vegan leather—bearing the label “Blackspot.” Blackspot is an open-source brand, which means that it can be used by anyone, for any purpose, at no cost.

* Kick It Over: This initiative encourages economics students around the world “to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs.” The campaign’s signature document—the “Kick it Over Manifesto”—calls for “an economic revolution” that will yield “a new economics” which is not centered around Gross Domestic Product or any other “fundamentally flawed and incomplete” measures of economic progress. “Deep in recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming,” said AMF in 2011, “now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path.”

* One Flag: This was a competition which encouraged Adbusters readers to design and create a flag that symbolized “global citizenship,” without using language or commonly known symbols.

AMF has often condemned Israel for allegedly expropriating Palestinian land, instituting a discriminatory system of laws reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid regime, illegally demolishing the homes of peaceful Arabs, and routinely using excessive force and violence in an effort to humiliate and terrorize Palestinian civilians. In an October 2010 article/photo montage critiquing Israel’s embargo of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Adbusters magazine likened Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto of the WWII era—suggesting that contemporary Jews’ treatment of the Palestinians resembled the manner in which the Nazis had treated Jews under Hitler.

AMF was a key organizer—along with such groups as Occupy Wall Street, USDayOfRage, NYC General Assembly, Take The Square, and Anonymous—of a September 17, 2011 “Day of Rage” protest which was staged in the vicinity of New York’s Wall Street financial center, which AMF viewed as the very emblem of the capitalist system which it so despised—“the financial Gomorrah of America” and “the greatest corrupter of our democracy.” Seeking to build on the anti-globalization movement and striving to promote “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” AMF called for “20,000 people [to] flood into lower Manhattan [on September 17], set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

According to journalist Aaron Klein, the September 17 New York City protests—which ultimately drew about 1,000 participants—apparently represented “the culmination” of a campaign by Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN and president of an SEIU local in New Orleans, who in March 2011 had issued a call for “days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase.” Rathke’s efforts were supported by Stephen Lerner, an SEIU board member and radical-left organizer who candidly aims to “destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement”; “bring down the stock market”; “bring down [the] bonuses” of executives in the financial sector; and “interfere with their ability to ... be rich.”

On October 1, 2011, a horde of the Wall Street demonstrators shut down traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge for two-and-a-half hours, a move that resulted in some 700 arrests. Among the high-profile personalities who had already made personal appearances in support of the demonstrators were Michael Moore (who spoke at the September 17 New York rally), Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Cornel West, Charles Barron, Frances Fox Piven, and Charles Rangel.

Between 2001 and 2011, AMF received $176,500 in grants from the Glaser Progress Foundation, and $309,773 from the Tides Foundation.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7695

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