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Adbusters Greenthink

The Canadian “Mental Environmentalists” Face behind Occupy Wall Street



imageIf you are a factory owner or in the business of making widgets in today’s America, you are a capitalist pig and Occupy Wall Street protesters will use you as an excuse for anarchy with violent signs that read: “Eat the Rich”. If you are a Michael Moore or a Susan Sarandon, making millions in the film world, Wall Street protesters will eat you up, sing your praises and bow forever at just the mention of your name.
As George Orwell penned long ago, “Some animals are more equal than others”. The face of the Occupy Wall Street protest is a Canadian one. It’s the face that belongs to AdBusters owner Kalle Lasn, but can’t be found on AdBusters website. Canada Free Press (CFP) went to the Way Back Machine to bring Lasn forward today.

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But Lasn takes full credit for the protests that started with Wall Street and are spreading across North America to other cities in today’s Globe and Mail. “This was all cooked up right here at Adbusters. It’s a Canadian adventure,” he said. “Egypt and Tahrir Square proved that a few smart people on the Internet can call for something and, if it captures the public’s imagination, it can get tens of thousands of people out on the streets.” Lasn collaborated on the book Design Anarchy (2006) with fellow social activists Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge. This is the biography written by Kalle Lasn revived from Way Back Machine: “I was born in Tallinn, Estonia, during the middle of World War II. In 1944, as the Russian army approached Tallinn, my family escaped to Germany. We lived in a displaced persons’ camp for five years. When I was seven we immigrated to Australia where I received my education, graduating with a B.Sc. in pure and applied mathematics. My first job was with the Australian Defense Department where I played computer-simulated war games in the Pacific Ocean. At age 23 I headed for Europe, but my boat stopped in Yokohama for two days. I fell in love with Japan and was unable to get back on the boat. During the ‘60s I ran a market research company in Tokyo and made enough money to travel around the world for three years. Then I returned to Japan, married Masako Tominaga and we immigrated to Canada. I started a documentary film making company. Over the next 15 years, my documentaries were broadcast on PBS, CBC and around the world, winning over 15 international awards. “In 1989 I produced a 30-second TV spot about the disappearing old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, but to my dismay, none of the commercial TV stations would sell me any airtime. The Media Foundation, Adbusters Magazine and Powershift Advertising Agency were all born out of this incident and the realization that there is no democracy on the airwaves. I’ve spent the last thirteen years editing and publishing Adbusters, launching social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and fighting legal battles for the right to access the public airwaves.” According to Wikipedia, “Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 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. “The Adbusters Media Foundation publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism. Notable past and present contributors to the magazine include Christopher Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe, Douglas Rushkoff, Jonathan Barnbrook, David Graeber and others.” Before starting off the North American protest movement based on the so-called “Arab Spring”, Adbuster’s main claim to fame was “Mental Environmentalism”. While Environment giant Greenpeace, (which also originates from Canada) campaigns against pollution and takes to the seas to “Save the Whales”, AdBusters’ self-professed “greenthink’ aims to “clean up the toxic areas of our mind”. The pollution of invading the privacy of the human “mind” is not mentioned. The Adbuster greenthink is on the record describing how “Mental environmentalists argue that a whole range of phenomenon from the BP oil spill to the emergency of crony-democracy to the mass extinction of animals to the significant increase in mental illnesses are directly caused by the three thousand advertisements that assault our minds each day”, though this is tagged with a Wikipedia notation “citation needed” Don’t watch alphabet television networks, but Adbuster ads promoting Occupy Wall Street will keep you safe from risk of mental illness.


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Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

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