Reuters catches up to Glen Beck almost One Year Later...

[4est_4est_Gump]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – 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.

"I can understand their sentiment," Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

Pressed further for his views on the movement and the protesters, Soros refused to be drawn in. But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Soros, 81, is No. 7 on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $22 billion, which has ballooned in recent years as he deftly responded to financial market turmoil. He has pledged to give away all his wealth, half of it while he earns it and the rest when he dies.

Like the protesters, Soros [and us rabid right-wing "radicals" s, A_J] is no fan of the 2008 bank bailouts and subsequent government purchase of the toxic sub-prime mortgage assets they amassed in the property bubble.

The protesters say the Wall Street bank bailouts in 2008 left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from Washington. They contend that the richest 1 percent of Americans have amassed vast fortunes while being taxed at a lower rate than most people.

BANKING LIFE SUPPORT

Soros in 2009 wrote in an editorial that the purchase of toxic bank assets would, "provide artificial life support for the banks at considerable expense to the taxpayer."
He urged the Obama administration to take bolder action, either by recapitalizing or nationalizing the banks and forcing them to lend at attractive rates. His advice went unheeded.

The Hungarian-American was an early supporter of the 2008 election campaign of Barack Obama, who will seek a second term as president in the November, 2012, election. He has long backed liberal causes - the Open Society Institute, the foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations and Human Rights Watch.

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros' Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center [van Jones - A_J], 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.
Aides to Soros say any connection is tenuous and that Soros has never heard of Adbusters. Soros himself declined comment.

The Vancouver-based group, which publishes a magazine and runs such campaigns as "Digital Detox Week" and "Buy Nothing Day," says it wants to "change the way corporations wield power" and its goal is "to topple existing power structures."

SLOW START

Adbusters, whose magazine has a circulation of 120,000 and which is known for its spoofs of popular advertisements, came up with the Occupy Wall Street idea after Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, said Kalle Lasn, 69, Adbusters co-founder.

"It came out of these brainstorming sessions we have at Adbusters," Lasn told Reuters, adding they began promoting it online on July 13. "We were inspired by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt and we had this feeling that America was ripe for a Tahrir moment."

"We felt there was a real rage building up in America, and we thought that we would like to create a spark which would give expression for this rage."

Lasn said Adbusters is 95 percent funded by subscribers paying for the magazine. "George Soros's ideas are quite good, many of them. I wish he would give Adbusters some money, we sorely need it," she said. "He's never given us a penny."

Other support for Occupy Wall Street has come from online funding website Kickstarter, where more than $75,000 has been pledged, deliveries of food and from cash dropped in a bucket at the park. Liberal film maker Michael Moore has also pledged to donate money.

The protests began in earnest on September 17, triggered by an Adbusters campaign featuring a provocative poster showing a ballerina dancing atop the famous bronze bull in New York's financial district as a crowd of protesters wearing gas masks approach behind her.

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111013/ts_nm/us_wallstreet_protests_origins

Beck told us about this "grass roots movement" and the planned actions and all the "Fountainhead" style groups that were gathering to unleash the unthinking mob, the mob the Democrats have fully thrown their support to, on America in the hopes of violent revolution and overthrow...

This is stage one. Greece, Paris and London are the planned stage two.

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
Ayn Rand

 

[Wat_Tyler]

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/092409/beat-the-recession.gif

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I'm going into gold mintage.



Ten Bears on the front and crossed rifles on the back.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Yes, stamp out some 20-horse pieces.



"Iron words" can be the motto.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

... and a Ten Bears two woman piece...

 

[Saint Peter]

...or 72 virgins...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

How small is the one donkey piece?


Can a mouse find enough of it to fasten a tooth in?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

It's a wooden nickel except in KANSAS where it is a buffalo chip due to lack of wood.




They will both keep you warm at night in a pinch if no teepee is to be had...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

It is the nature of protest movements that they must either expand or wither away: they can never stand still.

The current Wall Street protests, originally conceived of as an "occupation," are attempting to maintain their momentum by expanding their numbers, occupying more territory, and generating clashes with the police. They are now approaching the point of critical mass, where they will either swell into a mass movement that brings about significant change, as did the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s, or simply dissolve and disappear.

Protest movements operate out of their own internal dynamic. They swell in numbers in response to perceived injustices; they fade away if they cannot retain momentum. As the great social psychologist Elias Canetti wrote of gatherings of this sort, "[e]verything here depends on movement" (Crowds and Power, 1984, p. 30). Absent a sense of movement toward a goal, the Occupy Wall Street protest and similar protests in other cities will soon disintegrate.

Having gathered significant numbers in New York and other cities, the protest now finds itself at this critical juncture. The crowds that have gathered to protest "corporate greed," as they imagine it, are of necessity moving beyond occupation and toward a more aggressive stage of protest. The "occupation," in other words, is no longer an occupation, but instead an assault.

In New York, Boston, and Washington, it is clear that the protests have entered this second stage. On September 24, Occupy New York began to turn violent as police were forced to control the disorderly crowd, and eighty protesters were arrested. On October 5, also in New York, hundreds of protesters stormed a police barricade, forcing police to respond with pepper spray and leading to further arrests. Moving from its sanctioned location in Zuccotti Park, the mob has attempted to shut down traffic and cause disruption in heavily frequented parts of Manhattan, including the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange and the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. It has carried its protest to the Upper-East-Side residences of prominent New Yorkers, particularly those associated with conservative politics, such as Rupert Murdoch and David Koch.

It is not just in New York that the protests have turned violent. On October 11, one hundred protesters were arrested in Boston when they refused to comply with police instructions to leave the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Similar violence has been reported in Seattle and Washington, where protesters stormed the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

Granted, many of these young protesters seem clueless as to what they are about. Many seem to be protesting for the sake of doing so, as if the protests were a pleasant little summer camp and not a serious political statement. But there is also the sense of darker forces at work behind the scenes. The hapless young people who initiated Occupy Wall Street have been joined by hard-line leftists, union thugs, and lawless radicals intent on inciting violence. As was the case with the Arab Spring, zealous revolutionaries have their eye on what may have begun as an incoherent gathering of disaffected youths. These more organized elements are determined to move the protests toward a third stage.

What is the third stage? Lawlessness, violence, and terrorism.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/predicting_the_weatherman.html

 

[rosco rathbone]

apless young people who initiated Occupy Wall Street have been joined by ...union thugs

 

[koalabear]

Beck warned you all, nanananana.