KALLE LASN

• Co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation
• Derides “the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism” as “a destructive system”
• Condemns American consumerism
• Catalyst of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011

Born in Estonia in 1942, Kalle Lasn spent his early childhood years in a German refugee camp and then relocated with his family to Australia. From 1965-70 Lasn lived in Japan, where he founded a market research company and worked in the advertising industry. In 1970 he moved to Vancouver and spent the next two decades producing documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board.

In 1990 Lasn lent his support to an environmentalist group that was engaged in an anti-timber industry campaign. When the CBC and other television stations refused to sell advertising airtime to that organization, Lasn and his allies started Adbusters magazine which, according to journalist Kenneth Rapoza, once featured George Soros on its editorial board. (Aides to Soros said in October 2011 that Soros had never before heard of Adbusters, and Soros himself declined comment.) Soon after launching Adbusters, Lasn and wilderness cinematographer Bill Schmalz co-founded the Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF).

Denouncing American consumerism as an “ecologically unsustainable” and “psychologically corrosive” phenomenon, Lasn derides “the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism” as “a destructive system” that has caused “a terrible degradation of our mental environment.” In his 2000 book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge—and Why We Must, Lasn wrote: “The aggregate level of American life fulfillment peaked in 1957, and with a couple of brief exceptions, it’s been downhill from there.” According to Lasn, “at least 75 percent” of the U.S. population is “caught in a consumer trance,” having been “brainwashed” into “believ[ing] in the American Dream.”

Lasn and AMF strive to combat consumerism through such initiatives as “Buy Nothing Day” and the “simplicity movement,” which encourage people who have been “stung by consumer culture” to drop their obsession with money and material possessions.

Warning that anthropogenic “climate change” poses a worldwide ecological threat, Lasn derides the automobile—because of its greenhouse-gas emissions—as “arguably the most destructive product we humans have ever produced.” To counteract the environmental damage allegedly caused by such emissions, Lasn recommends “not just a carbon tax, but a global across-the-board pricing system” in which cars would cost “around $100,000” apiece, and “a tankful of gas, $250.” Moreover, Lasn calls for the imposition of a 1 percent “Robin Hood Tax” (i.e., taking from the “rich” and giving to the “poor”) on most goods and services worldwide, with the aim of using its generated revenues to fund social-welfare programs.

Lasn refers to advertising professionals, whom he holds in contempt because of their commitment to perpetuating consumerism, as “the cool-makers and the cool-breakers” who “more than any other profession ... have the power to change the world.” He hopes to promote “a mental/environmental movement that will wipe the advertising industry out as we know it.”

In 2004 Lasn wrote a controversial Adbusters article entitled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”—criticizing America's most influential neoconservatives for their “view that the U.S. is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image,” and noting that “half of them are Jewish.”

Describing himself as someone who has “been a student of revolution all my life,” Lasn says that in the summer of 2011 he and his fellow Adbusters staffers—especially senior editor Micah White­—were "inspired" by the popular revolution that had recently occurred in Tunisia. Moreover, they “thought that America,” whose economy was in crisis, “was [also] ripe for this type of [mass] rage.” According to Lasn, Americans' anger stemmed chiefly from Wall Street financial speculators' violation of the “sense of fairness Americans have always believed in.”

Lasn was also confident that young Americans' “despondency” over such concerns as “climate change,” “corruption in Washington,” and the “decline” of their country, greatly increased the likelihood that the U.S. might experience “a Tahrir moment” of sorts. (The reference was to Cairo's Tahrir Square, a focal point of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.) Emboldened further by “that sort of anarchy cred” which the civil disobedience/“hacktivism” group Anonymous had been demonstrating in recent times, Lasn and his Adbusters associates held brainstorming sessions on how they themselves might effect “some kind of a soft regime change” to diminish the political influence of “finances,” “lobbyists,” and “corporations.”

In an effort to “catalyze” a protest movement against those forces, Lasn and Adbusters “put feelers out on our [Internet] forums” suggesting a mass demonstration in the hub of New York City's financial district. Thus was born the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, whose first public rally was held on September 17, 2011. After some OWS demonstrators subsequently became involved in conflicts with police officers, Lasn said that “police brutality actually helps the movement” by drawing media attention.

While Lasn concedes that every popular movement faces the “danger” that its idealistic leaders may eventually “turn into monsters,” he nonetheless believes “it’s very important for us to win, and [to] worry about how badly we behave later—right now we need to pull the current monster down.”

Lasn is an open admirer of Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, anarchist David Graeber, and post-anarchist Saul Newman.