• 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

See also: Adbusters Media Foundation


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.”

The dangers of consumerism, says Lasn, have profound "environmental, psychological, and political consequences" not only domestically, but internationally. Asserting that "every single purchase that you make has some kind of an impact on the planet," he complains that "we, the rich 1 billion on the planet, are now consuming 86 percent of all the goods in the global marketplace, leaving a lousy 14 percent for the rest of the 5 billion people on the planet." The worldwide resentment that is allegedly bred by this "overconsumption in the rich countries," Lasn concludes, "is one of the root causes of terrorism."

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 says that "overconsumption is in some sense the mother of all our environmental problems." Specifically, he 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.

ADBUSTERS MEDIA FOUNDATION (AMF)

• 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"

See also: Occupy Wall Street USDayOfRage Take The Square Kalle Lasn


The Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1990 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." Further, their aim is to "topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century." In the fall of 2011, AMF issued the following directive to its members and supporters:

"Its now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful détournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything, from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate … be the spark that sustains a global revolution of everyday life!"

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, documentarian and media-studies instructor Douglas Rushkoff, Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt, and Marxist sociologist Antonio Negri.

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 June 2009 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. A legal dispute ensued between Adbusters and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which reportedly owned the Warsaw photos used by the publication.

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.”