Kalle Lasn's World Revolution

An interview with the Adbuster publisher and Occupy Wall Street instigator on his plans for our collective future

Please check out my interview with Kalle Lasn (and please like, subscribe, and share to our channel.

An internationally known documentarian and anti-consumerism activist, Lasn is the publisher of Adbusters magazine and founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation and Powershift Advertising Agency. With Adbusters, he has dedicated himself to launching such social media campaigns as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and to fighting legal battles for the right to access public airwaves. Much of his activism has taken the form of “culture jamming”—a term he coined and illustrated his first book, Culture Jam. Lasn, along with Adbusters senior editor Micah White and Adbusters’ 90,000-strong global network of activists, instigated the first #OccupyWallStreet event on September 17th, 2011. Lasn and Adbusters authored Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics. Lasn lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

By the way, I have been posting other interviews and videos essays on my Youtube channel, including my recent interview with Betsy Chasse, the director/writer known for What the Bleep Do We Know:

And also Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God, among other books, who grew up at the red hot center of the modern evangelical movement:

Below is an excerpt from Lasn’s latest book, the provocatively named Manifesto for World Revolution:

We are now waking up to the fact that the world runs on a handful of well-entrenched, largely unquestioned precepts. Most of us take it for granted that economists know what they are doing. That toxic financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps are business as usual. That flash trading is an efficient way to run stock exchanges. That money can move freely across borders but people can’t. That advertising is harmless. That secrecy is a normal part of democracy. That arms trading cannot be stopped. That no matter how heinous a crime a corporation commits, it’s untouchable.

But now, caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out, we begin to question these hidden coordinates of our reality and start thinking about a new operating system for Planet Earth.

We hatch a new grand narrative, a set of ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

And then we deploy them.

We crack the global mind on seven critical fronts:

On the ecological front, we get Adam Smith’s invisible hand working for us instead of against us. We lay a plan for a capitalist reformation — a painful but necessary move towards a new kind of global marketplace, a bioeconomy — in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.

On the corporate front, we launch the mother of all boycotts against one of the most criminal corporations in the world and wipe it out. Once the mightiest has fallen, the rest will follow, and a Corporate Charter Revocation Movement will be born.

On the financial front, we force our leaders to eliminate all tax havens.