Thursday, October 13, 2011

Protesting for Profit

John Carney reports:
The real story here isn’t the backing of one person but the way online fundraising has allowed Occupy Wall Street to attract shocking amounts of cash. Kickstarter, which allows people to request donations for projects they are starting, raised $75,000 for Occupy Wall Street’s newspaper, Occupy Wall Street Journal. Almost all of it came from individuals pledging less than $85 a piece.

About two weeks ago Occupy Wall Street’s finance working group asked a progressive group called the Alliance For Global Justice to be its fiscal sponsor and receive donations for the group. The AFGJ expected to receive some between one and five thousand dollars. Instead, it was flooded with donations for up to $140,000.

The flood of donations caused AFGJ to exceed the limits of the donation processing account they have with a subsidiary of Visa, which started rejecting the donations.

“We ran into a limit we didn’t know we had because we’ve never seen such an explosion of donations,” AFGJ national coordinator Chuck Kauffman told me.
Bottom lime: Protesting can be very profitable (If you are near the cash). A friend who knew Abbie Hoffman told me that Hoffman made tons of cash during his protesting years.

4 comments:

  1. Profit???

    Profit is evil!!!

    We should occupy Occupy Wall Street!!!

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  2. First comment made me laugh out loud

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  3. If you go to their website, afgj.org, you will see that all of their staff members have backgrounds in Communism. AFGJ was founded for the solidarity movement in Nicaragua. Their playbook for peaceful revolution follows Lenin's. They have "fiscally sponsored projects", such as militaryproject.org, which is an extensive guide for US military to commit mutiny, and couragetoresist.org, a blueprint for active duty conscientious objectors. THE money they collect is barely doled out to the US protestors. It is sent to Nicaragua.

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