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Kalle Lasn, 69, is the publisher and editor of Adbusters magazine. It’s a small, non-influential critical and artsy magazine with a decent following of around 90,000 who call themselves “culture jammers”. Occupy Wall Street began in the conference rooms at that Vancouver mag.

I spoke with him this afternoon about this weekend’s European wide protest, the G-20 and a worldwide Robin Hood tax.

Kenneth R: The Washington Post calls you the leader of Occupy Wall Street. What do you make of that?

Kalle L: This is a leaderless movement. But the founding of the idea came out of lots of brainstorming here among our staff editors, photographers, freelancers and people on our list-serve. Back in the summer we were all talking about what we were going to do next with the magazine and we were all inspired by what happened in Tunisia and thought that America was ripe for this type of rage. We put feelers out on our forums. So it was relatively recent, in June, when we came up with this idea and launched the hashtag in mid-July with the magazine and then it just took off. Once that issue was published, we started putting out tactical briefings to our list serve.

Kalle is a man of the world, so it is no surprise to him or his network of culture jammers, that a Wall Street protest was conceived far away in Vancouver, Canada. That’s fairly close to the site where another surprising protest in U.S. history took place. The 1999 anti-globalization protests caught everyone by surprise in Seattle during the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. Back then, the model was to attack corporate control over the public sphere like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male and those who followed behind in a pack. The new model has evolved from a pack…to a swarm. Kalle gets inquiries and emails about Occupy Wall Street from London to Shanghai, but he’s not ringing his hands and sticking pins in a wall-sized map about where his next diabolical plan against capitalism will take shape.

KR: Seriously? Everyone thinks their movement is the one to really change things.

KL: You can’t think too rationally about this. These movements are best understood years after they are gone. We have a long history of movements that have just fizzled out, but I think this time it’s different. This movement has an edge. First, it is a global moment. We are all living in dire times. We are all facing major tipping points around the world. We are faced with a political crisis in the U.S. and concern that the U.S., with no help from Washington, is now in irreversible decline. The economy is surely in decline. So people see this, young people see this, and they wonder what their future holds for them given those circumstances. The future doesn’t compute. The backbone of the movement that helped end the Vietnam war was the fact that young people were faced with the draft. Their bodies were on the line. They could get scooped up from wherever they were and sent to Vietnam to killed by the Viet Cong. When your future is on the line, when your kids’ future is on the line, people will fight for what they want. Occupy Wall Street says our future is on the line. Is there a chance that this will all fizzle out? Yes, but I think over time we will pull it off and are getting our point across.

KR: Who’s on your side in DC?

KL: Nobody is on our side in DC. We don’t want to hop into bed with anyone. We don’t mind Al Gore saying ‘Hey, I like you guys’, that’s fine with us. But we are not going to hop into bed with the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party did with the Republicans. Once you do that, you’re dead. You align yourself with existing power players. The Tea Party got a few people elected, had a few protests, but that’s it. Now it’s our turn.

KR: Talk about divide and conquer. We have a long history of that in the West, when public movements are overthrown by splitting the public up on the issue. Should Occupy Wall Street guys and Tea Party guys join forces?

KL: Forget divide and conquer. It’s too soon for that. And it may happen. I don’t know. The good thing about the Tea Party is that deep down in their guts they understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with our system. But they want to recapture the past when there is no going back. Their target is the government. Our target is the people who run the government: corporations and Wall Street. If some Tea Party people want to come out and protest, please come. They know we have to take away some of the powers the financial markets and speculators have over our system. They know that we have to make money less important in politics or this democracy is in very big trouble.

KR: Where is this all going?

KL: We don’t know. We will see what happens in Europe this weekend. Social movements there have been planning protests for Saturday. We could have some Occupy Wall Street people involved in that, as well. Then on Oct. 29th we are thinking about protesting in Paris ahead of the G-20 meeting. Look, people of all ages are looking at their political leaders, they are looking at Wall Street or the London Stock Exchange and they are saying, ‘fuck you guys. You don’t know what you are doing. All you can talk about is stimulus and cuts and should we provide stimulus here or should we provide stimulus there.’ It doesn’t address the problem the financial sector has over our lives.

KR: What should they do?

KL: We would like to see a 1% Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions. We want to push for that. We want to kill some of the global casino and one way to do that is to slow down the fast money, the derivatives markets, the credit default swaps and exotic financial products that wiped us out in 2008; a way to slow that market is with a tax.

KR: This is going from being a national conversation to a global conversation.

KL: Lots of people are coming to our website from outside the U.S. and Canada. It is already a global conversation.

Kalle seems younger than his years let on. He’s as alive as the young protesters he’s talking about. So as a former reader of Adbusters, I had to have some fun with Kalle in the last few minutes of our call.

KR: Okay, I’m looking through an old Adbusters magazine and see that George Soros is on your editorial board. He must tell you what to write and give you money for all of this. Is he your main funder?

KL: Sadly, George Soros is not on our editorial board.

KR: He must be a subscriber and donor.

KL: I don’t know if he is a subscriber. I know he is not on the board. He has never sent us any money, though I wish he would. I liked a few of his books, though.

KR: When are you going to do an Occupy K Street?

KL: We’ll have to talk about that one. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/10/14/the-brains-behind-occ
upy-wall-street-and-where-its-heading/3/

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The campaign (U.S.: lobbying effort) has proposed to set taxes on a range of financial transactions - the rate would vary but would average at about 0.05%.[1] The tax would be applied to those trading in financial products such as stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, futures, and options. It would affect individual investors, banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions. The campaign is sponsored by various prominent charities, aiming to raise money for International development, to tackle climate change and to protect public services.

The British campaign's launch was accompanied by an online poll on the charity's web site for the public to have a say on whether they support the tax. Initially, there was an apparent backlash with what appeared to be thousands of members of the public visiting the Robin Hood Tax to vote against the idea. However on investigation it was claimed by the lobbying group that some five thousand of the "no" votes came from only two servers, one of them belonging to the investment bank Goldman Sachs.[10]

The Robin Hood tax has been supported by some 350 economists in a letter written to the G20, including Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffery Sachs.[11] Politicians supporting the tax include Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Katsuya Okada, Japan's foreign minister.

Campaigning for the tax continued in 2011, with over 1000 economists signing a letter addressed to G20 finance ministers prior to their April 2011 meeting in Washington. Prominent signatories include Jeffery Sachs ; Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman ; Harvard's Dani Rodrik and Cambridge's Ha-Joon Chang. A copy of the letter was also sent to Bill Gates, who has been commissioned by G20 chair and French president Nicolas Sarkozy to investigate new ways of funding the development of low income countries.

The Robin Hood campaign has been attempting to build international public enthusiasm for the tax prior to the November G20 summit; in June the organisation reported the staging of campaigning events in 43 different countries. [20] In late June the European Commission reversed its earlier opposition to the tax, proposing EU financial transaction tax be adopted within the 27 member states of the European Union.

Also in October the Robin Hood tax was endorsed by His Holy Father the Pope . [32] In November, Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury, re-affirmed his support the Robin Hood campaign with an article in the Financial Times.

Recent Eurobarometer poll of more than 27,000 people published in January 2011 found that Europeans are strongly in favour of a financial transaction tax by a margin of 61 to 26 per cent. Of those, more than 80 per cent agree that if global agreement cannot be reached - an FTT should, initially, be implemented in just the EU. Support for an FTT, in the UK, is 65 per cent. Another survey published earlier by YouGov suggests that more than four out of five people in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy think the financial sector has a responsibility to help repair the damage caused by the economic crisis. The poll also indicated strong support for an FTT among supporters of all the three main UK political parties.[37][56] Despite the arguments that a EU only FTT tax would hurt Great Britian, other 2011 polls have suggested about two thirds of the British public support the Robin Hood tax campaign.

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A tiny tax on the financial sector can generate £20 billion annually in the UK alone. That's enough to protect schools and hospitals. Enough to stop massive cuts across the public sector. Enough to build new lives around the world – and to deal with the new climate challenges our world is facing.

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