Meet the Radical Group Handling ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Finances
Lachlan Markay /
A story in a communist group's newspaper, obtained by Heritage at Zuccotti Park, implores protesters to "smash" Wall Street..
Shortly after the Occupy Wall Street protests gained national attention, donations from supporters began pouring in. Lacking the infrastructure to manage the hundreds of thousands of dollars reportedly donated, the protest group enlisted the services of a non-profit organization called the Alliance for Global Justice.
The group takes a 7 percent commission of all donations it manages. According to its secretary, the Alliance for Global Justice is processing hundreds of times as many donations as it did prior to partnering with the Occupy protestors.
The AFGJ provides “grassroots” support for organizations that pursue “a socially, ecologically and economically just world,” according to its website. Among its initiatives are efforts to encourage American soldiers to desert and an anti-George Bush organization founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The organization’s president, Katherine Hoyt, leads the Alliance’s Nicaragua Network program, which supports the country’s Marxist Sandinista political party – and was founded for the explicit purpose of overthrowing the country’s government. Hoyt previously worked for the Sandinista government, and has written numerous scholarly works lauding the group. The Sandinistas ruled from 1979 to 1990. Their leader, Daniel Ortega, was elected again in 2006.
The Nicaragua Network is one of the Alliance’s four “core” projects, but it also funds a variety of extreme leftist organizations and efforts. Courage to Resist, for instance, encourages American soldiers to “resist illegal war” through tactics that include “going AWOL” and “publicly refusing to fight.”
Another Alliance-backed project, The World Can’t Wait, was founded by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party to oppose the Bush administration. With Bush’s successor in office, its mission statement has shifted to “stop[ping] the fascist direction initiated by the Bush Regime.”
Given the radical nature of many of its projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Alliance receives money from a host of progressive individuals and organizations. Chief among them is George Soros’s Open Society Institute, which has given the group $100,000.
The AFGJ has also received tens of thousands of dollars from the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which holds “the emphasis upon economic growth as a panacea” to be “fundamentally incompatible with ecological or biological sustainability.” It is explicitly anti-economic growth, in other words.
Much hay has been made over organizations and individuals that have endorsed the Occupy protests. They include the American Nazi Party, the government of North Korea, the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Kohmeini. But the Occupy folks have no control over who endorses or voices support for them.
But in their decision to enlist the Alliance for Global Justice, the Occupy Wall Street leadership affirmed its support for the group and its principles. Those principles are radical, well outside the mainstream of American public opinion, and certainly not representative of the 99% of Americans for whom the protestors claim to speak.
Heritage’s Brian Darling, who spent the day at Zuccotti Park on Friday, said the affirmative support for such a radical group didn’t surprise him. “The Occupy Wall Street movement has embraced the far left like the Alliance for Global Justice,” he said. “I witnessed a sign supporting the movement from the Workers’ World Party and other far left wing groups.”
Critics note that the presence of radicals at a protest does not denote a protest movement’s endorsement. But the affirmative relationship between Occupy Wall Street and the Alliance for Global Justice does – it speaks directly to the political vision of the movement’s leaders.
H/T Matthew Vadum