One of those involved with founding the SDS, James Kunen, writes in his memoir The Strawberry Statement that Big Business sought to channel funds to the SDS as part of a dialectical process:

In the evening I went up to the University to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS convention. He said that at the convention men from Business International Roundtables, the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government —tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class.

They agree with us on black control and student control…

They want McCarthy in.[28] They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace.[29] The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago.

We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the centre as they move to the left.[30]

This Big Business dialectic with the New Left is confirmed independently by Gerald Kirk, who as a student at the University of Chicago, and became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club,[31] the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, as an informant for the FBI. Kirk broke from the Left in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…[32]

The manner by which the dialectical process works was specifically demonstrated in 1968 when the SDS Columbia chapter instigated a student revolt and take-over of the University. Revolutionary leadership was taken out of the hands of the SDS and was taken over by the Students for a Restructured University (SRU) [33] that had been funded with a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.[354 The Ford Foundation 1968 annual report states that:

At the University of California (Berkeley), a grant of $500,000 was given for a new university Office of Educational Development that enlists both students and faculty in the planning and conduct of educational experiments. These include new interdisciplinary courses that reflect contemporary social, political, and economic issues, and a system of residential colleges linked to specific student interests rather than to academic fields.[35]

The Ford Foundation was funding in Berkeley, noted as the centre of New Left radicalism, the institutional promotion of New Left ideology. Note the reference to “educational experiments,” “courses that reflect contemporary social, political and economic issues,” and the promotion of a system of so-called “specific student interests.” The 1968 Foundation report states further:

To facilitate thoughtful student involvement in academic affairs, the Foundation granted $315,000 to the National Student Association for a three-year program. The grant will assist two principal activities: a national dissemination program to inform students of various patterns of educational innovation and change and participation of N.S.A. staff as advisors in student reform efforts.

At Columbia University, which was severely disrupted by student demonstrations in the spring, grants were made to three groups studying and redefining the roles of faculty, students, administrators, and trustees. They included a faculty committee and a student organization that was active in the demonstrations but is dedicated to restructuring, not overturning, the university.

The Foundation report cryptically mentions “a student organization” active in the New Left demonstrations with the SDS, Black Panthers and others, referring here to the Students for a Restructured University, without naming the SRU as the recipient. Students for a Restructured University presented themselves as the “moderate” wing of the student uprising, the strategy being to threaten that if their “moderate” demands were not met, the University administration would have to deal with the SDS and other extremists. This was the dialectical strategy in operation.

Here We Go Again

The current use of the young generation for capitalist revolution behind the banner inscribed with left-liberal slogans is therefore a well-tried formula. A difference is that where it was once the CIA which co-opted “radicals” such as Gloria Steinem and Timothy Leary under a program directed by Cord Meyer, a co-director of the United World Federalists along with banking scion James Warburg,[36] the CIA programs have been replaced with those of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Soros, and an array of often interlocking fronts, think tanks and NGOs.[37]

Cartalucci has exposed the background of a contemporary major youth movement that is analogous to the New Left of yesteryear, as well as cogently explaining the real purposes of this movement. The by-line of AYM/Movements.org is: “Identify. Connect. Support.”[38] Movements.org states:

We match members of our global network with necessary resources from the technology, media, private and public sectors as well as with each other in order to foster peer to peer capacity building. Movements.org hosts annual summits, regional training events, and on online hub for best practices, lessons learned, discussion and news about the use of new technologies in social movements.[39]

The focus is on the use of digital technology, a feature of the “velvet revolutions” [40]from Eastern Europe, to Central Asia to the current turmoil in North Africa and Iran. Movements.org calls their constituency “digital activists.”[41]

Whereas the CIA covertly channelled funds to the New Left during the 1960s, now the new generation of young revolutionaries proudly display the logos of their corporate sponsors. Under the category of “Sponsors” Movements.org states:

Movements.org has leveraged its relationships with exciting movements in civil society to bring together some of the globe’s top technology and communications companies to share their knowledge and expertise with online activists from across the world. Movements.org has received sponsorship and continues to be supported by global industry leaders…[42]

These corporate sponsors displayed on the AYM website are: Howcast, Edelman, [43] Google,[44] Music TV, Meetup, Pepsi,[45] CBS News, Mobile Accord, Youtube, Facebook, MSN/NBC, National Geographic, Omnicom Group,[46] Access 360 Media, and Gen Next.

The Public Partnerships are: Columbia Law School, and the US State Department.

Most of the logos on the AYM website link directly to the companies so that Movements.org also serves as an advertising medium for corporate America. What is of interest is that the digital technology companies approve and support the manner by which their services are being used in the world velvet revolution. They are not only not indifferent; they are the sponsors of the revolutionaries. This is because the “brave new world” being created by their young “digital activists” will be one in which young consumers will emerge from the traditional societies that are now being overthrown. There will be a larger consumer market; more youngsters addicted to consumerism, as they are in the West.

Howcast, the primary backer of AYM, has for example made a business empire out of “how to” videos based around the banality of the mass consumer, the subjects of wisdom being imparted including: “How to go on a date with someone you met on the internet,” “How to prevent a blister,” “How to headbang,” “How to enter and elegantly exit a car…”[47] …Not exactly in the same category as The Communist Manifesto or The Little Red Book, but fitting articulations of the type of revolution that neocon strategist Maj. Ralph Peters predicted would overtake the old order and reshape the world in America’s image by means of consumer addiction via what he called “creative destruction.”[48]

Howcast CEO Jason Liebman conceived the idea of the Alliance of Youth Movements/Movements.org. His profile on the Howcast website states of Liebman: “Jason is also a cofounder of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a nonprofit organization that helps young people to effect nonviolent change around the world using 21st-century tools.”[49] Howcast is described as working directly “with brands, agencies, and organizations” such as GE, Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Defense, and Ford Motor Company… [50] Howcast is therefore intimately involved not only with global corporations but also with the U.S. Government. Liebman was previously with Google where he forged corporate relationships with Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, The New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.[51]

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