The other Movement.org Board Members and Co-Founders are:

Jared Cohen is director of Google Ideas. “He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on terrorism and counter-radicalization, the impact of connection technologies, and ’21st century statecraft.'”[52] The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the omni-present foreign policy think tank that was founded in the aftermath of World War I by corporate interests in conjunction with academics and politicians, and is the prototype of subsequent think tanks.[53] Cohen is a director and founder of a youth movement that claims to be creating revolutionary change throughout the world, yet simultaneously he advises CFR on “counter-radicalization.” With this it might be discerned the actual purpose of Movement.org: that of co-opting and channeling youth dissent into acceptable forms. The profile for Cohen continues:

Previously, he served for four years as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he advised on the Middle East, South Asia, counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, and the development of the “21st century statecraft” agenda. He is twice a recipient of the Secretary of State’s Meritorious Honor Award.

Cohen is author of the books Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. He has also written several articles, including “Diverting the Radicalization Track” (Policy Review) and “Iran’s Young Opposition” (SAIS Review).

Cohen has travelled extensively throughout Africa, where he examined issues related to democracy, governance, and genocide. He has also conducted research in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, looking at opposition groups, the spread of technology, and interviewing militants ranging from Hezbollah to several Al-Qaeda affiliated groups.[54]

The other corporate revolutionary Board Member and Co-Founder of Movements.org is Roman Tsunder, founder of Access 360 Media, “the nation’s largest digital Out-of-Home media network focused on shoppers that connects to over 100MM consumers each month in over 10,000 locations through the communication platforms that matter most to them – In-store, Online and Mobile.”

In 2009, Roman created the PTTOW! Summit (www.youtube.com/pttow), an invite only event bringing together 35 top execs from the world’s most innovative companies to discuss the future of the youth industry, representing every major industry category, including: wireless (AT&T), clothing (Quiksilver); gaming (Activision), social media (Facebook), technology (HP), online video (YouTube), beverage (Pepsi), athletes (Kelly Slater) and the US Government.[55]

Tsunder’s agenda is clear enough, as with others, being to create and expand the “youth industry” (sic) and that indicates how youth are perceived by the corporate revolutionaries: as consumers and potential consumers. He is also “a founder and board member of Gen Next (gen-next.org), a non-profit organization focused on ‘affecting change for the next generation.'”[56] Revolution has become another means of profit maximization. Gen Next is one of the corporate sponsors of Movements.org.

The Movement’s “Development and Corporate Partnerships Manager,” itself an interesting title for a supposedly idealistic youth organization, is Rachel Silver, who worked for Liebman’s Howcast, and as such organized the Movement’s summits in New York City, Mexico City and London.[57]

AYM Summits

The Movement has held three summits so far. The 2010 Summit held in London, had as its keynote speaker Scott Heifferman from Meetup.com. Other luminaries at the summit were Kristen Morissey from Google; Juan Zarate, CBS News; Farah Pandith: Special Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State on Muslim Affairs.

“Guests, hosts and sponsors” included representatives from Google, Rand Corp., Edelman, Howcast, Access 360 Media, World Bank, US Institute of Peace,[58] Global Engagement Group, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.[59][60]

“Moderators and Speakers were from the National Democratic Institute,[61] Gen Next, Twitter, CBS, Meet Up, Google, World Bank, and You Tube. Farah Pandith and Jared Cohen represented the US State Department.

Movement.org’s Role in the North Africa Tumult

Lest it be thought that Movement.org is not much more than a bunch of nerdish armchair revolutionaries and a past-time for CEO yuppies, the organization has been playing an important role in the North Africa upheavals. Ariel Schwartz writing for the Fast Company, writes:

File this under: Timing is still everything. Just in time to help organize Egyptian grassroots activists with restored Internet access, the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) has rebranded itself as Movements.org, an online hub for digital activists….

The AYM has a history of creating change–in 2008, a summit organized by the AYM included leaders of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, a protest movement seeking political reform and a democratic government.

“Movements.org is the source for anyone who wants to keep up to date on the use of technology for achieving real social change,” said Movements.org and Howcast cofounder Jason Liebman in a statement. “We have existed for three years as a support network for grassroots activists using digital tools, and today we come out of alpha launch to make our platform and resources available to everyone.”

In other words, the revolution is now centralized…[62]

It should be recalled that the April 6 Youth Movement has been a major factor in organizing the Egyptian revolt. The link for the April 6 Youth Movement provided by Fast Company goes to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the veteran globalist institutions, which describes the pivotal role “social media” played in the creation of the April 6 Youth Movement

In the spring of 2008, over 100,000 users of the social networking website Facebook joined an online group to express solidarity with workers protesting in the Delta industrial city of al-Mahalla al-Kubra. As the protests escalated into a nationwide strike, the Facebook group gained momentum and eventually coalesced into a political movement known as the April 6 Youth Movement.

In 2009, the group still claimed a membership of around 70,000 young Egyptians, most of whom are well-educated and politically unaffiliated. Like Egypt’s other protest movements, the April 6 Youth Movement is not a formal political party, but it nonetheless provides an outlet for a new generation of politically conscious Egyptians.[63]

Google’s Ghonim

One of the first leaders of the riots in Egypt to be detained was Google’s Egyptian executive Wael Ghonim, arrested on January 8, and freed ten days later. “Wael was also active on Facebook and Twitter regarding the Revolution…”[64] Newsweek credits Ghonim with a major role in the Egyptian revolt, with the subheading: “Wael Ghonim’s day job was at Google. But at night he was organizing a revolution.” [65] Although based in Dubai as Google’s head of marketing for North Africa, Ghonim “volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei,[66] the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader.”[67] According to Newsweek, it was Ghonim’s broadcast that actually instigated the revolt that toppled Mubarak:

On Jan. 14, protests in Tunisia felled that country’s longstanding dictator, and Ghonim was inspired to announce, on Facebook, a revolution of Egypt’s own. Each of the page’s 350,000-plus fans was cordially invited to a protest on Jan. 25. They could click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to signal whether they’d like to attend.[68]

Interestingly, it is claimed that Ghonim undiplomatically rejected offers by an “American NGO” to fund him. The claim seems disingenuous, given that Google is a U.S. corporation with close contact with the U.S. State Department, sundry NGOs and think tanks and a pivotal part of AYM. The question arises as to whether this is posturing by Ghonim given his comment that he would like to resume his job with Google if he’s not “fired” for his role in “sparking the Egyptian revolution.”[69] The quip is pure cant, as it seems unlikely that Ghonim is ignorant of the role Google and Facebook have played with AYM and the “velvet revolutions.” The following nonsense is supposed to have taken place between Ghonim and Google head office:

On the record, Google’s not talking about Ghonim or the question of employee activism. For his part, Ghonim told CBS’s Katie Couric in an interview on Friday that his participation in the protests had no connection with his employer.

“They did not know anything about this and actually when I took the time off and I went to Cairo, they did not know I was going to the protest,” he said. “But when everything became public, I talked with the company and they suggested that I take a leave of absence and I also suggested that to them and I think it was a good decision for that. Google has nothing to do with this.”[70]

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