Bailout for OWS?

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

Bankruptcy makes for strange bedfellows. During its brief spell on the national stage, the Occupy Wall Street movement raged against rich corporations – “corporate fascists” in OWS parlance. But as the national spotlight has faded – and as cash from progressive donors has dried up – the movement’s soak-the-rich agitators are set to welcome a financing boost from the same “1 percent” they once denounced.

OWS’s corporate benefactor is the so-called Movement Resource Group, a funding venture backed by the left-wing founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream as well as the former manager of grunge group Nirvana, among others. The group has raised some $300,000 so far, and plans to raise around $1.8 million to revive the moribund movement.

Ben and Jerry’s involvement in the cause is entirely in keeping with the company’s activist giving. Driven by its founders’ Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield’s radical politics, the ice cream giant has long funded extreme left-wing causes through its Ben and Jerry’s Foundation. Dispensing funds to a broad spectrum of left-wing groups, from ACORN to the Tides Foundation, the ice cream makers have never seen a contradiction between their commercial success and their intense loathing of free-market capitalism. In recent years, for instance, their foundation has endorsed the “Earth Charter,” a document that blames capitalism on the world’s environmental, social and economic ills. The charter declares that “the dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species” and blames capitalism for causing the “gap between rich and poor.”