It's really all leftists vs. the rest of us...

Who's behind '99 percenters'?

By Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott

A company hired to lead marketing campaigns for such corporate giants as Pepsi, Starbucks, IBM and Toyota now is promoting Occupy Wall Street while complaining about the top "1 percent" ultra-wealthy allegedly hoarding the country's wealth.

GOOD Worldwide LLC describes itself as a media platform that promotes, connects, and reports on the individuals, businesses, and non-profits "moving the world forward." It maintains a central website, quarterly magazine, and online video content all dedicated to promoting so-called progressive values.

A division of the company, GOOD/Corps., seeks a "shared value revolution" by working with some of the world's biggest companies to "helps brands and organizations align business strategy with social impact, and win through highly participatory and profitable relationships with their audiences."

GOOD recently led rebranding campaigns for a litany of corporate giants. It developed Pepsi's "Refresh" campaign, a "Harmony" project for Toyota, IBM's "smarter cities" drive and Starbucks' "community" project. Other major companies listed as having "partnered" with GOOD include Apple, Aveda, BP, Ford, Gap , GE , IBM, Jet Blue Airways, Levi's, Lexus, Kashi, Microsoft, MINI, NBC Universal, Ralph Lauren , Skyy Vodka, Virgin Mobile and Whole Foods.

While GOOD/Corps clearly aims to infuse specific values to corporate marketing campaigns, the companies themselves have praised those very campaigns for increasing revenues. Robert MacDonald, CEO of P&G, reportedly changed the strategy of the company to "Touching and improving more lives, in more parts of the world, more completely." "It's more than a noble idea, it's a game-changing growth strategy and a powerful source of competitive advantage," MacDonald said of the rebranded strategy.

Michael E. Porter of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, commenting on the progressive marketing campaigns, said, "Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success." While GOOD/Corps is partnered with some of the biggest names on Wall Street, it has been supporting the Occupy movement in recent weeks, even complaining about the "top 1 percent" allegedly hoarding the country's wealth.

A visit to GOOD's websites on any given day finds an abundance of pro-Occupy content, including articles supporting the movement. Just yesterday, the main site's rotator featured an article by GOOD's managing editor, Megan Greenwald, complaining, "No plan that included raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans had a chance of earning Republican support."

The article contained a photo of protesters demanding, "Tax the rich." Another article yesterday publicized, "Rooftops: Occupied! Communities Turn Out for Solar Power." GOOD featured a series of "anti-1-percenter" articles. On October 24, it was "The 1 Percent Are Not All Wall Streeters – But Lots of Them Are Bosses," followed on October 26 by "The 1 Percent Has Nearly Tripled Its Share of America's Income." On October 12, deemed by Occupy Wall Street as Bank Transfer Day, GOOD posted "A Step-by-Step Guide to Leaving Your Big Predatory Bank."

GOOD writer Curtis Walker's web page instructed readers to "Protest Big Banks with Their Own Junk Mail. "Not everyone who supports Occupy Wall Street movement can camp out in solidarity. So there's a simple and cheap way to get back at big banks and make your voice heard. All you need to get started is your daily pile of junk mail," he wrote.

GOOD's writers are concerned about OWS's political future. One recent post stated "Occupy Wall Street Needs Democratic Friends in Congress." A few weeks after came the claim "Occupy Wall Streeters Aren't Republicans – Or Democrats." Concern later shifted to "How Will the Occupy Wall Street Protesters Vote?"

Soros Connections:

GOOD, meanwhile, was founded as a magazine by Benjamin Goldhirsh, who "decided to create a magazine dedicated to social causes." Goldhirsh co-founded GOOD with Max Schorr and Casey Caplowe, reportedly using $2.5 million from his own trust fund after becoming wealthy from an inheritance left by his father.

Goldhirsh serves on the board of directors of  The Goldhirsh Foundation, which supports "social programs, environmental initiatives, innovative medical research and leading cultural institutions." He also serves on the boards of "Be the Change," which launched the United Nations Millenium Promise, an organization founded in 2005 by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Millenium has worked with GOOD in multiple initiatives.

Other Millenium Promise board members include Sachs and Stewart Paperin, executive vice president of the Open Society Institute and president of the Soros Economic Development Fund. Partners in the Millenium Promise — an organization "guided by the UN's Millenium Development goals to end global poverty by 2025" — include Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Soros Economic Development Fund, Soros Foundations Network, and The Goldhirsh Foundation.

Sachs has been in the news recently after he penned a New York Times oped deeming the Occupy movement a "new era in America" that will realize the dawn of corporate and government cooperation. He further called for "a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites." Sachs is a key member of Soros' Institute for New Economic Thinking, or INET.

The group holds an annual gathering of economic giants in the mountains of Bretton Woods, N.H., at the Mount Washington Hotel, famous for hosting the original Bretton Woods economic agreements drafted in 1944. That conference's goal was to rebuild a post-World War II international monetary system. Soros' gathering openly has a similar goal – a global economic restructuring.

With additional research by Chris Elliott .

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