4 July 2005 The Yes Men

Andrew Denton & The Yes Men - Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno
Photo by Gary Johnston

The theory goes that ordinary people are powerless, that we can't really have a say in the globalisation process. For years now The Yes Men, a pair of anti-corporate pranksters, have travelled the globe, passing themselves off as spokesmen for major corporations, exploits which have been captured in an upcoming documentary. Putting the act into activism, please welcome, from Paris, The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.

ANDREW DENTON: Welcome, men. Mike, if I could start with you. In 1993 you put your name on the map with the Barbie Liberation Organisation. What was that?

MIKE BONANNO: Well, that was an event where we switched the voice boxes between talking Barbie dolls and talking GI Joes and put them back on store shelves all around the United States, resulting in GI Joe's that said things like, "I love to shop with you," and Barbie's that said, "Let's shoot 'em up," and, "Dead men tell no lies." So on Christmas Day people brought these toys home, the kids opened them up and they got a little something extra, a little extra surprise from what we call the Barbie Liberation Organisation.

ANDREW DENTON: That is so sweet. Andy, you, in 1996, first made your mark with Simcopter. What did you do?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well I was working in a games company, a computer games company, and I was a bit fed up with my job, basically, and just as kind of a lark I decided to make the game more interesting without my bosses knowing. So I put - you know, I thought what would be interesting would be to see hundreds or thousands of boys in swim trunks kissing each other in the middle of the game randomly. Other people thought that was interesting, too, and they fired me. Then it became this big media story because I told a reporter and he thought that was interesting, and then everybody suddenly thought that it was very interesting. So I found, like, a lot of people shared my sense of what was interesting and that's kind of how I started thinking of this sort of activism.

ANDREW DENTON: Mike, you guys joined forces and in 1999 you managed to do something that upset George W. Bush. What was that?

MIKE BONANNO: We had put up a website at a domain called gwbush.com, which was a similar one to georgewbush.com, his official website. On gwbush.com website we tried to be a little more honest than he was being himself. So, for example, we announced a program on his behalf, called Amnesty 2000, in which he was going to release all of the prisoners in Texas who were being held on drugs charges. Because he, of course, had admitted to using drugs as a youth. He said that since that time he had grown up and so we figured, "Well all these other people have spent all this time in prison, growing up, so they're entitled to their release." He wasn't very fond of the website and he announced in a press conference that there ought to be limits to freedom and he thought we were garbage men and he urged us to remove the site, which we didn't.

ANDREW DENTON: So, Andy, after the George Bush website, you decided to set up another website, www.gatt.org, to tell people, in plain language, what the World Trade Organisation stood for. But the trick was, you made it look exactly like the WTO's actual website so people couldn't tell the difference. What sort of things did you say? How did the WTO react?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well we made it look similar to the real website, but if you read one single line of the text you'd be really shocked by what was on there. There was stuff about, you know, how the Holocaust was bad, but today we have a new Holocaust and it's called distrust of big business, and, you know, really tasteless things like that and worse. We intended it to make fun of the WTO, just like a satire, kind of like with gwbush, where we were making fun of Bush. We set up gatt.org to make fun of the WTO. But we were shocked because immediately we started getting a steady stream of email from people wanting to know all kinds of obscure trade matters, so we had to suddenly become experts on obscure trade matters and answer these questions as best we could.

ANDREW DENTON: There was another reaction, too, which is that you started getting requests to speak at conferences, to appear as representatives of the World Trade Organisation. Eventually you accepted one, one at International Trade Law in Salzburg. You set yourselves up as experts, what kind of expertise did you have?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: We felt like we understood the basics of free trade philosophy, which is, basically, you let the rich do whatever they want and it will be great for everyone. So we took off from there and just went as far off the deep end as we could. We suggested, basically, letting the rich, letting corporations buy votes from individual citizens, instead of financing elections and campaigns indirectly, the way they do today. Just, you know, offer 10 dollars a vote to anybody who wants to vote for candidate A or B and pay people to vote, and they loved it, they thought it was a good idea.

ANDREW DENTON: So, Mike, even though you were going, what you thought, was off the deep end, the response to this was, "This sounds great"?

MIKE BONANNO: Yes, it was incredibly shocking. We expected to go in there and get kicked out, we expected to maybe find out something about law enforcement in Austria, because this was in Salzburg. So it was incredibly shocking to not have any law enforcement action and to not even have people raising an eyebrow in the audience, to simply have them nod and say, "Good idea. Let's open a free market in democracy."

ANDREW DENTON: The invitations continued to come, including television appearances. Andy, you went on European television, as part of a debate about globalisation, as Granwyth Hulatberi, where, amongst other things, you suggested that the rich are right because they have power. We have an excerpt of that appearance here.

(EXCERPT SHOWN)

ANDREW DENTON: Andy, again, did anyone bat an eyelid here and say, "Hang on, this guy is not for real."

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well, no. The producers of the show didn't notice, none of the business audience noticed. Nobody noticed. The excerpt you saw was only the tip of the iceberg, I just really said some disgusting things, like, "We have the books, we've been studying these things. People have been writing books about this theory, it must be right."

ANDREW DENTON: What did that tell you?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Basically that you can't go far enough, I think. If you're the WTO and you're speaking to a business audience, you just can't go far enough. They seem to have infinite trust, or maybe they just weren't listening.

ANDREW DENTON: Mike, you decided to try go and further at a Textiles of the Future Conference in Finland. What was your plan for that?

MIKE BONANNO: We decided that maybe, since people weren't getting it when we were just saying it and showing Power Point images, maybe they needed something visual, a visual reminder. Some kind of metaphor. I won't explain exactly what it is because I believe you might have a clip that shows a little bit of it.

ANDREW DENTON: We do, and there are no words that can adequately describe this. So let's take a look at The Yes Men in action at the Textiles of the Future conference in Finland.

(CLIP SHOWN)

ANDREW DENTON: Now, gentlemen, presumably when you unveiled the EVA you were thrown out of the conference, right?

MIKE BONANNO: Wrong again. In fact, after the event we actually went around and tried to get people to complain about the phallus. You know, we asked them, "Is there anything wrong with this?" just implored them to find something wrong with it. There was only one person, a woman, who said she was offended by it and we asked her why and she said, "Well, women can be factory owners, too." So she didn't have a problem with the idea of giving electric shocks to workers in the Third World, but she had a problem with just the shape. Andy actually suggested, "Well what if it was in something a bit more, kind of, like, feminine," and she said, "Yes, that'd be fine."

ANDREW DENTON: We would never fall for an act like yours in Australia, would we?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: No, no, absolutely not.

ANDREW DENTON: You've never done anything here, have you?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: No, no.

ANDREW DENTON: Yes, you have.

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Okay, you got us. When we were invited to Australia by the Accounting Association in Sydney, we decided to dissolve the World Trade Organisation as representatives of the World Trade Organisation. For 45 minutes I described the reasons why we were shutting down, you know, rising poverty, rising inequality, all kinds of unrest in the Third World. The Australian accountants who were there were overjoyed, because they had thought about this before, they knew that it was an inappropriate system, that was not - unjust, that it was unjust to the poor and that it did have to be changed or things would get really bad.

ANDREW DENTON: Mike, there is a strong argument and plenty of statistics to back it up, that in fact globalisation works, that at no time in history has there been so much wealth spread amongst so many nations. What's your problem with that concept?

MIKE BONANNO: I think that if you compare that to the statistics, the idea that there are more poor people in the world than ever before, that the gap between rich and poor is as wide as it's ever been, that we see the poorer countries getting poorer over the last 20 years and the richer countries getting richer and we see increased rates of starvation, it seems that then the arguments that say that this current trade system is working don't seem to hold up anymore. In some cases it does work and in some cases it doesn't. But we need an organisation like the one we proposed to the accountants in Australia, that says, "We're going to apply a different set of rules here and our goals are going to be different." Instead of helping businesses do businesses, which is the goal of the WTO, you can read it on their website, our goal is going to be to help businesses help people and to make sure that all of those business decisions are about helping those people on the ground, helping the poor and helping the environment.

ANDREW DENTON: Andy, it's not just the WTO you target. Last December was the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, a leak at a Union Carbide plant in India which killed thousands, left more than 100,000 needing lifetime care. You were invited on BBC Worldwide, as a representative of Dow Chemicals, Jude Finistera. What did you say?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: What I did, on 3 December, was announce, on behalf of Dow, to the world, that we were doing the right thing. That we were compensating the victims of Bhopal finally, we were cleaning up the site so that people wouldn't continue to die of toxicity in the ground water. I went on for five minutes, explaining all the wonderful things that we were doing and it became world news for about an hour. Then Dow, of course, was finally reached and informed the BBC that it wasn't, in fact, doing anything whatsoever.

ANDREW DENTON: How did you feel about raising the hopes of the people of Bhopal, if only for a brief period of time?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Well for a little while we felt pretty bad about that, until we actually met some of the people from Bhopal, who told us that they were overjoyed and that the false hopes wasn't a really big deal for them, compared with the 500 articles in the US press that resulted from the event.

ANDREW DENTON: Mike, it's an extraordinary thing that you managed to get access to BBC Worldwide to do something like this. In the end, though, are you just showing up the big guys for a moment, or is there something more you're achieving?

MIKE BONANNO: I like to think that for that particular event, the Dow event, we showed that another world is possible. For just a moment everybody in the world who watched BBC News, or who read the story, could imagine the results of Dow suddenly doing the right thing. Again, it was just a matter of piercing the illusion that they couldn't, because in fact, you know, 12 billion dollars for them, I know it's a lot of money, but they could liquidate Union Carbide and they could compensate those victims. It would be the right thing to do and it would be easy to do if simply people could say, "Let's have a different kind of system. Let's make sure that the victims are cared for, let's make sure that the site is cleaned up." It's that simple.

ANDREW DENTON: Was part of the joy in this actually forcing Dow to come out and refuse to do the right thing?

MIKE BONANNO: Yes, that was definitely one of the things we wanted to do, because on the anniversary Dow was not going to say anything, we knew that, on the anniversary of the disaster. So we wanted to make sure that they had to say that they weren't going to help the victims. It was also somewhat satisfying that their stock plunged three billion dollars on the Frankfurt Exchange, before it rebounded again when the traders found out that it was false, that the story was false.

ANDREW DENTON: Andy, is this a full-time thing for you guys? How do you support yourselves?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: These days it's full-time. Mike has a job, I don't yet but I probably will soon. We've been lucky to - I mean I have a very frugal lifestyle. You can't see my pants, but I've been wearing them for about a week and a half now. We, at least I, just basically spend money on this and that's all, and, kind of, yes, survive on very little. Also we've gotten a few art grants. We've been taken for art by arts organisations at times and gotten grants that have probably funded us for a couple of years of the time that we've been working.

ANDREW DENTON: Mike, the World Trade Organisation manipulates the truth for its ends, you fake things for your ends. Who can we trust and how will we ever know the truth if we see it?

MIKE BONANNO: Well, I think one of the lessons of what we do is to trust nobody, but especially distrust those who have power. I mean, trusting us, in a sense, doesn't - you don't lose anything from trusting us, whereas by trusting those who have power and trusting everything they say and following along blindly, we lose a tremendous amount.

ANDREW DENTON: Andy, last question. Do invitations still come into your various websites? Are you still being asked to appear as people you are not?

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: We look forward to the next one. Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, The Yes Men, thank you very much.

MIKE BONANNO: Thank you.

ANDY BICHLBAUM: Thank you.

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