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It's your world. Understand it!
March 6: Sunday Monitor
KPFT - Pacifica Radio
listen online at www.kpft.org
or, in Houston, 90.1 FM
6 pm Central
7 pm Eastern
4 pm Pacific
ARCHIVES
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Just look for SUNDAY MONITOR and the date of the show.
<> 6 pm CST -- HEADLINES
<> ~6:15 pm -- SEGMENT ONE: Voting Activists
The
first segment is excerpts from a piece produced for Sprouts by Dori
Smith of Connecticut. Our co-host Pokey Anderson consulted on the
piece. You will hear Rice Professor Dan Wallach reporting on the first
open meeting in Texas of voting machine vendors and citizens -- a
meeting that took place in Austin this week.
<> ~6:35 pm -- SEGMENT TWO: THE YES MEN
The
Yes Men are some quirky fellows who dress in suits and insinuate
themselves into meetings of the mighty and powerful. Our co-host, Mark
Bebawi will speak with a Yes Men co-founder, Andy, live from the West
Coast.
The Yes Men explain themselves on their website:
The
Yes Men get into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions,
and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public
glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. The Yes Men shock
their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satires on global free
trade. But, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to agree with
every terrible idea the two can come up with.
Why are you called the Yes Men?
You
know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We
do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with
people—turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can
see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that's what we try
to do, anyhow—but as it turns out, the image always seems to look
normal to them.
RE: THE WTO
When we went to the
International Legal Studies Conference in Salzburg, we delivered a
speech that we thought would make people think twice about WTO
policies. We suggested that the siesta in Spain be made illegal because
it gets in the way of work. We suggested that a "free market" be
established in the realm of democratic government by allowing the
buying and selling of votes... we even showed them a website that could
make the process very efficient.
All of these ideas simply
follow the free market philosophy at the core of the WTO to its logical
extreme, which is of course quite illogical when you look at the facts.
And the facts are that in the last 25 years the poor of the world have
gotten even poorer... while the rich have gotten astronomically richer.
And all that during the implementation of policies that the WTO claim
will help the poor. Of course, these kinds of twisted ideas of what is
right for the weak or the poor are not new—there was a bizarre logic
that supported colonialism too.
Unfortunately, our current
religion of free-trade is so strong that despite our best efforts to
satirize the logic, the various audiences we spoke to simply agreed
with every sinister, corrupt, and disgusting idea that the "WTO" could
muster. So we learned exactly how frightening this reality is.
RE: MEDIA
Mainstream
journalists almost always get our serious points, and transmit it to
the journalism-consuming consumer. A lot of these people (journalists)
really want to write about important things—but in the U.S. at least,
you can't cover the WTO or the Bhopal anniversary just because they're
tremendously important. We can provide the fodder, sometimes, that lets
these subjects get covered.
RE: BHOPAL
Our intention
was to get news about Bhopal into the U.S., where most people don't
even know what happened there in 1984, let alone that a person still
dies every day from residual pollution that has never been cleaned up.
Right there in Dow's headquarters—Midland, Michigan—most people don't
realize that Dow still refuses to do the slightest thing to repair the
damage they are responsible for.
Yes Men WEBSITE: www.theyesmen.org
MOVIE:
Currently playing in the UK, The Yes Men, a movie, follows this pair of
anti-corporate activist-pranksters as they impersonate World Trade
Organization spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the
world.
HOSTS: Mark Bebawi and Pokey Anderson
TIPS or COMMENTS
Write to SundayMonitor@journalist.com
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