The Yes Men aren't afraid to take their lumps either, and throughout the movie they play clips of the media response to their stunts as well as relaying official statements from various politicians who have been duped by them. It's quite amazing how many times they are accused of playing cruel tricks upon people by creating false hopes. When they went to New Orleans and announced that HUD was changing its mind and would re-open all the public housing instead of tearing it down - public housing that had survived Katrina intact - or announced on worldwide television that Dow Chemical was going to finally do what was right - the response was identical. Yet who were the ones who were doing the damage in the first place, who caused all the pain to begin with? Weren't those who made the decision to tear down public housing in New Orleans depriving people of a place to live being cruel? Wasn't the fact that Dow Chemical announced that it had no intentions of making restitution to the people of Bhopal or cleaning up the Union Carbide plant more of an insult to the people living there than anything either of the Yes Men could have said?
To find out, Andy and Mike went to Bhopal and met with the people who run the community health clinic for those affected by the leak and with a journalist who not only broke the story, but for five years prior to the leak tried to warn the government the plant was a disaster waiting to happen. The journalist and the head of the Sambhavna Clinic both agreed that while they were obviously disappointed that the offer wasn't real, they thought it was a brilliant way to make the world aware of the ongoing situation and how Dow Chemical was shirking its responsibilities.
The truly scary part of The Yes Men Fix The World is the number of times people have taken them at face value. Whether they're explaining to people how to factor loss of human life against potential profits in order to figure out a project's net value, explaining how corporations should be allowed to buy people's votes in order to streamline democracy, or demonstrating an outrageously silly survival suit to insurance adjusters, nobody blinks an eye and merely want to exchange business cards. They were trying to shock people and ended up shocked themselves. The only times people got upset is when they made announcements about doing something positive for people who were suffering. What does that tell you about the world we live in?
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