The Yes Men strike back in new HBO documentary

Led by a pair of subversives, the performance artists/social agitators known as The Yes Men combat and comment on corporate greed, government malfeasance and the misdeeds of other powerful organizations by staging stunts that call attention to outrages about which they believe most of the public has become complacent.

A chronicle of their last six years of work, the new documentary "The Yes Men Fix the World," will premiere at 9 p.m. Monday on HBO and likely will be shown theatrically in the Capital Region in the fall.

"The stakes keep getting higher," says Mike Bonanno, 41, half of The Yes Men and an associate professor of arts at RPI in Troy, explaining what keeps the pair energized.

Their next project, about global warming, is expected to be carried out at the United Nations climate-change conference being held in Copenhagen in December. The details of the action are still a secret, but Bonanno says this of the subject: "If we believe scientists instead of the no-global-warming PR campaign, the entire future of the planet is at stake now. We can either choose to make the right decision or ignore it, and if we ignore it, hundreds of millions of people will die."

So far their most famous action, as they prefer to call the stunts, came in December 2004 on the 20th anniversary of the Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, that killed about 16,000 people and left up to 10 times that number with lifelong medical problems. After being contacted by the BBC through a fake Web site The Yes Men created for Dow Chemical, owner of Union Carbide, Bonanno's partner, Andy Bichlbaum, said in a BBC interview broadcast worldwide that Dow was finally accepting responsibility and would liquidate Union Carbide to fund a $12 billion compensation fund for victims.

Although the fraud was exposed within hours, the value of Dow's stock fell by $2 billion.

As shown in the film, corporate executives, government officials and members of the media excoriated the deception, saying The Yes Men had cruelly given false hope to the disaster victims.

Perhaps, The Yes Men say, but any false hope they might have engendered lasted just a few hours -- infinitessimal in comparison with 20 years' worth of fruitless waiting for Dow to pay for compensation, cleanup and medical care. Further, they say, and as a visit to Bhopal in the documentary shows, the victims and their advocates quickly got over their disappointment and celebrated the trickery for bringing renewed international attention to their suffering. As The Yes Men say on their Web site, "If the deaths, debilities, organ failure, brain damage, tumors, breathing problems, and sundry other forms of permanent damage caused by Dow and Union Carbide aren't enough to arouse your pity, and the hour of 'false hopes' we caused is (enough) -- fantastic, we won! Go straight to Bhopal.net and make a donation."