The Yes Men
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The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction". They pretend to be powerful people and organizations and then use their newfound authority to espouse what they think those groups really believe. Its two leading members are known by a number of aliases, most recently, and in film, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.
Their experiences were documented in the film The Yes Men, distributed by United Artists, as well as the book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization (ISBN 0972952993).
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WTO
The Yes Men's most famous prank is placing a "corrected" WTO website at gatt.org [[1]] (GATT is the treaty that led to the WTO). The fake site began to receive real emails from confused visitors, including invitations to address various elite groups on behalf of the WTO, which they obligingly took up.
Showing up in newly-purchased suits, The Yes Men gave speeches encouraging corporations to buy votes directly from citizens, arguing that the US Civil War was a waste of money because Third World countries now willingly supply equivalent slaves, and claiming that people should listen to the WTO, not the facts, because the WTO had a lot of experts.
George W. Bush
One of The Yes Men's first pranks was the satirical website www.gwbush.com, established during the 2000 presidential election to draw attention to hypocrisies on Bush's actual website. When asked about the site in a press conference on May 21, 1999, Bush responded that the website had gone too far, and that "there ought to be limits to freedom."
In 2004, The Yes Men went on tour posing as the group "Yes, Bush Can!" encouraging supporters to sign a "Patriot Pledge" agreeing to keep nuclear waste in their backyard and send their children off to war. They appeared at the 2004 Republican National Convention and drove across the country in a painted van.
Dow Chemicals
On December 3, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Andy Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World as "Jude Finisterra", a Dow Chemical spokesman. (Dow is the owner of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the chemical disaster which killed thousands and left over 120,000 requiring lifelong care.)
On their fake Dow Chemical Website [2], the Yes Men first said as clearly and emphatically as possible that Dow Chemical Company had no intention whatsoever of repairing the damage. The real company received considerable backlash and both the real Dow and the Yes Men's Dow denied the statements but Dow took no real action. The Yes Men decided to pressure Dow further, so as "Finisterra" went on the news to claim that Dow planned to liquidate Union Carbide and use the resulting $12 billion to pay for medical care, clean up the site, and fund research into the hazards of other Dow products. After two hours of wide coverage, Dow issued a press release denying the statement, ensuring even greater coverage.
At the International Payments Conference on April 28, 2005 'Dow representative' Erastus Hamm unveiled Acceptable Risk, the Acceptable Risk Calculator, and the Acceptable Risk mascot — a life-sized golden skeleton named Gilda — to an audience of about 70 banking professionals.
External links
- The Yes Men official website
- Book website
- IMDB - Info Wars
- The Yes Men and Activism in the Information Age (pdf)
- Interview of the Yes Men.
For Dow Chemicals:
- "Corrected" Dow Chemicals site
- News report
- Story from Yes Men site with link to BBC broadcast
For George W. Bush:
Listening/Viewing
- Interview with Andy Bichlbaum from Democracy Now! program, May 12, 2006
