The Man Who Shut Down the WTO
text and
photos by Sndor Lau, October, 2003
It's my first time
seriously asking anyone, "So what's your real name." But it
seems only appropriate to ask Andy Bichlbaum, aka Granwyth
Halutberi, aka Hank Hardy Unruh. And I have to admit I feel
slightly uneasy when, in a quiet American accent, he says "I
can't tell you."
Of course I wouldn't tell me either if
I were the frontman for the Yes-Men, a group posing as the
World Trade Organization, both through their website, www.gatt.org, and in person on
international media and at international conferences.
At
a 2001 conference in Tampere, Finland, "Hank Hardy Unruh"
addressed 150 representatives of the "textilian" industry,
suggesting that abolition of "Involuntarily Imported Labor",
as practiced in the American South, was unnecessary.
Because market forces would have replaced it anyway with our
current system, which is both more humane and of course,
more profitable. Under the WTO, Remotely Located Workers
(RLWs) in places like Gabon provide the industry with
slave-like labour, without the unnecessary costs of
providing for the workers' needs or dealing with restrictive
US child labor laws. His speech was apparently well
received and was praised three times by the master of
ceremonies.
Andy, or whatever his name is, is here in
Auckland for the Manukau Institute of Technology's Cultural
Provocation conference. Merata Mita has just spoken about
Hone Heke chopping down the flagpole at Kororareka as an
early act of Mori civil disobedience. When it comes Andy's
turn to present, he seems surprisingly anxious to show
videos of the Yes-Men files rather than speaking. He's only
just showed up at the conference near midday, and his
roommate tells me he came in at 4am, after a night of social
activism.

I ask him about his
first act of civil disobedience, expecting something about
organizing a high-school boycott of the pledge of
allegiance. While he admits to rearranging his blind
uncle's furniture in younger days, he says the distinction
between artist and troublemaker is a small one, and his
first Russell flagpole came much later in life. It seems
pointless to ask his age when I don't even know his name,
but he looks to be in his 30s, so I can only guess he was
well into his 20s when, in 1996, he planted a picture of two
boys kissing into a video game he designed.
While I have
not discovered any kissing on
www.gatt.org, they do have something almost equally as
interesting, a deck of hit-list cards featuring the most
wanted war criminals of the Bush regime. The site also
posts the kind of fun facts that are censored from the
corporate news because investigative journalism is neither
financially nor strategically profitable for the six
corporations who now control most of the US media. In his
speech, Andy points out that 30% of US television news is
shot and delivered to broadcasters by private corporations,
and I wish I could believe that this was just a Yes-Men
hoax.
Here are just some of the fun facts from www.gatt.org:
On September
11, 2001, 3000 people died in the terrorist attacks on the
US; 24,000 people died of hunger; 6,020 children were killed
by diarrhoea; and 2,700 children were killed by measles.
Which is even more interesting considering the
context:
"The UN estimates that poor countries lose about
US$2 billion a day because of unjust trade rules, many of
them instituted by the WTO-14 times the amount they receive
in aid." Kiwis can stand up proud and tall, knowing that
Whakatane boy and former PM Mike Moore served as the WTO's
director general from 1999-2002.
According to Andy, the
Yes-Men's finest moment came in Sydney last year, where
before a meeting of the Certified Public Accountants of
Australia, he announced the dissolution of the WTO, and its
replacement with an organization based on the principles of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The implications
of the WTO shutdown spread so widely, they were debated in
the Canadian Parliament.
With that, though, the Yes-Men
downsized themselves into near-redundancy. Shutting down
the WTO is not exactly a hoax you can repeat. The website
is still going, and the makers of American Movie premiered
their new documentary, The Yes-Men, at the Toronto
International Film Festival in September. Bill Gosden, you
must bring it to the New Zealand Film Festival next year.
I immediately become suspicious when Andy tells me he had
a normal childhood. After a little prodding, I discover
that by normal, he means growing up gay in a French-speaking
household in the Arizona desert. Andy, or whatever his name
is, claims he now lives in Paris, and while I have no reason
to think otherwise, I'll believe it when I read in the
newspaper that France is going to make reparations for South
Pacific nuclear testing and the Rainbow Warrior.
******** Andy Bichlbaum's reading
list:
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914-1991-Eric J. Hobsbawm
The Great Transformation-Karl
Polanyi
Two Worlds-Anne Salmond
http://www.gatt.org
http://www.theyesmen.org
http://www.rtmark.com
Full transcript of the exploits
of Hank Hardy Unruh in Tampere, Finland in Harpers magazine
Nov. 2001
****ENDS****- Contact
Sndor Lau at sandor_lau (at) yahoo.com
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