The Voice of the Turtle Salutes the Yes Men

The Yes Men are an odd flank in the battle against capitalist globalisation. They look like capitalists, they talk like capitalists, not all of them are men and the only weapons they carry are pies and PowerPoint presentations.

Ever since Seattle, the Yes Men have been bringing the pomposity of the pro-Europe, pro-free trade apologists home. In the past, they've presented compelling economic reasons why the poor should become hamburgers, why the Italians are congenitally lazy, and most compellingly, why the poor should auction their votes to the highest bidder, rather than persist with the façade that democracy and corporations exist in different worlds. Enlightened by these disquisitions have been the unwitting lawyers at international trade firms, business students in New York, and textile experts in Tampere, Finland. This latter stunt was particularly spectacular a hundred and fifty participants at the Textiles of the Future conference nodded in agreement as a "WTO representative" denounced Gandhi's self-sufficiency movement as protectionist. He also lamented Lincoln's heavy-handed intervention in the free market for slaves, arguing that today's distributions of labour and capital in America could have been achieved, at less cost, under pre-Civil War arrangements. The speech ended with the launch of the "Management Leisure Suit"‚ a gold-lamé leotard with a three-foot phallus to detect radio-waves from collared employees.

This is a hard act to follow, and yet, in May, the Yes Men pulled off their biggest coup to date.

The World Trade Organization's official website has long been accompanied by the slightly less trafficked, and superficially indistinguishable, http://www.gatt.org/ (named after the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which the WTO replaced). Except that, rather than reproducing the WTO site verbatim, the Yes Men have inserted a few disruptive comments of their own; instead, then, of a new tariff schedule for Burkina Faso, one might find oneself confronted by a dizzying array of statistics correlating increases in trade with decreases in standards of living. On 20 May, the Yes Men announced through gatt.org that the WTO would be dissolving itself. A speech leaking this announcement was delivered by a "WTO representative" to the Certified Practicing Accountants Association in Sydney, Australia on 19 May. It is a masterpiece of rhetoric a tale of one economist's descent into the maw of the WTO, his subsequent epiphany, and a dawning realisation that the WTO is not part of the solution, but part of the problem. Thus our representative was able to deliver, with a straight face, the following snippet

"Now I know this news will profoundly shock many of you. I know that it still shocks me, even though I have had many months to prepare. These were months in which I learned many things that I did not know, or did not fully understandthings that have profoundly altered my vision of the work that we have done, and that have led me to accept that our policies have, overall, had exactly the opposite effect as that which we originally intended. Understanding the extent of our error has brought me peace with this difficult decision."

The representative was also pleased to announce that the WTO would be replaced by a Trade Regulation Organisation, based on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and motivated by a firm commitment to the rights of the hungry trumping the rights of the rich.

The Yes Men's press release puts it well: "After overcoming their initial shock, the audience of Australian accountants expressed enthusiasm for the change, and offered many thoughtful suggestions for how world trade could benefit the poormoving the headquarters from Switzerland to a Third World country, for example. "I‚m as right-wing as the next fellow", said one of the accountants, "but it‚s time we gave something back to the countries we've been doing so well from".The work was flawless enough to prompt John Duncan, a Canadian Alliance MP, to ask questions about how the new TRO would work for Canadians.

These are dark times for people involved in activism on the internet. Corporations are, through PR agencies like the Bivings Group, handmaiden to Monsanto, using the internet to create a veneer of popular support for, in this case, GMO foods. This "astro-turf activism" has real consequences: it has most recently been providing arguments for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's inchoate views on GMOs.

That's what makes the Yes Men a particularly appropriate organization to salute. They are more than just hucksters; they're artists, in a venerable tradition. They're modern court jesters, speaking truth to power, voices for the oppressed.

Consider this: the opposite situation, of a group of corporate lobbyists talking to a bunch of activists as if they were real activists would never be possible. The Yes Men are about opening eyes and ears, not closing them. And this marks them out as exceptionally creative, and comic, revolutionaries. Che Guevara's dictum, that "the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love", needs a supplement: Can"t have revolution without a sense of humour.

And so, for their dedication to knavery, their elaborate trickery, tireless good humour, the Turtle is proud to Salute the boys and girls of The Yes Men!

Visit them at http://theyesmen.org/