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igkultur  >  TRANSVERSAL  >  The Yes Men
The Yes Men

THE YES MEN are the corporate children of a website: http://www.gatt.org/. Born when the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had already been replaced by the WTO, GATT.ORG has catalyzed the distracted attention of CEOs, lawyers, journalists and other splinters of the Western ruling class. The Men behind the site have proudly accepted invitations to conferences and TV shows, providing some Power Point presentations, which have collectively been called the "Naked Lunch of Globalization" (see in particular www.theyesmen.org/finland and www.theyesmen.org/wto). What follows is a shake of identity net.plays aimed to spread corporate citizenship in a global consumer democracy.

FROM

From: The World Trade Organization <info@gatt.org>
From: Mike Moore <mmoore@gatt.org>
From: Alice Foley <afoley@gatt.org>
From: Andreas Bichlbauer <abichl@gatt.org>
From: Werner Daitz <wdaitz@gatt.org>
From: Kimppa <kimppakiva@theyesmen.org>
From: Moishe Pippikstein <moishe@theyesmen.org>
From: CNN - Bartle Huickinjag <bhuick@theyesmen.org>
From: CNN Information Services <CNNinfo@theyesmen.org>

SUBJECTS

Subject: Re: CILS Conference, Session on Int'l Trade, Salzburg, Austria, Oct. 26-29, 2000
Subject: WTO representative
Subject: Friday lecture in Salzburg
Subject: investigation
Subject: Unpleasant announcement, URGENT REQUEST
Subject: Re: Bichlbauer R.I.P.
Subject: Re: Terrence Hibbert
Subject: Granwyth Hulatberi-Hulatberi-Smith

BODIES

Dear Mr. Devine,
Thank you for your kind invitation. I may not be able to attend personally, but I would like very much to send a substitute. Would this be possible? Please let me know and I will begin the search process.
Thank you, Mike Moore

Dear Susanne,
When Michael Devine invited Mr. Moore to send a substitute speaker on his behalf, Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer was kind enough to oblige.[…]
Best wishes, Alice Foley
Administrative Assistant to Mike Moore

Dear Professor Campbell,
I was disappointed to hear from Alice Foley that some people in the audience on Saturday disliked my lecture. […] Those who were upset by the lecture were clearly unreceptive to any message departing from the simple WTO "party line" as it is presented in larger arenas. […]
Best wishes Andreas Bichlbauer

Dear Mr. Campbell,
Indeed you are correct, Dr. Bichlbauer was in fact "pied" after speaking at the Salzburg CILS conference. At present we are not completely certain of all the details, but it appears […] that an agent provocateur planned the pieing from the start. […]
Best wishes, Alice Foley
Administrative Assistant to Mike Moore

Dear Delegates,
We apologize for interrupting your holiday season with this most unpleasant announcement.
Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer, who spoke on behalf of the WTO at the CILS conference in Salzburg on Oct. 27, and with whom many of you shared a pleasurable moment or two, has passed on. He succumbed yesterday, at 16:50 CET, to an infection thought to have been caught from the rotten pie which was hurled in his face after his Oct. 27 lecture. […]
Walther Funk
Investigative Services

Dear Mr. Schroeder,

Indeed, we have a particular problem that I would like to take up with you. I think I did mention, did I not, that we had developed a Management Leisure Suit, a garment allowing today's CEOs to oversee foreign workforces in unprecedented detail, all the while engaging in healthy leisure activities sure to bolster efficiency?

Well, that was a "white lie": while we have developed a *prototype* of the suit, we have not developed the suit itself. It is, in a word, quite difficult to develop. Here is what it must do:

1. Perform surveillance of distant factory floors, relaying information directly into the vacationing manager (through implanted sensors) of any anomalies, excesses, excrescences, superlatives, and errors. Thus information-enabled, the manager can gambol all over Bermuda, if he/she so chooses.

2. Upon unusual information excrescence, the MLS must enable the manager to express upon any given worker, or on all workers together, electrical impulses that will alert the worker to the fact that work must be performed more ethically. […]

Thank you,
Granwyth Hulatberi

Dear Mr. Schroeder,

We are gratified to receive your request to work for the World Trade Organization. Thank you! What we are is this: an effective organization with global goodwill and goodwill for the globe. We have forward momentum; we will hurry humanity into prosperous futures! […]

At the Malaysian agribusiness conference, we laid out a radical plan to allow the Third-World hungry to participate in the miracle of U.S. fast food by recycling their one-dollar hamburgers as many times as financially necessary.

On CNBC, we showed how it would be possible to extend the logic of "pollution vouchers," whereby countries and companies purchase rights to pollute, into the field of human rights violations.

And at a legal conference in Salzburg we promoted a scheme to privatize voting--allowing companies to contract directly with individual voters for a particular suffrage. This would let politics be run more efficiently, through commerce, rather than through the clumsy and indirect language of big-government bureaucrats.

You will find such examples inspiring, and you will see that there is a place in our organization for difficult work and strenuous efforts at communication. Indeed, communication can help us all travel outside the box, or even--yes, potentially!--to rupture that box completely, through spurring and prodding and effort.

Let's spur! Let's prod! And let's effort: now you tell us how.

With very best wishes,
Granwyth Hulatberi
Informatics for Progress Division, WTO
http://www.gatt.org/
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