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May 28 - On
Tuesday, May 21, a representative of the World Trade Organization
announced the dissolution of his organization to a shocked but
supportive Sydney audience (http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf,
http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html
). He stated the WTO would reconstitute as a new organization
dedicated to assisting the world's poor instead of the rich (http://gatt.org/trastat_e.html).
The bombshell
announcement has had worldwide repercussions, sparking debate on the
floor of the Canadian Parliament, where MP John Duncan took the
floor to ask "what impact this will have on our appeals on lumber,
agriculture and other ongoing trade disputes" (http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020525/338502.html).
At that point,
WTO headquarters in Geneva denounced the "representative" as an
impostor. "While we can appreciate [the impostors'] sense of humour,
we would not wish for reputable news organizations like yours to be
counted among those duped."
"It isn't humor
this time," said Andy Bichlbaum, who "represented" the WTO in
Sydney. "We really do want to dissolve the WTO and rewrite its
charter so that the poor benefit rather than suffer from trade
policy." The group he belongs to, The Yes Men, have previously
represented the WTO at two international conferences ( http://theyesmen.org/wto/, http://theyesmen.org/finland/
) and on mainstream TV (http://theyesmen.org/tv.html).
Each time, they have been invited by people who mistook a Yes Men
parody website (http://gatt.org/) for the official WTO
site (http://www.wto.org/). The WTO reacted
to previous appearances with outrage and attempts to shut GATT.org
down.
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 poor--moving 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."
In past
appearances, the Yes Men hoped to horrify audiences by taking
free-trade ideas to their logical conclusions. They argued for
selling votes to the highest corporate bidder (http://theyesmen.org/wto/ppt/),
making the poor "recycle" hamburgers to cure endemic hunger (http://theyesmen.org/hamburger/),
allowing countries to commit human rights abuses with a system of
"justice vouchers" modelled after pollution vouchers, and even
enabling managers to administer electric shocks to sweatshop workers
from afar by using a futuristic telepresence technology embedded in
a three-foot-long golden phallus (http://theyesmen.org/finland/photos.html).
The joke was on
the Yes Men, however, when these proposals failed to shock
audiences, who repeatedly found it credible that such ideas would
come from the WTO.
Finally, the Yes
Men decided to say "no."
"We've already
demonstrated that audiences of experts will accept anything
whatsoever so long as it comes from the mouth of the WTO," said Mike
Bonanno, a Yes Man who helped to prepare the lecture in Sydney.
"This time, we decided to use the WTO's authority to lead people on
a useful exercise that could actually produce something
positive."
"It really is
possible to dissolve and remake the WTO," said Bichlbaum. "The WTO,
after all, was put together from a bunch of wishful thinking and
previous agreements one day in 1994. It can just as quickly and
easily be replaced by something much better, based on other
agreements--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for
example."
After the events
in Sydney, the Yes Men are even more optimistic. "The accountants
offered us all kinds of useful suggestions on how to make sure the
new version of the WTO benefits the poor," said Bonanno. "We feel
kind of bad for misleading them, but they came up with much better
plans for the future than we could. We hope they'll accept our
apologies and keep working with us."
CONTACTS:
The Yes Men: mailto:representatives@theyesmen.org
CPA
Australia: mailto:barbara.magee@cpaaustralia.com.au,
mailto:rhonda.traversi@cpaaustralia.com.au
http://www.cpaonline.com.au/
WTO
Public Relations (current): mailto:enquiries@wto.org
WTO Public
Relations (previous): mailto:jean-guy.carrier@wto.org
The WTO
representative's speech in Sydney:
http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf
CPA
Australia: http://cpaonline.com.au/
The
CPA's press release: http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html
WTO
dissolution announcement: http://gatt.org/irelease.html
Statistics about trade liberalization's effects on the poor:
http://www.gatt.org/trastat_e/
World
Development Movement: http://www.wdm.org.uk/
United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
The
primary goal of RTMark (http://rtmark.com/) is to publicize
corporate subversion of the democratic process. It has helped to
sponsor three of the Yes Men's appearances.
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