For Immediate Release
Contact: RTMark,
The
Yes Men representatives@theyesmen.org
May 28, 2002 -- 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/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."
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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