"But they were so polite and they had such a large
Powerpoint presentation, how could they possibly be
hoaxers?"
...says it all, really...
Read the original
article or read on below.
You can fool some of the people...
by Stuart
Mackenzie
Excellent Freelance Journalist
Another day, another great internet hoax story. Stuart
Mackenzie reports on how Australia`s peak accounting body got
cleaned up.
They stand among the wreckage of their former clients,
heads shaking.
How could it happen? How could they have misled us? How
could we have missed what was really going on?
Perhaps seeking some relief from the killing fields of
recent corporate failures, last month a group of Certified
Practising Accountants settled down in Sydney to a lunchtime
seminar on international trade with the World Trade
Organisation’s Kinnithrung Sprat.
Sprat had some dramatic news to announce – the WTO’s
planned dissolution in September and its reconstitution as a
new Trade Regulation Organisation, dedicated to assisting the
world`s poor instead of the rich.
“The new organisation will have as its basis the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the aim of
ensuring the TRO will have human rather than business
interests as its bottom line,” Sprat was quoted as saying.
After the initial shock, some of the accountants expressed
enthusiasm for the change, and offered thoughtful suggestions
for how world trade could benefit the poor – moving the TRO
headquarters from Switzerland to a Third World country, for
example.
“I’m as right-wing as the next fellow,” said one of the
CPAs, ”but it`s time we gave something back to the countries
we`ve been doing so well from.”
Realising the news value, CPA Australia issued a media
release through Australian Associated Press, under the name of
NSW communications manager Barbara McGee, announcing the WTO’s
restructure.Meanwhile, Canadian MP John Duncan had seen a
similar media release on a website and during question time
asked the government what impact this would have on current
trade negotiations.
A confused Pat O`Brien, parliamentary secretary to the
trade minister, responded that Canada would continue to press
its cases before the WTO.
Unfortunately, for both bean-counters and pollies,
Kinnithrung Sprat was not who he purported to be, but was
impersonator Andy Bichelbaum from an anti-globalisation group
called the Yes Men.
The Yes Men’s hoaxes involve posing as WTO employees and
presenting information to business meetings around the world
that is contrary to the aims of the real World Trade
Organisation.
Bichelbaum recently told the ABC’s Media Report that people
listening to his presentations think that it’s really the WTO
speaking to them.
“This caught us by surprise the first time when we
responded to an invitation to go and speak to a conference of
lawyers specialising in international trade in Salzburg. We
expected them to react to the insane talk that we’d prepared
with horror, and either drum us out of town, put us in jail,
at least react. And when they didn’t and when they didn’t even
notice that there was something fishy going on, we were rather
taken aback.”
After one hoax in Finland, a participant said, “But they
were so polite and they had such a large Powerpoint
presentation, how could they possibly be hoaxers?”
"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, another Yes Man who helped to
prepare the Sydney lecture.
Bonanno says his group is trying to balance the free trade
debate.
“We simply wanted to present the idea that it is possible
and attainable to create a trading system that is first and
foremost concerned with the welfare of people, rather than the
current system in which profits are the only goal,” he told
AAP recently.
So how does it work?
The Yes Men own the Internet URL http://www.cyberpunks.org/display/658/article/display/658/article/www.gatt.org
which impersonates the WTO’s official site.
Business organisations seeking a speaker from the WTO
contact the Yes Men through the site, often enquiring about
the availability of Mike Moore, the WTO’s Director-General.
The Yes Men write back saying Moore is unavailable and
offering an alternative expert speaker, which is usually
accepted and away they go.
Subscribers can find more information about the WTO
dissolution hoax at this
web site including the media release from CPA Australia
which apparently ran on their website for several days before
they realised they’d been had.Stuart Mackenzie can be reached
at freelancejournalist@bigpond.com