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/