Yes, You Can

A BuzzFlash Interview. Posted October 4, 2004.

If you want to know what free trade fantasists really believe about the stretch of corporate power – such as giving companies the right to buy someone's vote and letting supply and demand sort out democracy – then you'll want to check out a new film called "The Yes Men."

Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, two activists who live in New York, went on a truth-finding mission to uncover what happens at various conferences and meetings on free trade by posing and speaking as World Trade Organization officials. The documentary follows the irreverent pair pulling off hilarious stunts and suggesting to eager trade lawyers and representatives how to increase productivity by ending the siesta in Spain or using electric shocks to spur on workers, even if they are child laborers. Instead of outrage from the free trade representatives to such ideas, The Yes Men discovered an eerie quiet acceptance from the men and women who would auction off every possible resource of the planet in the guise of free trade. The Yes Men's radically honest speeches about the true goals of the World Trade Organization will make you laugh just to keep yourself from crying.

Currently the Yes Men are touring the country in what looks like a George W. Bush campaign bus with Dubya's picture and the slogan "Yes, Bush Can. I'm telling the truth." The Yes Men are hoping to correct the identity of George W. Bush by telling voters Bush's true position on the issues and distributing fliers at various stops. One section from the flier boasts that "Only George W. Bush has had the political courage to embrace global warming as a useful weapon in the trade wars." Supporters are asked to sign the U.S.A. Patriot Pledge which states "I support tax cuts favoring the elite, and I volunteer to pay more than my share of taxes to allow the elite to invest their money in our nation's economy."

BuzzFlash: Your film, "The Yes Men," opens this Friday, Oct. 1. The movie follows how you and your comrade Andy Bichlbaum impersonated World Trade Organization representatives and spoke at major conferences and various meetings. Tell our readers more about your irreverent comedy.

Mike Bonanno: Over the course of about three years, we went and represented the World Trade Organization at conferences, business meetings and on television around the world. In 1999, we set up a web site at the domain gatt.org, and that stands for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the predecessor to the WTO.

A lot of people went to this site and, surprisingly enough, didn't read the satire that was there, and instead immediately sent us messages thinking we were the real WTO. Some of them even invited us to their conferences and meetings, thinking that we were the WTO. So we showed up and gave them sort of a more-honest-than-usual vision of WTO policy.

For the first event that we did, for example, in Salzburg, Austria, at a conference on international trade law, we introduced ideas like outlawing the siesta in Spain because it got in the way of work, and outlawing the long lunch in Italy because, of course, it also gets in the way of work. The end of the lecture was when we suggested that a free market in democracy be opened up by allowing corporations to sell votes to the highest bidder. We basically followed free-trade logic to its extreme.

When you first designed and put up the web site, did you expect that people would invite you to speak at various conferences and meetings?

We did not expect that we would be invited based on the web site. I mean, the web site, if anybody read it, was critical of World Trade Organization policy and it was a satire. We thought that people would recognize that. But a lot of people went to the web site and didn't read it very carefully, including those who are engaged in inviting the World Trade Organization to conferences. That was a surprise for us.

I read your book as well that documents a lot of what's noted in the film. When you were essentially "radically honest" at these World Trade meetings, did anybody question your motives or your authenticity?

We never had anybody question who we were, which was actually shocking because we went there intending to get arrested or to at least raise the ire of the conference participants. We thought that they would recognize that we weren't the WTO because we weren't staying on message with what the WTO would usually say about their policies. We were keeping with the logic of the WTO – the logic of free trade – but we were saying things that they would never be able to say themselves.

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