Posts Tagged ‘yes’

The Yes Men – Fix The World

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

The Yes Men are a group of activists who pretend to be spokespeople for powerful organizations, and then say what they wish these organizations would say.  Their pranks border on criminal, yet they persist, and by exposing these powerful evildoers, they have the best intentions for humanity on their side.

The Yes Men

In 2003, the Yes men released a self-titled movie, which was truly enjoyable.  Some highlights were:

  • when they gave a speech in Finland, pretending to be from the WTO, espousing the profitability of keeping slaves in their homeland instead of importing them.
  • when they offered feces as a solution to world hunger -reBurger Mmmm
  • entering a televised interview/debate on CNBC where one of the Yes Men posed as Granwyth Hulatberi of GATT (The WTO predecessor), and said how privatized education will be good because it will indoctrinate the students to support privatization, how the rich are right because they have power and the poor are wrong because they don’t.

Now, they are back again, with The Yes Men – Fix The World.  This movie was just HILARIOUS!!! Absolutely brilliant.  It is truly inspiring to see what this team can do, when they take a chance, muster up the courage, and show these large organizations as to what they could be doing.

The Yes Men - Fix the World

Some highlights this time around are:

  • Causing Dow stock value to drop by 2 Billion in a few hours by pretending to be a Dow spokesperson, and admitting blame in the Bhopal disaster.
  • Helping with a phony NY Times paper that showed an idealized version of what could happen in the future, inspiring hope and optimism
  • Pretending to be from HUD (a group supposed to rebuild housing) and saying how housing complexes slated for demolition were now going to be reopened.

In this film, they took into account the reactions of those who they inspired false hope to, like the survivors in Bhopal, or the victims in New Orleans, and were able to find at least a few people who supported their work, stating how the Yes Men expose these large group by showing what they could and should be doing.

All in all, the Yes Men do excellent work, and their films are pure gold.  Check them  out, if you haven’t already.