Big corporations run the world, it seems, and the Yes Men are determined to monkey wrench the publicity machine that helps sustain them. The duo of guerilla pranksters, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno a.k.a. the Yes Men, impersonate the sort of bland-voiced corporate spokesmen who routinely wrap the world in a gauze of lies. Slipping into media interviews and seminars, the Yes Men issue outrageous statements with a straight face, either satirizing the depravity of the corporations or urging them to do what’s right.
They document themselves in their film The Yes Men Fix theWorld (out on DVD). It’s a cheeky presentation of a cheeky campaign that seeks to expose the amorality and dishonesty of real corporate publicity managers. Step one for the Yes Men is setting up real-looking bogus websites to attract attention. Their facetious DowEthics.com seemed to real that they were invited to speak on Dow Chemical’s behalf at an international finance conference on “acceptable risk” i.e. how many people can be sickened or killed by a corporate project (such as Union Carbide’s chemical plant in Bhopal) before the venture becomes unprofitable.
The Yes Men also cogently satirize the minions of one of the last century’s most insidious ideologues, Milton Friedman, apostle of the greed is good ethos that inspired much reckless depravity among investment banks and rationalized the abolition of financial and environmental regulations. The Yes Men aren’t merely funny; their pranks help us understand the nature of the systems operating around us.
