Barbie Liberation Organization
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Wikipedia-Article "Barbie Liberation Organization"
The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction". They pretend to be powerful people and organizations and then use their newfound authority to espouse what they think those groups really believe, or in some cases what they think the groups should believe. Its two leading members are known by a number of aliases, most recently, and in film, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonano. Their real names are Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, respectively. Servin is an author of experimental fiction, and was known for being the man who inserted images of men kissing in the computer game SimCopter. Vamos is an assistant professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. They are assisted by numerous people across the globe, including media artist Patrick Lichty, graphic designer Matt McElligott, costume designer Sal Salmone, and many others.
For their first prank, in the 1990s, they swapped the electronics of talking Barbie and GI Joe toys and then returned them to the store. They then issued a message as the "Barbie Liberation Organization." The pair later set up a mock web site claiming to be that of the World Trade Organization. When the site received invitations to speak on behalf of the WTO, they made a series of keynote lectures at international conferences with deliberately absurd proposals for economic development and labor relations.
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WTO
The Yes Men's most famous prank is placing a "corrected" WTO website at gatt.org (GATT is the treaty that led to the WTO). The fake site began to receive real emails from confused visitors, including invitations to address various elite groups on behalf of the WTO, which they obligingly took up.
Showing up in newly-purchased suits, The Yes Men gave speeches encouraging corporations to buy votes directly from citizens, arguing that the US Civil War was a waste of money because Third World countries now willingly supply equivalent slaves, and claiming that people should listen to the WTO, not the facts, because the WTO had a lot of experts.
Their experiences were documented in the film The Yes Men, distributed by United Artists, as well as the book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization (ISBN 0972952993).
George W. Bush
In 2004, The Yes Men went on tour posing as the group "Yes, Bush Can!" encouraging supporters to sign a "Patriot Pledge" agreeing to keep nuclear waste in their backyard and send their children off to war. They appeared at the 2004 Republican National Convention and drove across the country in a painted van.
Dow Chemicals
On December 3, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World as "Jude Finisterra", a Dow Chemical spokesman. Dow is the owner of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the chemical disaster which killed thousands and left over 120,000 requiring lifelong care. The Yes Men, electronically impersonating Dow, first said as clearly and emphatically as possible on their fake site that Dow Chemical Company had no intention whatsoever of repairing the damage. Then the real Dow got the backlash and both the real Dow and the Yes Men emphatically impersonating Dow disavowed the statements but Dow took no real action. The Yes Men decided to pressure Dow further, so as "Finisterra" went on the news to claim that Dow planned to liquidate Union Carbide and use the resulting $12 billion to pay for medical care, clean up the site, and fund research into the hazards of other Dow products. After two hours of wide coverage, Dow issued a press release denying the statement, ensuring even greater coverage.
At the International Payments Conference on April 28, 2005 'Dow representative' Erastus Hamm unveiled Acceptable Risk, the Acceptable Risk Calculator, and the Acceptable Risk mascot — a life-sized golden skeleton named Gilda — to an audience of about 70 banking professionals. Details
Quotes
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- "Now some Civil-War apologists have stated that Civil War, for all its faults, at least had the effect of outlawing an Involuntarily Imported Workforce. Now such a labor model is of course a terrible thing; I myself am an abolitionist. But in fact there is no doubt that left to their own devices, markets would have eventually replaced slavery with "cleaner" sources of labor anyhow. ... Suppose Involuntarily Imported Labor had never been outlawed...What do you think it would cost today to profitably maintain a slave [here]?"
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- "[L]eave the same slave back at home--let's say, Gabon. In Gabon, $10 pays for two weeks of food, not just one day. $250 pays for two years of housing, not a month's. $50 pays for a lifetime of budget clothing! Health care is likewise much cheaper. On top of it all, youth can be gainfully employed without restriction."
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- "The biggest benefit of the remote labor system, though, is to the slave him or herself--because in Gabon, there is no need for the slave not to be free! This is primarily because there are no one-time slave transport costs to recoup, and so the potential losses from fleeing are limited to the slave's rudimentary training. So since the slave can be free, he or she suddenly becomes a worker rather than a slave! Also terrific for morale is that slaves--workers!--have the luxury of remaining in their native habitat and don't have to relocate to places [where] they would be subject to such unpleasantries as homesickness and racism."
-- from a lecture by "Hank Hardy Unruh" entitled "Towards the Globalization of Textile Trade" before the "Textiles of the Future" conference at Tampere University of Technology in Tampere, Finland
The lecture is printed in full in the book The Yes Men.