The Yes Men started when Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno put up a fake George W. Bush campaign website during the 2000 election. Their next target was the the World Trade Organization. The WTO supervises trade regulations between countries. GATT.org is the Yes Men's version for an official WTO site (based on the organization's original title, General Aggreement on Tariffs and Trade.)
GATT.org was so convincing that The Yes Men were invited to speak at conferences. This was a priceless opportunity to continue their satire into the real world. Posing as representatives of the WTO, they found that corporations actually believed their ridiculous ideas were WTO policy. This tour became the center of their first movie, The Yes Men.
Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, takes on Dow chemical, Haliburton and ExxonMobil. Andy posed as a Dow spokesperson on the BBC promising to pay the victims of the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India. Dow stock dropped three points before the company assured stockholders they weren't actually being generous. The Yes Men presented an oil conference with plans to manufacture fuel from human flesh, and the oil folks applauded. Posing as Halliburton reps, they demonstrated the Survivaball, a full body protective suit for living in a scorched earth. People bought that too.
Andy is traveling on new adventures right now while Mike is at home tending to his baby. He took a break from this interview when the baby's cries could be heard in the background. Speaking about the issues in the film and beyond, Bonanno sounded more like a concerned paternal figure than some corporate terrorist. It's all in good fun, right?
SuicideGirls: With your movie coming out and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, why do you think so many filmmakers are addressing the problems of capitalism at this time?
Mike Bonanno: Well, I think a lot of people have known that the idea of continual growth would eventually do us in. It just seemed like it was a really long way off. I think that there are some things, among them the economic collapse, that helped accelerate people's sense that that might be going on. But, there are other environmental problems too that are looming like climate change. I think with climate change it's really a kind of do or die situation for many of the people of the planet. So I think it's accelerated the need to change the system.
SG: Do you see films like yours and Capitalism: A Love Story making a difference in educating people?
MB: I do think that films make a difference. I think that sometimes they work very quickly if they're very popular and sometimes they're a slow burn, but they do influence people. I mean, we wouldn't make them if we didn't think they made a difference.
SG: In the last year since these two started coming out, have you seen any quantitative change?
MB: Unfortunately, I think the change is happening incrementally and I think there will be some tipping point, hopefully soon enough to deal with some of the major problems before they get the better of us. I think that historically what you see with social movements, big period of upheaval where systems change a lot, like the Civil Rights movement for example, there were really more than 100 years of agitation and work that went in before things really hit the boiling point in the late '50s and early '60s. Hopefully, our boiling point as far as the social movements doing something and trying to create a sustainable future happens soon enough that climate change and other problems don't get the better of us.
SG: How did Bhopal escape the public relations exposure that Chernobyl had?
MB: Well, I think that in Bhopal, the plant was built and operated and then eventually of course had an accident in a place that most of the western world doesn't really care about. The reason you don't think about it is because of the double standard there. I think also, we do have similar plants here. In fact, there's a plant that's very similar that makes the same stuff in West Virginia, but it's been operated entirely safely and built to higher specification than the one in Bhopal. It was actually built prior to the one in Bhopal. So I think it hasn't had that big an effect here and it's largely not remembered because it's not people in the U.S. who died basically, unfortunately.
SG: Have there been any developments on that issue since your stunt in the film?
MB: There have been some developments on that since the stunt. Among other things, they've now just recently, successfully fought for having a clean water pipeline installed and it's being installed as we speak. So the whole section that we did that was about water contamination, they're now getting clean water in most of the communities that were suffering.
SG: Did that have to do with Dow or other attention that was brought to them?
MB: It had nothing to do with Dow. Actually, the Indian government is the one that's been forced to now bring in the water.
SG: What does it say that oil companies would rather seriously consider fuel made from human flesh than just investigate alternative fuels?
MB: I mean, it just says that the profit motive is what's governing their decisions. Until we actually change the rules that establish what corporations can and can't do and what corporations are rewarded for, they're going to continue to seek short term profits, which right now is really mortgaging the entire planet. Right now, a good example is Shell, which had in recent years developed a large alternative energy program. They just appointed a new CEO who's more like one of the financial guys, who just went through and cut their entire solar program, really gutted the program basically. His job was to make them money and that's still not making them as much money as simply controlling the supply of oil. It's a shame. Unless we actually force them to change, they're not going to change.
SG: Wouldn't someone see even being the first company to master an alternative fuel source would make them profitable?
MB: Yeah, there is definitely room for innovation. In theory, the research should pay off but historically it's not corporations that have done most of the research. It's usually government that does it and then corporations capitalize on it. They're the ones who make the money. That's happened in just about every field, pharmaceuticals included. Most of the big money pharmaceuticals have initially come from government research that's then turned over and capitalized by corporations. So it's curious to think about where we would draw the line and to acknowledge really where the innovation is coming from and put our efforts in those areas as well. We can't expect the corporations to innovate because they're going to do things that are profitable. The innovation is often actually incredibly expensive so if they can just keep selling oil, they're not going to necessarily want to do that.
SG: I'm interested in the bank fiasco. Their loan modifications are already a joke. What prank could you pull to bring that to light?
MB: Yeah, I think there's a lot of room there and we haven't really given it enough attention. I think that's one of those things where we'd have to turn the question around and ask people reading this what they would do. If they have something they want to do, maybe we can help in some way. They can e-mail us and we'll communicate you.
SG: They say we'll help you if you've defaulted but if you've defaulted we don't trust you with a loan but we want you to keep paying the loan you can't pay.
MB: Unfortunately, it's hard to satirize some of these things that are already incredibly sick and would be or should be funny. It's just that they're true so they end up not being funny. You laugh guiltily reading about it. I think that's one of the reasons also that we've in some ways abandoned some of the satirical approach that we are so fond of, doing really funny announcements or sendups like the Survivaball, Haliburton's answer to climate change. You can only go so far because that's so close to the truth that you may as well announce what you'd actually like to see sometimes.
SG: How do you take a satirical approach to Survivaball when people are taking it seriously?
MB: I think over and over again, we've tried to turn the volume up past 11, to quote Spinal Tap. The more and more kind of absurd that we get, it just doesn't matter. As far as we can tell, there's no threshold to how strange or violent or absurd our proposals can be if people think we actually represent someone quite powerful and important whose business card they want to get a hold of. That's a reason why in a way we only employ that approach when we think it will be really entertaining and there will be big rewards for the viewer, because it certainly doesn't do much for the people in the audience.
SG: Have you ever blown a prank by cracking up?
MB: Not by cracking up. We've made some bad decisions and we've got some stuff that we'd rather not have spun done, but we've never actually had the problem where we started laughing in the middle of it. I think it's because when you're actually doing it, it doesn't seem funny. It's funny to watch but to participate, not so much.
SG: Are any of the corporations onto you?
MB: They probably are. I think that at some of the events that we've done, people in the audience have recognized us, but they usually keep quiet because they want to see how it unfolds.
SG: Who might your next targets be?
MB: Next targets, it's hard to tell right now. Obviously we're doing a lot of work around climate change still, so that includes pretty much everybody as far as the targets go. But there's also health care is a major issue. The Obama health care plan is just very sad. I mean, it's sad that it's gutted. We want real public health care. What they call single payer. In other words, what's also called socialized medicine. I don't really see what's wrong with that. I've lived in Europe and was the beneficiary of socialized medicine. It was incredible how easy it was compared to doing it back in the U.S. These countries are not exactly bankrupt and there's not exactly no freedom. There are so many issues, so we don't know. We'll see what lands on our plate.
SG: The protests against it were amazing. Were people okay with not being able to see their doctor?
MB: It's just unbelievable. Back in upstate New York, I have a good job and I have what's considered a really good health plan at work. Still, the bureaucracy of being part of this HMO thing is just insane. It's just absolutely ludicrous the way the referral system works and the way doctors and your insurance companies are always encouraging you basically to take a path that's less costly for them. It's stupid. I've done the same thing in the health care system in the U.K. and it's been really a breeze. It's not the same kind of pressures.
SG: Again, it's so ridiculous, how do you satirize that?
MB: How do you satirize something like that? I don't know but there've been some really fun actions related to health care and some really straightforward actions, sit ins and things like that. One thing that was really funny was the health insurance lobbyists have a big meeting every year in Washington and at the meeting, a group of activists sang a musical in the middle of it. They got up and did it really well. They'd practiced and everything so it was a really funny video on the internet, viral video. There are things like that that I think aren't exactly satire but they are activism that works in a really creative way to get a story out.
SG: Is that more along the lines of little stuff for the web than for a next movie?
MB: Hard to say. I just don't know what we're going to do next. I really don't. Right now, we're in this period of kind of regrouping and trying to build a little bit of capacity because we're sort of overwhelmed. Me and Andy still have fulltime jobs so we can't really juggle everything that needs to be done. We're trying to raise money to hire somebody to help us.
SG: Wow, the Yes Men doesn't pay for itself?
MB: No, it doesn't actually. In fact, the more ambitious we get, the more money we lose. That especially happens in the movie business right now. I think with the exception of Hollywood blockbusters, pretty much everybody is losing money. It's hard to find examples of independent films, and especially documentary, where people are doing well. Even Academy Award winners like The Cove. It's not like they're making a fortune on it. They're doing okay but it's expensive to make the film, expensive to finish and in distribution now it's really hard to get anybody to go see a movie in the cinema. You need to advertise a lot so that costs a lot. Then in the area of DVD sales, we'll see. Most things aren't selling a whole lot of DVDs either. There's a lot of other ways of watching films.
SG: Is it like running a nonprofit almost?
MB: It actually is and if we had more administrative capacity, we would have incorporated as a nonprofit. It's just that it took more work to do that so we didn't. It's as simple as that. To do that we would need a board and we'd need to spend more time dealing with the bureaucracy.
The Yes Men Fix the World is now available on DVD.
GATT.org was so convincing that The Yes Men were invited to speak at conferences. This was a priceless opportunity to continue their satire into the real world. Posing as representatives of the WTO, they found that corporations actually believed their ridiculous ideas were WTO policy. This tour became the center of their first movie, The Yes Men.
Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, takes on Dow chemical, Haliburton and ExxonMobil. Andy posed as a Dow spokesperson on the BBC promising to pay the victims of the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India. Dow stock dropped three points before the company assured stockholders they weren't actually being generous. The Yes Men presented an oil conference with plans to manufacture fuel from human flesh, and the oil folks applauded. Posing as Halliburton reps, they demonstrated the Survivaball, a full body protective suit for living in a scorched earth. People bought that too.
Andy is traveling on new adventures right now while Mike is at home tending to his baby. He took a break from this interview when the baby's cries could be heard in the background. Speaking about the issues in the film and beyond, Bonanno sounded more like a concerned paternal figure than some corporate terrorist. It's all in good fun, right?
SuicideGirls: With your movie coming out and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, why do you think so many filmmakers are addressing the problems of capitalism at this time?
Mike Bonanno: Well, I think a lot of people have known that the idea of continual growth would eventually do us in. It just seemed like it was a really long way off. I think that there are some things, among them the economic collapse, that helped accelerate people's sense that that might be going on. But, there are other environmental problems too that are looming like climate change. I think with climate change it's really a kind of do or die situation for many of the people of the planet. So I think it's accelerated the need to change the system.
SG: Do you see films like yours and Capitalism: A Love Story making a difference in educating people?
MB: I do think that films make a difference. I think that sometimes they work very quickly if they're very popular and sometimes they're a slow burn, but they do influence people. I mean, we wouldn't make them if we didn't think they made a difference.
SG: In the last year since these two started coming out, have you seen any quantitative change?
MB: Unfortunately, I think the change is happening incrementally and I think there will be some tipping point, hopefully soon enough to deal with some of the major problems before they get the better of us. I think that historically what you see with social movements, big period of upheaval where systems change a lot, like the Civil Rights movement for example, there were really more than 100 years of agitation and work that went in before things really hit the boiling point in the late '50s and early '60s. Hopefully, our boiling point as far as the social movements doing something and trying to create a sustainable future happens soon enough that climate change and other problems don't get the better of us.
SG: How did Bhopal escape the public relations exposure that Chernobyl had?
MB: Well, I think that in Bhopal, the plant was built and operated and then eventually of course had an accident in a place that most of the western world doesn't really care about. The reason you don't think about it is because of the double standard there. I think also, we do have similar plants here. In fact, there's a plant that's very similar that makes the same stuff in West Virginia, but it's been operated entirely safely and built to higher specification than the one in Bhopal. It was actually built prior to the one in Bhopal. So I think it hasn't had that big an effect here and it's largely not remembered because it's not people in the U.S. who died basically, unfortunately.
SG: Have there been any developments on that issue since your stunt in the film?
MB: There have been some developments on that since the stunt. Among other things, they've now just recently, successfully fought for having a clean water pipeline installed and it's being installed as we speak. So the whole section that we did that was about water contamination, they're now getting clean water in most of the communities that were suffering.
SG: Did that have to do with Dow or other attention that was brought to them?
MB: It had nothing to do with Dow. Actually, the Indian government is the one that's been forced to now bring in the water.
SG: What does it say that oil companies would rather seriously consider fuel made from human flesh than just investigate alternative fuels?
MB: I mean, it just says that the profit motive is what's governing their decisions. Until we actually change the rules that establish what corporations can and can't do and what corporations are rewarded for, they're going to continue to seek short term profits, which right now is really mortgaging the entire planet. Right now, a good example is Shell, which had in recent years developed a large alternative energy program. They just appointed a new CEO who's more like one of the financial guys, who just went through and cut their entire solar program, really gutted the program basically. His job was to make them money and that's still not making them as much money as simply controlling the supply of oil. It's a shame. Unless we actually force them to change, they're not going to change.
SG: Wouldn't someone see even being the first company to master an alternative fuel source would make them profitable?
MB: Yeah, there is definitely room for innovation. In theory, the research should pay off but historically it's not corporations that have done most of the research. It's usually government that does it and then corporations capitalize on it. They're the ones who make the money. That's happened in just about every field, pharmaceuticals included. Most of the big money pharmaceuticals have initially come from government research that's then turned over and capitalized by corporations. So it's curious to think about where we would draw the line and to acknowledge really where the innovation is coming from and put our efforts in those areas as well. We can't expect the corporations to innovate because they're going to do things that are profitable. The innovation is often actually incredibly expensive so if they can just keep selling oil, they're not going to necessarily want to do that.
SG: I'm interested in the bank fiasco. Their loan modifications are already a joke. What prank could you pull to bring that to light?
MB: Yeah, I think there's a lot of room there and we haven't really given it enough attention. I think that's one of those things where we'd have to turn the question around and ask people reading this what they would do. If they have something they want to do, maybe we can help in some way. They can e-mail us and we'll communicate you.
SG: They say we'll help you if you've defaulted but if you've defaulted we don't trust you with a loan but we want you to keep paying the loan you can't pay.
MB: Unfortunately, it's hard to satirize some of these things that are already incredibly sick and would be or should be funny. It's just that they're true so they end up not being funny. You laugh guiltily reading about it. I think that's one of the reasons also that we've in some ways abandoned some of the satirical approach that we are so fond of, doing really funny announcements or sendups like the Survivaball, Haliburton's answer to climate change. You can only go so far because that's so close to the truth that you may as well announce what you'd actually like to see sometimes.
SG: How do you take a satirical approach to Survivaball when people are taking it seriously?
MB: I think over and over again, we've tried to turn the volume up past 11, to quote Spinal Tap. The more and more kind of absurd that we get, it just doesn't matter. As far as we can tell, there's no threshold to how strange or violent or absurd our proposals can be if people think we actually represent someone quite powerful and important whose business card they want to get a hold of. That's a reason why in a way we only employ that approach when we think it will be really entertaining and there will be big rewards for the viewer, because it certainly doesn't do much for the people in the audience.
SG: Have you ever blown a prank by cracking up?
MB: Not by cracking up. We've made some bad decisions and we've got some stuff that we'd rather not have spun done, but we've never actually had the problem where we started laughing in the middle of it. I think it's because when you're actually doing it, it doesn't seem funny. It's funny to watch but to participate, not so much.
SG: Are any of the corporations onto you?
MB: They probably are. I think that at some of the events that we've done, people in the audience have recognized us, but they usually keep quiet because they want to see how it unfolds.
SG: Who might your next targets be?
MB: Next targets, it's hard to tell right now. Obviously we're doing a lot of work around climate change still, so that includes pretty much everybody as far as the targets go. But there's also health care is a major issue. The Obama health care plan is just very sad. I mean, it's sad that it's gutted. We want real public health care. What they call single payer. In other words, what's also called socialized medicine. I don't really see what's wrong with that. I've lived in Europe and was the beneficiary of socialized medicine. It was incredible how easy it was compared to doing it back in the U.S. These countries are not exactly bankrupt and there's not exactly no freedom. There are so many issues, so we don't know. We'll see what lands on our plate.
SG: The protests against it were amazing. Were people okay with not being able to see their doctor?
MB: It's just unbelievable. Back in upstate New York, I have a good job and I have what's considered a really good health plan at work. Still, the bureaucracy of being part of this HMO thing is just insane. It's just absolutely ludicrous the way the referral system works and the way doctors and your insurance companies are always encouraging you basically to take a path that's less costly for them. It's stupid. I've done the same thing in the health care system in the U.K. and it's been really a breeze. It's not the same kind of pressures.
SG: Again, it's so ridiculous, how do you satirize that?
MB: How do you satirize something like that? I don't know but there've been some really fun actions related to health care and some really straightforward actions, sit ins and things like that. One thing that was really funny was the health insurance lobbyists have a big meeting every year in Washington and at the meeting, a group of activists sang a musical in the middle of it. They got up and did it really well. They'd practiced and everything so it was a really funny video on the internet, viral video. There are things like that that I think aren't exactly satire but they are activism that works in a really creative way to get a story out.
SG: Is that more along the lines of little stuff for the web than for a next movie?
MB: Hard to say. I just don't know what we're going to do next. I really don't. Right now, we're in this period of kind of regrouping and trying to build a little bit of capacity because we're sort of overwhelmed. Me and Andy still have fulltime jobs so we can't really juggle everything that needs to be done. We're trying to raise money to hire somebody to help us.
SG: Wow, the Yes Men doesn't pay for itself?
MB: No, it doesn't actually. In fact, the more ambitious we get, the more money we lose. That especially happens in the movie business right now. I think with the exception of Hollywood blockbusters, pretty much everybody is losing money. It's hard to find examples of independent films, and especially documentary, where people are doing well. Even Academy Award winners like The Cove. It's not like they're making a fortune on it. They're doing okay but it's expensive to make the film, expensive to finish and in distribution now it's really hard to get anybody to go see a movie in the cinema. You need to advertise a lot so that costs a lot. Then in the area of DVD sales, we'll see. Most things aren't selling a whole lot of DVDs either. There's a lot of other ways of watching films.
SG: Is it like running a nonprofit almost?
MB: It actually is and if we had more administrative capacity, we would have incorporated as a nonprofit. It's just that it took more work to do that so we didn't. It's as simple as that. To do that we would need a board and we'd need to spend more time dealing with the bureaucracy.
The Yes Men Fix the World is now available on DVD.