Announcement of WTO closure goes to Canadian Parliament

[Guest guest]

this made me feel good.

 

 

 

May 28, 2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: representatives

 

ANNOUNCEMENT OF WTO CLOSURE GOES FROM SYDNEY TO CANADA'S PARLIAMENT

Latest in series of WTO pesterings by The Yes Men

 

On Tuesday, May 21, a representative of the World Trade Organization

announced the dissolution of his organization to a shocked but

supportive Sydney audience ( http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf,

http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html ). He stated the WTO would

reconstitute as a new organization dedicated to assisting the world's

poor instead of the rich (http://gatt.org/trastat_e.html).

 

The bombshell announcement has had worldwide repercussions, sparking

debate on the floor of the Canadian Parliament, where MP John Duncan

took the floor to ask " what impact this will have on our appeals on

lumber, agriculture and other ongoing trade disputes "

(http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020525/338502.html

).

 

At that point, WTO headquarters in Geneva denounced the

" representative " as an impostor. " While we can appreciate [the

impostors'] sense of humour, we would not wish for reputable news

organizations like yours to be counted among those duped. "

 

" It isn't humor this time, " said Andy Bichlbaum, who " represented " the

WTO in Sydney. " We really do want to dissolve the WTO and rewrite its

charter so that the poor benefit rather than suffer from trade

policy. " The group he belongs to, The Yes Men, have previously

represented the WTO at two international conferences (

http://theyesmen.org/wto/, http://theyesmen.org/finland/ ) and on

mainstream TV (http://theyesmen.org/tv.html). Each time, they have

been invited by people who mistook a Yes Men parody website

(http://gatt.org/) for the official WTO site (http://www.wto.org/).

The WTO reacted to previous appearances with outrage and attempts to

shut GATT.org down.

 

After overcoming their initial shock, the audience of Australian

accountants expressed enthusiasm for the change, and offered many

thoughtful suggestions for how world trade could benefit the

poor--moving the headquarters from Switzerland to a Third World

country, for example.

 

" I'm as right-wing as the next fellow, " said one of the accountants,

" but it's time we gave something back to the countries we've been

doing so well from. "

 

In past appearances, the Yes Men hoped to horrify audiences by taking

free-trade ideas to their logical conclusions. They argued for selling

votes to the highest corporate bidder (http://theyesmen.org/wto/ppt/),

making the poor " recycle " hamburgers to cure endemic hunger

(http://theyesmen.org/hamburger/), allowing countries to commit human

rights abuses with a system of " justice vouchers " modelled after

pollution vouchers, and even enabling managers to administer electric

shocks to sweatshop workers from afar by using a futuristic

telepresence technology embedded in a three-foot-long golden phallus

(http://theyesmen.org/finland/photos.html).

 

The joke was on the Yes Men, however, when these proposals failed to

shock audiences, who repeatedly found it credible that such ideas

would come from the WTO.

 

Finally, the Yes Men decided to say " no. "

 

" We've already demonstrated that audiences of experts will accept

anything whatsoever so long as it comes from the mouth of the WTO, "

said Mike Bonanno, a Yes Man who helped to prepare the lecture in

Sydney. " This time, we decided to use the WTO's authority to lead

people on a useful exercise that could actually produce something

positive. "

 

" It really is possible to dissolve and remake the WTO, " said

Bichlbaum. " The WTO, after all, was put together from a bunch of

wishful thinking and previous agreements one day in 1994. It can just

as quickly and easily be replaced by something much better, based on

other agreements--the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for

example. "

 

After the events in Sydney, the Yes Men are even more optimistic. " The

accountants offered us all kinds of useful suggestions on how to make

sure the new version of the WTO benefits the poor, " said Bonanno. " We

feel kind of bad for misleading them, but they came up with much

better plans for the future than we could. We hope they'll accept our

apologies and keep working with us. "

 

 

CONTACTS:

The Yes Men: representatives

CPA Australia: barbara.magee,

rhonda.traversi

http://www.cpaonline.com.au/

WTO Public Relations (current): enquiries

WTO Public Relations (previous): jean-guy.carrier

 

The WTO representative's speech in Sydney:

http://theyesmen.org/tro/disband.rtf

CPA Australia: http://cpaonline.com.au/

The CPA's press release: http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html

WTO dissolution announcement: http://gatt.org/irelease.html

Statistics about trade liberalization's effects on the poor:

http://www.gatt.org/trastat_e/

World Development Movement: http://www.wdm.org.uk/

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

 

 

The primary goal of RTMark (http://rtmark.com/) is to publicize

corporate subversion of the democratic process. It has helped to

sponsor three of the Yes Men's appearances.

 

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