The Yes Men Trick the World

Mike Bonanno grew up in the ‘80s in upstate New York, in the kind of suburb that forces adolescents interested in life outside their manicured lawns to make their own fun. It was there where he spent his teenage years at the local mall, pulling his friends around in suitcases. The game was to unassumingly drag the giant bag from store to store while another kid screamed for help from inside. As shoppers stared, Bonanno, shrieking luggage in hand, would pretend as if there was nothing wrong.

Looking back, Bonanno, now in his 40s, says his teenage pranking was meant to rattle people and call into question consumerist values. Little did he know that he was setting the stage for a lifetime of jokes on a much larger scale.

Several years after abandoning his mall pranks, Bonanno would meet Andy Bichlbaum in New York City, where they both joined the Barbie Liberation Organization. As members of the BLO, the duo famously exchanged voice boxes between 300 Barbie dolls and 300 G.I. Joes, and then returned them to stores for sale. Children were soon tearing open Barbies that screamed, “Vengeance is mine!” and G.I. Joes that proclaimed, “The beach is the place for summer.” “We wanted to show gender stereotypes reinforced by consumerism,” Bonanno explains.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bichlbaum had a similar history of suburban teenage angst. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, he had once convinced his classmates that his grandfather was the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of 1979’s Iranian Revolution. Kids didn’t believe him at first, but he persisted, and eventually strangers were approaching him to ask about his grandfather, the Ayatollah. “I liked to make people think,” says Bichlbaum, now a “professor of subversion” at Parsons.

Fast forward to 2002. Inspired by a lifetime of political practical joking, and now calling themselves the Yes Men, Bonanno (aka Igor Vamos) and Bichlbaum (aka Jacque Servin) decide to create a website on which they represent themselves as spokesman for Dow Chemical, the owner of Union Carbide. Besides its multibillion dollar revenues, UC is perhaps most famous for causing one of the greatest industrial accidents in history. In 1984, a UC pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, accidentally released nearly 40 tons of methyl isocyanate into the air, exposing 500,000 Indians to the toxic gas. Subsequently, 15,000 Bhopal residents died, and many more continue suffering illnesses to this day.

In the wake of the tragedy, Dow Chemical received considerable negative press but quickly shifted the blame, stating that it had never actually owned Union Carbide. After paying $470 million in a settlement agreement, Dow’s profits remained astronomical, and Bhopal citizens continued dying. Going against practically every piece of Dow’s rhetoric, the Yes Men’s trick website issued a fake press release, which stated, “As a publicly owned corporation, Dow is unable, due to share-price concerns, to accept any responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe caused by our fully owned subsidiary, Union Carbide. As an individual, however, you can help as your conscience dictates."

Patience was a virtue for the Yes Men, and two years after initially creating their website, they received an invitation from BBC World to address the Bhopal disaster. Posing as Dow spokesman Jude Finisterra, Bichlbaum accepted the invitation and, on December 3, 2004, he announced on live television that “his” company would be closing Union Carbide and donating $12 billion to pay for a proper cleanup of Bhopal and the healthcare of its ill citizens. It was a lie, of course; Dow intended to do no such thing. Nevertheless, within just a few hours, the company’s stock had fallen by $2 billion. Amazingly, neither Bichlbaum nor Bonanno were sued. According to their lawyers, that’s because it’s not directly illegal to falsely claim you represent a corporation. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would disagree, as it’s filed a suit claiming unfair competition, trademark infringement, and false advertising after Bichlbaum held a press conference announcing the Chamber would begin to officially recognize global warming.)

As their most effective prank—or as the Yes Men say, “action”—yet, the Dow Chemical fiasco is the logical opener for The Yes Men Fix the World, a new documentary that follows Bonanno and Bichlbaum through various bouts of hijinx, including actions pulled on everyone from Haliburton to HUD to Exxon. The film, a follow up to 2003’s The Yes Men, is slated for release on DVD—by no accident—on April Fool’s Day.

You may have noticed that the Yes Men primarily target corporations over government entities or social organizations. According to Bonanno, that’s because “our attention needs to be on the big picture, the economic system that focuses on short-term profits.” Bonanno calls corporate greed and globalization “the mother of all issues.” “If we don’t have a planet, we needn’t worry about abortion rights,” he adds. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but both Bonanno and Bichlbaum say they are very much for a woman’s right to choose.)

Despite their antisocial tendencies, Bichlbaum says he and Bonanno are not only pro-democracy, but an integral part of the democratic process. The stunts they pull, he says, function to further progressiveness, influencing everyone from casual observers to the Obama administration. “People got him elected, but that was only the first part of the job,” Bichlbaum says. “A big part of what is missing in the change equation is civil disobedience. Fucking shit up is an essential part of democracy. When you have people getting angry and messing stuff up, it makes [other people] think, ‘It must be important. It must matter.’”

To that end, Bichlbaum believes liberals’ general devotion to pacifism is the wrong catalyst for change. “The left has the idea that extremists make us look bad, but conservatives have the right idea. There has to be some sort of revolution.”

The Yes Men say the stunts they pull off are exhausting, requiring a tremendous amount of time, money, and preparation. That’s why they’ve recently started working to launch the Yes Lab, a workshop structure seeking to enable others to do similar out-of-the-box activism.

Bonanno, who teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says he’s already teaching his students about radical activism, its causes and effects, and how it can have impacts nobody ever anticipated. “A lot of these kids come into college do not have the knowledge in what really happened in history,” he says. “In one of my classes, we study Martin Luther King Jr. and why people flocked to him. And it was because there were people like Malcom X and the Black Panthers. We study what the Black Panthers were doing that drew people to King.”

One thing the Yes Men haven’t been able to figure out is how to reconcile their hoaxing with their belief that quality media is “critically important” to democracy. For instance, while their prank on Dow did indeed humiliate Dow, it also humiliated the BBC. “There was collateral damage that we did not expect,” Bonanno says. "The reason they fell for it in the first place was because they were trying to do good and get Dow to admit what they’d done."

Serious considerations aside, Bonanno says he and his co-conspirator will ultimately be seen as people on the forefront of a new form of protest. “We see ourselves as a potential funny technique to give a message that is normally ignored,” he says. And their hope for their new movie? "We hope that viewers will come away thinking that wherever your talents lay, whatever you did in high school, you can use them to create change,” says Bichlbaum. “And a desire to fuck shit up.”

Lisa Gillespie is a former staff writer for Campus Progress as well as the Managing Editor & New Media Director at Street Sense. She graduated from the University of North Carolina–Asheville.

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