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The Yes Man Fix the World

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Troublemaking duo Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, posing as their industrious alter-egos, expose the people profiting from Hurricane Katrina, the faces behind the environmental disaster in Bhopal, and other shocking events.

 

Interview with Director Andy Bichlbaum

 

Q: You are the professor at the Person University. What is your partner Mike Bonanno's job?

Andy Bichlbaum: He's a professor as well. We've both done sort of activist action for a political purpose. I put the kissing voice to the video game SimCopter; he did the Barbie Liberation Organization. People put us in touch, friends put us in touch, then we started working together.

Q: How did you get yourself into the fixing the world?

Andy Bichlbaum: I'm always feeling like an activist like so many people; its just a choice you make to do something. So I just find what I like to do, and I do that.

Q: Could you talked about your fake WTO (World Trade Organization) site, Gatt.org?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, we set up the fake WTO site in 1999. We couldn't go to the Seattle protest against WTO, so we set up the fake web site, just to make fun of the WTO.

Q: So WTO was taking over GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade) in 1994. Is that why people confused it with your Gatt.org site? People assumed that this is a legitimate site? That's why you guys are getting those e-mails from some of the companies?

Andy Bichlbaum: Well, we got e-mail because it looked like a real website...

Q: Well, even if it looked like a real website, people have to type in a specific word to get to this place, right?

Andy Bichlbaum: What happened was this. When we set up the site initially, the WTO reacted to our web site; they wrote a press release saying, "This is bad," and so what we did was, we sent their press release to thousands of journalists who then wrote about it, and therefore the search engine picked it up. So when you search WTO, you sometimes come across our site, so it's ironic that WTO did boost our site.

Q: What kind of e-mail are you getting through that GATT web site?

Andy Bichlbaum: Oh, just the people who looking for advice about the trade rules and business, mostly through the companies. Sometimes we get an e-mail from government.

Q: When you appeared on BBC news disguised as a Dow Chemical representative, you said "Dow Chemical will compensate the victims of gas leakage in Bhopal." I was curious because I used to work for TV Tokyo: they usually do a background check on who's gonna be on the broadcast. Didn't BBC News do that prior to the broadcast?

Andy Bichlbaum: Well, it's pretty easy to fake it. I don't think we told them what the name of the person would be who came, so they couldn't do a Google search--there's no such person, we invented him fictionally. We didn't tell them who was coming, we just said that "We had a representative in Paris who would be speaking." So we didn't give them anything to search on.

Q: But before it was broadcast, didn't you guys discuss about what you were gonna talk about through e-mail or fax?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, they asked me what we were going to talk about. I said, "We have a good announcement to make, and I told them I couldn't tell them everything beforehand for obvious reasons." They said, "It'll be good."

Q: So were you surprised that this incident wiped out 2 billion dollars of stock on Dow Chemical?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, I was very surprised. I had no idea that was going to happen like that. There were 600 articles on the Bhopal catastrophe because of our action; the point was to get press attention for the situation there.

Q: Were you afraid to go to India after you made this fake announcement?

Andy Bichlbaum: No, we knew exactly what they thought of it. We knew they liked it a lot; it's just in the film that we pretended not to like it, because we had been talking to them several months, so that scene was the dramatic tension, it was a joke. For a month or two after the announcement we thought they (Indians) might be angry at us, because that's what the press reported as a false hope. But we talked to them and found out that it was not true.

Q: I'm also curious as to why Dow Chemical didn't pursue a lawsuit against you guys? Were they afraid of more media coverage?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, that's right. If they had, we would use them to get more press attention.

Q: You guys met the person who initially broke the news back in 1980's. He mentioned that there were similar incidents prior to the big gas leakage. You didn't go into the detail that much in the film; could you talk about what exactly happened?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, there were all kinds of problems. There were numerous problems with the plants that people were pointing out: this is not a properly maintained plant; an extremely toxic mixture was there; there was not adequate safety. Basically Union Carbide had these two plants, one in Virginia and the other in India. These are similar plants, the same plants basically, but the Virginia one was properly maintained, and watched over, and guarded. They used a proper safety procedure, whereas the one in Bhopal didn't.

Q: Could you talk about how much Milton Friedman affected the current economy?

Andy Bichlbaum: Well, very wealthy people created the current economy, and also the large corporations. They did same things in the 1920s: there was a similar kind of mania of investment, and mania of feeling that the free market could solve everything. There were also similar things in the 19th century. Each time that happened, it ends in a crash or crisis. But in this current case, it started in the late 70's and 80's with Reagan, Thatcher and so on. And [Friedman] was the spokesperson for it, the excuse was that Milton Friedman is kind of a mediocre intellect but he said the right things and people took what he said, and it was a good excuse for them--wealthy people--to pillage things. So he's not the cause of it, obviously, but more like the spokesperson.

Q: When you guys went to the Go-Expo conference in Canada, you guys passed out to human flesh candles to the people in the conference. How did you come up with that concept?

Andy Bichlbaum: The idea was basically, if you let the corporations do what they want, they'll destroy the world, which is what they've been doing, and it's kind of an extreme version of--okay, like after they destroy the world, what then? We could say, "They surely don't want to destroy the world, because they would die, too. But maybe, they have enough money to just turned dead people into fuel!" So it's the extreme version of [what would happen] if we let the corporations do what they want.

Q: When you guys disguised yourselves as Halliburton representatives to introduced the new product called SurvivaBall, not only did people in audience like your performance but they even gave out their business cards. Were you surprised at their reaction?

Andy Bichlbaum: I was surprised, but we thought that they would get the joke to see these big stupid looking suits and think "Oh, this is a joke." But they would have a moment of introspection then would go, "Oh, I see. Apparently not." It's like fully believable; it's basically what the corporations are doing. They really are gated communities; they are securities forces in places where the rich aren't safe because there are too many poor people around. This is just the ultimate example of that.

Q: Could you talk about publishing the "hopeful articles" in the New York Times with your friends and colleagues.

Andy Bichlbaum: We published this fake New York Times paper a week after the presidential election. So it was the vision of what could happen in the next six months. If the people fight, they could make it happen; that's really a goal. It's a great image of what could happen if things work out well. We almost issued hundreds of thousands of papers to hand around in Manhattan.