Sunday Monitor at 6 pm CST: (1) Voting + (2) The Yes Men

[SophieZ]

It's your world. Understand it!
March 6: Sunday Monitor


KPFT - Pacifica Radio
listen online at www.kpft.org
or, in Houston, 90.1 FM

6 pm Central
7 pm Eastern
4 pm Pacific


ARCHIVES
If you miss a show, you can find it at ARCHIVES at
http://www.kpftx.org/archives/kpftsignal/index.php

Just look for SUNDAY MONITOR and the date of the show.


<> 6 pm CST -- HEADLINES

<> ~6:15 pm -- SEGMENT ONE: Voting Activists

The first segment is excerpts from a piece produced for Sprouts by Dori Smith of Connecticut. Our co-host Pokey Anderson consulted on the piece. You will hear Rice Professor Dan Wallach reporting on the first open meeting in Texas of voting machine vendors and citizens -- a meeting that took place in Austin this week.

<> ~6:35 pm -- SEGMENT TWO: THE YES MEN


The Yes Men are some quirky fellows who dress in suits and insinuate themselves into meetings of the mighty and powerful. Our co-host, Mark Bebawi will speak with a Yes Men co-founder, Andy, live from the West Coast.

The Yes Men explain themselves on their website:

The Yes Men get into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. The Yes Men shock their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satires on global free trade. But, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to agree with every terrible idea the two can come up with.

Why are you called the Yes Men?

You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people—turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that's what we try to do, anyhow—but as it turns out, the image always seems to look normal to them.

RE: THE WTO
When we went to the International Legal Studies Conference in Salzburg, we delivered a speech that we thought would make people think twice about WTO policies. We suggested that the siesta in Spain be made illegal because it gets in the way of work. We suggested that a "free market" be established in the realm of democratic government by allowing the buying and selling of votes... we even showed them a website that could make the process very efficient.

All of these ideas simply follow the free market philosophy at the core of the WTO to its logical extreme, which is of course quite illogical when you look at the facts. And the facts are that in the last 25 years the poor of the world have gotten even poorer... while the rich have gotten astronomically richer. And all that during the implementation of policies that the WTO claim will help the poor. Of course, these kinds of twisted ideas of what is right for the weak or the poor are not new—there was a bizarre logic that supported colonialism too.

Unfortunately, our current religion of free-trade is so strong that despite our best efforts to satirize the logic, the various audiences we spoke to simply agreed with every sinister, corrupt, and disgusting idea that the "WTO" could muster. So we learned exactly how frightening this reality is.

RE: MEDIA
Mainstream journalists almost always get our serious points, and transmit it to the journalism-consuming consumer. A lot of these people (journalists) really want to write about important things—but in the U.S. at least, you can't cover the WTO or the Bhopal anniversary just because they're tremendously important. We can provide the fodder, sometimes, that lets these subjects get covered.

RE: BHOPAL
Our intention was to get news about Bhopal into the U.S., where most people don't even know what happened there in 1984, let alone that a person still dies every day from residual pollution that has never been cleaned up. Right there in Dow's headquarters—Midland, Michigan—most people don't realize that Dow still refuses to do the slightest thing to repair the damage they are responsible for.

Yes Men WEBSITE: www.theyesmen.org

MOVIE: Currently playing in the UK, The Yes Men, a movie, follows this pair of anti-corporate activist-pranksters as they impersonate World Trade Organization spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world.

HOSTS: Mark Bebawi and Pokey Anderson

TIPS or COMMENTS
Write to [e-mail]

[SophieZ]

1. just started. eom