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The Yes Men Fix the World's a Riot. No, Really
We all know the facts.
Free-market capitalism is dangerous. It's run by a whole lot of bad, powerful people, and it hurts a whole lot of people who don't deserve to be hurt.
So much for the obvious. Now what?
Our movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, will help answer that question. It opens this Wednesday in New York City - and if it doesn't become the first film run shut down by the NYPD, it'll be the most action-packed week in New York film history.
The film's story is simple: two guys, armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, infiltrate the world of big business, where we make a lot of bad, powerful people really uncomfortable.
You'll see us knock $2 billion off Dow Chemical's share price, expose New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for the corporate lackey he is, and show some of the most powerful free-market spokesmen to be C-level liars.
Around you in the theater you'll hear spontaneous cheering, multiple bursts of hysterical laughter, a few sniffles, and the occasional thud of an audience member rolling in the aisles. If past screenings at Sundance, Berlin, and many other places are any guide, you'll also see a standing ovation, and, as the lights go up, a room of people visibly eager to rise up and fight.
For five years, we worked hard to make a film that would make people feel that way. It worked, which makes us happy. The fact that Sunday's New York Magazine called it a "glorious testimony to the moral power of satire" and "outrageously entertaining" makes us happy too.
But WANTING to rise up isn't enough. A cinema isn't a town hall, popcorn isn't paving stones, and change doesn't come from people sitting together in a dark theater.
What matters is what happens when the movie is over, and the audience takes to the streets.
That's exactly what they're going to do after seeing our movie, this week in New York, and then, two weeks later, nationwide.
We can't tell you exactly what'll happen each night. But we can give you some hints, at least for the week ahead in New York.
Wednesday's premiere (October 7) will be the national launch of "Balls Across America," the preview of which made a big splash on CNN thanks to New York's boys in blue. Assorted stars and starlets, fitted with their own custom " Survivaballs," will waddle off to wreak havoc on unsuspecting climate criminals. (These things are remarkably hard to put handcuffs on!)
The next day (Thursday) we'll lead a rowdy-as-usual crowd from the 8pm screening across town to the "Hijinx" Premiere Party at the Delancey, hosted by some of New York's most revved-up muckrakers. Interestingly, a massive new Whole Foods sits smack dab in the middle of that crosstown march - providing a great opportunity to make Whole Foods CEO John Mackey continue regretting his recent reactionary comments on health-care reform. (Do big-box stores have stupidity insurance?)
Opening weekend kicks off with a Friday matinee screening hosted by the Raging Grannies, Granny Peace Brigade and Gray Panthers. These elders get arrested blocking access to recruitment centers and otherwise putting their bodies on the line against militarism and war profiteering. Who will bear the brunt of the Grannies' rage Friday? Come early to find out.
Friday's 8pm screening is hosted by Reverend Billy, the Green Candidate for mayor of New York City, and his ever-rambunctious choir. The Reverend, who's been arrested more than 40 times, has a stubborn habit of using humor, gospel, and civil disobedience to fight grave injustices. Only blocks away from the Film Forum theater sits one particularly blatant example of injustice. Is levitation really a myth? Buy tickets now to find out!
Saturday night the ruckus goes international, with simultaneous screenings in three foreign cities featured in our film: Bhopal, Calgary, and New Orleans. (OK, New Orleans isn't really a foreign city, but you wouldn't guess it from how the US government continues to treat Katrina's victims.) Each of these screenings, plus post-screening fracas, will be hosted by a group we either worked with in the film, or were inspired by: the Sambhavna Clinic (Bhopal), the Arusha Centre (Calgary), and Common Ground (New Orleans).
Back in New York, almost every remaining night of our two-week run we'll be sharpening pitchforks with an incredible list of activist partners: CODEPINK, Rainforest Action Network, Picture the Homeless, SEIU, Witness, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Corporate Accountability International... The list goes on and on.
But New York is only the start. Beginning October 23, "Balls Across America" will visit dozens of cities across this great, weird land of ours. See www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com/screenings.htm for full schedule.
Sweeping positive changes have only come to America when there's been a progressive President, pushed to do the right thing by large numbers of rowdy citizens. (Think FDR and the New Deal; think LBJ and the Civil Rights movement.)
Today, we've got the progressive President. Now all we need is to vote with our feet, and enable him to do what we elected him for.
Our film is a small part of a movement to help make that happen. Another part is BeyondTalk.net - a website we recently launched in collaboration with a dozen direct-action activists. The idea is to get 10,000 folks to sign the "Climate Pledge of Resistance" and risk arrest to demand sane climate-change policy. On November 30, the tenth anniversary of the Seattle protests, and a week before the Copenhagen climate talks, those 10,000 activists will form the largest civil disobedience action in recent protest history.
Please join us on this big, crazy trip. And on the way, please see our film and learn how you too can have a riot while fixing the world.
Special note to our friends:We've got no ad budget to speak of. Want to help our film do well regardless? Easy! Just Twitter, Facebook, and email your friends and let them know they should see it. Use our fancy HTML e-flier or the simple text version. Change your Facebook status, or your Facebook picture - either to the poster or a weird inflatable widget.
And as you leave the theater, Twitter your friends to tell them what you thought of the film. It won't fix the world, but if they do go see the movie as a result, and it helps them realize that things can change, you'll feel pretty proud!
And finally: in our quest to build an adequate Survivaball army, we're currently 20 short of our goal. Is there a Survivaball angel out there? If so, please write angel@survivaball.com.
13 Comments so far
Show AllAh, awesome :-)
And go Rainforest Action Network!
It's too bad there's nothing in DC though.
i was down with this whole thing until i read: "Today, we've got the progressive President"
now that truly is funny - what we got today is a cardboard cutout nwo shill who can only hear the voices of his controllers - that would be the rockefeller proxies of kissinger and zbig
obama is a psyop - fake lefty - nwo blow boy
and he aint that funny
his belly flop at copenhagen round of the olympics showed how dumb and ineffective he is
he is a nothing
a void
if you don't know that you don't know nuthin
Thanks. I thought I was going to have to say that.
At this point in time Obama is as you say, but all individuals evolve through their lifetimes. Maybe these guys, like Michael Moore and Bill Moyers, do not want to say anything to make it even more difficult and more unlikely that Obama will evolve into a progressive.
I'm hoping Obummer will evolve into President Kucinich in 2012.
Even Bloomberg has establishment people attacking the people that got us into this mess:
Jeffrey Sachs, a prolific economist, author and professor at Columbia University, had unusually harsh words in his speech today directed at Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve — placing him with much of the blame for the current financial crisis.
Jeffrey Sachs (The Earth Institute)
“The essence of the current downturn is finance,” Mr. Sachs said. “It’s a Wall Street crisis. A crisis made down the block.” He said, and “if you look under the rubble you can figure out what happened and why.”
First, “a long bout of easy credit championed by Alan Greenspan and the Fed outside of the normal boundaries of monetary policy,” which came together with “a nearly complete deregulation of the financial sector contrary to almost everything we know about the risks of a highly leveraged financial system.”
“This is flagrant irresponsibility,” he said. “This isn’t a matter of one’s market philosophy, just profound irresponsibility.” Later, though, he said Mr. Greenspan’s ideology was possibly at fault, given his “Ayn Rand” philosophy that markets take care of themselves “until he discovered the flaw of his theory later.”
Mr. Sachs also spoke harshly of the Clinton and Bush administrations. “We arrived at this cliff through the aggressively irresponsibility of two U.S. administrations in a row,” he said, accusing them of bending to the will of the nation’s biggest lobbying group — the financial industry.
“Where were the regulators? Consciously and deliberately kept out of the scene,” he said. “This led to a bubble financially that was most notable in the housing sector…and Alan Greenspan added fuel to the fire by keeping interest rates around 1%” from 2002 through early 2005.
“You get credit for stopping a Depression but I don’t want to give too much credit because the people who stopped it were the people who started it also,” said Mr. Sachs.
Mr. Sachs needs to also ask WHEN ARE THE PRISON SENTENCES AND ASSET STRIPPING OF FINANCIAL CROOKS GOING TO OCCUR?
Good for Sachs for placing the blame directly where it belongs -- right on Mr. Andrea Mitchell's luxurious doorstep. Except for Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, it's rare for an economist to go after one of the fraternity. Sure, the GOP and many Dems were pushing the same 'self-correcting free market' agenda as if those more expensively dressed than Mafia thugs would also exhibit a higher morality, but it was Greenspan's laissez-faire, 'let it ride' philosophy, and his delusional adherence to the discredited economic and social theories of Rand, Laffer and Milton Friedman, et al, that led to the banking and housing collapse of 2008. Greenspan even apologized, long after the horse had left the barn and he had banked his profits securely. Thanks, Alan.
Prison and asset stripping appear to be off the agenda. And bad as so many decisions are by Obama, he has done a few good things. But if I had known in 2008 what I know now, I wouldn't have voted for him. He's running for reelection by chasing corporate money. My question is, can he fool the voters twice? Not if most of them are unemployed. It doesn't matter what the powers-that-be say about unemployment rates. People look at their own circumstances to decide how the economy is doing.
The Yes Men are my favorites! They make me think of Voltaire's prayer "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous". This country has a hero worship attitude toward wealth that needs a reality check.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
As much as I'd hate to quibble, BeForKids October 6th, 2009 7:36 pm, since I've also been whipsawed by Obama's feints from right to left and back the past spring and summer, there may be a method to his madness -- perhaps he really is playing some type of Grand Master-level political chess.
I can't verify this with a link, but I have heard that Obama was behind both Rep. Anthony Weiner and Rep. Alan Grayson coming out strongly for a public option and attacking the GOP, and now Blue Dog Dems such as Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson are feeling the heat in their home states for trying to eviscerate health care reform with a public option. The Republicans in Congress just dropped to Dick Cheney single digits after all of their howling about mythical death panels and the like for the past two months while Obama has gone up six points in the polls.
What if Obama was just giving the GOP and the BD Dems a chance to hang themselves in public? What if this were a scheme all along to really piss off the left -- as he has -- so that they would come out and fight for a public option? Meanwhile, Obama keeps his 'bipartisan, work with both sides of the aisle' skirts clean. Is it possible he has outwitted the Republicans on this thing? (I guess we'll see if he signs a bill with a public option.)
All I know is that Obama is a brilliant politician; a long-shot who came out of nowhere two years ago to defeat the well-funded odds-on favorite Hillary Clinton, so I wouldn't put anything past him.
I wish.
Stop tempting me to hope.
Let's see if Obama signs something with a true public option. Unfortunately, the addled third-graders running our Big Media, who don't 'do' complexity and can't seem to understand a story unless it involves 'exciting visuals' like monkeys smoking cigars or something being blown up or burning down, have focused on Baucus' demented Finance Committee bill to the exclusion of Tom Harkin's HELP committee bill that includes a public option. As Harkin recently said:
"I just want to reassure the American people that we are going to have a good health care reform bill," Harkin said during an appearance on MSNBC. "And it's going to be on the president's desk before Christmas. And he's going to sign it before Christmas."
"I can assure you that the bill that gets to the president's desk will have a public option," he added.
-- From The Hill, "Harkin says Obama will sign healthcare bill with public option by Christmas," Oct. 7, 2009.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/62063-harkin-says-obama-will-sign-bill-with-public-option-by-christmas
Add to that the fact that Pelosi already knows that any HC reform bill without a public option will not pass the House, and you a situation where either a bill with the PO goes to Obama, or no bill at all comes out of Congress. No bill at all is not an 'option' for Dems seeking reelection in 2010.
I don't have hope, but I'm willing to wait to see how this shakes out before I'm prematurely disappointed and disgusted.
alwaysamazed Catch these guys on LINKTV!! What talent!
"What matters is what happens when the movie is over, and the audience takes to the streets."
And then drive home to their suburban home? Today's America is protest-proof. We don't have the social cohesion to organize meaningful and effective demonstrations, and the physical environment guarantees that we spend most of our time alone in front of media.
Nice work, Yes Men. Pushing the envelope when it comes to producing shocking cinema.