If you haven’t yet heard of the Yes Men, you either get most of your news from mainstream media outlets, or hate environmentalists, or something like that.
To briefly familiarize readers, the Yes Men are, for lack of a better term, a “culture jamming” duo, who play really funny pranks on some of the biggest, and typically most irresponsible corporate and/or government entities, and have many notches on their post in this regard.
For instance, you may have heard about the time they posed as representatives of the infamous no-bid contract-loving oilfield services company Halliburton (HAL) , or the time they fooled the US Chamber of Commerce and reporters alike, when they posed as representatives of the conservative-leaning organization to announce that they had finally accepted the general thesis/theses of climate science.
If this last prank sounds like a useless antic, consider that because a number of media organizations actually believed the story, and subsequently ran it, the Chamber of Commerce was actually forced to come out and retract the false announcement, which was extremely embarrassing for them (though it likely had little effect on their stance vis-a-vis climate change).
Be that as it may, the Yes Men have an impressive resume of (successful) antics to their credit. At least one documentary has been made about the duo, who are allegedly one Andy Bichlbaum and another Mike Bonanno.
The devotion they apply to their goal of embarrassing the powerful and corrupt is hugely impressive, no matter what one may think of the politics; in other words there’s some real risk and courage involved. Somewhat like Sasha Baron Cohen from the early days of the “Ali-G” show, or even early Tom Green antics, but with much higher stakes.
And so it was that earlier this week, the Yes Men were at it again, when they attended the ominous-sounding “Homeland Security Congress” (was anyone even aware that such a Congress existed?), posing as government officials in order to unveil a completely fictitious initiative called the “American Renewable Clean-Energy Network” whose goal it would be to transition the US to 100 percent renewables by the year 2030.
The video below, via Democracy Now, contains a 5 minute interview with the pair, including some footage of what took place earlier this week. Totally worth a watch, though one has to wonder how they even managed to pull this off what with the Village People-esque get-ups that are were a bit more of a giveaway than one usually sees from these fellows.
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