The Yes Men have done it again. They infiltrated the World Economic Forum at Davos and announced a united strategy to end world poverty. (As if!) They issued this press release and set up a fake website, featuring carefully-dubbed fake interviews with various leaders (including Bill Clinton, shown above) admitting past exploitative economic policies and pledging to change them.
But the press corps attending the event largely ignored them, more's the pity:
In a series of diabolically stupid video manipulations, a cabal of anti-poverty filmmakers have performed an elaborate slander of the World Economic Forum, showing its "leading lights" taking a dramatic departure from the litany of meaningless pledges they usually make at the annual gathering in the Swiss resort town.
In response, WEF spokesperson Adrian Monck could barely contain himself. "The only defense to satire is common sense!" he sputtered, before racing back into the WEF war room to deal with the burgeoning crisis.
Fortunately for the WEF, few media outlets picked up on the WEF's fantastic but fictional approach to world poverty ("World Leaders Pledge Strategy to End Poverty Now").
Instead, the media was dominated by coverage of a real WEF press release warning of "Over Regulation of the Financial Sector" (sic).
The forged videos showed eight of "leading lights of Davos" outlining a few clear strategies to end poverty.
The CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, the world's largest agribusiness conglomerate, spoke of "agriculture's role in today's economic savagery, and the broader long-term issues of robbing whole groups for the greed of the food industry," before calling for "universal justice and agriculture's reform" via Food Sovereignty. "We want to undo the injuries of global capitalism," added a much-improved "Klaus Schwab," founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
"The source of our financial treasure was violence towards the colonies of the global South," admitted "Queen Elizabeth II" most refreshingly, before pledging to sell her lands and use the proceeds to improve the lot of the world's poor. "We have caused this disaster," added "Prince Harry" with a stalwart giggle. "Nobody wants a catastrophe," Canadian Prime Minister "Stephen Harper" chimed in most helpfully.
"Haiti was a house of cards that we built through a history of exploitative economic policies," said a tired-looking "Bill Clinton." Now we have a chance to rebuild a more independent society by ending exploitation, forgiving their debt and bringing back real sustainability."
The perpetrators included a prominent film director, several Hollywood voice actors, at least one disaffected member of the World Economic Forum itself, and thirty-four of the Yes Men.
"Yes, these are real talking heads," explained Robert Diaz Leroy, a Hollywood film producer who was one of those behind the action. Another co-conspirator, film director Philippe Diaz, went into greater detail.
"We did this out of frustration with the fact that each year in Davos, the wealthy and powerful figure out ways the global economy can continue to benefit them," said Diaz, who directed The End of Poverty?, which opens this Friday in New York. "Even this year, they're still talking about economic growth and de-regulation as the solution to poverty. That's especially obscene in light of this year's economic crisis, which resulted from those exact policies and has disproportionately affected the poor."
