Capitalism swaps invisible hand for visible phallus

[Edric O]

Apparently, there's no limit to what right-wing economic "experts" will believe as long as you tell them the World Trade Organisation said it. A comedy group called The Yes Men set up a fake WTO website (www.gatt.org) as a joke. To their surprise, they found out that they made their website so believable that they were invited to speak at various conferences and even on a CNBC program as representatives of the WTO. They used these opportunities to present absolutely insane ideas to audiences of capitalist economic "experts". And the "experts" took every single one of them seriously. That's what makes this whole thing so amazing. In brief:

"As the World Trade Organization, Andy and Mike delivered shocking satires of WTO policy to audiences of so-called

[danielsh]

What makes the whole thing especially funny is that every page the main GAAT.org site links to is obviously not something the WTO would want to advertise.  Click "WTO News," for example, for a list of statistics demonstrating that the WTO, World Bank, and IMF are making the world's people poorer and the world's economy less stable.

[Kiyouta]

So what is the WTO suppose to do?

I always thought, as captialist propagana dictates ;), that the WTO is a good thing?

[danielsh]

I was really hoping Edric would get involved in this, since he can probably address your question better than I.

[Wolf]

You're very welcome. Referring to the three statistics which suggest that overall global economic security is plummeting, I would like to refer people to the "fortress world" scenario; http://mars3.gps.caltech.edu/whichworld/explore/scenarios/scenfw.html.

[Dude_Doc]

Now that is the ultimate cyberpunk future, explained in every word in that link. Let us hope that that will never happen...

[danielsh]

Here's a couple more articles on why the developing world loves the WTO:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/international/asia/24aids.html?

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/03/24/when_ip_kills.php

[Cyborg]

The documentary film they made was shown on the cinema here, and I watched it.

The best documentart I'd seen in months. Probably because it was so hilarious.