The Yes Men Fix the World

Two good-looking men in their forties, smartly dressed. As left-wing activists pretending to be spokesmen of large companies, they succeed in making headlines with a 'hoax' over and over again. For example, when on the BBC News they tell on behalf of Dow Chemical that compensation will finally be offered to the victims of the gas leak in Bhopal (India). A worldwide scoop for an hour or so, until the information is contradicted by the company itself. Yet for a brief moment they have shown the world what things could be like, too… if one really tries. In this popcorn documentary full of humour, fast editing and acute comments (Michael Moore is never far away), the Yes Men ridicule the free market and the ideology of economist Milton Friedman, using images of Reagan, and Clinton too, glorifying the market’s capacity for self-regulation. The Yes Men’s message is that unbridled capitalism sacrifices human lives. At the end of the film we see Obama, who may well have marked a new era when he pronounced these words: "A free market was never meant to be a free licence to get whatever you can get however you can get it."