"A hoax email."
"So we got a group known for perpetrating stunts."
"And here we have our vaunted and respected"
"State-Controlled Media falling for it"
"without even checking it out!"
"The internet is just a sewer?"
"It seems to me they get most of their news from that sewer these days."
- We're here with this special filesharing edition
of 'The Yes Men Fix The World'
- Yeah, and this is a special edition, because we have another film
to show you first.
One that you won't see anywhere else
because we're being sued by
The United States Chamber Of Commerce.
- And as part of their lawsuit, they have demanded that
every copy of this video that you're about to see
be impounded and destroyed.
- So please do pass it around.
- September, 2009.
Back in September
we were working with a bunch of climate change activists
to plan an event in Washington D.C.
We wanted to make an political point about an organization
that's pulling off some of the world's biggest hoaxes
No, not this organization.
The one across the street.
The one that looks like a US government office
but really is working against the government.
In reality the US Chamber Of Commerce
is a large corporation
that is reported to lie to the public
on behalf of even bigger corporations.
They spend nearly half a million dollars a day
trying to convince the US government to do really stupid shit
like killing environmental regulations
and undermining workers' rights.
But since they spend so much money on their hoaxes
many people believe them.
- And as it says: "American Free Enterprise. Dream Big."
- But their dreams are our nightmares,
because their plans are to prevent us from passing
climate change legislation, which means,
we're screwed.
Since The Chamber was hoaxing us all,
and threatening our survival,
we decided to fight fire
with fire.
We would reveal one of their biggest lies
by masquerading as them.
We would hold a press conference as The Chamber
at The National Press Club.
But first, we sent out a parody press release from them.
It was sort of like their normal ones,
except ours was saying:
How would the world react to The Chamber, suddenly
reversing it's position on the climate change?
- Bitter reversal on climate change from the US Chamber Of Commerce
- It will reverse it's position on the climate change bill
and wants a carbon tax, if you will
Alright, so, the US Chamber's denying it now..
Alright, so..
Maybe not.
Apparently it was a hoax.
Either there is a group, or some people, or a person
- Is there any involvement of the White House, whatsoever?
- I couldn't even begin to go there, Larry, on that one.
- Today the country's largest business lobby, The Chamber Of Commerce
got punked.
It began early this morning, when a press release went out
reportedly from the United States Chamber Of Commerce.
Amazingly, the release said that the Chamber would now support
this legislation, that it spent months fighting against.
Reporters were surprised, and probably confused
at this odd turn of events, but
that was nothing compared to what actually happened at
the press conference,
when it was held later on this morning.
Watch this tape.
- Clean coal is a technology, that
has not only not been proven, it basically doesn't exist.
- Ok, this is, umm.. I'm Eric Walsh
with the US Chamber Of Commerce.
This is not an official US Chamber Of Commerce event.
So I don't know what pretenses you're here.
I know some of you on the press world.
But this is a fraudulent press activity and a stunt.
- Who are you really, sir?
- Do you have a business card? Are you with the US Chamber?
- I do, we can discuss afterwards.
- Ok, can I see your business card?
- Can I see yours?
- Are you here representing the US Chamber Of Commerce?
- Yes I am.
- Ok, I work there and you did not look familiar to me at all.
- Could I see your business card?
- Are you interrupting the person there?
- Yes I am.
This guy does not represent the US Chamber Of Commerce.
- Can we finish the speech? - No.
This is not an official Chamber Of Commerce.
What is your position at the Chamber Of Commerce?
- I just spoke my position.
- What is your title?
Your official title at the US Chamber of Commerce?
- I'm the assistant to mr. Donahue.
- This guy is a fraud, he's lying.
This is a stunt that I've never seen before.
So if you'd like to actually talk to the legitimate Chamber Of Commerce
I've got my business cards outside.
This gentleman, I will assure you, does not have any business cards
and he's not legitimate.
- Show me your business card, no, show me yours, no, show me yours..
- They both look like impostors..
- Do you have a business card? - It's so weird, because..
- Because you don't look familiar.
- The US Chamber Of Commerce says it was victimized..
- Victims of a hoax by environmental activists..
- Public relations hoaxes undermine the genuine effort to find solutions
on the challenge of climate change.
- A hoax actually led to the Chamber admitting that there is a challenge
for climate change. Seems like a good next step for a hoax is about
poverty, violence, hunger.. - Education..
- The big education hoax, we'd better get a big education hoax..
- So that's the story, folks.
- Not entirely...
- Then they decided to use this opportunity to raise funds.
- They put out Google ads. - Click on that
and it will take you to a page
from the US Chamber Of Commerce, asking you to give them 250 dollars
to help defend themselves against us.
- It gets even funnier..
They not only use this opportunity to fundraise..
But then, they decided to sue us.
- By the way, we're being defended by some of the best lawyers in the world
We're being defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
go to eff.org to check them out!
- There's another punchline
- Not only did FOX pick up our release
Not only did Walshlagel come and interrupt our press conference
Not only did the Chamber of Commerce try to raise funds
of this event
- And not only did.. - ..They sue us!
- Not only did they sue us, but..
They actually changed their policy two weeks later.
- Just today, the Chamber Of Commerce changed positions,
not courtesy of the Yes Men with that stunt in Washington
a few weeks ago.
But they're now saying that, surprisingly to me,
and I'm glad about it,
that they want to get legislation and they're now working with the
sponsors of the bill.
- Gore saying it didn't happen because of the Yes Men is kind of
the highest compliment we've ever been paid, I think.
- So if you're interested in people maintaining their freedom of speech
eff.org is a very good organisation to support
and also, if you're interested in basically more mayhem of this sort
please do go and see theyesmen.org/lab
that is theyesmen.org/lab
where you can find out about the Yes Lab.
- The Yes Lab is a thing we've launched to try to make this happen a lot more.
- Pass this film around to other people, because
the US Chamber Of Commerce wants people not to see it.
That's reason enough as far as we're concerned.
"The Chamber Of Commerce needs the support of every"
"American who gives a damn about free markets, private property"
"and fears of creeping fascism"
"This country cannot afford for the insurance industry to cave."
"This country cannot afford for the Chamber of Commerce to cave."
"The Chamber Of Commerce has been screwed!"
[traffic rumbling]
- Are you ready?
- [inhales sharply]
[whimpers]
I'm extremely happy to be here,
because today is a very historic occasion for all of us at Dow,
and I am grateful
let's walk that way.
I am grateful.
- You're extremely pleased to be here.
- I'm extremely pleased to be here, yes.
Extremely pleased to be here, Steve.
- This is my friend Andy.
- Hi. - ^IBonjour, monsieur.^I
- And my name is Mike.
Today I'm holding the camera.
- Is it okay if?
- Yes, sure.
It's a good thing to announce.
- Exactly.
- Andy is about to go on live television
in front of 300 million people.
They're going to think that he represents
one of the largest companies in the world,
which he doesn't.
And that's why he looks so nervous.
- Should I typically just look right into the camera?
Okay.
[sighs]
- Andy's about to tell a really big lie,
which, unfortunately, is going to wipe $2 billion
off one company's stock price.
- [sighs nervously]
- But before I tell you this story...
- One minute.
- I guess I should tell you how we got ourselves into this situation.
[Judy Garland's ^IGet Happy]^I
- # Forget your troubles #
# Come on, get happy #
# You better chase all your cares away #
# Shout hallelujah #
# Come on, get happy #
# Get ready for the judgment day #
# The sun is shining #
# Come on, get happy #
# The Lord is waiting to take your hand #
# Shout hallelujah #
# Come on, get happy #
# We're going to the promised land #
# We're heading across the river #
# Wash our sins away in the tide #
- Hi.
My name's Mike.
- And I'm Andy.
And this is a movie in which the two of us...
together: Fix the world.
[screams]
splash!
- # Forget your troubles #
# Come on, get happy #
- Aren't we fixing the world?
- Yes.
- Well, come on.
I'm scared.
- # Get ready #
# Get ready #
# For the judgment day #
- # Hallelujah, hallelujah #
# Hallelujah #
[applause]
[laughter]
- Now what?
What we do is pass ourselves off
as representatives of big corporations we don't like.
We make fake websites,
then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences.
- My name is Fred. I'm from Halliburton.
My name is Hanniford Schmidt.
I'm with the World Trade Organization. I'm from Arizona.
- My name is Francisco Guerrero.
Oborloo Hochmanks.
- Hundreds of oil and gas executives were duped today.
- Louisiana officials were taken for a ride by the Yes Men.
- ^ILes Yes Men.^I
- The Yes Men, anti-globalization activists
that travel the world pulling pranks at corporate events.
- A bunch of lefty protesters.
- World-renowned troublemakers.
- Sick, twisted, cruel.
- And what they do is really to take absurd ideas,
and they present these ideas in all seriousness.
[laughter]
- The group has done this many times before.
They have a track record of getting away with it.
So how did this happen?
Equity International says the imposters
- At home in our underground headquarters,
it was time to start planning our next mission.
- The battle raged on.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died.
- Worries are growing among top government and business leaders
about the surge of food riots.
- Markets continue to shake.
Unemployment is up.
-The oil companies reported
the highest profits in the history of the world.
- But with so many things going wrong, who should we go after next?
We got our answer when a text message arrived.
[glass shattering]
Dow Chemical had just bought Union Carbide,
a company that became infamous in the 1980s.
You remember the 1980s:
Challenger,
Chernobyl,
Bhopal.
Bhopal?
In 1984, when Union Carbide's pesticide plant at Bhopal exploded,
at least 5,000 people died within weeks,
and 100,000 thousand more remained sick for life.
It was the biggest industrial disaster in history.
But Union Carbide settled with the Indian government
for $470 million,
meaning most of the victims got less than $1,000 each.
- Now, I just want to say to shareholders of Union Carbide
that I am confident that the victims
can be fairly and equitably compensated without a material adverse effect
on the financial condition of Union Carbide Corporation.
There was little adverse effect on the shareholders,
but in Bhopal, people continued to suffer.
When Dow announced it would buy Union Carbide,
there was finally hope for justice.
Dow said it would compensate victims of Carbide's past negligence
and promptly paid over $2 billion...
to 14 asbestos plaintiffs in Texas.
Dow could do for Bhopal what they'd done for Texas.
But we knew they wouldn't.
So we decided to do it for them.
We set up a fake Dow Chemical website, dowethics.com,
and we waited and waited...
and waited.
Then one day, we got our chance.
- You have mail.
- We'd just been invited to a conference on international finance.
Some of the biggest banks in the world would be there.
These were the kind of banks who help companies
like Union Carbide and Dow do what they do.
A company might say,
"We're gonna build a shoddy plant in an underdeveloped country
"with a corrupt legal system.
"The plant might explode, and people might die,
but we'll make a lot of money."
And the bank comes back and says, "Great!
Sounds like a plan."
What could we possibly do to show bankers
what was wrong with this logic?
So right now, I'm painting Gilda, the Gilded Skeleton,
actually the golden skeleton that we're going to use
in the Dow Chemical Lecture in London
at a financial services conference in just a few short days.
The only good skeleton is a gold skeleton.
In case Gilda didn't scare them enough, we had a backup plan.
We rented a theatrical pyrotechnics unit here
so that we can make a big puff of smoke.
bang!
Oh, my God.
We're on our way to a conference,
and Erastus Hamm is going to be speaking
at the conference as Dow Chemical Company.
Our plan was to have Dow demonstrate for the first time ever
exactly how they calculate the cash value of human life.
Would this make the bankers think twice?
It was time to find out.
- Thank you very much.
On May 1st,
we are releasing the beta version of Acceptable Risk,
the world's first market-smart risk calculator,
to help you find out instantly
what risks are or are not acceptable
from a bottom-line business perspective.
Will Project X be just another skeleton in the closet,
something your company comes to regret?
Or will it be a golden skeleton?
A complex case is IBM's sale
of technology to World War II Germany
for use in identifying certain populations.
This was very bad, of course.
But no one can deny they were profitable,
and although the issue remains a skeleton in the closet,
in retrospect, it is quite clearly golden.
You may have heard the joke.
How many Americans does it take
to screw in a lightbulb?
12, 1 to climb the ladder and 11 to file the lawsuit.
[laughter]
What about Indians?
Oh, just one.
We would, of course,
never wish to imply that an Indian life is worth more or less than another.
I myself believe in the sanctity of all life.
But the market has its own logic,
and if we're willing to live with it,
we must make the most of the choices it makes.
Because if there's one thing
that we at Dow want you to remember today,
it's that the only good skeleton is a gold skeleton.
[small explosion]
Ooh!
[applause]
Surprise.
[laughs]
This is Gilda.
She's the mascot for the Dow Acceptable Risk program.
Gilda is here to basically tell you that if you have a skeleton in the closet,
it may not be just a skeleton.
It could very well be a golden skeleton as well.
And as you move into a future
of ever increasing complexity and ever increasing opportunities,
Dow Acceptable Risk
can assure you that your touch will be the Midas one.
- Achoo!
- And I'd like to finish with a little poem.
I'd rather be handsome than homely.
I'd rather be youthful than old.
If I can't have a bushel of silver, I'll do with a barrel of gold.
So thank you very much.
We hope you come up and get a closer look.
[applause]
Thank you. - Thanks a lot.
- Oh, thank you for having us.
- Thank you very much.
Here's a keychain.
Thank you very much. Absolutely.
Unfortunately I don't have a card anymore.
I've ran out of them, so
- Oh, wonderful, yes, you were one of the earlier speakers, thanks.
- Yes, so it's a pleasure. - Thank you very much.
- It was definitely very interesting.
- Is it applicable is your model applicable to anything?
I mean, Is it applicable can we use it in risk management?
- Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I'll have our risk management guys take a look at it,
because we do a lot of interesting things.
- Wonderful. Well, this is interesting.
- Thanks a lot. - Thank you.
Okay, take care.
- Yes, hello. - Hello, sorry.
- Mm-hmm, yeah.
- That's right.
- [laughs]
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.
[laughter]
- Is that right?
- Well, that's pretty much yeah, that's exactly what I said.
I meanit's did you find that not
- Okay.
- Refreshing?
We'd meant to be shocking, not refreshingly honest.
To us, this was about as refreshing
as the Kool-Aid in Jonestown.
- The mass suicide and murder of more than 900 Americans
took cyanide-laced fruit punch from their spiritual father
and then lay down to die.
- That's the thing about cults.
What's shocking to outsiders seems normal to insiders.
Is this why unfettered greed seemed normal to bankers?
And if so, who was the cult leader here?
This is Milton Friedman.
We were told that he was the world's most influential economist.
- Did government play a role in this?
Very little.
Only by keeping the road clear for human greed and self-interest
to promote the welfare of the consumer.
- In this book, Friedman used the word "freedom" 374 times.
But by "freedom," he didn't mean this.
He meant this:
the freedom of corporations to profit no matter the risk to people
and without interference from government.
- Dr. Milton Friedman,
a scientist, a careful thinker, and a great teacher...
- A hero of freedom, Milton Friedman.
- I sought out Dr. Friedman and had the great pleasure and privilege
of meeting him and his economist wife, Rose.
And we've all become friends, and now I call him Milton.
- If we wanted to understand the bankers' mind-set,
we needed to find the guru of greed.
There was only one problem.
[bell tolls]
But though Friedman had now ascended,
his followers carried the flame.
- Okay, so we should go in there.
Oh, great. Thank you.
- Uncle Milty, I call him.
- These guys belong to free-market think tanks,
which have spent billions of corporate dollars
trying to make us all believe
that if we just let corporations do what they want,
everything will work out great.
- We're kind of on a quest.
We want to fix the world.
And we want to know how to do it.
- Private property, rule of law,
and a market unrestricted by government regulation and control.
- When we see companies demonized, we should work against that.
When we see the free-market system castigated,
we must work against that.
- More wealth leads to greater efficiency
and greater innovation and basically all good things.
- Wealth. - Money.
- Privatization. - Wealth.
- Money. - Individualist freedom.
- Privatization. - Free markets.
- Ownership. - And a great deal of money.
- Capitalism and freedom.
- Wealth and prosperity.
- # Alleluia! #
- We were getting the message.
And so were millions of others.
These guys spread Friedman's free-market gospel
by any means that they can,
like speaking to Congress,
viral videos,
and guest spots on Sunday morning talk shows.
They claim to have derailed the Kyoto Protocol
and to have helped destroy regulation around housing,
banking, energy, and the environment.
They agree to meet pretty much anyone with a camera, even us.
- # Alleluia, alleluia! #
- You see there's a blue screen behind you.
What would you like to be put in front of?
- A planet Earth.
- Oh cool, a blue screen.
- I'd say the Jefferson monument.
- How about Jefferson Memorial?
That'sit's more - It's already taken.
- Oh, it is taken? - Somebody asked for that already.
- I'm sure you have a good backdrop of Washington.
- Don't put me in front of anything in Washington.
- I hate Washington.
- Put up a scene in outer space or something, you know.
- I would say a world in which man is treated
as an end in himself rather than a tool
to be manipulated by those with political power.
- How can we represent that?
Is there a single image
or a series of images?
- I think that the images are of men...
just the prosperity of free men
following what their hearts and desires lead them to.
I think we can find that. - Okay, sounds good.
- Now that we had our new friends at ease,
it was time to ask them the really tough questions.
- What would you say to people who harp on
the Bhopal catastrophe or other tragedies?
- Bhopal is an interesting example.
But that facility had created educational opportunities
for an Indian emerging technocratic class.
It had created value-added and tax base for the community,
and something like 3,000 people died.
That's a tragedy,
but there are always risks of going into the future.
- "There are always risks of going into the future"?
For thousands of people in Bhopal, there was no future.
At least the Jonestown suicide cult killed only themselves.
The free marketeers seemed willing to put everyone else at risk.
Back at home...
- You have new mail.
- We had mail.
Turned out our Dow site was the gift that kept on giving.
This time, it wasn't a mere conference.
We'd hit the jackpot.
The BBC, perhaps the world's most respected news organization,
was doing a big broadcast about Bhopal,
and they wanted to know whether Dow might finally clean up their mess.
The interview, they said, would be broadcast to 300 million people.
This was what we'd been waiting for.
To the BBC's great surprise,
Dow emailed back to say they would be delighted
to speak publicly about the catastrophe.
As for us, 300 million people was about a million times bigger
than any other audience we'd ever had.
We were scared.
So we asked the BBC if instead of coming to their headquarters in London,
we could meet them in neutral territory, the original land of revolution.
[La Marseillaise ^Iplays]
[cheers and applause]
[laughing]
- Are you a little nervous?
- I'm so nervous!
Oh, God, it's like going to the guillotine.
I think it's right near
where they used to have the guillotine, too, in Paris, the office.
Mm.
Yeah.
I think it's the biggest thing we've ever done, this.
I haven't combed my hair in, like, 20 years, yeah.
Really.
Like, I think I used to do it this way.
All right!
We're off.
Oh, God.
When we acquired Union Carbide three years ago,
we knew what we were getting,
and today we are prepared to do the obvious.
Let's see.
Don't film too much when we get there, I think.
Hi. - ^IBonjour, monsieur.^I
- ^IBonjour.^I
- And you're watching ^IBBC World.^I
Our main headlines.
The world's worst industrial accident is being remembered in India today.
It's 20 years since deadly gas
leaked from the Union Carbide chemical plant in the city of Bhopal.
At least 18,000 deaths are attributed to the leak,
and many local people say that contamination
has never been properly cleared up.
- Yeah.
Should I typically just look right into the camera?
Okay.
- The factory still exists here,
and that's been a real problem for the people living here locally.
I mean, the site, I've been to it,
and it's full of toxic waste.
People who are living in these houses, they've all got a story to tell...
- One minute.
- About that day 20 years ago.
Many of them lost members of their family,
and they say that they're continuing to suffer
because of the tragedy.
And they're saying somebody needs to answer for this.
Legally what they're saying
is that they want to pursue the company
to try and clean up the site.
But whether the company will accept liability seems doubtful.
- Well, joining us live from Paris now is Jude Finisterra.
He's a spokesman for Dow Chemicals, which took over Union Carbide.
Good morning to you.
A day of commemoration in Bhopal.
Do you now accept
responsibility for what happened?
- Steve, yes.
Today is a great day for all of us at Dow
and I think for millions of people around the world as well.
It's 20 years since the disaster.
And today I am very, very happy to announce that for the first time,
Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe.
We have a $12 billion plan
to finally at long last fully compensate the victims,
including the 120,000 who may need medical care
for their entire lives,
and to fully and swiftly remediate the Bhopal plant site.
Now, when we acquired Union Carbide three years ago,
we knew what we were getting.
And it's worth $12 billion, $12 billion.
We have resolved to liquidate Union Carbide,
this nightmare for the world and this headache for Dow,
and use the $12 billion
to adequately compensate the victims.
- Jude, that's good news
that you have finally accepted responsibility.
Some people would say too late.
It's three years, almost four years on.
- When we acquired Union Carbide,
we did settle their liabilities in the United States immediately.
And we are now, three years later, prepared to do the same in India.
We should have done it three years ago.
We are doing it now.
And I would also like to say that this is no small matter, Steve.
This is the first time in history
that a publicly owned company of anything near the size of Dow
has performed an action
which is significantly against its bottom line
simply because it's the right thing to do.
And our shareholders may take a bit of a hit, Steve.
But I think that if they're anything like me,
they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion
of doing right by those that we've wronged.
- Just to reiterate what Jude Finisterra,
the spokesman for Dow Chemicals, has just said,
he says Dow Chemicals
now fully accept responsibility for the events in Bhopal.
- Great.
- That's it? - Well done.
- Great! Now they wanted
- Now you do...
together: Radio.
- I can tell you one thing.
We're not going out of business.
We will continue to make profit.
We will simply make slightly less profit than normal.
But we are doing the right thing.
We're comparing here, though, the value of money
to the value of human life, and there is no comparison.
- Exactly.
I mean, how often does Dow get toyou know?
I wouldn't want to be a Dow spokesperson otherwise.
Good.
Oh, my God.
I'm going to have a serious nervous breakdown now.
"Dow accepts responsibility for Bhopal,"
dash, dash, "Spokesman."
- Where is that?
- In Reuters.
"Congratulations, your appearance...
Everyone here at BBC cheered."
It's over an hour, and it's still headline news.
Hello, this is Jude.
Who has said that?
Perhaps they're not in communication with the Dow
with the Dow leadership.
[phone ringing]
Hello?
Yes, this is Jude Finisterra.
Sure.
Right.
Sure.
Right.
Let me just
yes, could I ask you to either to hold for a moment?
Okay, thank you.
Well, I wouldn't say it's a hoax.
It's an honest representation of what Dow should be doing.
- This morning a false statement was carried by BBC World
regarding responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy.
The individual who made this statement identified himself
as a Dow spokesperson named Jude Finisterra.
Dow confirms that there was no basis whatsoever for this report.
- Well, earlier today we carried an interview
with someone purporting to be from Dow Chemical,
a company which subsequently bought the plant from Union Carbide.
This interview was inaccurate
and part of an elaborate deception.
- Take a look at this. Like, look at this.
This is the top of Google News.
"Dow said on Friday there was no basis whatsoever
"in the ^IBBC World Report^I
saying that it had accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster."
That's a funny sentence.
- The hoax was an elaborate one involving a fake website.
- Dow Chemicals was quick to issue
a series of statements denying all knowledge of a Jude Finisterra.
- Also, tonight, backtracking because of this man.
- We're going back to the BBC television studio right now
that we were at this morning, because they want to talk to us.
We thought, "Well, okay.
What do they want to know?"
Well, let's go see.
- Yeah.
Hi.
Sorry.
[laughing]
- It didn't occur to us at all.
We got contacted by you guys.
- Yeah, I did hear that.
Has it gone back up?
- I'm sure it has.
- Well, the prank, which briefly knocked
3% percent off Dow's shares comes 20 years to the day
after the chemical leak from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.
Today's unlikely corporate humiliation of a U.S. chemical giant
was all about reminding the world that Bhopal remains
an unhealed sore.
Well, earlier I spoke to Andy Bichlbaum,
and I asked him what he did when he got an email from the BBC
asking him for an interview.
- Essentially, Dow has been promulgating a hoax
by which they've convinced people that they can't do anything about Bhopal,
that they cannot accept responsibility.
And we wanted to prove that that was not accurate.
- I mean, it is nevertheless a pretty cruel trick to play
on the people of Bhopal.
- Well, we
- Did you think about the people of Bhopal when you decided to peddle this stunt?
- Yes, yes, we did, and
- Well, that surely is the tragedy of today.
You spring upon them the actual hoax that they actually suddenly believe
that they have got a payout from Dow,
and then, you know, an hour or two later,
they find it's untrue.
- Let's put this in contrast.
I mean, we may have given people two hours of false hope.
Dow has given them 20 years of suffering.
I mean, this is this is what we're faced with.
- Are you expecting the next knock at the door to be Dow's lawyer?
- No idea what Dow will do.
- Dow's lawyers didn't call,
and millions of people learned for the first time
that 20 years on, Bhopal was never cleaned up.
But the media also reported
that many of the victims in Bhopal cried tears of joy
upon hearing the news and were then bitterly disappointed.
Had we actually upset the people we'd meant to help?
There was only one way to find out.
Here we are.
We're in India.
Hey.
And this is Bhopal.
Bhopal is a big city.
There's over a million people here.
Unfortunately,
we heard from a lot of news reports that the victims here in Bhopal
were extremely upset
because we had raised false hopes
about them actually getting some compensation after 21 years.
What do you think they'll do?
- Well, I don't know.
I mean, what's the local custom here? I mean
[people shouting]
[shouting, gagging noises]
[excited chatter]
- We're here at the Sambhavna Clinic.
And this place was set up by a bunch of people
to help treat the gas victims
of the worst industrial accident in history.
- So patients come in from here.
This is a form basically
where we determine their history of gas exposure
by how far they were living,
or were they sleeping in a tent that night?
And then their severity grade is determined.
These are some of the disabled children.
And every system of the body has been affected,
you know, the muscular, skeleton, the nervous system.
40% of the women coming here under 40 have menopause.
Yeah.
This is Sathyu.
- Hello.
Hey.
Oh, my God.
[laughter]
Hey.
We got the news that Dow was willing to pay $12 billion.
And at first, we just felt the news was too good to be true...
- Uh-huh.
- And Dow was too bad for the news to be true.
- Yeah.
But still we thought, "Maybe it is true.
Maybe they have just seen sense in this."
- Yeah.
- I mean, for about an hour we were under that impression.
- Yeah. Did people cry with joy?
- Yeah, I cried. - Oh, no.
- Lots of people cried.
- Were you kind of angry at first, though, when you heard it was a hoax?
- No, I wasn't angry.
- Wow.
Do you think it was worth it?
- Totally worth it. - Okay.
- We are saying, "No more Bhopals."
What people have gone through here,
no one else in the world should go through this.
- I think we're in Shivajinagar.
And it's been a little bit of a a bit of a
well, a bit of a
[laughs]
a maze getting here.
What would you call it?
- We got lost.
That's what it's called.
We were trying to meet up with a journalist to interview,
and we got lost.
Oh, here he is. - Here he is.
- Oh, my God.
- Rajkumar Keswani broke the disaster story.
In fact, he broke it years before it actually happened.
So you had already predicted how many times
that the disaster would happen before it happened?
- When you heard it was a hoax, the thing that we did,
were you, like what did you think of it at first?
- I thought it was a wonderful thing to do.
We were put into a situation
which we never thought of that would actually happen.
So it is just like being in the heaven,
because I'm sure I'm not going to be in the heaven.
So if one
I'm expecting hell.
And suddenly, someone puts me for a while in the heaven.
So I said, "Okay, thanks."
[laughter]
[kids chattering]
- Hi.
- 20 years since the disaster,
the poisons left behind at the plant were still leaching into the groundwater.
- Communities that you see in red
have not gotten a single drop of clean water.
- Oh, really? - Yeah.
- Until now? - Until now.
Eight communities are getting about 12% of the requirement.
But this is contaminated water.
Some of them use to drink,
cook, wash clothes.
[kids chattering]
- Dow could clean up their mess, but they didn't.
Instead, they spent tens of millions of dollars
on an ad campaign to clean up their image.
- For each of us, there is a moment of discovery.
And just then, in the flash of a synapse,
we learn that life is elemental.
And in the dazzling brilliance of this knowledge,
we may overlook the element not listed on the chart,
its importance so obvious, its presence is simply understood.
The missing element is the human element.
And when we add it to the equation, the chemistry changes.
The human element is the element of change.
The human element.
Nothing is more fundamental, nothing more elemental.
- This is Kevin Finn.
He trades bonds.
- This is what I do.
sit here and just look at this screen for, you know,
12 and 14 hours a day.
It's very romantic, actually.
- More than anyone else we knew,
we thought Kevin could explain why Dow wouldn't do anything to fix Bhopal.
He told us what happened when Andy went on the BBC.
- I got a call from my clerk in the middle of the night.
Dow Chemical made some announcement
that the stockholders of Dow Chemical didn't like
because Dow's stock went down.
The S&P 500 futures went down.
You know, I had to go roll out of bed.
My clerk's, like, freaking out, because my position's going against me.
My friend tells me he thinks it's, you know,
some global conspiracy of traders to try to screw us,
and, you know, finds out it's two jokers.
- The effect of our big announcement on the BBC
was that Dow's stock lost over $2 billion in 23 minutes.
- This tells me all the news that's happening in the world.
So on December 3rd,
if I was sitting here watching this, it would say, you know,
"Dow Chemical decides to settle with the Bhopal people."
And people that own Dow Chemical would be like, "Ahh!
Sold!"
- Everybody we talked to about that was really happy that Dow
was doing the right thing.
- Sure, sure, okay.
I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be.
I'm just saying that,
sure it seems like a good thing, unless, I guess,
you're a Dow Chemical stockholder, and you're expecting the $20 billion
to go towards a dividend to come back to you
or to come to buy some new chemical plant,
and it's going to these people that, at least at this point,
aren't able to get any money.
I mean, you could see how that would how they could be upset about that, right?
- We were confused.
As kids, we learned that it was bad to do something bad,
and if you did something good, you got a reward.
Yet when we announced Dow would do something great,
the market gave Dow a spanking.
So how could we get companies to do the right thing?
We needed to change the rules of the market.
But that meant regulation, and regulation meant government.
The only problem was,
government was drinking Friedman's free-market Kool-Aid.
- Free markets are working miracle after miracle of economic growth.
- Open markets and rule-based trade are the best engines we know of.
- But when the governments step back
and let the free enterprise system do its work,
then the better we did, the more robust our economy grew,
the better I did, and the better my business grew.
- For the last 30 years, the leaders of most powerful countries
did whatever the free marketeers recommended.
And what they recommended was simple.
- The solution is not to have government intervene or regulate in some way.
- In fact, most problems will solve themselves if ignored
and let free people working in free markets address them.
- Following advice like this,
governments around the world
got rid of a whole bunch of regulations meant to protect people,
like in banking.
- I'm confident that the degree of harm or spillover effect,
whatever subprime mortgages go bad, that the market will devise ways
to minimize and diffuse the negative effects.
- Their faith in the market was unshakeable.
But we all know what happened next.
- Now with the world's largest insurance company, AIG,
on the brink of collapse,
it could mean devastation way beyond Wall Street.
- What other disasters weren't coming?
- Global warming is silly.
It's not a serious issue.
Warmer is healthier, and warmer is more pleasant,
and that's why states like Arizona keep gaining population rapidly.
- Well, there are benefits to global warming.
Cold-related deaths will actually decrease considerably.
- Just like with the subprime mortgages,
our free-market friends were doing all they could
to stop government from intervening.
Except here, the stakes were higher.
- I think it's quite possible that if it weren't for groups like ours,
that the United States might very well be in the Kyoto Protocol by now.
- And if you've seen the ads that we ran about a year ago,
which we produced in-house on this global warming
where our central contention is,
"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution.
We call it life."
- There's something in these pictures you can't see.
It's what we breathe out and plants breathe in.
Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution.
We call it life.
- We got lots of hate mail.
Two senators this past fall sent a letter to ExxonMobil,
calling on it to stop funding CEI.
- So Exxon was secretly paying think tanks to tell us we shouldn't regulate Exxon.
[glass shatters]
Public outrage forced Exxon to stop.
- In fact, ExxonMobil didn't fund us at all this past year.
- That was great.
But Exxon had other ways to influence policy,
like this guy, Lee Raymond.
He's a trustee of one of the key free-market think tanks.
He also used to be Exxon's CEO.
And the year he left that job,
he became an official adviser to the U.S. government on energy matters.
This was scary.
If we let the free-market cult keep running the world,
there wouldn't be a world left to fix.
We had to do something.
So when we heard about a huge oil conference up in Canada,
we decided to go.
Posing as a big PR agency,
we offered them Lee Raymond, Exxon's ex-CEO, as keynote speaker.
They jumped at the chance.
But what they didn't know is that on the day of the talk,
Raymond would be suddenly unavailable,
and an assistant would step in to replace him.
- Okay. - Yeah.
- "This keynote speech will attract substantial media coverage
"and will be one of the major highlights
of GO-EXPO."
- What would we do to shake this audience up?
It would have to be more shocking than anything we'd done before.
[building clarinet music]
- If there's one thing that's gonna be abundant in the world to come,
what with climate change and all that, it's people, dead people.
This is a pilot program to use that fuel.
It's called "Vivoleum," and here we are making Vivoleum.
- As Lee Raymond's assistant, Andy would announce Vivoleum,
Exxon's new biofuel to be made from the victims of climate change.
And he'd even hand out a sample.
- So it started out, we made one Reggie.
And then we cast a bunch of Reggies in wax.
That's human hair right there.
- This is a lot of experimenting to figure out
how to make a candle smell like human flesh.
Ow!
I lost a Reggie.
- Quick. - Ow!
- We wanted to make sure that the oilmen knew
what the candles they'd be holding were made of.
So we'd show them a tribute video to Reggie Watts,
a terminally ill Exxon janitor who had volunteered to be turned into fuel.
- I think I'd like to be a candle.
I think a candle would be fun, because you can
there's just so many uses for a candle.
- There are 6 billion people on this Earth today.
We're probably using the energies, maybe, of a billion of those at best.
- They had me test a Hellfire missile once.
That was pretty cool.
- We simply haven't found the miracle fuel yet
to replace petroleum,
but we'll eventually get there if government gets out of the way.
- We had his miracle fuel.
And our grandfathers were turning over in their mass graves.
[dramatic music]
- ^ICTV News ^Iwith Barb Higgins and Darrel Janz.
- Good evening.
A bizarre situation today at the GO-EXPO Energy Conference
at Stampede Park.
- Organizers and hundreds
of Alberta Oil and Gas executives got duped.
- They'd been promised a major announcement from a major player
in the energy industry.
Attendees paid 50 bucks a head to hear this speech
from the National Petroleum Council,
a group that advises the White House on oil and gas matters.
- Welcome to GO-EXPO's keynote luncheon.
- Please welcome S.K. Wolf.
[applause]
- First, I need to say
how wonderful it is to see
on all the faces here today the childlike exuberance
of a great industry in full flower.
And why not?
Without oil, at least 4 billion people would starve,
and starving would become the new black.
But I'm not here today to pat us all on the back.
I'm here to speak of Plan Bs.
- As Andy began outlining Exxon's tough solution to climate change,
ten volunteers passed out 300 human flesh candles.
This vigil would be like no other.
- Who first had the idea to use the oil of a recently living animal
to light his or her house?
Even today, Shetland islanders cut the heads off their puffins
and put wicks in the stumps to make candles.
We at Exxon firmly believe that a free market will,
if left to its own devices,
always find solutions to the dilemmas that humanity faces.
We're calling our new technology Vivoleum.
- As Andy began to describe Exxon's new biofuel,
the candles were lit.
A strange odor rose into the air.
- What you see here is an artist's rendition
of an advanced, large-scale plant.
The Vivoleum feedstock is renewable and unprecious
and responds to the need of a shrinking market with greater supply.
The dance of capital appears in full flower.
- Finally, it was time to introduce Reggie Watts,
the dying Exxon janitor who had volunteered to be turned into fuel.
- And now we begin the tribute video to Reggie Watts.
- Worked in Maintenance for a while, moved up to Maintenance II,
started doing cleanup, toxic spill cleanup.
[bell tolls]
After I heard from the doctor that I was going to die,
I felt like I had something to live for.
- I think I'd like to be a candle.
There's just so many uses for a candle.
I mean, you know,
like, if you want something romantic.
And that'd be nice to know I was a candle on a table
you know, when people, they first met each other on a date.
I think that would be great. I'd love that.
That'd be a hoot.
- This is a funerary observance.
I mean, this guy died.
- Switch this off before I do. - This man died!
- It's people.
It really is.
[people chattering]
- Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Thank you very much.
- I'm very sorry, but we've been cut off.
Apparently, we're not allowed to have a funerary observance
for a man who's died to make a product possible.
And I'm being
Are you allowed to do that to me?
[scattered applause]
- The remaining 20 is just, you know, binders, bonders,
to keep it together.
We have to think
- Excuse me, sir.
- Wow. - Boy, oh, boy.
[indistinct chatter]
- Now. Thank you.
- Hey. - Shut it down.
- Don't touch my camera. - Shut it down, now.
- Had we actually made the oil people
think about what they were doing?
It was hard to tell.
And there wasn't much time left to figure it out.
Big oil was already destroying the planet
and not just by speeding up climate change.
- This house right here, it used to be on this side.
- No way.
- Yeah, it was over here,
but it moved over there.
You know, I could only take it, like, two or three days a week
coming down here to work.
And this year for hunting season, I mean, I didn't kill nothing.
I just wasn't in the mood to kill.
I mean, after seeing everything else that was dead,
I just wasn't in the mood.
I mean, you know, not that I'm a big killer,
but I like killing stuff.
- Yeah.
[laughter]
- It's really just amazing when you go downriver.
Some of the ponds that we used to fish in are now almost like a bay.
- For decades, the government had ignored scientists' warnings
and let industry carve up the wetlands that protected New Orleans from storms.
- About a million acres of land has disappeared since 1930.
It was done canal by canal, oil field by oil field,
port by port, parcel by parcel.
It was, if you will, death by a thousand cuts.
The governing mind-set, culturally and legally, was,
if there's an impact, we'll deal with it later.
And in some ways, you know, this is a preview
of what the rest of this country and the rest of the world
have in store for them.
[wind howling]
- When Katrina hit, the wetlands weren't there to diminish its force,
and the levees didn't stand a chance.
So the real culprit for the destruction of New Orleans wasn't just a big hurricane
but greed dressed up as progress.
- What produced this tremendous improvement in technology?
It was self-interest or, if your prefer, greed,
the greed of producers who wanted to produce something
that they can make a dollar on.
- Greed had caused the biggest catastrophe ever to hit the U.S.
And now the government was handing out billions of dollars
in rebuilding contracts;
in other words, letting greed solve the problem.
- There has been this idea
that it is government's responsibility to replan the construction of New Orleans.
It's better to leave it to the market.
- We wanted to take a closer look
at how the market was fixing the U.S. Gulf Coast.
- We're on our way to the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Conference
at the Washington Convention Center.
We're going to talk to a number of people who are busy reconstructing New Orleans.
[horn honks]
Ahh, watch out.
- # We're on the move #
- There are many silver linings to this horrendous disaster,
and with it has come an incredible opportunity.
- I'm optimistic when I see a room full of folks
who want to take advantage of the opportunities,
and that's a good thing from our perspective.
It's a great thing.
- Well, you know, it's like the Israelis say, you know.
Once in a while, a good crisis is not bad.
You come up with new things.
- We were seeing a lot of new things.
But wasn't this supposed to be about Gulf Coast reconstruction?
- We're especially interested in Gulf Coast reconstruction,
and is thisdoes this have anything to do with that?
- This is for bomb detonation and ammunition storage.
- Perimeter and physical security, mainly anti-ram road blockers.
- This particular unit can be used in military applications.
- Wow, so it's a real, like, catastrophe toilet, basically.
- All this stuff would be great for the people of New Orleans
if they were gonna fight a war.
Where was the stuff about helping people?
Ah, here it was.
The pavilion from Central Asia.
- Kyrgyz people are ready to help the people
of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama
by erecting yurts there for them as a temporary shelter.
[men singing in Kyrgyz]
- And here is the yurt.
- Oh, my God. - This is it.
You can cover it up. You can build a fire.
You can open it up.
And if there's a flood,
you can take it up in less than an hour.
They're interested in sending one free of charge
to Louisiana as a test if you're interested, soyep.
- The yurt was the only solution here about helping people,
but the government reps didn't seem very interested.
There's no money in yurts.
We decided we could outdo everyone at this conference
and beat the free market at its own game.
- # We're on the move #
- We would invent the ultimate disaster technology,
a device so sophisticated
it could protect anyone from pretty much anything.
But it would cost so much
that only the richest businessmen could afford it.
- They kind of just flatten out. - Yeah.
- The only question was: what company would make such a thing?
- You've got to think Halliburton.
- # For they are the ones who do the research to make the mud #
# To build the tool #
# To run in the well #
# To make the test #
# To log the zone #
# To set the packer #
# Cement the pipe and fire the gun #
# To perforate #
# To pump the gel that carries the sand #
# That props the frac #
# Completes the well #
# To produce the crude that runs the world #
# For all the people all over the Earth #
# Who live in the house that oil built #
- Halliburton has been the world leader
in extracting profit from every kind of disaster.
They made billions off the first Gulf War and its sequel
and hundreds of millions off Katrina, all paid for by the U.S. government,
whose vice president was once their own CEO.
[men singing cheerfully]
- If anyone could make a killing from total disaster,
Halliburton would be the one.
This morning, we got up really early,
drove up to the very fancy hotel which shall remain nameless
because they threatened us if we use the material with their name.
But you know, what's it called, basically, the hotel?
- Ritz-Carlton. - Ritz-Carlton.
That one.
- How are you doing?
- I'm Northrop Goody.
I'm here with Halliburton, with Fred Wolf.
I'm just helping demo a product, so...
Would either one of you mind helping us demo the suits?
We have three of them.
So you have to actually step into it, pull it on.
It's kind of like a coverall. - All right, I'll wear it.
- You'll wear it? - I'll wear it.
- All right, great! - No problem.
- You're a good sport.
You're a really good sport. - No problem.
- The Catastrophic Loss Conference
was for insurance people.
They knew numbers.
And we were about to show them some pretty simple math.
[typewriter clacking]
With Gilda, we'd tried scary.
With Reggie, we'd tried gross.
Now we would go for ridiculous.
- We really appreciate being invited to speak on this panel.
A lot of you work with the insurance industry, of course.
Insurance has become extremely worried
about some grave new dangers to people
that we're seeing in the world around us today.
I'm of course talking about climate change
and the disasters that it brings.
But I can personally guarantee you that level heads
will always be able to turn lemons into lemonade.
Consider the Black Plague.
This was an unspeakably rotten event, of course,
in which 1/3 of Europe's population died in great agony.
No one of course would wish such a thing on any civilization.
Yet without it,
without the Black Plague,
the old business models of Europe would never have been overturned
by the entrepreneurs of the Renaissance.
And what would the world be without ^IThe Mona Lisa?^I
Or closer to home, how about ^IThe Great Deluge?^I
This world-ending disaster, literally, was surely seen as a terrible catastrophe
by Noah's contemporaries and perhaps by Noah himself.
Yet Noah was ready to seize the day, and at the end of that day,
not only was there a whole new world,
but Noah found himself with a monopoly of the animals.
For those of us in positions of responsibility, however,
who might have to take charge in a crisis,
even more innovative solutions are necessary.
I'd like now to introduce my colleague here,
Dr. Northrop Goody,
who's the head of our Emergency Products Development unit at Halliburton.
And Dr. Goody will be showing some mock-ups
of some items that his unit has developed.
[applause]
- We want something that's going to be able to save a human being
no matter what Mother Nature throws at him.
And so this is the answer.
This is the Halliburton Survivaball.
Its three easy steps for deployment:
suiting up, inflating, and of course, launching
launching out of a building.
And we have an artist's rendition
of what it might be like in Houston when we launch our Survivaballs.
In the event of extreme catastrophe, there might be a scarcity of resources.
In this case, we've got a Survivaball here
that's going up and extracting resources, in this case, from an animal.
And you don't want to be exposed to the elements,
but you still want to be able to extract resources from,
for example, a cow.
They're going to be able to go underwater,
rated at 50 feet.
They can be used in any condition.
It doesn't matter whether
you're in a landslide in California
or even in the Arctic.
Of course, any other conditions, whether it's tsunamis or tornadoes,
the Survivaball is designed to withstand.
But the best part of the Survivaball is that people need people.
And so our biggest inspiration
for the way that a community should work with Survivaballs
comes from biology.
As some of you probably know,
amoebas gather together and actually form another body.
They aggregate.
And so these one-celled organisms come together as a single body.
For example, here's a raft formation of Survivaballs
in the ocean floating, communicating, exchanging nutrients,
differentiating function.
Last of all,
this is, literally, thousands of Survivaballs
dancing through the streets.
[applause]
- And we'll be happy to take any questions.
So if there are any more technical ones for Northrop here, or general ones.
- Yeah.
- If you could demonstrate the turtle position, please,
that would be great.
Basically, if you duck down
- Yeah, visor, heads-up display, the whole thing.
- Yeah.
- Well, that's right.
- Hi.
Northrop.
- Gary. How are you?
- Well, it does. That's it.
- Much more so than, you know, Katrina.
- Yeah, yeah, well, I mean
We'd done all we could to show these people
what sucked about letting greed run our future.
- Oh, dear.
- But instead of freaking out,
they just took our business cards.
- Wonderful.
And if you want take one of mine here.
- Our effort had been a failure.
- It's not very well articulated, really.
- And come to think of it,
all of our efforts had been failures.
[bright orchestral music]
But, you know, a Yes Man never gives up.
We knew we could do it.
All we needed was a whole new approach.
Maybe making fun of stupid ideas was a stupid idea.
We had to get smart,
because the people with the really stupid ideas
were very, very smart.
For Friedman and his followers,
disaster was not just a chance to get rich
but an opportunity to push through all kinds of unpopular policies
like privatizing public schools,
shutting down public hospitals,
and kicking people out of their homes.
This is the Lafitte Housing Project.
It survived Katrina intact.
That was lucky for the thousands of residents
who wanted to come home and rebuild.
So what did the government do?
They decided to tear it down.
- The disaster for us started after the storm...
- Uh-huh.
- When people found out that you were going to be marooned
in a strange foreign city wanting to come home,
and the government was going to take your home away.
- This was ours before the storm.
When storms happen everywhere else, people get a chance to go back home.
This is home to us.
Why they gonna take away our pride and joy?
They don't know what people going through.
- It's a whole city that sort of washed away.
Now you got to rebuild the whole thing.
So part of what this was is,
if you ever had an idea that you couldn't get through before the storm,
well, the storm meant that everything was,
you know, tossed salad.
So if this idea had been roundly rejected by the city and by voters and whatever,
now's your chance to sneak on in.
- When residents tried to come home after Katrina,
they found themselves locked out by HUD,
the U.S. Government's Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- The federal government came up with a program
to dismantle public housing and privatize it,
and that's what we're doing.
And so you've got to develop a nice community
so that the poor have an opportunity to live
in an environment where people work,
that they're part of the American Dream.
And you'll get a number of folks that are not used to the type of lifestyle
that we all live where trash is thrown on the ground
or cursing off of the balcony.
- The idea really is to provide role models,
essentially, for poor folks, right?
- Absolutely. - Mm-hmm.
- On the BBC, we'd tried to show that companies could behave differently.
And we'd learned that they couldn't
until government made rules to control them.
Yet even here in New Orleans, where help was most needed,
government was also drinking the free-market Kool-Aid.
- I believe in a market-driven process.
Economics, capitalism is gonna take over,
and the marketplace is poised to respond.
- So the government didn't believe in government.
We knew what we had to do.
We would become the government,
and we would find out what would happen if government did the right thing.
- We are preparing to go
to the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Conference
at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner near the airport.
- You shouldn't drive.
- Okay.
So it's almost like we should be saying, "We are facing a state of emergency."
I'm going to speak as HUD,
as the Deputy Assistant of the Secretary of HUD,
who couldn't make it, and CNN is going to be covering it live.
- This conference was taking place
on the first anniversary of Katrina.
A thousand contractors who were rebuilding New Orleans would be there.
What's that?
- Oh, my God.
Mayor Ray Nagin coming
is a bit more than we expected would happen.
When we'd hatched our scheme,
we'd told this guy, the conference organizer,
that we represented Alphonso Jackson, the head of HUD.
When the mayor and governor found out that Jackson would be there,
they had to be there too.
Once again, the keynote speaker wouldn't show up,
but his assistant would.
Would the mayor notice that something was wrong?
And what would the contractors think
of HUD's radical new approach to public housing,
an approach that could cost them money and even put some of them out of a job?
- Please join me in welcoming Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans.
[applause]
And please also join me in welcoming Rene Oswin,
the Assistant Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development.
[applause]
- So it's an honor to share the stage
with our two partners in recovery, with Rene Oswin, representing HUD,
who's definitely one of our most important partners
in this rebuilding effort,
and Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, whose challenges are enormous.
- And I also want to stop and thank Rene, who's here from HUD.
HUD has been an incredible, incredible partner with us.
We are on the verge of doing some really unique things,
some things that we could have never tackled
in the city of New Orleans,
and now we are poised and positioned
to enhance public housing in the city of New Orleans.
You know, there's lots of information out there.
There's lots of misinformation out there, you know, and
but I have a fundamental belief
that truth and lie cannot stay in the same place at the same time.
It reminds me of a story I once heard.
Truth and Lie went swimming one day in Lake Pontchartrain.
They went skinny-dipping, so they laid their clothes on the banks,
and they were out there having a really good time.
But then Lie all of a sudden jumped out the water,
put Truth's clothes on,
and started running down Esplanade Elysian Fields Avenue.
Truth got out the water,
started running after Lie.
So ladies and gentlemen, what you had was
a well-dressed Lie being chased by naked Truth.
[applause]
- That's quite a tough act to follow.
Nothing like that to make you feel a bit naked, eh?
[laughter]
Dear friends, it is with the greatest joy that I announce to you today
a brand-new department of Housing and Urban Development.
Everything is going to change about the way we work,
and the change is gonna start right here today in New Orleans.
Until last week, our M.O. here at HUD
was to tear down public housing whenever we could.
Like many folks in Washington,
we felt that the projects caused crime and unemployment.
We were wrong.
When we tore down St. Thomas
and replaced it with mixed-income flats,
only 1 of 27 former residents ever made it back,
and the rest have faced many problems, in some cases, even homelessness.
It just didn't work.
We won't make that error again.
This afternoon, we will begin
to reopen all public housing projects in New Orleans
and allow these Americans to be part of their city once again.
[applause]
But opening doors
[applause]
But opening doors won't be enough.
As you know, the main reason New Orleans was so vulnerable to Katrina
was the destruction of the wetlands.
I am very, very, very pleased to announce that Exxon and Shell
have agreed to finance wetlands rebuilding
from part of the $60 billion in profits this year.
As J. Stephen Simon,
Exxon Vice President, writes,
"ExxonMobil is earmarking $8.6 billion
"from revenues our company has made in this region
"so as to assure
"that ExxonMobil never again has a hand
in destroying a large American city."
[applause]
Ladies and gentlemen,
we will rebuild not just New Orleans.
We will rebuild the American Dream.
Please come join us at the Lafitte Housing Complex
for a ribbon-cutting ceremony immediately after the plenary session.
This is what we're all here for, so let's make it happen.
Let's bring New Orleans back.
[applause]
- I thought it was very uplifting.
This has been a big problem.
A lot of people want to come home, and they have been unable to do so.
So I thought it was a very positive message.
- Very encouraging.
And what's really encouraging in particular
is not only getting people back home and helping them rebuild,
but the recognition that we have to deal with Mother Nature,
and that Exxon is going to make some significant contribution
to restore wetlands is it's very encouraging.
[applause]
- This was encouraging.
When the contractors heard that the government
was gonna do the right thing,
even though it might cost them some business, they cheered.
Friedman was wrong.
Greed alone didn't rule the world.
- Hi.
- My name's Steve Strader, WWL. You mind if I talk to you over here?
- Absolutely. - Do you have a card?
- Oh, not today.
- And this time, we'd gotten away with it.
Or so we thought.
- The city and the state both say they've not heard anything about this.
This announcement comes as a surprise
to the governor's office and the mayor's office.
Why would HUD do this without consulting the city and the state?
- Well, it's such a
we haven't done this without consulting with them.
- You have no cards? You say you're new to the agency?
- I have a card, but it's back at the office.
I'll get it to you.
- Where is your PR team?
- I'm right here. Hi. - There.
- Hi, you're with HUD? Do you have a card?
- There's an entire HUD housing project there left unfinished.
Yeah.
- There are some saying that this is a farce,
that you're not truly with HUD,
and that this is not an actual announcement.
- Well, they can say whatever they want.
Who are these people?
- Where is your office?
- In Washington. - Where in Washington?
- He just joined the agency from France.
- From France?
- Yeah, he's been a special attaché
to the Department of the Interior in France.
Why are you so skeptical?
- I just heard the speech, and I have a newscast very shortly.
I need to confirm if it was a real speech from HUD or not.
The governor and the mayor knew nothing of it.
They were shocked.
We desperately need to know if this is real or not.
He's standing right here,
the man who just apparently committed this hoax on your department.
Okay, I'm on the phone with HUD right now, and they say you're a liar.
- Okay, well, they can say whatever they want.
I mean
- I'm sorry?
- They can say whatever they'd like.
- "They can say whatever they'd like."
But you work for them, don't you, as a deputy secretary?
- That's right.
Now that you've been discovered,
do you want to explain to me why you did it?
I mean, if you're trying to make a point,
why don't you come over here and tell me why you did this?
All right, all right, man. I'll call you in a few minutes.
But it is a hoax, a massive hoax perpetrated today.
You just pulled off a heck of a hoax.
- Thank you.
I mean, I would say that, you know,
HUD is pulling off a hoax by pretending
that tearing down affordable housing is what's gonna solve it.
I mean, that's what they've been doing until now.
This is a time when all of these people are clamoring to get back in.
They want to get back into their housing,
and they deserve to be there.
It's crazy.
- And worth lying to all these people to try to make your point.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Actually telling the truth.
This is actually truth-telling where normally there would only be lies.
How difficult would it be to remediate what you see here today
and make it inhabitable, say, next week?
- Just take off the covers here.
- Oh, yeah. That's a good start, yeah?
- Absolutely.
- Finally, we will be reopening public housing for the residents,
for the workforce that's going to move back in
and again rebuild New Orleans.
- Sick, twisted, cruel.
Those are all words used to describe the prank
on Louisiana officials and about a thousand contractors
in New Orleans today.
- I'm Deputy Assistant Secretary to
of the assistant, essentially, of Secretary Alphonso Jackson.
- Rene Oswin can't get his title right
or his relationship to HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson.
- Yay!
- After taking the mayor for a ride,
these contractors followed him
to a makeshift ribbon-cutting at the Lafitte Housing Project.
- Mr. Oswin, you're not even on the directory of HUD.
You're not even listed.
You don't even have a phone number.
- It's come to that, has it?
It's come to that.
Well, thanks for being the one to break the news.
- HANO, The Housing Authority of New Orleans
says this is simply a cruel, cruel joke,
trying to give people some kind of fake hope
that they were going to be able to move back.
- But I guess it's just to call their hand.
It's just to call their hand.
I respect this hoax,
because maybe it'll take a hoax like this to bring 'em out here
to see what we going through.
So if the hoax what it be, a hoax is what we got.
And I ain't mad.
I'm going to have me some barbecue.
[cheerful laughter]
- I think what you guys exposed
is the fact that HUD could do these great things
if they wanted to.
Secondly, you got the attention of the residents,
so now they're gonna begin to ask,
"Well, why aren't you doing these things?"
And number three, you are creating a controversy to feed off,
to organize, and to build the struggle to the next level.
So in my opinion, everything y'all did was excellent.
- It had all been worthwhile.
We were on top of the world.
But then reality began to sink in.
[water bubbling]
We'd made a splash, but we hadn't fixed the world.
The free market was still destroying New Orleans.
All over the world, people were losing their homes.
Climate change kept getting worse.
And in Bhopal, people continued to suffer.
We really did need to fix the world,
but it was gonna take more
than two guys with cheap suits and fake websites.
It would take millions of us.
[people shouting]
But even as old regimes were swept away,
we knew that real change wouldn't come easy.
After all, the free market cult was still here.
- Wealth. - Money.
- Privatization. - Wealth.
- Money. - Free markets.
- Privatization. - Ownership.
- A great deal of money.
Now, we can afford that.
- Remember these guys?
They're not going away.
And neither would we.
We needed a really ambitious plan,
because all we ever read in the newspapers was how we needed
to put everything back on track, back to how it was before it fell apart.
But how it was was the problem.
We needed to show what real change could look like.
So together with a whole lot of friends,
we would blanket Manhattan with 100,000 copies
of our very own newspaper.
We'd call it ^IThe New York Times,^I
except our ^INew York Times^I would be a little bit different.
Ours would be set six months in the future.
It would show what could happen if we set our imagination free.
- Things have gotten pretty bad,
and I think it's hard for people to imagine the world working another way.
So we're trying to, as realistically as possible,
present this world as it could be.
- They just brought in the proof
of ^IThe New York Times,^I and it looks un-[...]-believable.
- Really good.
- The obvious question, how the heck did you do it?
Andy, you want to start?
How long were you working on this thing, and how many of you?
- Well, there were a lot of us.
It wasn't just the Yes Men.
It was a large group of people.
We were just one of many groups.
It was an idea that sparked a lot of people's imaginations.
They wanted to see this happen,
and that's sort of the message of the paper as well,
is that, great, we elected Obama, and that's fantastic.
But now the real work begins.
- The idea was to put out something that was optimistic,
that says we can do all these things.
Why not?
We created this system that we have now,
so why not create a good one instead?
- Wow. - Very good.
Here, let me tie you up. This is the big day.
7:00 a.m. Rush hour.
This is the time to get the papers out there.
- Morning.
Free ^ITimes.^I
Special issue.
- Free ^INew York Times.^I
- Special edition of ^IThe New York Times.^I
- Free ^INew York Times.^I
- Is this real?
- It's fake, right?
- Who publishes this?
- Can I grab another one please?
What?
- What?
- Free ^INew York Times.^I
- "National Health Insurance Act passes."
- "The PATRIOT Act repealed."
- "Maximum wage law succeeds."
Good luck with that one.
- This is too good to be true.
But it's not impossible.
- It's a dream newspaper.
Right?
It's like you wake up and all the things that you wanted
became the news.
- The war is over!
- Our fake news was a hit.
But would the real news pick it up?
- You don't work for ^IThe New York Times.^I
Who is that you work for handing this out?
- A guy named John, John Smith.
Yeah. - John who?
- John Smith?
- It's ^IThe New York Times^I special edition.
Is there anything wrong with it?
- Yeah, it's not ^IThe New York Times.^I
- Read all about it.
^IThe New York Times^I declares the war in Iraq is over.
- Some commuters got their hands on what looks like
a special edition of ^IThe New York Times.^I
As you might have guessed, though, it's a fake.
- [speaking German]
- [speaking French]
- We printed a paper with the headlines that we'd like to see.
So if these are the headlines that people were so excited
to read this morning, let's make them happen.
- I think we're going to have to exercise some muscles
we either don't have or that have atrophied or something,
a civic muscle, a thrifty muscle, a generous muscle.
- We've got to take back our government,
march into City Hall, and say, "Here, we've got the solutions."
- We can think of the different ways
that we can contribute to a movement that says
business as usual is unacceptable,
because people are being hurt,
and we're not gonna play the role, the subservient,
routine role that we usually play.
- Let's go.
- We're going. We're going.
- Come on.
[people cheering]
- Make change happen.
Put, you know, put your effort on the line to make something happen.
And that's what kind of we did here, and, you know,
it's whatyeah, it's kind of yeah, oh, boy.
- And if a few people at the top can make the bad news happen,
then why can't all of us at the bottom
get together and make the good news happen for a change?
I mean, for real.
[thoughtful music]
[joyful instrumental music]
We insert new subtitle, in position 1807 (last node)