The Yes Men: “We’re Screwed”
By Jaisal NoorSeptember 21, 2009 | Posted in IndyBlog | Email this article
At 4 a.m. Monday morning, the Yes Men and hundreds of volunteers began handing out tens of thousands of copies of a spoof New York Post with a cover story titled “We’re Screwed.” The subhead reads, “What you’re not being told: Official City report predicts massive climate catastrophes, public health disasters.”
In an interview with The Indypendent, the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum said of the paper, “It’s all real, it’s all assiduously researched. We had climate experts working on it. We had a lot of professional writers and journalists.”
“The science is not complicated. You can sum it up in two words: we’re screwed. It’s absolutely 100 percent real and it’s absolutely 100 percent scary, ” Bichlbaum said.
The 32-page paper includes spoof advertisements and was designed to look just like a real copy of the New York Post. Bichlbaum said, “It’s in the Post’s style—because it’s the clearest. They publish things very brutally clearly, but they publish bullshit most of the time. So what we’re doing is publishing what’s important in the language that anyone can understand.”
The paper’s release comes the day before the start of the U.N. Summit on climate change in New York, in which General Assembly President Ban Ki Moon will push 100 world leaders to make a serious commitment to help reduce climate change, ahead of the major Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.
Bichlbaum is critical of the U.S. government’s efforts on helping curb climate change.”The Congress passed an enormously insufficient climate bill this summer called Waxman-Markey… it’s terribly insufficient and the Senate isn’t even considering that bill. There’s a good chance nothing will be passed and Obama will go to Copenhagen empty handed, without any enforcement possibility, without the ability to sign a treaty,” Bichlbaum said.
The release of the fake New York Post is part of Climate Action week where activists hope to create, in the words of Bichlbaum, “An outpouring of public outrage [so lawmakers] will pass something much stronger than Waxman-Markey that Obama can then take to Copenhagen. Its about saying. ‘Look ‘we have to do something now. Now is the time, and lets do it”,
For more of The Indypendent’s coverage of the Yes Men, check out Arun Gupta’s interview with Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno in the latest issue here.
5 Responses to “The Yes Men: “We’re Screwed””
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:20 am
There are good solutions out there. What about Solarbotanic, this looks really promising.
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:03 pm
It’s funny how human beings establish a technically advanced civilization in 3,000 years then suddenly they think everything can be explained away, and micro-managed into a neat little package of simple explanation.
The Major, Major Oil and Gas companies are pushing more money into ‘Global Warming’ science than private individuals. They are also investing immense sums of capital into the new ‘Carbon Derivitives’ markets emerging as a result of ‘Global Warming Legislation’ as the topic becomes everyones favorite norm and fearful driving force of change.
The simple truth is easily over looked by simple people. Human beings DO NOT INFLUENCE WEATHER. Carbon Dioxide exhaled by human beings, and all of the various fuels we use from livestock and food, to internal combustion engines and power-plants is ABSORBED FASTER THAN IT REACHES THE ENVIORNMENT. AFTER ALL WE ARE SYMBIOTIC WITH THE ENVIORNMENT. THE EARTH IS A GIANT WASHING MACHINE, CONSTANTLY CLEANING ITSELF.
The simple truth is that the ‘Elite Wealthy Familes’, who controlled banking after the collapse of their Monarchies, aim to consolidate power back to their reign. They aim to do this by engineering an ‘imagined threat of global warming’ to impose taxation on every conceivable human behavior. They achieve their global agenda through International Governmental bodies that regulate human behavior, outside of regional democratic processes.
To them, this is absolutely acceptable because in their minds they are the architects of society. Wake up, this Group The Yes Men, are pushing their propoganda now. Funny how Fox News was the number one propoganda in America during Bush, now it’s MSNBC under Obama.
Think about it, Propoganda from Both Sides, towords the same office??? Our President is a Puppet, THINK ABOUT IT.
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
“Global warming conspiracy deniers”– Wow Michael you are so far off in Larouchie la-la land that you could fall off the edge of the Earth. It is flat after all. Haven’t you heard?
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:26 am
re: Blind–
You mean well no doubt, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. First of all, the Yes Men and their volunteers are certainly a genuine grassroots organization and we are reporting real scientific facts, facts buried and ignored by the media –media which is largely controlled by the very folks you claim are behind the global warming “scam”.
In my opinion, anyone who uses such a conspiracy theory as yours to debunk global warming is the most gullible of all dupes, someone who believes talking points spewed by pseudo-pundits and wild accusations gathered from web sites, someone refuses to look at any real evidence that contradicts their own notions, or to do any actual research of their own.
The assertion of climate change as “propaganda” originates from right wing elites who routinely spread disinformation– and this IS well documented– because they don’t want to scare people into stopping their ever-increasing spending and consuming, and they certainly don’t want an international treaty to stop global warming. If they wanted that we would have signed the one at Kyoto.
These large scale industrial polluters, financiers and arms dealers are secretly driven before the lash of their greatest terror: that they may one have to share the planet on equal terms with all the people they’ve wronged, exploited, murdered the families of, robbed. They know that things could easily get out of control once people come to grips with the enormity of what they’ve done, and they sure would be screwed then.
So they’d rather keep the planet in a death grip, and whistle while it burns, than face the consequences of their own crimes.
Naturally it would be much easier to just pretend global warming isn’t happening, that we puny humans have very little effect on the planet. But that’s patently false and absurd. If the planet could clean itself so neatly, we wouldn’t have killer smog, mass deforestation, rapidly shrinking wildlife habitats, desertification, rapid ice cap melt or “Silent Springs”, to name just a short list of the wide-scale devastation of the environment.
If the planet could clean itself so easily it would have gotten rid of us by now. Which may be what will happen if we don’t wise up.
Open YOUR eyes, Blind– ordinary people are making huge sacrifices right now to bring you to see the truth– don’t spit on their service to humanity.
September 21st, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Hah-hah-hah! The only honest edition of the New York Post we will ever see and it is a spoof. Good job getting the story behind the story Mr. Noor.