Sorry, but this trader's banking confession was no prank

The Yes Men have been blamed for Alessio Rastani's comments on the financial crisis. But sometimes truth outdoes satire The Yes Men
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 September 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/29/alessio-rastani-no-prank

This week, an insignificant market trader and self-proclaimed financial self-help guru, Alessio Rastani, rocketed to stardom after speaking frankly on the BBC about the collapsing market and his plans to make money from it. We Yes Men heard about it right away, because soon after the broadcast, people started emailing from all over the world to congratulate us on another prank well done. They couldn't imagine that a real trader could possibly speak so candidly about the market, so they assumed Rastani was one of our posturings.

He wasn't. Rastani is small potatoes, but he's a real trader. And he said nothing that would suggest otherwise; he simply described what he does, more honestly than a true insider would, but quite accurately. "Every night I dream of another recession," Rastani said, and explained that it's possible to make huge money from a big crisis even when millions of others lose their life savings, and worse.

Well, duh. Don't we all know that Goldman Sachs bet against the same housing market they were such a big player in, and made $1bn in profit when the sub-prime crisis rendered millions of Americans homeless? John Paulson, the manager whose hedge fund was betting for Goldman, could have honestly said exactly what Rastani said, but of course he knew better – possibly because unlike Rastani, Paulson's firm had a major, immediate and provable impact, and there's no telling how his millions of victims might have reacted. Unlike Rastani, true industry insiders like Paulson, Geithner et al remain silent about the way their system works, couching it all in technical jargon and full-on deceit. They've been doing it for decades, and, since Ronald Reagan's day, with increasing consistency.

Lately, it hasn't been working so well. Something has been speaking in very plain language to millions of people. The crowds amassing in cities from New York to Athens to Paris are just the tip of the iceberg, just the most visible of all those who have long known, viscerally, that Rastani's point of view is actually mainstream. Those people also know that, armed with truth and awareness, anything is possible.

As Michael Moore pointed out to those occupying Liberty Plaza near Wall Street, in America it's just 400 people who own as much as most of the rest of us put together. And when the rest of us decide we really want to change the rules of the game, and take back this country for all the people, those 400 won't be able to do anything about it.

GE Returns Billions to Public, NOT

The Yes Men punk A.P.
04.15.2011
Richard Metzger
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/ge_to_donate_billions_to_the_federal_government_the_yes_men_punk_a.p

Once again the heroically funny Yes Men (along with the anti-Tea party patriots of “US Uncut”) have punk’d the establishment. This time their victim was the Associated Press. From the press release:

USA Today, AP fall for US Uncut ploy; GE stock loses billions
Contact: Blair Fitzgibbon 202-503-6141 blair@fitzgibbonmedia.com, Duncan Meisel 512-657-9124 duncan.meisel@gmail.com, Carl Gibson 601-454-6443 usuncut@gmail.com, The Yes Lab info@yeslab.org

Washington, DC - US Uncut, a burgeoning grassroots movement pressuring corporate tax cheats to pay their fair share, posted today a fake GE press release announcing that they would return their illegitimate (but legal) $3.2 billion tax refund, and that they would lobby to close the sort of corporate tax loopholes that had allowed them to skip taxes in the first place. Several major media outlets, including USA Today, ran the story as true. (Here is a link to the original USA Today story; here is the first article debunking the release.)

US Uncut quickly reacted with another release pretending to praise GE for this entirely unpredictable, unlikely, and in fact impossible act.

“At a time when working families are being asked to accept massive cuts nationwide, this action showed another way the world could work,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. “For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing. But the only way anything like this is really going to happen is if we change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place.”

In the period the hoax was believed, GE’s stock plunged by .6% (far more than the value of the supposed return), then quickly recovered as soon as it became apparent the press had been duped. “Obviously, GE can’t possibly be expected to do the right thing voluntarily; their stock would keep plunging,” noted Gibson. “That’s why we must change the law.”

“GE’s tax avoidance is unpatriotic, it’s undemocratic, it’s unfair,” said Andrew Boyd, a US Uncut spokesperson. “It might be legal, but that’s only because GE has used its money and lobbying influence to buy the loopholes they’re now taking advantage of.”

US Uncut developed the project with help from the Yes Lab.


US Uncut’s Andrew Boyd told MSNBC (partially owned by General Electric, of course): “It might be legal but it’s immoral.”

YES it is. The Yes Men guys are absolute geniuses. If you’re going to infiltrate capitalism, you have to do it all the way...

The Yes Men call O’Keefe, Breitbart ’sad and pathetic’ for targeting ACORN

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0330/yes-men-breitbart-okeefe-sad-pathetic-acorn/

The Yes Men call O’Keefe, Breitbart ’sad and pathetic’ for targeting ACORN
Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The ends justify the means, say The Yes Men, but only as long as you're going after the right people.

The duo's latest movie The Yes Men Fix The World, out on DVD April 1, chronicles the real-life efforts of anti-globalization activists Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum to expose corporate malfeasance in unorthodox ways.

"What we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like," Bonanno explains in the film. "We make fake websites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences."

They've shined a spotlight on controversial practices of powerful companies like Exxon-Mobil and Halliburton. One of their most prominent hoaxes occurred in 2004, when Bichlbaum posed as a spokesman for Dow Chemical on BBC News television and -- under false pretenses -- accepted "full responsibility" for a disaster its subsidiary created in Bhopal, India.

Such tactics have now been emulated by conservatives such as James O'Keefe, who famously went undercover and unveiled the dodgy dealings of some ACORN employees last year, the video clips of which were vigorously promoted by writer and publisher Andrew Breitbart.

"For O'Keefe and Breitbart to be targeting ACORN is incredibly sad and pathetic," Bonanno told Raw Story. "Most of its members are lower-income home owners, so these are model Americans -- pull themselves up by their bootstraps type of people -- people who are often very poor."

In a videotaped conversation with blogger Mike Stark at last month's CPAC convention, Breitbart, probed about the morality of O'Keefe's actions, pointed to The Yes Men as an example of progressive activists using similarly questionable means to attain their goals.

But it's not his and O'Keefe's tactics that The Yes Men take issue with; it's who they're taking aim at, and the now-extinct community group didn't deserve the treatment, Bonanno alleged.

"It's why you're lying and who's gaining and who's losing as a result," he said. "There are liars and there are assholes. What James O'Keefe is doing is making a lot of lower-income people lose, unfortunately. And it's supported by a bunch of very nasty, mean-spirited people."

"A lie itself isn't necessarily bad," Bonanno continued, drawing out the difference between The Yes Men and individuals like O'Keefe. "We lie in order to criticize people who are abusing their power. They lie in order to humiliate and take out people who are at the receiving end of power."

The Yes Men have been chastised as "world-renowned troublemakers" as well as "sick, twisted and cruel" beings by mainstream news organizations. In their latest of two films, the duo deplores the "free-market cult" they claim is centered around "letting greed solve the problem."

They seek to comfort the afflicted by actively afflicting the comforted. And that's the opposite of what anti-ACORN activists are doing, Bonanno purported. "By targeting ACORN, they're targeting people who are victims of a very nasty power dynamic. So, I think it's a mean thing to do."

Bonanno found it "amazing" how Congress insists on taking aim at groups like ACORN over "a few bad apples" when large defense contractors, for instance, have committed far worse transgressions on a broader and more damaging level and walked away unscathed.

Ultimately, Bonanno concluded that lies and trickery are helpful to fight the establishment in an age where corporations wield unprecedented power and where "the political middle is being pushed further and further and further to the right."