From Michael Franti and the Disposable Heroes:

Review of the film ‘The Yes Men.” Directed by Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman. United Artists, 2003. Starring Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. 83 min. Rated R. Avail. DVD.

“The Yes Men,” is a brilliantly funny satire and pseudo mock documentary which chronicles the exploits a group of political activists, who use rogue media appearances, hoax lectures, and a prankster spoof of the World Trade Organization web site to criticize the social and environmental impacts of economic globalization. The film follows Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum two super-activist-pranksters around the world from New York to Finland and on to Australia. Their daring mission is to pose as WTO representatives and get invited to business conferences and trade forums. There they make outrageous arguments on the WTO’s behalf, arguments that expose what they see as the WTO’s underlying cruelty and absurdity. And the irony is that they succeed and their ideas are accepted by their corporate audience.

The Corporation, a recently released film directed by Mark Achban, Jennifer Abbot and Joel Bakan, begins with a little US political history, observing how, in the 19th century, a “corporation” was a “benevolent” association of people with a government charter to serve “the public good”. When, in the late 1860s, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution recognised the slave as having human rights, the nascent corporate elite of the time had their lawyers stake a claim to the same rights with the Supreme Court. They fought and won, and the state henceforth recognised the corporation as a human being, a person in law, with the same right to life, liberty and property.

This leads to one of the big questions of the film: if corporations are legally defined as people, then what kind of people are they? One way the film addresses this question is to call in the FBI’s Consultant on Psychopaths, Dr Robert Hare. Hare proceeds to run through a check-list of the traits of your run-of-the-mill psychopath before concluding that the modern corporation, bearing no moral responsibility for its actions, is very much the prototypical psychopath.