WTO Yes Men Announce Compassionate Slavery Plan
OK I know this is a bit off-topic for this blog, but after seeing this story starting to pop up all over the blogosphere, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.
It should. There's no Hanniford Schmidt, the Gatt.org website isn't run by the WTO, and those people at the Wharton Business School conference were just punk'd by The Yes Men.
Andy and Mike do this sort of thing a lot, and it's not surprising that the conference attendees didn't seem too alarmed that the WTO wanted to create a market for buying and selling Africans. It seems no matter how outrageous their presentations are (setting up a market to sell votes to the candidate willing to pay the most for them, a market in human rights violations to allow countries that want to abuse people to buy “Justice Vouchers” from those who don’t, etc.), their audiences have no problems as long as their ideas adhere to the fundamentals of free market capitalism.
It appears that a lot of the bloggers posting about this don't realise it's a joke. Oops!
At a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor" for the parts of Africa that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West.Sounds pretty unbelievable, doesn't it?
The initiative will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright. Schmidt recounted how private stewardship has been successfully applied to transport, power, water, traditional knowledge, and even the human genome. The WTO's "full private stewardry" program will extend these successes to (re)privatize humans themselves.
"Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.
It should. There's no Hanniford Schmidt, the Gatt.org website isn't run by the WTO, and those people at the Wharton Business School conference were just punk'd by The Yes Men.
Andy and Mike do this sort of thing a lot, and it's not surprising that the conference attendees didn't seem too alarmed that the WTO wanted to create a market for buying and selling Africans. It seems no matter how outrageous their presentations are (setting up a market to sell votes to the candidate willing to pay the most for them, a market in human rights violations to allow countries that want to abuse people to buy “Justice Vouchers” from those who don’t, etc.), their audiences have no problems as long as their ideas adhere to the fundamentals of free market capitalism.
It appears that a lot of the bloggers posting about this don't realise it's a joke. Oops!
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