Submitted by Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop.com:
In January, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend unlimited $$ in our elections. In July, Target gave $150,000 to the anti-gay, anti-worker candidate for Gov. of MN. Last week, a quarter million people pledged to boycott Target.
Yesterday . . .
Learn more — Take Action — Sign the Petition at www.targetboycott.org
Submitted by Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop:
People generally find it notable when the Founding Fathers show up at your rallies.
And when Agit-Pop and the Campaign for Fair Elections sent Benjamin Franklin and friends to razz BP’s major lobbying firm, the Washington Post stood up and took notice.
In one of the cooler Agit-Pop actions in a while, the framers stood guard at the biggest fundraising hot spots in DC – and caught more than a few Congressmen taking their cues from Big Money, getting major press attention along the way.
Take part in more delicious Fair Elections Now hijinks – learn about July 4th events happening in your community.
– Andrew Boyd, Chairman of the Blurb, & John Sellers, Chief Existential Officer, Agit-Pop
photo: Fair Elections Now
Submitted by Andrew Boyd of Agit-Pop Communications:
Last Tuesday March 9th Agit-Pop and Health Care for America Now conducted a Mass Citizen’s Arrest of the insurance industry’s lobbying arm AHIP at the Ritz-Carlton in DC. We Deputized 4,000 reform-warriors and collared some insurance criminals to tell Congress to end their support of a broken health care system.
Get yourself deputized at http://citizensposse.org
Related links:
From Agit-Pop Communications:
On friday, Agit-Pop and the Billionaires for Wealthcare carried the rising tide of support for the Public Option into the very heart of the insurance industry – in song!
In the latest Agit-Pop – Billionaires collaboration, we infiltrated the closing keynote of the AHIP insurance industry conference and serenaded their leading pollster.
The guerrilla musical, set to ‘Tomorrow’ from the musical Annie, immediately went viral, appearing on the front page of Huffington Post, CBS.com and Rachel Maddow called it “the single most unexpected turn of events yet in the fight over health reform.”
Watch the 2 min video with lyrics here:
Yesterday it hit #2 on YouTube’s most Most Popular Videos, was shown on CNN’s Situation Room last night, and even Ashton Kutcher tweeted us. 🙂
Stay tuned for more from the Billionaires and Agit-Pop!
–John, Andrew, Andy, Avery, Duncan and the whole Agit-Pop! team.
ps. a huge shoutout is owed to all (singers, lyricists, name tag hackers, grass-roots advocates, video editors, secret camerapeople, crash-pad hosters, and the lady who waived our restocking fee at the Best Buy, as well as Pollster Bill McInturf himself) who made this action possible.
From Andrew Boyd:
The latest incarnation of the “Billionaire” meme, “Billionaires for Wealthcare” struck again this weekend, as Healthcare Inc. CEOs in tuxedos and gowns “thanked” Tea-baggers for coming out for Glenn Beck’s March on Washington this past Saturday.
Tea-baggers eagerly joined in on Billionaire chants of “Bring Back Bush!” and “Fight Socialism! Abolish Medicare Now!”, but the greatest crowd pleaser (and provoker) of the day, was a stirring rendition of their original song “Let’s Save the Status Quo” sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and memorably captured in this piece by Rachel Maddow.
Watch as we thank our confused Tea-bagger friends for protecting ‘our’ right to deny their claims.
Submitted by Andrew Boyd:
We lowly activists have done shit like this before, but this is the second richest person in the world and geek-in-chief doing it…
Bill Gates releases swarm of mosquitoes on TED audience
by Georgina Robinson
theage.com.au
February 5, 2009
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has released a swarm of mosquitoes into an audience at a technology and design conference in California.
High profile members of online networking service Twitter reported the incident on Wednesday (US time), which reportedly occurred during Gates’s talk on malaria eradication, a cause the entrepreneur is pushing through his philanthropic foundation.
“Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said ‘Not only poor people should experience this’,” Facebook manager Dave Morin wrote on Twitter. (more…)
Submitted by Andrew Boyd:
A Canadian comedy duo called The Masked Avengers from CKOI 96.9 FM in Montreal, Quebec pranked Sarah Palin, convincing her (and her team) they were receiving a call from French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Related Articles:
From Andrew Boyd and John Sellers of Agit-Pop, May 21, 2008:
Bush & Cheney & McCain & Fox News & the whole neo-con cabal have been rattling their sabers about bombing Iran for nigh on a few years now. Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post confirmed it :
“US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term,” Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.
And now the entire Bush team is denying it in The New York Times. We think they doth protest too much. And so, we’ve launched our latest, ass-kicking mini-video:
It’s currently being featured on YouTube Politics. And our partners at True Majority are using it to build rapid support for Senate Resolution 356: “Any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated.”
P.S. A new trans-partisan coaltion – The Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran – is following the lead of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and others in calling for “immediate, unconditional, and comprehensive talks” with Iran. Many of their member groups will be using our video soon.
Support them here: http://www.newiranpolicy.org
Submitted by Andrew Boyd and John Sellers:
Agit-Pop’s video Stop the Clash of Civilizations has won the coveted 2007 Youtube Video Award for the best Political video of the year!!
As you can imagine, with the ascent of Generation Youtube in this critical election year, we were up against some real electoral heavy weights. But Obama Girl couldn’t lay a glove on us. Neither could that whuss Chuck Norris or his boy Mike Huckabee.
Posted by Andrew Boyd:
On the first day of the 2007 New York Auto Show, SWAT-team-like uniformed agents from the Oil Enforcement Agency (OEA) surprised visitors and convention center security when they impounded a Toyota Tundra on the showroom floor.
See Plenty Magazine article and watch a video about the action:
As they secured the perimeter with “Global Warming Crime Scene” caution tape and announced to a growing throng of onlookers that, at a measly 14 MPGs in the city, the Tundra fell well below the agency’s fuel-efficiency standards, many in attendance wondered whether the government was finally taking the threat of climate change seriously.
In fact, the OEA is an elaborate prank just launched by the coalition of environmental groups at FreedomFromOil.com (with some help from me, pictured above). The idea is to heighten pressure on the Big 6 automakers to increase fuel efficiency as well as model of what the government SHOULD be doing to reduce tailpipe emissions.
OEA “field offices” are starting up around the country, and anyone can join. It’s simple and fun: Choose a code name. Order your hat and uniform. Download the secret training manual. And you’re good to go.
The new web site at http://www.oilenforcementagency.com has everything you need, including a hilarious video of OEA action hi-jinks.
View a trailer for the video:
Greenpeace activists performed an amusing and savvy intervention on a Kleenex commercial shoot in Times Square, effectively hijacking their ad campaign, and shutting down the shoot for the rest of the day (March 24th 2007). Kleenex, responsible for vast old-growth forest destruction in Northern Canada’s Boreal Forest, opened the door for this one.
Friends of mine at notanalternative.net put together this neat little video of the jam:
And check out the main campaign against Kleenex’s criminal timber practices at: http://kleercut.net (a good culture jam in its own right).
With additional coverage here at gothamist.com.
Welcome to the Art of the Prank, produced and edited by Joey Skaggs. Here you will find insights, information, news and discussions about art, pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming & reality hacking around the world - past, present and future - mainstream and counter culture. You are invited to contribute to its development. May your journey be filled with more than your expectations.
