An ad for the Yes Men's 2009 movie. Now they're trying to fix Bank of America.

As the movie trailer put it, “Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth.”

The Raw Story reported earlier today that “Google blacklisted on Wednesday a website made to look like an outreach campaign by Bank of America, in what turned out to be an activist’s effort to get people talking about how the nation’s largest bank should operate.”

However, after the Raw Story piece appeared, Google took the website off its blacklist.

The website was the work of the Yes Men, activist satirists who create fake websites and news releases that lampoon the cozy relationship between corporate giants and prominent politicians.

From the “personal letter” by CEO Brian Moynihan, on the fake BofA site:

The institutions you rescued in 2008 have continued much as they always were, engaging in the same practices that brought our economy so close to collapse. To make sure that this time around, things turn out differently, we at Bank of America are launching a forum in which you, the American taxpayer, can prepare for the time that you own us. By sharing ideas, and reading and rating the ideas of others, you can begin charting a course for this Bank—your course.

And when the day comes that you, the American taxpayer, own this Bank, you will be ready to make it a Bank for America—one that brings benefits not to the privileged only, but to all of our customers, and to all of our stakeholders too.

Three cheers for the Yes Men who, unlike employees of the mainstream media, have the freedom to say what ought to be said.