Brother, can you spare $10,000? Well, what if the money is going to be used to help teach activists how to play media pranks on organizations like McDonald's, Dow Chemical or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

That's the question corporate pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, aka the "Yes Men," are asking their fellow Americans, especially those who think the business climate has bent too far toward easing environmental regulations and too far away from protecting workers' rights.

For the past 10 years, the Yes Men have built an international reputation for culture jamming stunts in which they pretend to be spokesmen for multinationals like Exxon, McDonald's and Dow Chemical and make outrageous claims and insanely pro-business proposals.

For instance, in 2007, they spoke at a Canadian oil conference pretending to be Exxon executives who were announcing a new replacement for the diminishing oil supplies called "Vivoleum," an oil substitute made from the flesh of humans who died cleaning up toxic spills.

Now, they're looking to teach their public relations wizardry in the classroom. Bichlbaum and Bonanno have created a kickstarter campaign in hopes of raising $10,000 to train activists how to engage the media to report their causes.

"We apply incredibly strict ethical standards, but not in the service of power," Bonanno told HuffPost Weird News. "We want to help train existing organizations who need a publicity bump. We will train them in our techniques and skills."

They certainly have skills, especially when it comes to trickery.

Their stunts parody corporations that Bonanno and Bichlbaum say are undermining environmental regulations and workers' rights. One of their most high-profile spoofs came in 2004 during the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster. Bichlbaum went on the BBC pretending to be a fictional Dow Chemical executive and offered to compensate the victims of the gas leak that killed an estimated 11,000 people and injured 500,000.

The story was carried as breaking news around the globe until Dow Chemical officials declared that Bichlbaum had lied.

The Yes Men took that opportunity to skewer the chemical giants again with a bogus press release on fake Dow Chemical letterhead saying, basically, "No, Dow Chemical refuses to pay compensation."

Earlier this year, Bichlbaum and Bonanno created a phony website designed to look like the official page for General Electric. They posted a bogus claim that GE would donate its entire $3.2 billion tax refund to help offset cuts and save American jobs.

The Associated Press reported it as fact before GE declared that the statement was a prank and that, no, they wouldn't be donating the tax refund.

But pranks may not be the focus at what they are calling the "Yes Lab," which officially opens on Sept. 14 at New York University.

"Most journalists have topics of interest that they write about," Bonanno said. "We will be teaching these activists how to provide an excuse for journalists to write about what they really want to write about.

"For instance, when Andy went on TV claiming to be an executive for Dow Chemical who was offering to finally pay compensation for the victims, that gave journalists a story to pitch to their editors about the 20th anniversary of the disaster. The writers wanted to write about the disaster, but their editors needed something new."

Bonanno said that giving the media what they need goes a long way toward getting a story covered.

"At the Yes Lab, we are going to enhance peoples' abilities to get their stories out by teaching them the importance of good headliners, good pictures, good one liners."

The $10,000 -- most of which has been contributed already -- will be used for basic expenses, such as registering domain names and setting up servers. The Yes Men also have tried fundraising in other ways, such as an anti-smartphone app called "Phone Story," a game that mocks the smartphone supply chain. It requires players to force children to mine precious metals, save suicidal workers from jumping to their deaths so they can labor another day, or find the cheapest way to dispose of mountains of e-waste -- all, according to the product description, "while keeping productivity up so you can toss shiny trinkets to adoring consumers."

Although Bonanno said he had hoped to make a mint selling it on iTunes for 99 cents a pop, the chances of that happening now look extremely doubtful, he said.

"We posted it there, but it got pulled by Apple," he said. "But it avoided censors just long enough for them to wake up in Palo Alto."

WATCH: AMY GOODMAN DISCUSSES THE YES MEN'S ACTIVIST PRANKS