By Jen Haberkorn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 12, 2006
Halliburton
Co. fell victim this week to a group of pranksters pushing a
"SurvivaBall" to save corporate executives from the effects of global
warming.
Members of the Yes Men, a group of
environmental and corporate ethics activists, gave a presentation at a
trade conference pretending to be Halliburton executives touting large
inflatable suits that provide corporate managers safety from global
warming. They also distributed a phony press release through e-mail and
set up a Web site, halliburtoncontracts.com, similar to the real
Halliburton site, halliburton.com.
"It's basically a giant inflatable orb,"
said a Yes Man posing as "Fred Wolf of Halliburton" during a phone
interview yesterday. "If catastrophe threatens a large population, the
business manager simply enters the orb, puts it on, and it protects him
or her in any climate condition, whether it involved tornadoes,
hurricanes, tsunamis, ice conditions or heat conditions."
The Yes Men posted photos of the products,
which look like large plastic bubbles with six hands, two
speakerphone-looking ears and an opening for the executive's face.
The group, which has pulled similar stunts
on Dow Chemical Co. and the World Trade Organization, says it presented
the phony global-warming-protection suits -- priced at $100 million
each, nonetheless -- to show that corporations are more concerned about
profits than taking expensive steps to reduce carbon emissions to
reduce global warming.
"We were targeting Halliburton because
they're the most iconic example of companies profiting from global
warming, climate changes and even natural disasters like in New
Orleans," said a Yes Man who called himself Andy Bichlbaum.
Halliburton, the Houston oil and energy
company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been accused
of being more concerned about profiting from oil than the environmental
impact of oil drilling.
Halliburton denied connection to the phony release.
"[T]he information is not a company press
release or document. To confirm, Fred Wolf is not a Halliburton
employee," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.
Halliburton said it received fewer than
five phone calls about the release and said it's handling the matter
internally.
The Yes Men say they uncover the
wrongdoings of corporations with "identity correction." They set up
phony Web sites and e-mail addresses under names similar to the real
companies and wait for invitations to conferences and media interviews,
where they reverse the companies' positions on hot topics. They have
been featured in a book and a documentary.
One of the Yes Men appeared in a British
Broadcasting Corp. interview in late 2004 as a Dow spokesman and
claimed responsibility for a 1984 cyanide gas leak in Bhopal, India,
which killed thousands of people. The fake spokesman said the company
would pay billions of dollars in compensation.
During the 2004 election, they posed as a
"Yes, Bush Can" group, encouraging people to sign up to send their
children to war and keep nuclear waste in their neighborhood, before
putting out an endorsement for Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat.
This week's catastrophic-loss conference
was organized by Mealey's, a branch of LexisNexis, which did not return
calls yesterday afternoon for comment. A conference chairman declined
to comment.
Mr. Bichlbaum said they're not sure if what they do is legal, but said they think they're moral.
"Is it legal to do what we're doing?
Technically, we don't know. But we've never encountered any trouble
with this thing," he said.
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