Houston:Halliburton 80th birthday bash turns into pie throwing frenzy

Today at Halliburton world headquarters in downtown Houston, about 25-30
Houston tax-paying citizens partied like it was 1924 and threw an Un-Happy
80th birthday street party for hometown war-profiteering corporation,
Halliburton. The community based anti-war profiteers group, Stop The War
Profiteers, continued their campaign of raising awareness about
Halliburton's shady dealings in the reconstruction of Iraq and corporate
cronyism by highlighting recent revelations by former Halliburton
employees, the Army Corp. of Engineers and Halliburton themselves.

Media stories now include: revelations by former Halliburton employees of
waste and mismanagement of tax-payer resources --including an $85,000
truck being abandoned for a flat tire, a $45 case of soda and $100 to wash
a bag of dirty laundry; Vice-President Dick Cheney (former CEO of
Halliburton) and his staff ensuring that Halliburton receives $9 billion
in no-bid contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq in 2002; and the
company severing ties with some it's own executives --including J. Albert
Stanley, former CEO of Halliburton subsidiary KBR-- for channeling $7
million into a Swiss bank account from a Nigerian energy project. More
and more, Halliburton resembles Houston's other notorious corporation,
Enron.

While Halliburton itself spent the weekend in celebrating it’s founding in
a Wal-Mart parking lot in Duncan Oklahoma, Stop the War Profiteers
observed the 80th anniversary of the founding of Halliburton with wrapped
gifts of “Accountability”, “Truth” and “Honesty” and a giant birthday
cookie. The group sang songs of fraud and corruption to the tune of
“Happy Birthday” and hoped that the large gathering of horse mounted and
bicycle police across the street watching the street party would join them
in the festivities, but the police soon kept their distance as the
birthday pie being passed around the Un-Happy birthday table soon turned
into a PIE-THROWING MELEE!!

Saddened by the lack of participation from current Halliburton CEO David
Lesar and other corporate birthday boys leaving work, the crowd began
picking on party animal Dick Cheney and first gave him 80 licks with a
paddle, aptly named “BAD BOY”, and then gave him a pie right square in the
face. This quickly degenerated into all birthday participants turning the
sidewalk in front of Halliburton world headquarters at Austin and McKinney
into a scene out of a Little Rascals movie. Pig-snouted anti-corporate
activists sprayed environmentalists with cans of whipped cream, anti-war
warriors got splattered by pacificists and the black block turned into a
fun loving pie-faced crowd of class clowns.

The fun got so out of hand one woman came out and screamed at the street
soiree’ that her husband had worked for Halliburton for 18 years and that
the birthday revelers should lay off Cheney as the facts were wrong and
Cheney was “a good guy” creating lots of high-paying jobs. But for who?
Not the Iraqi’s that had been living under the boot of Saddam Hussein for
nearly 30 years. Not the people that Bush and Cheney had claimed to
liberate. Instead, Halliburton and the Bush-Cheney junta have turned Iraq
into a new system of repression and exploitation called “Corporate
Occupation”, known everywhere else as “Corporate Globalization”. Houston
based Stop the War Profiteers will continue their long march to organize,
educate and agitate around the issue of war profiteering, specifically
Halliburton. Please come out and join us on June 29 for Iraqi
Independence Day as we celebrate Halliburton’s purchase of Iraqi
independence, freedom and democracy.

For further info about Stop the War Profiteers or to get involved, contact
hgac (at) riseup.net or checkout http://www.houstonglobalawareness.org Our next
meeting is Tuesday June 22nd at 8pm at Helios. And remember; only you can
prevent War Profiteering.