The Three Greatest Pranks of 2010

Strange winds are blowing across this wide, weird land of ours; all is not as it seems.

Last week in Washington, AIPAC made a most uncharacteristic announcement. As numerous big media outlets reported, the conservative pro-Israel lobby suddenly changed its long-term hard-line stance and publicly agreed with the Obama administration (gasp!) that continued settlements in the West Bank, illegal under international law, are an impediment to the peace process.

Well, maybe not. Turns out this was a "Yes Men inspired"-coup by antiwar heroes CODEPINK. The ruse was soon revealed by AIPAC, which denied the statement and was pushed to reiterate its support for illegal settlements.

Also last week, a bit further west, Macy's and Smurfit-Stone -- two longtime Missoula, Montana businesses that had closed just before Christmas, laying off hundreds of workers -- widely and exuberantly announced an extremely generous "thank you, Missoula" concert and giveaway. It did make sense. After all, Macy's had generated $1.6 billion in cash flow thanks in part to similar cost-cutting measures; and Smurfit-Stone's millions in executive bonuses owed a lot to such cost-cutting measures as well, as well as not paying local taxes.

But, well, not. This too was the work of activists, in this case some angry Missoulans who were fed up with wondering why they'd sacrificed prospects and jobs for the companies' profits and bonuses.

While we roundly applaud these efforts, there are, to be honest, a large number of infinitely bigger pranks that haven't received the kind of coverage they deserve. These pranks employed state-of-the-art PR and marketing tools, were engineered by the most pedigreed pranksters on earth, and impacted the media and public opinion in a huge way while leaving nary a fingerprint.

There are too many such pranks to count, but in order to give just a bit of credit where credit is due, we'd like to highlight three of the best from the recent past (and near future). So in the spirit of some of the best TV news we can see, a countdown:

Third Place: The Dow Live Earth Run for Water

This one had to be on our list for sheer ballsiness. The Dow Chemical Company is coming to a neighborhood near you later this month with its "Dow Live Earth Run For Water." Wait, is that really the word "water" there at the end of that name? And is that the same Dow that refuses to clean up the groundwater in Bhopal, India--site of the largest industrial disaster in human history, committed by Dow's fully owned subsidiary, Union Carbide -- so that children continue to be born there with debilitating birth defects? The same Dow that has dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemical byproducts into Louisiana wetlands? The Dow that has literally poisoned its own backyard, leaving record levels of dioxins downriver from its global headquarters in Midland, Michigan? Yup, that's the one.

So if your sense of irony needs to be exercised, strap on your running shoes to show how much you support Dow's latest venture into promoting the "Human Element." Then again you could just skip the middle man and give the $50 entry fee to a somewhat more trustworthy cause. It's not quite as funny, but it might actually do some good.

Second Place: the Coalition for Chemical Safety

We now turn our attention to our friends at the Coalition for Chemical Safety, a "public interest coalition" made up of "people like you," and looking to reform our nation's chemical safety laws. The coalition couldn't have come along at a more auspicious moment, given that this year Congress has promised to update the archaic Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which currently regulates only a tiny fraction of the 80,000 chemicals on the market.