Halliburton's shareholder meeting on Wednesday attracted more than 300 protesters, including a jazz combo, women dressed in pink and a 25-foot inflatable pig.
[...]
Some protesters, however, did manage to get inside the hotel to do more than talk.
Five slipped past front-door security at the luxury hotel 20 minutes before the meeting and shackled themselves to brass banisters in front of the security checkpoint on the third floor.
The four men and women chanted: "Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown and Root — go to Iraq to loot, loot, loot." They also shouted, "Oil is not worth human blood" before covering themselves in fake blood made out of corn syrup and red dye.
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The five included Andrea Buffa, who was credited by many of the protesters outside as the main organizer of the demonstrations. She recruited the local activists who went to jail, secured the delivery of the inflatable pig, dubbed Hallibacon, for the occasion and scouted out the Four Seasons for a room above its front door.
Her colleague Jodie Evans rented the room for $355 so 15 minutes before the meeting she could unfurl a 10-foot-by-30-foot pink banner out a narrow window that read, "Cheney's in bed with Halliburton, but we got screwed."
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After the meeting, [Halliburton chairman, president and CEO Dave] Lesar spent about 10 minutes answering shareholder questions.
One of the first ones asked was how many Halliburton workers have been killed or wounded in Iraq.
Lesar said 35 workers, most of them truck drivers, have been killed in the war zone. He did not know how many employees suffered injuries, but estimated 100 had.
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More than an hour after the shareholder meeting adjourned, activists continued to chant, pass out fake $100 bills with Cheney's face on them, play their instruments and dance.
Interesting that the CEO had a rough idea of how many expendable truck drivers had been lost, but "did not know" how many Halliburton employees had been injured.
The liberal bias in the media coverage of this story was obvious when one of CNN's talking heads referred to one of the pig-masked protesters this morning, in all earnestness: "That's a pinko pig."
In another moment of editorial hilarity, the Houston's Chronicle's lead story wasn't the Halliburton pig-masked protesters but "A surgical alternative for obese kids."
