Issue and Opponent: Dow Corporation states that it is limited and regulated by market forces, but these arguments make no sense since they don’t truly limit these companies at all.
Dilemma action: On April 28, 2005, at a London banking conference to which they had accidentally been invited because of their fake Dow website, “Dow representative” Erastus Hamm unveiled an “Acceptable Risk” calculator for determining how many deaths are acceptable when achieving large profits. The bankers enthusiastically applauded the lecture, in which “Hamm” pondered whether some huge industrial crimes—including the Bhopal catastrophe and IBM’s sale of technology to the Nazis for use in identifying Jews—were “golden skeletons,” i.e., lucrative and acceptable skeletons in the closet.
Outcomes: Several of the bankers in attendance then signed up for licenses for the “Acceptable Risk Calculator” and even posed with the Acceptable Risk mascot “Gilda, the golden skeleton in the closet,” for photos. The prank got media coverage.