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Bhopal Disaster Revisited [updated]
On December 3, 1984, a chemical plant run by Union Carbide and located in Bhopal, India
released about 40 tons of a toxic gas which was an intermediate chemical used in creating pesticides. (That is, the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life.) Safety at the plant had not been a concern of management; numerous safety systems were offline or non-functional. The gas cloud drifted over the city and killed thousands of people, and inflicted permanent injury to hundreds of thousands more. It was the worst industrial accident to date. Today, the site remains a contaminated wasteland, unusable and never cleaned up. The survivors have been minimally compensated, but as time passes, enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works. Update: 12/03 15:51 GMT by M : Whoops, just kidding, the Reuters story linked there is wrong; the BBC was apparently hoaxed into putting a Dow spokesman on TV who wasn't actually a Dow spokesman. Dow has no plans to clean up the facility and no plans to compensate the survivors. Hope this clears things up.
Yeah, except that the chairman of UC has been charged with culpable homicide in India, and declared a fugitive. But the US govt. has so far refused to let him be extradited for trial.
Without the monumental advances in overcoming human nature since these dark times, we wouldn't even be considering shifting regulatory responsibility from the government to the private sector. Yea, we are truly blessed to live in such an enlightened age.
fnord
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
... enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works.
I shudder to think that this means that there are so few remaining survivors that a pay out is financially feasible for Union Carbide.
These pesticide thingies sound evil. Are you also against antibiotics?
Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.
> enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works.
Just wait a short while longer, and they won't have to pay anyone
So a corporation allows the boardmembers to escape ethical responsibility for their group actions, and when the brown stuff hits the fan the company goes bust and nobody is left responsible.
I think governments should be responsible for the actions of companies that belong to them - which implies companies must belong to a government. After all, the government(s) will be profiting from illegal acts via taxation.
If I remember correctly, the facility was down due to a labor strike prior to the release. Water snuck into a methyl isocyanate (MIC) tank and caused the reaction which led to the gas leak. I think the labor strike had a lot to do with the safety systems being down.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
"After a legal agreement the firm provided victims with compensation averaging $500 (£300)."
So that's what a life is worth to a multinational corporation?
numerous safety systems were offline or non-functional.
Technology didn't fail. People did.
I can't believe we haven't realized that capitalism is bad, and all corporations are evil. Why can't we just have government, our savior, do everything for us. These sorts of disasters would never happen then.. Thinking of how caring and thoughtful communist governments are towards their people makes me glow green with envy... or is that just the residual radiation from the reactors at chernobyl...
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
The Bhopal plant was jointly owned by Union Carbide and the Indian government, with the government owning 51%. The plant was run by Indian workers. Most of the deaths occurred not in the town of Bhopal, but in the shanty town that went up next to the plant after the plant was built.
I don't want to degrade the tragedy that these people have gone through.
However, this incident highlights that in America and the rest of the world where labor is given the respect and government protection that it deserves, companies that want to do business simply can't compete. How can any company who locates itself in a country with labor protections compete against companies that can simply *kill* their workforce by locating themselves in countries who turn a blind eye to such behavior.
The USA, and other countries with labor protection need to stop doing business with companies who take advantage of countries without proper protection. Why do we have labor laws when we allow and even *encourage* businesses to locate in places without them?
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Up to 500,000 survivors still suffer symptoms such as paralysis, partial blindness and impaired immune systems.
Union Carbide accepted "moral responsibility" for the disaster. It later blamed sabotage by a disgruntled worker.
After a legal agreement the firm provided victims with compensation averaging $500 (£300).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Actually, the Indian government was awarded payment. Just reciently, because of civilian unrest, the indian government has decided to use some of those funds to clean up the area. So you see, it's a bit messed up from both perspectives.
Union Carbide!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
When you hear shit like "the terrorists hate our freedom," think of Bhopal. Around 3k people died on 9/11. In Bhopal, the lasting death toll is somewhere around 15,000. I wonder if Anderson would have been allowed to settle if 15,000 Americans had died.
Mod me down if you want, I have karma to burn. But I'd sure like to see some magnetic yellow ribbons to support the victims of US multinational homicide. Mox
If they didn't have enought people to run the plant they could have shut it down till the strike was over.
Blaming the strikers is just stupid as management made the decision to keep the plant running.
This story comes up every year. Sure, this was a tragedy, but several independent studies and investigations have been done to show that this was sabatoge. The introduction of water into the storage tank could have only been done by somebody with intimate knowledge of the procedures.
Hopefully their government will start to push for standards from companies that come and park in their counrty. I hope mexico sees this also as we are using them as whores for producing materials.
All we can do is hope that they take this tragedy and move towards standards of business and living that will move them towards a better life style.
Question for you: how does the number killed in Bhopal compare with the number killed in 9/11 ?
The leak was the result of sabotage.
Best Slashdot Co
here is a link with a recent article the disaster is believed to be the result of sabotage. Also, union carbide claned up most of the site and it is now in the hands of the Indian gov. In addition they paid hundreds of millions in compensation but almost all of it was lost in the government and the victims got nothing. There are far to many sides to blame. To call the story above wrong would be a gross understatement.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
- They exist because they are legally entitled to exist.
- They exist to make money.
Therefore, they will do nothing unless they are legally compelled to do it, or unless it will make them money, either now or in the future.See this movie.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Wording changes everthing.
Leader with compassion to his followers to defend against the terrorist.
V.S.
Dictator merclessly kills the revalutionaries.
which one will be in the history books. Well it depends on what side writes it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Kind of one-sided article. Anyway, before we all go off on tirades against Union Carbide, why don't you get their side of the story at http://www.bhopal.com/. Essentially, Union Carbide claims the Indian government's report was hastily done and its conclusion that Union Carbide is liable is not supported by the evidence. UC tried to conduct their own investigation, but was locked out of their own facility for more then a year and denied access to witnesses by the Indian government. Union Carbide finally was able to release their own report, and concluded it was sabotoge by a disgruntled employee that caused the leak. The "fugitive" president went over to India soon after the accident to personally meet with the Indians. The Indian government arrested him, then let him leave.
Bottom line, get both sides, then make up your own mind.
BBC says Bhopal interview "elaborate deception"
Wow. Thanks for that obscure factoid, Sparky. Pesticides kill things. Huh. Who knew?
I'm sure there's a clever comment to be had here about floods and dihydrogen monoxide here, but I'm far too weary.
--- Ban humanity.
This is not a story when technology failed..
This is a story of corruption, of not having any fail safe mechanisms or adequate safety measures, of negligence, of politicians willingly selling their souls and of those who they represent and of a system which failed to protect its own.
A thousand fingers could be pointed and in this horrible disaster, anywhere you point, you can find guilty who are still sheltered by the law, by the money they have willingly spent for their own defense and none for the people who suffered.
Union Carbide / Warren Anderson and Dow Chemical - Till now, they have chosen not to accept any form of responsibility and instead suggest sabotage. Union Carbide had spent a paltry sum before they agreed to pay 470 million of which hardly one third has been paid to its victims for the lack of any judicial oversight and sadly, corruption at the heart of the system. Even the 470 million that hopefully will be disbursed one day, hardly 2000 dollars will go to the families of those who died and 500$ to those who lost everything but their lives. Hardly a sum for the cost of a human life...
Union Carbide's response cleverly attempts to distance itself from the tragedy by calling the Bhopal plant owned by an indian firm. Clever, but it also serves to belittle the scope of this disaster and the lives that were snuffed out.
Would this be the same outcome if this had happened elsewhere, or in the developed world? And wouldnt a proper clean up in order or long completed if this were anywhere else.
Warren Anderson never saw the inside of a prison and still lives quite contently in Florida or NY and the US judicial system has done its part by denying the extradition requests by India. The Indian system on the other hand has comfortably chosen to neglect the cries for justice and has happily moved on..
Rediff.com has a sombre look at the tragedy, its victims, those who were forgotten, and those who still suffer.
One more reason not to trust corporations..
Also no additional compensation is planned and Dow has not apologized or owned up to this tragedy as the last part of the slashdot post. It is a hoax and was unknowingly perpetrated by a BBC interview. Read the AP article first (it drips accountability which is the last thing Dow or any corporation would do)and the proof its a hoax
Rapid Nirvana
correction:
Surely you've learnt that now? Hypocracy is one of the founding tenets of the US [foreign] policy.
"That is, the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life.", so was this the disaster at the disinfectant or antibiotic plant?
OK, buddy, take your own pill and get off your logical positivist ass. Then, after briefly noticing that your post itself contains no reasoning and no information, tell me exactly what more there is to the issue. As far as I can tell, it is that not only do we not want "this guy" to go to jail/take the ultimate penalty, but we don't want anyone else to either. Hardly profound.
I'm sure there is a little more to the issue than we just don't want this guy to go to jail or be executed or whatever India does.
.. and those were in special cases.
FYI, India has only had a couple of executions over the past 20 years
I wasn't jabbing at America, I was jabbing at the lack of international justice in matters such as this.
A foreign company was responsible for large-scale devastation and deaths in thousands, and yet the management of the company get away scot-free.
Don't you think it's a little unfair? Swindling money and getting away with it (a la Enron) is one thing, but killing people and getting away with it is another.
Over 15,000 people were killed and thousands more have been scarred for life. The entire ecological system in that city is in ruins and there is no life or vegetation growing there.
There is something called responsibility for your actions. Just because you are a corporation does not excuse you from that. American or not.
actually the question of who is really responsible in instances of corporate misbehaior is very interesting. in europe corporate directors are ultimately responsible for the actions of the companies they lead.
even in the event that such legislation was enacted in the us, you can be sure that it would be _very_ diffficult to convince a judge of malfeasance.
but the responsibility part is the one i like. in the bible (no i'm not religious, particularly) it mentions that the sins of the father shall be paid by the son (you get my drift). so the question i ask is (without reaching too far), does the justice required by death of 20,000 people get visited on the descendants of the corporate directors? in a christian, hindu, and buddhist sense that would be just.
So why isn't in the Science section? Note who posted this: Michael. This is just another case where Michael is using the Slashdot front page to rant. He's a big fan of corporation bashing.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
See here for more information or check Google News.
If you think michael posted this because of the science aspect, you're out of your mind.
...rather, from your arse.
I was listening to NPR yesterday when one of the guests suggested that chemical plants would be a likely soft target for terrorists and could result in an disaster like Bhopal. He claimed that security at these plants is very lax compared to, say, a nuclear plant, making them a soft target. Given the severity of the Bhopal incident, this seems to suggest this is a very serious concern, and it is something else to take into account when thinking about chemical plant safety. It's not all just about accidents.
I'm not sure how much credence to give these claims. The discussion suggested that there are steps being taken to improve security at chemical plants, but the really serious, manditory ones were killed in congress in favor of less stringent, voluntary programs. I'd be interested if others who know more about the situation can offer some insight.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
"BBC World said yesterday it was duped in an "elaborate deception" by a man who claimed to be a Dow Chemical Co spokesman and said the US company accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster."
The story
that was totally uncalled for
Now we have a Politics subject, shouldn't this fall under that? Technology seems a bit far found. Anyway, good to see this covered on Slashdot, keep up the good work guys!
This was on NPR this morning. Click here for NPR story There is also an audio stream of the NPR news story
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
- Doctors kill in ones.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
And the chairman should be brought to trial for what reason? It's horrible what happened, but he had nothing to do with the problem. It's not like he was telling the factory to cut corners and not to follow regulations.
He had probably never spoken to anyone at the site, ever. We're not exactly talking about a small company here.
I just want to put the following quote: The survivors have been minimally compensated, but as time passes, enough of them have died that compensation may now be in the works. in the context of the Indian Legal system.
The Indian Legal system is notorious for the lack of speed with which the wheels of justice turn. Even for the smallest cases ten years from filing to final disposition is not unusual.
I recently read an article which discussed several cases from the 1950s that is still in the courts and still being fought.
Yours,
Jordan Dea-Mattson
The CBC has been doing a good job recently reminding people about the magnitude of this disaster. I just can't image things on the order of 30,000 lives -- other than war -- and apparently the effects continue even today.
This just reminds me of a sad truth: large companies operating in the third world see the people there are disposable. A settlement of $300 million for something of this scale is just sick (way way too small).
Yeah, only America is allowed to kill it's own citizens.
OK then, should we hold accountable the French and German companies that made the plants for WMDs that Iraq used to kill Tens of Thousands? WMDs are illegal under International Law, so someone should compensate the "victims", right? Wasn't this corporate greed by the EU? Corporate greed is not a 100% American trait.
Today's one of those days when you can really see the difference between what the rest of the world is talking about and what the US media is covering by looking at google news and comparing it to the US sites. No mention of this historic anniversary anywhere in the US media, but pretty clear it's weighing on the minds of people everywhere else.
But, you know, if Julia Roberts has twins...
And the Bhopal disaster was a result of corporate greed, a bunch of greedy assholes got together and decided to play with the lives of thousands of people so that they could line their pockets with cash.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
There is the concept of scapegoating at play here. Do you really thing that Anderson had anything personally to do with the actions that night? Even remotely indirectly it's a big reach.
What happened was a shame, and awful. An industrial disaster that was unmitigated in it's terror and destruction.
A nearly $500 million settlement was reached with the government of India to repair to extend possible. That's 1980's dollars, by the way. That's a lot of money in India.
A crime equally nasty is that the government in India has done virtually no good with that money.
everytime i hear DOW mentioned in this discussion it reminds me of how people can talk about something with almost no facts and jump to conclusions. The disaster was in 1984 at a union carbide plant. In 2001 DOW bough union carbide. Now, how is DOW to blame here?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
You think internal home policy is all above board then?
It was the worst industrial accident to date.
Is that true?
Good point.
The company should have at least provided financial aid for the victims. But they don't care...
Fair enough, then try him in the United States at least. Get evidence etc. from the India.
.. At least we should try criminals .. How is it in our public interest to have murderer scum bags walking around ??
.. remember we all have to answer to a higher power one day .. and THAT is in our interest too.
Does the USA even have a process for dealing with citizens who commit crimes in other countries? Given that its hard to get a fair trial in some countries (hush, let's not say that it includes the US)
Besides, I wouldn't want that on the country's conscience
So we have multiple reasons not to harbor this criminal.
Safety systems are designed to prevent and contain accidents, not intentional acts of sabateurs.
The article about compensation is a hoax.
See this article
On the day of the anniversary, the British Broadcasting Corporation had to retract a story reporting that Dow Chemicals had accepted full responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy and was poised to offer $12 billion more in compensation.
An activist "falsely identified himself as a Dow employee" and made the claim to the BBC, according to a statement posted on Dow's corporate website.
The statement continues: "Dow confirms that there was no basis whatsoever for this report."
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
A plant not taking safety precautions and having cost-cutting measures that killed thousands is not the same as a company making weapons.
Corporate greed is not a 100% American trait.
Where oh where in my post did I even mention America? I merely said that it should be the same for ALL companies, no matter what or where you're from.
We're not here to discuss corporations of other countries and their behaviors - I was talking about Dow Chemical and how the US is being quite unethical in not extraditing someone whose "cost-cutting measures" killed thousands.
Jesus BLOODY FUCK is it that hard to spell HYPOCRISY like you have a brain in your head?
Because heading a large multinational is not just about receiving large bonuses at the end of each year. Its about being the legally repsonsible figure head who has to take credit for the good and, in this case, terrible "performance" of the company you manage.
It's called "responsibility". The chairmain reaps the benefits for his company's successes, he should be forced to pay the piper when his company fucks up.
Perhaps someone else can verify the facts. What I understood was:
The president (ceo?) of UC turned up in India immediately after the incident. He said that he was horrified and the company would do everything it could to make things better. The Indian government then arrested him. After that UC brought in the lawyers and the result is what you see today. Advice to the Indians: You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
The reason the compensation for the victims is so pitiful is that it was done under Indian law. In Indian law, if you accidentally kill someone, the compensation is based on what they would have been worth at the end of their life. In most cases, that is pretty much zero. In American law, you get an amount that tries to reduce the consequences of the death. ie. If you are caring for your parents and are killed, the damages include an amount to replace that care. This produces much greater damages than the Indian case.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Does the US have an extradition treaty with India?
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
If this was not the case, then a CEO would be able to hire executives which are explicitly told not to tell him if there are any legal concerns, in order to protect his ignorance defence in the future.
As it stands, CEOs are held responsible in order to make sure that they do all they can to avert disaster.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Slashdot links to this article:
y pe =topNews&storyID=6987580
d =2 99657
http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t
which is in fact a hoax,
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?i
If they didn't have enough labor to run the plant, they certainly didn't have enough to shutdown.
Shutdown and startup are typically the most dangerous procedures in a plant. All employees are kept 'on call' for a week or two. Most employees work 12hr shifts. The absolute last thing that you would consider if you had a labor strike would be to attempt a full shutdown.
Of course...even if they were shutdown they would still have chemicals sitting in storage tanks and equipment. When you shut down, sometimes you leave chemicals in the equipment because it's dangerous to pump air (or water) into some pieces of equipment.
As long as we continue to allow company officers to bear no responsibility for the actions of a company we will continue to see events like this. It makes no sense whatsoever that the offices should not be held accountable for the offenses of the company. They are in the position of responsibility. That word apparently doesn't mean what it used to, because they are seldom expected to actually take responsibility. They have all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Personally I think that if we're not going to punish the company officers then we have only one other solution. If corporations want to be treated as a person (and in many ways they are) we should treat them as a person and accept them to assume the responsibility for their actions. Therefore if a company kills thousands of people it is a mass murderer and it should be destroyed or incarcerated permanently without chance of parole, its resources sold at auction to pay for the legal action... and maybe even to provide restitutions.
US$500M is nothing compared to even one human life lost in the pursuit of greed. Can there be any doubt that the safety measures were skimped on simply to save money? When people die due to someone's greed then the perpetrator should suffer more than a loss of money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
another link for the jihad then: http://anti-slash.org/injustices/michael/
Found this two minutes after this "story" was posted:
2 99657
BBC Says Dow Interview an 'Elaborate Deception'
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=
The Bhopal disaster isn't necessarily the worst industrial accident. Many people give that distinction to the collapse of the Baia Mare Dam, a tailings dam for a gold mine, holding water laced with cyanide and heavy metals. It dumped on the order of 100,000 cubic meters of this stuff into the Danube, killing tons and tons of fish and poisoning the drinking water of millions in Hungary. Luckily, the Australian parent company had an excellent Public Relations contract; this wasn't even news in Europe, much less in the USA.
m l
Here's one link to it.
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/mdafbm.ht
fsh
You are comparing a terrorist attack against an accident. Sure both were tragic, but the intent is vastly different. I'm not saying someone should not be responsible, but you are ocmparing apples and oranges.
Umm.. 9/11 was a direct attack. Bhopal was an accident. Analogies are dangerous when missused.
All of a sudden outsourcing doesn't seem so bad!
Yes, they do.
But ofcourse, laws are bent where money is concerned.
we could get Union Carbide to open facilities in Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc.....
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
They're magnetic?
Mod parent up (even if they're AC). Payments were made to the Indian goverment, but they did not pass them onto the affected people.
Chip H.
Dow Chemical purchased all the stock of the Union Carbide corp. in 2000. I fail to see how this makes Dow responsible for Bhopal. If I purchase a used car that was involved in a hit-and-run, am I now responsible for the accident? The plant in Bhopal was sabotaged during a strike. The responsibility lies with the person who committed the sabotage, and no one else.
The chairman is not the one who should face charges, the Site director/manager should be brought up on charges. He is the one resposible to that site's safety and operations not the CEO/Chairman.
I am a very pro-business individual, by annual pay depends on my companies and divisions performance. That said what happened at UC India is in-excusable.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
That is what life was judged as having been worth in Bhopal.
If you want to be taken seriously then don't post like a buffoon. I know drunken rednecks that come back with better lines than that one.
Jeez, could your bias be any more obvious?
Pesticides are not "deadly to life"; they're first and foremost deadly to insects...and because of this property, they dramatically cut the losses in raising food crops, allowing more people to be fed on less farmland, which means that more land can remain uncultivated.
Next up: anti-biotics kill germs, and thus are "deadly to life".
And after that: suregons use hot water and soap in the prep room before operating...two things that are "deadly to life".
And after that: farmers use combines to harvest grains...which results in all of the plants being killed. More "deadly to life" technology!
Pfffttt.
The Bhopal plant was jointly owned by Union Carbide and the Indian government, with the government owning 51%.
Straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.bhopal.com/facts.htm
FACT: The Bhopal plant was built, owned and operated by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL). Union Carbide held 51 percent of the shares in UCIL, the Indian government owned 26 percent, and some 24,000 private Indian citizens owned the balance.
FACT: Union Carbide never actually operated in India. Rather, Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL), a separate company 50.9% owned by Union Carbide, was controlling the operation of the Bhopal factory at the time of the tragedy. Following the tragedy, the Government of India ceased production at the plant and took complete control of the property.
Bhopal.com is run by Union Carbide so you can't question this source.
Let the insane neocons come out of the wood work babbling about this being "the cost of doing business" in their twisted way. If there's anything I hate, it's the fucking neocons.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The recipient country is ultimately responsible for the regulatory environment in which the plant operates. The plant had lax procedures in place because they could.
India, China, and other pacific rim countries hopefully learned the lessons of this and other industrial tragedies.
Let's hope anyway
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
The Bush administration has emasculated environmental laws, and government oversight of industry.
Check out Robert F. Kennedy's book Crimes Against Nature for a shocking appraisal of the current administration. Another book summary.
They pervert science to meet the needs of the big business/polluters.
The end result is that we are at risk. Rates of childhood asthma are way up, carcinogens in the air and water are increasing. They do this under the guise of small government, and deregulation. But, what it really amounts to is a ticket for their big contributors to bypass any responsibility to the people and the environment.. essentially a backdoor tax on you and me - someone eventually needs to deal with the problems they create. Either in cleaning up the messes, cleaning polluted resources like water and air, or paying medical costs resulting from their contaminants. That financial burden gets passed to the tax payers, since Bush/Cheney have given industry a free pass, rolled back regulations, eliminated oversight, and killed any enforcements.
If you think the way they came in and dismissed the problems with Microsoft was bad, you should look into what they did with companies the Clinton administration was prosecuting for environmental issues. They are ten times more egregious.. Companies that cause billions in damage in environmental accidents get most charges dropped, and fines of less than $10,000.
When you neglect security to a point where accidents are bound to happen sooner or later, do you still not think we should hold the responsible accountable?
If you continue your line of thought, you could say that the terrorists of 11/9 only wanted to do material damage, but human lives was lost by accident.
Given the current situation in the USA, where corporations have the same rights as people then they should bear the same responsibilities.
As CEO of the company Warren Anderson is the person in which these responsiblities rest.
To extend the analogy - who effectively is responsible for Abu Ghraib?
That post was clearly sarcastic and should have been modded 'Funny', in lieu of a 'Sarcastic' Moderation choice...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The survivors and family of victims should start a collection and put a price on his head.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
No. That is incorrect.
Had he personally known about or had ignored the problems at the site then he is responsible. Had he issued orders that the site bypass certain regulations, then he would be responsible.
Simply sitting at the head of a huge multinational corporation when something bad goes wrong in no way makes you criminally liable for the action. They want to try him for murder. What next, one of your employees rapes another one, and the Chairman is brought up on rape chargers?
the most frightful part about the whole thing is that india is about 10 times more industrialised than it was 20 years back! and more or less the same carelessness exists! Just because it is India, anyone can get away by bribing or slipping a wad of notes to any politician/ police etc. Just because it is India - there's an apparent lack of justice/ an air of carelessness.
for example: a nike/ reebok/ *.popular american brand shoe will cost more or less the same in the indian streets. but the quality is quite different (nevermind even if its made in china!!!) its the QA thats non-existent - only now things have begun to change a wee bit. its the price that the indians have to pay for excess population - there's always someone who's willing to bear with anything without complaining! strange resilience to bear with impossible conditions. maybe because people always blame thier fate!!! thats the hard part to understand.
For those who of you claiming they met their responsibilities and that the Indian government was somehow to blame here's some food for thought:
An enquiry towards the official position on their stance on the whole debacle received this response (translated by me, reads pretty much the same in norwegian):
Union Carbide have nothing but the highest respect and compassion for the populace of Bhopal, however Union Carbide have no interesents - nor any responsibility for - the Bhopal-facilities.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
That sounds dangerous.... do any plants in the US use it?
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I fully agree with you, but that treaty was signed in 1997. It doesn't appear to be retroactive. Did it replace an older one?
If not, then the situation sucks, but there's nothing to be done about it. Did UC ever face an investigation in the US over the incident?
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
On Sarcasm...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Yeah, well if you had bothered to actually READ any of the articles, you would know that the Indian government is as much to blame for lack of victims relief and site cleanup.
OK... go back to hugging a tree.
WMD are not banned, for instance USA has the largest collections of the ones called nuclear bombs. Biological weapons on the other hand are banned, except in the US where that treaty was never ratified. For the same reason Saddam had to make his own biological weapons, unless he got help from the US, since no one else are making them.
That you answered seriously to an obvious humour post, or that it was modded "Insightful".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
What about the American companies? The US-industry and government were no innocent bystanders when Sadam built those weapons.
I know it is convenient to forget that litlle detail but lets not shall we?
That word apparently doesn't mean what it used to, because they are seldom expected to actually take responsibility. They have all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?
Additionally, you claim that if one life is lost in the pursuit of profit they person responsible should be in jail. Fine if you think that. But that's every accidental industrial accident, ever. For the right amount of money any accident can be prevented. Period. Any. There isn't an industrial accident that couldn't be prevent given the right amount of cash. Any death at the hands of a corporation in your system would require the CEO to be imprisoned.
Corporations have limited liability for a reason. It is impossible to run a large company and not have issues of wrong-doing come up in the company. We need large companies. Large companies were not possible before limited-liability companies were concieved.
I think the point is more that there were improper safety measures in place for such dangerous manufacturing, and not enough oversight. Actually, in this case, there was oversight, it was just ignored by management.
Same thing looks to have happened to the 166 miners that died in the China mines recently.
See the book "The Cyanide Canary" for similar happenings in the US.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
9/11 was a direct attack. Bhopal was an accident. Analogies are dangerous when missused.
Blatant disregard for safety procedures and lax management make accidents? If I blatantly disregard the law and fail to secure my child in a seat belt, then get into an accident, I am criminally liable for his injuries. If I oversaw a chemical plant, failed to ensure safety systems were online and safety precautions were taken by my workers, and an "accident" occurred, I should be liable.
9/11 could be the same thing -- our government had information but failed to act on it. As far as I am concerned, our government is criminally liable for failing to do *anything* about 9/11 before it happened, even if just acknowledging the possibility and making a token gesture by alerting the FBI.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
In my opinion, the BBC have just joined Dan Rather and the ABC "News" team in spreading falsity. They were wrong, period. BBC has a reputation for arrogance and radically liberal views, most of them anti-American anyway. So much for their "important" voice in the world. Dorks.
A chemical plant, making pesticides blows up and DOW pays out. How or what does this exactly have to do with slashdot and it's readers? Am I missing the change over to CNN now?
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Well theres a difference then saying that "Deliberate murder is worse than accidental death" and saying "Accidental death should never be punished"
As for 9/11, it is pretty clear that the loss of human life was the explicit goal of the terrorists. To say otherwise is pretty indefensible.
You are missing the point. It wasn't what was being produced at Bhopal, it was UC's irresponsiblity when it came to compensating those who died or were seriously injured in the accident.
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
Guilt by criminal negligence is still guilt. Terrorists killed people because of their beliefs. The men who piloted those planes thought they were doing good, and believed in it enough to die with their targets. Monstrous, but true. Plus, their supporters and organisation were properly punished for it (except, of course, the conspicuously free mastermind).
Those 15,000 Indians were not killed for any such passionate reasons - they simply weren't worth enough to bother protecting. They were killed for money, for the price of a few intelligent safety measures. The perpetrators of that crime not only didn't die in its commission, they haven't been punished.
Story from ABC News
"BHOPAL: THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE
Dec 4th - San Francisco
Dec 5th - Stanford, 1:30 pm, Bechtel Intl Center
Screening and Discussion
with NADEEM UDDIN , Director
On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India leaked poisonous methyl isocyanate gas killing fifteen thousand helpless men, women and children. Hundreds of thousands more were permanently maimed. Bhopal was, and remains, the world's worst chemical industry disaster" http://ektaonline.org/events/bhopal/index.htm
and wikipedia doesn't mention one either. And the amount of water involved was rather large, several hundred liters, so it did not just sneak in. It is unknown how and why the water got into the tank, but none of the possible reasons usually discussed (a misguided attempt to clean the tank, a wrongly connected nitrogen pipe, sabotage) makes Union Carbide look good.
And even if there was a strike: wouldn't you expect management to make sure that your plant doesn't blow up in case of a simple labor dispute?
I think governments should be responsible for the actions of companies that belong to them - which implies companies must belong to a government. After all, the government(s) will be profiting from illegal acts via taxation.
In the 21st century USA, the companies now own the government... and the companies are more than happy to let the govt accept all responsibility for the companies' fuggups.
in this age of vigilantism perhaps violence could solve this dispute (after all witness USA foreign policy)
if the gov is unwilling to solve the problem perhaps its up to the citizens to solve it for them
this was just an awful day, and I've relived some of it thanks to an npr commentatory this morning. He recalls this horrible image of a http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/Dead.htm>dead child being buried, from when he was a child in india 20 years ago.
The fact that things still haven't been cleaned up is testimate to corporate greed and indifference for human life.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Given the current situation in the USA, where corporations have the same rights as people then they should bear the same responsibilities.
You're right. The COMPANY should be held responsible. Not someone who probably had no idea there were safety issues at the site.
As CEO of the company Warren Anderson is the person in which these responsiblities rest.
He's Chairman, but that doesn't matter really. Someone can, and should be, held personally responsible if their actions lead to the problem. Did Warren Anderson order that safety issues be ignored? Did he know about the problems, but did nothing? Then he might be personally responsible. Simply being at the head of a company when some of the people way down the chain from you massively fuck up is in no way a reason for you to personally be charged for murder.
To extend the analogy - who effectively is responsible for Abu Ghraib?
To extend your badly formed analogy: clearly it's the Bushilter and Cheniburton! Give me a break.
Instead of spending time on Slashdot, maybe you should go and educate your British friends about Auschwitz.
Yes, I do believe there was a previous treaty between India and the US - but I'm unable to find the details of it online.
And no, UC never faced any investigation in the US over the incident.
constitute a movement of money and value into India. Don't think our government didn't approve and arrange, possibly at corporate request. Or that corporations at that level didn't talk with each other to arrange it.
Negotiations often bring about strange deals, especially when you can't be forthright about it due to public outcry, treaties, etc.
*Removes colander with antennae and blinking LEDs from head...*
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Warren Anderson was never the chairman of Dow Chemical. He was the chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster, and retired from that position within a couple of years. Dow did not acquire UC until 1999. It is Dow's position that the $470 million settlement that was paid in 1989 (of which $330 million remained in July of 2004, when an Indian court ordered it to be disbursed to survivors) satisfies its financial obligations. I'm not sure that I agree, though I really don't have enough facts about the site and the terms of the 1989 settlement to have an informed opinion. It does not appear that the Indian government did a very good job of negotiating a settlement, though, and I would say that it also bears some responsibility for following up on the site cleanup. That should have been part of the settlement (for UC to do the cleanup), and UC should have been held responsible for getting the cleanup accomplished.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Yes, actually, I do think he was responsible for the events that transpired. The plant was designed with many safety systems to prevent a release of toxic chemicals, however, the plant was operating with most of those systems disabled. That's deliberate and criminal negligence on the part of the company officers because they knew the systems were disabled and put their profits ahead of the safety of both their employees and everyone living in the surrounding area.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Was UC following all of the safety rules and regulations in effect at the time in India? One of the reasons U.S. corporations move production to other countries is to take advantage of relaxed regulations. If this was the case, then perhaps India needs to strengthen its regulations. If Carbide was following all regulations then in effect, then they are not culpable.
Was the plant run by Americans or was it run by Indians?
mod parent up
Education is the silver bullet.
The design of the unit at Institute, WV was supposed to be identical to the Indian unit. We were always told that Bhopal tragedy was caused by deliberate sabatoge. MIC is water reactive. The system was designed so that water could not be introduced into it. The water and steam hoses had fittings that could not be attached to the connectors on the MIC storage to prevent water from being introduced to the system. Someone at the Indian unit had cut the end off of a water hose and attached a connector that would fit the MIC system and introduced water into the system. A chemical reaction occured causing the vapor cloud to be released into the atmosphere.
MIC is used in the making of insecticides. It is one of the main ingredients of Seven, along with Phosgene and Chlorine, two other poisonous gases. Phosgene is the name of the mustard gas used in World War I. Basically insecticides are nerve agents designed to work on insects. Many of the ingredients are lethal to humans as well.
My opinion is this: we're talking 15,000 people here. As I understand it, the safety violations were out in the open and painfully obvious to every floor worker and every manager.
It's not like there's any shortage of blame to go around. It's not like there's a finite limit to the punishment you can dole out. String 'em all up.
How about the victims of corruption in the UN, the EU, and other countries around the world. Seems very few people talk about or even know about things such as the growing "Oil for Food" scandal involving many countries working in conjuction with the most corrupt organization in the world (the UN). A lot of countries have helped fund a regime responsible for the murder, toruture, and rape of hundreds of thousands of people. This same useless organization turns a blind eye to the genocide that has been going on for a long time in African countries. There is a lot of blame to go around the world. If people could stop pointing fingers at the US long enough to look in their own back yard, they would find that the dog has been crapping all over the place.
Safety systems are designed to prevent and contain accidents, not intentional acts of sabateurs.
Especially when it was very likely that the saboteur(s) was/were terrorists who siezed an opportunity in the old Hindu/Muslim conflicts that have raged for centuries in central India. UC being an American corporation was just icing on the cake for the saboteur.
It seems to me that the chairman should be at least generally aware of overall conditions at any large site. There were hundreds of employees at that site. It's not like it was just some little sales office somewhere. Does your boss just ask how you're work is going and take your word for it?
An "accident" which is a direct consequence of wilful negligence on this scale is no accident, it is a situation waiting to happen.
God knows how many other similar situations like this exist in the world, but those responsible are putting people's lives just as surely at risk. If anything, the profit-line motivation makes them more criminally culpable than terrorists attempting to underline a political or religious point.
You are confusing "They want to try him for murder" with "They have already convicted him of murder, without collecting any evidence, or giving him a fair and impartial trial."
Now, if you want to state that you do not completely trust the courts of India to make that distinction, then I can go along with you on that one.
But they have *every right* to try him for murder.
Education is the silver bullet.
When is the Indian government going to take responsibility for their own involvement and contributions to the disaster and its aftermath? We have the Indian subsidiary of a U.S. company, owned by Indians, managed by Indians, operated by Indians, regulated by Indian law, which is made and enforced by Indians. Yet, the incident is portrayed as being solely the fault of an evil foreign corporation. How convenient. It's disingenuous for India to play the "we're poor victims of Western colonialism" card at this late date.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Yeah, I realized a little after I'd posted - I mentioned it rightly in the post but wrongly in the title.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility. On 9/11, the deaths were the result of a deliberate attempt to kill. In Bhopal, the deaths were a foreseeable result of reckless neglect of safety and concern only for money. In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder*.
If a similar accident took place on U.S. soil, the press, the public, and the politicians would be screaming for blood. Do you think that Dow Chemical could 'accidentally' release a few tons of (say) chlorine, kill a couple thousand people, and then close the book on it with a million or two in settlements and a mea culpa?
*Yes, yes. IANAL.
~Idarubicin
I prefer an obvious bias than one that is hidden under the guise of fair and balanced reporting.
What?
Are these jobs we really want?
"brxref
Pesticides are not "deadly to life"; they're first and foremost deadly to insects.
So insects aren't alive?
Next up: anti-biotics kill germs, and thus are "deadly to life".
Bacteria are life forms. They grow, eat, reproduce, respond to stimuli, etc.
Sounds like you're the biased one. You're implying something along the lines of "if it ain't a mammal, reptile, etc. then it ain't alive".
Uh no. 9/11 was just such an example of vigilante "justice".
They should do everything within their power to force the laws of their country to be fully and impartially executed.
Education is the silver bullet.
UC settled for 470 millon dollars with the Indian govt. This should cover cleanup of the site and reperations and health care for the injured. The only reason it hasn't is that the INDIAN govt. didn't pay the affected people. They need to sue there govt. not UC or anyone else.
Parent is correct. It's a classic agent scenario anyone who's had a business law class should recognize. The person the agent reports to is responsible for the actions of the agent. It's not a valid legal defense to intentionally remain ignorant. Since you have the ability to fire the agent if he's doing something bad, or wrong, you're responsible for making sure you know what he's doing.
Loaded along with this article was an ad near the top of the screen for Doom 3... with a murderous, red-faced zombie scowling out at me. Great timing! Are the dead from Bhopal coming back to get us or something?
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
- He knew the conditions at the plant and did nothing to correct it (or, worse, authorized it). Either way, he's personaly responsible for the deaths.
- He didn't know what was going on because someone underneath him falsified documents and didn't report conditions at the plant to executive management. His defense would be to find out who lied and finger them as the responsible party. However, he's still guilty of mismangement, because he should have made sure that there was an internal auditing system to catch lies like that. Even if no one had died, he should still have been made aware of conditions which could caused a major plant to be shut down.
If the CEO and Directors of a company are not aware of major policy decisions being made by their subordinates then they're not doing their jobs. It's a CEO's RESPONSIBILITY to be aware of any potential catastrophy which could impact the company's bottom line or which could severely damage the company's public image.Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Therein lies the rub: multinationals deliberately set up shop in out-of-the-way places in order to circumvent laws applicable in their own countries, or to put it baldly, to to elsewhere what they are not allowed to do at home.
Again, How is the Immediate parent offtopic?
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Here's a question to ask.
So, a company builds a plant and generates a whole bunch of binders full of safety procedures.
They then hire people who've got experience in chemical manufacturing and train them on the excepted way to run the plant (based off of the safety procedures).
Now, when these people don't follow procedures, don't keep equipment properly maintained and an accident (such as not closing a value so that when the system was flushed out with water, water would inavertently enter a tank full of a chemical that reacts explosively with water, whose fault is it?
Is it the fault of the operators of the plant?
Is it the fault of the company for not doing enough oversight?
I don't know enough about the Bhopal accident, but I'm suspecting it was probably a bit inbetween.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
They now make all those wonderful chemicals in Charleston, WV.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
While this disaster is certainly a reason for hate, it was still accidental. I tend to think that terrorists (and non-terrorists alike) derive most of their hate from deliberate aggression, i.e. war and other demonstrations of government force.
When the US government invokes military force (which they have, somewhere in the world, for every year of the past century), it is essentially guaranteed that innocent civilians will die. The war on Iraq is a perfect example. No rational person can claim that tens of thousands of deaths -- occurring continuously, steadily, and endlessly (not all at once like a freak disaster) -- is accidental. The reality is that the US government knew damn well that they were going to kill innocent civilians, and they made a calculated decision that their political goals are worth more than those people's lives.
That kind of policy, IMO, results in a higher level of hate and resentment than any accidental disaster would.
$470 million dollar settlement / 15,000 deaths (not including survivors) = $31,333 per victim.
If we wanted payouts for each victim:$470 million dollar settlement / 500,000 survivors = $940 per victim.
Counting both the dead and the living, payouts could be as low as $912 a head. This doesn't help when your hospital bill is about $5000.Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
I seem to recall that it was Union Carbide not Dow that was responsible for the incident. Unless one is a subsidiary of the other.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Hoaxed, huh? Haven't read the poll lately?
If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?
He is responsible for having procedures in place that it does not happen.
The specific cause of the accident is that a relief valve popped and failed to reset, thus releasing the gas out of the tank it was in.
Note: the relief valve did half of its job. Yes, it's supposed to pop open when pressure rises to unsafe levels....but its also supposed to reclose when the pressure is back at safe levels. That didn't happen, which is part of the reason so much gas was let loose.
And judging from the French actions this week in Africa it isn't just the US that is a hyprocrit.
I do not mind him for doing so, I might even want to encourage him to do it more often.
May your kapitalistik world come crumbling down on you in a bhopal way!!
Who cares if there was a previous treaty? What does the US have to lose by allowing the extradition of the person responsible? Money. That's it. And IMO that's not enough to disallow the extradition.
I diasgree a little. I don't think someone can be held responsible for inaction. Lets say you're in a grocery store and it gets held up. The grocery clerk can't take me in because I hid in the corner. You could have helped, and didn't and are therefore responsible? no.
However, if someone is flagrantly negligent, then its another story. For example, If I have a factory with a machine. Workers are paid to use this machine. I fail in my duties to maintain the machine and it explodes injuring workers. That is my fault because I failed to perform my duty to the best of my abilities.
What it comes down to is responsibility. UC had a responsibility to make the plant safer and not explode. They failed and are responsible for the effects. 9/11 they have a responsibility to protect the country. In order to hold anyone liable you have to examine each individuals personal responsibility and then evaluate how well they performed vs. how they could have performed and what the effects of their failures where. A much more complicated affair.
As for the grocery clerk, I'm not responsible for his security.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Um, I think that is the very definition of Corporation
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
The magical invisible free hand of commerce will provide the optimal solution to this discontinuity. Libertarians rule, back to work you slags.
I've been told the Indian government actually ran this plant. (My father used to work for a UCC plant they used to own in Moses Lake, Washington). UCC has an unusual business model, they set up manufacturing facilities, create new ways of producing products, make the facility profitable and then sell it. It is very common for UCC not run operations of a facility, they make money from patents. In fact the Moses Lake plant was built about the same time period as the India plan and they were built with the same safety standards. The India plant was being ran outside of specification which caused this disator.
1. It's news. It's the 20th anniversary of the event if you hadn't noticed.
2. It's relevant to all of us. It speaks volumes about corporate responsibility, or rather the lack of it, in a time when corporations wield more power than ever. Worse, elected politicians whose pockets are lined directly and indirectly by these corporations are constantly giving them more protection and less responsibility.
3. Corporations should be wholly accountable for their actions and brought to book when they screw up. I think the world's biggest industrial disaster, which killed and maimed tens of thousands of people, falls into the category of actions for which someone should squarely take responsibility: don't you?
I have to ask: if you don't think that killing 15,000 people without even coming close to properly paying for the crime, or even poisoning a city without even coming close to properly putting things right, is something to question corporations about then when is it to OK to do so?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
" Does your boss just ask how you're work is going and take your word for it?"
Yes because I have a good track record. If there had been no major safety incidents before at the site, why would the CEO/Chairman expect anything was going on?. I'm not trying to excuse him but I don't think he's the one culpable, given the available information.
Another possibility is that India is using this as political leverage to get access to better documentation for an investigation. They don't have a lot of political clout but this would provide at least some measure of diplomatic leverage.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
If the Indians who sabotaged the Bhopal plant had known their actions would cause so much as a single death, it is very likely that they wouldn't have done it.
OTOH, the Islamofascist who bombed the WTC the first time around in 1993 "expressed regret that more people had not died and said he had hoped the bomb would cause one of the two World Trade Center towers to fall on its twin, killing at least 250,000 Americans.". I'd imagine that bin Laden and company have much the same sentiments, though perhaps they'd have acted differently had they comprehended the subtle differences between Democratic and Republican Commanders-in-Chief.
Intent matters. And BTW, why no angst about the 100 MILLION+ that were murdered by Communism in the 20th century? I mean, if we're going to bitch about economic and political systems...
It is incorrect to say that Bhopal has no vegetation growing there abd that nobody lives there. A lot of people were killed and a lot of damage was done, but people moved back in. This is India after all.
The real problem is the after effects of the poison with children being born malformed and the remnants of the factory leaking mercury. Dominic Lapierre, a few days ago released an article in the press about this.
And here is a wikipedia article article
I had to study Bhopal for a business ethics class about 8 months ago. If memory serves, the plant had American managers on-site. The site underwent numerous safety inspections, and continuously failed them. Despite the prescriptions of the inspectors, nothing was ever done. At least one person in management state-side was getting reports from the inspectors, and nothing was done to encourage the managers in India to comply, or to punish them for not complying. So, yes, the on-site managers of the plant are responsible, and whoever was getting the inspection reports and ignoring them is also responsible. These are the people that should be extradited.
His memory is 100% fucking wrong.
Actually it was Jesus Christ I believe though Mary may have called him that other name occasionally when she fancied one.
> When you hear shit like "the terrorists hate our freedom," think of Bhopal. Around 3k people died on 9/11. In Bhopal, the lasting death toll is somewhere around 15,000. I wonder if Anderson would have been allowed to settle if 15,000 Americans had died.
:)
Wait a second - you actually believe what they force feed the American people? This is an unfair government, and there has always been a double-standard. The Americans that voted Bush fully support this (not that Kerry would've done anything different as far as American imperial doctrine, but at least his voters can envision a better, or "more humane" to use today's fake terms that don't mean anything, future).
All people are created equal, as long as they are rich white Americans. This is a perfect example of who these people are, they didn't give two shits about human life, none whatsoever, zero, zip, zilch - trading human life for dollars. Much like we trade animal life (cattle, etc.), but with our own species. We should be proud - I know God is!
This, my friends, is why the rest of the world can't stand us. We are unfair, we will shoot you in the back if it serves our purposes, we will kill you, we will destroy your country (not just Iraq - think Nicaragua, East Timor, list is long), sometimes commit genocide. We are the greatest military force in the history of mankind with the collective responsibility of a 10 year old. And as a people, we're so ignorant that dirt knows more about what's going on than the average American. But hey, the average American knows who won American Idol, or what Britney Spears' diet is. Go figure!
Alright, alright - I'll go have my coffee now..
Must-not-watch TV!
Last week's Westwing, The Dover Test basically mentioned the Bhopal incident in their storyline where Leo McGarry was offered a board position with a chemical company and his Indian nurse became upset.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Here you have the problem with how a Corporation is treated by the US government. All the rights of being legally equivalent to a person, with none of the responsibilities.
the chairman and executives of a corporation are directly responsible for the actions of that corporation. we (used to) apply the same concept to government and somebody coined the phrase "the buck stops here."
Some food for though.
The labour laws that are applied in the west were "fought" for. Many people died in the workplace or wrestled with wages below the cost of living for many many years before we got to where they are today. There was a time, not too long ago, when dangerous exploitative factories and shanties like what you see in the third world were found all over what today is the 1st world. And just as things improved here, so will they improve around the third world, eventually.
Trying to "rush" it through legislation that penalizes what happens behind someone elses borders isn't going to make things better. In fact you may retard advancement instead of promoting it. If multinationals no longer have an economic advantage to moving operations to the third world, then you simply limit the economic growth of the third world, and probably the democratic progressions that go hand in hand with it. North America does not have a "right" to have jobs before the third world does. We are all better off if we all share in the pie. there's nothing wrong with some people get bigger pieces at different times - we'll all have the same share eventually.
Besides, why do so many people believe that the third world needs western help to get them out of where they are? Are people in the third world less intelligent or something? Are they incapable of solving their own problems? I blieve, they can do it on their own and probably better too, if we just kept our noses out of their business, stopped putting up trade barriers and protective legislation, and let the third world find the solutions that are good for them.
Do you honestly think that those reigms would have fallen if it were not for Oil-for-Food? That program saved countless more lives than it indangered. Seriously, the UN is not responsible for the rape and torture of anyone. Half this scandal in America is just FNC trying to shift the focus of Iraq being fucked up onto the UN.
"This same useless organization turns a blind eye to the genocide that has been going on for a long time in African countries."
I cannot even believe that you said that. I hope you are referring to the US, because if I saw the country act with the passion towards Sudan, etc that it did with Iraq things would be a lot less fucked up over there. At least the UN is trying to broker some peace in that country.
Anyway, your comment was hardly relevant to the discussion as it was headed.
forget it.
What does this have to do with the topic at hand, mainly the head of a company being criminally liable for the deaths caused by his plant.
How does other events justify UC avoiding responsability?
It is easy to continue one's line of thought to a point of absurd.
In particular, if one continues your line of thought, we ought to hold Bush and Clinton accountable for 9/11.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I agree with what you have written, but that is beside the point. It still doesn't mean Warren Anderson should get US protection. They set up that plant there to profit by not having to worry about unions, decent wages or safety. The US should extradite him for trial. It would set an example to other companies, that when you do business outside the US, you follow that countries laws and you won't be protected by the US for your own misdeeds. By protecting Union Carbide, the US set's itself up for finger pointing. And about the oil for food scandle, the bulk of those oil sales from vouchers went to US oil companies. We need to look at our back yard their too! Those companies were aware of what was going on. The UN is quickly outliving it's usefulness, there needs to be some serious reform. They also need to start paying rent. The little backstabbers have been living here free, getting the most of their funds from US taxpayers, all the while breaking state and federal laws with diplomatic immunity. Ask an average New Yorker how they like their guests!
So this justifies all of the atrocities being commited in your name?
What exactly is your point?
Under US law, wouldn't disregard for safety procedures fall under the heading of negligence or involuntary manslaughter? Homocide just doesn't seem to be the appropriate charge - accountability is important, but so is proper application of the law.
As far as the 9/11 comparison - the "US Government" is a collection of tens of millions of people. Those responsible for security probably find dozens of possible threats each day, most of which are not likely. Whoever filtered that one out made a mistake - but mistakes happen. That's not the same thing as supression, or grounds for criminal liability.
Name an instance when an accidental release of antibiotics killed tens of thousands of people and you'll have a point.
Seriously - that parenthetical statement in the summary was unprofessional and unnecessary. Most people know what pesticides are. And, for those who don't, a dictionary definition would have sufficed (which, according to Webster, is "an agent or chemical used to kill pests"). The Bhopal story is already pretty grim, and the facts speak for themselves. Adding petty statements such as "they were making a chemical deadly to life" that are clearly biased only serves to make readers doubt the veracity of anything else in the article. I know it's hard to be objective when reporting on things like Microsoft and Linux, but can Slashdot at least try and show *some* professionalism?
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
"I wasn't jabbing at America, I was jabbing at the lack of international justice in matters such as this."
Well you should jab at (U.S. of) America since they don't acknowledge any power to the international court.
Read here and here to get an example of what can do stupid people protected by irresponsible superiors supported by corrupt governments.
I hope those bastards get what they deserve, be it in Iraq or somewhere else. Too bad that who's actually responsible for not punishing those atrocities will never see a battle zone from less than 1000 miles.
He was apparently chairman/CEO at the time. This timeline is fairly informative, though it comes off as containing more than a bit of rationalization. It's interesting that UC contributed the proceeds from its sale of the Indian subsidiary to a fund for a hospital in Bhopal. That seems to me to be at least a tacit admission of continued responsibility. The changes in ownership structures make legal responsibility an "interesting" question, but Dow would do well to show some compassion, rather than just saying "not our fault, not our responsibility".
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Conversely, I suppose it doesn't matter to you if someone in such a position is negligent and willfully does such things to increase profit? Seriously, this country is filled with nothing but corporate brainwashed fools.
If you are the Captain of the ship, you should go down with the ship.
"If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?"
If he's negligent in properly running the factory, yes. He is the boss. That's why he gets paid big dollars. If he's not doing his job then he should pay the price. If he can't handle the responsibility then he has no business being in that position. However, if the incident occurs due to the failure of a single workman, then sure he's off the hook. This disaster was due to gross negligence that took place undoubtedly at the behest of the senior executive staff of the company. They should pay. They should pay dearly.
Corporations and the people who work for those corporations need to be held responsible for their actions. This shit goes too damn far.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
The point is that those who bitch about the USA on /. are strangly silent when other countries do the same or worse.
This article says the fake spokesperson claims to be a member of the Yes Men group, who has been doing this sort of thing for a while. But there is not confirmation of the Bhopal hoax on their site. (The hoaxster could be lying!)
Here's the salient bit from the article:
"Finisterra, whose identity could not be confirmed, later told BBC's Radio 4 he was part of the group Yes Men, which hoaxes businesses and governments and which has gone after Dow before over Bhopal."
Question is - who was responsible?
When the plant was built, UC had an agreement with the local government that no housing be built near the plant - at the time of the accident, housing had been built right up to the plant boundaries. The plant was supposed to have a Chemical Engineer on-site at all times - at the time of the accident, the fellow in charge was at home having tea.
Along that line, did UC have total operational control of the plant? That is, was the accident a result of something that UC had control over, or was due to circumstances under local control?
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I agree with everything you said. I was being critical of Michael, not the disaster. The anniversary is important but is offtopic for Slashdot's front page.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
And the Flood from Halo: They try to consume everything in their path.
And werewolves and zombies and vampires; all mindless eating machines.
Corporations are constantly trying to feed their hunger for profits. Ever increasing profits, especially.
So does this make corporations evil?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
If you continue your line of thought, you could say that the terrorists of 11/9 only wanted to do material damage, but human lives was lost by accident.
Except all the evidence points to the fact that the 9/11 terrorists did (and continue to) want to end human lives. So, in fact, this line of thought does not in any way lead to believing that the terrorists only wanted to do material damage.
Explain worse then Pinocet, Iraq, or killing 3000 people because proper safety regulations would chew too much of the profit margin up?
I know it's quite popular to think of large organizations as having some sort of collective brain (like the Borg on ST:TNG), but this just isn't the case. In the 9/11 case, one person in the government had information that an attack was planned by Islamic terrorists, another person had information that Islamic flight school students were acting very suspiciously, but these two people never met. They never talked to each other, they didn't even know the other person existed, let alone what information they had. Could somebody have put it all together? Possibly, yes. But it wasn't likely, and it didn't happen.
As for the token gesture you mention, that was already done -- the FBI (which is part of the government after all) was the organization that knew about the flight school students. Perhaps you meant the FAA or the airlines? Then I would agree. Also, a case could also be made that not having hijacker-resistant cockpit doors was negligent (it's not like 9/11 was the first airplane hijacking).
The Bhopal case is entirely different from 9/11. UC was in the business of making dangerous chemicals. Everything at that plant was under direct control of UC. If UC officials neglected proper safety procedures (I take no position on whether they did), they should be held criminally liable for damages caused.
I don't want to sound cold-blooded, but isn't the lack of regulations one of the main reasons this plant was in India in the first place? When you start cutting/ignoring safety mandates things like this are going to happen. Until the developing world ups it's regulatory standards to those of the developed world, another Bhopal could be just around the corner. Of course, more red tape would cut into the nice revenue stream these countries get from attracting those evil corporations to their back yard. Let's not pass all the blame to foreign corporations when their is plenty to dispense at home.
The landmark judgement on tobacco industries was hailed everwhere even though people(supposed victims) smoking very well knew the consequences. But when it comes to a the Bhopal tragedy where every person was innocent, we get responses that $400 odd million dollars is adequate to compensate the victims. Is an american life worth thousands of times a non-american one? Union Carbide, Philip Morris(and others)...which do you think was more negligent in their actions?
Yep, Many countries helped fund that regime. And the US government put it in place. Our brave leaders have no problem funding genocidal freaks so long as they toe the line and do as we say. If they step out of line, watch it.
So long as UC and Dow continue to feed the beast by puumping millions into our fully-corrupted political system, they will never be held accountable for their criminal negligence.
Actually the Indian government has never requested extradition. The US government has never refused because it was never asked. If you read the story you will see that many people in India feel that the Indian government is not asking because the fear scaring way overseas investors. If you want to blame someone blame the government of India.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I was certainly off-topic, and I agree that the US should not be protecting anyone who may be culpable in this matter. My point was only that there is a lot of crap that goes on in the World, and the US is NOT the only country in the world responsible.
That would make a lot of sense, except:
I'm not defending Union Carbide. I'm just opposed to some of the stupid analogies being made in this thread.
In Canada we have a "Good samaritan" law, such that you can be held liable for inaction, if a court finds that you had a reasonable chance of being able to help someone in need, without putting yourself in danger, and you didn't. It has been used fairly infrequently, but it does exist.
For example, if you see a car accident on the side of the road, and no one else has stopped yet, you are obligated to stop and see if you can provide any assistance.
Random and weird software I've written.
I agree.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What next, one of your employees rapes another one, and the Chairman is brought up on rape chargers?
If you should have known that stuff is set up in your company to make rape happen, then yes, you should be held responsible in some way. The freakin' senior security officer of the site resigned over the security measures at Bhopal, it's not as if the accident happened out of the blue sky
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Rather, its being held in an account by the Reserve Bank of India and has accrued interest. The reason it hasnt been yet paid out completely is because of red tape, bureaucracy and the time it takes in the Indian judicial system. The money is not being spent by anyone, its held safely.
However its horribly less compared to what Dow or Carbide would have had to pay if this were to occur anywhere else. For that, I blame both UC and the Indian administration. Infact, UC's initial offer was far less. Knowing that how can one stand with this corporation???
Rapid Nirvana
The prison / execution system in China.
I'm not sure I should even respond to a troll like this, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, to say that is preposterous is being quite generous. If you've followed any of the videos from Usama you can see that they wanted to hit the American people, not just the towers. The fact that the towers fell was beyond their greatest expectations. If they wanted to minimize the casualties, they would have crashed into the very top of the towers or attacked them at a different time of day or even attacked a different, less populated target. Saving lives was not only not a priority, it was contradictory to their plans. The plan was to attack an American icon and if civilians died, all the better.
So mod up this parent all you want, but it's not going to make it any more valid a line of arguing.
Let's just leave it at being a terrible tragedy that could (probably) have been easily avoided had the Indian or American company intervened, as they should have. Should someone be held criminally responsible? Sure. Should the people receive some of the $470 million that was paid to the Indian government? Sure. Should the victims receive more compensation (or any) directly from Dow? Sure. Is this tradegy comparable to a terrorist act? Not even remotely.
This is all horrible yes. But there is one thing wrong with your reasoning:
The Indian government accepted responsiblility for the land when Dow + UC gave them 400 mil for the damages. Yes that's right, almost half a billion dollars. And this was years and years ago. It hasn't been cleaned up because of many false applications for damages (original estimates were 100k people should recieve compensation, 500k applied), and the courts have tied up any cleanup efforts. Can you blame UC and Dow for people who are hurt after they sold the property and the Indian governement has done nothing to improve conditions there? I hate how everyone is up in arms about this whole thing when they don't realize what the current situation is!
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Uh. He was likening the magnitude of the incidents, not the causes behind them. Because Bhopal happened to someone else, we don't care about it, regardless of scale.
Did Warren Anderson order that safety issues be ignored?
I'd guess he ordered the plant to produce at costs that mad it impossible to observer security measures, and a CEO should know that. If he ignored that willfully, he is responsibel
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Try the other side.
9/11 was the single largest failure of US security agencies in history. It happened two years into an administration where the topic of terrorism was pretty much ignored.
NOT ONE PERSON WAS HELD RESPONSIBLE. NOBODY LOST THEIR JOBS. Nobody, not one, nada, zippo, zilch.
Why? If we held the president responsible for falling asleep on the jobs the homosexuals would be able to get married and they would be teaching that evolution in shcools that's why.
evil is as evil does
The first problem was that the MIC process had been scrapped in the US by UC as it was old and better processes had been developed.
Second, regardless of what happened with the valve, the tanks were never meant for long-term storage (which is what they were being used for.)
Third, the flame tower was of insufficient size. If it had been of proper size it would have consumed the MIC before the chemical left the plant.
Fourth, the warning alarm was not heard by the citizens and was probably never sounded. The plant manager claims that it was sounded, but even if it was the surrounding populace wouldn't have known what it meant.
Fifth, a plant like this should never have been in a large city to begin with.
Sixth, there were no backup machines. This alone would probably be culpable in the US when dealing with such toxic products.
I would say that UC got off lightly with only 500 Million in fines, as any chemical engineer with proper training in plant design and safety could point out these problems.
--Your neighborhood chemical engineer
If people can connect to one another even the smallest of voices will grow loud.
--Serial Experiments Lain
OK then, should we hold accountable the French and German companies that made the plants for WMDs that Iraq used to kill Tens of Thousands?
Or for that matter, should Iraqi civillians be able to hold Lockheed Martin accountable for the weapons they make that kill innocents?
IMO, no on all counts. Don't blame the manufacturer of the tool, blame the one who weilds it. Which is why to me your arguement doesn't hold water - the managers of this plant were directly responsible for the accident through their gross negligence, while the French and German companies that worked with Saddam provided him with the TOOLS he used to murder.
You're confusing 'negligence' with 'criminal negligence'
The former is "failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same circumstances"
The latter is "recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences"
It's difference between getting fired, and going to prison.
Was Warren negligent? I think a case could be made. Was he criminally negligent? No.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Let's not forget that the reason Union Carbide was in there to begin with was because the Indian government created an environment where western companies could pay workers less than market wages, have lax environmental laws, and pretty much run a shoddy operation in order to get money. That business in India could have easily been located in the United States, but, instead, the Indian government allows its workers to be payed less and treated worse to get its competitive advantage. Declaring the head of Union Carbide a fugitive and playing victim is a red herring designed to cover the tracks of a completely corrupt system that is designed to elevate one caste while others are expendable. If you want to prevent Bhopals, insist that foreign governments have rules to make companies paying the same wages and same safety standards as their western counterparts.
This is my sig.
It's the usual "Indians posting local news" thing. As usual, they've avoided responsibility for the corruption involved in plant construction and their stupid cheesiness in operating it.
The plant was indeed shut down. My father the chemical engineer wondered why they had an inventory of MIC if they weren't operating.
Lesson: if you don't store it, it can't leak.
Accounts of what happened vary wildly and it's hard to extract lessons learned to prevent future accidents. The civil aviation world does it better: there are safeguards to keep lawyers from distorting the safety reporting system.
Lesson: there's a tradeoff between "justice" and safety.
There were plenty of early warnings. A safety audit from Carbide's US side flagged a lot of the things that went wrong during the accident. My wife knew one of the Carbide people who trained the plant personnel. He came home *really* worried about the quality of the plant operators.
Lesson: have a safety reporting system and for the love of humanity connect it to real action.
There's a ton of info about Bhopal in Nancy Leveson's book _Safeware_. Don't take it as gospel, my dad said some of it didn't make sense to a chemical engineer, but she has important insights. The main one is that you can play Whack-a-Mole with scapegoats and immediate causes forever, but the only real fix is to build safety into the company culture. My dad worked in places where everyone from the janitor to the CEO was constantly thinking about what might go wrong and what to do to prevent or mitigate it. Those places did not blow up.
Notice how much of the wisdom of chemical plant safety applies to computer security? If you don't store customer credit card numbers, they can't get stolen. If you let security turn into a blame game then nothing will get fixed. You've got to have a place where people can report security problems without getting fired for finding them.
Oh, see nysus's post below for more good facts about Bhopal.
Untrue. Russia has, by far, the most Nuclear warheads. You can add up all the world's nuclear powers (US, Britian, France, China), and you still don't equal the number of warheads in Russia. US has 10,000, and Russia has 18,000, if memory serves.
I think this is a good example of the demonizing of America that is so popular these days. I'm an American in Europe, and here it is amazing how igorant the European media and population are about America. Sure, America has done plenty to be upset about (I'm not too happy with an awful lot right now), but the amount of disinformation is breathtaking.
I think it is completely in-context to point out that this may not even be a subject if Dow were not American. A Q Khan arms up the world's rogue nations with Nuclear weapons, and gets a full pardon by his government. Russia supplied (illegally) GPS jammers to Iraq. Then let's talk about Chairman Mao: we don't even blink when the Chinese talk about that mass murderer like a hero. Were was his justice?
Right now, hating America, whether with or without reason, is popular. I get hit with all sorts of stereotypes here. But, above all, my favorite thing is that, once my European friends learn that I am well traveled, well read, and have a pretty informed view of the world, they are completely unable to comprend those qualities from an American. So they label me as an a-typical American just to get around having to examine the problems with their own beliefs.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
The difference? One was a faith-based initiative.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Nothing really. Just a knee-jerk reaction to the "US international homicide" remark. I think folks SHOULD be held responsible for both their negligence and for the their corruption.
-- I randomly moderate down people who describe their abuses of the mod and metamod system in their sigs. --
I can't be the only one who sees such blazingly obvious hypocrisy in that sig.
Survivors not compenstated: wrong. There was a settlement, but the *Indian* court system has had it tied up for years. IIRC the settlement was in the 400 million dollar range, and it did a good job of bankrupting UC.
Dow Chemical is somehow responsable: Wrong. Dow chemical bought what was left of Union carbide in the late 80's / early 90's, long after the disaster settlements had been made. Holding Dow responsable for Bhopal would be like an AMX owner suing DiamlerChrysler 20 years after getting a settlement out of AMX.
Union Carbide ran an evil nasty horrible pit of dispair of a factory. Right. Sorta. The plant fell in line with many Indian safety standards, which at the time were no where near what our standards are. Of course inspections and safety take a back seat to giving people a job in developing countries. This is nothing new.
Bhopal was a horrifying disaster, but the impression I'm getting is that India is becoming a truly western society. The scummy lawyers are shooting out of the woodwork to go after the deepest pockets. UC's former chairman stil works for Dow, but once the courts on both sides get their heads out of their asses, he'll end up facing charges in India, it's just a matter of time
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Dow Chemical is in no way responsible for the Bophal disaster. The supreme court of India and Union Carbide agreed on terms for a settlement, and the Indian Goverment wasted their that money. Dow has no involvment with the tragedy, and should not be responsible for cleaning it up.
I agree except for one thing. How can the US extradite him if the Government of India never asks!
Read the story and you will see that there has never been a request for extradition. Seems like the government of India is more worried about money than putting the CEO in jail. Frankly anyone with a clue knows that the CEO probably did not know about the lack of safety systems at the plant. He just got the profit loss report from the department that the plant was part of. Safety systems where in place but not functioning. Who made the decision to keep working with many safety systems offline. I can promise you that it was not the CEO but some middle manager. It would be easy to blame the CEO but the real problem would be farther down the chain of command. Not to mention the government of India. Where where there inspectors? Why have they not asked for the US too extridte him. Have the sent any of the managers at plant to jail? What they want to do is look like they are doing something while doing nothing. The charge the CEO of a Union Carbide but never ask for extradition. The US is not protecting this guy yet. It may try since but the Indian government has done nothing to try and actually get him extradited.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
> Were these safeguards required by law?
Unambiguously, yes. In addition to a reasonably well developed set of Health and Safety laws for a third world country, India has the usual common law system of damages for breach of duty of care, (the tort of negligence). It does not have US-style punitive or trebled damages, what is being sought here is merely the cost of putting people back into the position they were previously in, so far as the damage caused to them was forseeable by the company at the time.
The real problem here is with the corporate fashion for holding companies with large numbers of subsidiaries. As each subsidiary is nominally a separate legal person (notwithstanding, with 100% subsidiaries, the tendency for all to follow the topco's orders), the topco is able to avoid corporate responsibility.
I think the word you are looking for here: the excepted way is accepted.
terrorists did (and continue to) want to end human lives.
According to the opinion of terrorists, they want to bring an evil empire down. All the lives lost are considered collateral damage. In any case, people who gave away their lives are considered martyrs, and all 3000 people in WTC went to heaven. Thus, the terrorists did them a favor.
Aren't Jerry, Kramer, George and Elaine in jail for this very offense?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
As others have pointed out, a terrorist attack is a deliberate attempt to end human life and is not quite the same thing as an accident, even one resulting from gross negligence. As operators of the plant, UC had the responsibility to protect its workers and its surroundings. If I wreck my car into someone's house, I am held responsible. It might have been an accident, but I am still responsible. Just say "oops" and walking away does not absolve my debt to those I've hurt. I think the biggest "they hate us" behind this isn't because of the accident (which was horrible) but the conspiracy of ignorance perpetrated by our government and citizenry. I admit I don't know the extent of the negligence involved, but even assuming everything was above board, they killed thousands of people and did millions in damages, so they sure as hell better pay up big time. In addition, if it were found that gross negligence was part of company policy, I would expect criminal proceedings against those complicit in such reckless actions.
As a libertarian at heart, I have to note that more laws and more government regulation are not the answer. The fact is, damage was done and that can be dealt with by the court system. As soon as the politcians get involved, everything goes to hell. In every country around the world, every time a new law is passed that regulates business, it has been been compromised and subverted by those same politicians before the ink is even dry. The fact is, every new law seems to open more loopholes for the dishonest corporation or individual while at the same time locking out those who truly aim to just do the right thing. If a company commits to following the insane rats' nest of legalese that they are required to by law, they will be out of business shortly and only the companies willing to bribe, lie and cheat will be left. As a former big government liberal, I'd have to say that what most pushed me to a "less is more" view of government was the administration of George W. Bush. At first angered by the subversion of what seemed to me sound environmental and regulatory policy, I soon came to the realization that this is how it had always been: the dishonest simply bypass the law. In fact, it seems the criminals seem to favour the law as it keeps legitimate competition at bay. I think that if the government was committed to keeping people safe in their persons and their property, nothing else would be necessary. I still think we need clever solutions to problems like air pollution (it is a common resource and to allow any one group the right to sully it at the expense of the rest of us is the surrender of very basic property rights).
All in all, I think that civil and criminal action should be taken against UC as soon as possible. I really don't understand how anyone could argue that it's alright to kill people so long as it is an accident and that I should only have to make minimal recompense to the victims of my flagrant irresponibilities.
I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
And it's the BBC that's apologising?
mod parent down :)
Sorry to post here, but no email is shown. Eric Johnson aka eric@thejoynt.com.
If available, I would surely appreciate an invitation. Thanks.
We win together or suffer without.
I can't see how Oil-for-Food caused the fall of any regime. It protected Sadam's regime. It bought votes in the security council. It funded the aquisition of arms. It funded terrorism. Billions of dollars never made it into the mouths of the people for whom it was intended. Saddam's take alone was $10.1 Billion. FNC may be the only channel covering this (no surprise, really), but investigations have just begun. Lot's of folks are going to come out of this one dirty.
"If I blatantly disregard the law and fail to secure my child in a seat belt, then get into an accident, I am criminally liable for his injuries."
Yes, but surely you're not comparing blatant disregard for your child's welfare(to help save money) to be the same as shooting him/her. That's just plain idiotic.
(I won't even get into you blaming the government for the 9/11 attack. Do you also blame gun manufacturers? Why not blame the airlines?? But NO - don't ever blame the terrorists - that would just be crazy.)
The bottom line is, should they be liable? YES - duh. Is it a terrorist attack - along the lines of 9/11? The pure idea of this question makes my head want to explode. *POP*
To quote Dr. Phil: "How's that working for ya?"
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The little backstabbers have been living here free, getting the most of their funds from US taxpayers, all the while breaking state and federal laws with diplomatic immunity.
US has not paid its dues in many years, always bickering and holding up payments until UN does things their way. I would love to do the same to my creditors.
You mentioned that International Law should trump US law and the extradition should occur. That's a roundabout way of saying International courts know better than each country. Sounds like you are for letting the UN or other World Government decide things for the USA. UC didn't violate any laws in the safety of the plant. India has very few laws protecting workers, why do you think software "sweatshops" are locating there? You want to hammer one company from ONE country for killing a few 1000's and ignore the fact that 1000's of factory workers in China die every year and even more in the mines. Why not hammer THAT saftey record? Accidents like Bhopal happen, you can't prevent them all from occuring even with the most comprehensive safety systems. At least UC owned up to being at "fault", I haven't heard Exxxon acknowledge that about the Valdez oil spill yet!! If this accident had happened in the USA the claims would STILL be in court. At least the poor bastards in India got something. Here the lawyers get it all. So it's not all negative. And cost-cutting is not per se unethical. Maybe you haven't had an ethics class at Ga Tech yet so you don't quite comprehend the scenario fully.
And by saying that they are "first and foremost deadly to insects" isn't to say that the chemicals can't kill other life, but that they target insects. Just like the dose of antibiotics it takes to kill off bacteria obviously isn't going to kill humans (typically). Different methods of killing affect different organisms in different ways. The poster isn't saying that insects aren't alive, just that they are the target and not humans.
Come on, where have all the quality trollers gone that whose arguments could actually withstand a little logic?
Dow has no plans to clean up the facility and no plans to compensate the survivors.
LOL MICAHEL
You're a complete fuck you and you know it. Why don't you get your head out of your ass and actually look past the "AMERIKAN CORPORATIONS ARE TEH SUCK!" viewpoint you have.
They have compensated to the tune of almost $500,000,000 and they have helped to clean the site up.
WHERE'S your BULLSHIT outrage against the Indian government for doing nothing? They had a 51% share in the plant for fuck sakes.
Golly I hope a Ukranain team is coding an FPS where you roam the barren wasteland of Bhopal hunting pesticide zombies...
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Outsourcing Lost
Any more off-topic than, say, the anniversaries of events such as the Apollo 11 lunar landing or the attacks of September 11th?
Man, Slashdot is run by the editors for the editors. A member of a rock group dying of a drug overdose made the front page simply because he happened to be in CmdrTaco favourite band. There's no rhyme or reason to this shit, they just make it up as they go along. Always have and always will.
And, no, I don't like the latter any more than you do.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The US is not protecting this guy yet. It may try since but the Indian government has done nothing to try and actually get him extradited.
Indian government is made up of people who have been paid up to prolong the case, they are not acting in the best interests of the people, but rather for the people who want to drag this case till it dies.
Remember, who gains from dragging this case? Hint, it is not the affected people or the government. Also remember, that a case going on for long enough can be closed without any judgement once the main parties are no longer alive/doing business.
You're right he did "nothing." As in, he did nothing to set up the safety procedures he should have.
If he had done "something" instead of "nothing", the lives of thousands of people would have been spared.
It's Hydrogen Hydroxide. H2O is wrong, it HOH, hence it having polar bonds. If you are going to make snarky comments, at least get them right.
Don't you remember holding a electrically charged object near a stream of water and having it bend away? Can't do that with the balanced molecule that H2O represents.
I'm an average New Yorker so I feel I ought to weigh in on your question.
As an average New Yorker I pretty damn happy to have the UN in my backyard. And I suspect that goes for most average New Yorkers. I suspect it is a rather rare and non-average New Yorker who is bothered by having the UN here. And I suspect it is an even less average New Yorker who would want them to leave.
Are there some problems with having the UN in the back yard? Wel, duh. The same goes for having any multi billion dollar organization in your back yard.
Do the minuses out-weigh the plusses? Only if you have a few screws loose or a partisan agenda. Look you'd have to be crazy to want to kick a multi billion dollar organization out of your local economy. The UN doesn't even pollute. They are incredibly benign as far as the average New Yorker is concerned. What is a few hundred thousand dollars of unpaid parking tickets next to a billion dollars of local spending. It's a molehill. That's what it is.
Also the average New Yorker is a democrat. The Island of Manhattan is true blue. This is even true for the majority of Wall Street employees. Don't believe me, look up maps of the political donations from the upper east side (its mostly blue and that is where most of the wealthiest New Yorkers live.)
Socially, most New Yorkers are a mix of recent immagrants from all over the world. It isn't hard to extrapolate that the average New Yorker is socially inclined to be ok with the UN.
So what we have is that the average New Yorker supports the UN socially, economically and politically.
So fuck you and the horse you came on. How dare you presume what the average New Yorker thinks. BTW, did it ever occur to you that if the UN was supporting a red state's local economy that we would never hear anything from the Republican reactionaries about the UN as they would get slapped down every time they tried?
Welcome to the reason people hate Michael. He constantly interjects his comments into the story. The rest of us have to post our comments in COMMENTS, like everyone else. Michael thinks he's above that and puts his comment at the very top so we're all forced to read it.
Corporations that do damages on this scale to life and/or environment should have corporate charters suspended then revoked if compensation/cleanup is deemed inadequate. These charters should be revoked by every member state of the UN, and sanctions should be put on non-member states that do not cooperate.
Corporations and their leaders/shareholders should be held responsible for any damages done.
Question is - who was responsible?
That's a very good question. The local government has decided that it's very likely that the UC chairman was probably at least partly responsible. Which is why they want him to face trial.
Unfortunately, the US won't extradite him, so there won't be any trial to decide whether he was responsible or not. If you want to answer the question, "who was responsible?", tell the US to let the trial go ahead.
It happened two years into an administration
Which administration was that? Bush took office in January 2001 and the attacks happened in Sept 2001. Thats more like 8 months...
Did Anderson know the emergency readiness of each and every Dow chemical plant in the world? I think not. Certainly, someone one, probably an officer, is responsible. We shouldn't pass the buck up the CoC straight to the chairman, though.
Your opinion causes me great sadness.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Most states in the US also have good samaritan laws. Nevada is (or was, a few years ago) an exception.
(A student at UC Berkeley was in Reno with his friend. He saw his friend lure an 8-year-old girl into a men's bathroom, where the friend raped and killed her. This student would be charged under the good samaritan law in most states, but not in Nevada. There were quite a few protests aimed at getting Berkeley to dismiss him.)
Lea
I first read the headline as
Brothel Disaster Revisited
Oh, and by the way. At least the US has called what is happening in the Sudan "Genocide." The UN has yet to do that. The mistake the US is making is that it is trying to deal with this problem through the UN. From the Miami Herald: "Mr. Danforth suffered a serious diplomatic setback last week when the U.N. General Assembly thwarted a resolution that would have denounced the killings and other rights abuses in Darfur. The inaction amounted to moral and political cowardice, particularly among African countries. Once again, they followed their pattern of refusing to criticize human rights abuses by another African nation."
This is one case were a US Company outsourced worked... and it ended up killing people... WE NEED TO STOP ALL OFFSHORE OUTSOURCING BEFORE IT KILLS MORE PEOPLE!!!
The $480 million dollar settlement was reached between the Indian government and Union Carbide -- without the input of the families. To date, those affect have seen approximately US$300-500. That may be a lot in India but...
Does that cover the bloody, spontaneous miscarriage pregnant women suffered that night?
How about losing the primary bradwinner in the household?
MethylIsoCyanite killed those affected most severely by virtue of pulmonary edema. For those not medically inclined it means you drown in your own body fluids. People continue to suffer blindness, obscure cancers and all sorts of obscure disorders that are difficult to treat because of their rarity.
They have found that it also continue to have devastating effect on reproductive organs ensuring that the effects will be felt in their children and children's children. I hope I never get to see an earless, lipless or deformed child in person like the ones born there.
Isolate yourself from this tragedy if you want but just remember that corporations are isolated from responsibility and will continue to behave this way if someone does not step up to force people to think about the unique privilege enjoyed by corporations.
There were 6 safety systems incorporated in the design of the factory that were systematically disabled or misused that could have truly limted the impact. Why? Because this factory was not profitable in selling the pesticides, and they were going to shut it down anyway. Never mind that MIC (the toxin) should never have been stored in the megacontainers they stored them in (plant safety would dictate 55-gallon drums, not enough to store 40 TONS of this gas).
Alas, this is the way of the world. We understand that Union Carbide was not necessarily out to do what happened. Technically, it's not their fault right? I think it's the perfect example of what allows to go unchecked, and how legal liability and fiduciary responsibility take precedent over justice.
-- Just another bleeding heart.
The next time I slip and fall on a wet floor, I'm going to sue the CEO of the company a thousand miles away for his viscious attack on me! Then, in about 15 years...I'll sue the new CEO for his viscious attack on me.
Can we get a legal scholar in here please? Sorry, but the buck(rupee) doesn't land that far away. Is the guy in the U.S. who invented technology used in the Chernobyl reactor decades later responsible for that accident? How about the CEO of the company that developed the tech? Why not the POTUS? He is the real top dog. He runs the whole nation and is consulted on every small topic!
Owwwwwwwwwww! Ignorance makes my head hurt!
Before you've made up your mind about an issue, go read about it for yourself. http://www.anwr.org/
"But I'd sure like to see some magnetic yellow ribbons to support the victims of US multinational homicide"
What does that have to do with this? Just because DOW is a US company, suddenly this is "US multinational homicide"? Explain why the ENTIRE US is responsible for what one company does?
Oh, right. You weren't interested in making a lucid point, you wanted to jump on the oh-so-popular-on-slashdot bandwagon against anything from the US.
Sigh. I'm so tired of that. Really. You sound foolish, and contribute nothing to the conversation. I'm sure you can do better, so do us all a favor and try a little harder to think things through next time.
You guys just dont get it do you?!? You see, what youre saying just _wont_ jive with the anti-corporate bashing that people on /. insist on engaging in ... no matter what the facts are.
That wasn't due to an evil corporation though so it doesn't count.
Article
As far as wastelands go, how about the area surrounding the 70 tons of superheated nuclear waste that blew up in 1957 in rural russia.Article
Is it the fault of the operators of the plant? Is it the fault of the company for not doing enough oversight?
Exactly, as awful as this event was, I have a question:
Was this plant being operated by the locals? I.e. Indians? Did they live in Bhopal? I'm guessing the plant wasn't operated by a bunch of fat white American men smoking cigars and wearing top-hats.
To make a trivial comparison, our company has all sort of problems with our outsourced QA teams in India - we have all sorts of detailed specs and info, and these guys still produce some really sloppy work. Is it our fault? Well, maybe a little for management deciding to outsource to begin with.
(Not intended to be a slam against Indians BTW.)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Thanks. I'm glad you liked it enough to comment about it.
Try not paying your taxes for a couple years and you'll see exactly how "responsible for inaction" you can be.
The government can and does, unjustly, prosecute people for much less than this every day.
- Sometimes you're the pidgeon, sometimes you're the statue.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the "blame Anderson" and "blame Union Carbide" bandwagon, and while they are a party to the accident that killed so many, consider this:
Do you think that that plant would have been there in the first place if they were required to have the same liability for accidents and protection systems in place as in the US?
Do you think that India would get continued development by chemical countries if it pushed to punish DOW?
Of course not. This is a case of the India's government selling out the lives and well-being of its own people in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace. That is to say that if they aren't willing to let corporations cut costs, some other country will. The Indian government is as guilty as any safety operator at that plant.
~Ben
I am *not* confusing those things.
How on earth can *you* determine that "no", he was not criminally negligent?
It's completely valid to say that you believe that he was not criminally negligent.
But that's not up for you or me to decide. It's up for a court of law to decide, and people in this argument are saying that he should not even be tried. That's a ridiculous assertion.
That's like saying that O.J. Simpson is guilty of criminal homicide in the first degree. Uh, actually, no. You may believe that, but that doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it true in fact, and it certainly doesn't make it true in our legal system.
You are confusing opinion with fact, and you are also confusing opinion with the verdict of a jury.
Hell, I don't even know for sure that India uses a jury - but by whatever system they use, you do not know right now what the outcome would be.
Education is the silver bullet.
The United States is the largest financial contributor to the UN and has been every year since its creation in 1945.
>What would you think if Dow sent a cloud of dioxin gas over Hoboken?
;-) Good post though.
Probably "I hope I don't die", since I live there.
>If IG Farben contributed directly to the deaths of a few thousand measly Jews?
Probably "I hope I don't die", since I am one.
Wow, you really stuck it to me
Seriously - that parenthetical statement in the summary was unprofessional and unnecessary.
Welcome to slashdot!
Im very surprised that noone has replied to you yet on this matter, but the gas and bio weapons Saddam used in 1991/1992 against the Kurds was purchased from the US and the UK in the 1980s, including the ability to produce more of them. Yes, the vast majority of WMD that we are looking for in Iraq are tehre because we sold them to Iraq. It is true that Germany and France also took part, as did Russia and China, but for the 1980s WMD were commonly traded arms, and the US was one of the biggest traders in them.
Source
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The "benefit" is that the owners of the corporation get rich while everyone else does the hard work and gets no justice. Great system.
Wake the fuck up. The system you are defending is based on exploitation, greed, and lies.
According to Union Carbide's history timeline the Bhopal incident was the result of sabotage, yet I can't find any reference to this in any other source - it's invariably referred to as an accident. It seems a bit of a bizarre claim for them to make, especially in one isolated part of their site. Can anyone shed any more light on this?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
9/11 worked just horribly for me, actually.
About 3,000 people lost their lives, and an estimated 1,000,000 Americans lost their jobs.
I wasn't aware that Dr. Phil was critical of the victims on 9/11, or of people who are harmed by financial loss. Can you point me to an article where he bashes widows and people on unemployment?
Or where he calls for illegal retribution and vigilante justice? Actually, I think that as a licensed psychologist, he is required by law to report to the legal authorities any time that a patient of his indicates that they are going to break the law.
Murdering someone is against the law. Declaring that you wish to murder someone (directly or indirectly) is a clear indication of your intent to break the law. I'm quite confident that Dr. Phil would not approve. But I guess I honestly don't know that for sure.
Education is the silver bullet.
No, this is wrong analogy, you are not hired by the store as a security guard, but your government in fact employes people who are supposed to be doing just that - working as security guards for your country.
You can't handle the truth.
I know. I was speaking hypothetically _if_ human lives was only lost "by accident" (to save money otherwise spend on a more accurate attack), would it make it any less a crime?
IT'S PLAIN STUPID
- "a chemical plant run by Union Carbide". Whoa there. India is a semi-socialist country; it has some very strict laws limiting foreign ownership and control. It would be fairer to say "a company majority owned by the Indian Government, with Union Carbide as a minor partner". I realize this doesnt fit in with the "bad multinational american companies" bogey-man, but tough.
- "released about 40 tons of a toxic gas". Maybe it would be fair to state that this was an UNINTENTONAL release, probably caused by various factors including tired workers and labor unrest.
- "...plant was in the business of creating chemicals deadly to life." Well, if you call locusts, nematodes, chiggers, termites, ants, earwigs, wasps, et al, "life", I guess thats right. But a few people think it's a good idea in a country with a marginal food supply to save a few million human lives from death by starvation by producting chemicals to kill the above-listed lifeforms, so that humans might have a chance of eating some food.
- "Safety at the plant had not been a concern of management". Hmmm, let me think, let's assume the management has no concern for human life, including their own lives or those of their workers-- they just care about making money. In order to make money in that business, you have to be able to control dozens of chemical reactions, temperatures, pressures, flow rates, valves, pumps, manifolds, etc.. If you don't have the right control systems in place everywhere, things can quickly go out of control, and your many billion dollar plant is not making pesticides, it's making a mixture of 31% water, 38% salt, and 21% brown sludge. There HAVE to be extensive mechanisms in place to prevent chemical releases, at the very least those chemicals are expensive!
- "Today, the site remains a contaminated wasteland, unusable and never cleaned up." It comes down to economics: is the cost of cleanup less than the value of the land? India is not that small that it will miss a few acres.
- "The survivors have been minimally compensated". There's a fund of $328 million dollars. If that were spread evenly over the 3,000-some families of survivors, each family would get about $100,000 each. That's about 35 years of average earnings. I wouldnt call that "minimal".
Yes, it was a bad thing that happened, but it doesnt help to misdirect blame and energy.Good samaritan laws in the US protect those who voluntarily attempt to assist victims (e.g. if I see an accident, go attempt CPR on the victim, and end up breaking their ribs doing compressions - which is common even if I am performing them correctly - he/she can't sue me). This is as opposed to professional EMTs/Paramedics.
Good samaritan laws do NOT hold those who fail to assist victims accountable in any way.
According to Google, Quebec is the only place in Canada to suggest bystanders need to assist someone in peril - and only if it does not involve the risk of injury to the would-be rescuer (stopping on the side of a highway does involce the risk of injury, so there is some legal leeway there):
I think you have missed the point that you obviously are an atypical American. You stated that you are well traveled and well read and have a pretty informed view of the world. I can't really give more than my opinion about the worldview of the typical American, but illiteracy rates being what they are, and so many people beyond that being functionally illiterate (able to read, but unwilling) it is pretty fair to say that the majority of Americans are not well read (this may be true in many countries, of course). I also think it would be fair to say that the majority of Americans have not even left their own country and in many cases have not even left their home state. So, being well traveled and well read, you are an atypical American. Just being an American living in Europe (as opposed to passing through on a packaged tour) makes you atypical.
P.S. The poster you replied to didn't mention the vast cache of chemical weapons the US still has. Whether it's the largest or not, the point still stands that the US has a pretty vast array of horrifying weapons of mass destruction. How about those wonderful fuel/air bombs the US has and uses that not only cause a tremendously powerful explosion, but also suck up so much oxygen that survivors of the explosion go on to die horrible, choking death?
AC wrote: "Yeah well, On December 3, 2004, an Indian on a train run by the MTA and located in New York, NY released about 40 tons of a toxic gas on to the subway...or at least is smelled like that. It could have just been the curry."
Hey jackass... first off, curry is delicious. I love the shit. Even if you are a WASP who can't stomach anything with more flavor than a baked potato, the ingredients are GOOD FOR YOU. Turmeric has actually been shown to fight cancer cells. How the fuck is it 'toxic gas'.
Idiot.
I was not demonizing the US, I was responding to an unfair and incorrect attack on France and Germany.
I am too lazy to look up the exact numbers, but the number of nuclear warheads is not that interesting, or even that the US has them, just that WMD are something fairly regular that is helping to protect the western world from a new world war. The parent post was trying to make the mere possesion of WMD into something illegal and unethically, when in reality we are just selfservingly oppressing nations we don't trust into not having them.
Do you have a link to that? I'd like to read it. Thanks!
You will get no argument from me. I am just saying that blaming the US government for not extrdiding him when they the US was never asked to is unfair US bashing.
Frankly what happened in Bhopal was terrible and Union Carbide should have paid a lot more to help those people.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It is on Slashdot for the same reason it is on the BBC news.
n slaughter.htm#current
... ?
It is something that we should all remember.
Many of us work in technology related jobs, and it is important for us to remember the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them in the future.
We all have a responsibility to make sure something like this does not happen again.
In the work we do, in our choices of things we buy, and in legislation our respective government(s) apply.
There may be someone reading this who is worried about the safety procedures where they work. This reminder may help them to make the right decision.
When we buy things because they are cheaper, do we ask how a company can afford to sell something at significantly lower cost than others ?
If we don't ask, or don't care, then we may be (indirectly) encouraging a less safe manufacturing process.
Companies won't take the risks if we don't buy the products.
In the UK, the government is working on a bill to introduce a new offence of 'Corporate Killing'. http://www.corporateaccountability.org/Updates/ma
Would this help to make companies pay more attention to possible safety risks ?
We should all encourage our respective governments to improve their legislation.
I'm as guilty as the next person.
I've seen things in the past that are not 100% safe, and have not reported them.
I buy things that are cheaper and haven't checked how they were made.
I haven't done much to push for better legislation.
Perhaps this article is a reminder for us to do better
Don't read into it too much...I'm using the quote to illustrate how the Indian legal system has worked (or didn't work) for the survivors and victims of the chemical plant accident.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
"Whoops, just kidding," You shouldn't be 'kidding about disasters such as this.
My sister lives there and is also a democrat. She is an average New Yorker, so I don't presume anything! Ask the question, should they pay rent? I didn't say get rid of the UN, withdraw or move it, I want it reformed. Comprehend what I wrote and don't assume so much! If you like an estimated $21 Billion scandle, Kofi Annan's son Kojo implicated and 10 years of sanctions,constant bombings in the no fly zones and were a fan of Saddam being in power. Sitting by while massacres happen in Rhuwanda, Sudan, and Kosovo. Doing nothing, until others have to act. All the while, collecting 3 Billion dollars a year from the US , while other countries pay little or nothing. Pretty much the status quo, you are not "average".
So does this make corporations evil?
Yes it does. Thank you for playing.
please, wont someone think of the criminals feelings?
oh wait, there were two criminals.
ok i guess that means we cant bash either one.
you state that 'most' of the site was cleaned up. do you have any evidence of this whatsoever, other than this news story? because the news story does not say how much UC cleaned up. it only says that UC claimed a study showed groundwater was clean, and payed a certain numbd of millions of dollars to do cleanup. Which study? Was it a good study? Where was it published? When? By whom? and just because someone payed x million dollars to clean something up, doesnt mean that 'most' of it was cleaned up.
I am not asking this to be a lawyer, I am asking you to simply check your facts.
Just a law student looking to reduce IANAL misstatements. While you are probably right in your conclusions (what would happen in US, etc), the current state of criminal law doesn't really recognize something as "reckless neglect". There is recklessness and there is neglect. And at any rate, recklessness or neglect is not the difference between first degree murder and second degree murder, but between murder writ large and manslaughter, a very significant difference indeed. Furthermore, that is all criminal law stuff. Corporate criminal liability is very controversial (who do you arrest? who really winds up paying the price? theories abound, but all have significant problems), corporate civil liability is not. And in many cases, corporate violations are strict liability, that is, all that is required is the bad conduct, regardless of intention. So while millions of dollars sounds like pittance, and surely not adequate to the harm, it could have the affect of destroying the company. Maybe that's enough, maybe not.
I guess in your universe 49.9% is greater than 50%
Perhaps the U.S. gov't is waiting until India prosecutes the gov't inspectors who failed to ensure safety equipment was operational. Maybe they're waiting for the prosecution of the politicians who took the bribes from the local plant manager to cover up the problems.
In other words, maybe they realize that the charges against the UC chairman are probably nothing more than an attempt to create a scapegoat so the corrupt courts and governments involved at the LOCAL level can get off scott free.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
That plant wasn't operating with those safety systems turned off. There was a labor dispute which had the plant shut down. UC claims to this day that a disgruntled member of that labor strike sabatoged something in the plant.
I agree here. Why in the world did michael put that little commentary in the parenthesis? The initial construction of the Bhopal plant in India was greatly praised by many people, not just for the jobs it created, etc., but more so for the pesticides it would produce. These pesticides make farming, both commercial and family, able to produce much more food per area, something which a country with a poor and crowded population like India needs greatly.
Environmental responsibility is very important, but it's hard to argue against the use of pesticides when you're talking to a family that is severely malnourished because weevils and locusts have destroyed their previous three harvests.
Anderson's paid a CEO's salary because he is responsible for running the company. He's the boss of the boss of the boss of the guy who didn't do his job (or however many iterations there are there). When the company does well, Anderson does well. He gets credit when stuff goes right (even if it's just for hiring the right people to do a good job).
So, when it fucks up, he fucked up. He's not the guy with the hand on the switch, but he is -- make no mistake -- responsible for that switch. He's ultimately responsible for making sure the maintenance and safety is done correctly, even if he delegates the management of those facets of the company to somebody else.
you candy coated it.
the managers and executives of that plant and the company that owned it made intentional and pre-meditated decisions to NOT put in place the safety measures. they KNEW that it could and would happen without the safety equipment in place and or operating.
sorry but the entire board of that company needed to be publically hanged in the town square and their bodies dragged through the streets.
I am firmly for holding the executive staff of corperations completely accountable for any decison they make and anything their company does and our govt needs to capture and turn over these terrorists to the indian athorities for punishment.
but we all know that King George W the second is for protecting the rights of these monsters to kill for the sake of the almighty dollar.
If you break it, you fix it .
.
, .
, .
.
.
They should go in there and restore the land as it was before
they ruined it, they should cover all medical costs of the victims
and bypass the Indian government except for perhaps the cleanup
effort
The corporations of the world are living under one set of law
and the ppl are an under class beneath it, this has to stop
As for nothing like this going on in the US, go rent Erin Brokovich.
As a female lawyer she fought corrupt corporations in the US
and they did all they could to scare her and threaten her right
here on US soil
Not the same number of ppl died, but never the less alot of ppl
were dying and entire towns were affected by it
Corporations need to be placed as a service/tool beneath the rights
of human beings, and their trampling of human rights world wide
needs to come to end for all time
Corporations need a business model, not a get out of jail free card.
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Weapons of Mass Destructions fall into the three categories:
Nuclear
Biological
Chemical
Of the three, the US only has large stockpiles of the first, nuclear. They have minimal quantities of chemical weapon and are in the process of disposing of them.
The US has never created or maintained any biological weapons.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
How the hell are the poor CEO's supposed to make a profit now!?!?!?!?!
Goddammit this is just bullshit!!!!!!!!!!!
FYI, daisy-cutter bombs are not fuel-air explosives.
Great and informative post though, thanks!
This line of arguing is so damn hypocrticial.
Had it been some security flaw in Windows, everyone would've been beating the shit out of M$ and Bill Gates all over Slashdot.
Now, isn't THAT an accident. People dont (usually) introduce bugs intentionally. But here on Slashdot that kind of stuff is blasted.
But here, 15,000 people died - because some son-of-a-bitch American firm wanted to have cheap investment and greater profit - and that's why they didn't install even minimum security measures.
It's homicide I'd say!
And look at the hypocrisy. If it's Saddam Hussain with his "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (whatever they were) - America burns down a whole country!
And when it's an American CEO with large pockets, he isn't even being extradited for a ghastly crime.
Sickening!
Nandz.
PS: I'm an Indian, btw. I can expect a thread about offshore outsourcing and job-stealing now!
I just received the following email at work. Nice tongue-in-cheek, anti-Dow email and related website.
December 3, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"DOW" STATEMENT A HOAX
"Historic aid package for Bhopal victims" a lie
Contact: Marina Ashanin, Corp. Media Relations, +41-1-728-2347
Related information: http://dowethics.com/bhopal/
Today on BBC World Television, a fake Dow spokesperson announced fake plans to take full responsibility for the very real Bhopal tragedy of December 3, 1984. (1) Dow Chemical emphatically denies this announcement. Although seemingly humanistic in nature, the fake plans were invented by irresponsible hucksters with no regard for the truth.
As Dow has repeatedly noted, Dow cannot and will not take responsibility for the accident. ("What we cannot and will not do...
is accept responsibility for the Bhopal accident." - CEO Michael Parker, 2002.) The Dow position has not changed, despite public pressure.
Dow also notes the great injustice that these pranksters have caused by giving Bhopalis false hope for a better future assisted by Dow.
The survivors of Bhopal have already suffered 20 years of false hope, neglect, and abdication of responsibility by all parties. Is that not enough?
To be perfectly clear:
* The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) will NOT be liquidated. (The fake "Dow plan" called for the dissolution and sale of Dow's fully owned subsidiary, estimated at US$12 billion, to fund compensation and remediation in Bhopal.)
* Dow will NOT commit ANY funds to compensate and treat 120,000 Bhopal residents who require lifelong care. The Bhopal victims have ALREADY been compensated; many received about US$500 several years ago, which in India can cover a full year of medical care. (2)
* Dow will NOT remediate (clean up) the Bhopal plant site. We do understand that UCC abandoned thousands of tons of toxic chemicals on the site, and that these still contaminate the groundwater which area residents drink. Dow estimates that the Indian government's recent proposal to commission a study to consider the possibility of proper remediation at some point in the future is fully sufficient.
* Dow does NOT urge the US to extradite former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson to India, where he has been wanted for 20 years on multiple homicide charges. (3)
* Dow will NOT release proprietary information on the leaked gases, nor the results of studies commissioned by UCC and never released.
* Dow will NOT fund research on the safety of Dow endocrine disruptors (ECDs) considered to have long-term negative effects.
* Dow DOES agree that "One can't assign a dollar value to doing what's morally right," as hoaxter Finisterra said. That is why Dow acknowledged and resolved many of Union Carbide's liabilities in the US immediately after acquiring the company in 2001. (4)
Again, most importantly of all:
* Dow shareholders will see NO losses, because Dow's policy towards Bhopal HAS NOT CHANGED. Much as we at Dow may care, as human beings, about the victims of the Bhopal catastrophe, we must reiterate that Dow's sole and unique responsibility is to its shareholders, and Dow CANNOT do anything that goes against its bottom line unless forced to by law.
For more information please contact Marina Ashanin, Corporate Media Relations, +41-1-728-2347, or reply to this email.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
(1) On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide - now part of Dow - accidentally killed thousands of residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant leaked a vast cloud of lethal gas over the city.
Since that date, at least 12,000 more people have died from complications, and 120,000 remain chronically ill. The Dow Chemical Corporation hereby expresses its condolences to the victims.
(2) Union Carbide was originally forced to pay US$470 million in compensation to survivors, which amounts to about US$500 per victim.
(Note: Dow hereby wishes to retract the 2002 statement o
Law?!! What's that? In India there are no rights for anyone who doesn't have deep pockets or strong connections into the government or legal system. Everything in India is a privilege (personal safety, healthcare, electricity, clean water, clean air).
Any 'settlement' made with the govt. is simply distributed amongst the honorable (yeah right) public officials. Hence nothing ever makes it to the actual victims. Corruption is the cancer of India.
Apart from highly talented engineers and doctors (most of whom are outside India), India's legal and political system is a total farse. At the end of the day, no public official cares about the citizens. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you're dependent on a public agency or official - GOD help you. Bottom line, you're better off dead than alive.
That business in India could have easily been located in the United States
According to this web site, the same chemicial was produced and stored at a Union Carbide plant in Institute, West Virginia, USA. Safety was neglected to the point that state officials fined Carbide that year (see same page). I remember some mention of this in the press at the time.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
" I diasgree a little. I don't think someone can be held responsible for inaction."
It depends. If you are a lifeguard on duty and you let someone drown by "inaction", you will be held responsible.
That company was responsible for keeping their lethal toxins safe from the public. They are responsible for their inaction/negligence when thousands of people die.
unfortunately, justice is served arbitrarily, if at all...
The law is like poorly written code. and the justice system is a broken compiler. sigh...
4000 people dead? why didnt someone declare a "War on Corporate Ignorance of Safety"? oh wait they were Indian deaths...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Yeah after all the only thing saying that you can't extradite and American citizen from America is just a pice of paper labeled the bill of rights. What does it matter. Lets just throw it in the garabage can because you don't like it.
This is the website which duped the BBC news producer:
l
http://dow-chemical.va.com.au/
it is a copy of the real website. apparently the whole interview was organised by email and no other validation was used apart from the appearance of the website as being real. they just said as much on the bbc news channel.
i actually saw the interview this morning and thought it was real. anyway the hoax is by these people:
http://www.theyesmen.org/dow/articlenytimes.htm
In the US, A "Good Samaritan Law" means, not a law that forces people to help out, but a law that holds them blameless if they do so. These types of laws were passed in reaction to some very nasty lawsuits where the good samaritan got sued afterward because his attempts to help were not well-informed and ended up causing damage. (i.e. giving someone CPR incorrectly and breaking a rib, when it turned out the person's problem required a heimlich maneuver instead of CPR, so the risk of breaking ribs that comes with CPR was unnecessary in the first place.)
Anyway, that kind of Good Samaritan law I agree with, but the kind you talk aobut, to make it *mandatory* that you do a good deed seems to be treading on dangerously thin ethical ice - it's a bit like mandatory tithing.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The Who's John Entwistle Dead. Front page article. Go figure.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Why not compare?
Osama believes the lives of thousands of innocent Americans are less important than his insane plans for Islam.
The US believes the lives of thousands of innocent Indians are less important than avoiding a precedent of holding corporations and their executives accountable for mass slaughter.
Our position on corporate negligence is no less despicable than Osama's on terrorism, and at least as deadly.
BTW, an accident is only an accident if you shoulder responsiblity for it. If you shirk it, then it becomes something worse.
Play Command HQ online
There is the concept of scapegoating at play here. Do you really thing that Anderson had anything personally to do with the actions that night? Even remotely indirectly it's a big reach.
Internal Union Carbide documents, released in the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit against the company, indicate that he and other executives had been warned by engineers of the poor safety mechanisms. A 1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology that would be used in the Bhopal factory was "unproven." A safety review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a "serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials" at the factory.
You can read part of the class action complaint against Anderson here.
How Politicians Lie: http://www.factcheck.org/
They're only brown-skinned third world people, but hey.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
Don't updated to say, "oh, we lied...but Big Corporations are still evil because they didn't do this this or that". Take the story down. Fucking be responsible for once, Michael.
The person you responded to didn't say Union Carbide is without blame. All that was said is that the analogy to 9/11 doesn't work because one was a deliberately planned act and the other was not. Just because some entity is in the wrong doesn't mean it is identical to all other incidents in which some entity was in the wrong. It is still useful to point out the differences between criminal situations, otherwise you'd end up with jaywalking, murder, fraud, and theft all being treated with the exact same punishment under the exact same statute, and that would be absurd.
You'd have an easier time getting your hands on the CEO of Union Carbide if you levied charges against him that actually legally apply - there are some, like massive negligence. Murder, however, is not what occured. Uncaring negligence is.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
This shit goes too damn far.
Swearing about shows you have no grasp of the details.
If someone negligently directs safety to be disregarded to increase profits, then he or she is a criminal.
What you have described though is that the CEO is personally criminally responsible for any act of wrongdoing done by any part of the company. That is absurd.
More US bashing from EXTREMELY left-wing organizations and mainstream media. The US has never sold bio-weapons. In the 1980's it was Top Secret that we HAD them. What the US sold was petroleum refining technology. If you would take a look the organic chemistry to make pesticides and the chemistry to make something like Sarin are damn near identical. A refinery can make the components of beneficial drugs or deadly chemicals with very minor changes as the technology is the same, just the mixture of chemicals a bit different.
Sure Bhopal was a disaster. Should India ban all technology and recede into the dustbins of history because of Bhopal?
Should the government of India also be held responsible?
If you think that they are at least somewhat responsible, then why on earth would you let them "place judgement" on anyone. How were they held accountable?
I do agree that a company that chooses to run it's business in a third world country such as India, to save money should be held somewhat responsible for damages done, BUT the people of that country should demand accountability from their government.
Can't you just see it. India comes to the U.S. and says "put that dangerous plant in our country, it will employ a ton of our cheaper labor people and we don't have near the restrictions the U.S. has". The company says sure, but we have our "standard" safety measures that must be kept up. India says "No problem, we can handle that....": but they don't.
This reminds me of dealing with Indian software developers now. Every answer out of their mouth is "Yes we can do that". You ask a question like "We need someone with 20 years of Java experience, do you have anyone like that...." and before you can finish they have answered "Yes we have many people like that". Then when you need the work done, you find out the truth. Granted nobody dies, (unless it is some medical system), but this illistrates how they oporate, and shows that nothing has changed in 30+ years of doing business with them.
So yes the guy is somewhat accountable, but you want the people that hold a lions share of the blame (their government) to put this guy on trial?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Ah, so that _wasn't_ weaponized anthrax made at a US lab that made the rounds some time ago?
moron
When you neglect security to a point where accidents are bound to happen sooner or later, do you still not think we should hold the responsible accountable?
Of course they should be held accountable - but only for what they actually did, not some made up version of what they did that has been inflated for bullshit political reasons (.i.e. calling it terrorism when it was actually negligent homicide).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It was, in fact, half of a billion dollars.
Not sure if anyone has posted this yet, but listening to the CBC they were discussing this two days ago and the fact was brought up that the whole problem occured because of a refrigerator was turned off during the day(or night) just to save the company $50.00 a day. I'm certain that they didn't mean for this to occur over $50.00 however it is just gross to hear that the accident was a result of doing so.
Depraved indifference that leads to death is, in fact, murder. In the US, at least. I'm not familiar with Indian law, but I'd assume that killing 15,000 people through negligence is probably a felony there, too.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
There was coverage of this on CBC morning radio this week. Apparently, despite repeated requests by medical professionals, Dow refuses to hand over a list of the chemicals used to produce the gas, citing Trade Secrets. Until they make an effort to help these people find effective treatments for their afflictions the company should be put under heavy sanctions.
The UN can no longer legally pay rent. It is not possible. That question could have been raised back when it was first formed, but it cannot be raised anymore. It's a done deal now. Why? Because the land it sits on is no longer part of the USA, in precisely the same way that Washington DC isn't part of either Virginia or Maryland anymore. The land was ceeded, and now it's a done deal.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In the US inventory, there is no 'weaponized' anthrax. A small quantity is kept on hand at Fort Derrick, MD, to test and create vaccines.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Here's a suggestion. Stop opening your mouth. The less you say the smarter you look.
- dopehead. In which case, this is just about some embassies owing NYC property taxes. Well I have news for you, embassies are not part of the UN. They are part of various foreign nations. So take your beef up with those nations, not with the UN.
0 227316
You asked, "should they pay rent?"
You do realize they own the fucking building, don't you? Perhaps you were refering to real estate taxes. But if you were, then you still don't know wtf you are talking about, because the land isn't part of the US it is international territory.
I'm guessing that you are just repeating from memory some lame rant from pick-you-favorite-reactionary-celebrity-oxycontin
RE 3 billion dollars a year. You ignorant slut. Here's a good breakdown of the '03 payments:
http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FO2002
Basically our annual dues are ~300 million. We pay more to fund peacekeeping operations across the globe. Those are all operations which we chose to be involved in, you might recall we have veto power over such things. And the grand total isn't even in the ball park of 3 billion a year.
RE: Massacres - Where in the UN charter do you see a mandate to be the world's policeman. It simply isn't what the UN was formed to do. Its a straw man argument. Anyway, it has taken on a lot of peacekeeping roles, including roles in all of the places you mentioned, which pretty much makes you look ignorant again - a running theme.
Re: 21 billion dollar scandal - The report comes out in January let's wait and see. That's what my Senator, Hillary, said. Although, it ain't looking good for Kojo. Anyway, I'm not up on the scandal, maybe you can fill me in on the details, but I bet the more details you get the less it will have to do with average New Yorkers and what they ought to think of the UN being in their backyard. In otherwords, I bet it is off topic.
Re:While other countries pay little or nothing - That's like the rich bitchin about paying more in taxes than the poor. The funny thing about being a rich american is that we materially benefit more from a stable world than does some poor bastard in the third world. The key to this is 'material' as in wealth. Our wealth requires stability and so we pay to keep it. That's reality, get over it.
Given the current situation in the USA, where corporations have the same rights as people then they should bear the same responsibilities.
Which is a physical impossiblity, which is what is wrong with the legal definition that a corporation is a seperate entity from the people that make it up. It gets all the same rights, but it is physically impossible for it to get the same responsibilities. It can't serve out half its life in a prison. It can't "get the chair". Thus individuals who commit crimes on their own that have these sorts of punishments are taking a much larger risk than individuals who do it through a corporation. It's no surprise then, that corporations tend to push the envelope of laws more than individuals do - for them it's not as risky.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Also when you think of the people who run this world, think of corporations. Who else but the corporate ruling class could kill thousands of people and get away with it?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Bhopal is NOTHING LIKE 9/11.
On 9/11, WHITE, AMERICANS DIED!
When that happens, people here lose their minds.
Should the government of India also be held responsible?
No. It's the chairman that we are talking about here, and there's nothing stopping the government of India also holding the individual responsible in the government accountable.
This reminds me of dealing with Indian software developers now. Every answer out of their mouth is "Yes we can do that".
How experienced are you with Indian developers? Dealing with one or two companies isn't an excuse to write off all the developers in a country as a bunch of scam artists.
So yes the guy is somewhat accountable, but you want the people that hold a lions share of the blame (their government) to put this guy on trial?
If it was the person in the government responsible for the accident deciding who gets charged, then I would agree with you, but it isn't, is it?
India isn't asking for extradition - individuals WITHIN India are, but the government is not, and you can only extradite someone to a government, not to a collection of concerned citizens staging a protest The protesters are talking to the wrong audience. FIRST they need to convince the Indian government to call for an extradition before they ask the US to comply with such a call that doesn't exist yet.
And they might have a lot of trouble doing that, since the Indian government itself is just as much to blame in the disaster as is Union Carbide was. (Union Carbide got the agreement from the government that the area around the plant would be zoned such that no residences would be allowed to exist in the vacinity. The shanty town where the majority of the deaths occurred was built close to the plant in violation of that agreement.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Right, and somehow I doubt the terrorits' scheme took only 8 months to cook up. A good chunk of this was going on under Clinton's watch.
Now, I do agree that more head should have rolled though, particularly in the CIA...
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Ummm...yeah. That's what anyone who goes to war does. When we fought the Second World War, it was because our leaders made a calculated decision that their political goals (e.g. American sovereignty, opposing national socialism &c.) were worth more than the lives they cost. And you know what, they were right.
Same with Iraq. Same with any war: the decision is made that the cost is worthwhile. You may disagree in one or another case, but even you would apply that same calculus.
What, exactly is the point about saying that the plant was in the business of creating chemicals deady to life?
I don't see why it matters -- methyl isocyanate, the gas that was released, is a key reagent in number of industrial chemical syntheses, like the production of plastics, not just the production of "chemicals deadly to life."
While it may be true that the people responsible for the plant should have been extra careful because of the nature of their product (if that is what the parenthetical was supposed to convey), the fact is that the risks are much broader.
In 1905, Belgian colonial entrepreneurs called the Red Rubber massacres in the Congo the result of "negligence which goes with the industrial extraction and exploitation of the resources of our great Crown Colony". Millions of people died ("they didn't drink enough water, we told them to do so; they died from exhaustion", "we cut off their hands to teach them that they should drink more water", etc...).
The perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Instead, they have received statues and monuments. Brussels, my city, was built on the profits stemming from those ideological "accidents".
And the capital which was amassed by these perpetrators still works today, in mysterious ways. It has increased and expanded. I'm sure UC will be punished and will give some financial compensation. But Capital moves so much faster than the sorrow and the memories of the people whose lives have been destroyed by it.
Advice to UC executives: when you kill 15,000 people- yes, 15,000 people...you should thank your lucky stars you're not ripped to shreds by an angry mob or tried in an international court for crimes against humanity. The fact that nobody in Union Carbide management hasn't committed suicide over the guilt is pretty good proof of how disturbed they really are.
The reason the compensation for the victims is so pitiful is that it was done under Indian law. In Indian law, if you accidentally kill someone, the compensation is based on what they would have been worth at the end of their life. In most cases, that is pretty much zero.
The whole point is that the deaths were not accidental. They were due to extreme and willful negligence on the part of Union Carbie (now Dow Chemical) management and employees. Worse, UC blamed a disgruntled employee for the whole thing, despite very conclusive proof otherwise.
Please help metamoderate.
There was an episode on "Sienfeld" where the gang was held legally responsible because they stood by and let a mugging happen, I thought this episode was based on a law that Juiliani passed while he was in office, is this correct?
Pretty much ever day of every year is an anniversary of something big that has happened in the past. Perhaps you missed both the supposed purpose of this website and also Michael's obvious retarded editorializing. There are plenty of places on the internet where this is appropriate material, I'm just saying that Slashdot shouldn't be one of them. This has little to do with "technology" (how this story was categorized) and mostly to do with corporate and government politics and liability.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Actually, it can "get the chair".
Basically, you revoke the corporations charter, pay all the debts (which hopefully include a whopping fine for negligence) and divest the remainder of the holdings (if any) to the shareholders.
Ideally, the shareholders get bupkiss after the fine, which raises an immediate scream from investment firms all over the globe and prompts *serious* investigation of any company that is being invested in to make sure that kind of stuff doesn't happen again.
The guy who ran the company at the time is obviously washed up forever, as no board would want to touch such a person with a 10-ft pole.
Punish non-ethical companies severely, and they'll stop receiving investments. Darwinian law applies.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Looks like someone forgot to change the copyright date.
First and second degree murder are distinguished by an ethical judgement.
Corporations can and should pay for their misdemeanors. When you say that the company could be destroyed by paying - what you realy mean is that its current shareholders could lose their money and the assets could be sold to other management. The existing workforce would continue to work and the business should go on to prosper.
Responsible businesses can and do buy companies which have outstanding liabilities. An example is the european engineering company ABB which took on a company which had substantial asbestos related liabilities. ABB is paying for those liabilities at considerable cost to its shareholders and profit line. Dow Chemical is similarly liable and seeks to spend money in the courts defraying their responsibility into the future, because it is cheaper to their bottom line and with any luck the victims will all be dead in a few more decades. Dow Chemical took on a liability which it is trying to evade, I do not think they have ethical management.
If people spent as much time and energy on demanding regulation of abominations against natural justice in the capitalist system as they do getting moralistic about gay marriage and abortion then I might have more respect for their ethics.
Is Bohpal evidence that ethics is a commodity which has been bought and manipulated in the United States?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Wait, when was the US in Rwanda and Sudan? NATO was in Kosovo, and besides http://www.europaworld.org/issue44/bushendorsesuns 27701.htm
Cheers,
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
The details of the Bhopal disaster are well-documented. There is no new detail to speak of. UC is obviously, blatantly, indefensably guilty of ignoring critical safety precautions that directly resulted in this massive loss of life. And you, danheskett, sit there behind your keyboard and actually try to explain away and defend these actions with the most blinkered, ignorant red herrings and non sequiturs. Its fucking astonishing, and sickening. Why on earth you would deign to take this position is a mystery, unpenetrated by your bloviatings. Warren Anderson should go to jail and UC should have to pay restitution. Forget Indian law, forget corporate non-person responsability. They should do what's right. They haven't. It's a massive crime, and it's just that simple.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I hate to say soemthing in favor of the hideously negligent corporation(s) behind this disaster, but they did try to make ammend. CEO Anderson arrived immediately after the disaster to try to "assess and assist," but was placed under house arrest and threatened with a murder trial if he did not flee the country. ('Shoot first, ask questions later' comes to mind.) Also, while 470,000,000 dollars is hardly a lot to compensate the current count of over half a million injured and more than 15,000 dead; at the time UC was negotiating a compensation settlement, they were being told 8,000 dead and 100,000 injured... and half a billion US dollars in mid-'80s money is quite a chunk of change. The Indian official responsible for managing and dispensing the money have bungled the situation for 15 years, shouldn't they be accepting some of the responsibility for letting these victims live horribly painful lives without proper care this whole time?
Now we are talking about hoaxes. did you notice Bush was arrested
It did not make the news for long.
As you mentioned, if a similar accident occured on US soil, press, etc would be screaming for blood. But culpability would be more clearly defined here. The local/state governments that gave the permits for the plant, the EPA/OSHA/State department of environmental management which had oversite over the plant and accident -- they all would share in the blame. Isn't the Indian government at least partly to blame for allowing the accident and allowing the unsafe operation. I mean, I don't put my trust in a chemical company to keep me safe, but I know that my government is going to at least make an attempt. Also, from what I have read - there has been 470 million dollars paid to the Indian government that has NOT been used for anything related to helping people. Personal responsibility goes to anyone who knew about the conditions, such as plant manager, safetey engineer, local government, but blame should be spread evenly.
That's because you never these other countries saying how great they are either, or deciding unilaterally on wars, or going on and on about how the whole world wants to attack them, etc...
JESUS BLOODY FUCKING *HELL* is it THAT hard to spell HYPOCRITE WITH THE FUCKING _E_ AT THE END??
Everytime you illiterate lemurs write 'hypocrit' I think it's a blood test!
So, what you are saying is that Union Carbide purposely blew up its own plant, just like Osama deliberately attacked the WTC? The statements are only comparable if you belive that Bhopal was a deliberate act.
Let me quote from my sources in my previous post: Hardly 'petroleum refining technology', and even if these were jsut sent to Iraq under the guise of public health, its incredibly nieve of the administration.
In 1994, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs produced a report into sales of chemical and biological weapons technologies to Iraq, and concluded that sales were greenlighted by the US administration. I quote (emphasis mine): Again, I say hardly petroleum refining technology. This isnt US bashing for the sake of bashing, this is cold hard truths being shown at a time when the US would rather it wasnt. I will freely admit that the UK, France and Germany isnt any better, but at least we dont delude ourselves into thinking it didnt exist.
The big difference is that 15,000 foreign *brown* people died. That's the political equivalent of two or three Americans. Two or three *poor* Americans. I'm surprised the head of UC didn't make a comment like "Crunch all you want, they'll make more."
pooptruck
Yeah, I know. And honestly I kind of feel the same way you do.
*Someone* needs to be accountable for these deaths, since it was clearly no mere accident.
Education is the silver bullet.
A nearly $500 million settlement was reached with the government of India to repair to extend possible. That's 1980's dollars, by the way. That's a lot of money in India.
I calculated that Union Carbide was fined over ten times their 1984 profits.
The stock price was halved as a result. Debt approached 80% of company revenue. It was the target of several hostile take-over attempts. UC did not easily walk away from Bhopal.
Due to numerous fiscal problems (including the above) they restructured themselves several times to avoid bankrupcy and were bought out by Dow Chemicals in the end.
Interestingly, Union Carbide of India (Limited) actually owned the plant. They had revenues of $170 million in 1984. Union Carbide Incorporated (USA) owned just over half of that plant. As far as I can figure, UC (India)'s profits were under two million for 1984. UC (USA)'s profit for 1984 was $41 million.
Of course, there are more than a few people who wanted to see Union Carbide's buildings razed, the ground salted, lawyers and accountants fighting over the corpse, and their employees out of work.
I'm not sure that would be justice.
Justice would have been the Indian government not playing politics with the case and going after the people responsible. My impression is that they have failed that objective.
This is not the first time that Dow Chmeicals is victim of an hoax on this matter. In 2002, the activist group RTMark did a hoax site dowethicals.com where they were talking about Bhopal. You can see the press release they did at the time. After that Verizon cut the connectivity of their hosting provider thing.net without any warning, and obviously Dow was behind.
Their slogan: "Living. Improved daily."
Their commitments: "Maintaining strong relationships with our communities is also a priority and is covered by Dow social responsibility policies. Dow communities tend to be smaller in size and our corporate presence is often very significant. We interact closely with local businesses, governments, community groups, and individuals both collectively as Dow and individually as members of the community."
They definitely interact closely...
Take a look at this 60's ad for Union Carbide... Picture's a little ironic, no? http://photos2.flickr.com/1891004_c76fe310c2_b.jpg
No, but he's responsible for yours, at least while you're in his shop. And, his manager is responsible for his. The same applies to the White House, but expand it to the whole country.
Negligence can be criminal, but that really isn't the question is it? What the situation comes down to is that will it hurt business if executives are held responsible for negligence that costs lives? The answer in the minds of those who have the power to make these decisions is yes, it will hurt business. The result is a bifurcation of justice for the haves and the have-nots. Is this a second crime to compound the first? Yes, it is.
= 9J =
yeah, but if you're a security guard at that same grocery store, and you hide in a corner, you CAN and should be held responsible for inaction!
the inaction of safety officials amounts to negligence of their job and they ARE responsible.
I'm assuming that you realize that you're twisting the argument by referring to WWII, since most people will agree with you that this was considered the closest thing to a "just war" in recent memory; moreover, it wasn't a unilateral US operation. Western Europe was more than happy to see the US *finally* get involved in WWII.
The original poster is referring to the plethora of other unilateral, non-declared military operations the US has conducted, many of which are/were in violation of international laws.
I'm confused. I thought good samaritan laws absolve people who try to do good from liability. For example, you collapse and I give you CPR. In the process, I break your ribs. You cannot sue me for breaking your ribs.
What you describe sounds like the last episode of Seinfeld, and frankly, doesn't sound like it would hold up in court, unless the Berkeley student had prior knowledge of what his friend was going to do.
AFAIK, absolutely not. Perhaps a proposed law somewhere, but such a law would never have been proposed by Giuliani, imo.
Uhhh, ya know why that is? I'd have to say that it's probably because most of the people on /. are Americans, so we live in this country and are in a position, perhaps a small one, to actually do something about the acts of the US. I don't live in France, don't speak the language and am not a citizen of that country, meaning that my chances of influencing their foreign or domestic policies is nada, dick, fuck-all, if you know what I mean.
Also pointing at another country's wrongdoing is in no way a justification for country's wrongdoing despite what Republicans and other conservatives believe and say.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Has the government of Bhopal provided sufficient evidence that the chairman of UC was legally culpable? Especially since UC is claiming that the release may have been due to an act of sabotage - a worker putting too much water into the methyl isocyanate tank.
Countries have the right to refuse to extradite one of their citizens for a variety of reasons - one would be the concern that the person would not receive a fair trial or face excessive punishment (e.g. many countries not willing to extradite to the US due to capital punishment). And many countries will refuse to extradite someone when the charges are not something that is a criminal offense in that country.
Has anyone in India been prosecuted for their part in the disaster?
>I don't think someone can be held responsible for inaction
Tell that to Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine
Robber: Alright fatso, out of the car.
Kramer: I want to capture this.
Robber: Come on! Gimme your wallet.
Victim: Don't shoot.
Jerry: Well, there goes the money for the lipo.
Elaine: See, the great thing about robbing a fat guy is it's an easy getaway. You know? They can't really chase ya!
George: He's actually doing him a favor. It's less money for him to buy food.
Robber: I want your wallet. Come on. Come on, come on.
Jerry: That's a shame. Alright, I'm gonna call NBC.
Victim: Officer, he's stealing my car! Officer, I was carjacked. I was held up at gunpoint! He took my wallet, everything!
Jerry: Okay, thanks anyway. They can't get another plane.
Kramer: All right, what's wrong with the plane we got? They're just checking it out.
Elaine: Forget it.
Jerry: No, no, no. We're not getting on there. Come on, let's go get something to eat in Sticksville.
Officer: All right, hold it right there.
Kramer: What?
Officer: You're under arrest.
Jerry: Under arrest? What for?
Officer: Article 223-7 of the Latham County Penal Code.
Elaine: What? No, no - we didn't do anything.
Officer: That's exactly right. The law requires you to help or assist anyone in danger as long as it's reasonable todo so.George: I never heard of that.
Officer: It's new. It's called the Good Samaritan Law. Let's go.
I could happen....
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
What does that have to do with this? Just because DOW is a US company, suddenly this is "US multinational homicide"? Explain why the ENTIRE US is responsible for what one company does?
US government has been supporting US based multinational corporations for years (heck, they decide who will be in power and what the policies will be). So, naturally, the anger would be towards US as a whole.
US people are fine (at least a majority) when innocent iraqis are being killed because some Saudis are responsible for 9/11 attacks. Yet, people like you have the nerve to feign innocence when a systematic abuse and a large scale homicide happens.
I couldn't agree more, the Indian government was criminally negligent in not caring for the safety of it's people.
What else can you expect from the makers of Napalm? Tears for the sufferers? Money! Naah.
They make money on death. That business needs people to have no conscience. And this clearly reflects in their handling the UC case too.
UC is obviously, blatantly, indefensably guilty of ignoring critical safety precautions that directly resulted in this massive loss of life.
I've said nothing to discourage that. I did note however that India is guilty of taking a huge pile of cash and doing nothing resolve the suffering caused by UC. That is horrendous, perhaps as bad or worse than the original crime. 20 years of sitting on nearly $500M in cash is indefensible.
That being said, there is not irrefutable evidence that the CEO of the company is personally criminally liable for the safety problems at the plant in question. That is a fiction, and if you proof I ask you to present it instead of swearing up and down all day.
Why on earth you would deign to take this position is a mystery, unpenetrated by your bloviatings.
Justice requires more than blind scapegoating. Holding one person solely responsible for a chain of events that was long, uninterrupted, and far removed does no justice to anyone. Frankly, unless the CEO was personally the one to pull a lever that knew would kill all those people he does not hold 100% of the guilt. Assigning guilt in the proper proportion is essential to detecting and preventing this massive type of injustice in the future.
Warren Anderson should go to jail and UC should have to pay restitution.
I have said nothing that contradicts that. Two things should be noted. One is that simply stating Warren Anderson should go to jail solves nothing, and does nothing to address the huge, larger than life issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice that this case raises. Secondly, UC paid significant damages. Virtually any amount larger and UC would have been bankrupt and everyone involved would have got absolutely nothing. Not one dime. India extracted the maximum fine that UC could absorb without bankruptcy. Since then India has done nothing to assuage the suffering of the victims. Virtually all of the funds are left stagnant. That is a crime on a scale that is beyond anything UC ever was accountable for.
It's a massive crime, and it's just that simple.
Asking you to look deeper than just a silly obsession with swearing at the "bad guy" might be a waste of time, but I am going to anyways. Holding a person like Anderson "fully-accountable" for this crime makes nothing better. It prevents nothing. It resolves nothing. And ultimately, it's not just. One person clearly was not fully responsible for this act. And falsely assigning blame to one person is a massive failure of people like yourself who want neat little resolutions where everyone gets placed in the "good guy" or "evil villian" column.
Friday Dec.3rd marks the 20th anniversary of the tragedy in Bhopal, India. Unfortunately, the Bhopal disaster has never ended. It remains one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the century.
More than half a million people were exposed to the deadly MIC gases on the night of the accident, 120,000 so badly that they've been left with permanent and debilitating health effects. Blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and cancer are common after effects of exposure, and gynecological problems are also rampant. Some women are still waiting for their first period at the age of twenty, while others have as many as four or five per month. Brain damage and birth defects are also common. The after effects of gas exposure have extended to the second and third generations, and few of the victims have access to adequate medical treatment.
The people of Bhopal have endured unimaginable pain and suffering, and will continue to do so until the site is cleaned up (Union Carbide simply packed up and left the site as it was) and is now after 20 years, the chemicals are contaminating local water supplies. Students and other organizations are joining together in the struggle for Bhopal, one of the most beautiful areas of India. I have collected over 200 links to information on the Bhopal tragedy including local actions on the 20th anniversary, humor, Dow/Union Carbide statements, activist groups, news, book reviews, petitions, timelines, photos and videos, case studies and technical papers.
Please visit my site at...
20th Anniversary of Bhopal, India tragedy on December 2/3. 1984
Thanks for your time,
also aswell
Here's a previous slashdot story the Yesmen vs. Dow, Dow vs. Parody.
PS this post was rejected two days ago
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
http://www.greenpeace.org.au/toxics/hotspots/homeb ush.html
Union Carbide at the time had complete disregard for the Sydney area.
Industries like theses should never be placed in residential areas.
At the end of the day it's the responsibility of the government to zone the areas correctly and the responsibility of the company to keep the plant in safe working order.
On a side note:
According to a friend there is some agent orange buried some where in Homebush that was produced for the Vietnam War.
As for 9/11, it is pretty clear that the loss of human life was the explicit goal of the terrorists. To say otherwise is pretty indefensible.
I'd say it wasn't. And that's plenty defensible.
They wanted destruction of an 'evil' empire, and they were hitting a target of great economic importance, as well as military tagets (pentagon, possibly the white house). I'd even wager that the loss of civilian life was not a major consideration. They could have attacked it around 11 am, there probably would have been more people there. Or right around 2 pm. Or they could have done it on a weekend, when there would have bee nthe least number of people ther. But hey, when you've got a plane to catch, you don't get to pick the time. They did not care how many people died, just that those towers were hit, the US economy was hurt, and their opponent weakend.
Osama is a horrible man, and his actions indefensible, but he was created by horrible human traits like greed, ignorance and arrogence. US foreign policy exemplifies these traits, and more.
The military has become a tool of the rich and powerful to secure foreign interests, and the powerful escape the law through a court system that caters to the rich. And all the while, the propaganda machines pump out stories to dull the mind and distract the masses, so no one sees the truth. Each side thinks they're the "good guys" when right now, there are no good guys. No one in this conflict can even say they're better then the other.
Perhaps years of being taught about collateral damage by the US military in their homelands made the "evildoers" believe that life is cheap.
The world will be a safer place when the Osama's, the Saddams, and the Bushes and Blairs of the world are removed from power, and people with peace in mind take the reigns.
Yes. They could get away with it on US soil. In fact they did. I don't remember the name of the place, but they intentionally poisioned the water of a river used for drinking by a town in Georgia. They knew that this would lead to thousands of deaths, but they correctly calculated that paying the fines that would be levied when this was discovered would be significantly cheaper than cleaning up.
This was reported in either Science News or New Scientist...sorry, I don't remember the dates, probably two years ago. And it was DOW, not Union Carbide. And they did get away with a token payment. And the press did not raise a stink.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Especially since UC is claiming that the release may have been due to an act of sabotage
Other people have posted about that theory not holding up.
Countries have the right to refuse to extradite one of their citizens for a variety of reasons - one would be the concern that the person would not receive a fair trial or face excessive punishment (e.g. many countries not willing to extradite to the US due to capital punishment).
Going back to an earlier analogy somebody made - when the USA asked the Afghanistan government to extradite people they claimed were responsible for the 9-11 attacks, they didn't offer any evidence and there are good reasons not to do so anyway - capital punishment, like you mention, and also barbaric treament like the running joke on this site, prison rape.
The Afghanistan government understandably refused, and the USA promptly labelled them as a "rogue nation" and invaded. The Bhopal disaster claimed many more lives, the Indian government has asked for some USA citizens they think are responsible to be extradited, and it has been refused. Of course, it's not like India would be capable or justified in invading the USA, but it's a nasty case of double-standards, don't you think?
"The report includes harrowing testimonies of abduction, deprivation of liberty and denial of freedom of movement, torture and ill-treatment, including psychological threats, beatings and rape."
Ah yes, those blessed NATO soldiers, bravely going forth and doing what no US soldier would dare.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3686173.stm
**>>BELCH
Coastwalker,
Not sure what you mean by "first and second degree murder are distinguished by an ethical judgment." Those jurisdictions that recognized degrees in murder (generally common law jurisdictions) usually have second degree murder as a residual category. That is, their statutes will define 1) specific ways of committing murder and/or 2) the quality of premeditiation/deliberation and/or 3) a list of other felonies during which the death occurred. Any murder falling into one of these three categories is first degree murder. Everything else is second degree murder. The only ethical judgment involved is that of the legislature in making its laws. But this is perhaps what you meant.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not entirely clear what you are arguing. You write: "Corporations can and should pay for their misdemeanors." It seems to me that no one is arguing against this. The question is whether criminal liability rather than civil liability can or should be invoked. Based on your "moralistic" line, I conclude that you think civil liabilites are insufficient. You are not alone. But the problems in working out how to impose criminal liability on a corporation are real and have flummoxed quite a few sharp people, though other sharp people have thought that the model used in Europe is quite reasonable.
Finally, I would encourage less lines like the following: "If people spent as much time and energy on demanding regulation of abominations against natural justice in the capitalist system as they do getting moralistic about gay marriage and abortion then I might have more respect for their ethics." You of course can express this, but my concern is with the use of "people" and "their ethics." You do not have a clear referent, and are as a result basically improperly aggregating. Perhaps people who care quite a lot about abortion also care quite a lot about corporations being held to account. Is there a way for you to know this? Are you responding to how these issues (and people's thoughts about them) are treated in the media? Or just that corporate liability is such an outstanding problem with such an obvious solution that its very existence indicates that no one cares? Bohpal could be an example that ethics is fiscally malleable in the US. Then again, it could stand for that same concept for all of humanity through time. My tendency is to think the latter.
Pesticides are not designed to kill humans any more than antibiotics are. However accidental releases of antibiotics into the ecosystem has probably killed thousands of people through producing antibiotic-resistent strains and will only continue to increase as time progresses until it dwarfs the numbers killed by pesticides. The amusing part is that because they don't produce a poison cloud that you can see it escapes your mind's comprehension.
As much as I would like hold the people responsible, I wouldn't know where to start. I think we are going to find Jimmy Hoffa before we ever find out the truth about this. This goes much deeper than any of the drivel you're going hear here.
Although your last statement may appear harsh(sorry you got modded down), it's closer to the truth about the man than most people will admit. It seems that the election was decided by the very things you mention. It would be sad to think that such whackos really do outnember the rest of us. It helps me to understand why blacks and some other minorities feel so disenfranchised. Turns out that they are. They could all vote for the same thing, and they will still lose. Now we can add any reasonable person to that list. It shows that fear, uncertainty, and doubt will always win. Unless the 49% of the electorate that loses has some voice in their gov't, American style democracy is doomed, and will descend into total mayhem. What little respect the people have for their gov't then will completely disappear. Only a nationwide epiphany can possibly save them now. Otherwise the violent revolution cycle will once again repeat itself, and of course the final result will be the same as the last revolution. And also of course in the meantime there will be many more Bhopal type disasters to come.(There. I'm back on topic.). The real failure to prosecute those bastards is really our failure. We didn't demand it. We failed to put people in charge that would demand it. Same applies to the Micosoft case, the Ford Pinto, the space shuttle, 9/11...you name it. I know that only I can be responsible for my own personal misfortunes, and nobody else, no matter what. I also feel that we are all partialy responsible for what happened in Bhopal. For our species to survive we do indeed need to care for each other. This every man for himself mentality that we suffer now is unsustainable.
What?
The irony is that the administration's excuse for *not* checking into the 9/11 warning memos is the same excuse they *now* use for that silly warning color system. "There is a potential threat..." The end result is that the public is in a constant state of borderline fear, and the government does *nothing* more than previous. Except change a stupid color and make the public uneasy.
Industrial accident
Terrorist attack
3000 dead is still 3000 dead.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You might be ignorant of this fact, but Osama said flat out that it was the duty of Muslims everywhere to kill US citizens. That statement alone implies to me that he had an explicit desire to kill civilians in 9/11. While I believe that the CEO of Union Carbide should be extradited, he did not make it his explicit goal to pollute the Bhopals of the world.
End of story.
or:
You take the premeditated road
and I'll take the negligent road
and I'll kill 10,000 before ye!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Quite correct. The technical term I was grasping for--but couldn't quite reach, this morning--was "depraved indifference". Deaths as a consequence of depraved indifference qualify as second-degree murder in New York state; in other jurisdictions your mileage may vary. (Here's the PDF of the standard directions to a New York jury for a depraved indifference second degree murder charge; also available the Google HTMLified version.)
Obviously, such a criminal finding might be challenging to come by. You'd have to prove that specific individuals at Union Carbide knew that their facility was unsafe, and that a fatal accident was a reasonably foreseeable outcome, and that they failed to take reasonable steps to protect the public. It is indeed a high bar to clear.
~Idarubicin
Support Bhopal campaign started by aidindia.org at http://bhopal.aidindia.org/ and variety of projects taken up and considered by them. You can also find the link via http://boise.aidindia.org/
We need large companies?
Seriously, now...
A lot of countries have helped fund a regime responsible for the murder, toruture, and rape of hundreds of thousands of people.
The US is hardly in a position to point a finger at the UN on that charge. The US has often directly funded regimes which murder, torture, and rape their own people. Look at El Salvadore, Pinotchet in Chile, the Shah in Iran, and even Saddam himself back in the good old days. Gassing the Kurds was not a problem to the US as long as he was useful for fighting anti-western regimes.
From http://www.petitiononline.com/bhopal/
"1. There was no siren and no warning--people woke with the gases already in their faces, filling their mouths, noses and lungs with excruciating pain.
2. NONE of safety systems were functioning on the night of the disaster--six in all.
3. Union Carbide under-invested in an inherently hazardous facility located in a crowded neighborhood, used admittedly unproven designs, stored lethal MIC in reckless quantities, dismantled safety systems and cut down on safety staff and training in an effort to cut costs.
4. Union Carbide and its new owner, Dow Chemical, continue to blame the disaster on a fictitious and unnamed worker, and deny their own negligence.
5. In the wake of the disaster, Carbide claimed that the gas was harmless, when it knew it was lethal (as described in its own manuals).
6. Dow-Carbide refuses to share all its medical information about the health effects of the gas it released, MIC--information that doctors could use to save lives--claiming the information is a "trade secret".
7. Union Carbide fled India and abandoned its Bhopal plant, leaving thousands of tons of dangerous chemicals behind, which are now poisoning the water of the same people Carbide first poisoned 20 years ago. As more people grow sick, Dow-Carbide still refuses to clean up its pollution in Bhopal.
8. The Union Carbide Corporation, charged criminally with "culpable homicide" in the wake of the disaster, has refused to appear in court or stand trial. Union Carbide is now an international fugitive from justice, considered an "absconder" under Indian law."
IMHO Dow Chemical could have done no worse had they set out to intentionally kill those people. Warren Anderson, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people is now quite well off on Long Island.
Here's a list of technical I put together on Bhopal at my site, listed in my sig. These are very deadly chemicals with effects that linger on and on and on and on...you know Union Carbide became the EverReady before Dow bought them...
New Exportation of Risk: The Case of Bhopal
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
UC management wasn't to blame:
1. India demanded that UC employ Indian workers in high level plant operations, even though they were grossly trained for the positions they held. On many occations, UC shutdown the plant because of safety failures cause by incompetent workers.
2. On that faithful day, the on duty plant manager was a disgruntled employee and deliberately sabotaged one of the tanks storing toxic chemicals. He had to physically break seals on safety values using a sledge hammer, and connected two hoses from another tank to create the disaster. This man also had ties into high gov't officials as is still free man today.
3. UC immediately responded to crisis sending a team to control and clean up the mess to prevent further loss of life The India gov't refused.
4. UC immediately provided $10 million in cash for accident victims. Because of rampant corruption in the Indian gov't at the time, less than $300K of the 10 million made it to the victums. In India, everyone gets a cut, except for the people money is intended for.
Let's rephrase it the correct way
What do you think the answer to that question should be?
Personally, I think entities like corporations should at the very least be held to the same standards as individuals. If they were actively complicit in those deaths, that's murder. If it was due to an active act of omission, or an unintended but forseeable side effect, then that's manslaughter.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
well, lets look on the bright side! ,Chernobyl , The killing fields, spahn ranch, hell,that'd get a lot of bhang for the buck to console victims.
We could start an "extreme tours" business hosting tours to exotic sites and let a percentage of the cost go to victims.Bhopal
Sorry, I'm having a David Lynch day.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Depraved indifference that leads to death is, in fact, murder.
No it's not. It's called negligent homicide. Not all homicides are murder. "Murder" refers to the deliberate kind.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How much does the "person" called a corporation care about its "life", when compared to how much a real person cares about his life?
The punishments are not equal.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
But do you know how much those safety systems cost to operate? It was a *massive* £30 per day that's not per year that's *per day*. We are talking about huge costs here!
How else do you expect that Warren Anderson would be able to pay the £1,750 for tennis club membership on Long Island? How else do you expect him to pay £680,000 for a holiday home, house in the Hamptons and winter holidays in Miami?
I mean come on people if that sort of lifestyle isn't worth the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the continuing suffering and health prolems of hundreds of thousands more than I ask you what is?
Next at 11, Warren Anderson describes Pol Pot as a "really nice guy!"
The 9-11 attacks were an act of war - there was a clear intent to kill and directed by people sponsored by the Afghan government. There was good reason to beleive that further attacks were coming (which did in fact happen in other countries).
Of course, it's not like India would be capable or justified in invading the USA, but it's a nasty case of double-standards, don't you think?
It would be a double standard if there was evidence that UC deliberately set out to create the disaster - by your reasoning several countries that had SARS deaths would have grounds for extraditing members of the Chinese government for suppressing news about the problem. It would have been a double standard had India prosecuted the people in UC of India and the local governments for their role in the disaster.
Warren Andersons last know address:
929 Ocean Road
Bridgehampton, NY
111 South Catalina Court
Vero Beach, Florida
There is ample testimony by people involved in the counter terrorism services that Bush didn't give a flying fuck about osama.
evil is as evil does
It may have taken more then 8 months to cook up but the vast majority of the implementation phase was happening in those 8 months.
But I understand your reluctance to hold the Bush administration responsible for anything, we wouldn't want to let the fags get married would we?
evil is as evil does
But they were only ragheads. Fuck, there'd be even more unemployed programmers in the US if this hadn't thinned the herd a bit.
Please check out forum.aidindia.org where u can find the "truth" about DOW and GOI. (Association for India's Development) AID'ers have have been fighting for bhopal cause for a very long time. Also, if someone wants to make a difference they can by going too www.oneforindia.org Thanks for you time. Amit Khandelwal
You think that because the USA, knowing where Warren Anderson lives (unlike the tens of thousands of people who died because it was decided that Union Carbide wanted to save 30 pounds a day and turn of safety systems) and harbouring him from justice is not responsible for anything?
You think that it is OK for a company of your country to commit human rights attrocities in other countries and then flee from their responsibilities? But then, its OK as long as it doesn't happen to you right?
Well, that or you're spouting total fucking shite.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
[1] though a lot of them are (they "skill pool" - one gets a job in some thing his mate hs experience in & vice-versa - the giveaway is he's on the phone all the time going "mbud bud bud mbud budbudbud").
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Please check out forum.aidindia.org where u can find the "truth" about DOW and GOI. (Association for India's Development) AID'ers have have been fighting for bhopal cause for a very long time. Also, if someone wants to make a difference they can by going too www.oneforindia.org Thanks for you time. Amit Khandelwal
If you had been around when it happened you would know a few facts.
1 Union carbide did not control how the plant was operated india did.
2 Union carbide had tried to buy up all the land around the plant before the plant was built but india refused. Carbide did NOT want a shanty town close to the plant.
3 Carbide had wanted to build the exact same plant as built in amerca but india insisted on dangerous and stupid changes in it.
Carbide FREAKED when a shanty town popped up 5 feet from the freaking plant but the indian gov refused to move the people. This spelled the end for union carbide as they from the start worked toward one goal...
Carbide was in the process of making enough money off the plant operation to make up for all it had paid building it so they could shut the thing down and run away before india bleeped it up. They failed to reach the goal by about a month or 2.
What carbide was guilty of was being stupid enough to deal with india in the first place instead of going to some other bleephole where at least the government wasnt quite so screwed up.
The reason indian officials dont want to push the matter is if they push too hard facts will come out and heads will roll.. their heads.
I know that not all homicides are murder. However, deaths caused by depraved indifference fall under second degree murder. Lesser negligence that doesn't meet the standard of "depraved indifference" may be prosecuted as manslaughter instead (or with a lesser included offense of manslaughter, allowing the jury to decide if the acts in question showed depraved indifference or not).
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Yeah, you completely missed the point. Mainly, the US hasn't done anything in Rwanda or Sudan, but that doesn't fit with our do-good world police image now does it? No, so you quote the link, attacking that instead of the real message. This really was more of an experiment on you, rather than an actual message. It's just becoming more and more obvious that to support one's views, a person will resort to anything, no matter whether or not they realize that the truth goes against what they say. Cheers, Ryan
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Yeah, right. Blame UC. The fact that India STOLE the plant from UC (like so many others at the time), removed ANY UC control from the plant, told UC it wouldn't get any $$$, but MAYBE it would paid in kind, THEN replaced ALL UC mgmt with India nationals -- the UC plants was STOLEM, uhh, err, "nationalized". UC had some minority engineers still there. UC REPEATEDLY wrote memos to the Indian fovernment employess who then totally MISMANAGED the plant -- deferred and IGNORE maintenance, ignored limits by running the plant at over 200% designed limits (for over 2 years), and theh told UC it wouldn't even get paid in kind when, 6 months before the explosion UC started pulling ALL its remaing mid-level employees from the pkant (all 30 of them, from the pkants 300+).
So then of course, the thieving Indian thugs, after stealining, er, nationalinfg the plants, ran it to the ground, it exploded, so opf COURSE blame UC.
So I guess if I stole YOUR car, drove it 120 MPH on the freeway and crashed recklessly into a bus of widows and orphans, I can blame YOU!!
Typical socialist thuggery.
But I guess the FUD generated by blaming UC worked for most people.
The Economist had a really good story on the above about 8 months after the explosion.
Thnk about how many real lives -- specifically CEO's and top executives -- that killing a corporation like that would ruin and try telling me that again.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
We need large companies. Do we? I don't think we do. If large companies are thought as persons, their personal profile would be a psychopath.
I think we should get rid of the large companies and allow multiple small individual companies to form larger entities where each company has their responsibilities. If some part of that entity is responsible for a Bhopal like disaster, it should be exterminated without hesitation.
I've been playing with an idea for a while that commerical confidentiality should only be facilitated (by the usual legal fictions) within business units or equivalent non-corporate lowest-level common-purpose associations. Full transparency could be made mandatory at all higher levels of aggregation, with full whistleblower protection.
Might level the playing field out a little.
Growth by acquisition is illusory.
As for why corporations are needed at all, it is mostly tied up with their successful roles in (i) fostering a sense of personal identity in, and (ii) redistributing income to, the plebs. That is not something we would want to turn off overnight.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
No, if a single employee can be shown to be at fault, you can punish them. However, this appears to be a case of the company systemically ignoring safety considerations. This is more than a few leaves on the tree, this is root blight.
Personally I see this as a supporting fact for my argument, not yours. You can prevent accidents, but they believe profit is worth more than human life. Apparently the majority agrees, because we allow them to carry on this way.
Not necessarily. I believe we should draw a distinction between accidents people have tried to prevent, and those which no one tried to prevent. We should also draw a distinction between things which come out of the blue and things which people really should have known to check for.
Wrongdoing is one thing. Killing thousands of people is another.
I'm not sure I agree. Why would this be true?
Maybe that's a sign that we either need to conceive a better way to have large companies, or that we need to not have them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1980 to 1984: The work crew of the MIC unit was halved from 12 to six workers, the maintenance crew from six to two workers. On December 26, 1981 a plant operator was killed by a phosgene gas leak. Another phosgene leak in January 1982 severely injured 28 workers and in October the same year MIC escaped from a broken valve and four workers were exposed to the chemical. The senior officials of the Union Carbide, privy to a "business confidential" safety audit in May 1982, were well aware of 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC units. Remedial measures were then taken at Union Carbide's identical MIC plant in West Virginia, USA, but not in Bhopal.
December 2-3, 1984: Poisonous gas leak from Union Carbides pesticides factory. In three days around 8,000 people die. On the night of the disaster, water (that was being used for washing the lines) entered the tank containing MIC through leaking valves. The refrigeration unit, which should have kept the MIC close to zero degrees centigrade, had been shut off by the company officials to save on electricity bills. The entrance of water in the tank, full of MIC at ambient temperature triggered off an exothermic runaway reaction an consequently the release of the lethal gas mixture. The safety systems, which in any case were not designed for such a runaway situation, were non-functioning and under repair. Lest the neighbourhood community be "unduly alarmed", the siren in the factory had been switched off. Poison clouds from the Union Carbide factory enveloped an arc of over 20 square kilometres before the residents could run away from its deadly hold.
Bhopal timeline
A William Stavropoulos 'Wanted' poster
My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
What? Your reading comprehension skills leave something to be desired - like comprehension. He's saying that if the disaster is due to gross negligence at the behest of the senior executive staff then they should be held responsible. They're responsible for the problem, why shouldn't they be held responsible?
Also, saying that someone doesn't understand the situation because they are using language which you don't approve of is fucking ignorant. Would you say that someone doesn't understand because they're speaking another language? One is much like another. You knew what he was trying to express, but you attacked his understanding of the situation. Clearly you are taking advantage of the situation to make a personal attack. This is unproductive for people trying to have a serious debate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your point? The bottom line is that This can;t be pegged on a single president.
And what the hell does this have to do with gay marriage? You use of the term 'fag' is considered demeaning, you should know.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Three Timelines
My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
You wrapped up my thoughts on this topic very eloquently and succinctly.
Couldn't have been put into better words.
Sorry my wording on that was poor, I meant to ask if you thought it seriously prevented the downfall of any regimes
forget it.
1980 to 1984: The work crew of the MIC unit was halved from 12 to six workers, the maintenance crew from six to two workers. On December 26, 1981 a plant operator was killed by a phosgene gas leak. Another phosgene leak in January 1982 severely injured 28 workers and in October the same year MIC escaped from a broken valve and four workers were exposed to the chemical. The senior officials of the Union Carbide, privy to a "business confidential" safety audit in May 1982, were well aware of 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC units. Remedial measures were then taken at Union Carbide's identical MIC plant in West Virginia, USA, but not in Bhopal.
December 2-3, 1984: Poisonous gas leak from Union Carbides pesticides factory. In three days around 8,000 people die. On the night of the disaster, water (that was being used for washing the lines) entered the tank containing MIC through leaking valves. The refrigeration unit, which should have kept the MIC close to zero degrees centigrade, had been shut off by the company officials to save on electricity bills. The entrance of water in the tank, full of MIC at ambient temperature triggered off an exothermic runaway reaction an consequently the release of the lethal gas mixture. The safety systems, which in any case were not designed for such a runaway situation, were non-functioning and under repair. Lest the neighbourhood community be "unduly alarmed", the siren in the factory had been switched off. Poison clouds from the Union Carbide factory enveloped an arc of over 20 square kilometres before the residents could run away from its deadly hold.
Bhopal timeline
A William Stavropoulos 'Wanted' poster
My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
Dow-chem chairman Warren Anderson???? Warren Anderson was chairman of Union Carbide, not Dow, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, long after the **Indian government** had collected and apparently frittered away much of the original settlement! The subsidiary of Union Carbide that was responsible was sold to an Indian company in 1994. If Dow has some sort of legal liability after all this time, they should pay up, and clearly the US government should not hesitate to extradite this Warren Anderson clown if he's in our borders, but you have to wonder whether the current legal shenanigans at this point are for the benefit of the victims or for the benefit of the lawyers.
From the featured Wikipedia article:
In an out-of-court settlement reached on February 14, 1989, Union Carbide agreed to pay USD $470 million for damages it caused in the Bhopal disaster. (The original lawsuit was for USD 3 billion.)
The CEO of Union Carbide at that time, Warren Anderson, who had retired by 1986, was declared a fugitive from law by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal on February 1, 1992 for failing to appear at the court hearings in a culpable homicide case in which he was named the chief defendant. Orders were passed to the Government of India to press for an extradition from the United States, with whom India had an extradition treaty in place. However, the demanded extradition never materialized. Many activists allege that the Indian government has hesitated to put forth a strong case of extradition to the United States, fearing backlash from foreign investors who have become more important players in the Indian economy following liberalization. A seemingly apathetic attitude from the US government, which has failed to pursue the case, has also led to strong protests in the past, most notably by Greenpeace.
A plea by India's Central Bureau of Investigation to dilute the charges from culpable homicide to criminal negligence has since been dismissed by the Indian courts. To date, Anderson is still an absconder before the Indian courts and faces charges that if proven may result in imprisonment of up to 10 years.
Meanwhile, very little of the money from the settlement reached with Union Carbide went to the survivors, and people in the area feel betrayed not only by Union Carbide (and chairman Warren Anderson), but also by their own politicians. On the anniversary of the tragedy, effigies of Anderson and politicians are burnt. In July 2004, the Indian Supreme Court ordered the government to pay to victims, and families of the dead, the US$330 million remaining in the compensation fund.
Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary, which had operated the Bhopal plant, to an Indian battery manufacturer in 1994. The Dow Chemical Company purchased Union Carbide in 2001 for $10.3 billion in stock and debt. Dow has publicly stated several times that the Union Carbide settlement payments have already fulfilled Dow's financial responsibility for the disaster.
That's just hand-waving. Look at what India did over here! Ignore the man behind the curtain.
You're talking about criminal liability as if it had something to do with morality or what is best for society. It doesn't, and you shouldn't pretend it does. Laws are made primarily by people who were put in power by people with financial power, and who are indebted to the people who got them where they are today. If you think that laws reflect the will of the people, and/or are intended to help them, you are sadly deluded. The laws are intended to help the people who have the clout to get them passed, nothing more.
He is the CEO. He is supposed to be responsible for the company. He is not held responsible because of the way the laws of the world are laid out - to protect the already-rich so they can get richer, killing people in the process. He is as responsible for the deaths of those people as if he did throw a switch, because managing the company is his responsibility. Not just to make money, however, but also to behave responsibly. Failing to hold anyone responsible for this gross failure to maintain safety standards is clearly not the answer.
Does nothing? Who paid you to write this shit? Or are you a CEO already? Putting the CEOs in prison when shit like this happens means the other CEOs will care about safety measures. It doesn't work to prevent ordinary, run-of-the-mill crimes because people who commit those crimes are deluded and/or desperate and they don't care about the consequences - they [feel that they] have nothing to lose. These people are different. They are in a position to prevent things like this from happening, but they don't because it would take away from their salary, and because they are not punished if they fail to do so. By making apologies for them as you are doing you are helping things like this happen - in other words, you are guilty of helping people murder people through negligence. It's murder because these people realize they're running companies that could kill people, and they decide not to make sure they're not doing something that WILL kill people. It's premeditated. And you're helping. Congratulations.
Again, this is plain handwaving. This is a horrible thing but it's not what we're talking about right now. The fact (assuming that it is a fact) that the money has not been spent to help the people who were harmed, and/or those who have survived them, is a separate issue. I agree it is worthy of discussion and inspection, but you're trying to distract people from the root problem. That problem
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reason a person is punished is because based on his past actions, he is deemed harmful for the society. If given a punishment, he will regret doing such things and (hopefully) not repeat them.
For example, a murderer is imprisoned because his current state of mind (beliefs, ideals, instincts, etc) allows him to do a murder, essentially an act against humanity. It is assumed that spending some time in prison (or any other punishment)will bring about a change in his mind and make it conducive to live in line with humanity.
Now Anderson's neglect for human safety is harmful for the humanity. If not punished accordingly, his mental state remains the same and he will continue to act with similar ideals in future.
The amount of punishment required for a particular offense was decided by some experts when the laws were made (I honestly don't know who). Therefore I think any amount of repentence (or self punishment) behind closed doors, while defending himself in public, will not do the trick.
I find it acceptable to punish everyone in the chain of culpability. However, I think it is necessary to punish those with greater responsibility to a greater degree. If we expect every employee to object to every injustice in a company to such a degree that they will be fired, then we are expecting a world full of unemployed people. It is, however, reasonable to put the thumbscrews to the managers who told them not to complain about safety issues, and their managers who either told them the same thing or ignored them - all the way to the top.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think the Indian government shares a great deal of the blame, just not so much in preventing the accident (did the Indians even have an OSHA?) as failing to stick up for its citizens (possibly pocketing the settlement money) afterwards.
See #2 on this list for correct ownership of Bhopal plant
My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
> the US is NOT the only country in the world responsible.
Of course it is! Haven't you been reading Slashdot?
Appearantly the Yesmen sent someone to the BBC saying they represented DOW chemical and they were going to give a ton of money to fix the situation in Bhopal, which isnt a hoax.
Or was that an attempt at humor?
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
US$500M is nothing compared to even one human life lost in the pursuit of greed. Can there be any doubt that the safety measures were skimped on simply to save money? When people die due to someone's greed then the perpetrator should suffer more than a loss of money.
Yes I do realize you were trying to be funny.
But US$500M will buy a hell of a lot of Indian goods along with good will... hell 1/2 a trillion dollars would probably buy you a whole country and probably 90% of the government needed. (the other 10% could probably be negotiated at below "market" value as long as palms were greased and swiss accounts were opened.) This was 20 years ago can we get real and move along....
I hear that they tried to prove that witches couldn't float back a few hundred years ago.
I also heard that the constitution is a work of fiction; OK some one pass me the tin-foil I need to make a hat.
Oh, wait...
Suddenly it seems like a good idea after all, if you wanna scrimp on the expense's bottom line...
" Your point? The bottom line is that This can;t be pegged on a single president."
Mmmm. Ok then it was partially bush's fault and yet nobody held him responsible. The odd thing is that it's kind of understandable in the case of Clinton. You may remember that he was being impeached for where he put his cock, maybe that proved to be some sort of a distraction, maybe that distraction put the country in danger.
What's Bush's excuse? That he was vacation?
And what about afterwards? What about a botched invation of iraq? what about lying to congress about WMDs, what about lying to the world in the UN? Remember powell saying to the world at the UN that iraq had four tons of VX? How come nobody was held responsible for those lies?
"And what the hell does this have to do with gay marriage? "
Because the red staters it's more important not to let the fags marry then it is to hold somebody responsible for what happened on 9/11. Litening all those toby keith records while fucking your cousin tends to do that I guess.
evil is as evil does
Boy you express bigoted attitudes towards southerners and Homosexuals all in one sentence. I see now you are just a kook. No point in debating with you further.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
There is a double standard. Why isn't the Indian government held responsible for the disaster? Why is all the blame on UCC? UCC owned 49%. What about the other party who was profiting from poor saftey standards? Your right it is a double standard.
Over 3000 people died instantly, and about 10000 died in the aftermath. That's people with brown skin, by the way. That's not worth a lot of money in America. And it sure as hell is not worth letting a rich white man stand trial.
Bush made no significant changes to Clintons plan for dealing with terrorism. So if Bush wasn't doing a good job preventing terrorism then neither was Clinton. Bush and Clinton are just as responsible for 9/11.
There is no story here. End of story. Period.
You live upto your name you prick... you are stupidand a fool and ignorant.
the site is still not cleaned up, and UCC owned 51% share of the plant.
Okay. I already did the first time, but I'll do it again.
There. Done. I thought about it a second time.
The punishments are still not equal.
People's lives are not ruined just because they lose money (and losing a career is the same thing). They are inconvenienced a lot, but not to the same degree as someone who gets killed is.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Lesser negligence that doesn't meet the standard of "depraved indifference"
Like, for example, operating a dangerous chemical plant in a situation where the government promised the neighboring area would be free of housing when in fact it was not...
may be prosecuted as manslaughter instead
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
You'll want to look into something called "piercing the corporate veil," which became common in British-derived legal systems in the late 1800s. India almost certainly has a similar mechanism.
The real problem here is not knowing the details of the UC incident. The people at fault were the local managers, not the corporate head. Whereas there's no question that Dow does some scumbag things in third world countries, what caused the UC incident was a series of simple mechanical errors, including safety valves left open, stop checks (little metal plates that go into the pipe sideways) weren't in place, et cetera.
Look, I'm not defending Dow. Still, get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers. There's a good reason that this hasn't gone up the chain, and it's not because of corporate legal abuse. You would do well to watch for the History Channel special on the incident, which will give you a bunch of facts you're missing; whereas it's hardly a comprehensive view of the situation, it's fairly clear that you'd benefit from the very basics.
In this case, Dow had the safety hardware in place. Granted the underground tanks were irresponsibly large, and granted that would eventually have led to a similar catastrophe, that is not what happened here. Just because they were on the path to negligence doesn't mean that everything that goes wrong is their fault. This was local error, not international greed.
Mod parent subterranean.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
In the United States, that would be roughly the difference between first- and second-degree murder
Murder is killing intentionally. This is manslaughter, whether it's a genuine accident or the result of irresponsibility.
This is true, but it does not absolve Union Carbide and its executives of responsibility.
No, but the facts of the case do. The problem was caused by water leakage into the tank which caused a detonation - the result of safety valves simply left open, and check plates simply not in where they were supposed to be.
The problem was local management. Whereas Dow was making irresponsible decisions, such as an immensely oversized storage tank, what caused the error was a local manager's total lack of responsibility. This is not Dow's fault, no matter how badly you want for it to be.
Mod parent down.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
As long as we continue to allow company officers to bear no responsibility for the actions of a company we will continue to see events like this.
Wake me when you have a clue what happened. The fault was the local plant manager's, not corporate. Simple things like check plates were missing, and safety valves were just left open (which is probably how the water got into the tank in the first place.)
Point fingers when you know what happened, and no earlier.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Southerners? You mean those bigoted, bible thumpin, science hating, cousin fuckers? You mean those people? Yes I am bigoted against ignorant, racist, homophobic, idiots.
evil is as evil does
That's deliberate and criminal negligence on the part of the company officers because they knew the systems were disabled and put their profits ahead of the safety of both their employees and everyone living in the surrounding area.
... storage? I mean, this doesn't make sense.
Do you really believe they were making money off of leaving plates hanging by ropes instead of putting them into slots, or by leaving valves open? Do you think that they were somehow producing more
It was negligence, not profiteering. Don't take the lamb to the slaughter until you've checked to make sure it's a lamb.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
" Bush made no significant changes to Clintons plan for dealing with terrorism."
Well that's a lie. Don't take my word on it just ask Rand Beers and Richard Clarke. Both of them worked closely with bush (clarke with clinton and Bush sr too) and they both say Bush really didn't care all that much about terrorism.
Well now that your first sentece was a lie let's tackle your second one.
"So if Bush wasn't doing a good job preventing terrorism then neither was Clinton."
It didn't happen on Clinton's watch? Why? Maybe because he was paying attention. Maybe because he wasn't so one sided about the israeli/palestenian problems, maybe because he invited prominent muslims to the white house during ramadan, maybe because he did not set himself up as the christian god's spokesperson on earth.
Either way it didn't happen on his watch so that makes it MOSTLY Bush's fault.
"Bush and Clinton are just as responsible for 9/11."
What about what happened afterwards? Is Clinton also responsible for lying to the congress about Iraq's nuclear program? Is Clinton also responsible for lying to the UN about 6000 tons of VX? Is clinton also responsible for invading iraq for no real reason? Is Clinton also responsible for the deaths of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dead iraqis and a thousand dead US soldiers? Is Clinton also responsible for the sinking dollar, the net job loss, and record deficits?
While you are at it why don't you blame clinton for the darkness and cold too.
evil is as evil does
Pasted from here:
"In 1943, the United States began research into the offensive use of biological agents. This work was started, interestingly enough, in response to a perceived German biological warfare (BW) threat as opposed to a Japanese one. The United States conducted this research at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick), which was a small National Guard airfield prior to that time, and produced agents at other sites until 1969, when President Nixon stopped all offensive biological and toxin weapon research and production by executive order.
Richard Clark and Rand Beers were hired by Clinton and kept on by Bush. Most of the people (Including Richard Clark and Rand Beers) who were combating terrorism for Clinton continued working for Bush. The idea was that Clinton's plan for dealing with terrorism was working so why mess with it. The fact that Richard Clark and Rand Beers were still working in the same post under a different adminstration and a different party underscores the point. Bush made no significant changes to Clintons plan for dealing with terrorism. About the 2nd part, are you trying to say that in the 8 months Bush was in office before 9/11 he offended Osama and other Muslims so bad they planned and carried out 9/11? That is just silly. Osama had been at war with the US for years. I don't agree with Bush's policy in Israel and the reason's given for invading Iraq smell funny but, that has nothing to do with 9/11. Whatever Bush did after 9/11 could not have affected 9/11. Clinton did a good job as president but, he's still just as responisble (or more so) as Bush. Bush was not in office long enough to make the kind of changes it would take to prevent 9/11.
Exactly. They researched biological weapons. They were never part of the inventory. At no point could the president of the US go and say "Hey, General so-and-so, you have authorization to use biological weapons. Go over and pick yourself up some, and have at it."
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
So what you're saying is that corporate shares none of the blame? Is that why they sued the company for the money, and not the plant? You're making excuses, and I don't know why. Either you work for UC, or you just like it when corporations fuck people over.
Stop making apologies for incompetence. Whoever is in charge of the plant manager is responsible for making sure he maintains a safe environment. Whoever is in charge of that guy is in turn in charge of making sure that he takes care of his underlings. This continues to the top of the company. The company has a tree structure with one man or a few men at the top, depending on how you look at it. The people at the top must be held responsible for the actions of the people at the bottom, at least in the chain of management. To suggest otherwise is again to support the existence of a corporation as an entity that has all of the rights but none of the responsibilities of an individual. When you give privileges without balancing them with responsibilities, bad things happen. When the entity is as powerful and dangerous as a chemical company, those things are really bad.
Why are you making apologies for people who don't do their jobs, resulting in the deaths of thousands?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Right. That's why they chose flights with the maximum number of passengers, and hit the WTC and Pentagon in the early afternoon"
morning, dickass.
This can;t be pegged
"can't".
" Richard Clark and Rand Beers were hired by Clinton and kept on by Bush."
Great. So that means they can both accurately testify as to what the differences were between the two administrations.
"Bush made no significant changes to Clintons plan for dealing with terrorism."
That's your lie. You can keep repeating that lie but it won't turn into a truth. How do I know it's a lie? Becasue both Clarke and Beers say so. They have both testified under oath that Bush did not care all that much about osama, that bush diverted resources from terrorism and that he just didn't really want to hear about it.
"Bush was not in office long enough to make the kind of changes it would take to prevent 9/11."
This is bullshit. Again both Clarke and Beers made it clear to Bush that Osama was going to attack the US Imminently. Bush chose to ignore that.
evil is as evil does
In the case that it really was sabotage and not deliberate endangerment, wouldn't the onus be on UC to find out who was responsible so that they can be brought to justice? Why is sabotage being used as an excuse?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Where did I say any of that was ok? Show me where I said that.
Again, you don't care about truth or facts, just getting your rant out. But we don't care.
Stop trying so hard to turn everything into a cause for revolution. You sound like an idiot.
9/11 was the single largest failure of US security agencies in history
Not to pick nits or anything, but the single largest failure of US security agencies would probably be Pearl Harbor. We were actually reading the Japanese communications at the time.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
So your saying everyone was telling Bush Osama was about to attack and he didn't believe them. That is not what the 9/11 commision found. Your only listening to one side. Most of the senior people dealing with antiterroism were doing the exact same job under the Bush administration as they were under the Clinton administration. This includes Clarke and Beers. If antiterrorism efforts were messed up while Bush was in office then they were also messed up before he took office because nothing changed with antiterrorism when he took office. The budget wasn't cut. There were no people put into positions to repay a favor. The US was doing the same job before and after Bush took office. You will believe what you want to believe and only listen to people saying what you want to hear. How much money did Clark earn for writing his book? Beers was part of the Kerry campaign. The two people you keep quoting have good reasons to be biased. The FBI was unable to connect the dots to give credibility to the terrist threats before 9/11. The intelligence reports warning of 9/11 put the attack in Europe or the Middle East. Every day there are threats agaist the US. There was no credible warning given for 9/11. John Kerry and the rest of the 9/11 commision doesn't agree with your conclusion that there was sufficent warning to prevent 9/11.
" So your saying everyone was telling Bush Osama was about to attack and he didn't believe them."
No he ignored them.
"That is not what the 9/11 commision found."
Of course not, what else would a republican congress find?
'Your only listening to one side."
I am listening to the two people who you admit would be in the best position to know. The people in charge of fighting terrorism under both clinton and bush.
"Most of the senior people dealing with antiterroism were doing the exact same job under the Bush administration as they were under the Clinton administration. This includes Clarke and Beers."
That's right. And they have both said that Bush didn't take the threat seriously. In fact Beers left the administration and helped kerry.
". If antiterrorism efforts were messed up while Bush was in office then they were also messed up before he took office because nothing changed with antiterrorism when he took office."
Once again you keep repeating this lie and hoping it comes true. Both Clarke and Beers have testified there were a lot of differences. Once again constantly repeating a lie will not make it come true.
" The two people you keep quoting have good reasons to be biased."
Yes they do. The became disgusted with the way Bush handled the events before and after 9/11. Clarke was a registered republican who worked for Bush Sr. They are not biased because they were born that way, they are biased because of what they experienced first hand.
"The FBI was unable to connect the dots to give credibility to the terrist threats before 9/11."
And Bush did not hold one person responsible for this collasal failure.
"The intelligence reports warning of 9/11 put the attack in Europe or the Middle East. Every day there are threats agaist the US."
Yes and that's why the title of the report was "Osama determined to attack in the United States".
"There was no credible warning given for 9/11."
And Bush did not hold one anybody for this collasal failure of intelligence.
evil is as evil does
John Kerry (and other Democrats) were on the 9/11 commision and do not share your view. Many of the things you won't believe are testemony in this. John Kerry as a member of the 9/11 commision also "did not hold one person responsible for this collasal failure." And that includes Bush. It was John Kerry's (and the rest of the 9/11 commision) to figure out what happened and posssibly assign blame. Not Bush's. There are many other people who knew exactly what was going on who's testitmony differs Clarke and Beers. Why aren't you listening to them? The 9/11 commision is not congress. Was there even a congressman on it? You don't know what's going on and you won't listen to anyhting outside your narrow view. If you want to blame Bush for 9/11, darkness and cold go ahead.
As a citizen benefitting from the country you do have an obligation to help others. Just like you're forced to pay taxes.
" John Kerry (and other Democrats) were on the 9/11 commision and do not share your view. "
That's right. They don't.
"Many of the things you won't believe are testemony in this. John Kerry as a member of the 9/11 commision also "did not hold one person responsible for this collasal failure.""
That's right. And he is not the president. It's the president's job to hold people responsible. He is the commander in chief. He doesn't get to throw the ball on somebody elses lap and go play golf.
"If you want to blame Bush for 9/11,"
I do blame him for 9/11. I also blame him for all the horrible things he as done after 9/11. Most of all I blame him for not being man enough fire everybody whose job it was to keep us safe.
BTW you keep bringing kerry and clinton into this. You are saying that there is no difference between kerry, clinton and bush. Is that how you think of bush? That he is no better then clinton and kerry?
evil is as evil does
Reports I've read state that a contributing factor was cost-cutting at the plant that was ordered by the parent company.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Thanks for the correct spelling of Giuliani. :)
Wow, you just totally missed the point.
Are you a racist? It seems like you are racist against people from India. If so, why?
If not, why does reportage of a major technological disaster in a technology forum bother you?
When did Bush lie about Iraq's nuclear program?
Please name just one item.
Did he look at the latest information provided by US intelligence and other information provided by other goverments intellences and then take action on what that intellence was saying was happen. Yes. Did alot of that information turn out to be wrong. Yes. Is that lieing? No.
Why is a shoplifter giving more punishment than either a CEO who's actions kill 15000 people or one that bilks millions of people out of their life savings?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'm sure he intended it that way. Homosexuality is offensive and immoral and in many places illegal. It's been that way for many hundreds of years. It's also in most religious scriptures, both east and west. No amount of fruits waving signs and paying off film makers, political action committees and lobbyists is going to change that part of culture. Get over it.
All people deserve tolerance and support. Love the sinner, but not the sin and all that. But let's not get carried away and confuse tolerance and acceptance of an individual for an endorsement of that individuals problems and behavior.
While I agree on your point that there is a bias showing here, I would point out that insecticides are generally harmful to humans as well. To prove my point, I will now drink this glass of DEET.
*gulp*
HRRRK.........