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Brilliant Hoax- the Joke's on Dow Chemical

Jake, Colossus of Clout

21:41 / 06.12.04

Check this out.

Basically, this guy poses as a Dow-Jones spokesman and goes on the BBC to publically apologize for the Bhopal disaster twenty years ago. He is very convincing- I just saw this on Democracy Now!, and he really looks and sounds like a corporate spokesman.

Interesting tidbit: While people still thought this was for real, Dow-Jones stock fell.

21:53 / 06.12.04

Oh my sweet jesus. Was that the same apology that I heard on NPR the other day? These guys are now my biggest heros of all time for the next 24 hours.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:59 / 06.12.04

Yup. It was the Yes Men guys, wasn't it?

Papers are saying this was a cruel trick to pull on the victims (what, like ACTUALLY POISIONING THEM wasn't?)... I'm kind of hoping that, given as the fake spokesman DID give the apology and promise UC SHOULD have given, giving them ever more much-needed bad publicity, they'll actually pay it just to look less shit, seeing as how the story's not going away now.

But then, I'm in an optimistic mood.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:13 / 07.12.04

Not going to happen. Dow Chemical (not Dow Jones - very different) does not accept liability for Bhopal, as they say the liability was settled 15 years before their merger with Union Carbide. Unless they are forced to pay up, they won't, and they won't be forced to pay up because it would set too dangerous a precedent for corporate liability, not to mention taking a huge chunk out of their profits. It's back to shareholder value...

11:53 / 07.12.04

the sad thing about bhopal is it was most likely caused by sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

12:01 / 07.12.04

the sad thing about bhopal is it was most likely caused by sabotage by a disgruntled employee.

i didn't know that. my guess is that most workers at chemical plants in the developing world have plenty of good reasons to be disgruntled.

12:38 / 07.12.04

well sure, but disgruntled enough to cause the death of 2000 people, untold numbers of orphans, put thousands of more people out of work (all over the world)?

I would have to say that was an excellent example of sticking it to the man!

13:09 / 07.12.04

oh, i'm not saying it was justified at all. i'm just saying that it's really the result of poor working conditions and economic issues and so on. if you take a bunch of people and treat them like crap, some of them are going to snap. if they work in a place where they can do a lot of damage when they snap...

13:26 / 07.12.04

oh, i completelly agree. its just if you dig a bit deeper into the whole situation, it becomes a bit more complex than just corporate exploiters killing innocents for profit. 49% of the plant was owned by the local government which was actually going through some sort of revolt at the time. it looks as if it was more of getting to them then union carbide.

13:54 / 07.12.04

Have you got a reference for that? Sounds interesting.

unheimlich manoeuvre

17:32 / 08.12.04

nun respects vultures: yes, some corroboration would be good.
I believe the accident happened because Union Carbide cut corners and Wikipedia supports that argument.

04:28 / 09.12.04

to be honest, the only reference i have to it is some special on bhopal i had seen on the tenth anniversary of it, so im a pretty sketchy source.
might have been sixty minutes, but well, like i said, sketchy source.

and well, the wikipedia is all well and good and all, i love it, but its pretty much open information, so i would suppose who writes the article gets to write history. i just think bhopal is a bit like an onion, you just have layers and layers of shit to peel off.

but i guess thats what the world has lawyers for. to seek out and find the truth and answer all questions about everything!

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:04 / 09.12.04

So, hang on.. on the strength of something you vaguely remember seeing on television 10 years ago, you are ready to say that it was "most likely" that the Bhopal catastrophe was caused by sabotage, thus exonerating the management?

I can see why Dow's Board isn't exactly shaking in their handmade shoes: if people are this easy to spin, they're laughing.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:19 / 09.12.04

Just for the record: the theory of sabotage by a disgruntled employee was proposed by Dr. Ashok Kalelkar in an report commissioned by Union Carbide. The employee has never been named, and Union Carbide never offered any evidence in court to support the theory.

The accident was caused by an inflow of water and impurities into tank 610. To quote the Amnesty International report:

However, there has been more than one explanation of how the water and other impurities entered the MIC storage tank. One theory, argued by workers at the plant, is that it occurred during routine water washing of pipes on the evening of 2 December during the second shift of production on which there was no longer a maintenance supervisor due to staff cuts.As several bleeder lines were clogged, water began to back up in the system and pushed through a leaking valve into the relief valve vent header (RVVH). It then fell into a jumper line which ran between the RVVH and the process vent header (PVH) which had been installed in May 1984 with the authorization of UCC engineers.148 One valve remained to protect Tank 610, the nitrogen outflow valve, but this was known to be leaking as engineers had been unable to pressurize the tank on 26 November.

Sabotage is unlikely and unsubstantiated, and even if it *did* occur, Union Carbide failed to observe basic safety, used unproven technology and - and this is not something to lose sight of - observed a very different standard of safety than they did in plants involving white, English-speaking people.

trouser the trouserian

08:31 / 09.12.04

I'd reccomend the book Five minutes past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro. They also dismiss the 'sabotage' theory and state that many of the safety systems designed to regulate the MIC storage tanks were turned off at the time of the accident (due to cost-cutting measures), and that long-term storage of MIC (there were over 40 tons of it in tank 610) was not a reccomended practice in the chemical industry due to its volatile nature. Furthermore, Carbide did not give Bhopal's hospitals any information about MIC's composition either before or after the accident. And in the aftermath, Carbide lawyers argued that damages to the victims’ families could not be assessed because determining the value of life in the third world was impossible.

The Indian government are still trying to extradite Carbide CEO Warren Anderson on charges of culpable homicide.

A Greenpeace report in 1999 found that Carbide's now-derelict site in Bhopal has severely contamined the local area, with levels of mercury six million times higher than expected and local water contaminated with chemicals known to produce cancer & genetic defects.

According to www.bhopal.net 8,000 people died in the immediate tragedy, and there are at least 120,000 people suffering from chronic health problems as a result of the disaster.

10:27 / 10.12.04

And in the aftermath, Carbide lawyers argued that damages to the victims’ families could not be assessed because determining the value of life in the third world was impossible.

Whereas, it seems, assessing the loss of profits for disruption caused to your business by protesters is a far easier exercise. I think the Union Carbide settlement was in the region of $500 per person, so I make it that 2 hours disruption is worth 20 times as much as an Indian's life.

16:12 / 13.12.04

I just found this reported on commondreams today (For a little irony's sake, here's the Beeb's review., where they are called "merry pranksters."

I couldn't find, on the BBC website, their official retraction of the story, but it's too bad it had to be the BBC, since they have been in some hot water over other issues related to the nefarious Bush/Blair connection which have been distracting. Still, I don't think I blame the Yes men for going forward. Do any of you British folks think this hurts their credibility any? How has the story played there--has it gotten any more attention?

16:17 / 13.12.04

My message somehow got garbled. I tried to include, first, the reference to the story on Commondreams, here and then to ask if anyone had seen the documentary of the film about the Yes Men, called "The Yes Men" which is reviewed on the BBC site I linked above. Sorry if that was confusing. The film is worth seeing, by the way. They are such funny, funny guys. It's out in the U.S. but not the UK.

And, Nun, as the review above makes clear, a big part of their whole raison d'etre is to convince us to be a little more skeptical of what we hear from men in suits talking on TV.