Olympic Committee: Dow Not Responsible for Bhopal Tragedy
[Dow Chemical] merged with the Union Carbide Corporation - whose subsidiary Union Carbide India ran the Bhopal pesticide plant - in 1999 and denies any liability for the chemical gas leak.
As well as its sponsorship deal, the US-based company is funding a £7m ($11m) fabric wrap for the Olympic stadium in east London, which will be 900m (0.56 miles) long and 20m (67ft) high.
Indian NGOs working with the survivors of the gas leak and the IOA have repeatedly demanded that Dow Chemical should be dropped as one of the sponsors for the Olympics.
A commissioner for a body monitoring the Olympics recently resigned over its links with Dow.
Well, they need money, Dow gives them money.
So, you see, one corporation gobbles another and liability ends.
As part of an Amnesty International query on this ongoing legal nightmare for those Bhopal sufferers in India:
In 2005, the Bhopal Court issued a summons for Dow to attend the proceedings and give account as to why it should not produce its fully owned subsidiary and proclaimed absconder, UCC, in court. Dow's subsidiary in India, Dow Chemical India Private Ltd, successfully applied for the summons to be stayed.
Comments
How disappointing. Dow may not have owned Union Carbide at the time but it has done all that it can to shield its liability since it acquired it. Just the fact that it would do business, as a purchaser or otherwise, with a company that committed negligent homocide would be enough for me to refuse its sponsorship.
The accident site, which sits in the middle of Bhopal, was given back to the state government. It still has 425 tons of hazardous waste that have yet to be cleared. Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical Company in 2001, and the Indian government is seeking to get Dow to clean up the site. Disease and disfigurements remain common in Bhopal, though little research has been done on the toxic legacy of the accident site.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/bhopal/index.html
Better Genocide Through Chemistry. Fiduciary 'Responsibility' has never been clearer.
To put this in the international affairs perspective, I see the Olympics as a kind of good will international competition event -- or sorts, anyway. I'll leave my personal issues related to sports and competition out of this very brief set of questions. As such, as a general representation of the body of nation states as they have evolved to this point, do they supposedly represent the people of the nations struggling to be the best that they can be? It's not just the individuals and teams that get the gold, in the end it's the individuals and teams associated with the nations that select and send them. Are they also supposed to represent the economies of those nations and their key actors, as a marketing function (and everyone knows how going pro excludes these athletes from competition, why is that?)? Well, that may indeed be an underlying meaning. What is their place in the international scheme of things?
Taking on a corporate sponsor to keep this international affair going has meaning. That meaning may not be easy to dissect in all its nefarious tentacles. And so we come to this sort of "rationally justified" decision to accept money from a transnational corporation. One that has its hands very dirty in relation to one of the worst industrial accidents in history. And we get good will as "the Olympics" mixed with, maybe even attempting to white wash something dark and dangerous. In essence, I would venture, the revealed structure of what Walter Lippmann once identified as "the Manufacture of Consent".
The nefarious Avery Brundage and a lot of corporados have made what could have been an international symbol of human play and unity into a corporate piece of corruption. It was not exactly pristine when Hitler got to stage the games, even though Jesse Owens did get a chance to kick his Aryan butt. There is some good sports journalism on this if anyone wants to look it up. It just is not that important in the long run.
The irony of Greece having been the last host nation is there. They did get a real upgrade in their urban mass transit out of it; but how much that let the banksters in is hard to determine. Greece's problems are their rich people, not their poor workers and civil servants. Tax evasion could be an Olympic Sport for them. What they had after the Generals did not bear close inspection.