Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Obama Hasn't Learned Lessons of Bhopal
Foreign companies such as BP are shown the big stick, but Washington offers a big shield for its multinationals abroad
The compensation – some $470m – paid out by Union Carbide, the US owner of the plant and now part of Dow Chemical, was just the cash it received from its insurers to compensate the victims, a process that took 17 years. But it's one rule for them and another for anybody else.
Obama wants "British Petroleum" to pay back every nickel and dime the Deepwater Horizon disaster costs. To make sure BP gets the message, the president says he back Congress plans to retrospectively raise the liability limit for claims from $75m to $10bn. That's real money.
While foreign companies in the US are shown the big stick, Washington offers a big shield for its multinationals abroad. In the case of Bhopal, it was the US that blocked India's requests to extradite Warren Anderson, the former chairman of Union Carbide who accepted "moral responsibility" for the accident until a short spell in an Indian jail changed his mind. This week saw just the prosecution of local Indian managers – 26 years after the event.
That was then. Surely India, which says it is an emerging power that wants to shape the world, would be able to stand up to the United States today? And wouldn't a more moral president see that foreign lives are as precious as American ones? Apparently not.
India's still playing a craven toady to a US that is ruthlessly pursuing an agenda where commercial interests are put above the lives of others. Delhi has stripped a flagship nuclear bill of a clause that allowed companies to be sued for negligence in the event of a – God forbid – accident.
It is bizarre to see a leader of the developing world offer up its citizens' lives cheaply to secure investment from foreign companies and governments. Under the civil liabilities for nuclear damage bill, central to a deal with the controversial nuclear pact with the US, costs for cleaning up a catastrophic failure would end up being paid by the Indian taxpayer.
Sure, India is desperate for the nuclear deal – which will see it become the only nonpermanent member of the UN security council to keep its atomic weapons and trade in nuclear know-how. But at what price? Today we know.
Washington made it clear it wanted India to set the bar low on liability – so that shareholders of large US corporations would not be forced to pay out for sloppy, deadly mistakes. So any future victims in India would be left at the mercy of the country's justice system, like those poor souls who lost lives, loved ones and their health and were condemned to spending years lost in the courts with little to show but false hope.
Delhi had argued that international suppliers would not be willing to enter the Indian nuclear market without such a bill. But has Russia been willing to do so. And Germany accepts no cap on nuclear liability. In the US the nuclear lobby accepts a liability set at $10bn.
In Bhopal, what happened in the years after was a bigger scandal than the original accident. Although Delhi was cackhanded, the US bears most of the blame. Unlike BP, Washington did not threaten US companies for deaths in the past and is actively working to ensure they evade responsibility in the future. Obama's administration has not learned the lessons of history. It means we are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
- Posted in
22 Comments so far
Show All"It is bizarre to see a leader of the developing world offer up its citizens' lives cheaply to secure investment from foreign companies and governments."
What is so strange? India has always done that. Read some of the works of Arundhati Roi. She has documented numerous incidents - e.g. villages destroyed to build a dam.
The lesson of Bhopal for Obama is that the nuclear and petrochemical industries contribute boatloads of money to politicians, so pander, baby, pander !
This article is the classic example of the unwarranted assumption. The author presumes that Obama knows or even cares about the real history of the matter and somehow if he did he would take righteous action.
Example:
Unwarranted assumption: Bush/FEMA really WANTED to deliver water, food and emergency supplies to the Katrina victims.
You perhaps make this assumption because (a) it was their official and moral duty to do so, and (b)any sane human being would have tried their best to do so. But none of this means that Bush and FEMA actually set out to do things you think they should have done. The assumption is unwarranted, because you are extrapolating from yourself, and the general population of sane human beings, to Bush and his cronies.
The exact same assumptions are made left and right about Iraq: that Bush, in his heart of hearts, wanted to bring US-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, only he failed. That Bush wanted to keep the price of oil down to ensure the continuation of the American Way of Life™, only he failed. The facts suggest the precise reverse: that the chaos, the bloodshed, the skyrocketing oil prices are not unfortunate side-effects of a botched (but well-intentioned) job, but rather, that they have always been the goal. Until this simple point is well understood, there will be no effective opposition to what this administration has done, and no holding them to account.
See the real purpose behind what and who Obama is and you will see that he and his people have in fact been amazingly competent when you consider that their purposes are to support and bail out at every turn the predators of Big Business.
Just Friends
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy... But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies".
And no, once gain another article that botches the adverbs, it is not "we" who are repeating mistakes it is THEY who are destroying our lives. Until you get this burned into the equation all of your calculations are wrong from the start.
one of the most interesting exercises is to simply look, and feel, without attaching, or acknowledging, words...
I dig your shit, mcoyote...
you keep right on keeping on, thank you very much...
Great post again from mcoyote. You bring the real goods. Appreciated.
Actually, if anything, Obama *has* learned the one great lesson of Bhopal: Side with the polluters, because they'll get away with it, and fill your pockets with cash besides.
More nonsense:
"Obama wants "British Petroleum" to pay back every nickel and dime the Deepwater Horizon disaster costs. To make sure BP gets the message, the president says he back Congress plans to retrospectively raise the liability limit for claims from $75m to $10bn. That's real money."
Even assuming Obama wants any such thing, the planned action is a classic example of an ex post facto law, which is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. What kind of fools do these folks take us for? The only thing that would keep a judge from ruling immediately in favor of BP in the case of the retroactively enforced raised liability limit is the convulsive laughter that would keep the judge from speaking.
You are correct about the Constitution. I believe the relevant clause is the one banning a "bill of attainder."
But the gov't could blackmail BP with the threat of a criminal prosecution. Not likely, with Holder et al. in the Justice Department reluctant to make any waves, but it is a possibility.
Yeah, what with Holder having been on the legal defence team of Chiquita Banana Co. when it was accused of paying goons to off activist workers and union organizers...
Well, hopefully a lot of Americans watching Maddow the other day got it. She explained this on Wednesday's show -- so if there are fools around, hopefully they learned a lesson. Obama loves to spout nonsense -- because he has to spout something otherwise he might not know what to say -- and then he would look like Bush. There has to be something that separates him from Bush -- so far the only thing he's got is full sentences and correct pronunciation.
The Empire that Obomber serves has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to learn: its ossified ideology renders it blind to reality, nature, peoples, and history.
It is a crippled monster that can change in only one direction, that of irreversible decline, waste, and chaotic withering.
how is this for reading between the lines?
either you are republican trying to turn everyone against obama,
or you are just ignorant
(and arrogant?)
Obama wasn't selected to learn lessons.
It's not Obama's fault. India wanted nuclear power and its getting nuclear power. It's a poor country and they bugging us for resources and stealing our jobs. Poopoo article blaming Obama. Geeeeeez !
Sarcasm?
(Sorry, damn it, but sometimes I really do need a sign).
If someone gives a bad deal and asks the other party for consent, its up to that party to say no, no? Don't know Indian govt but if they accepted it, why is Obama only to blame?
Nobody says Obama is to blame. He was 23 years old at the time of the accident. It was Union Carbide in collusion with home grown Indian neo-cons.
Critics are saying despite his Harvard credentials, Obama seems to have a problem learning from history.
Joe
So the blame is joint? That would sound more sensible then. Thanks man.
Why
Why
Why do so many articles proceed from this assumption that Obama's intentions are in some way humane when
no
no
no empirical evidence exists to so much as suggest that?
0bama seems to have learned the lesson or a lesson of Bhopal quite well: transnationals, executives, and politicians are barely prosecuted for abuse, even mass murder, if they do it in company interests; therefore, the major loss to major funders is bad publicity, and damage control primarily means information control.
Watch the lesson in application:
+ No one had or required proper equipment to handle a massive eruption of oil, even though these have happened over and over. However,
+ All the prez's minions and all the prez's shills - and those of BP, of course - were on hand and deployed from Day 1 to prevent proper investigation, reporting, and publicity.
$10 billion is more than 700 million, true -- for BP, a big bag full of peanuts instead of a handful. This is nowhere near representative of the amount of damage that BP has caused and nowhere near the profits they have taken by these practices.
Does anyone imagine that 0bama's price for all this has not been discussed?
now you feel all superior bardamu?