The Chris Moeller Archives

Death at home

A monumental and historic crime is committed. Thousands are killed, and the lives of tens of thousands of others tragically and irreparably changed. The highest court of one of the most populous nations on Earth finds the man responsible guilty of the crime and takes him into custody, but he skips out on a $2,100 bail and another country agrees to provide a safe haven for the fugitive. He eventually dies peacefully of old age in a nursing home three decades after the crime took place. So private has his life in sanctuary become that news of his death takes a month to hit the mainstream news media. Public records expose his death after his family chooses not to publicize it.

The man's name was Warren Anderson, and the country that protected him until his death on September 29th was his own, the United States of America. Anderson was the chairman and CEO of Union Carbide Corp. in 1984 when a gas leak at the company's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India took the lives immediately of at least 3,787 people, and certainly thousands more from long-term illnesses over the ensuing years.

The Bhopal tragedy is representative of a legal system that renders justice against nation-less and border-less global corporations nearly impossible. Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of napalm king Dow Chemical, did much of its business- it's dirtiest business- in a state that it did not call home. Its negligence, well-documented, in attempting to cut costs and failing to train workers or maintain a decaying facility at even basic safety and environmental standards, speaks to a two-tiered justice system that is as border-less as Dow Chemical.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, the global community is now aware of additional crimes. The 2012 Stratfor leak-- which resulted in the publication of more than five million of the private security company's email messages-- revealed that Dow employed Stratfor to spy on the personal and public lives of activists involved in the Bhopal case. Stratfor publicly condemned the leaks, but both Stratfor and Dow have refused to either confirm or deny the accuracy of the information.

posted by CM @ 3:41 PM