Bhopal hoax

It's almost too sad to be appreciated. DemocracyNow.org hoaxed the BBC on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster (go to "browse recent shows" and scroll to Dec 6). The BBC interviewed "Jude Finisterra", representing himself as a Dow Chemical spokesperson, who said that Dow was now willing to take responsibility for Bhopal, and would clean up the site and liquidate Union Carbide so they could give the Bhopal residents $12 billion in compensation.

Listening to Mr. "Finisterra" talk about compensating the Indian people, pushing the US to extradite the man responsible for the disaster back to India, cooperating with future legal actions, and funding research on the safety of the chemicals they produce entertained me initially, but about halfway through I started to get sad. In the world I want to live in, this is how companies really would behave. The reality of the world I do live in is reflected in the fact that when this report was aired, company stock dropped 4.2% in 23 minutes, not because stockholders were horrified to find out about the disaster, but because they didn't want to take a financial hit from the compensation and cleanup.

The best part of the hoax is that Dow was forced to publicly state that they would not claim responsibility for the disaster. The worst part is the possibility that some residents of Bhopal heard the report and may have believed that they were finally going to get justice.