One of the hoaxes they pulled was “Yes Man” Andy Bichlbaum posing as Dow Chemical spokesperson "Jude Finnesterra" for an international BBC interview back in 2004. Under that guise, he proceeded to “do the right thing” and have Dow admit that Union Carbide was responsible for the infamous 1984 Bhopal industrial accident. Here is some of what he said:
Today is a great day for all of us at Dow and, I think, for millions of people around the world, as well. It's twenty years since the disaster. And today I’m very, very happy to announce that for the first time Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe.
We have a $12 billion plan to finally, at long last, fully compensate the victims, including the 120,000 who may need medical care for their entire lives, and to fully and swiftly remediate the Bhopal plant site.
Keep in mind that this was a total fabrication. Here is the part that really, really gets me. After word got out that Dow was “accepting full responsibility,” according to Juan Gonzalez, co-host of “Democracy Now!,” it cost Dow Chemical over $2 billion in market value within a half-hour.
Think about it. The World was under the impression that a giant, multi-national corporation was going to do the right thing and help those that Union Carbide caused great suffering, and the value of the corporation goes down by $2 billion! How pathetic is that?
I know it’s very naïve of me, but I would hope that a giant corporation who causes grief among the world’s population would reap benefits from its generosity in admitting and rectifying the disaster that it caused. The fact that Dow dropped $2 billion just reinforces other multinational corporations to deny, deny and deny again any responsibility for disasters they cause.
The ultimate questions are: What does it say to us as a world community that corporations suffer if they do the right thing? Is the world really a two-tiered system in which the moneyed power players don’t want the multinationals to “do the right thing” under threat of major devaluation and the rest of us folk have no say or influence in the matter? Really sad.
