Yesterday me and my group members watched the documentary, Bhopal.  It was a heart wrenching film about the devastating gas leak in Bhopal, India where Union Carbide International, now a subsidiary of Dow corporations, had set up an untested chemical substance factory at the center of the small and poor community. It brings to light many of the faults in how our society, particularity talking about how it is run by corporations.  These corporations will do anything they want to get their money and they don’t care about who they hurt to get it.

The movie starts in 1984 where the plant leaked toxic gas from its holding tanks.  Millions of family’s woke up at three in the morning, and ran from their homes to avoid the gas that was “stinging their eyes.”  On average, every family in the town lost 1-2 members that night but many lost even more.  Later, after an investigation, it was found that the plant had disabled its safety measures in the holding containers to save labor and money.  It was also found that the company had been dumping toxic waste into the surrounding areas, causing water contamination which also caused many problems for the people living there.  An arrest warrant was put out in India for the CEO of Union Carbide and the managers of the Bhopal factory.  This warrant is still active today, even though the CEO is retired in a beach house on Long Island.  The movie went on to explain that Union Carbide denied that the accident was their fault and refused to give any relief to those affected in Bhopal.  This was until they were forced to by the U.S. Supreme Court.  They were forced to give $470 million to the Indian government.  Today, after more than 25 years later, children are still born with birth defects because of the toxicity of the surrounding area.  Many riots still happen in that area and almost all of them are because of this issue.  The Indian government and Dow chemical are still not doing anything about it.

From this movie we learned more about the problems with our corporate regulations. Even though we have many laws that tell what corporations can and cannot do, when these rules get broken many times nothing is done about it.  This movie shows that corporations will go to great lengths to make profits, and find even the smallest loopholes in our legal documents to do so.  The Bhopal disaster is just one example of this, and these “accidents” are still happening today!  We need to get these corporations under control if we have any chance of a better future.