*BP and Union Carbide: Shifting Standards of Corporate ‘Responsibility’

In India, with its love of acronyms, BP has always meant something different from British Petroleum. BP is blood pressure, and a rather common middle-class preoccupation is the measurement of BP with home BP kits, not least of all because there are many things, from the oppressive heat to the traffic snarls caused by CPWD’s lazy habit of leaving behind large amounts of debris on every road, that tend to make an average person’s BP shoot up. [CPWD, for the uninitiated, is Central Public Works Department.] It appears that the BP of the unflappable Barack Obama, hitherto renowned (and sometimes criticized) for never exploding with anger, has likewise suddenly registered a rapid increase. The spill from the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico, which has caused anger and consternation among the residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, has created environmental havoc and there seems to be no end in sight to this crisis. In an interview with NBC News Today on June 8, where Obama was questioned about the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill, he is reported as saying: “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick.”

Obama’s faith in experts is unexceptional, even if he is more prone to expressing his profound respect for expertise knowledge than other recent occupants of the White House. What is exceptional – not, let us be sure, in the annals of American presidential history, but only judged against Obama’s recourse to more elevated speech in comparison with some of his predecessors — is his casual reference to kicking ass, and more recent reports suggest rather unequivocally that Obama is now prepared to exercise the prerogatives of American power to secure “adequate compensation” for all those who have been adversely affected by the oil spill. The White House and BP have reached an agreement that BP will create a $20 billion fund that will be used to clean up the Gulf and award compensation to those whose lives and livelihoods have been endangered by the oil spill. It is significant that Obama himself has been involved in negotiations with BP’s senior executives and lawyers, and that the agreement, if one wishes to call it that, was struck not with the EPA or the Department of Justice, but rather with the White House. The oil spill has become a matter of state, a matter to be adjudicated by a war cabinet. Agreement seems a rather benign word, since it is all too clear that Obama in effect ordered BP’s chairman, Carl Henric Svanberg, “to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness.”

There is certainly no reason to feel sorry for BP, or indeed any other similar monstrosity, and others can mourn BP’s losses. In Britain there is said to have been concern that Obama has been playing the nationalist card, referring to BP as “British Petroleum” even though BP is a multinational and shed its earlier name some years ago; others note that the fate of millions of pensioners and investors is tied up with BP and neither Obama nor British Prime Minister David Cameron can permit BP to go down under. Some in Britain, mindful of the “special relationship” that is said to exist between the US and the UK, might perhaps take affront at Obama’s provocative admonitions to “British Petroleum”. Nevertheless, the consequences for bilateral US-Britain relationships, of which much has been said, seem trifling in comparison to other considerations. There is no gainsaying the fact that BP has not been on the level: the amount of oil it claimed to be retrieving some two to three weeks ago, around 15,000 barrels a day, is three times the amount it first claimed was leaking from the spill. Indeed, more recent estimates suggest that 60,000 barrels, or the equivalent of 2.5 million gallons of crude, are spilling out every day. BP claimed to have spent by mid-June well over $1 billion in efforts to plug the leak and clean up, and in compensation claims to workers, fishermen, and businesses along the coast.

“Corporate responsibility” has always largely been a fiction, but since Obama has been so strident in denouncing BP’s negligence and culpability and insisting that BP be held fully accountable, the question that arises is whether American corporations will be held to the same standards. But, before turning to that question, it may be instructive to dwell on America’s own culpability, about which the US media has been (true to its reputation to avoid anything that might be remotely interesting) studiously silent, in the matter of the oil spill. In April 2009, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), an arm of the Interior Department charged in part with supervising and policing offshore operations, granted a “categorical exemption” to BP from the National Environmental Policy Act. Some will claim that MMS made a wholly inadequate evaluation of the possibility of a large oil spill and thus erroneously allowed BP an exemption, but this obfuscates the wretched history of the MMS as an organization rife with corruption. In the American context, there are other factors that preclude effective regulation of corporate giants, none perhaps as prominent as the fact that senior officials at corporations, in the US administration, and in regulatory agencies are all part of what is called the revolving door. Thus, to take one example, Obama’s appointee as head of the Department of the Interior, Ken Salazar, has voted against regulation that would require vehicles to be more fuel efficient, and he similarly voted against an amendment that would have repealed tax breaks for major oil companies — and this man is supposed to be safeguarding the environment! Salazar in turn lured Sylvia B. Vaca from BP, where she spent a stint after holding a position in the Clinton administration, to be the deputy head of the Minerals Management Service. ‘Revolving Door’ may be one way to describe these scandalous migrations, but I am more inclined to think of these relationships as indicative of the place of incest in the history of the American establishment.

In these same weeks that the oil spill has enraged the US, the Indian Supreme Court handed down, after a lapse of twenty-five years, a judgment which sends a handful of former Union Carbide Corporation of India (UCIL) officials to jail for a mere two years. Over 2,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the leak of a poisonous gas from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal; since then, at least another 20,000 people have died as a consequence of their exposure to the lethal gas, and half a million have suffered various ailments for the same reason. UCIL was a subsidiary of Union Carbide (now absorbed into Dow Chemical), but Union Carbide, which owned a 50.9% share in UCIL, refused to accept responsibility for the catastrophe and resolved upon a strategy intended to establish that it had a distant relationship with its own subsidiary; indeed, it even suggested that a disgruntled Indian employee had sabotaged the plant. Since, it was reasoned by many in the US, and certainly by Union Carbide’s officials, life in India is cheap, why bother at all with substantive compensation? The paltry amount of $470 million was agreed upon as final compensation for the hundreds of thousands whose livelihoods, hopes, dreams, and futures were snatched from them. The complicity of the Indian government in this crime against common people cannot be denied, but neither should that admission serve as the pretext for exculpating Union Carbide’s responsibility.

The story of Bhopal’s gas leak has been told many times before, and not too long ago on this blog itself; and though it need not be rehearsed again at this juncture, the overwhelming question remains: will Obama have the daring to admit Union Carbide’s responsibility in its crimes and order Dow Chemical to pay a just compensation to the victims of the gas leak? And, yet, this is scarcely a question, since the answer has long been foretold. Obama will do no such thing. We should not be surprised that, when Obama finally leaves the White House, we find him part of the ‘revolving door’, moving from one corporate board to another, from one obscenely lucrative speaking engagement on “corporate leadership” to another.

*‘They Make War and Call it Peace’: The Shame of Obama’s Nobel Prize

Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant:  ‘They make solitude [desert] and call it peace’.  So wrote the Roman historian Caius Tacitus almost 2,000 years ago.  The text from which this quote is drawn deserves a bit more scrutiny:  “Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominis imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant”, says Tacitus (Life of Agricola 30), which has generally been rendered as follows:     ‘To robbery, slaughter and rapaciousness [rapere] they give the false name of empire; where they make a solitude they call it peace.’  Tacitus was describing the conduct of the Romans, to whom the “further limits of Britain” had been thrown open.  By solitude, Tacitus meant a ‘desert’; they laid waste to a place and so rendered it a place of solitude [solitudinem].  Somehow, reading Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered today in Oslo, Tacitus’s text comes to mind.

When nearly two months ago the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the conferral of the peace prize upon Obama, one wondered what Obama had done to deserve the honor, or what qualifications the Committee’s members had to bestow the prize upon Obama – or indeed anyone else.  Both questions are easily answered.  The Norwegians know something about salmon and lingon berries, and they should content themselves with that knowledge, and leave judgments about international governance and peace-making to others.  (The results of their previous efforts to ‘broker peace’, to use the debased jargon of realpolitik, are there to be seen in Sri Lanka.)  As for Obama’s qualifications, many people are persuaded, and who knows Obama himself among them, that his (supposed) repudiation of the policies of his predecessor in the White House has alone made him an eminently worthwhile candidate for unusual and great honors.  Quite tickled pink with the idea of his rock star charm, Obama even made a flying visit to Denmark to help in Chicago’s bid to stage the Olympics, only to receive a rude shock when Chicago was thrown out of the final round of competition with the lowest number of votes.  Once Obama had been so slighted, it may be argued, something had to be done to assuage his wounds.  And the Nobel Peace Prize is certainly there for the taking.

Many of the left objected, as indeed they should have, to the conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize upon Barack Obama, who is a wartime President of the United States.  Obama had, in October, already ruled out immediate withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan and was even contemplating an increased American military presence in Afghanistan, a step that has now become official policy.  His administration has retained the previous administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition and has, again in keeping with the trend established by his predecessor, blocked attempts to release photographs and other evidence of abuse from Abu Ghraib.  The objection that a wartime President should not be conferred the Nobel Peace Prize is an entirely legitimate one, but one that is futile.  Others may occasionally forget that the President of the United States is also, in title and in fact, the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, but Obama’s acceptance speech today does not shy from this fact.  As Commander-in-Chief, Nobel Laureate Barack Obama presides over a military establishment with a budget that dwarfs the military expenditures of every other country.  In 2008, the Stockholm Peace Research Institute has reported, the United States spent $607 billion on its armed forces, accounting for 41.5% of the world’s military expenditures.  By comparison, China spent $85 billion, France $66 billion, Britain $65 billion, Russia $59 billion, and India $30 billion.  Whatever else the US might be, it is, and has been for some time, a war-making machine.  That is the most fundamental and ineradicable part of its identity.  War is an American addiction, and Obama is no freer of that addiction than any other power-monger in American history. Unfortunately, Obama is not merely the victim of that addiction; he is today charged with peddling that addiction – arms sales of the most advanced weaponry also fall under his jurisdiction, for example — with palpable consequences for the rest of the world.

Thus, in accepting the Nobel Prize, Obama had to engage in some exercise of sophistry.  He perforce had to begin with reflection that, even as he receives the award, he has authorized the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Obama has mastered the art of appearing ‘noble’, in pursuit of higher truths – in his Nobel speech, this manifests partly as repeated invocations to Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  (Thankfully, Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, a matter of much regret to many well intentioned but hopelessly confused Indians who puzzle over his omission.)  Obama might have ruminated over the fact that the same Martin Luther King, only a year before his death, unhesitatingly described the United States ‘as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world’.  Independent-minded as he is or claims to be, Obama can rightfully claim that he can pick and choose what he likes from his alleged mentors.  As for Gandhi, that man seems to have an inescapable presence in Obama’s life, popping out of the bottle like some genie every now and then.   A few weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about how Obama, when asked by a schoolgirl who he would like to have had as his dinner guest, had identified Gandhi.  And, now, in his Nobel speech, here is Gandhi again:  “The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.”  How Obama loves that man!

Augustine and the church fathers authored the doctrine of ‘the just war’, and Obama’s fond enunciation of this tenet — with which Jesus’s name should not be associated — of the Christian faith will be celebrated by some as a reflection of his ‘principled’ stand on the question of war.  One thought that the distinction between the ‘bad war’ (Iraq) and the ‘good war’ (Afghanistan) had been buried by intelligent minds, but Obama has just breathed new life into this sterile, not to mention stupid, distinction.  The usual platitudes about the presence of evil in this world, and the pain he feels at sending young men and women into the killing fields aside, I could not but notice the sleight of hand with which he dispatched the idea of nonviolent resistance, which Obama otherwise claims to champion, into oblivion.  “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies”, said Obama; “Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”  I’m not aware that an international nonviolent movement was even remotely contemplated, much less brought into existence, but it has become an article of unquestioned faith to argue that Gandhian-style nonviolent resistance would not have survived a minute against Nazi Germany.  Still, supposing that Obama is right in rehearsing this cliché, what is striking is that he should have used the most extreme example of the exercise of violence, namely totalitarian Nazi Germany, to support his call for war in Afghanistan.  So is Afghanistan an instance of the unmitigated evil that men can do?  And if al-Qaeda and Afghanistan – notice, too, the easy and implicit pairing of the two – are reminiscent of the days of Hitler, surely this is a ‘just war’?

The avid lovers of Foucault, and the myriad other postmodernists and poststructuralists, should all be on notice, if they were not previously, that in Obama we have the latest instantiation of the view that, in our progressive times, we shall be killed by kindness.

*Terrorism’s Drones: Cowardice and the New Front of American Warfare

Mrs. Clinton, we are told, has been having a tough time in Pakistan, where students and journalists have apparently been subjecting her to some ‘grilling’. The intellectual standards of American media being what they are, namely pathetic, one should not marvel at the fact that any serious questioning is immediately termed ‘grilling’. It is not any less interesting that such ‘grilling’ as takes place occurs largely in countries that the US otherwise imagines as ‘unfree’.

Under the “remorseless gaze of the Pakistan news media”, says today’s New York Times, Mrs. Clinton returned punch for punch. She castigated Pakistani officials for allowing al-Qaeda safe havens, and in turn was asked whether she did not think that American predator drone attacks in South Waziristan and elsewhere in Pakistan’s frontier areas constitute terrorism. “No, I do not,” Hilary Clinton replied.

Terrorism, as we all know, is not something that the Americans engage in: it has long been an article of faith that America wages (just) wars, engages in defensive conduct, or otherwise acts to free the world of the scourge of terrorism. In recent years, Americans – functionaries of the state, policy experts, and the numerous ‘independent’ commentators whose sole ambition appears to be to authorize the actions of the state — have been particularly insistent in advancing the view that their actions always seek to minimize civilian casualties, and that technological advancements have given them the capacity to wage relentless war with precision attacks that spare civilian lives.

The most notable, and increasingly visible, arsenal in American warfare technology is the invisible predator drone. The drone attack has become the new front of American warfare, and its incidence has increased markedly over the last two US administrations, and most notably since Barack Obama occupied the White House. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially, drone attacks are bitterly resented, but not only because many civilians have been killed. To take one instance, only into the third day of Obama’s administration, on January 23rd, one of two predator strikes run by the CIA eliminated the entire family of a pro-government tribal leader just outside Wana in South Waziristan.

Whatever the rhetoric about precision attacks and the reverence for life that is the supposed feature of American liberal democracy, there is but no question that drone attacks permit the execution of an untamed and aggressive foreign policy in new and unheralded ways. Though President Gerald Ford’s executive order of 1976 banning American intelligence agencies from carrying out political assassinations has in principle never been repudiated, predator attacks are only the latest and most shameless instantiation of the repeated violation of this order. That some of the people who have been assassinated, such as the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud — killed (along with much of his family) by a Predator drone in early August — themselves led lives of violence is not disputed. There is yet a more significant consideration: if histories of war stress, in ancient times, the face-to-face combat and the rules of chivalry that guided combat, we have now moved to the other extreme where the entire intent is to wage as faceless a war as is possible. Apparently bravery, in an extension of merciless air power, now consists in bombing people into extinction, all the while ensuring that no lives should be lost on one’s own side.

As Obama struggles to reach a decision on American involvement in Afghanistan, an increasing number of voices purport to take the middle ground. The US, these voices argue, cannot win the war in Afghanistan, certainly not without a major escalation of the conflict and increase in commitment of troops; on the other hand, the US cannot merely abandon Afghanistan. The question of ‘losing face’ aside, the ‘Great Game’ must continue, unless the US is prepared to concede ground to all others who have eyes on Afghanistan, including Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan. The war, then, must be waged off-shore, with a full deployment of intelligence, cruise missiles, drones, guerrilla units, and so on. What rules of conduct will apply to this warfare? The military and the CIA, as a policy of matter, already do not make public any information on drone attacks, but the entire idea consists in ensuring that there shall be no accountability for American attacks. This is indeed the new front of American warfare: faceless, cowardly, geographically indeterminate, indeed groundless in every respect. Let us recognize terrorism’s drones for what they are.

*Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food: Part I, On the Ideal Dinner Guest

Earlier this month, as Barack Obama prepared to deliver a national address to school-children, conservative politicians, radio talk-show hosts, and many ordinary citizens went on the offensive at the thought that the President was proposing to indoctrinate young minds with communist ideology.  School boards were instructed in a number of states that parents who wished to spare their wards the ordeal of being addressed by a sitting President of the United States could withdraw their children for the day from school or at least from a live viewing of Obama’s address.  Indeed, the White House even made the speech available to schools before it was broadcast, lest anyone should have occasion to accuse the President of secretly hoisting dirty or radical ideas upon the young.  (No lesser a person than Socrates, let us recall, was compelled to consume poison after he was found guilty of leading the young astray.)  As it transpires, Obama gave a harmless little speech, venturing forth, as he often does, to inspire the nation’s youth with sunny thoughts about the virtues of schooling, the gains to be wrought from hard work, the importance of education in shaping a bright future, learning from one’s failures, and the desirability of dreaming.   This talk should be described as an improvement of sorts upon the efforts of his predecessor who, at a commencement address, I think at his alma mater Yale, lovingly described how he had managed to secure the Presidency of the United States even as a ‘C’ student in his undergraduate days.  (And then we’ve been told that in banana republics high elected offices are for sale, when not appropriated at the barrel of a gun.)  We might say that Obama’s speech is in a similar mold, if more elevated in style, substance, and elegance of delivery:  dream the best dreams, and they may well come true.  The road to the White House is less crooked than is imagined.

Leaving aside for the present the question of whether there is anything more than a liberal bone in Obama’s body, and the even more interesting question as to why this kind of political comedy is peculiar to the United States, there is a little detail about his visit with 32 ninth-graders at Wakefield High School in Arlington before his address that demands attention.  One girl by the name of Lily posed this question to the President: “And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”  The room shook with genial laughter.  “Well, you know, dead or alive, that’s a pretty big list,” Obama replied to more mirth making. “You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine.”  Had Obama said Marx, Mao, or Che – let us stick with the dead, with known ‘revolutionary’ figures, and with those who are of foreign vintage – there would have been an uproar, to say the least.   But Gandhi:  isn’t he the harmless little chap, Jesus-like, who spoke about turning the other cheek, and giving away the cloak (not that Gandhi owned one)?  So, though Gandhi has his detractors, as I recall from some of the vitriolic reviews of the hagiographic film by Attenborough that appeared in late 1982, for the most part he is viewed as the champion of non-violence, the apostle of peace, the messenger of love, and so on – pick your favorite cliché.  In the received version of what Gandhi wrought, he used non-violence successfully against the somewhat gentlemanly British, who having failed to hold on to their colonies on the east coast of America moved on to India.  (And, here’s a small history lesson from a history professor, all this is captured in the figure of Lord Cornwallis, who disgraced himself by conceding defeat to George Washington – see the painting by John Trumbull, ‘Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown’, 1797 — and was at once sent to India to lord it over the natives, which Cornwallis proceeded to do with a reckless piece of legislation called the ‘Permanent Settlement.’)  If Obama had picked a somewhat unusual figure as his ideal dinner guest, at least he had picked a charming if somewhat quixotic world historical figure.

In a later blog, I shall turn my attention to the idea of Gandhi as one of Obama’s heroes.  For now, let us try to digest the idea of Obama dining with Gandhi.  What would the evening have looked like?   Obama himself elaborated on the possibilities:  “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”  Indeed, Gandhi ate very little, often nothing more than small raw or boiled vegetables, a small bowl of curds or yogurt, and, apparently, quite a few nuts.  It is the nuts, which are not the poor man’s food, that might have prompted Gandhi’s close friend, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, to quip, “It costs a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”  Had Obama wanted to make his audience go nuts with laughter, he could have cited Naidu, but among the hordes of his advisors there is evidently no Gandhi specialist.  Now let us continue with Obama, who immediately added the following:  “But he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King, so if it hadn’t been for the nonviolent movement in India, you might not have seen the same nonviolent movement for civil rights here in the United States. He inspired César Chávez”, the last a reference to the eminent Chicano political activist and labor union leader.  So Gandhi ate very little, “but he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in.”   Obama’s use of “but” is, to put it gently, bizarre:  the supposition is that though Gandhi ate very little, it is still possible to be inspired by him.  Perhaps, in a land where food is plenty, one has to be a huge or at least generous consumer of food to be taken seriously?

The next course of the dinner — Part II of ‘Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food’ — to follow tomorrow.