> [ The interesting thing about this parallel is that of course
> most of us would normally never have thought about the victims
> of the Exxon Valdez. The court system is kind of a legitimation
> miracle that way: it makes every victim of an important corporate
> crime isolated and forgotten, which is part of why the crimes
> themselves vanish from the memory as if they'd been fixed. ]
In other news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/asia/08bhopal.html
8 Former Executives Guilty in '84 Bhopal Chemical Leak
NEW DELHI - More than 25 years after a plume of fatal toxic gas from an American-owned chemical plant wafted over the slumbering city of Bhopal, eight former executives of the company's Indian subsidiary - including one who has since died - were convicted Monday of negligence. The seven surviving defendants were sentenced to two years in prison and fined 100,000 rupees, or $2,100.
They were the first criminal convictions from the leak at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, a central Indian city. The leak killed 3,000 people almost instantly, and thousands more died later from the aftereffects of the toxic gas, an ingredient in pesticides the plant produced.
[...]