Synogenes.com

Eight people were sentenced to two years each in jail and fines of £1500 in the Indian courts this week. You'd think it was a relatively minor offence but in fact it was the judgement in the Bhopal case, the world's worst ever industrial accident. They were convicted of negligence and the consequence of that negligence was a death toll of at least 15,000 and perhaps as many as 25,000 people.

On 3rd December 1984, the Union Carbide plant was manufacturing pesticides and around forty tons of methyl isocyanate escaped and fell on the town killing over 3000 people in the first day. There followed decades of health problems including birth defects. For such a disaster you would have thought that if the company was found to be negligent, the CEO would be in the dock. After all, the decisions about how the plant was run, what it's profitability targets were, what style of management to impose, its operating procedures, would have been taken not solely by the eight Indians convicted and sentenced this week, but also by the Union Carbide chairman, Warren Anderson.

He's been named as one of the accused, but not mentioned in the sentencing. Why is that? Well, back in 2000, Warren Anderson was reported to have gone into hiding to avoid being served a summons to appear in a Manhattan court to face civil proceedings against him.

The Indian government had brought a civil case against him in 1989 and they agreed a settlement of $470 million. Nevertheless, the Indian Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant on the charge of "culpable homicide" but Anderson refused to be subject to the Bhopal Court jurisdiction.

So whilst the big bosses behind the company get off without facing court, eight Indians including the Indian chairman, managing director, vice-president, works manager, a plant superintendant and a production assistant are jailed and fined.

The current owners of Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals, are still resisting attempts to get the corporation to take full responsibility for the disaster. Union Carbide argued that the Indian branch should take full responsibility even though UC owner 51% of the Indian subsidiary. Such is the way with corporate responsibility - it doesn't count for very much at all.

UC has effectively offered up eight Indian employees as sacrificial lambs whilst one of the biggest culprits in the case has managed to avoid extradition, arrest, and a court appearance. It is understood that Warren Anderson is a very wealthy mean. Cynics might think these two facts are related.

The oil spill from the rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico on 20th April is the worst environmental disaster the US has ever faced and for the moment Obama is going after BP to pay for the damage. But we should think about what really caused this disaster.

Certainly the company didn't know how it would deal with such a failure at that depth because it had never happened before. It's safety plans were clearly not up to dealing with the consequences of its own operations, so there is some culpability there. But we should ask why companies are undertaking such dangerous and environmentally hazardous procedures at all.

The quest for more and more profit is not simply the result of greedy individuals although that's the way it is often presented. In fact, there is a compulsion in all businesses to increase their profits because failure to do so risks a takeover, or at worst going bust. So every company, every corporation, every global business, is in cut-throat competition to maximise the return to the shareholders. All else is a secondary concern.

They will bend government policies, bribe states, corrupt politicians, and when it is expedient dismiss or downplay any environmental, social or economic consequences of their actions. Profit always comes before anything else and the shareholders, the owners of capital, sitting in the background expect board members always and unquestionably to act in their interests.

That fundamental clash between the interests of the owners of capital, and society in general is often hidden behind an ideology that tries to convince us all that it is in our best interests for these companies to succeed, by which is meant to make increased profits. When these companies are in difficulty because of periodic crises, we are told that we have to accept austerity measures in order to keep up the profits for the shareholders. The system that creates the crises is deemed beyond criticism.

We are even told that we are all shareholders now because our pension funds are invested on our behalf. Of course, the truth is that our pensions are deferred income, income that we have not yet been given even though we have earned it. Far from being something we should be grateful for, it is in fact capital that is being used by the major company owners to further their own interests.

The oil spill should suggest to us all that a system that allows the owners of vast amounts of capital to undertake operations that kill their own workers and produce environmental disasters, is fundamentally flawed. A civilised society would not allow a minority of very wealthy people to take such risks just because they own capital. The social cost is simply too great.

And to deal with the disaster, it is very reasonable to propose that the capital of BP be seized and applied to the clean up. No dividends, no profit to the owners, no compensation to the directors, unless and until the mess is cleaned up. Thereafter, it is questionable whether the same people should ever be entrusted with such power again. Often revolutionary and reasonable are the same thing.

"The Society's foundation is its Fellowship, which is made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Each year, the Fellows elect 44 new Fellows and eight new Foreign Members, chosen for their scientific achievements." That's what the Royal Society website says.

And it goes on, "The main criterion for election as a Fellow is scientific excellence." So there you have it. A scientific body which elects its fellows on the basis of significant scientific achievement. The Royal Society says "The election process for Fellows and Foreign Members is extremely rigorous and is based upon the established practice of peer review."

But it seems there has been some exceptions made. The Princess Royal and the Duke of Kent are already Fellows. Already the Duke of Edinburgh is a Fellow, and now his grandson Prince William is to be made a Fellow as well. What, we might ask, is their scientific achievement? Why on earth would an eminent scientific society pander to royalty by degrading the significance of a Fellowship of the Royal Society and allowing in people who, apart from being very rich, have no distinguishing characteristics at all.

The election of honorary fellows was supposed to be to be able to include those who "rendered signal service to the cause of science, or whose election would significantly benefit the Society by their great experience in other walks of life". But in this case, it's a throwback to the time in the seventeenth century when scientists were thin on the ground and in order to get any financial backing for scientific activity, you had to pander to the rich and famous.

The clause to elect honorary fellows enabled wealthy folk to parade around with FRS after their name. The category of Royal Fellows allowed direct pandering to royalty which persists to this day. Of course, it won't make any real difference to anything much. Prince William has not shown any "significant scientific achievement", indeed he's not personally involved in anything much to do with science. He's just a name.

But this is just another aspect of marketing, branding, and pumping up the Society's importance through the names it can list, rather than through the profoundly important scientific advances of its true Fellows. Does it really need to do this pandering? True, it is part of the long historical tradition of the Society and by pandering to the self-importance of royalty, it make funding a little more likely, so there's clearly an opportunist element to this act.

But doesn't it look cheap? The spirit of rationalism that pervades the real work of the Royal Society ought at the same time to point to the need to drop the archaic pandering to royalty and other wealthy people.

Given the lamentable record of the Catholic Church in addressing the long-standing criminal activities of its child-abusing members, it is no surprise that the Belgian authorities saw fit to confiscate material which was being reviewed by the bishops.

If the bishops had had a clear intention of addressing the issue, instead of working on the material themselves, they would have voluntarily involved criminal investigators. That they didn't do so is sufficient grounds for having zero confidence in their ability to address the issue.

We are left wondering what, if anything, they intended to do. Suppose they found evidence of child abuse. Their first decision would have been whether or not to inform the criminal investigators and that allows for the possibility that they might not have. It is entirely possible that in the interests of their own institution, the church, they would make a decision to attempt to resolve the "problem" internally. That of course, it utterly unacceptable.

The very fact that they were willing to filter through potential evidence and make a prior judgement about what if anything would be reported to the police shows how malleable is their sense of morality and justice. There should have been no question of the church looking into crimes committed within its ranks. Those criminal child abusers are subject to criminal law, defined and implemented by the state. They are not first accountable to the church.

There is an important principle here. The church has always pretended that they are answerable to some "higher authority", as if that supersedes the laws of the state. The church has behaved as if it can pick and choose whether or not to subject itself to civil law and the Belgian authorities have demonstrated that they don't have the choice.

The potential for incriminating evidence to be hidden away under the guise of "confidentiality" meant that the only way for the police to be sure of getting at the evidence itself was to seize it. The church should be ashamed of trying to conduct an internal review instead of voluntarily opening its documents to criminal investigators. This doesn't show the church implementing its so-called "zero tolerance" policy, but of once again trying to hide from the public gaze the shameful internal workings of the church administration.

We can see why so many people have "zero confidence" in the morality of the church.