Money 2 – Morals 0

On April 28, 2004, at a London banking conference to which they had accidentally been invited because of their satirical website, "Dow representative" "Erastus Hamm" unveiled "Acceptable Risk," a Dow industry standard for determining how many deaths are acceptable when achieving large profits.

The bankers enthusiastically applauded the lecture, which described several industrial crimes, including IBM's sale of technology to the Nazis for use in identifying Jews, as "golden skeletons" - i.e. skeletons in the closet, but lucrative and therefore acceptable ones.

Several of the bankers in attendance then signed up for licenses for the "Acceptable Risk Calculator" and even posed with Acceptable Risk mascot "Gilda, the golden skeleton in the closet," for photos.

The exercise was intended to illustrate the absurdity of depending on "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR) to set limits to corporate behavior. If corporations were completely free to behave as the market demands - the logical extreme of CSR - then industrial catastrophes of huge magnitude, such as Bhopal, would not necessarily be disadvised.

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