A folk song, written in the 1980s, about the Union Carbide industrial accident in Bhoopal, India, on December 3, 1984, which cost the lives of over 16,000 people.
“There’s poison in the air
Right near the factory!”
And children start to die
And mothers start to scream
And fathers start to weep
And workers start to shout:
“The Union Carbide plant—
Its gas is pouring out!”
It came to India
To use the cheap labor
And thousands it did kill
When its poison gas did pour
“Safety, it costs too much”
The bankers all did say
And the silent spring of death
Won’t affect the USA.
The pesticide for insects
Murdered people now instead
The methyl isocyanate
From the storage tank it fled
Morgan Guaranty Director Brown
And Chase Manhattan Director Ferguson
Directed Union Carbide
To use the cheapest gas.
Each day another horror
Or a new atrocity
There is no regulation
As they destroy the air we breathe
Today they poisoned India
Tomorrow your city
A monument to profit
A tribute to corporate greed