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Notice the difference: "Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges again

Notice the difference: "Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges against the companies" They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large companies. If this was a couple of small, local competitors who were the only two [whatever] in the area and they did this, I guarantee you the owners would be individually indicted.

deleted 8y ago
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munk-a 8y ago
I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse 2. Go after the coercers or modify our understanding of liability to allow those targeted to make the argument that their superiors deserve to repay them every bit of penalty they owed. Really, in the modern world, just sue someone and tell them they're on the hook but they'll be allowed to sue whoever is responsible for their portion of the responsibility and watch this all work itself out quickly.
- crowdpleaser 8y ago
  "Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials? In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Whether or not you're punished for following orders has more to do with whether or not you're on the side that writes history than anything else.
      - munk-a 8y ago
        This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more levity[1]...) [1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.
        stirfrykitty 8y ago
        Depends on the situation. Let's say you have a hostile war captive (enemy combative of a high rank) who is the ONLY one who can provide you with critical, war-winning details. You (metaphorically) would want to do whatever it took to secure those details. I've been in hairy situations before. Everything Hollywood depicts goes out the window. Embedded reporters get a newfound respect for troops once they ride out just one hot encounter. They understand the need for the military to do what they do, and are likewise frustrated when the military's hands are needlessly tied when they shouldn't be. I agree to not engage in heinous acts for their own sake, but sometimes more vigorous actions are needed to win for the sake of innocent lives. Case in point being ISIS. They should have been afforded zero grace. In fact, my aforementioned situation has played out in the real many times over. Imagine if the man above had kidnapped a loved one. You would do and sanction anything necessary to get back your loved one. Failure to see this is a moral failure on the part of the one to make the right decisions. There are some situations where "anything goes" is the way to go. Thankfully they are few and far between.
        8y ago
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    It was rejected in 1474 - rather a long time before Nuremberg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#The_trial_of_Peter_von_Hagenbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#The_trial_of_P...
  - ipsocannibal 8y ago
    If read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376.The_Nuremberg_Trials https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376.The_Nuremberg_Tri... I believe you will find this is not the case.
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    "Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.
    - rtkwe 8y ago
      Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that. > Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” and > Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...
      - GeekyBear 8y ago
        People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death. The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done. Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.
        zaphirplane 8y ago
        Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    And it’s still valid if you haven’t lost a war because no one can make it valid.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Transfer of liability? There are candid emails between Steve jobs and Schmidt about the topic. Edit: They made a minor settlement and there was a lawsuit that got a tiny amount of press. http://time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chilling-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ http://time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chilling-response-after-get... Edit 2: there was not even a slap on the wrist legally speaking: "The proposed settlement, which if accepted by the court will be in effect for five years, prohibits the companies from engaging in anticompetitive no solicitation agreements. "
  - deogeo 8y ago
    ...am I understanding it correctly that their 'punishment' was having to promise not to break the law again? But only for five years??
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      Yes. They'll get a "harder" slap if they do it in the next five years (if caught), but after that are free to do so with baseline "penalties" (again, if caught).
    - thatoneuser 8y ago
      "Don't be evil"
  - animal531 8y ago
    Yeah that's ridiculous. A real penalty would be for example to not allow them to appoint new employees for 5 years.
  - PunksATawnyFill 8y ago
    Jobs was a liar. He also said no engineers were laid off from Pro Apps, when in fact half of Pro Apps engineers were fired at the end of the 2000s.
- module0000 8y ago
  >> 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse Yes it is, see: https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/ That said..I agree with the spirit of your post. The only officers that cannot receive corporate immunity are the CEO and CFO - they can be held liable in criminal and civil litigation.
  - yeahitslikethat 8y ago
    Then why aren't they being held accountable? Ever? Banking scandals. This example. Why aren't those who are tasked with enforcing the law enforcing the law?
    - rcw4256 8y ago
      Because they're actually tasked (implicitly or otherwise) with protecting capital. In many cases this means enforcing the law, but in cases of corporate misbehavior, usually means ignoring it.
      - yeahitslikethat 8y ago
        The upward FLOW of capital.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Hey, it reads "in good faith". This only works when an officer in question could not know (s)he is breaking a law. Knowingly doing illicit things is not covered, afaict.
    - koonsolo 8y ago
      Definitely so. "But my boss told me to kill that person, else I would lose my job :'("
      - anfilt 8y ago
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 8y ago
  In a frictionless system, sure. When lawyers cost so much, this kind of chain-of-lawsuits system would be a huge payout to lawyers.
  - thfuran 8y ago
    It'd be nice if the people adversely affected by malfeasance got compensation, but the more important part, as far as utility goes, is that the perpetrators suffer significant penalty to disincentivize the behavior.
  - maxdamantus 8y ago
    If that's the criticism, it should presumably apply much more widely than just this case—why not all of civil law?
- thereare5lights 8y ago
  > 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse That's not true. Just look at Lt. William Calley.
  - masonic 8y ago
    "following orders" was specifically not an excuse, hence him being convicted. He didn't serve additional time due to other technical issues in his prosecution.
    - thereare5lights 8y ago
      What an awesome way to split hairs. "Howard Callaway, Secretary of the Army, was quoted in The New York Times in 1976 as stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders—a rationale that contradicts the standards set at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where following orders was not a defense for committing war crimes.[98]" [98] Marshall, Burke; Goldstein, Joseph (2 April 1976). "Learning From My Lai: A Proposal on War Crimes". The New York Times. p. 26. Sure sounds like an excuse to me. Now that I think about it, you're not splitting hairs, you're just flat out wrong at best.
      - munk-a 8y ago
        Being genuinely coerced into an action against your will doesn't leave you ethically liable for your actions - you need to have some intent and will to carry out your actions for any culpability in a philosophical sense[1]. As an example, if you were to hand someone a gun and tell them (in a manner which they fully trusted your honesty and intent) that you would shoot them and their friend if they didn't shoot their friend then... you're on really shaky ground philosophically - dismissing any scenario escapes (shooting your captor, disarming them etc...) you're left with three basic options, shoot yourself, shoot your friend, and refuse to shoot and have both yourself and your friend be shot - in this case it is logical and it should be a guiltless action to shoot your friend and preserve your own life (but it's complicated by our value system). So, excusing part of an action due to a coercion to follow actions is valid, but every time we talk about this scenario in the real world you're going to have more options, maybe you doubt your captor would actually shoot both of you - in that case shooting your friend is back to mostly being your decision - the issue occurs when this grey story is converted to black and white and people paint themselves falsely as being unwilling participants. In WW2 US soldiers could have refused when asked to participate in concentration camps, it would have been severely inconveniencing and that counts for something, but they chose the easy route and that is a perfectly valid guilt. [1] There is a rather sound argument to be made that evil and culpability is a false construct and that we should refuse to punish any bad actors beyond the point of discouraging recidivism. If there is a common good that we all share as a "known truth" then deviations from that truth can be considered to be impairments about seeing the truth and comprehending it which would lead any deviations from that truth to be understood as a need to enlighten their view of the truth. It's quite an interesting philosophical path to head down.
samatman 8y ago
I would agree with both. But bringing charges against a company is important. Boards of directors are supposed to, well, direct the executives, not look the other way while they break the law and abuse their employees. The way to encourage this is to hit the company, hard, right in the wallet.
- shdh 8y ago
  The cost was probably less than the profit in this outcome for each of the companies.
- turc1656 8y ago
  Oh I definitely agree. Both should ideally be charged because these people were acting on behalf of the company and were in management positions, which makes the company legally liable for their actions. But if I only get to choose one to charge, I go the individual route any day of the week because it reduces/removes the moral hazard of getting to shift your criminal activity to an intangible, legal entity like a corporation. Sure, you'd never get the $435M settlement from these people, but once everyone knows the government is coming after them personally, I would bet my last dollar that this type of crap virtually never happens again.
- citizenkeen 8y ago
  But that's half the problem - we never do. These kind of criminal charges result in a few million dollars worth of fines. It's never enough to really hurt a company the way that losing one year in jail hurts a person.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It has been shown repeatedly that boards won't do much and repeated fines are more and more just another cost of business. Either the fines need to be raised to a level where the company loses profit for one or more years or we need to go after individuals.
  - yardie 8y ago
    Don’t bother to fine them. They’ll just use that to punish employees and shareholders. Make the executives liable.
i_am_proteus 8y ago
Part of the reason modern corporate bureaucracies are so bloated and complicated is to reduce the personal risk to executives by muddying the apparent decision-making process at the top. Executives can make it look like they're people who execute complicated processes rather than decision-makers. They end up taking credit when things go well, and they might look bad when things go poorly, but they essentially never get held criminally liable. Nice work if you can get it.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  This is a powerful insight, thank you. I am fascinated by the way "fitness landscapes" manifest in companies OUTSIDE the financial fitness of the company's trade. People often act like trade fitness is the only realm where we compete in capitalism, but there are so many more. Moat fitness for a company doesn't benefit their trade at all. Customers don't benefit when you kill a competitor, but you do. Similarly PowerPoint doesn't benefit the customer or the business. It's a tool for employee theater, using it makes employees appear less fit to be fired. And I like your point that unaccountability fitness is also an existential competition for executives. I wish there were a big list of these for me to ponder.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Power Point? What have PPT ever done to you?
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      No offense to PowerPoint fans! I've observed people making pointless presentations to shore up their brand as employees, not to facilitate trade. It has other uses but... Have you not seen what I describe? That would be a useful data point for me if true.
      - rightbyte 8y ago
        Not really but I guess that's dependent on company culture. You work at a stack rank place? Where I work Power Point is mainly used to make presentations that are easy to read on a projector screen (as it should be used). On many places it seems to be used as a general document writer application ... so what we emotionaly associate with Power Point might differ alot.
macspoofing 8y ago
Meh. It really wasn't that big of a deal. They got caught and fined and that feels like an appropriate level of punishment. There are times when a prison-term against bad-actor executives is the right punishment ... this isn't it. >If this was a couple of small, local competitors who were the only two [whatever] in the area and they did this, I guarantee you the owners would be individually indicted. No. 100% NO. I guarantee you that the regulators wouldn't care. And if they did care, the 'local competitors' would get AT BEST a slap on the wrist like a strongly worded letter with a time-frame or MAYBE a fine (if that). There would be no indictments. I work with regulators all the time (FDA, Health Canada), and they will work with you to get you under compliance. Consider the fact that all companies are under a large amount of legal and regulatory constraints and chances are every company is doing something against some law or some regulation (knowingly or unknowingly), and you can see that as long as what you did didn't result in undue hardship (though I'm sure you'll try to claim that this was an egregious action - I disagree) and you fix your behaviour, you'll be fine.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >No. 100% NO. I guarantee you that the regulators wouldn't care. And if they did care, the 'local competitors' would get AT BEST a slap on the wrist like a strongly worded letter with a time-frame or MAYBE a fine (if that). There would be no indictments. Unless of course an indictment is the politically determined goal. E.g. that one small Chinese bank that got screwed for the lending bubble that popped in '08.
- turc1656 8y ago
  "...they will work with you to get you under compliance" Sure, as long as they are doing so in good faith. An act like this is clearly not in any sort of good-faith attempt to be in compliance with the law. It's obviously illegal. I would expect (hope?) that regulators and law enforcement would act swiftly and with much more than strongly worded letters and small fines for anyone who does this. Yes, you are correct that I would definitely claim that this was an egregious action. If people are conspiring to limit the employment prospects and potential income of others and are doing so in a manner that violates the law - yeah that's pretty f'ed in my book and they should, in my opinion, be subject to the harshest punishment the law allows for these instances.
justfor1comment 8y ago
Being a rich executive is essentially a get out of jail free card in America. Only good outcome for us commoners is that they can't screw us in the same way again. They have to invent a new way next time.
- rexpop 8y ago
  ...not really, though. Laws aren't always changed based on such incidents, those that do are eventually struck down, and if the employer's not "caught," they can perform all the classic exploitative tricks.
dominotw 8y ago
> Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees How do they enforce this agreement? Reminds me of Phoebous cartel agreeing to produce lightbulbs below certain lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Enforced with threats from Steve Jobs himself: https://www.engadget.com/2014/03/24/emails-reveal-that-steve-jobs-angrily-called-sergey-brin-over-go/ https://www.engadget.com/2014/03/24/emails-reveal-that-steve... https://www.cultofmac.com/316682/how-steve-jobs-reacted-when-one-of-his-top-lieutenants-joined-palm/ https://www.cultofmac.com/316682/how-steve-jobs-reacted-when...
JDulin 8y ago
This is an important point, and I couldn't agree more. This idea overwhelms me when I read the newest filings and indictments of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. A corporation, fundamentally, cannot "learn lessons" like people do. It is a collection of incentives, with men inside directed or manipulated by those incentives. If gently nudging 47,000 people a year to kill themselves with overdoses would create more revenue for the corporation, after lawsuit settlements, than not, they would likely do it all over again. Even if you change the men making the decisions - "Finding more moral men" is not a plan. Executives must have skin in the game, because the possible upside to their career at the highest levels of American business are too great to hope they'll take a moral stand. The potential upside for Richard Sackler, and John Kapoor, and Steve Jobs is so high (Massive bonuses, stock prices), and the potential downside so low (They are fired, with a generous golden parachute), they are willing to take the chance they'll get away with it. The most likely outcome is that attorneys will get rich, and nothing much else. The only solution to †his type of white collar crime and leadership malfeasance is to make executives, the individual human beings, feel a tinge of reptilian fear in their gut that they may go to prison and the livelihood of their families could be put in danger.
- josho 8y ago
  While I agree, in our current political climate it’s not going to happen. In the interim I would be willing to settle on significant punitive damages. Eg. Make getting caught very expensive and those corporate nudges will start nudging in the directions of protecting employees, consumers, etc.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    It should also be down to the individual level so that people down the the chain of command won't have the incentive to protect the executive in fear of losing their jobs.
    - arthur_pryor 8y ago
      also, take a page from our transit providers: "if you see something, say something." and be proactive about it. don't wait till it's too late. if we're all whistleblowers, people high up the chain will fear having the whistle blown on them. don't just leak illegal things, leak immoral things. grassroots transparency. do it anonymously if you have to. hold your bosses accountable.
sneak 8y ago
Google’s shareholders and board kept Eric Schmidt in a position of power for approximately a decade after his fraud against the staff was revealed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 8y ago
Depending on their position and the law, it is possible that liability is limited so that they cannot be sued by external entities. That is, external entities can sue the companies, but only the company and shareholders and possibly the state can sue the execs.
fulafel 8y ago
Was there a criminal case to be made?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 8y ago

I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse 2. Go after the coercers or modify our understanding of liability to allow those targeted to make the argument that their superiors deserve to repay them every bit of penalty they owed. Really, in the modern world, just sue someone and tell them they're on the hook but they'll be allowed to sue whoever is responsible for their portion of the responsibility and watch this all work itself out quickly.

crowdpleaser 8y ago
"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.
- mtgx 8y ago
  You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials? In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Whether or not you're punished for following orders has more to do with whether or not you're on the side that writes history than anything else.
    - munk-a 8y ago
      This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more levity[1]...) [1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.
      - stirfrykitty 8y ago
        Depends on the situation. Let's say you have a hostile war captive (enemy combative of a high rank) who is the ONLY one who can provide you with critical, war-winning details. You (metaphorically) would want to do whatever it took to secure those details. I've been in hairy situations before. Everything Hollywood depicts goes out the window. Embedded reporters get a newfound respect for troops once they ride out just one hot encounter. They understand the need for the military to do what they do, and are likewise frustrated when the military's hands are needlessly tied when they shouldn't be. I agree to not engage in heinous acts for their own sake, but sometimes more vigorous actions are needed to win for the sake of innocent lives. Case in point being ISIS. They should have been afforded zero grace. In fact, my aforementioned situation has played out in the real many times over. Imagine if the man above had kidnapped a loved one. You would do and sanction anything necessary to get back your loved one. Failure to see this is a moral failure on the part of the one to make the right decisions. There are some situations where "anything goes" is the way to go. Thankfully they are few and far between.
        8y ago
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  It was rejected in 1474 - rather a long time before Nuremberg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#The_trial_of_Peter_von_Hagenbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#The_trial_of_P...
- ipsocannibal 8y ago
  If read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376.The_Nuremberg_Trials https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376.The_Nuremberg_Tri... I believe you will find this is not the case.
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  "Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that. > Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” and > Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...
    - GeekyBear 8y ago
      People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death. The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done. Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.
      - zaphirplane 8y ago
        Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  And it’s still valid if you haven’t lost a war because no one can make it valid.
jammygit 8y ago
Transfer of liability? There are candid emails between Steve jobs and Schmidt about the topic. Edit: They made a minor settlement and there was a lawsuit that got a tiny amount of press. http://time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chilling-response-after-getting-a-google-employee-fired/ http://time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chilling-response-after-get... Edit 2: there was not even a slap on the wrist legally speaking: "The proposed settlement, which if accepted by the court will be in effect for five years, prohibits the companies from engaging in anticompetitive no solicitation agreements. "
- deogeo 8y ago
  ...am I understanding it correctly that their 'punishment' was having to promise not to break the law again? But only for five years??
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    Yes. They'll get a "harder" slap if they do it in the next five years (if caught), but after that are free to do so with baseline "penalties" (again, if caught).
  - thatoneuser 8y ago
    "Don't be evil"
- animal531 8y ago
  Yeah that's ridiculous. A real penalty would be for example to not allow them to appoint new employees for 5 years.
- PunksATawnyFill 8y ago
  Jobs was a liar. He also said no engineers were laid off from Pro Apps, when in fact half of Pro Apps engineers were fired at the end of the 2000s.
module0000 8y ago
>> 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse Yes it is, see: https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/ That said..I agree with the spirit of your post. The only officers that cannot receive corporate immunity are the CEO and CFO - they can be held liable in criminal and civil litigation.
- yeahitslikethat 8y ago
  Then why aren't they being held accountable? Ever? Banking scandals. This example. Why aren't those who are tasked with enforcing the law enforcing the law?
  - rcw4256 8y ago
    Because they're actually tasked (implicitly or otherwise) with protecting capital. In many cases this means enforcing the law, but in cases of corporate misbehavior, usually means ignoring it.
    - yeahitslikethat 8y ago
      The upward FLOW of capital.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Hey, it reads "in good faith". This only works when an officer in question could not know (s)he is breaking a law. Knowingly doing illicit things is not covered, afaict.
  - koonsolo 8y ago
    Definitely so. "But my boss told me to kill that person, else I would lose my job :'("
    - anfilt 8y ago
6gvONxR4sf7o 8y ago
In a frictionless system, sure. When lawyers cost so much, this kind of chain-of-lawsuits system would be a huge payout to lawyers.
- thfuran 8y ago
  It'd be nice if the people adversely affected by malfeasance got compensation, but the more important part, as far as utility goes, is that the perpetrators suffer significant penalty to disincentivize the behavior.
- maxdamantus 8y ago
  If that's the criticism, it should presumably apply much more widely than just this case—why not all of civil law?
thereare5lights 8y ago
> 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse That's not true. Just look at Lt. William Calley.
- masonic 8y ago
  "following orders" was specifically not an excuse, hence him being convicted. He didn't serve additional time due to other technical issues in his prosecution.
  - thereare5lights 8y ago
    What an awesome way to split hairs. "Howard Callaway, Secretary of the Army, was quoted in The New York Times in 1976 as stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders—a rationale that contradicts the standards set at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where following orders was not a defense for committing war crimes.[98]" [98] Marshall, Burke; Goldstein, Joseph (2 April 1976). "Learning From My Lai: A Proposal on War Crimes". The New York Times. p. 26. Sure sounds like an excuse to me. Now that I think about it, you're not splitting hairs, you're just flat out wrong at best.
    - munk-a 8y ago
      Being genuinely coerced into an action against your will doesn't leave you ethically liable for your actions - you need to have some intent and will to carry out your actions for any culpability in a philosophical sense[1]. As an example, if you were to hand someone a gun and tell them (in a manner which they fully trusted your honesty and intent) that you would shoot them and their friend if they didn't shoot their friend then... you're on really shaky ground philosophically - dismissing any scenario escapes (shooting your captor, disarming them etc...) you're left with three basic options, shoot yourself, shoot your friend, and refuse to shoot and have both yourself and your friend be shot - in this case it is logical and it should be a guiltless action to shoot your friend and preserve your own life (but it's complicated by our value system). So, excusing part of an action due to a coercion to follow actions is valid, but every time we talk about this scenario in the real world you're going to have more options, maybe you doubt your captor would actually shoot both of you - in that case shooting your friend is back to mostly being your decision - the issue occurs when this grey story is converted to black and white and people paint themselves falsely as being unwilling participants. In WW2 US soldiers could have refused when asked to participate in concentration camps, it would have been severely inconveniencing and that counts for something, but they chose the easy route and that is a perfectly valid guilt. [1] There is a rather sound argument to be made that evil and culpability is a false construct and that we should refuse to punish any bad actors beyond the point of discouraging recidivism. If there is a common good that we all share as a "known truth" then deviations from that truth can be considered to be impairments about seeing the truth and comprehending it which would lead any deviations from that truth to be understood as a need to enlighten their view of the truth. It's quite an interesting philosophical path to head down.

samatman 8y ago

I would agree with both. But bringing charges against a company is important. Boards of directors are supposed to, well, direct the executives, not look the other way while they break the law and abuse their employees. The way to encourage this is to hit the company, hard, right in the wallet.

shdh 8y ago
The cost was probably less than the profit in this outcome for each of the companies.
turc1656 8y ago
Oh I definitely agree. Both should ideally be charged because these people were acting on behalf of the company and were in management positions, which makes the company legally liable for their actions. But if I only get to choose one to charge, I go the individual route any day of the week because it reduces/removes the moral hazard of getting to shift your criminal activity to an intangible, legal entity like a corporation. Sure, you'd never get the $435M settlement from these people, but once everyone knows the government is coming after them personally, I would bet my last dollar that this type of crap virtually never happens again.
citizenkeen 8y ago
But that's half the problem - we never do. These kind of criminal charges result in a few million dollars worth of fines. It's never enough to really hurt a company the way that losing one year in jail hurts a person.
maxxxxx 8y ago
It has been shown repeatedly that boards won't do much and repeated fines are more and more just another cost of business. Either the fines need to be raised to a level where the company loses profit for one or more years or we need to go after individuals.
- yardie 8y ago
  Don’t bother to fine them. They’ll just use that to punish employees and shareholders. Make the executives liable.

i_am_proteus 8y ago

Part of the reason modern corporate bureaucracies are so bloated and complicated is to reduce the personal risk to executives by muddying the apparent decision-making process at the top. Executives can make it look like they're people who execute complicated processes rather than decision-makers. They end up taking credit when things go well, and they might look bad when things go poorly, but they essentially never get held criminally liable. Nice work if you can get it.

erikpukinskis 8y ago
This is a powerful insight, thank you. I am fascinated by the way "fitness landscapes" manifest in companies OUTSIDE the financial fitness of the company's trade. People often act like trade fitness is the only realm where we compete in capitalism, but there are so many more. Moat fitness for a company doesn't benefit their trade at all. Customers don't benefit when you kill a competitor, but you do. Similarly PowerPoint doesn't benefit the customer or the business. It's a tool for employee theater, using it makes employees appear less fit to be fired. And I like your point that unaccountability fitness is also an existential competition for executives. I wish there were a big list of these for me to ponder.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Power Point? What have PPT ever done to you?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    No offense to PowerPoint fans! I've observed people making pointless presentations to shore up their brand as employees, not to facilitate trade. It has other uses but... Have you not seen what I describe? That would be a useful data point for me if true.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Not really but I guess that's dependent on company culture. You work at a stack rank place? Where I work Power Point is mainly used to make presentations that are easy to read on a projector screen (as it should be used). On many places it seems to be used as a general document writer application ... so what we emotionaly associate with Power Point might differ alot.

macspoofing 8y ago

Meh. It really wasn't that big of a deal. They got caught and fined and that feels like an appropriate level of punishment. There are times when a prison-term against bad-actor executives is the right punishment ... this isn't it. >If this was a couple of small, local competitors who were the only two [whatever] in the area and they did this, I guarantee you the owners would be individually indicted. No. 100% NO. I guarantee you that the regulators wouldn't care. And if they did care, the 'local competitors' would get AT BEST a slap on the wrist like a strongly worded letter with a time-frame or MAYBE a fine (if that). There would be no indictments. I work with regulators all the time (FDA, Health Canada), and they will work with you to get you under compliance. Consider the fact that all companies are under a large amount of legal and regulatory constraints and chances are every company is doing something against some law or some regulation (knowingly or unknowingly), and you can see that as long as what you did didn't result in undue hardship (though I'm sure you'll try to claim that this was an egregious action - I disagree) and you fix your behaviour, you'll be fine.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>No. 100% NO. I guarantee you that the regulators wouldn't care. And if they did care, the 'local competitors' would get AT BEST a slap on the wrist like a strongly worded letter with a time-frame or MAYBE a fine (if that). There would be no indictments. Unless of course an indictment is the politically determined goal. E.g. that one small Chinese bank that got screwed for the lending bubble that popped in '08.
turc1656 8y ago
"...they will work with you to get you under compliance" Sure, as long as they are doing so in good faith. An act like this is clearly not in any sort of good-faith attempt to be in compliance with the law. It's obviously illegal. I would expect (hope?) that regulators and law enforcement would act swiftly and with much more than strongly worded letters and small fines for anyone who does this. Yes, you are correct that I would definitely claim that this was an egregious action. If people are conspiring to limit the employment prospects and potential income of others and are doing so in a manner that violates the law - yeah that's pretty f'ed in my book and they should, in my opinion, be subject to the harshest punishment the law allows for these instances.

justfor1comment 8y ago

Being a rich executive is essentially a get out of jail free card in America. Only good outcome for us commoners is that they can't screw us in the same way again. They have to invent a new way next time.

rexpop 8y ago
...not really, though. Laws aren't always changed based on such incidents, those that do are eventually struck down, and if the employer's not "caught," they can perform all the classic exploitative tricks.

dominotw 8y ago

> Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees How do they enforce this agreement? Reminds me of Phoebous cartel agreeing to produce lightbulbs below certain lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

lern_too_spel 8y ago
Enforced with threats from Steve Jobs himself: https://www.engadget.com/2014/03/24/emails-reveal-that-steve-jobs-angrily-called-sergey-brin-over-go/ https://www.engadget.com/2014/03/24/emails-reveal-that-steve... https://www.cultofmac.com/316682/how-steve-jobs-reacted-when-one-of-his-top-lieutenants-joined-palm/ https://www.cultofmac.com/316682/how-steve-jobs-reacted-when...

JDulin 8y ago

This is an important point, and I couldn't agree more. This idea overwhelms me when I read the newest filings and indictments of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. A corporation, fundamentally, cannot "learn lessons" like people do. It is a collection of incentives, with men inside directed or manipulated by those incentives. If gently nudging 47,000 people a year to kill themselves with overdoses would create more revenue for the corporation, after lawsuit settlements, than not, they would likely do it all over again. Even if you change the men making the decisions - "Finding more moral men" is not a plan. Executives must have skin in the game, because the possible upside to their career at the highest levels of American business are too great to hope they'll take a moral stand. The potential upside for Richard Sackler, and John Kapoor, and Steve Jobs is so high (Massive bonuses, stock prices), and the potential downside so low (They are fired, with a generous golden parachute), they are willing to take the chance they'll get away with it. The most likely outcome is that attorneys will get rich, and nothing much else. The only solution to †his type of white collar crime and leadership malfeasance is to make executives, the individual human beings, feel a tinge of reptilian fear in their gut that they may go to prison and the livelihood of their families could be put in danger.

josho 8y ago
While I agree, in our current political climate it’s not going to happen. In the interim I would be willing to settle on significant punitive damages. Eg. Make getting caught very expensive and those corporate nudges will start nudging in the directions of protecting employees, consumers, etc.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  It should also be down to the individual level so that people down the the chain of command won't have the incentive to protect the executive in fear of losing their jobs.
  - arthur_pryor 8y ago
    also, take a page from our transit providers: "if you see something, say something." and be proactive about it. don't wait till it's too late. if we're all whistleblowers, people high up the chain will fear having the whistle blown on them. don't just leak illegal things, leak immoral things. grassroots transparency. do it anonymously if you have to. hold your bosses accountable.

sneak 8y ago

Google’s shareholders and board kept Eric Schmidt in a position of power for approximately a decade after his fraud against the staff was revealed.

deleted 8y ago

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jhanschoo 8y ago

Depending on their position and the law, it is possible that liability is limited so that they cannot be sued by external entities. That is, external entities can sue the companies, but only the company and shareholders and possibly the state can sue the execs.

fulafel 8y ago

Was there a criminal case to be made?