7 ms·

Just a fine of ~280 mil, no jail time for any responsible. If corporations are people, why can't we jail walmart?

nerdponx 7y ago
I wouldn't want to jail Walmart. That doesn't benefit anyone, it's just punitive. Jail the executives responsible under the usual criminal law.
- clairity 7y ago
  so maybe sanction walmart to sell everything for a 20% discount for a month so that the benefits of punitive action accrue to its customers?
  - rojoca 7y ago
    This arguably also punishes their competitors.
khazhou 7y ago
Corporations aren't people. You're misrepresenting Citizens United
- patentatt 7y ago
  The gp comment doesn’t seem to mention citizens united ... why bring it up in response to a comment about corporate personhood? It is almost completely non sequitur
  - khazhou 7y ago
    Almost every modern reference to "Corporations are now people!" is a callback to Citizens United. If the commenter I replied to is not aware of and was not referring to that, I apologize. But... he probably was. A simple search for "corporation are people" or "corporate personhood" will bring up articles that immediately and extensively focus on Citizens United.
    - wilg 7y ago
      And/or to Mitt Romney saying "corporations are people, my friend" which happened around the same time and this was a big political topic. The idea of corporate personhood became popularized around this time.
- tr3ndyBEAR 7y ago
  Citizen's United is not the only case relevant to the idea of corporate personhood. There's a whole history of corporations earning rights usually reserved for people. You can read the wikipedia page for "corporate personhood" if you want to learn more about the history of it and specific cases and rights afforded to corporations.
  - chrstphrhrt 7y ago
    Since I just read about this in a course, the main reference (at least for Canada/UK/Commonwealth) is the Salomon case from 1895: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_v_A_Salomon_%26_Co_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_v_A_Salomon_%26_Co_Ltd So, not new. I think people overreact to hearing that corporations are (legal) "persons" when in fact they are not anything like natural persons (no body, no constitutional rights). As I understand it, directors and officers are the ones held personally liable in criminal matters, but corporations can still be liable for negligence and breach of contract etc. IANAL. Sounds like it is different in the US. Does citizens united somehow make corporations more like people?
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      It did not, in the sense that it only clarified a constitutional issue. The crux is that while corporations are complex legal fictions, they are still ultimately property owned and managed by actual people with constitutional rights. Corporations inherit on incorporation the constitutional protections that the incorporators would have if they were acting directly. In the words used in the majority opinion of the court, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
- googlemike 7y ago
  How should one interpret it then?
  - eindiran 7y ago
    From the Wikipedia page: "Although the decision does not address "corporate personhood," a long-established judicial and constitutional concept, much attention has focused on that issue."[0] "How should one interpret [the case] then?" Recognize that Citizen's United is _not_ about corporate personhood, and actually read what the case was about. The number of times I've heard people making snarky remarks about Citizen's United without having read anything about the case is amazing. In the US, corporate personhood is about: (1) Corporations having equal protection under the law as persons (ie the 14th amendment applies to corporations). (2) Coporations having the same rights as persons to draft and enforce contracts, making them "legal entities". This is related to (3). (3) "Person" as a concept applies to associations of people rather than just individuals; associations of individuals includes corporations. See here: [1] None of these things were decided in Citizen's United and further, it had no legal bearing on the case law surrounding these things. Instead Citizen's United was about whether a particular law violated the 1st Amendment. Specifically the law prohibited corporations from releasing media 60 days before an election if it could impact the results of that election by reaching 50,000 or more people in the electorate. But the 1st Amendment makes no distinction between e.g. newspaper companies and other corporations, so the majority opinion was that this law and other laws that limit speech of associations of people infringe on the 1st Amendment. From the opinion: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
    - geofft 7y ago
      That's all well and good, but 'frequentnapper did not actually say anything about Citizens United in the first place. If corporations are people, we should jail them. If corporations aren't people, why do they have legal rights independent of the individual, jailable people who constitute them?
- sumedh 7y ago
  > Corporations aren't people. As per a former presidential candidate, they are, my friend. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/us/politics/12romney.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/us/politics/12romney.html
briandear 7y ago
Perhaps we could jail Airbus too? https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-bribery-throw-shadow-over-airbus-a-1260324.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-... https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/08/airbus-executives-get-swept-away-by-a-corruption-investigation https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/08/airbus-executi...
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
We can't jail Walmart, but we should be able to jail its CEO. Perhaps if being CEO meant taking the risk of jail for the corporation's misdeeds, the job would actually be worth the ridiculous salary it pays out, and provide a much stronger incentive for the CEO to police illegal conduct internally.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Why not the entire C-suite and the board? Then you’d get some real accountability.
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    I'm pretty much a free market capitalist and I'm all for that. Mandatory minimums should be established for when companies violate the law in ways that seriously harm people, things like this should have you spend at least a few months in jail even if you "didn't have knowledge". Perhaps a lifetime ban from working at any publicly traded company as well, sort of like registering as a sex offender.
  - ghufran_syed 7y ago
    Why not every shareholder? Or every shopper too?
    - arcboii92 7y ago
      Or at the very least, every person who has ever shopped at Walmart has to now spend their first turn of Monopoly in jail. THEN we'll see real change.
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    Strange this is so far outside the Overton window that it can be read as a joke. In cases involving lower valued assets, the owner is almost always punishable: his dog bites you, it's his fault. His contractor lays bad wiring that burns down your house, it's his fault. His kids misdeeds are often legally his fault. And even if he loans his car to someone who crashes into it's legally his fault. But behind a corporate shield, nothing is ever the owners fault. The more value the company has, the less possibility any owner is to receive legally blame. Not that there's much possibility in the first place. This remarkable and thoroughly ingrained inconsistency does consistently benefit a certain category of person. A very practice and effective solution would be to seize some chunk of the shares/value based on the size of the crime and auction them off. The proceeds going to victims or the like and weakening or removing irresponsible investors in favor of someone else. But this option is simply unthinkable and instead there's endless debate on the CEO's culpability.

I wouldn't want to jail Walmart. That doesn't benefit anyone, it's just punitive. Jail the executives responsible under the usual criminal law.

clairity 7y ago
so maybe sanction walmart to sell everything for a 20% discount for a month so that the benefits of punitive action accrue to its customers?
- rojoca 7y ago
  This arguably also punishes their competitors.

khazhou 7y ago

Corporations aren't people. You're misrepresenting Citizens United

patentatt 7y ago
The gp comment doesn’t seem to mention citizens united ... why bring it up in response to a comment about corporate personhood? It is almost completely non sequitur
- khazhou 7y ago
  Almost every modern reference to "Corporations are now people!" is a callback to Citizens United. If the commenter I replied to is not aware of and was not referring to that, I apologize. But... he probably was. A simple search for "corporation are people" or "corporate personhood" will bring up articles that immediately and extensively focus on Citizens United.
  - wilg 7y ago
    And/or to Mitt Romney saying "corporations are people, my friend" which happened around the same time and this was a big political topic. The idea of corporate personhood became popularized around this time.
tr3ndyBEAR 7y ago
Citizen's United is not the only case relevant to the idea of corporate personhood. There's a whole history of corporations earning rights usually reserved for people. You can read the wikipedia page for "corporate personhood" if you want to learn more about the history of it and specific cases and rights afforded to corporations.
- chrstphrhrt 7y ago
  Since I just read about this in a course, the main reference (at least for Canada/UK/Commonwealth) is the Salomon case from 1895: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_v_A_Salomon_%26_Co_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_v_A_Salomon_%26_Co_Ltd So, not new. I think people overreact to hearing that corporations are (legal) "persons" when in fact they are not anything like natural persons (no body, no constitutional rights). As I understand it, directors and officers are the ones held personally liable in criminal matters, but corporations can still be liable for negligence and breach of contract etc. IANAL. Sounds like it is different in the US. Does citizens united somehow make corporations more like people?
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    It did not, in the sense that it only clarified a constitutional issue. The crux is that while corporations are complex legal fictions, they are still ultimately property owned and managed by actual people with constitutional rights. Corporations inherit on incorporation the constitutional protections that the incorporators would have if they were acting directly. In the words used in the majority opinion of the court, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
googlemike 7y ago
How should one interpret it then?
- eindiran 7y ago
  From the Wikipedia page: "Although the decision does not address "corporate personhood," a long-established judicial and constitutional concept, much attention has focused on that issue."[0] "How should one interpret [the case] then?" Recognize that Citizen's United is _not_ about corporate personhood, and actually read what the case was about. The number of times I've heard people making snarky remarks about Citizen's United without having read anything about the case is amazing. In the US, corporate personhood is about: (1) Corporations having equal protection under the law as persons (ie the 14th amendment applies to corporations). (2) Coporations having the same rights as persons to draft and enforce contracts, making them "legal entities". This is related to (3). (3) "Person" as a concept applies to associations of people rather than just individuals; associations of individuals includes corporations. See here: [1] None of these things were decided in Citizen's United and further, it had no legal bearing on the case law surrounding these things. Instead Citizen's United was about whether a particular law violated the 1st Amendment. Specifically the law prohibited corporations from releasing media 60 days before an election if it could impact the results of that election by reaching 50,000 or more people in the electorate. But the 1st Amendment makes no distinction between e.g. newspaper companies and other corporations, so the majority opinion was that this law and other laws that limit speech of associations of people infringe on the 1st Amendment. From the opinion: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
  - geofft 7y ago
    That's all well and good, but 'frequentnapper did not actually say anything about Citizens United in the first place. If corporations are people, we should jail them. If corporations aren't people, why do they have legal rights independent of the individual, jailable people who constitute them?
sumedh 7y ago
> Corporations aren't people. As per a former presidential candidate, they are, my friend. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/us/politics/12romney.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/us/politics/12romney.html

briandear 7y ago

Perhaps we could jail Airbus too? https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-bribery-throw-shadow-over-airbus-a-1260324.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/suspicions-of-... https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/08/airbus-executives-get-swept-away-by-a-corruption-investigation https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/08/airbus-executi...

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

We can't jail Walmart, but we should be able to jail its CEO. Perhaps if being CEO meant taking the risk of jail for the corporation's misdeeds, the job would actually be worth the ridiculous salary it pays out, and provide a much stronger incentive for the CEO to police illegal conduct internally.

pmiller2 7y ago
Why not the entire C-suite and the board? Then you’d get some real accountability.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  I'm pretty much a free market capitalist and I'm all for that. Mandatory minimums should be established for when companies violate the law in ways that seriously harm people, things like this should have you spend at least a few months in jail even if you "didn't have knowledge". Perhaps a lifetime ban from working at any publicly traded company as well, sort of like registering as a sex offender.
- ghufran_syed 7y ago
  Why not every shareholder? Or every shopper too?
  - arcboii92 7y ago
    Or at the very least, every person who has ever shopped at Walmart has to now spend their first turn of Monopoly in jail. THEN we'll see real change.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  Strange this is so far outside the Overton window that it can be read as a joke. In cases involving lower valued assets, the owner is almost always punishable: his dog bites you, it's his fault. His contractor lays bad wiring that burns down your house, it's his fault. His kids misdeeds are often legally his fault. And even if he loans his car to someone who crashes into it's legally his fault. But behind a corporate shield, nothing is ever the owners fault. The more value the company has, the less possibility any owner is to receive legally blame. Not that there's much possibility in the first place. This remarkable and thoroughly ingrained inconsistency does consistently benefit a certain category of person. A very practice and effective solution would be to seize some chunk of the shares/value based on the size of the crime and auction them off. The proceeds going to victims or the like and weakening or removing irresponsible investors in favor of someone else. But this option is simply unthinkable and instead there's endless debate on the CEO's culpability.