4 ms·

So, no jail time for the executives who made these decisions and "criminal misconduct"? Amazing.

by java-man 6y ago

bodhiandphysics 6y ago
It’s hard to put a company in jail... we still have to wait to see if there are charges against Boeing executives
- cameldrv 6y ago
  I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail. If a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time?
  - ars 6y ago
    At the end of the day you have to punish a human. And following your suggestion would punish a lot of uninvolved humans.
    - ljf 6y ago
      Companies go bankrupt all the time and we don't worry about the workers (unless they are 'too big to fail' banks). It would change workers relationships with companies a lot and would likely encourage companies to break themselves up into parts. Might be good anti-monopoly move?
    - markus_zhang 6y ago
      You can put the executives into jails though. And the executives, not some low level manager as a scapegoat.
      - ars 6y ago
        Certainly, but the person I was replying to suggested shutting down a company, rather than punishing execs.
        markus_zhang 6y ago
        It's doable too. The workers will lose job for sure, but many of them are going to find new ones, plus you extract as much $$ as possible from the company and exec to pay the workers.
    - anonymousab 6y ago
      Innocent people are affected when almost anyone is sent to jail. Families and friends and dependants and so on. The bigger and more important you are, the more people are affected by both you breaking the law and you being punished with imprisonment for doing so. A corporation is only different in scale.
      - ars 6y ago
        And because jail is sometimes a bad thing that means we should keep doing the bad thing? I have seen a couple cases of someone punished for a white collar crime sent to jail, effectively a vacation, while his family suffers terribly. They punished the wrong person and I feel it's a travesty. Jail is not the right punishment for nonviolent offenses.
  - the_duke 6y ago
    How would you suspend a company? It would have to close all offices/manufacturing sites and fire all employees. Suppliers and customers would have to be compensated, which would also probably result in lots of lawsuits. It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there. Suspending is more or less equivalent to just shutting it down. But yeah, a 2.5 billion fine is not much more than a slap on the wrist for a company with a revenue of 76 billion (2019).
    - anonymousab 6y ago
      >It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there. So not much different than when a person is imprisoned. Good luck not getting fired and having debts rack up. Such an existential threat seems like a very good way of scaring corporations into compliance (well, among other things).
      - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
        This was my thinking exactly. The point of establishing a formal punishment for criminal business activity is not to set up one that business aren't terrified of. Quite the opposite - it needs to be a very real, very scary source of motivation to do the right thing (since morality alone clearly isn't sufficient)
      - the_duke 6y ago
        But a companies "imprisonment" affects many more people. Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment. Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge. Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible.
        Yoofie 6y ago
        I'm not the OP but ... > Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment. This is what bankruptcy proceedings are for. A similar procedure can be made up for a "corporate death penalty". >Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge. If the government was doing its job, corporations of this size should not even be allowed to exist for precisely the reasons you mention. But since anything goes in corporate America, here we are. > Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible. I would argue that people being indirectly hurt would be a good motivator (or reminder) for people being more picky who they do business with. If you don't learn your lesson the first time, then being burned multiple times will (hopefully) get the message across.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Take a look at the defense fleet that Boeing supports: https://www.boeing.com/defense/ https://www.boeing.com/defense/
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail Because...it's an abstraction that is not physically embodied and can't be imprisoned. > a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time? Suspending a corporate charter isn't equivalent to jail, it's equivalent to a reversible death penalty; the corporate charter is the source of legal existence of the corporation. Without a charter the corporation doesn't exist, can't be subject of legal action, can't own property, etc. I'm not really convinced that that makes any sense as a punishment (or even that temporary impairment that would be more analogous to imprisonment would.) People can be remediated by that kind of punishment, maybe, but abstractions like corporations probably cannot. Better to either dissolve them or exclude the bad individual actors from them and let them continue.
  - rland 6y ago
    Well, "jailing" a company by suspending its operations is more like starving a living thing. That'd be more like a death penalty. I do believe if we had any social imagination at all we could think of many many ways to materially punish bad actors. Like forcing a negative dividend, punishing/fining executives or board members personally, etc. People who own and control corporations need to have some skin in the game. Fines that are expended (or worse, appealed in court and subsequently never paid) are, evidently, too far removed.
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  You can actually, as long as you want to put a company out of business. You can revoke license, freeze accounts in banks, etc., like the US has done many times. But, it's Boeing, its own boy, so why bother?
- 1024core 6y ago
  > It’s hard to put a company in jail... A "company" is a bunch of decisionmakers (execs). Start jailing them for this crap, and watch the rest of them fall in line. Losing your freedom for 15 years is a great motivator for good behavior.
- triceratops 6y ago
  Take all the company's profits for 2 or 3 years. That's like a prison term. Or 50% of revenues, if they start playing funny games with income.
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  Why can't we put the decision makers in jail? It happened with Lay, Skilling, Kopper, and Andersen. Hell, even Darby, Bermingham, and Mulgrew were extradited and imprisoned.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

So, no jail time for the executives who made these decisions and "criminal misconduct"? Amazing.

bodhiandphysics 6y ago

It’s hard to put a company in jail... we still have to wait to see if there are charges against Boeing executives

cameldrv 6y ago
I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail. If a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time?
- ars 6y ago
  At the end of the day you have to punish a human. And following your suggestion would punish a lot of uninvolved humans.
  - ljf 6y ago
    Companies go bankrupt all the time and we don't worry about the workers (unless they are 'too big to fail' banks). It would change workers relationships with companies a lot and would likely encourage companies to break themselves up into parts. Might be good anti-monopoly move?
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    You can put the executives into jails though. And the executives, not some low level manager as a scapegoat.
    - ars 6y ago
      Certainly, but the person I was replying to suggested shutting down a company, rather than punishing execs.
      - markus_zhang 6y ago
        It's doable too. The workers will lose job for sure, but many of them are going to find new ones, plus you extract as much $$ as possible from the company and exec to pay the workers.
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    Innocent people are affected when almost anyone is sent to jail. Families and friends and dependants and so on. The bigger and more important you are, the more people are affected by both you breaking the law and you being punished with imprisonment for doing so. A corporation is only different in scale.
    - ars 6y ago
      And because jail is sometimes a bad thing that means we should keep doing the bad thing? I have seen a couple cases of someone punished for a white collar crime sent to jail, effectively a vacation, while his family suffers terribly. They punished the wrong person and I feel it's a travesty. Jail is not the right punishment for nonviolent offenses.
- the_duke 6y ago
  How would you suspend a company? It would have to close all offices/manufacturing sites and fire all employees. Suppliers and customers would have to be compensated, which would also probably result in lots of lawsuits. It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there. Suspending is more or less equivalent to just shutting it down. But yeah, a 2.5 billion fine is not much more than a slap on the wrist for a company with a revenue of 76 billion (2019).
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    >It would mean bankruptcy for most companies out there. So not much different than when a person is imprisoned. Good luck not getting fired and having debts rack up. Such an existential threat seems like a very good way of scaring corporations into compliance (well, among other things).
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      This was my thinking exactly. The point of establishing a formal punishment for criminal business activity is not to set up one that business aren't terrified of. Quite the opposite - it needs to be a very real, very scary source of motivation to do the right thing (since morality alone clearly isn't sufficient)
    - the_duke 6y ago
      But a companies "imprisonment" affects many more people. Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment. Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge. Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible.
      - Yoofie 6y ago
        I'm not the OP but ... > Employees out of a job , suppliers losing contracts, customers never getting what they might have already paid for, creditors losing the debt, share holders lose all their investment. This is what bankruptcy proceedings are for. A similar procedure can be made up for a "corporate death penalty". >Especially with a huge corporation like Boeing with 160k employees and billions flowing in and out, the effect would be huge. If the government was doing its job, corporations of this size should not even be allowed to exist for precisely the reasons you mention. But since anything goes in corporate America, here we are. > Like I said, I agree there needs to be some way to punish, but just shutting it down would punish a lot of parties that aren't not responsible. I would argue that people being indirectly hurt would be a good motivator (or reminder) for people being more picky who they do business with. If you don't learn your lesson the first time, then being burned multiple times will (hopefully) get the message across.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Take a look at the defense fleet that Boeing supports: https://www.boeing.com/defense/ https://www.boeing.com/defense/
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I've never really understood why you can't put a company in jail Because...it's an abstraction that is not physically embodied and can't be imprisoned. > a person can be removed from society and their ability to act freely can be removed, why can't you simply suspend their corporate charter for a period of time? Suspending a corporate charter isn't equivalent to jail, it's equivalent to a reversible death penalty; the corporate charter is the source of legal existence of the corporation. Without a charter the corporation doesn't exist, can't be subject of legal action, can't own property, etc. I'm not really convinced that that makes any sense as a punishment (or even that temporary impairment that would be more analogous to imprisonment would.) People can be remediated by that kind of punishment, maybe, but abstractions like corporations probably cannot. Better to either dissolve them or exclude the bad individual actors from them and let them continue.
- rland 6y ago
  Well, "jailing" a company by suspending its operations is more like starving a living thing. That'd be more like a death penalty. I do believe if we had any social imagination at all we could think of many many ways to materially punish bad actors. Like forcing a negative dividend, punishing/fining executives or board members personally, etc. People who own and control corporations need to have some skin in the game. Fines that are expended (or worse, appealed in court and subsequently never paid) are, evidently, too far removed.
markus_zhang 6y ago
You can actually, as long as you want to put a company out of business. You can revoke license, freeze accounts in banks, etc., like the US has done many times. But, it's Boeing, its own boy, so why bother?
1024core 6y ago
> It’s hard to put a company in jail... A "company" is a bunch of decisionmakers (execs). Start jailing them for this crap, and watch the rest of them fall in line. Losing your freedom for 15 years is a great motivator for good behavior.
triceratops 6y ago
Take all the company's profits for 2 or 3 years. That's like a prison term. Or 50% of revenues, if they start playing funny games with income.
aaron-santos 6y ago
Why can't we put the decision makers in jail? It happened with Lay, Skilling, Kopper, and Andersen. Hell, even Darby, Bermingham, and Mulgrew were extradited and imprisoned.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]