3 ms·

I’m all for corporate liability. Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affec

I’m all for corporate liability. Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities. Corporate liability needs to be ratcheted up several orders of magnitude before we’ll see any actual change. As it stands, most governments have no teeth against corporate greed and exploitation.

tracker1 3y ago
A lot of that comes from prosecutors being a largely political office, beholden to contributors for getting elected. It's almost the worst of every angle in terms of how a justice system should work. As an aside, I sometimes think public defenders and prosecutors should come from the same pool of attorneys, held to account for striking balance instead of just W's to one side or the other.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  Another issue is even when companies are held liable they're able to nickel and dime the people they've harmed and just drag their feet through the process because the company can survive but the people they've hurt have usually lost some significant portion of their livelihood and can't fight the company for half a decade. So people are forced by necessity to take a lower payout than they actually should get because they just can't afford to fight any more. For a small infuriating sample post-Valdez Exxon argued against many tour and fishing businesses' claims saying there's no indication that those industries wouldn't have collapsed on their own in the absence of the spill so the court shouldn't take into account previous seasons' revenues for the calculation of damages. It's arguments like that where I wish judges and the court system as a whole could do something like finding that an argument was in complete bad faith and fine the companies and lawyers just for having the gall to make it. ( I know it's a pretty bad idea in reality but that and some of the lies told to get mergers through are just infuriating)
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  It is worse than that. The conservative legal movement made corporate torts a big target in the 90s/00s and won a lot of victories limiting the size of judgements and the ability of affected people to sue. Even legislatures followed along based on the idea that torts were getting out of hand. Even if you have dedicated prosecutors who are able to oppose moneyed interests, the law gives corporations huge tools to wriggle out of suits.
Gibbon1 3y ago
I'm almost to the point where I think the law shouldn't allow the government to fine corporations in criminal cases, they have to prosecute the officers. Perhaps fines should be levied against those that held voting rights.
emn13 3y ago
For corporate liability to really mean something we almost certainly need to reconsider the very foundational concept of what a corporation is. Because at it's heart, in granting the legal concept of a corporation we assume that it's a good idea to give a large group of people the ability to act with limited liability, for reasons of economic efficiency. What you see in industries such as mining where corporate liability is technically far less forgiving is that this concept of limited liability implies that a network of corporations can play musical chairs with hard-to-predict risks - essentially abusing bankruptcy and the general difficulty in enforcing liability via the courts even in the best of times to achieve not merely limited liability, but intentionally reduced liability. Since much of this is just a bunch of man-made rules, of course we're all going to game them to find the particularly profitable loopholes; this is inevitable. If it's not pollution, it's lobbying. If it's not lobbying, it's privatizing infrastructure at exploitative cost. If it's not physical infrastructure, it's owning social infrastructure, i.e. platforms. If it's not platforms, it's an incomprehensible spaghetti designed to evade or avoid taxes. Regarding corporations as equivalent to natural persons for many legal questions was a huge mistake, and needs to be reversed. I'm not particularly hopeful we'll get there without a literally bloody revolution, or by losing a war, or some similarly horrifying discontinuity of modern life. Allowing people to cooperate under some legal entity is a great idea; allowing capitalist incentives to optimize those a reasonable idea with some risks (but hopefully manageable ones). But doing all of that at essentially no cost, little oversight, lots of loopholes, very little transparency, very limited liability, legally not just unrestricted but even protected "speech" and with arbitrary nesting has to be one of the most idiotic things we've come up with in centuries.
gruez 3y ago
>Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities. Isn't it a bit early to make that conclusion, especially since all the legal action hasn't concluded?

tracker1 3y ago

A lot of that comes from prosecutors being a largely political office, beholden to contributors for getting elected. It's almost the worst of every angle in terms of how a justice system should work. As an aside, I sometimes think public defenders and prosecutors should come from the same pool of attorneys, held to account for striking balance instead of just W's to one side or the other.

rtkwe 3y ago
Another issue is even when companies are held liable they're able to nickel and dime the people they've harmed and just drag their feet through the process because the company can survive but the people they've hurt have usually lost some significant portion of their livelihood and can't fight the company for half a decade. So people are forced by necessity to take a lower payout than they actually should get because they just can't afford to fight any more. For a small infuriating sample post-Valdez Exxon argued against many tour and fishing businesses' claims saying there's no indication that those industries wouldn't have collapsed on their own in the absence of the spill so the court shouldn't take into account previous seasons' revenues for the calculation of damages. It's arguments like that where I wish judges and the court system as a whole could do something like finding that an argument was in complete bad faith and fine the companies and lawyers just for having the gall to make it. ( I know it's a pretty bad idea in reality but that and some of the lies told to get mergers through are just infuriating)
UncleMeat 3y ago
It is worse than that. The conservative legal movement made corporate torts a big target in the 90s/00s and won a lot of victories limiting the size of judgements and the ability of affected people to sue. Even legislatures followed along based on the idea that torts were getting out of hand. Even if you have dedicated prosecutors who are able to oppose moneyed interests, the law gives corporations huge tools to wriggle out of suits.

Gibbon1 3y ago

I'm almost to the point where I think the law shouldn't allow the government to fine corporations in criminal cases, they have to prosecute the officers. Perhaps fines should be levied against those that held voting rights.

emn13 3y ago

For corporate liability to really mean something we almost certainly need to reconsider the very foundational concept of what a corporation is. Because at it's heart, in granting the legal concept of a corporation we assume that it's a good idea to give a large group of people the ability to act with limited liability, for reasons of economic efficiency. What you see in industries such as mining where corporate liability is technically far less forgiving is that this concept of limited liability implies that a network of corporations can play musical chairs with hard-to-predict risks - essentially abusing bankruptcy and the general difficulty in enforcing liability via the courts even in the best of times to achieve not merely limited liability, but intentionally reduced liability. Since much of this is just a bunch of man-made rules, of course we're all going to game them to find the particularly profitable loopholes; this is inevitable. If it's not pollution, it's lobbying. If it's not lobbying, it's privatizing infrastructure at exploitative cost. If it's not physical infrastructure, it's owning social infrastructure, i.e. platforms. If it's not platforms, it's an incomprehensible spaghetti designed to evade or avoid taxes. Regarding corporations as equivalent to natural persons for many legal questions was a huge mistake, and needs to be reversed. I'm not particularly hopeful we'll get there without a literally bloody revolution, or by losing a war, or some similarly horrifying discontinuity of modern life. Allowing people to cooperate under some legal entity is a great idea; allowing capitalist incentives to optimize those a reasonable idea with some risks (but hopefully manageable ones). But doing all of that at essentially no cost, little oversight, lots of loopholes, very little transparency, very limited liability, legally not just unrestricted but even protected "speech" and with arbitrary nesting has to be one of the most idiotic things we've come up with in centuries.

gruez 3y ago

>Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities. Isn't it a bit early to make that conclusion, especially since all the legal action hasn't concluded?