7 ms·

Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionall

Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionally and knowingly poisoning nearly every living thing for decades, and when caught are allowed to not just still exist as a company, but continue to poison us.

bombcar 2y ago
A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes.
- smrtinsert 2y ago
  Leadership in the know should be banned for life, but the corporation would likely have to continue (split or not), otherwise you're giving the entire machine a reason to oppose accountability and correction.
  - thereddaikon 2y ago
    The only way you fix this is hold executives criminally liable. Fines don't work and never have. If people started going to jail over it then they would change their behavior. Everything in life is about incentive structures.
- mrighele 2y ago
  By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it. You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
  - tivert 2y ago
    >> A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes. > By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it. > You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later. That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set a sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them) and lax enforcement, then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame when the violations become a PR or legal problem. So some harsh action needs to be taken against the owners and the shareholders. A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts. Instead, since we have computers with big disks now, there needs to be a registry that tracks the historical beneficial owners of a company's stock. Then when something worthy of a "corporate death penalty" happens, those people are tracked down, fined, and any profits they enjoyed get clawed back. If they go bankrupt, tough: as owners, they should have proposed or voted for shareholder proposals to keep the management under control. Of course there would be some finer details to work out (e.g. breaking the veil on shell corporations, policies to deal with straw ownership, letting other shareholders off the hook if some small group (e.g. founders) have complete voting control of the company), but I think the idea is workable if you don't consciously let clever-assholes exploit loopholes
    - lacksconfidence 2y ago
      Over half of the stock market is held in the retirement accounts of everyday people. This is just a tax in a roundabout way. I don't have a solution, they all suck. But I'm not convinced this is any better.
      - 9question1 2y ago
        The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favorite-companies-are-privately-held/#:~:text=According%20to%20Forbes%2C%20less%20than,be%20classified%20as%20small%20businesses https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant. For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
        adolph 2y ago
        As an example of how important equity holdings of retirement accounts are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
      - bwestergard 2y ago
        That's true but misleading. If you ranked every American by the value of the stocks they owned, the bottom 93% - the everyday people - would be splitting a paltry 10% of the total value. The bottom 50% hold only 1% of the market. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9... Most business equity isn't even publicly traded; a complete accounting would show even greater inequality.
  - delusional 2y ago
    Personally I'm for a "captialistic death penalty", where if you've done something sufficiently bad, you get sentenced to work the night shift at McDonalds for the rest of your life.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    It's about destroying monopoly power. If you allow an entity to reach this size there's no incentive for it to follow the rules. Getting the executives would be a nice bonus, but I'm not going to stand ceremoniously when there's more important structural changes to be made.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    > You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later. I think it should be more about profits. In case of something like that, the corporation should be taxed the amount of entire profits they got from this. Also individuals in decisive positions should be investigated and indebted for the amounts they earned while the company was poisoning people plus interest since it happened.
  - fallingfrog 2y ago
    Difficult when those same people are now in charge of the regulatory industries.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all? I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world. All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes. It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet. Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around. "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers Quite the opposite - taxes are the only things that arm countries.
    - callalex 2y ago
      That’s not true: for example the US government (CIA) in the past century has also been funded through shady drug deals. This isn’t fringe conspiracy stuff either, they freely admit to past activities and have shown no willingness to change.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    > What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all? What if we could tame these gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters that casually wander into big cities and just start stomping skyscrapers down for shits and giggles? Think of how wonderful it would be to have one of those creatures under my control!!! > I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world. Nothing would make such a kaiju safer than putting it beyond the reach of even sovereign nations. And when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of, that has Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China put in charge, think of all the wonderfully progressive things that will happen then!
- szundi 2y ago
  It should be the people hold responsible
  - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
    You sort of need to do both. The issue at hand with a corporate death penalty is shareholders. If a company being "killed" zeroes out the value for shareholders, the stock value will have to price in the likelihood of complete loss due to malfeasance, which will start making companies on the level a safer buy. This means companies doing more to prevent illegal behavior become worth more and companies have a financial reason to prevent crime greatly exceeding mere fines.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      Exactly. Everyone likes to say "kill the board and CEO" but they're just employees of the shareholders. At some time collective punishment to match collective gains needs to be considered; even if they're not personally liable they can still lose their investment.
      - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
        Exactly. The common criticism of this is that... yeah, that means the punishment will impact people who had no say in the decision, seniors' retirement funds, etc. But that is just risk, which is what the entire stock market is designed to correct for. And a good investment portfolio is always supposed to hedge risks by spreading them across multiple investments. It'll drive prices down for riskier stocks, more involved larger shareholders will have reason to get more involved and ask more questions about compliance and corporate responsibility, etc. Being able to punish shareholders for bad corporate behavior for corporate death is, to be honest just good capitalism.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    If the level has been reached to discuss corporate death penalty, then the corporation employees should loose any protections the corporation normally provides.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  A company is nothing more than a group of people, working towards a single goal, no? If that's a case, breaking up the group itself also seems futile. We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts. Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
  - wumbo 2y ago
    If the janitor knew, but withheld the publically valuable information out of fear, they should still get some amount of punishment. Making bad decisions under duress is understandable but it’s still a serious issue to withhold this information. The execs need no less than life in prison.
    - reaperman 2y ago
      These days no one seems to talk with janitors … there’s an infinitesimally small chance any of them had any information to withhold in the first place.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    If the company is that large, the only real group left that "should be punishable" is the shareholders. The janitor can lose his job if the company goes under, and is unlikely to be prosecuted for anything major; but the shareholders can lose their investment, even if they're not prosecuted. Call it "corporate civil forfeiture".
- rlili 2y ago
  Won't happen, as corporations themselves control the law.
  - davidw 2y ago
    Cynicism is a great way to ensure that nothing ever happens.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- naikrovek 2y ago
  I’m fairly sure that the president can dissolve a company at will. Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today. Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    Ok I was dumb for thinking of it this way and I really wish I remember what I read.
- airstrike 2y ago
  Why? So all the workers who had nothing to do with this decision can be unemployed the next day? All you'll achieve is a cascade of negative effects and a hit to GDP It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  That penalty exists, and e.g. Purdue Pharma was subject to it. But of course, Purdue also shows why it's complicated: * When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get. * A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale. * But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    Fire sale everything. And without exemptions for the C-suite/owners. In the Purdue case, the family should have lost everything, not retained billions. And they damn sure shouldn't get protection from civil liability, as a few courts of tried to do. It'll be interesting to see what SCOTUS ends up deciding (I think the bankruptcy landed there, with arguments in December 2023).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring. The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M. You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    One way of enacting a corporate death penalty is to declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over. What is done with it afterwards is debatable, but at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over This, again, is fines with extra steps. Another novel procedure that gives targets years in court to appeal technicalities around the APA, eminent domain and expropriation. > at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out As they would with large fines. Corporate death penalties are nonsense invented to sidestep discussions of monetary penalties. Fines are liabilities. There is zero ambiguity around what happens to a company when it owes more than it’s worth. There is infinite ambiguity around applying a “death penalty” to fictitious entities; that is the point of this caper.
- yndoendo 2y ago
  This is needed when ever a company too big to fail needs to be bailed out. It would remove the bad CEO and top management by chopping up a company and selling it off. By keeping them around, bad CEOs, governments are rewarding bad behavior. Until politicians can no longer be bought, donations and super packs, this will continue to happen since rewarding bad behavior is a two-way street.
- Oarch 2y ago
  Take some of their IP and make it public. That'll do it.
  - zackmorris 2y ago
    A billion dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? No more dollars.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person. More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public. Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
- Lio 2y ago
  You could achieve that by properly fining company's when they are responsible. In theory their insurance costs would go up and fiduciary duty would compel executives to act properly. Most countries have the equivalent of corporate manslaughter which in theory should send executives to prison for the behaviour of their subordinates. The problem with both is that the powers at be don't prosecute very often. Executives often weasel out in court by simply saying "I didn't know"... when it is 100% their job to know.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  The C-levels need to be criminally liable, that will fix it. It will fix many things. In this case the people who were in charge should get the chair if the state has it or 100000x life in max with the other rapists and serial killers. It won’t happen again. Boeing comes to mind too. At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort. US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  We need this, plus criminal liability for the C-suite, and possibly for the BoD. The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    This.
- samlinnfer 2y ago
  It has already been solved. Just sentence the company executives personally like in China.
  - sneak 2y ago
    Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arrests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre... ?
- sneak 2y ago
  Corporations cannot act. If there is criminal activity, prosecute the human beings that committed crimes.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    By a corporate death penalty you're prosecuting the shareholders who hired the CEO who did the crimes. As it is, the shareholders can benefit from the crimes, the CEO retire, and the government is left holding the bag.
- m463 2y ago
  Will we dismantle silicon valley in the decades ahead after we start realizing the damage from collecting personal information, biometrics, behavioral data and more from everyone in the world?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Worse things have happened. Union Carbide still exists. And they literally killed 16000 people in India and injured hundreds of thousands more out of negligence. We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.
generic92034 2y ago
I wonder if we as individuals are ready to accept punishment for our own externalities, though.
- davidmurdoch 2y ago
  What?
- grvdrm 2y ago
  As in our addiction as consumers to all things plastic for convenience and other reasons?
  - generic92034 2y ago
    CO2, NOx, plastics, all kinds of problematic chemicals - we all release more of those than we would strictly need to. And even the strict needs could be argued about, in some cases.
    - grvdrm 2y ago
      It's a very interesting point. I am attempting (recently) to cut some chemicals and processed things from my house. Examples: using glass as much as I can, instead of plastic. Trying to use more local fresh ingredients in my cooking. Buying more from local stores rather than rely on the global supply chain. Trying and mostly failing to maintain a lawn (in suburbs) without some level of chemicals. I know these are not all perfect examples. Where things get tough is with time. It takes lots of time to re-engineer things down to simpler stricter needs. So, I still use grocery delivery, which generates a mountain of plastic, because I don't always have a span of time to get food I need.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bombcar 2y ago

A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes.

smrtinsert 2y ago
Leadership in the know should be banned for life, but the corporation would likely have to continue (split or not), otherwise you're giving the entire machine a reason to oppose accountability and correction.
- thereddaikon 2y ago
  The only way you fix this is hold executives criminally liable. Fines don't work and never have. If people started going to jail over it then they would change their behavior. Everything in life is about incentive structures.
mrighele 2y ago
By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it. You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
- tivert 2y ago
  >> A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes. > By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it. > You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later. That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set a sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them) and lax enforcement, then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame when the violations become a PR or legal problem. So some harsh action needs to be taken against the owners and the shareholders. A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts. Instead, since we have computers with big disks now, there needs to be a registry that tracks the historical beneficial owners of a company's stock. Then when something worthy of a "corporate death penalty" happens, those people are tracked down, fined, and any profits they enjoyed get clawed back. If they go bankrupt, tough: as owners, they should have proposed or voted for shareholder proposals to keep the management under control. Of course there would be some finer details to work out (e.g. breaking the veil on shell corporations, policies to deal with straw ownership, letting other shareholders off the hook if some small group (e.g. founders) have complete voting control of the company), but I think the idea is workable if you don't consciously let clever-assholes exploit loopholes
  - lacksconfidence 2y ago
    Over half of the stock market is held in the retirement accounts of everyday people. This is just a tax in a roundabout way. I don't have a solution, they all suck. But I'm not convinced this is any better.
    - 9question1 2y ago
      The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favorite-companies-are-privately-held/#:~:text=According%20to%20Forbes%2C%20less%20than,be%20classified%20as%20small%20businesses https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant. For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
      - adolph 2y ago
        As an example of how important equity holdings of retirement accounts are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
    - bwestergard 2y ago
      That's true but misleading. If you ranked every American by the value of the stocks they owned, the bottom 93% - the everyday people - would be splitting a paltry 10% of the total value. The bottom 50% hold only 1% of the market. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9... Most business equity isn't even publicly traded; a complete accounting would show even greater inequality.
- delusional 2y ago
  Personally I'm for a "captialistic death penalty", where if you've done something sufficiently bad, you get sentenced to work the night shift at McDonalds for the rest of your life.
- akira2501 2y ago
  It's about destroying monopoly power. If you allow an entity to reach this size there's no incentive for it to follow the rules. Getting the executives would be a nice bonus, but I'm not going to stand ceremoniously when there's more important structural changes to be made.
- scotty79 2y ago
  > You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later. I think it should be more about profits. In case of something like that, the corporation should be taxed the amount of entire profits they got from this. Also individuals in decisive positions should be investigated and indebted for the amounts they earned while the company was poisoning people plus interest since it happened.
- fallingfrog 2y ago
  Difficult when those same people are now in charge of the regulatory industries.
mandmandam 2y ago
What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all? I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world. All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes. It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet. Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around. "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers Quite the opposite - taxes are the only things that arm countries.
  - callalex 2y ago
    That’s not true: for example the US government (CIA) in the past century has also been funded through shady drug deals. This isn’t fringe conspiracy stuff either, they freely admit to past activities and have shown no willingness to change.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all? What if we could tame these gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters that casually wander into big cities and just start stomping skyscrapers down for shits and giggles? Think of how wonderful it would be to have one of those creatures under my control!!! > I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world. Nothing would make such a kaiju safer than putting it beyond the reach of even sovereign nations. And when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of, that has Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China put in charge, think of all the wonderfully progressive things that will happen then!
szundi 2y ago
It should be the people hold responsible
- ocdtrekkie 2y ago
  You sort of need to do both. The issue at hand with a corporate death penalty is shareholders. If a company being "killed" zeroes out the value for shareholders, the stock value will have to price in the likelihood of complete loss due to malfeasance, which will start making companies on the level a safer buy. This means companies doing more to prevent illegal behavior become worth more and companies have a financial reason to prevent crime greatly exceeding mere fines.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    Exactly. Everyone likes to say "kill the board and CEO" but they're just employees of the shareholders. At some time collective punishment to match collective gains needs to be considered; even if they're not personally liable they can still lose their investment.
    - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
      Exactly. The common criticism of this is that... yeah, that means the punishment will impact people who had no say in the decision, seniors' retirement funds, etc. But that is just risk, which is what the entire stock market is designed to correct for. And a good investment portfolio is always supposed to hedge risks by spreading them across multiple investments. It'll drive prices down for riskier stocks, more involved larger shareholders will have reason to get more involved and ask more questions about compliance and corporate responsibility, etc. Being able to punish shareholders for bad corporate behavior for corporate death is, to be honest just good capitalism.
- dylan604 2y ago
  If the level has been reached to discuss corporate death penalty, then the corporation employees should loose any protections the corporation normally provides.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
A company is nothing more than a group of people, working towards a single goal, no? If that's a case, breaking up the group itself also seems futile. We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts. Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
- wumbo 2y ago
  If the janitor knew, but withheld the publically valuable information out of fear, they should still get some amount of punishment. Making bad decisions under duress is understandable but it’s still a serious issue to withhold this information. The execs need no less than life in prison.
  - reaperman 2y ago
    These days no one seems to talk with janitors … there’s an infinitesimally small chance any of them had any information to withhold in the first place.
- bombcar 2y ago
  If the company is that large, the only real group left that "should be punishable" is the shareholders. The janitor can lose his job if the company goes under, and is unlikely to be prosecuted for anything major; but the shareholders can lose their investment, even if they're not prosecuted. Call it "corporate civil forfeiture".
rlili 2y ago
Won't happen, as corporations themselves control the law.
- davidw 2y ago
  Cynicism is a great way to ensure that nothing ever happens.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
naikrovek 2y ago
I’m fairly sure that the president can dissolve a company at will. Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today. Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
- naikrovek 2y ago
  Ok I was dumb for thinking of it this way and I really wish I remember what I read.
airstrike 2y ago
Why? So all the workers who had nothing to do with this decision can be unemployed the next day? All you'll achieve is a cascade of negative effects and a hit to GDP It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
That penalty exists, and e.g. Purdue Pharma was subject to it. But of course, Purdue also shows why it's complicated: * When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get. * A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale. * But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  Fire sale everything. And without exemptions for the C-suite/owners. In the Purdue case, the family should have lost everything, not retained billions. And they damn sure shouldn't get protection from civil liability, as a few courts of tried to do. It'll be interesting to see what SCOTUS ends up deciding (I think the bankruptcy landed there, with arguments in December 2023).
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring. The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M. You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
- bombcar 2y ago
  One way of enacting a corporate death penalty is to declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over. What is done with it afterwards is debatable, but at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over This, again, is fines with extra steps. Another novel procedure that gives targets years in court to appeal technicalities around the APA, eminent domain and expropriation. > at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out As they would with large fines. Corporate death penalties are nonsense invented to sidestep discussions of monetary penalties. Fines are liabilities. There is zero ambiguity around what happens to a company when it owes more than it’s worth. There is infinite ambiguity around applying a “death penalty” to fictitious entities; that is the point of this caper.
yndoendo 2y ago
This is needed when ever a company too big to fail needs to be bailed out. It would remove the bad CEO and top management by chopping up a company and selling it off. By keeping them around, bad CEOs, governments are rewarding bad behavior. Until politicians can no longer be bought, donations and super packs, this will continue to happen since rewarding bad behavior is a two-way street.
Oarch 2y ago
Take some of their IP and make it public. That'll do it.
- zackmorris 2y ago
  A billion dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? No more dollars.
austin-cheney 2y ago
No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person. More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public. Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
Lio 2y ago
You could achieve that by properly fining company's when they are responsible. In theory their insurance costs would go up and fiduciary duty would compel executives to act properly. Most countries have the equivalent of corporate manslaughter which in theory should send executives to prison for the behaviour of their subordinates. The problem with both is that the powers at be don't prosecute very often. Executives often weasel out in court by simply saying "I didn't know"... when it is 100% their job to know.
anonzzzies 2y ago
The C-levels need to be criminally liable, that will fix it. It will fix many things. In this case the people who were in charge should get the chair if the state has it or 100000x life in max with the other rapists and serial killers. It won’t happen again. Boeing comes to mind too. At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort. US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
alistairSH 2y ago
We need this, plus criminal liability for the C-suite, and possibly for the BoD. The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  This.
samlinnfer 2y ago
It has already been solved. Just sentence the company executives personally like in China.
- sneak 2y ago
  Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arrests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre... ?
sneak 2y ago
Corporations cannot act. If there is criminal activity, prosecute the human beings that committed crimes.
- bombcar 2y ago
  By a corporate death penalty you're prosecuting the shareholders who hired the CEO who did the crimes. As it is, the shareholders can benefit from the crimes, the CEO retire, and the government is left holding the bag.
m463 2y ago
Will we dismantle silicon valley in the decades ahead after we start realizing the damage from collecting personal information, biometrics, behavioral data and more from everyone in the world?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Worse things have happened. Union Carbide still exists. And they literally killed 16000 people in India and injured hundreds of thousands more out of negligence. We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.

generic92034 2y ago

I wonder if we as individuals are ready to accept punishment for our own externalities, though.

davidmurdoch 2y ago
What?
grvdrm 2y ago
As in our addiction as consumers to all things plastic for convenience and other reasons?
- generic92034 2y ago
  CO2, NOx, plastics, all kinds of problematic chemicals - we all release more of those than we would strictly need to. And even the strict needs could be argued about, in some cases.
  - grvdrm 2y ago
    It's a very interesting point. I am attempting (recently) to cut some chemicals and processed things from my house. Examples: using glass as much as I can, instead of plastic. Trying to use more local fresh ingredients in my cooking. Buying more from local stores rather than rely on the global supply chain. Trying and mostly failing to maintain a lawn (in suburbs) without some level of chemicals. I know these are not all perfect examples. Where things get tough is with time. It takes lots of time to re-engineer things down to simpler stricter needs. So, I still use grocery delivery, which generates a mountain of plastic, because I don't always have a span of time to get food I need.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]