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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.

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.

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.