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Here's the path: 1. Imprison executives who made the decisions that led to the result. Preferably in a way that makes them spend their fortunes on legal costs

Here's the path: 1. Imprison executives who made the decisions that led to the result. Preferably in a way that makes them spend their fortunes on legal costs so that when they get out in 20-30 years, they're dependent on social safety nets for the rest of their natural lives. People are dead because they thought that possibility of profit was worth the risk of hundreds of deaths. That's negligent homicide. 2. There is no 2.

dboreham 2y ago
Responsibility will turn out to be so diffuse that no individuals will be found to be liable. This is a superpower of large organizations and permeates our daily lives. Also one of the main reasons government regulation is always required. And why capatilist bros are constantly wittering about removing regulation.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  > Responsibility will turn out to be so diffuse that no individuals will be found to be liable. Au contraire. Most executives will justify their pay packages by saying they shoulder all of the risk. Well, what risk? Losing their jobs? When you make in a year what most people make in an entire career, that's not a risk. Losing their wealth? See the prior statement, but take into account that they have money managers who are paid to do nothing but diversify holdings and manage risk. They can't be held liable in a civil suit as individuals; that's the entire point of incorporation. Either they have risk to justify their compensation or they don't. They don't. So we need to find some risk. When you look for another way to assign risk to increase the quality of the decisions made by c-suites, Leavenworth starts to look like a fairly attractive option. And it would be for the convicted, when you consider that the crimes actually happened in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
  - thmsths 2y ago
    I fully agree. We need to adopt the same mindset they have in maritime tradition: the buck stops at the captain. If you're in charge you're responsible for the misdeeds of the people working for you. It does not matter that you did not explicitly order the bad thing or that someone took an initiative without your knowledge. At that level of pay/power/responsibility, "It was not me"/"I did not know" are NOT acceptable defenses. As the CEO you're in a unique position to ask for more controls, more safety, more audit. So unless you went above and beyond and things were truly out of your control, then yes, you should be held responsible when disaster strikes. If you think this is too much risk, then you're free to walk from the job (and the 8 figures pay package).
    - bgirard 2y ago
      Exactly. When you make the CEO responsible for things that they don't have direct visibility into normally it's amazing how suddenly they staff new positions/departments/orgs with competent folks with legitimate resources and power to oversee it properly. We should not accept large organizations, bureaucracy and lack of visibility as a deference.
    - richwater 2y ago
      All you're doing would be to kill companies above a certain size as literally every company makes mistakes and thus no one would have any interest in going to jail. A fantastic way to ruin the economy frankly.
      - thmsths 2y ago
        I am not advocating for a zero tolerance approach. In the example I mentioned, the navy, there are plenty of times when the inquiry into a disaster absolved the captain of the blame. All I am saying is that CEOs should be held to the same standards we hold licensed professions such as lawyers, doctors, engineers or pilots. Aka if something goes wrong we will scrutinize their behavior in the lead up and then determine if they took reasonable steps to prevent the issue. In that framework a CEO putting "safety first" will not have to worry in case a black swan events happen, it's the CEO who decided to do some "cost optimization" that will have to answer if the company routinely kills or injures people.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Au contraire. Most executives will justify their pay packages by saying they shoulder all of the risk. Feels like a strawman, or at least a misunderstanding of what "responsibility" is. Shareholders are willing to pay dearly for executives not because they need a fall guy in case something go wrong, they do so because someone in that position can easily fuck up the business, and therefore it's worth paying extra to get someone more qualified (at least in theory), so that doesn't happen. It's not any different than you not picking the cheapest guy on cragislist to housesit when you're on vacation. The premium isn't because you want a fall guy to sue in case your house burns down, it's so you don't end up with a guy who fucks up your house while you're away.
    - thmsths 2y ago
      You're assuming it must be one OR the other. Why can't it be both? If you're rewarded for your good decisions, it seems normal to also be punished for the bad ones, in a proportional manner.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >Why can't it be both? I wasn't making a normative claim, only disagreeing with OP's characterization that executives' pay packages are justified by the threat of going to jail. >If you're rewarded for your good decisions, it seems normal to also be punished for the bad ones, in a proportional manner. FAANG engineers are paid pretty well. Should they go to jail (or even fined 5-6 figure sums) for bugs they're responsible for?
        thmsths 2y ago
        Bugs are simply not comparable to losing 2 aircrafts and killing hundreds of people, furthermore FAANG engineers have little impact on the org individually. But we already have that kind of threats for malpractice in several fields, if an engineer or doctor makes a mistake resulting in injuries or death they will be held responsible financially and sometimes criminally.
        2y ago
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Yes. This is how you end up with a gunman waiting outside the Hilton. When there is no justice, vigilantes and lynch mobs materialise.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> People are dead because they thought that possibility of profit was worth the risk of hundreds of deaths Probably untrue, to the point that Boeing may prefer the government do this instead of pursuing the company as a whole. The problem was nobody was connecting the cost cutting to outcomes.
- ruined 2y ago
  who's responsible for that connection? who's responsible for outcomes? executive power comes with executive responsibility
- organsnyder 2y ago
  > The problem was nobody was connecting the cost cutting to outcomes. That's negligence at best. This sort of high-level strategy is the vast majority of the job descriptions for senior leadership.
  - zelon88 2y ago
    Criminal negligence that results in death is..... Get ready for this... Negligent Homicide.
    - plagiarist 2y ago
      It's neat that you can simply file paperwork and suddenly stealing wages from employees or negligent homicide of customers (and child labor employees) becomes a civil matter. Not a personal civil matter, of course. Also sometimes you can shuffle all the profits to a different set of paperwork and have the old paperwork vanish along with its consequences. Very neat system.
- jajko 2y ago
  Anybody knowing anything about quality control in critical systems knows why its pursued at all costs, exactly due to such consequences - thats not even 101 of QC rather just first paragraph on first page. Lets not make these into some clueless clowns, they knew darn well the risks and took them. Mass manslaughter would be a good start. Would be...
saturn8601 2y ago
So how do you suggest to implement this plan? This country has been an oligopoly since its founding and apart from a few edge cases (FDR preventing the complete transition to socialism by placating the masses with the New Deal) the working class have never really had power.
perfectstorm 2y ago
it will never happen. these company executives are major donors to politicians of both aisles. laws and regulations are for the common people like you and me. not for the ultra-rich. heck, even the judiciary is corrupt these days.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
You can change the leadership to someone who is amenable to a quick concession as opposed to a drawn out legal fight. But can you destroy the desire for profit?
- bithive123 2y ago
  We can't destroy ignorance and violence but we don't just shrug and let the ignorant and violent run amok.
- danaris 2y ago
  It's not about destroying the desire for profit. It's about recognizing that you can't, and putting safeguards in place to ensure that even with that desire—even when it's so overriding that in other circumstances we might classify it as a mental illness—the amount of harm that can do to people is strictly limited.
Seattle3503 2y ago
As harsh as this sounds, it also seems to have other benefits. Often when things go wrong the solution the government comes up with is "micromanage the industry more", and the industry becomes yet more bureaucratic and compliance focused. Innovation is harder because the people making the rules aren't necessarily the domain experts. I think an accountability approach lets engineers build for safety leveraging their expert knowledge, in contrast to a rule based approach which favors compliance and bureaucracy. Accountability will select for leaders with an understanding of good engineering and safety culture, rather than leaders who are good at bureaucracy and compliance. I worked in the financial sector for a bit, where some leaders have personal accountability (eg chief compliance officer). I've seen questionable projects die because the company couldn't find someone to stay in that accountability role. The financial sector is not necessarily a good example of what I'm talking about generally, but in my particular experiences accountability seemed to work. tl;dr: Fewer rules, more personal accountability.
- vanviegen 2y ago
  What does 'personal accountability' actually mean in your book? How is a person held accountable when their domain implodes due to incompetence or greed?
  - Seattle3503 2y ago
    I mean personal criminal liability. Not civil or criminal liability absorbed by the larger corporation (though penalties to the corp might be necessary as well). Patent law uses the concept of "a person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA) to determine which patents are novel and which are non-novel. The idea is that if an invention is obvious to a PHOSITA at the time of invention, the invention isn't novel or surprising. I think we could use the same concept in risk management. If, at the time a decision is made, a PHOSITA would say a decision is likely to lead to serious harm, then someone in a leadership position should face criminal liability if that decision later does in fact lead to harm. I think a) who should face the criminal liability, b) what we mean by "likely" c) what we mean by serious harm are all topics you could get into at length. But before you fiddle too much with the knobs on a, b, and c we would probably need to determine if criminal liability is the correct solution. I obviously think so.
kiba 2y ago
I don't think making an example out of those executives are going to do anything in particular. Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will. Forcing Boeing to reorganize their structural incentive will. Forcing shareholders to take a haircut means that they will likely hold the board more accountable will. Like, nobody really think about risking people's lives for slightly more profit. It's more like they think about "cutting cost to get promotion and make more money. What risk? There's no risk.". It's not like Boeing are particularly competent. Their projects experienced cost overrun for example. This whole idea of outsourcing to individual contractors turned out to make development of aircraft even more expensive. Their space division is currently blowing another hole in their budget. Their Starliner program is a joke and has no future beyond the ISS. Some people may need to go to jail because it's more than just gross incompetence, fair enough. I am just skeptical of long lengthy sentences.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  > Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will Do you know what this means? It means getting the UHC treatment.
  - brokencode 2y ago
    Murder is murder, and nobody deserves that kind of treatment. It makes our society worse, not better.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will. You mean a golden parachute? I don't think that will deter anything. I think the GP is on the right track. Business leaders need fear consequences, so they moderate their behavior, and that means messages must be sent. It would be perfect to have some fortune 100 CEO go to Davos one year, then return the next in a prison jumpsuit to tell all the collected elites about what it feels like to be utterly ruined. Then do it again and again until the message gets through.
legitster 2y ago
The idea that severe punishment for executive failure will lead to improved executive decision making I don't think bears out. When dictators publicly executed advisor 1 and then advisor 2 and then advisor 3, they would still manage to always find someone greedy/desperate enough to want to take a crack on chance #4 or #5. But it did nothing to make the advisors better, it just meant that the next guy had to be even more greedy or desperate.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  That's not an analogous situation. It's entirely possible to run a company like Boeing in a responsible way that's still profitable. Indeed, that used to be true for Boeing itself.
  - Sebb767 2y ago
    And the parent comment does not disagree with this. It's just that harsh punishment for executives might not improve the selection - in fact, it might be adverse selection, since increasing the risk will lead actually good people to avoid the position.
    - izacus 2y ago
      Are you seriously claiming that people would avoid position with millions of compensation just because their poor decision making could lead to the same consequences many of the worker class need to endure for their actions?
      - sgt101 2y ago
        Unfortunately I think that's a hard yes - because these people don't have to accept these positions. I think that this kind of high stakes gambling is part of the problem here... Much better to defuse responsibility in the executive suite and pressure shareholders in general to ensure good governance.
      - sdwr 2y ago
egl2021 2y ago
Why stop with the executives? Why not throw the shareholders into jail --- they approve the selection of the executives and benefit from whatever malfeasance you are targeting.
- tjwebbnorfolk 2y ago
  If you have a 401k, you almost certainly are a Boeing shareholder.
- brokencode 2y ago
  Most shareholders have no real say in the company, though it’s fair to investigate what the board knew and how they acted, as they serve on behalf of the shareholders. I do think there needs to be legal culpability for anybody who was informed of risks and pushed on regardless. Though I can see where it would be very hard to prove anything. It really is a tough problem here. I hope that somebody will be seriously punished for the deaths of hundreds, but I’m very doubtful.
sirspacey 2y ago
Then we should also jail the shareholders who profited and the activist shareholders who pushed for it CEOs, especially of large companies, are glorified management
- christhecaribou 2y ago
  I downvoted then thought about it more and changed my mind. It’s a fascinating idea to consider. If we could hold shareholders of companies like UnitedHealthCare or Boeing accountable for unethical behavior… it would sure stop fast.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 2y ago
    This used to be the case with banks prior to the 1910s. If a bank became insolvent, the shareholders were personally liable for fixing it.
anonym29 2y ago
Trying them for negligent manslaughter or homicide seems extreme, but I'd entertain an attempt at justifying that, and I'd do so in good faith and with an open mind to the arguments presented. Just to be clear though, are you proposing that they should have these charges brought up against them and given the same rights to due process that everyone else gets, are you proposing something more akin to extrajudicial detention - a suspension of due process and the suspension of habeas corpus?
mschuster91 2y ago
> 1. Imprison executives who made the decisions that led to the result. I'd go a step further. Follow the Truong My Lan case [1] - make these people actually fear getting executed. I'm not a fan of the death penalty at all. It is disproportionately affecting the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. But for ultra rich people making money off of risking the death of others? Maybe that is what is needed to get rabid capitalism under control. If the government keeps going on with not actually doing anything to the ultra rich until they steal from other ultra rich (SBF, Madoff), eventually people will take the law into their own hands otherwise. This United Health CEO will not have been the last, but "citizen justice" is not what anyone should want. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-death-sentence-tycoon-truong-my-lan-upheld-unless-pays-9-billion/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-death-sentence-tycoon-t...

dboreham 2y ago

Responsibility will turn out to be so diffuse that no individuals will be found to be liable. This is a superpower of large organizations and permeates our daily lives. Also one of the main reasons government regulation is always required. And why capatilist bros are constantly wittering about removing regulation.

lenerdenator 2y ago
> Responsibility will turn out to be so diffuse that no individuals will be found to be liable. Au contraire. Most executives will justify their pay packages by saying they shoulder all of the risk. Well, what risk? Losing their jobs? When you make in a year what most people make in an entire career, that's not a risk. Losing their wealth? See the prior statement, but take into account that they have money managers who are paid to do nothing but diversify holdings and manage risk. They can't be held liable in a civil suit as individuals; that's the entire point of incorporation. Either they have risk to justify their compensation or they don't. They don't. So we need to find some risk. When you look for another way to assign risk to increase the quality of the decisions made by c-suites, Leavenworth starts to look like a fairly attractive option. And it would be for the convicted, when you consider that the crimes actually happened in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
- thmsths 2y ago
  I fully agree. We need to adopt the same mindset they have in maritime tradition: the buck stops at the captain. If you're in charge you're responsible for the misdeeds of the people working for you. It does not matter that you did not explicitly order the bad thing or that someone took an initiative without your knowledge. At that level of pay/power/responsibility, "It was not me"/"I did not know" are NOT acceptable defenses. As the CEO you're in a unique position to ask for more controls, more safety, more audit. So unless you went above and beyond and things were truly out of your control, then yes, you should be held responsible when disaster strikes. If you think this is too much risk, then you're free to walk from the job (and the 8 figures pay package).
  - bgirard 2y ago
    Exactly. When you make the CEO responsible for things that they don't have direct visibility into normally it's amazing how suddenly they staff new positions/departments/orgs with competent folks with legitimate resources and power to oversee it properly. We should not accept large organizations, bureaucracy and lack of visibility as a deference.
  - richwater 2y ago
    All you're doing would be to kill companies above a certain size as literally every company makes mistakes and thus no one would have any interest in going to jail. A fantastic way to ruin the economy frankly.
    - thmsths 2y ago
      I am not advocating for a zero tolerance approach. In the example I mentioned, the navy, there are plenty of times when the inquiry into a disaster absolved the captain of the blame. All I am saying is that CEOs should be held to the same standards we hold licensed professions such as lawyers, doctors, engineers or pilots. Aka if something goes wrong we will scrutinize their behavior in the lead up and then determine if they took reasonable steps to prevent the issue. In that framework a CEO putting "safety first" will not have to worry in case a black swan events happen, it's the CEO who decided to do some "cost optimization" that will have to answer if the company routinely kills or injures people.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Au contraire. Most executives will justify their pay packages by saying they shoulder all of the risk. Feels like a strawman, or at least a misunderstanding of what "responsibility" is. Shareholders are willing to pay dearly for executives not because they need a fall guy in case something go wrong, they do so because someone in that position can easily fuck up the business, and therefore it's worth paying extra to get someone more qualified (at least in theory), so that doesn't happen. It's not any different than you not picking the cheapest guy on cragislist to housesit when you're on vacation. The premium isn't because you want a fall guy to sue in case your house burns down, it's so you don't end up with a guy who fucks up your house while you're away.
  - thmsths 2y ago
    You're assuming it must be one OR the other. Why can't it be both? If you're rewarded for your good decisions, it seems normal to also be punished for the bad ones, in a proportional manner.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >Why can't it be both? I wasn't making a normative claim, only disagreeing with OP's characterization that executives' pay packages are justified by the threat of going to jail. >If you're rewarded for your good decisions, it seems normal to also be punished for the bad ones, in a proportional manner. FAANG engineers are paid pretty well. Should they go to jail (or even fined 5-6 figure sums) for bugs they're responsible for?
      - thmsths 2y ago
        Bugs are simply not comparable to losing 2 aircrafts and killing hundreds of people, furthermore FAANG engineers have little impact on the org individually. But we already have that kind of threats for malpractice in several fields, if an engineer or doctor makes a mistake resulting in injuries or death they will be held responsible financially and sometimes criminally.
        2y ago
madaxe_again 2y ago
Yes. This is how you end up with a gunman waiting outside the Hilton. When there is no justice, vigilantes and lynch mobs materialise.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> People are dead because they thought that possibility of profit was worth the risk of hundreds of deaths Probably untrue, to the point that Boeing may prefer the government do this instead of pursuing the company as a whole. The problem was nobody was connecting the cost cutting to outcomes.

ruined 2y ago
who's responsible for that connection? who's responsible for outcomes? executive power comes with executive responsibility
organsnyder 2y ago
> The problem was nobody was connecting the cost cutting to outcomes. That's negligence at best. This sort of high-level strategy is the vast majority of the job descriptions for senior leadership.
- zelon88 2y ago
  Criminal negligence that results in death is..... Get ready for this... Negligent Homicide.
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    It's neat that you can simply file paperwork and suddenly stealing wages from employees or negligent homicide of customers (and child labor employees) becomes a civil matter. Not a personal civil matter, of course. Also sometimes you can shuffle all the profits to a different set of paperwork and have the old paperwork vanish along with its consequences. Very neat system.
jajko 2y ago
Anybody knowing anything about quality control in critical systems knows why its pursued at all costs, exactly due to such consequences - thats not even 101 of QC rather just first paragraph on first page. Lets not make these into some clueless clowns, they knew darn well the risks and took them. Mass manslaughter would be a good start. Would be...

saturn8601 2y ago

So how do you suggest to implement this plan? This country has been an oligopoly since its founding and apart from a few edge cases (FDR preventing the complete transition to socialism by placating the masses with the New Deal) the working class have never really had power.

perfectstorm 2y ago

it will never happen. these company executives are major donors to politicians of both aisles. laws and regulations are for the common people like you and me. not for the ultra-rich. heck, even the judiciary is corrupt these days.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss 2y ago

You can change the leadership to someone who is amenable to a quick concession as opposed to a drawn out legal fight. But can you destroy the desire for profit?

bithive123 2y ago
We can't destroy ignorance and violence but we don't just shrug and let the ignorant and violent run amok.
danaris 2y ago
It's not about destroying the desire for profit. It's about recognizing that you can't, and putting safeguards in place to ensure that even with that desire—even when it's so overriding that in other circumstances we might classify it as a mental illness—the amount of harm that can do to people is strictly limited.

Seattle3503 2y ago

As harsh as this sounds, it also seems to have other benefits. Often when things go wrong the solution the government comes up with is "micromanage the industry more", and the industry becomes yet more bureaucratic and compliance focused. Innovation is harder because the people making the rules aren't necessarily the domain experts. I think an accountability approach lets engineers build for safety leveraging their expert knowledge, in contrast to a rule based approach which favors compliance and bureaucracy. Accountability will select for leaders with an understanding of good engineering and safety culture, rather than leaders who are good at bureaucracy and compliance. I worked in the financial sector for a bit, where some leaders have personal accountability (eg chief compliance officer). I've seen questionable projects die because the company couldn't find someone to stay in that accountability role. The financial sector is not necessarily a good example of what I'm talking about generally, but in my particular experiences accountability seemed to work. tl;dr: Fewer rules, more personal accountability.

vanviegen 2y ago
What does 'personal accountability' actually mean in your book? How is a person held accountable when their domain implodes due to incompetence or greed?
- Seattle3503 2y ago
  I mean personal criminal liability. Not civil or criminal liability absorbed by the larger corporation (though penalties to the corp might be necessary as well). Patent law uses the concept of "a person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA) to determine which patents are novel and which are non-novel. The idea is that if an invention is obvious to a PHOSITA at the time of invention, the invention isn't novel or surprising. I think we could use the same concept in risk management. If, at the time a decision is made, a PHOSITA would say a decision is likely to lead to serious harm, then someone in a leadership position should face criminal liability if that decision later does in fact lead to harm. I think a) who should face the criminal liability, b) what we mean by "likely" c) what we mean by serious harm are all topics you could get into at length. But before you fiddle too much with the knobs on a, b, and c we would probably need to determine if criminal liability is the correct solution. I obviously think so.

kiba 2y ago

I don't think making an example out of those executives are going to do anything in particular. Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will. Forcing Boeing to reorganize their structural incentive will. Forcing shareholders to take a haircut means that they will likely hold the board more accountable will. Like, nobody really think about risking people's lives for slightly more profit. It's more like they think about "cutting cost to get promotion and make more money. What risk? There's no risk.". It's not like Boeing are particularly competent. Their projects experienced cost overrun for example. This whole idea of outsourcing to individual contractors turned out to make development of aircraft even more expensive. Their space division is currently blowing another hole in their budget. Their Starliner program is a joke and has no future beyond the ISS. Some people may need to go to jail because it's more than just gross incompetence, fair enough. I am just skeptical of long lengthy sentences.

greenavocado 2y ago
> Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will Do you know what this means? It means getting the UHC treatment.
- brokencode 2y ago
  Murder is murder, and nobody deserves that kind of treatment. It makes our society worse, not better.
tivert 2y ago
> Stripping them out of their position and banning them from holding executive positions will. You mean a golden parachute? I don't think that will deter anything. I think the GP is on the right track. Business leaders need fear consequences, so they moderate their behavior, and that means messages must be sent. It would be perfect to have some fortune 100 CEO go to Davos one year, then return the next in a prison jumpsuit to tell all the collected elites about what it feels like to be utterly ruined. Then do it again and again until the message gets through.

legitster 2y ago

The idea that severe punishment for executive failure will lead to improved executive decision making I don't think bears out. When dictators publicly executed advisor 1 and then advisor 2 and then advisor 3, they would still manage to always find someone greedy/desperate enough to want to take a crack on chance #4 or #5. But it did nothing to make the advisors better, it just meant that the next guy had to be even more greedy or desperate.

TulliusCicero 2y ago
That's not an analogous situation. It's entirely possible to run a company like Boeing in a responsible way that's still profitable. Indeed, that used to be true for Boeing itself.
- Sebb767 2y ago
  And the parent comment does not disagree with this. It's just that harsh punishment for executives might not improve the selection - in fact, it might be adverse selection, since increasing the risk will lead actually good people to avoid the position.
  - izacus 2y ago
    Are you seriously claiming that people would avoid position with millions of compensation just because their poor decision making could lead to the same consequences many of the worker class need to endure for their actions?
    - sgt101 2y ago
      Unfortunately I think that's a hard yes - because these people don't have to accept these positions. I think that this kind of high stakes gambling is part of the problem here... Much better to defuse responsibility in the executive suite and pressure shareholders in general to ensure good governance.
    - sdwr 2y ago

egl2021 2y ago

Why stop with the executives? Why not throw the shareholders into jail --- they approve the selection of the executives and benefit from whatever malfeasance you are targeting.

tjwebbnorfolk 2y ago
If you have a 401k, you almost certainly are a Boeing shareholder.
brokencode 2y ago
Most shareholders have no real say in the company, though it’s fair to investigate what the board knew and how they acted, as they serve on behalf of the shareholders. I do think there needs to be legal culpability for anybody who was informed of risks and pushed on regardless. Though I can see where it would be very hard to prove anything. It really is a tough problem here. I hope that somebody will be seriously punished for the deaths of hundreds, but I’m very doubtful.

sirspacey 2y ago

Then we should also jail the shareholders who profited and the activist shareholders who pushed for it CEOs, especially of large companies, are glorified management

christhecaribou 2y ago
I downvoted then thought about it more and changed my mind. It’s a fascinating idea to consider. If we could hold shareholders of companies like UnitedHealthCare or Boeing accountable for unethical behavior… it would sure stop fast.
- tjwebbnorfolk 2y ago
  This used to be the case with banks prior to the 1910s. If a bank became insolvent, the shareholders were personally liable for fixing it.

anonym29 2y ago

Trying them for negligent manslaughter or homicide seems extreme, but I'd entertain an attempt at justifying that, and I'd do so in good faith and with an open mind to the arguments presented. Just to be clear though, are you proposing that they should have these charges brought up against them and given the same rights to due process that everyone else gets, are you proposing something more akin to extrajudicial detention - a suspension of due process and the suspension of habeas corpus?

mschuster91 2y ago

> 1. Imprison executives who made the decisions that led to the result. I'd go a step further. Follow the Truong My Lan case [1] - make these people actually fear getting executed. I'm not a fan of the death penalty at all. It is disproportionately affecting the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. But for ultra rich people making money off of risking the death of others? Maybe that is what is needed to get rabid capitalism under control. If the government keeps going on with not actually doing anything to the ultra rich until they steal from other ultra rich (SBF, Madoff), eventually people will take the law into their own hands otherwise. This United Health CEO will not have been the last, but "citizen justice" is not what anyone should want. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-death-sentence-tycoon-truong-my-lan-upheld-unless-pays-9-billion/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-death-sentence-tycoon-t...