5 ms·

> That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not Maybe t

• arcbyte 2y ago
  Most crimes done by individuals are intentional. That is most often not the case with corporations. Intentionality is an important requirement in most crimes. That doest mean that there isn't plenty of room for more centralized civil protections against negligence and recklessness.
  • CogitoCogito 2y ago
    I guess if our goal were to stop this sort of corporate behavior, we would remove the requirement of a crime being intentional for corporations.
    • tehjoker 2y ago
      That or sharply raise the severity of lesser offenses if the perpetrator benefits financially from negligence with potential penalties including (a) corporate death penalty (revocation of charter) (b) nationalization.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > we would remove the requirement of a crime being intentional for corporations You still have the problem of punishing diffuse guilt. The correct answer is fines. Massive fines, potentially to the point of bankruptcy. We don't like to do that, however, because corporations have many stakeholders who may not deserve punishment, e.g. employees.
      • maeil 2y ago
        No, that's not why "we" don't like to do that, as there's countless way around that problem. They don't like to do that because it hurts the main stakeholders: those holding the reigns, the 0.1%. There's countless ways around the issue of "average" employees being punished. E.g. hard caps on top employee compensation for X years. Bans on dividends. Forced stock dilution, now that's a solid one. Create extra shares equivalent to 20% of market cap, given to the government who sells them on the open market. I'm sure there's holes in these but plenty of smarter people than me who can easily make them watertight.
        • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
          > countless ways around the issue of "average" employees being punished. E.g. hard caps on top employee compensation for X years. Bans on dividends How do either of these help an employee of a company that was just poofed? > there's holes in these but plenty of smarter people than me who can easily make them watertight No. There aren't. Both the caps you proposed--capping dividends and salary--have known workarounds. Stock buybacks exist because they're more tax efficient than dividends. Health insurance is tied to employment because in WWII the U.S. government capped wages. There is really one solution to corporate malfeasance: criminaly prosecuting where you have evidence of individual criminality and massive fines in every other case. We bankrupted our automakers without hurting their jobs. That's actually less intrusive than trying to fuck with their capital structure by e.g. banning dividends, which just incentivises leverage.
      • keybored 2y ago
        > You still have the problem of punishing diffuse guilt. Corporations are hierarchical. > however, because corporations have many stakeholders who may not deserve punishment, e.g. employees. Hiding behind the employees. The ones with the least stake in the company. That’s a classic. They might have their two weeks notice. What else? “There might be no other jobs around?” Class collaboration is a lie.
        • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    • gruez 2y ago
      Isn't that already the case? For instance Wells Fargo was fined $185M for fraudulently opening accounts customers didn't want[1]. Wells fargo (ie. management) weren't scheming to fraudulently open accounts. They only set aggressive sales goals, and that caused some employees to go rogue and commit fraud themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...
      • wahnfrieden 2y ago
        How do you know that lacked intent? It just sounds like cover for intent
        • gruez 2y ago
          The point isn't that wells fargo management didn't scheme to intentionally defraud customers, it's that the government was able to punish wells fargo for defrauding customers without having to prove they intentionally schemed to do so.
      • rectang 2y ago
        I'm skeptical that the intentions of the Wells Fargo executives were pure and white as the driven snow. The incentives align to encourage executives to commit crimes in service of short-term gains — even in the extreme case of Wells Fargo, Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf have both avoided prison time and ended up money ahead to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, even after clawbacks and fines. Not only shouldn't intent matter, we should assume the worst. Whether assuming the worst is a workable enforcement regime, I don't know — but it most accurately models a reality where the most rational behavior for executives is indifference to the law.
  • cycomanic 2y ago
    That's a big assertion to make without any evidence. There's a lot of individual crime which is not intentional (e.g. driving related) and there is a lot of corporate crime where someone clearly made a decision. In particular corporations employ lawyers so they have people qualified to decide if a crime is likely being committed.
    • arcbyte 2y ago
      Interestingly, driving infractions are mostly noncriminal. Corporations are giant responsibility diffusion machines and more often than not they stumble into illegal activity rather than internally commit to it. Hence, they are not acting intentionally. Also relevant is my assertion that this bumbling illegal behavior also needs better enforcement - it's just civil in nature and not criminal.
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    I'll disagree with the point that corporate crimes aren't intentional, they most certainly can be. There are plenty of examples of companies deciding that it's more profitable to "do crime" and just pay the fine if caught. Danske Bank famously have a post in their budget to pay fines for breaking banking laws. The problem is to prove that something is done intentional, on a "corporate level", whatever that means in the given case. Imagine having a law where breaking it would mean that the business have to shutdown. A competitor could pay off someone inside the company to break the law deliberately to have the legal system remove competition.
  • mikelitoris 2y ago
    This is a bullshit argument that people in charge of these companies make. How do you know the "thief" that stole merchandise from a store wasn't going to come back to pay for it in an hour? You don't... you just assume the worst, which should be the case for corporations.
    • arcbyte 2y ago
      It's not a bullshit argument, it is a battle tested argument with a long history.
      • dartos 2y ago
        Is it roughly the same long history as the long history of corporations getting away with crimes that individuals could not? Yknow maybe the modern day requires rethinking of some regulations regarding corporations.
• derektank 2y ago
  >Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process. Take insider trading for example. It would be very easy to simply make selling the stock of a company you work for, or are in any other way party to, outright illegal. But this would be bad for a lot of reasons; it would make it harder for businesses to compensate employees, it would encourage employees of successful companies to leave early taking important business knowledge with them, etc. Some behavior is simply harder to make illegal because it's harder to identify by its nature, which subsequently makes it harder to enforce laws against it.
  • AutistiCoder 2y ago
    You could just say employees get a blackout period each year where they can’t buy or sell company stock.
    • gruez 2y ago
      That's basically what SEC Form 144 is.
    • derektank 2y ago
      Sure, there are always compromises that can be made and my point wasn't about insider trading specifically, it was that there are tradeoffs to consider. But let's take your example, how long is the blackout period and how long is the open period? I would contend that there is almost no open period short enough that a motivated insider couldn't trade on their non-public knowledge if they were "lucky" enough to have it during the open period, so you're kind of back at square one where you still need the SEC and DoJ to investigate and borderline cases will slip through the cracks. And for everyone else, they've lost some liquidity in case of personal emergency, etc. Again, this isn't to argue against blackout periods specifically, they might be good policy, just pointing out that law and law enforcement is not always easy.
  • dartos 2y ago
    > Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process I’m no legal expert, ofc, but I’d bet that a good enough legislature could strike a balance that society can be okay with. Whatever we have now isn’t that.
• kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  DoJ Put hundreds of J6 fools behind bars because they aren't monied and influential enough to drag out the process. Meanwhile, Georgia has a mountain of criminal evidence from four years ago and they haven't gotten anywhere but for a few guilty pleas from the low level stooges.
  • steveBK123 2y ago
    I had a similar view during the GFC. Clearly crimes were committed, and clearly layers and layers of management were in on the joke, but only the few little fish at the bottom who were dumb enough to ever put things into writing with a paper trail went to jail. A lot of the alleged rogue traders were far less rogue than their employers would like you to believe, similar with the LIBOR fixing scandal, etc. J6 is very similar because there will never be a paper trail of the Orange man sending written orders to storm the Capitol. Everything is a wink and a nod. The guy at the top never actually says the thing, the next rung down maybe says it but only 1-1 in-person in a secure environment, a few levels down maybe a phone call & hopes not to be tapped, a few more layers down you start to get to the idiots who send a text/email. Akin to the Mafia.
    • kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      > The guy at the top never actually says the thing, Georgia literally has a recording of a criminal threatening to retaliate against a public official if they don't rig the election.
      • steveBK123 2y ago
        To be fair that was the one instance they have him dead to rights, true. It is a bit unexpected I suppose for a normally friendly party to be recording your phone call. He did work in a less regulated environment than banking so recorded phone call probably caught him by surprise. No one was that dumb at banks (most calls are recorded and there’s often even a beep to remind you the line is recorded).