We sure have come a long way since "by the people, for the people". It's the capitalist version of buying indulgences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence). Sounds like it's time for 95 Theses II: Electric Boogaloo.
The “corporate death penalty” would be seizing it and selling off assets at such small pieces that it would be hard to reassemble the whole.
Typical companies operate with some debt load (financing, etc). That would have to be paid off with the proceeds of selling off their pieces.
So in practice, even selling it off would produce zero or negative monetary return once debts were settled. You’d also be obliterating tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs overnight.
For a corporation, that would be like its operations totally ceasing, all employees are fired, shares might go to zero value, and individual assets sold off (like a will). That "shares going to zero" part would be important for accountability.
Corporations aren't people though. For one, corporations are just groups of people, so it's hard to claim that it's irredeemable and must suffer the death penalty. If you take a corporation, replace its board, executives, and employees, is it even the same corporation?
>operations totally ceasing, all employees are fired, [...] and individual assets sold off (like a will).
What purpose does this serve?
>That "shares going to zero" part would be important for accountability.
That happens regardless of the "death penalty" though. The government dispossessing all shareholders has the same effect.
However, I’m also amazed when these discussions generate calls for “corporate death penalty” powers being handed to the government and/or used for various transgressions. This entire discussion section is occurring under and article about the current administration abusing government powers for their own gain. How can people be so quick to call for even more levers for corrupt governments to use? “Nice company you got there. Would be a shame if it got the death penalty. On an unrelated note, my campaign fund could use another $100 million if you know anyone…”
Let’s leave the punishments as proportional to the damage/crime.
A similar dynamic is at play with Luigi. Someone finally pierced the corporate/legal abstractions of the healthcare cartel with some extrajudicial punishment on one of the more-visible cogs. We can all understand that, and it's downright cathartic...
But when Krasnov calls Bezos and tells him to discontinue publicizing how much Krasnov's new import taxes are costing everyone, Bezos knows how popularly hated his corporate ownership class is. If Krasnov ends him tomorrow most people won't be horrified, rather there will be throngs cheering it on - the rule of law no longer protects him. And so he has little choice but to lash himself to the fascist's power and comply.
I wish I knew how to reverse the trend.
3M knew exactly how bad it was too, back to the 70s
a corporate death sentence isn't enough, jail every board member who was involved
That's what bankruptcy is.
Existing owners (stockholders) lose the company entirely. The company gets sold to entirely new owners.
And while bankruptcy is usually due to mismanagement or bad luck, it can also certainly happen because a legal judgment or fine makes the corporation no longer viable.
But if you're asking for the company to be destroyed to the extent where every single contract is cancelled and every single person gets laid off, that's not generally desirable. We don't want people to lose their jobs, or customers to stop receiving what a company produces, whenever possible. There's a lot of value in a functioning corporation that you don't want to just disappear. Better to let new owners reuse it.
But the main counterpoint is that there's literally no point to that. If you want to punish the owners, there's no difference between taking the value of their investment to zero, or going beyond that and destroying every contract and job. The owners don't care if a receptionist loses their job too, but the receptionist sure does. It becomes more than just a "death penalty" -- it becomes a "nuclear bomb" that takes out everyone.
So bankruptcy already accomplishes everything you'd want from a "corporate death penalty". The company is gone as far as the previous owners are concerned.
Executives should be held accountable for making decisions or approving company direction that break laws
I know there's a lot of complexity here with how businesses operate
But it is really messed up that individuals can enrich themselves an incredible amount by directing companies to break laws, and often suffer zero consequences for that because the corporate veil is such a strong mechanism
Isn't that already the case? If an executive ordered a hit on someone, that doesn't become magically legal because he was doing it on behalf of the company.
But also the problem isn't that it becomes "magically legal",the problem is that the corporate veil means that if a company takes illegal actions then often only the company is held accountable, instead of the people responsible for directing the company to take illegal actions
And it takes a high bar (like ordering a hit) to make the legal system try and hold individuals accountable for company actions
I am arguing that is absurd. I think individuals inside companies take advantage of this often to get away with illegal shit to enrich themselves at the company's expense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
Note that while minions went to jail, the CEO came out of this scot-free.
Because it was determined that the minions committed the crime and that the CEO didn't know about it?
>The CEO Wenig's messages were deemed "inappropriate" by eBay, but eBay's internal investigation concluded that the CEO did not know about the stalking and harassment activities.
Another way forward is that the presumption of innocence should be a sliding scale based on the amount a person has benefited. So if you made $100 million from the company, the bar is very low; you don't get to make $100 million unless everything is absolutely squeaky clean. If you were just an average joe taking home a $50k paycheck, you get much more benefit of doubt. So it's basically like making a lot of money off any endeavor is itself something that requires extra-good conduct; the default position is no one gets to make a lot of money at all.
In theory at least, usually the CEO is legally responsible for the actions of the corporation. And all employees are accountable for their own actions
In practice we’ve seen that, at least big corporations, and their executives, get away with just paying fines and settling lawsuits
Going after executives might be a lot more viable, though. Generally they have much more direct power than major shareholders (since "sell" is usually the only option they have)
I wonder if someone has studied this formally and quantitatively.
Or create a new position "patsy" or "chief scapegoat" that employees can fight for.
The point is that if you require some one person to be legally liable, then you'll simply create a new industry of scapegoats to hire.
It makes sense because it maximises the hit-rate of finding a relevant precedent, and kind of creates a global system of common law.
Countries with newer legal systems (like Canada) can bootstrap centuries of precedent this way. Nearly a third of Canadian Supreme Court judgements cite foreign precedent!
> The primary contrast between the two systems is the role of written decisions and precedent as a source of law (one of the defining features of common law legal systems). While Common law systems place great weight on precedent, civil law judges tend to give less weight to judicial precedent. For example, the Napoleonic Code expressly forbade French judges to pronounce general principles of law.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File%3AMap...
It's rather discouraging to see the list.
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trollbridge•4h ago
actionfromafar•4h ago
cperciva•4h ago
A corporation is just a group of people acting together, and it's pretty well established in international law that collective punishment isn't acceptable; and on the flip side, a corporation can neither "act" nor "think" independently, but rather does so via the humans involved. (Perhaps this would change with corporate-owned AI?)
In all the cases I've seen where a corporation is alleged to have engaged in criminal conduct, there was in fact a human -- or several humans -- who were broke the law. As far as I'm concerned, that's where the buck should stop; it seems that prosecutors tend to target corporations simply because it's easier than doing their job properly and pinning down who specifically bears responsibility.
mindslight•3h ago
This is ignoring that levels of complexity creates new emergent behavior. If you're willing to believe that "AI" could make a corporation think independently, then how is a pile of paperwork running on a substrate of human wetware not the same dynamic?
> it seems that prosecutors tend to target corporations simply because it's easier than doing their job properly and pinning down who specifically bears responsibility
No, the problem is exactly the sorting through the emergent complexity of the corporation to correctly assign blame. The low-level person who did the actual illegal action is likely sympathetic and mostly judgement proof, and was likely incentivized to break the law by corporate policies. Meanwhile the corporate policies are phrased in terms of abstract metrics that aren't illegal per se, especially how they're written down.
Taking the fundamentalist view, that the individual would-be-fall-guy humans should take a hard line and refuse to break the law, doesn't solve the problem - it only increases the level of incentive required until someone is willing to do it. And focusing blame this way helps the higher up management escape accountability since they didn't actually break the law themselves.
One correct answer would be to charge all of the involved parties like the criminal conspiracy it is, but the capital-wielding upper classes escaping accountability is a dynamic as old as time.
bee_rider•3h ago
I guess it would also be ok to go after C-levels or whoever sets the policy. But, it will be hard, I think. High-level guidance can create an incentive structure to break the law without actually saying “break the law.”
BrenBarn•2h ago
The creation of such an incentive structure should itself be illegal.
bee_rider•2h ago
What about giving you bank employees performance numbers that can’t really be met with due diligence, and then not checking their work too much.
Similarly, it is evident that software companies are not able to produce defect-free software (so, somebody is setting up an incentive structure to push bugs into production). There must be some wrong incentive structures, but it is hard to say where they come from.
nickpsecurity•3h ago
If it's a person, then they might have to go after the corporation. Alternatively, each corporate crime might be a conspiracy charge.
With limited liability, it's unclear how much one can discourage the bad behavior if there's distance between the owners and the punishment.
I oppose both of these concept by default for criminal behavior. Power and accountability should always go hand in hand. Only people should be people, too.