It is one of the great imbalances in the justice system where technically corporations are people, but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.
Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
The US is left leaning compared to the majority of all nations.
Besides that, the US is far more progressive than eg Europe in many respects (and that's ignoring parts of Europe still ruled by actual fascism and dictatorship, countries where it's perfectly legal to beat your wife if you so choose and being gay is practically a crime). In the majority of Europe gay marriage is still illegal. How much more regressive and backwards can you get? The US is at least a decade ahead of Europe when it comes to gay rights and identity / gender matters.
In Denmark they're committing vast human rights violations against minority Muslims while the world looks the other way. Is that left by US standards? I don't see the US forcing cultural eradication upon Muslims or taking their children away from them and indoctrinating them with nationalistic propaganda.
Across Western Europe de facto Neo Nazi parties hold immense political power.
In France Macron has practically declared open cultural war against Muslims.
Formerly open immigration nations like Sweden have become hyper xenophobic and have locked down access. Neo Nazism is rampant in Germany and so is xenophobia. Meanwhile the US is one of the few affluent nations on the planet that still welcomes the poor and the non-skilled, you don't need to be rich or successful to immigrate into the US (and that's before Biden's Presidency begins, in which the Democrats will dramatically liberalize immigration).
Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade. So where are all these nations around the world that are a lot further left than the US? There are maybe a dozen, tops.
The US now spends more on its welfare state as a share of its economy than either Canada or Australia. In the next 10-15 years it'll catch up to Britain on that point.
The US is also progressing much faster on drug decriminalization and legalization than Europe is. And half of Europe is guaranteed to remain backwards, regressive, on all of the previously mentioned items.
I stopped reading after this
This post is the craziest collection of misconceptions and outright untruths I've read in... A very, very long time.
Please, not this argument again!
Medicaid is an health insurance, not free health care!
They are completely different things (no, it's not the same thing as providing free healthcare)
And btw, only 23% benefit from it
"providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans)"
> Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade
The only progress US has made has been the number of homicides...
A nation where a thousand people every year are killed by the police and that has almost 700 people in jail every 100,000 of population (25% of the global jail population) looks more like a dictatorships than a progressive country.
As a comparison in Italy for the police to kill a thousand people it would take 333 years. USA has only 5.5 times the population of Italy.
I've seen it happen, or what probably was retaliation, but how do I know for sure? They said the person wasn't competent or doing their job when they got fired. I don't know for sure if that was true, but I do know they reported significant theft that would likely have involved someone higher up, and not long afterwards he was fired.
I find it obvious that such retaliation happens, otherwise it would be strange to have such laws.
It's their job to know. Only if they are a victim of a genuine criminal conspiracy performed by other employees and it can be shown without the CEO's knowledge should there be any defence.
CEO's are quite happy to tell people to do things without telling them to do the thing. That has been going on for centuries. Shakespeare wrote whole plays about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Any level of management with a direct responsibility is where blame should lie.
If the organization is so big that the CEO believes that, it shouldn't matter. They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization. No one forced the company to be that big and no one made them take the job.
Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), the worker will lose his/her job if (s)he doesn't do it, and the manager will get someone else to do it. If the worker reports it, it's his word against the managers, the manager will just say it was leaked rainwater, and that they asked the worker to spill it in the gutter, so the worker has no real choice, if they want to feed the kids that night. People above the manager have no idea about that local wallmart, and that one time issue.
Then, the worker dumps the chemicals into the stream, the chemicals just happen to be very dangerous, and a million fish die in the river downstream. Is the CEO really the guilty on here? Did he really know?
On the other hand, you have the VW dieselgate, where a whole team had to work on the software, and atleast a few level of mangers had to have known about the issue. But on the corporate ladder, where every level is squeezing the level below it to "do more", "bring in more profits", it's possible that some manager in charge of something actually didn't tell the people above him, just how exactly he solved the exhaust issue, just that he solved it, and saved millions of euros (and got a huge bonus). On the other hand, coordinating a big team of coders, and such info not getting to higher ups or to members of different teams in the same company (with different managers) is probably unlikely.
What i'm trying to say is, that blaming the CEO by default is bad, because in the first case, it's unrealistic to expect the CEO to even know that that local walmart exists.... and in the second case, that there should be a very thourough investigation just how high the knowledge went, and have the whole chain of comand held responsible.
Maybe, just maybe we then should not have so large entities that nobody can be responsible for? Limited liability is a massive handout from society to the owners of the Limited liability company and should be priced accordingly. (I do not propose banning limited liability. I propose being more selective how and which operations actually deserve limited liability. And tax it appropriately.)
But who says no one is responsible? There are clearly guilty parties, just not the CEO.
Thus this specific act was the result of an employee failing to follow procedure, despite being given the training and time to do so.
This is the exact burden of proof that is used for health and safety. When an employee is seriously injured, there’s a burden on the employer to demonstrate that took all reasonable precautions to prevent the injury. That mean procedures, training and evidence that those procedures and training is followed, enforced and enough time and space to provided for employees to follow them.
This should exist through the entire chain of command, with each level ensuring that the level below isn’t cutting corners, and it part of a CEO responsibility to build that management framework. I mean it already exists for controlling costs and ensure health & safety in most successful companies, why can’t it exist for all legal and social obligations?
The whole theory behind paying CEOs their current absurd salaries is that they are 5-D chess geniuses, responsible for the value created by up to millions of people doing actual work.
How can a CEO be in control enough to deserve all of the profits but so out of control that they deserve none of the blame?
The practical outcome is that high-level executives create plausible deniability. In your story, they issue edicts like "our chemical disposal bill is too high! Fix it!" or just "Our per-store costs are too high!" and ride roughshod over objections. "Don't bring me problems! Solve them!" The pressure rolls downhill. People trying to do the right thing get yelled at or fired; people doing the wrong thing skate on by, because the metrics look better. So everybody learns to do what the CEO implicitly wants: cutting corners to increase profits.
If the CEOs don't know that's the natural outcome of their behavior then they're negligent or criminally incompetent. If they do, they're just criminals. But they have plenty of money to create enough deniability that they can walk away. Possibly using some lower subordinate as a scapegoat, when he was just responding to incentives that the CEO set up.
In my view, whether or not a CEO has direct knowledge of a direct crime is irrelevant. At the CEO level, they don't have direct knowledge of anything, but they have power over everything. It's not clear to me positions like that should exist, but as long as they do exist, they should be responsible for the whole system that they have so eagerly taken charge of. Ignorance cannot be an excuse.
but what is "them" in this case. You are talking about the corporation, but does this mean CEOs, managers, or some combination of the two?
I'm not sure I'm arguing along those lines at all. What I'm saying is most CEOs are far removed from anything direct, but I'm not sure how that translates to "and therefore no one is".
> They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization
I disagree. You don't really argue why, and I argue, at least, that it's not at all practically. Best case it leads to scapegoating the CEO for things they aren't best positioned to control, and/or executive-levels micromanaging lower levels for fear of liability.
Funny then how the CEO is the right level to take that high pay, which is generally defended as compensation for the ultimate responsibility.
Either the CEO is responsible for what happens under his reign, or he isn't. If he is, why shouldn't he shoulder the blame for the bad parts; if he isn't, why should he be paid for the good parts?
It strains plausibility they didn't know, they're just punting to a time they aren't under oath.
Anti trust hearings of 4 tech companies at once... ridiculous... All 4 of you have a monopoly on... something!
Bullshit politics. You aren’t being forced to use ANY services from big tech in the US there is HEAPS of competition. Just US lawmakers shoring up constituents
It follows from VC efforts that market dominance produces massive profits. That money comes from somewhere. Anti-trust enforcement is way too weak in the US. Congress's motives in going after the tech companies is decidedly mixed, but given decades of laxity, I'll take it as a good start.
Uber didn’t get a monopoly... and there are a bunch of competitors in lots of different countries. And Uber is paying for this with epic losses every year... where is the anti trust?
Before Uber... where were the taxi anti trust hearings?
By design. The corporate structure of plausible deniability protects executives, and ultimately shareholders, when lower level actors are subtly "encouraged" to commit criminal behavior which advantages the company — and then cut loose if they get caught.
The incentives provide a strong force ensuring corporate criminality in the aggregate which completely overwhelms the weak force discouraging it at the individual level.
That person would often be paid minimum wage, have at best a high school education and so on. That may not exactly be fair in all cases.
If a superior gives you an order that violates set rules or laws (e.g shoot civilians). You HAVE to obey and BOTH parties will be accountable.
It's crazy how severity of ignoring an order can be worse than tribunal. However I totally agree with accountability.
Though corps would figure out a way to weasel past this regardless.
Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo.
The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered.
The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum.
If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now.
The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
[Edit]
I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol?
> the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
Do they?
Because they invested money into the corporation when the corporation issued stock.
It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.
This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
I agree. That is part of the risk investors take.
That's crime-laundering. Whether it should be punished by criminal prosecution is dubious, but whether it should be punished by investors losing money is not. Otherwise the system manifests a perverse incentive to invest in corporations which commit crimes.
Then again, facilitating criminality by the investor class is the whole point, isn't it?
1) it’s rare, if ever, that a CEO, CFO or COO faces jail time for crimes the company committed that are similar or worse compared to jail-able offenses by individuals. So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.
2) shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company. If my dog maims you because of my negligence to control it, I’m liable. If a corporation knowingly commits crimes, then the CEO (and everyone in the chain down to whoever performed the criminal action) is a criminal, and the board and the shareholders should be liable for not exercising proper control and guidance. When you own something you also take on responsibility for that object. Stocks are no different.
It happened in this case. From the article, "Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company..." Anyone else who conspired with him could be charged with the crimes.
> shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company.
The entire purpose of the corporate entity is so that investors can share in the ownership of a business that they do not manage without risking personal liability. Shareholders can completely lose their investment because of liabilities of the corporation, but they usually don't face personal liability.
Advantaging criminality to this degree is a choice. Our economic institutions did not have to be designed in such a way that criminality is rewarded so highly. We could architect them differently — but then it would be harder for a small number of people to make a great deal of money ripping off the rest of us.
There is no advantage to criminality. It is a general rule of law that no one should be able to profit from his crimes. That rule applies to corporations as well as individuals and there are many ways to hold corporations and their managers and employees accountable (civil and criminal liability are two of them).
My point was that passive investors shouldn't be criminally liable for criminal actions of employees of the corporation that they knew nothing about.
Of course there is. That's why YCombinator prefers "naughty" companies that break rules but get away with it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
> "Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
Is there any doubt that YCombinator would be investing in TicketMaster if it were a startup? Is there any moral distance between the scofflaw insouciance of AirBNB and TicketMaster? TicketMaster just eliminated a threat to its quasi-monopoly through criminality and were rewarded because the criminal penalty was utterly inconsequential compared with the commercial advantage obtained. They have "won" in the "marketplace", as that criminality-advantaging "marketplace" was constructed.
The unjust demolition of TicketMaster's competitors, and the resulting systemic economic inefficiency, is underpinned by rhetoric like yours.
Shareholders are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the corporation they've invested in. If shareholders have a reasonable chance of signfiicant loss of value, then they're more likely to require the company take steps to mitigate that (i.e don't do shady stuff).
As for prosecution of employees for crimes - that, too, is often rarely done, or focuses on the wrong people. Plenty of cases where it was the whistleblower, or someone who was raising red flags that gets the harsher penalty, rather than management who deliberately ignored it and has better paid lawyers to go for some light-weight bs
Shareholders lose their investment
Investors that didn't invest in the criminal corporation get to buy the assets for pennies on the dollar.
Perfect harmony.
Executives involved in crimes can face personal liability for those crimes. The corporation can also be wiped out and the shareholders can lose their investments.
> I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Regardless of whether your intent was angelic, devilish, or neither, rampant corporate criminality (such as TicketMaster's) is the obvious consequence of building a system according to principles that advantage criminality so baldly.
As I wrote elsewhere, there is no advantage to criminality because there are many ways that a corporation can be brought to justice.
TicketMaster is not an outlier — corporate impunity is the rule, not the exception. The incentives you advocate have proven utterly inadequate to ensure either "justice" (for those who care about justice) or economic efficiency arising from legitimate competition.