Something in me, somewhere in a dark and vengeful place of my soul, just wants to see the big companies burn down and let the ashes of the big tech giants be a warning memorial for future leaders that might don't make right.
>The investigation also found that former CEO Wenig had made “inappropriate communications” but did not have advance knowledge of the harassment and stalking. Wenig, who was not charged, was allowed to resign in September 2019 with a compensation package worth $57 million; the Steiner scandal was a “consideration” in his departure, the company has said.
These morally bankrupt parasites somehow get in situations where they get rewarded when things go well and when things go catastrophically wrong under their watch. I wonder what you would have to do as a CEO to actually get fired without getting a huge sack of cash, murder someone in broad daylight?
It's clear to me that I don't really understand companies. Why give him such a huge exit package? Why would any executive get an exit package? What is the benefit to paying them so much money to leave? Why do most companies do this?
Board members tend to be, have been, or be related to CEOs. So, it is largely a matter of class solidarity. A norm of "CEO always wins" is good for them in general, even if it occasionally makes bad publicity. Bad publicity doesn't really cost them anything, anyway.
Boards and corporate officers ganging up against the interests of the stockholders is an old story. Nobody seems to have a solution, or to know how to put one into practice. Typically there is no one but a Board in any position to act on any idea.
200 years ago, if the people in power were acting up, the people had the capacity to act...and they did. Heads fucking rolled. And not just some heads, but a lot of heads. Present day, the state is more powerful than people 200 years ago could even begin to conceive of. We have trillion dollar companies that literally do whatever they want. The people have little recourse to do anything anymore (there's a panoply of reasons as to why that's the case, but that's besides the point). We inherently know violent resolution is not the way to go...but let's be honest: nonviolent resolutions aren't working anymore.
The rich have always had disproportionate power, but historically there was a lot more top-down violence. When the US started out, it was generally only land-owning white men who could vote, a pretty small proportion of "the people". It took decades past your "200 years ago" to get a vote just for the minority of people who were white men, and it was a very bumpy process. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion
It wasn't until about 100 years ago that a majority of "the people" could even vote, and it was only 50 years ago that saw voting and economic rights applied reasonably equally to a majority of "the people".
Or we could look at actual attempts at "the people" having a modicum of power: labor organizing. The US has a rich history of anti-labor violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
I am happy to complain about what's going on today. But as bad as, say, Amazon is about union organizing, we shouldn't pretend that it's (yet) as bad as it was for most of America's history. And part of what makes today better is a strong-enough set of governments to push back against corporate malfeasance. As the police in this story clearly did.
Until very recently, the idea that those with power could not use that power to extract whatever they could from those without power was laughable. And the shit that the common folks had to deal with hundreds of years ago makes the worse harassment of today seem completely benign. Hell, mass murder to make a few bits of extra gold was common. And no one really batted an eye. Sometimes society not only condoned it but celebrated it.
Not to say that harassment today should be ignored. But harkening back to the good old days that never were is not, IMO, the way forward.
Short story is that this was a private agency that openly offered services like the ones performed by the Ebay contractors, all the way to the point of directed murder, and did across decades, within living memory.
Nowadays, such services are offered mainly in war zones, by companies like what used to be called Blackwater, later Xi, run by Erik Prince, brother of Betsy de Vos. So there is still a market served, just a bit more circumspectly. But nobody who hires them goes to jail, and they don't either.