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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> How were they denying it?

"It's not us", "we have no idea", "our tests show we're clean" works for a shockingly long time in modern Western societies - the government has to prove that it is indeed 3M or whoever else who causes the pollution, and government agencies usually tend to take time until an investigation is complete. And even then, offenders can file a lawsuit... and until that lawsuit is finished and unappealable, it can take many years if not decades. And during that time, everyone claiming that a specific company is an offender is under severe risk of a defamation lawsuit.

We definitely need reforms both in staffing of regulatory agencies as well as in defamation lawsuits in cases of environment or labor offenses.

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The companies can also try to do creative things through bankruptcy courts to avoid any negative consequences, like Johnson & Johnson is doing right now:

> J&J, which also makes products such as Tylenol and Band-Aid, assigned legal liability for the complaints to the spinoff company, which immediately filed for bankruptcy — a maneuver dubbed the "Texas two-step."

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1083061992/johnson-johnson-wi...

FWIW this is the exact kind of thing that the plebs are told that bankruptcy courts will see right through - as an individual you have to be very worried about "piecing the corporate veil" of an LLC or corporation, to the extent that setting up an LLC doesn't actually make sense for many business activities. Yet a large company can pay enough lawyers and buy a corrupt Texas law to openly abuse the dynamic with impunity. It's bad enough that large entities can set up such fine-grained liability shields a priori while common individuals effectively cannot, but allowing them to be created a posteri is a slap in the face.

(This is an American perspective, but) I wonder how much a punitive strict liability regime could help with such stonewalling. Say after an environmental problem is discovered and publicized, the clock starts ticking on a hefty amount of penalty per day (irrespective of remediation costs and other tortious damages) for whomever is eventually found responsible for causing it. So the strategy of deny deny deny would end up accruing a very large penalty for willful pollution that could have been stopped earlier if the offender had chosen to act in good faith.

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