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Corporate negligence that results in significant damage to environment or public health must be criminalized with most severe punishment going to higher level decision makers, including some accountability for their superiors. If CEO knew and acted against public interests, then Board must be held accountable. If board knew and acted against public interests, then majority shareholders who voted for this board must be at least fined.

Not just that the CEO or board "knew" because that is a hard thing to prove. Better to have it be "reasonably should have known". If this is a thing that the company is doing and has been doing for a long time then the senior managers should know about it and are therefore liable and responsible. Such a rule would also incentivize managers from 'looking the other way' at wrong-doing because the saying 'I didn't know' won't matter.

This is very important. Each time there is a leak of a bunch of personal data companies whip out the "we have not found any evidence of the leak being ours" or something to that tune, which incentivizes them not look for evidence.

This is how it already works in e.g. foreign bribery for UK and US companies.

Executives just “letting” it happen is a crime, they have to explicitly ensure employees are educated and told not to do it.

Source: I worked in finance where we had tons of such useless courses.

I agree with the sentiment here, education is needed and finance / bribery is a good example. At a certain point though, you have to wonder what is wrong with society where "Don't kill a bunch of people through negligence" becomes something that needs to be educated.

The thought experiment of that there is a button and if you press it then you get $1M, but also a person you don't know somewhere far away dies. Turns out lots of people will press that button all day long. "Reduce worker safety conditions" PRESS!, "Dump cancer-causing waste in river" PRESS!, etc.

perhaps it relates to a concept of LD50 in chemical testing.. that is, run tests and show a distribution of content and application, that results in "greater than fifty percent" fatality or "less than fifty percent" overall mortality.. continue to evaluate through the entire market system..

No action or formulation is one hundred percent pure and beneficial, though many actions or formulations are certainly one hundred percent fatal, now or over time. This is true in products created by companies, and markets push towards maximum profitability, not maximum safety.

It often feels like the only requirement to be an executive at a large corporation is the ability to create plausible deniability via willful ignorance.

CEO on stage at a trade show: "Look at all these great things my company has done! Let me share with you all the details!"

Same CEO during a deposition: "I have no idea what my company even does! Do we make soup or something?"

Ironically enough, the government has been moving in the opposite direction - No fault compensation schemes like NCVIA, anti-lawsuits bills like PLCAA, limits on torts.

I do wonder why? Must be Big Business (in the NCVIA case, Big Pharma), right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Ah, so the regulators should share in the punishment when wrong doing is found, not just the CEO's.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

The buck can and should stop with the executive level anyway. They are paid extremely handsomely, in huge disproportion to the rest of the staff at their company, in part because fucking up at this level means you won’t see the C level again for a long time. It’s the ultimate accountability in the organization.

The accountability piece rarely happens now, unless you happen to defraud other investors, yet the compensation for the job continues to grow wildly out of proportion.

Hard disagree. High level executives are ultimately responsible for everything that happens, and must suffer the consequences - I really want to see C-levels regularly being sent to jail for the crimes comitted by the companies they led - but the low-level employees that actually performed the dangerous/illegal/immoral acts aren't magically innocent because someone higher up ordered them so ("just following orders" is not a valid defence).

Example at Boeing: the CEO and all related high level execs that fostered a culture of bean counting and cutting corners to save costs are guilty and liable for deaths. The actual people that designed a deadly system, those who approved it; similarly, those that forgot to put in bolts holding critical stuff together... they are guilty too. They knowingly endangered human lives.

I think we both agree, you just went into more detail on it.

The executive level shouldn’t be able to defer all of the accountability to employees lower down the ladder (e.g blaming it on an intern or whatever usual CYA excuse is rolled out). It’s one thing for an employee to go rogue, but totally another thing for leadership to either brush it under the rug or to create the environment for such behaviour in the first place.

> Maybe people who have more than, say, 20 million dollars should be personally liable. This seems like a very conservative middle ground, because, as you say, these people have sometimes knowingly made decisions they knew would result in deaths. Taking away only some of their money is the least of punishments, and they would still be left rich and very comfortable.

Monetary punishment is not enough, and in fact I would say any kind of punishment is not useful enough. We need to switch our thinking to focus on preventative measures.

In this case all of the money ever made from PFAS will never be enough to clean up the pollution or care for all of the human health side effects. You could make all of the employees and execs very uncomfortable, claw back every single penny ever made and it still wont be enough by a long shot. In some cases It's easy to do a huge amount of damage for (relatively) far less personal gain.

Some of the world's regulatory systems already at least attempt to work from a preventative perspective such as drug approval processes for humans. As more of society wises up to the fact that the environment is an extension of us, it shouldn't be that hard to convince people to take preventative strategies towards caring for it.

I agree, and prevention can't be a one time thing. In the 1930's if you were against using coal to produce electricity you would have been labeled crazy. Seems like what is needed is constant re-assessment to determine if new harms have been noted, along with ongoing research and testing to look for toxins, environmental effects, etc. As you state, preventive strategies. For example, ConsumerLab.com is testing herbal supplements, not just once, but regularly for lead, potentcy and more. This is something that should have already been ongoing for decades, not just started as a business in the last few years. Another example is national security as it relates to imported products. If we're not testing imported foods and other products (kids toys) reliably for lead and other poisons then a hostile country could poison your population before you know about it. Impaired people = impaired soldiers. Managing this in a cost effective way is difficult, but it seems possible.

Reassessment is needed for sure. To classify the other strategies you are describing I think I would call them "increased focus", which would be a positive move for sure. But the draw back of this approach is it's more of the same, it's reactive, it has to chase industry, and it's effectiveness is dependent on available resources not being outpaced by industry (unlikely).

An alternative regulatory system that doesn't need to chase industry would require industry to come to them by law when for example they want to release a new class of chemical into the environment. For all of it's flaws, I'm basically talking about something like the FDA, but hopefully less corrupt.

>Again, this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million

$20,000 I might accept, but that's ridiculous.

Edit: Really, I don't think any kind of limit is a good idea. We already have bankruptcy law and different sorts of fines or penalties being or not being dischargeable under forms of bankruptcy. Sticking to that framework seems best.

Are you a programmer? Would you accept having most of your money, retirement, possessions, and wealth taken away if it is discovered you made a mistake and there's a serious big in your code?

I'm not talking about just criminal negligence, I'm taking about honest mistakes too. If you want to be ultra rich, more than 20 million, then you have to be competent enough to not make big mistakes. For everyone else, they get to keep their retirement, etc. That's why I said 20 million.

And I'm thinking about more than punishment. It's about compensation. A CEO should be compensated for making good long term decisions, and if it turns out they have not make good decisions, they should retroactively lose compensation, but not be left in ruin over honest mistakes.

As for criminal cases, apply criminal penalties, which are beyond what I was suggesting.

My issue with your argument is in what world is a net worth of $20 million not "ultra rich." The median net worth of an individual near retirement age is $400,000. Under 35 it's a tenth of that.

I don't really have an opinion about statutory fines for executives in situations like this, but the idea that reducing someone's net worth to a measly 50x that of what most people have is somehow punitive is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

It's an arbitrary number, but I believe it should be fairly high in this idea I propose. (And this is all pie in the sky theory crafting anyway.)

My goal is not punishment as much as it is compensation. I want a world where if someone has a billion dollars, it's because they made good decisions and have proven to be good in the long term. Currently that is not the case, if someone has a billion dollars it might be because they made greedy short term decisions and then bailed and deployed their golden parachute and left others to clean up their mess.

I also think it's about liability. I like not being personally liable for mistakes I make a work, but I don't get paid millions of dollars either. I think once enough money is involved people should no longer be able to disconnect financial liability from their personal money.

I also proposed it as a conservative high number, because if this ever were to happen, you know talking heads would be screaming about it, but regular people are going to scoff when they learn the only threat is to take away wealth in excess of 20 million.

>I'm not talking about just criminal negligence

But that was the topic of the discussion. Actually, the context was gross negligence rather then mere negligence, let alone just ordinary mistakes.

Yes, but a once society crossed that boundary then it will be on you and your lawyer to prove that it wasn't criminal negligence, just the regular old kind

Congratulations: All your products are now made with chemicals designed and manufactured in China.

Not really. Sovereign countries can block 100% of China imports any time they want. That your lack understanding of trade policy is no excuse for such a reductionist claim. One can also imagine that people might personally refuse to import deadly products or products that harm their children's future environment. There are plenty of reasons this might not just be the race to the bottom you imagine and profess. Do the harder work next time instead of wasting everyone's attention on such worthless replies.

The government can also ban chemicals at any time, for import or domestic production. The issue is they didn’t, at the time, but 3M or similar was supposed to have “known better”.

Massive retrospective penalties for “should have known better” non-crimes will just result in an off-shoring to markets where these penalties do not apply.

…this liability would not be able to reduce an individual's wealth to less than 20 million…

Why? $20 million is a LOT of money. We shouldn’t allow greedy sociopaths to accumulate even that much wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

The Sackler family is a good example. Why should they walk away with even $20 million (let alone the $11 billion they kept after negotiating a $4.5 billion settlement). It’s crazy.

You think that if someone makes $20 million, then the money has been taken away from someone else? I see this sentiment on TikTok and Reddit alot, and it makes no sense.

We’re talking about people who, via a corporate shield, are polluting, or peddling drugs, or whatever else. The wealth they’re accumulating is at the expense of society at large.

If you want to make a billion dollars, fine, just do it without fucking over the rest of us.

Where did it come from if not someone else?

The economy is not a zero sum game

(Not defending the Sacklers, fuck that family)

If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor. We're getting off topic though quibbling over where to plant the goalposts.

you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor

This is a ridiculous claim. Do we have the same amount of total wealth as we did a hundred or a thousand years ago, and the only difference is how it's distributed?

It is still a zero-sum endeavor because all this new wealth didn't materialize out of thin air. It was created by people, and specifically by people doing productive work with their hands and their brains - which does not describe the suits on top, no matter how much they try to convince us otherwise. The reason why the latter end up with most of this newly produced wealth in their pockets is simply because they have access to a wide assortment of mechanisms to collect economic rent from the people who actually produce - this is the zero-sum part. The notion that, without the suits, the wealth wouldn't have been produced at all is nonsense.

This is a ridiculous response. Have we extracted more natural resources than we had a hundred or a thousand years ago? Are the biomes that our species utilize for foodstuffs more or less healthy than they were a century ago?

Sounds like you haven’t came to terms with it being zero sum either.

Zero-sum: adj, of, relating to, or being a situation (such as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side.

GDP can still increase, but doesn’t disprove capitalism isn’t zero-sum. If you haven’t been paying attention we are currently living in a period of the most wealth inequality in recent history.

> currently living in a period of the most wealth inequality in recent history.

Th feudal period would like a word with you.

Did the conversation slip into geologic timescales or something? Unless you're advancing the argument that modern day corporate structures bear some kind of significant relationship to feudalism the phrase was recent history. I'm fairly certain reasonable people wouldn't classify, for example, the War of the Roses as recent events.

> If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor

How ignorant do you have to be to still say that in 2024? We literally spent the last century conducting worldwide social experiments to show exactly the opposite. At this point objecting to capitalism itself (I’m not talking more or less regulation within a capitalist system) is like being a flat-earther.

Leftist westerners loved my home country—as an object of their virtuous pity—when it was socialist. You’d see commercials begging for $1/day to feed people. Thanks to capitalism the country has changed completely in the last two decades. Vietnam and China both abandoned communism for capitalism and their prosperity soared.

To be pedantic, the argument is that violence is necessary to maintain the fiction of property.

The violence is abstracted now that capitalism has matured so we only see it as numbers but death is most definitely zero-sum.

That’s a non-sequitur, because violence is required to maintain any kind of society.

It's not a non-sequitor, but I am glad we are in agreement.

"At this point objecting to capitalism itself (I’m not talking more or less regulation within a capitalist system) is like being a flat-earther."

You're welcome to that delusion but you're cheerleading a system that among it's many flaws is predicated on continuous growth that's based on a closed system with finite resources to draw from. Three guesses how that ends.

lol. people have been predicting the end to natural resources like oil, gas, minerals, and ores for over 100 years now, but they keep getting cheaper showing that they are more abundant now than ever. go read about the Simon and Ehrlich wager where Ehrlich just got humiliated.

Now who's ignorant? You're confusing the fruits of the combination of technological advancements in extraction and exploitation of the 3rd world with endless abundance. 150 years ago oil wells were routinely dug with nothing more complicated than a pick axe and some dynamite. You think companies invested in the complexity and cost of off shore drilling (as an example) in spite of simpler more cost effective methods being available? Pull your head out.

That does seem like much of a deterrent to be honest.