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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> America has a profound problem. It defines companies as legal persons with all the same rights.

Corporate personhood does not mean a company have all the same legal rights as a person. Did you notice that companies can’t vote in elections or plead the fifth amendment like a person can? Corporations only get some rights.

Corporate personhood is common across the globe. If you thought it was an American idea that’s completely incorrect. It is a funny example of the kind of American exceptionalism where people assume that America is an exception in having some property they dislike when in fact it’s common everywhere.

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

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The inability to personally jail megacorp CEOs who cause untold amounts of societal damage is not common "everywhere" ("many places", maybe). And that is the actual thing the person you're responding to cares about, and rightly so.

The countries who jail CEOs who due “societal damage” as a fuzzy cultural concept, as opposed to jailing CEOs according to the law, are not legal systems you want to imitate.

The US does jail CEOs who commit crimes. Social media just has a short memory for topics like Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, or even recent topics like Theranos and FTX.

You may also have your personal list of “societal damages” that you believe should result in people being jailed despite not having committed crimes, but I guarantee your list doesn’t match everyone else’s list. You wouldn’t be happy when the list of “societal damages” started extending to things like using a VPN or trying to be anonymous on the internet, but for many people who get to government positions it most definitely would!

Executives mostly get jailed when there is large media attention + the executive was foolish enough to leave evidence pointing straight at them. For every case where an executive is jailed, there are 100 other cases where they aren't. And that is just in the overt "breaking the law cases".

Even more incredible damage has been in us losing the laws that protect us in the first place. For nigh on 40 years thanks to neoliberal economists influencing policy we have been relaxing corporate and monetary regulation.

This has already provided great gifts to the world, such as enabling the fraud that led to the 2008 housing crisis (who was jailed again?).

When as a country you decide that punishing bad corporate behaviour is a non starter, you get the predictable consequences of increasing, not decreasing bad corporate behaviour.

This is turning into a gish gallop.

What specific laws would cause Mark Zuckerberg to go to jail?

This conversation feels like it really captures Mangione's point of view. It's like I'm listening to an internal dialogue.

Mangione had a personal grudge, caused by illness, pain and personal interactions with US healthcare system, which can grind down and drive to insanity anybody. The above just reads as a mashup or angry reddit posts which contain generic "evil rich people" platitudes, with zero depth or factual support. It's just low effort ranting.

Thousands of people were jailed in 2008 aftermath - look up operation Malicious Mortgage and Stolen Dreams. Most of them of course low level - because those were the people actually perpetrating the fraud. But some examples: Kareem Serageldin, Lee Farkas, Edward Woodard, etc. Ken Lewis, BoA CEO, faced multiple investigations and civil penalties, but none of those investigarions could find any criminal liability. He lost his post and BoA paid out billions in settlements.

> The countries who jail CEOs who due “societal damage” as a fuzzy cultural concept, as opposed to jailing CEOs according to the law, are not legal systems you want to imitate.

The US doesn't jail people according to the law and does not have a legal system you want to imitate.

> The US does jail CEOs who commit crimes. Social media just has a short memory for topics like Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, or even recent topics like Theranos and FTX.

Yes, the US jails CEOs that defraud investors, i.e. the powerful. This is a direct application of the fuzzy concepts that the US uses when deciding whether to jail someone.

You can jail CEO just fine if you prove they personally committed the crime beyond reasonable doubt. Proving that is hard, of course. Sometimes impossible because the CEO delegates a lot of what the corporation does. This is common for any big organization or group - be it corporation, political party, gang, army, state, etc. There's no special law or process singling out or protecting CEOs specifically, and no specific US rules for that.

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