Just finished watching Dark Waters, which is about the DuPont PFOAs in Teflon case. It's an insane story and hard to believe they can get away with intentionally and knowingly poisoning nearly every living thing for decades, and when caught are allowed to not just still exist as a company, but continue to poison us.
By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it.
You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
>> A "corporate death penalty" needs to be enacted, where a company can be seized and dismantled for egregious crimes.
> By the time the company get sentenced, the people involved have already left with a nice bonus, and found a nice new job, there is no incentive for avoiding it.
> You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set a sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them) and lax enforcement, then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame when the violations become a PR or legal problem. So some harsh action needs to be taken against the owners and the shareholders.
A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts.
Instead, since we have computers with big disks now, there needs to be a registry that tracks the historical beneficial owners of a company's stock. Then when something worthy of a "corporate death penalty" happens, those people are tracked down, fined, and any profits they enjoyed get clawed back. If they go bankrupt, tough: as owners, they should have proposed or voted for shareholder proposals to keep the management under control.
Of course there would be some finer details to work out (e.g. breaking the veil on shell corporations, policies to deal with straw ownership, letting other shareholders off the hook if some small group (e.g. founders) have complete voting control of the company), but I think the idea is workable if you don't consciously let clever-assholes exploit loopholes
Over half of the stock market is held in the retirement accounts of everyday people. This is just a tax in a roundabout way. I don't have a solution, they all suck. But I'm not convinced this is any better.
The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant.
For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
> Over half of the stock market is held in the retirement accounts of everyday people. This is just a tax in a roundabout way. I don't have a solution, they all suck. But I'm not convinced this is any better.
And how many people own no stock, and how many people own the other 50%?
That argument relies the same bullshit conceptual framework that's used to excuse so much capitalist dysfunction: since some of the ownership is spread very widely and very thinly. all ownership gets to dodge responsibility. It's still murder if somehow you arrange it so a million people pulled the trigger.
Edit: IMHO, the 401k was a genius stroke of manipulation and propaganda. It's convinced so many people to neglect or even argue against their own core interests in the off chance their account could be worth a few bucks more.
> Lots of Countries/Government have gotten away with it, though.
Going there is a derail. And it doesn't even work because my analogy relied on the relationship between private groups/individuals and the legal system, which is quite different than the relationship between a country/government and the legal system.
The poster has a point though in that the government is the Ur-legal-fiction. What ends up being a problem with any subsequently spawned legal fictions will necessarily be an issue with Government.
That being said, you're absolutely correct, and I don't think that it is on you to solve the Government level issue, and there is nothing about the Government level issue stopping us from slapping some additional constraints on legal fictions it spawns. The devil, however, is in the implementation details; many of which tend to cross increasingly hairy and controversial lines.
Things like limits on freedom from compelled speech for corporations with regard to privately funded research. Revocation of trade secrets (therein tend to lay the fertile ground for corruption). Mandatory recordkeeping practices that start violating the human dignity of everyone to be free from constant scrutiny, as it is only with complete comms records that one could actually piece together the facts of what happened; which still runs into the issue of criminals gonna crime; so what you effectively do is partition your population into two groups. Those that aspire to comply, and those deadset on success even at the risk of non-compliance.
These are not low-stakes social changes we're talking about here. This fundamentally refactors just about everything about our ways of life, from lowest employee to the hoghest level exec, to every small business owner.
It’s not necessarily a capitalist thing.
People will try to avoid any responsibility while getting the most of any system if you let them.
A retirement system like we have in France where older peoples shift the pension responsibility to younger generations regardless of their efforts as parents/cohort is not better at all.
Same as a bank? If you lie to investors and get yourself nuked, the owners or what passes for owners get wiped out, which is normal. The people who really qualify as victims are those who were harmed and didn't benefit from the fraud, which is everyone else.
Sure, some people would lose money but didn't intend to cause harm. Those are victims of the fraud. Their shares of the criminal company still get wiped out and they get in line to get bankruptcy proceedings.
Wouldn't the investment funds be motivated to avoid investing in these companies, the same way they are motivated to avoid investing in companies likely to crash? So reducing funding (via share price) of a company at risk of the death penalty would select for safer/better companies.
Pushing the externalities back into the company is exactly the thing we want - and the fewer companies that conduct themselves like this, the better off we all are.
> Wouldn't the investment funds be motivated to avoid investing in these companies, the same way they are motivated to avoid investing in companies likely to crash?
But they aren't. A small probability of huge return makes likely crash a non-problem.
However this deterrent effect is unfortunately conditional on the full risk of the outcome being apparent in advance to investors and indeed investees. I fear that often it is not, as in this 3M case. This boils down to our drive for progress leading to employing new technology beyond our ability to evaluate its risk, as e.g. currently with "AI". Deterrence of that cannot be acheived at the corporate level. It is a societal problem.
Conveniently, the great majority of those everyday people also own (via diversified retirement funds) vaguely-comparable amounts of the stocks of SleazeCo's competitors. So - when the feds ship SleazeCo off to the forced-liquidation slaughterhouse, the stocks of those competitors will rise, reducing the harm to the little folks.
Plus - reduced mass poisoning will improve the long-term prospects for the whole economy, also helping the investments of all those everyday retirees.
That's true but misleading. If you ranked every American by the value of the stocks they owned, the bottom 93% - the everyday people - would be splitting a paltry 10% of the total value. The bottom 50% hold only 1% of the market.
Even if 90% of the punishment ends up distributed across the richest 7% of Americans, I’m not sure what that would do to discourage corporate misconduct. A doctor with $10 million of stock in her accounts still has no individual say in what those companies do.
> Even if 90% of the punishment ends up distributed across the richest 7% of Americans, I’m not sure what that would do to discourage corporate misconduct. A doctor with $10 million of stock in her accounts still has no individual say in what those companies do.
That doctor has many things they can do:
1. Make and vote on shareholder proposals.
2. Refuse to own stock in any company that does not take sufficient action to "discourage corporate misconduct."
3. Etc.
And if a policy like mine were ever implemented, it's not like rugged individuals would only be able to take rugged individual action. The legal risk would reduce returns, and sophisticated mutual fund managers would have incentive to choose stocks that don't have those risks or vote their fund shares to make corporate policy changes to eliminate them.
Would you, personally, accept punishment if (when) your government is found to have done something wrong? After all, you can vote.
I get the feeling behind the desire, but this is why I don't think it's good.
You wrote up-thread:
> That's not sufficient though. The people who did the bad acts need to be punished, but the owners who profited from the bad acts need to be punished too. If you don't do that, you just create situations like Amazon: set an sounds-good internal policy but have internal incentives for employees to violate it (e.g. exploit 3rd party seller data to unfairly compete with them), then fire the employees as scapegoats when caught to deflect blame. So some harsh action needs to be taken the owners the shareholders.
And sure; but is it possible to determine when this incentive was created? If it is, can't it be stopped the moment it happens? If not, then the shareholders can't reasonably be blamed.
Unless the shareholders are the incentive, in which case sure.
> Would you, personally, accept punishment if (when) your government is found to have done something wrong? After all, you can vote.
That's fundamentally different. Everyone has to be citizen of some country or other, and it's difficult to change citizenships, but no one is forced to own stock in any particular company.
> And sure; but is it possible to determine when this incentive was created? If it is, can't it be stopped the moment it happens? If not, then the shareholders can't reasonably be blamed.
> Unless the shareholders are the incentive, in which case sure.
That example was meant as an illustration of using scapegoats to deflect consequences, and why the consequences have to bubble up beyond an individual doing a bad act on behalf of the corporation. I'm not sure what you mean by "the shareholders are the incentive."
My mental model for how this would work legally with shareholders would be modeled more on torts like negligence than on criminal law. So it wouldn't be necessary to determine exactly why the bad act was done to go after the shareholders, just that there was harm done on such-and-such date.
People are de-facto forced to hold stock in states that have no defined retirement benefit that can be lived off. The 401k in the USA is a good example.
I don’t think punishing stock holders makes any more sense than punishing all of Germany after WW1 did. You need to cut the head off the snake, not nibble at the tail. A hypothetical corporate death penalty should start at the top, then cascade down some amount of “tiers” down the executive chain. Executives tend to be the ones with the biggest stock rewards and the ones lining up unethical incentives in the first place.
The US has a defined benefit pension called Social Security. It is relatively generous compared to retirement pensions in other countries. A defined contribution plan like 401k is in addition to this pension; most developed countries also have something similar. In this regard there is nothing unique about the US.
> I don’t think punishing stock holders makes any more sense than punishing all of Germany after WW1 did.
Come on, stockholders are nothing like the subjects of a hereditary monarch.
> You need to cut the head off the snake, not nibble at the tail. A hypothetical corporate death penalty should start at the top, then cascade down some amount of “tiers” down the executive chain.
You need to do both: punish the owners and their agents.
What you're proposing is akin to punishing the generals and general staff, but letting the Kaiser get off scot free (including keeping his position).
Matt Levine's common refrain [1] of "everything is securities fraud" is useful here. If as a stockholder you suffer damages to your investment because a company did illegal things and hid it, you can sue for those damages if you argue that you invested in this company because you were assured they were not doing illegal things.
These lawsuits have been decently successful as far as I can tell from what stories make it to the media.
So the government reaches through the company to take money from shareholders, and then the shareholders sue to take it back from the company? Seems like you just get to the current system with extra steps.
Components that would simplify this are (a) limiting and simplifying damage calculation & (b) requiring companies to admit fault as part of settlements.
Currently, 'the company admits no fault' (but pays a fine), helps head off shareholder lawsuits.
If prosecuting entities and companies were instead required to include admitting fault, then shareholder suits would be much simpler.
The company has already admitted liability -> process directly to negotiation over amounts.
>
Even if 90% of the punishment ends up distributed across the richest 7% of Americans, I’m not sure what that would do to discourage corporate misconduct.
As a passive investor, you generally hope that active investors, who have very large stakes in a company's stock, and who care about their own returns, will steer company boards responsibly.
It seems to mostly work, if it didn't, there'd be waaaaaay more fraud in the SP&500. It's noteworthy that the overwhelming part of bad corporate behavior is stuff that doesn't get seriously punished.
People letting some other entity control their dollars with an expectation to grow by itself is flawed. These people are handing their money over so the corporations use it to their advantage by introducing these toxic products to begin with.
If “every day people” lose their money because they handed it over to someone else—that’s on no one but themselves.
People need to be investing in local businesses instead and take FULL responsibility for an investment that they actually understand.
If someone with the resources of a retail investor can do enough due diligence on every company of an ideally very diversified portfolio to determine which companies are committing crimes, someone with the resources of the US government can do so for every company and prosecute them. If the government can't figure out that a crime is being committed, how could we expect the average citizen to do so? There's just no point in making it their responsibility except as an excuse to say it was their fault.
I should have clarified but I mean with respect to financial loss, not culpability.
Every dollar is a unit of work, and people are saying, “meh, you guys do the work and pay me something.” They abdicate responsibility out of laziness. Gone is the good old fashioned entrepreneurial spirit in favor of indentured servitude.
That would be ideal. But I'll bet people won't do this though. I wouldn't. I don't have time to do the due diligence. So the downside is that you have a lot more "dead" capital that isn't doing anything productive and is slowly losing value due to inflation. Dead capital means it's harder to fundraise, to borrow money for your mortgage, etc etc.
Now I'm not saying that's necessarily /worse/...but we should be clear about what the real downside is.
The best local investment one can make is in the land. I'm in a rural area in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by "baby" trees and the skeletons of the old forest that used to be here. The list of foods that indigenous peoples used to eat around here is long, and I would be happy to thrive on that alone. Now, though? There are a few huckleberry spots within walking distance, some mushrooms now and then, elk of course (I get why people pen cattle, but elk and other game require much less maintenance, along with some effort and consideration when hunting), some greens (I've been eating nettles for the past month, on top of good grown elsewhere thanks to petrochemical fertilizers), some invasive greens (dandelion and oxeye daisy), and probably some things I'm not yet aware of. I'm not fishing the river, as there's not much fish there anymore.
The best investments we can make for life is towards community and the land we're on. I don't need an easy life, I need a meaningful one.
I hate to say this, but the OP is right. Nothing will change until we stop supporting the problem. I think the best course of action is to stop supporting corporate culture. People really do need to stop working for all corporations. We need to stop blaming them, we are supporting them with our energy, time and money.
Find a job at a local honest establishment, or create your own service.
Make it a priority to stop supplying these establishments with power.
Use your skills in a place where you have direct control over the outcome of your work.
Anything less is just you trying to convince yourself that you can carry on blaming others for the problem you/we created/are creating.
When corporations are unable to find people to work for them, something will shift.
I’m sorry you get downvoted because that’s basically the truth.
Previously retirement was done by investing in your children and environment. It makes a lot of sense, is a lot more secure and positive than any of the bullshit we came up with.
Only reason current system works is because mistakes get diluted and peoples don’t have much choices because of monetary control.
> A "corporate death penalty" doesn't really work, because shareholders can always sell. You don't want the guy responsible to profit, while some innocent schmuck gets punished because he happened to be holding the bag when the music stopped. You need action against the shareholders who were owners at the time of the bad acts.
You could always tailor this so the penalization only applies to private equity and throw in a lookback. That would encourage companies to go public (which, IMO, is a good thing) and would encourage private equity to be responsible.
You could still kill a public company that violates the public trust, you just don't have to penalize shareholders in that case because they are likely to not have the same level of information/control as a private equity holder/owner would.
Anything would be better than what we have now, where a (perhaps mythical) "fiduciary duty to shareholders" is used as justification for all crimes, legal or otherwise.
We want people to be scared to buy a company that's well known to be a ball of shit. If some people get away with it anyway, well some people get away with murder. That doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to punish it.
I'm usually more in favor of broad responses and then try to patch the loopholes afterwards than try to solve all loopholes beforehand. The shareholders already have the "can't lose more than the investment" guarantee, which should still be pretty damn good for non-evil companies.
The simplest solutions are best: target the corporate officers. C-suite execs are richly compensated on the basis of their social connections. The Boeing CEO, for example, will be walking away from the dumpster fire with almost $100M.
Introducing some additional risk would add minimal costs relatively speaking.
> You need proper fines and jail time for the people involved, even decades later.
I think it should be more about profits. In case of something like that, the corporation should be taxed the amount of entire profits they got from this. Also individuals in decisive positions should be investigated and indebted for the amounts they earned while the company was poisoning people plus interest since it happened.
Personally I'm for a "captialistic death penalty", where if you've done something sufficiently bad, you get sentenced to work the night shift at McDonalds for the rest of your life.
It's about destroying monopoly power. If you allow an entity to reach this size there's no incentive for it to follow the rules. Getting the executives would be a nice bonus, but I'm not going to stand ceremoniously when there's more important structural changes to be made.
This is fines with extra steps. That’s the point. Talk of a “corporate death penalty” is a red herring.
The article mentions the $62bn “researchers estimated…that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to,” which “exceeds the current market value of 3M.” A $62bn fine would cleanly end 3M.
You know what 3M would love instead of a $62bn fine? A “corporate death penalty.” Unprecedented and thus practically infinitely appealed in the legal system, riddled with ambiguity, and a political football they can play with for years.
One way of enacting a corporate death penalty is to declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over.
What is done with it afterwards is debatable, but at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out.
> declare that when a fine is larger than the company's value, the fining body simply nationalizes it and takes it over
This, again, is fines with extra steps. Another novel procedure that gives targets years in court to appeal technicalities around the APA, eminent domain and expropriation.
> at least the shareholders who permitted it are wiped out
As they would with large fines.
Corporate death penalties are nonsense invented to sidestep discussions of monetary penalties. Fines are liabilities. There is zero ambiguity around what happens to a company when it owes more than it’s worth. There is infinite ambiguity around applying a “death penalty” to fictitious entities; that is the point of this caper.
That penalty exists, and e.g. Purdue Pharma was subject to it. But of course, Purdue also shows why it's complicated:
* When you dismantle a company, you have to figure out what to do with its assets. You could just burn them all down I guess, but if the company did something wrong that we want compensation for, it usually makes more sense to try and maximize the value you can get.
* A large manufacturing company is going to have factories, distributor contracts, etc. with no liquid secondary market. The value-maximizing play is most likely going to be selling the package to an existing company or setting up a new one, rather than holding a piecemeal fire sale.
* But if you have a new company/division with all of the old company's assets, doesn't that mean you've just renamed the old company? Kinda, yeah. You could disrupt the sameness by firing all the employees and hiring new ones - but that's going to hurt the value of the assets too, and it's not clear what the point would be of punishing the employees for executive misconduct.
Fire sale everything. And without exemptions for the C-suite/owners.
In the Purdue case, the family should have lost everything, not retained billions. And they damn sure shouldn't get protection from civil liability, as a few courts of tried to do.
It'll be interesting to see what SCOTUS ends up deciding (I think the bankruptcy landed there, with arguments in December 2023).
We need this, plus criminal liability for the C-suite, and possibly for the BoD.
The C-suite gets paid millions to set the direction of the company. They shouldn't be able to "get out of jail free" by throwing a mid-level engineer under the bus. At least not without some strong evidence the scapegoat was acting in bad faith own their own. Similar for the BoD.
This is needed when ever a company too big to fail needs to be bailed out. It would remove the bad CEO and top management by chopping up a company and selling it off. By keeping them around, bad CEOs, governments are rewarding bad behavior. Until politicians can no longer be bought, donations and super packs, this will continue to happen since rewarding bad behavior is a two-way street.
A company is nothing more than a group of people, working towards a single goal, no? If that's a case, breaking up the group itself also seems futile.
We can probably assume that some people who belong to the group are both unessential and innocent of the crimes of the group. The janitor at one of Dupont's buildings isn't to blame for this, at least under most theories of culpability. But there is a core subset of people who are, and whether they are punished individually or not, at the very minimum, they shouldn't be allowed to participate in business (any business) again. Otherwise, they run off and get C-level jobs (or really, vp/director-level jobs and up), and perform more of the same stunts.
Not that it matters, the companies that commit these sorts of crimes are always large enough that their political sway would protect them even if there were laws on the books that could theoretically dismantle them. And certainly, all such companies collectively have more than enough mojo to prevent the passage of such a law.
These days no one seems to talk with janitors … there’s an infinitesimally small chance any of them had any information to withhold in the first place.
If the company is that large, the only real group left that "should be punishable" is the shareholders.
The janitor can lose his job if the company goes under, and is unlikely to be prosecuted for anything major; but the shareholders can lose their investment, even if they're not prosecuted.
I’m fairly sure that the president can dissolve a company at will.
Seems .. iffy but I remember reading it and being both shocked and excited that it was possible. I want to say that it was intended for things where the SEC and FTC would be involved today.
Maybe I dreamt it. Or maybe it was revoked via an early constitutional amendment that I’m not familiar with.
You sort of need to do both. The issue at hand with a corporate death penalty is shareholders. If a company being "killed" zeroes out the value for shareholders, the stock value will have to price in the likelihood of complete loss due to malfeasance, which will start making companies on the level a safer buy.
This means companies doing more to prevent illegal behavior become worth more and companies have a financial reason to prevent crime greatly exceeding mere fines.
Exactly. Everyone likes to say "kill the board and CEO" but they're just employees of the shareholders. At some time collective punishment to match collective gains needs to be considered; even if they're not personally liable they can still lose their investment.
Exactly. The common criticism of this is that... yeah, that means the punishment will impact people who had no say in the decision, seniors' retirement funds, etc. But that is just risk, which is what the entire stock market is designed to correct for. And a good investment portfolio is always supposed to hedge risks by spreading them across multiple investments.
It'll drive prices down for riskier stocks, more involved larger shareholders will have reason to get more involved and ask more questions about compliance and corporate responsibility, etc.
Being able to punish shareholders for bad corporate behavior for corporate death is, to be honest just good capitalism.
If the level has been reached to discuss corporate death penalty, then the corporation employees should loose any protections the corporation normally provides.
Why? So all the workers who had nothing to do with this decision can be unemployed the next day? All you'll achieve is a cascade of negative effects and a hit to GDP
It's much better to go after the individuals responsible for it
The C-levels need to be criminally liable, that will fix it. It will fix many things. In this case the people who were in charge should get the chair if the state has it or 100000x life in max with the other rapists and serial killers. It won’t happen again. Boeing comes to mind too.
At least then the enormous money matches a little bit the effort.
US (and others, but US is famous for it) peeps are for tougher on crime, but not for actual corporate mass murderers. If I bomb a plane with 200 people, I will never see the light of day; the Boeing CEO gets a bonus package.
Leadership in the know should be banned for life, but the corporation would likely have to continue (split or not), otherwise you're giving the entire machine a reason to oppose accountability and correction.
The only way you fix this is hold executives criminally liable. Fines don't work and never have. If people started going to jail over it then they would change their behavior. Everything in life is about incentive structures.
By a corporate death penalty you're prosecuting the shareholders who hired the CEO who did the crimes. As it is, the shareholders can benefit from the crimes, the CEO retire, and the government is left holding the bag.
What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all?
I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.
All the major offenders, all the companies who have wreaked havoc on us: Fossil fuel shitheads who sponsored climate doubt, arms manufacturers who lobbied us into illegal wars, social media companies responsible for polluting the minds of our most vulnerable, advertisers who greenwash and whitewash crimes.
It's only a fantasy, for now - we can't even prevent our tax dollars from arming mass murderers. We need to do something though. I'm sick of paying for the privilege of being gaslit, and tired of subsidizing the strip-mining of the planet.
Switch the major offenders and monopolies by force to a co-op model, and let's see if we can't turn the fate of the planet around.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Le Guin
> What if we could keep them, but make them work for the good of us all?
What if we could tame these gigantic, bloodthirsty monsters that casually wander into big cities and just start stomping skyscrapers down for shits and giggles? Think of how wonderful it would be to have one of those creatures under my control!!!
> I'd like to see them 'multi-nationalized' - not for one nation, but for the world.
Nothing would make such a kaiju safer than putting it beyond the reach of even sovereign nations. And when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of, that has Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China put in charge, think of all the wonderfully progressive things that will happen then!
I mean, the kaiju are kind of a great example - weren't they fought by everyone coming together to build giant monsters of their own but with humans making the decisions?
> when it's under the direction of some weird-assed UN committee no one's heard of
Er, not what I had in mind, but there's probably some useful energy behind that pessimism.
There are many examples of successful coops to choose from [0]. Seems a bit early to try and pin down all the details. I'm not an expert.
What I know for certain is that the current system can't continue.
Try playing the tape that's currently in the player to the end. It's not very pretty: Ask any climate scientist. Ask any historian, any ecologist.
Even (or especially) the billionaires know the current trajectory is not great; they're building apocalypse bunkers at a record pace.
Seems a lot of people expect someone to come along and offer a perfect solution out of the box, and somehow not get taken out by the people who like things just as they are. I don't think that's reasonable. There needs to be a critical mass of people pushing for radical change, or we're pretty much fucked.
That’s not true: for example the US government (CIA) in the past century has also been funded through shady drug deals. This isn’t fringe conspiracy stuff either, they freely admit to past activities and have shown no willingness to change.
No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person.
More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.
Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
Will we dismantle silicon valley in the decades ahead after we start realizing the damage from collecting personal information, biometrics, behavioral data and more from everyone in the world?
Worse things have happened. Union Carbide still exists. And they literally killed 16000 people in India and injured hundreds of thousands more out of negligence.
We need all new laws and enforcement against these companies, that can retroactively “pierce the veil” and go after the individuals and their assets. It’s not enough that just the company (which is just a legally established entity) goes away. Consequences are what deter future crimes.
CO2, NOx, plastics, all kinds of problematic chemicals - we all release more of those than we would strictly need to. And even the strict needs could be argued about, in some cases.
I am attempting (recently) to cut some chemicals and processed things from my house. Examples: using glass as much as I can, instead of plastic. Trying to use more local fresh ingredients in my cooking. Buying more from local stores rather than rely on the global supply chain. Trying and mostly failing to maintain a lawn (in suburbs) without some level of chemicals.
I know these are not all perfect examples.
Where things get tough is with time. It takes lots of time to re-engineer things down to simpler stricter needs. So, I still use grocery delivery, which generates a mountain of plastic, because I don't always have a span of time to get food I need.
