this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Lefty Memes
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Wiegraf was right in the beginning
This is why I like finest as percentage of turnover like what the GDPR does. Even the big shits pay attention of you are willing to make the fines actually significant.
Or we can just start nationalising businesses that break the law. No compensation for the leaches, just now the company serves the state. Lots of folk have no problem imprisoning and nationalising the labour of human criminals.
If we are going to suffer states we should at least make good use of them.
I like that idea. If you do something illegal but minor the board has to give up a certain number of shares to the government. More for larger crimes. Do something bad enough: government nationalizes the whole company.
With enough small crimes the government gets significant influence in shares. I bet the billionaires would hate that.
Something something government abuse being used to forcefully take over companies, businesses driven over seas, new avenue for corruption to flourish, etc.
I think businesses should be held accountable too, but creating a superhighway to nationalize control of any business that steps out of line is a recipe for disaster. How long until politicians use that power to find justification for stealing whole corporations?
Just need to pair with enough transparency so that no one politician can own a business because the state owns it.
Except that we don't hold politicians accountable for Jack shit. So in the end the billionaires would just pay the politicians to pretend the government owns it while getting all the decision making back through ~~bribes~~ lobbying
a year is a year to a rich man and a poor man alike. but a $50,000 fine is several years to a poor man and only a moment to a rich man. fines that don't scale with income are a sneaky way to make things only legal for the rich while pretending that there is equal protection under the law.
At the very least, fines of this nature should be an investigation into how much money was saved/generated by breaking the rule, and then using that plus some percentage for the fine amount. Too often the fine ends up being smaller than the gain which means it's always worth it to break the rule, especially knowing there's a chance you might not even get caught.
The cool thing is that even if the penalty isn't a fine, there's a good chance you can plea bargain your way back down to a fine
Most often it's the lowly employee's ass that gets put on the line for being told to break the law in the end. The higher ups get their golden parachute at worst in corporate America.
"I never told them to commit fraud. I just set goals, and every time those goals were met I increased them until they had no choice but to commit fraud or be fired for not reaching their goals. I'm not responsible for their illegal behavior, and I shouldn't have to bear the consequences. I am, however, still responsible for their profitable behavior and should absolutely bear the consequences for that."
The Wells Fargo model.
Regulators said Tolstedt and the bank’s former CEO, John Stumpf, bragged to investors about the scale of the community bank’s open accounts, despite the fact that millions of accounts were fabricated by employees trying to meet unrealistic sales goals set by management.
the wells fargo paddy wagon is coming down the street
Unfortunately this kind of repeated injustice isn't limited to just America.
Companies actually factor in the fines for breaking the law in their accounting. Ford calculated that it would be more profitable to release a vehicle which was known to be deadly since being found guilty for negligence (if it got that far) the fine the corporation would have to pay would be covered by the profit from selling the dangerous vehicles.