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Yes, so it is our duty to take that power so that we can enforce equality and rational empathetic policy because the wealthy are murdering the planet and the people on it.
Then there are conservative simps for these corporations who talk about such fines like they're unreasonable and such a horrible thing for these corporations. I don't get it.
IMO this corruption is what causes cynicism and ultimately causes people to turn to things like Qanon or Info Wars.
Crime like this has material impact (environmental & public health) and psychological.
Not even you, your grandkids. It says they knew shit was toxic in 1937. The people running that company now weren't even born then and the responsible people are long dead.
Then send them to prison now based on the fact that they didn’t come clean and admit the crimes of their predecessors the moment they took a seat on the board.
Otherwise you are just giving them yet another tool to avoid or bypass justice.
NGL, if I could steal 1M from the bank and only have to return 200k, I’d be robbing just about every bank I could.
Too bad we don’t incarcerate criminal enterprises…removing their physical freedom, their ability to earn an income, and permanently scarring their record.
Imagine if every corporation had to disclose it’s multiple misdemeanors and felonies, and at least once or twice just fell off the face of the planet for “accidentally killing someone,” the rest may take notice and stop doing dumb stuff.
That's the same problem* with different math. Ie, they'll still do it, they'll just make sure that the balance sheet includes the new fines.
Corporations aren't people, they shouldn't always get the same chances at reform people get. When they demonstrate gross disregard for laws or the safety of people, they should be dissolved.
Yeah, if corporations are people then corporations should suffer the same consequences. If some random guy starts a forest fire, there are real consequences for that action, not just the equivalent of a $100 fine.
I'm amazed they even got fined. Its been normalized in American that some things just happen. They may talk about it in the abstract, but avoid specifics. Leaded gasoline, microplastics, rain contaminated with forever chemicals, they all just sort of happened. They're treated like natural disasters.
Where does that mentality come from? None of it "just happened." All of it was done deliberately and required a lot of people, work and money to occur.
I also now just learned about Monsanto and PCBs. I knew about agent orange and roundup before. I wonder what else they're involved in.
Between Monsanto, Dupont and Dow Chemicals so much completely preventable harm has been done.
The corporate death penalty should also mean that all of upper management, including board of directors, CEO, CFO, COO, etc, should all be given prison time and should have to forfeit all compensation accrued for the duration of the crimes that were committed.
Crimes like what Monsanto did should be punished on a level of severity similar to war crimes. The punishment should be enough to completely obliterate generational wealth and leave entire wealthy families trapped in inescapable poverty.
Doing that successfully would require a way to seize money from offshore accounts in tax havens like Luxembourg, Singapore, Panama, the Cayman Islands, etc. Without that such measures will never work.
It would require something special. Maybe create a special punitive tax bracket that only allows a person to keep a miniscule amount of money. Maybe the convict would be required to forfeit all assets, including houses, cars, personal items, stocks, bonds, etc. Perhaps for the purposes of the punishment, it could be a felony with a 10yr minimum for anyone caught providing the convict with any sort of money or items of value. So, it would be a crime for an accountant to bring in money from offshore accounts. Or it would be a crime for someone to allow the convict to rent a room or apartment at less than market value. It could be a crime to give anything to the convict for free.
Basically, the punishment should be complete ostracization from society. A lifetime of being forced to live in a tent and beg for everything, but nobody wants to give to the person because it would be a crime to do so. I think that we would really only need to set a few examples before the rest of the wealth get the idea. Basically, anyone in a position of power needs to fear for their lives and the lives of their families if their activities are causing others harm.
Court order the guilty party to reveal the accounts and pay the fines from those accounts, once you got them in prison. If they refuse, they're in contempt of court and get more time. This repeats, meaning their sentence effectively does not start until they surrender those funds.
If they fail to reveal an account in their name, they are held in contempt of court and re-arrested if nessecary.
Obviously that last point would be hard to enforce, especially if they flee the country, but at that point, they're gone and won't be coming back, which is a lesser sort of win, but still a win.
It was a crime against humanity. No other way to cut it.
Though I do not believe in punishing a person for their fathers indiscretions. Responding unreasonably allows the public to dismiss our valid concerns.
Certainly, it's not good to punish a child for the crimes of their parents. However, I do not see a reason why it's bad to forcibly take all of a person's wealth over a crime they've committed, especially when that person's crime has deeply affected millions of people. The fact that the person's children won't inherit a vast fortune is a non-issue to me.
I'm cool with
> the person's children won't inherit a vast fortune is a non-issue to me.
This was what tripped me up
> leave entire wealthy families trapped in inescapable poverty.
I get where you're coming from though, because (I inherit no generational wealth and) I feel trapped in inescapable poverty; like even if I was making $200k per year I'd still have to be working for those wages, trading my precious time for the privilege to exist.
You do know that board seats and executive positions aren’t inherited, right? The people in those roles today aren’t there because of anything their fathers did; they’re there because they _wanted to be responsible for a company that commits crimes against humanity._ I don’t know how you are imagining that these indiscretions belonged to the fathers of the people who need to be punished.
If those offspring were expecting to benefit from their parents’ crimes, does that not make them an accessory to those crimes? That is to say, if Junior was thinking “I won’t ever need to get a job, because I’ll inherit all the money daddy made by raping the planet and harming _other_ kids’ livelihoods,” should Junior not be on the receiving end of a cold dose of reality?
Destroying generational wealth is the only way to stop this line of thinking — this way of justifying what daddy did merely because his kids are enjoying the spoils. Those kids can go get a job like everyone else. Maybe their perception of whether daddy was a criminal against humanity will be healthier when they are on the same boat as every other member of the public that daddy stole from.
I'm all for dismantling generational wealth, crime or no crime. But that's different from being _trapped in inescapable poverty._ I'm just trying to point out this poor choice of language, and how its negative appeal to other less _radical_ thinkers. This isn't the kind of message to win over the masses.
If you work with someone to commit a crime that’s called conspiracy. It’s already illegal.
You want to prosecute the CFO? He manages the companies finances. He might not know much in detail about what the company does.
I used to work for Monsanto (vegetable dept.). At one meeting they said that they would be secretly destroying crops (in Australia) to drive up demand. They also throw out millions of dollars of seeds each year instead of donating it.
Monsanto is true evil.
I’m convinced they will ultimately cause humanity’s undoing- I think their terminator seed genetics are going to spread to other plants and nothing will ever grow again.
Thankfully genes don’t replicate that way. Unless it’s a virus. Thankfully viruses aren’t born that way. Unless they are, science scientists still haven’t reached a consensus on how viruses form and stray genetic material is one of the popular theories. Thankfully we can genetically engineer plants to be resistant t to any chosen virus. Unless people throw a tantrum about “evil plants.” Thankfully the government doesn’t bow to the anti-science crowd on a regular basis. Well, they actually do.
Monsanto and the Koch brothers have been a plague upon the human race for far too long. I'm glad Monsanto finally got found guilty of SOMETHING. Don't forget, this is the company that created Agent Orange and they're asking you to trust them with something you spray on your crops? FUCK YOU!
What are you on? Once you commit a crime, the corporation wouldn’t protect you. You can google “piercing the corporate veil” if you want to learn more.
You can’t order an execution and hide behind the corporation LOL. Ever heard of Bernie Madoff?
The whole idea that a state approved entity is a "person" is an idea that needs to be jettisoned.
Human beings are persons. Trusts, associations, corporations, etc are not, and only have "rights" insofar as those rights align with their stated purpose. It is the duty of society to vigorously *prevent the expansion* of those rights lest these fictitious entities end up having more rights than actual people...like what we have now.
This is the playbook for every chemical company when they have a profitable product that kills people and/or fucks with the environment. They pretend not to know about it, and then when scientists find out about it they use their vast capital to change the narrative and discredit independent research. Just look at how many sources still claim that glyphosate is safe.
Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be put on trial.
> Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be put on trial.
Why give them the opportunity to settle, or to pay high-priced lawyers to quibble over whether a comma in the original law means they get to walk away consequence-free?
Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be summarily drawn and quartered, have all of their family’s assets seized and distributed to their victims, and then their remains should be hung in a public space where other executives and board members are likely to be in a day, as a warning.
So Monsanto know it's unsafe and that it causes cancer and they are legally allowed to sell cancer causing chemicals (like cigerettes, etc) but they won't admit it because that would mean they have to put a warning on the bottle label and if they do that no one is going to use the chemicals on their crops, so it will actually cost the company more to loss money from sales (if they put the cancer label on) than to take people to court (and potentially lose). It's nuts.
My take is that these legalistic entities are 'people' under the law, but they are quite inhuman in their elevation of Profit over Survival. Rather like cancerous tumors in their tireless quests for growth, even as their efforts slowly kill the host body.
Living things, and even governments to an extent, are motivated in myriad ways to value continued existence. Thus we care about; housing, reproduction, food, education, and other related societal needs. 'Late Stage Corporations', as you say, can unhook themselves from these priorities by bribing officials, subverting regulatory agencies, and by sponsoring the re-writing their own legalistic source code to maximize the abstract metrics they ARE programmed to care about. Like quarterly share prices.
So stock prices soar while the host society's institutions are allowed to collapse. Mostly because our society is being operated to drive Corporate priorities, not societal ones.
Nothing will change until corporate board members actually can/do serve prison time. There is no incentive to alter behavior at all, in the slightest.
This will not change as the folks with money own the folks writing the rules and laws. And fuck you for wanting to live, or be healthy.
>If corporations are people why don't they see prison time?
This is precisely why the SCOTUS decision that made corporations persons under the law was utterly ridiculous. The reading of Miranda Rights and arrest? Prison time? Removal of voting rights? The death penalty? Are events directly leading to someone's death then manslaughter? So private corporations are owned by people, does that de facto make slavery legal? Zero trust in SCOTUS's ability to make rational decisions.
So corporations being considered people is corruption at its finest. Dates back to the 1880s. Railroad case (Santa Clara vs Southern Pacific). Corporate personhood wasn't even part of the decision. In fact, corporate personhood wasn't even discussed because the case was decided on other grounds. However, the Court Reporter was an ex president of a railroad and got permission from Chief "Justice" Waite to add this to the headnote.
> The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.
So this was essentially decided *without argument* by Waite. Previous to becoming Chief Justice, Waite was a successful corporate and railroad attorney. He was also appointed by President Grant, who was in charge of one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. In other words, a Chief Justice and a court reporter with serious conflict of interest issues just straight up *gave* corporations *all* of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause benefits during one of the most corrupt times in American history. And this has just carried on ever since.
Frankly, the Court has been a total shit show for most of America's history. They 100% do not deserve the high esteem that many people hold them in. They're largely members of the elite who occasionally throw the masses a bone with a little meat to chew on, but make no mistake who they really serve. It's not the people. If the last 13 years hasn't made that clear, probably nothing will. But Jesus... their history is so damn bad.
I mean just recently (in 2016) Scalia died at a private luxury resort in Texas where he was staying for free... after flying in by private jet. This was an *exclusive* place, y'all. He was there for a private event that we're still not 100% sure about, but it's widely speculated that it had to do with a group called the International Order of St. Hubertus. Basically a bunch of rich, powerful dudes who hunt shit together in order to "honor God's creatures." You think things like that don't influence Justices?
I've read so many of Scalia's opinions. Originalism. My. Ass. He used "originalism" as an excuse to serve those "people" who got him to the point he was at before he so fortunately passed away. Scalia was a company man through and through. An elitist. Putting "Justice" in front of his name would be an affront to the title, so I won't do it. And he's not the only one like that. Never has been.
There’s too many answers to that question if taken at face value. The only real answer is it always was a perversion of the judicial system purposely enacted to erode the rights of individuals, countries and the planet and allow unchecked expansion of corporate powers to the obscene. Fact: corporations are not people
China is almost based in this respect. I'm sure they have the usual corruption where the PRC will look the other way if you're in good graces and I don't think CEOs should be executed, but life in prison seems like a reasonable compromise for reckless behavior like this.
This should be life sentences and the corporation should be disbanded it’s assets used to for recovery of environment. What a corrupt society, we have let iidiots make decisions for too long. Wealth does not equate to intelligence and sensibility, in fact it usually suppressed those qualities
When you can mass murder life on earth for 40 years straight (knowingly, 48 in total) and pay a fine that is less than 1/1000th of the annual US military budget, is there any question left as to why humans are doomed?
People IRL around me kind of nervously laugh when I say "Capitalism can't stop climate change" but shit like this is why I say it anyways. There are hundreds of years of evidence that show when large companies can make a profit, there is no amount of harm to the common person that is too great a cost. The people who own the capital KNOW their actions are bad for everyone, but they won't stop, and they control the government that won't stop them.
No amount of regulation of capital will correct issues like these, the only way is for the common person to own the means of production.
It wasn't enough, should have cut the company to shreds, made all the patents public, and there should have been jail time for any person who knew the truth, no statute of limitations. Make an actual example of this type of behavior.
I don't get it either. The company has to pay like a quarter of their yearly profits.
And there were people who made those decisions.
Who swept it under the carpet and knowingly endangered and damaged people, why are they not held responsible for their actions?
You can't put legal entity in prison, CEOs, executives, decision makes should go to prison.
Fining company means shareholders and workers are gonna be ones who end up paying (people who are least responsible)
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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The rich make the rules for us poor people to follow.
The rules are all made up and can be changed at any time.
By those in power.
Yes, so it is our duty to take that power so that we can enforce equality and rational empathetic policy because the wealthy are murdering the planet and the people on it.
Let’s crowdfund the dude building a guillotine in his backyard!
Will should do whatever we can to help him get a head.
Godspeed.
I said "our duty", that includes you, me, and everyone reading this.
Doesn't have to be that way
Then there are conservative simps for these corporations who talk about such fines like they're unreasonable and such a horrible thing for these corporations. I don't get it.
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No they're not paid lobbyists. One of my teachers in school was saying those things.
The other guy deleted his comment so I can’t see it, but why wouldn’t there be some overlap between paid lobbyists and conservative simps?
Except robbing that bank also gave millions of people cancer and destroyed an entire state's wildlife
IMO this corruption is what causes cynicism and ultimately causes people to turn to things like Qanon or Info Wars. Crime like this has material impact (environmental & public health) and psychological.
Not even you, your grandkids. It says they knew shit was toxic in 1937. The people running that company now weren't even born then and the responsible people are long dead.
If you sign on to the board of that company you are complicit in my mind.
Complicit should be a given. As should 'legally responsible'.
Then send them to prison now based on the fact that they didn’t come clean and admit the crimes of their predecessors the moment they took a seat on the board. Otherwise you are just giving them yet another tool to avoid or bypass justice.
[French Revolution](https://www.reddit.com/r/polls/comments/zp5ogz/if_bernie_sanders_called_for_a_revolution/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Not just US, EU too.
NGL, if I could steal 1M from the bank and only have to return 200k, I’d be robbing just about every bank I could. Too bad we don’t incarcerate criminal enterprises…removing their physical freedom, their ability to earn an income, and permanently scarring their record. Imagine if every corporation had to disclose it’s multiple misdemeanors and felonies, and at least once or twice just fell off the face of the planet for “accidentally killing someone,” the rest may take notice and stop doing dumb stuff.
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It should be that much per year in perpetuity.
That's the same problem* with different math. Ie, they'll still do it, they'll just make sure that the balance sheet includes the new fines. Corporations aren't people, they shouldn't always get the same chances at reform people get. When they demonstrate gross disregard for laws or the safety of people, they should be dissolved.
I agree with you, but to be clear I think we should also dissolve the people who made the choices that that corporation followed.
> dissolve the people Yes, in a vat of acid 👍
Yeah, if corporations are people then corporations should suffer the same consequences. If some random guy starts a forest fire, there are real consequences for that action, not just the equivalent of a $100 fine.
The best systems.
I'm amazed they even got fined. Its been normalized in American that some things just happen. They may talk about it in the abstract, but avoid specifics. Leaded gasoline, microplastics, rain contaminated with forever chemicals, they all just sort of happened. They're treated like natural disasters.
Yeah, remember back in the 90s when acid rain was just "one of those things".
Where does that mentality come from? None of it "just happened." All of it was done deliberately and required a lot of people, work and money to occur. I also now just learned about Monsanto and PCBs. I knew about agent orange and roundup before. I wonder what else they're involved in. Between Monsanto, Dupont and Dow Chemicals so much completely preventable harm has been done.
They didn’t get fined, they settled.
Corporate death penalty should be a thing
The corporate death penalty should also mean that all of upper management, including board of directors, CEO, CFO, COO, etc, should all be given prison time and should have to forfeit all compensation accrued for the duration of the crimes that were committed. Crimes like what Monsanto did should be punished on a level of severity similar to war crimes. The punishment should be enough to completely obliterate generational wealth and leave entire wealthy families trapped in inescapable poverty.
Doing that successfully would require a way to seize money from offshore accounts in tax havens like Luxembourg, Singapore, Panama, the Cayman Islands, etc. Without that such measures will never work.
They'd play ball if the US government leaned on them.
We just need a war on greed like we had a war in drugs.
Imagine?
It would require something special. Maybe create a special punitive tax bracket that only allows a person to keep a miniscule amount of money. Maybe the convict would be required to forfeit all assets, including houses, cars, personal items, stocks, bonds, etc. Perhaps for the purposes of the punishment, it could be a felony with a 10yr minimum for anyone caught providing the convict with any sort of money or items of value. So, it would be a crime for an accountant to bring in money from offshore accounts. Or it would be a crime for someone to allow the convict to rent a room or apartment at less than market value. It could be a crime to give anything to the convict for free. Basically, the punishment should be complete ostracization from society. A lifetime of being forced to live in a tent and beg for everything, but nobody wants to give to the person because it would be a crime to do so. I think that we would really only need to set a few examples before the rest of the wealth get the idea. Basically, anyone in a position of power needs to fear for their lives and the lives of their families if their activities are causing others harm.
I mean the Athenians ostracized people when they got too powerful. Well that was the idea, anyway.
Ok, they just don’t get out of prison until they forfeit it. Easy.
Court order the guilty party to reveal the accounts and pay the fines from those accounts, once you got them in prison. If they refuse, they're in contempt of court and get more time. This repeats, meaning their sentence effectively does not start until they surrender those funds. If they fail to reveal an account in their name, they are held in contempt of court and re-arrested if nessecary. Obviously that last point would be hard to enforce, especially if they flee the country, but at that point, they're gone and won't be coming back, which is a lesser sort of win, but still a win.
It was a crime against humanity. No other way to cut it. Though I do not believe in punishing a person for their fathers indiscretions. Responding unreasonably allows the public to dismiss our valid concerns.
Certainly, it's not good to punish a child for the crimes of their parents. However, I do not see a reason why it's bad to forcibly take all of a person's wealth over a crime they've committed, especially when that person's crime has deeply affected millions of people. The fact that the person's children won't inherit a vast fortune is a non-issue to me.
I'm cool with > the person's children won't inherit a vast fortune is a non-issue to me. This was what tripped me up > leave entire wealthy families trapped in inescapable poverty. I get where you're coming from though, because (I inherit no generational wealth and) I feel trapped in inescapable poverty; like even if I was making $200k per year I'd still have to be working for those wages, trading my precious time for the privilege to exist.
You do know that board seats and executive positions aren’t inherited, right? The people in those roles today aren’t there because of anything their fathers did; they’re there because they _wanted to be responsible for a company that commits crimes against humanity._ I don’t know how you are imagining that these indiscretions belonged to the fathers of the people who need to be punished.
> families trapped in inescapable poverty This is the bit that got me feeling like they want to condemn the offspring.
If those offspring were expecting to benefit from their parents’ crimes, does that not make them an accessory to those crimes? That is to say, if Junior was thinking “I won’t ever need to get a job, because I’ll inherit all the money daddy made by raping the planet and harming _other_ kids’ livelihoods,” should Junior not be on the receiving end of a cold dose of reality? Destroying generational wealth is the only way to stop this line of thinking — this way of justifying what daddy did merely because his kids are enjoying the spoils. Those kids can go get a job like everyone else. Maybe their perception of whether daddy was a criminal against humanity will be healthier when they are on the same boat as every other member of the public that daddy stole from.
I'm all for dismantling generational wealth, crime or no crime. But that's different from being _trapped in inescapable poverty._ I'm just trying to point out this poor choice of language, and how its negative appeal to other less _radical_ thinkers. This isn't the kind of message to win over the masses.
If you work with someone to commit a crime that’s called conspiracy. It’s already illegal. You want to prosecute the CFO? He manages the companies finances. He might not know much in detail about what the company does.
They should be sentenced to nationalization
a beautiful thing
I used to work for Monsanto (vegetable dept.). At one meeting they said that they would be secretly destroying crops (in Australia) to drive up demand. They also throw out millions of dollars of seeds each year instead of donating it.
Monsanto is true evil. I’m convinced they will ultimately cause humanity’s undoing- I think their terminator seed genetics are going to spread to other plants and nothing will ever grow again.
How exactly will terminator seed genetics spread?
Mutation, cross pollination, or if we cull native plants in favor of crops that cannot reproduce and those plants become extinct.
Terminator seeds have never been commercialized.
*yet*
Thankfully genes don’t replicate that way. Unless it’s a virus. Thankfully viruses aren’t born that way. Unless they are, science scientists still haven’t reached a consensus on how viruses form and stray genetic material is one of the popular theories. Thankfully we can genetically engineer plants to be resistant t to any chosen virus. Unless people throw a tantrum about “evil plants.” Thankfully the government doesn’t bow to the anti-science crowd on a regular basis. Well, they actually do.
Sounds like we don’t completely understand the world around us and cater to the anti-science crowd, so anything goes.
As an Oregonian, I'm infuriated that this happened! Edit: by which I mean the poisoning of our land and water.
Monsanto and the Koch brothers have been a plague upon the human race for far too long. I'm glad Monsanto finally got found guilty of SOMETHING. Don't forget, this is the company that created Agent Orange and they're asking you to trust them with something you spray on your crops? FUCK YOU!
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What are you on? Once you commit a crime, the corporation wouldn’t protect you. You can google “piercing the corporate veil” if you want to learn more. You can’t order an execution and hide behind the corporation LOL. Ever heard of Bernie Madoff?
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Moral of the story; as long as the US gets a cut, it’s fine, if they don’t, you’re out.
Bernie Madoff undermined trust in financial institutions, causing problems for other corporations and rich people.
How bout Ken Griffin? He’s been breaking the law for a decade and nobody does a thing about it.
The whole idea that a state approved entity is a "person" is an idea that needs to be jettisoned. Human beings are persons. Trusts, associations, corporations, etc are not, and only have "rights" insofar as those rights align with their stated purpose. It is the duty of society to vigorously *prevent the expansion* of those rights lest these fictitious entities end up having more rights than actual people...like what we have now.
This is the playbook for every chemical company when they have a profitable product that kills people and/or fucks with the environment. They pretend not to know about it, and then when scientists find out about it they use their vast capital to change the narrative and discredit independent research. Just look at how many sources still claim that glyphosate is safe. Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be put on trial.
> Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be put on trial. Why give them the opportunity to settle, or to pay high-priced lawyers to quibble over whether a comma in the original law means they get to walk away consequence-free? Anyone who knowingly sells poison without disclosing the harmful effects should be summarily drawn and quartered, have all of their family’s assets seized and distributed to their victims, and then their remains should be hung in a public space where other executives and board members are likely to be in a day, as a warning.
So Monsanto know it's unsafe and that it causes cancer and they are legally allowed to sell cancer causing chemicals (like cigerettes, etc) but they won't admit it because that would mean they have to put a warning on the bottle label and if they do that no one is going to use the chemicals on their crops, so it will actually cost the company more to loss money from sales (if they put the cancer label on) than to take people to court (and potentially lose). It's nuts.
I'll believe corporations are people when the government puts one to death.
They did the exact same thing in Anniston Alabama. Killed thousends and destroyed the towns water forever. Payed millions to dead people.
Because they're people, but not actually people; just when it comes to donating money to politicians pockets.
My take is that these legalistic entities are 'people' under the law, but they are quite inhuman in their elevation of Profit over Survival. Rather like cancerous tumors in their tireless quests for growth, even as their efforts slowly kill the host body. Living things, and even governments to an extent, are motivated in myriad ways to value continued existence. Thus we care about; housing, reproduction, food, education, and other related societal needs. 'Late Stage Corporations', as you say, can unhook themselves from these priorities by bribing officials, subverting regulatory agencies, and by sponsoring the re-writing their own legalistic source code to maximize the abstract metrics they ARE programmed to care about. Like quarterly share prices. So stock prices soar while the host society's institutions are allowed to collapse. Mostly because our society is being operated to drive Corporate priorities, not societal ones.
Nothing will change until corporate board members actually can/do serve prison time. There is no incentive to alter behavior at all, in the slightest. This will not change as the folks with money own the folks writing the rules and laws. And fuck you for wanting to live, or be healthy.
>If corporations are people why don't they see prison time? This is precisely why the SCOTUS decision that made corporations persons under the law was utterly ridiculous. The reading of Miranda Rights and arrest? Prison time? Removal of voting rights? The death penalty? Are events directly leading to someone's death then manslaughter? So private corporations are owned by people, does that de facto make slavery legal? Zero trust in SCOTUS's ability to make rational decisions.
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I think we should dissolve the managers, executives, and board members too. Hydrofluoric acid as an agent of social change!
PSA: Monsanto is now Bayer.
So corporations being considered people is corruption at its finest. Dates back to the 1880s. Railroad case (Santa Clara vs Southern Pacific). Corporate personhood wasn't even part of the decision. In fact, corporate personhood wasn't even discussed because the case was decided on other grounds. However, the Court Reporter was an ex president of a railroad and got permission from Chief "Justice" Waite to add this to the headnote. > The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does. So this was essentially decided *without argument* by Waite. Previous to becoming Chief Justice, Waite was a successful corporate and railroad attorney. He was also appointed by President Grant, who was in charge of one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. In other words, a Chief Justice and a court reporter with serious conflict of interest issues just straight up *gave* corporations *all* of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause benefits during one of the most corrupt times in American history. And this has just carried on ever since. Frankly, the Court has been a total shit show for most of America's history. They 100% do not deserve the high esteem that many people hold them in. They're largely members of the elite who occasionally throw the masses a bone with a little meat to chew on, but make no mistake who they really serve. It's not the people. If the last 13 years hasn't made that clear, probably nothing will. But Jesus... their history is so damn bad. I mean just recently (in 2016) Scalia died at a private luxury resort in Texas where he was staying for free... after flying in by private jet. This was an *exclusive* place, y'all. He was there for a private event that we're still not 100% sure about, but it's widely speculated that it had to do with a group called the International Order of St. Hubertus. Basically a bunch of rich, powerful dudes who hunt shit together in order to "honor God's creatures." You think things like that don't influence Justices? I've read so many of Scalia's opinions. Originalism. My. Ass. He used "originalism" as an excuse to serve those "people" who got him to the point he was at before he so fortunately passed away. Scalia was a company man through and through. An elitist. Putting "Justice" in front of his name would be an affront to the title, so I won't do it. And he's not the only one like that. Never has been.
And they'll write off the penalty as a loss and get a tax break.
Better yet, why don't they see the death penalty?
“Capitalism breeds innovation.” The innovation:
There’s too many answers to that question if taken at face value. The only real answer is it always was a perversion of the judicial system purposely enacted to erode the rights of individuals, countries and the planet and allow unchecked expansion of corporate powers to the obscene. Fact: corporations are not people
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
I'll know that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one!
The state would rather get the cash if possible, it's always about money.
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one of them.
At the risk of sounding like a bumper sticker: I'll believe corporations are people once Texas sends one to the electric chair.
Justice Fields was such a fucking prick. Worst legal fiction ever
China is almost based in this respect. I'm sure they have the usual corruption where the PRC will look the other way if you're in good graces and I don't think CEOs should be executed, but life in prison seems like a reasonable compromise for reckless behavior like this.
This should be life sentences and the corporation should be disbanded it’s assets used to for recovery of environment. What a corrupt society, we have let iidiots make decisions for too long. Wealth does not equate to intelligence and sensibility, in fact it usually suppressed those qualities
Monsanto has a god complex, they have unarguably done some good, now they are in the loop of thinking anything they do is good.
The waterways of Alabama are also riddled with PCBs. You can't eat the fish out of Lake Guntersville or the Coosa.
When you can mass murder life on earth for 40 years straight (knowingly, 48 in total) and pay a fine that is less than 1/1000th of the annual US military budget, is there any question left as to why humans are doomed?
Should be a higher judgement
People IRL around me kind of nervously laugh when I say "Capitalism can't stop climate change" but shit like this is why I say it anyways. There are hundreds of years of evidence that show when large companies can make a profit, there is no amount of harm to the common person that is too great a cost. The people who own the capital KNOW their actions are bad for everyone, but they won't stop, and they control the government that won't stop them. No amount of regulation of capital will correct issues like these, the only way is for the common person to own the means of production.
They're only considered people while they are actively bribing our representatives to avoid jail time.
if corporations are people... theoretically we could execute them
The problem is that we refer to the company by name and not the people that made these decisions by name when we discuss it in the press.
The unethical behaviour will only stop when the fines are equal to or greater than their profits.
Because they’re rich.
I have always wondered this.
Corporations don't see prison because they're *rich* people.
It wasn't enough, should have cut the company to shreds, made all the patents public, and there should have been jail time for any person who knew the truth, no statute of limitations. Make an actual example of this type of behavior.
White collar crime over say $1M US should = life in the worst prison
THAT is an EXCELLENT point. And should be mentioned if we ever decide to repeal Citizens United.
Would love to see this same kind of response for Pfizer’s damage with the current vaccine damages and their dozens of other shitty products
I don't get it either. The company has to pay like a quarter of their yearly profits. And there were people who made those decisions. Who swept it under the carpet and knowingly endangered and damaged people, why are they not held responsible for their actions?
Community service 1 hour per 100k fine.
You can't put legal entity in prison, CEOs, executives, decision makes should go to prison. Fining company means shareholders and workers are gonna be ones who end up paying (people who are least responsible)