Your issue with VW has nothing to do with corporate personhood, it has to do with a lack of criminal penalties for certain civil regulations. There are, of course, plenty of corporate crimes that do lead to jail time (though I hope you're joking about the guillotine). Call your representatives in congress and ask them to expand the criminal statutes. But don't pass this off on corporate personhood which has likely benefitted you and all of us far more than any perceived harm.
I read that remark as this: If corporations are people legally, there should be certain crimes that lead to their dissolution. I assumed this was the proposal: If a corporation does something evil enough, its leaders going to prison and paying a fine isn't enough, it should face the corporate guillotine which revokes its incorporation.
Are you going to seize the assets of the corporation and redistribute them? How is your proposed dissolution different from a fine big enough to bankrupt a company?
I mean really after the damage that was done, you don't think companies like BP should still exist.
How about all those resource companies walking over the people of the third world. etc etc.
As for cutting peoples heads off...Who knows what this new america will bring :)
VW could pay the damages in its particular case without dissolution. What would you do with the extra money after liquidating its assets? It seems like you're simply arguing for even bigger fines.
If the company can pay for fines, fine. No need to dissolve them, but the leadership responsible still needs to face a judge. Just because you're part of a corporation, shouldn't mean you get to walk from crimes.
There’s your problem, assuming that there is a way for leadership in a company not be responsible. Managers being ‘responsible’ is the only argument for them being paid disproportionally more than the average worker. In turn, a manager should always be responsible for the actions of their underlings all the way to the top, regardless of personal involvement in or knowledge of those actions.
The idea that the management of a company could not be responsible for something done by that company (which, e.g. could have resulted in considerable savings for the company and its shareholders) is simply ludicrous.
You could argue that they should have a seperate control instance, but that was what they had, and they cheated it anyway.
Morally, certainly yes, that’s why they’re the CEO. Their only defence against responsibility is incapacity to fulfil their duties, in which case they should resign immediately.
This isn't just a theory. On of my companies competitors (I do not know which, I was just given it as an example) was caught bribing officials in China. After investigation it was decided that it was a rouge manager and not the CEO: they has a policy of not bribing, everyone was trained in recognizing how something (even a meal) could be seen as a bribe, and when other unethical action had been taken in the past the company took action to stop it and treated the whistle-blowers well. The CEO got off because he did everything in his power to ensure this wouldn't happen.
That's a good start on fines. Now make them reimburse 590K owners. Let's see... A Jetta has an MSRP of >$20K. So, how about reimbursing $5K-$10K of every diesel vehicle that was fraudulently sold? Or, force VW to buy them all back at original MSRP. Then they could resell them for whatever they could get for them.
Would you pay $10K for a 2 year old cheater Jetta?
Edit: removed typo
And the small-timers, with their meagre holdings and pension funds would be wiped out.
Corporations aren't monolithic; they are a collection of people working for and owning stake in. Their dissolution wouldn't be small and contained, it would be large and messy.
This is a deterrent and would be very disruptive to the owners conducting business. It would discourage investors from elevating questionable people to boards of directors.
It could be something like this: 1. Sell/auction assets 2. Pay fines and damages and debts 3. Split remaining proceeds amongst non-legally culpable share holders
There's a whole section in the Wikipedia article on corporate personhood that addresses these misconceptions[1].
I guess the real world "corporate guillotine" is for a corporation to be sued/fined out of existence or go bankrupt, all of which can happen due to gross negligence, bad behavior, or criminal behavior (see: Gawker Media, Bear Stearns, etc). But obviously jail is reserved for individuals who commit actual crimes, not corporations who are, after all, merely legal vehicles for pooling resources.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Misconcep...
...or completely innocent of crimes.
I think it's important to remember that when there's talk about beheading corporate executives (and this isn't the first time I've read that on these forums): people are more likely to be innocent than not.
Because, of course, no sensible capitalist would have stood by and watched all those assests disappear. Toyota would have bought a factory here, Nissan a factory there. Robots would have been sold off, etc.
Ford and Hyundai would have ramped up production and would have needed additional employees. And somebody would have stepped in to buy what was left of GM for 10 cents on the dollar.
It would have been very disruptive, yes. But within two years or so, the market would have adjusted. And there would be some incentive to not have anyone get too big to fail. As it stands, the incentive is to not let anyone be punished too much no matter how bad they act.
Wells Fargo should have gone out of business when thousands of employees were caught stealing from customers. Every shareholder should have lost everything. Of course the shareholders didn't commit the offence, but it would teach a lesson to be more responsible in investments, and make sure that the companies you invest in play square.
It might give Boards a different set of priorities when they negotiate the contracts of CEOs.
Equating modern corporations to the limited government granted corporation (permitted only for a limited and explicitly stated purpose [like building a bridge or railroad] in the public benefit) of 400 years ago and the nearly limitless powers of a corporation leveraged out of the 14th Amendment is a bit dishonest.
"The Corporation" gave a good summary of how the 14th amendment (passed to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves) was hijacked by corporate lawyers to dismantle the traditional limitations on corporations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qNmV4Iv0GE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Cont...
If you read the part that talks about criminal prosecutions, many top executives were put to death or received life imprisonment.
It's up for debate whether this is 'good' or 'justice' because the economic causes that led to the problem are complex, but babies were literally being killed because of this.
The real problem is that breaking the law and then paying the fine makes corporations better off than obeying the law in the first place.
The bigger issue is it seems there has been one executive scapegoat and no real punishment for the multitude of people involved.
While a company fine is good, if we were to gaol and heavily fine at a personal level anyone involved to the point of wiping out their net worth, and heavily fine anyone (if we cant show they were involved) who should have been in a position to know/stop this I suspect we would see a better result in these matters in future. IMO the bigger issue is every time we have one of these scandals the perpetrators seem to walk away without any personal punishment or direct consequence of their actions.
Instead VW will be broken up into smaller more manageable companies, with tighter governmental oversight, and if it is done properly we'll have a stronger economy for it---one without the existence of a malignant massive company.
1. Nationalize part of the company hurting investors. 2. Auction the shares to the market 3. Profit$
This way a "too big to fail" company can continue running its business as usual while punishing the value of the company. That doesn't means that personal responsibilities are forgiven, any one that breaks the law should be prosecuted.
There are probably a lot of other solutions, the problem is that economics is not about economy but about politics.
Fines can be mitigated by raising prices so that equity-holders shift pain to consumers. Stripping equity on the other hand means that you change who profits from sales.
Perhaps we need to require of publicly-listed companies that they have a "registered acquirer" or the like--a company that all the employees would be moved to if the original company were forced out of existence. (Basically turning every Chapter 7 bankruptcy of a public company into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy by default.)
Then we could allow civil suits to kill companies with impunity, knowing their employees would just end up "passed to" another company willing to retain them for the same salaries performing the same duties.
The question is who such a punishment would have been directed towards. A few decisonmakers make something illegal, and the punishment is given to a hundred thousand employees, not to mention the owners of the cars without emissions cheating (most)?
This is the problem with megacorporations. Punishing them proportionally to the damage they make is unfair, because you are mostly punishing employees and consumers who knew nothing about the wrongdoing. Consequences need to be strong enough to be a deterrent but weak enough to not kill a large employer. That's nearly impossible.
Perhaps the most reasonable thing to do, as has been argued with banks, is to simply not allow megacorps to form, that is, no organization should be to big to fail because we want to allow the bad ones to fail.
1. It is possible to punish a person for his crimes in a justifiable manner.
2. People are somehow deterred by punishment when the option of winning via cheating is available to them.
It's very hard to argue that 1 is possible considering the ethical dilemmas that it exposes e.g. would capital punishment be a justifiable punishment for a murderer?
If 2 were true, then there wouldn't be doping scandals in sports, would there?
1) any entity, corporate or otherwise, must act without flaw or be dismantled. Big talk from one whom I doubt is running a top 5 company in arguably the most influential sector of the global market. The fallout of 'ending' VW is the forgotten factor. Try a little tenderness, who don't you?
2) the infrastructure that sustains VW is not a logo, or a brand name, it's thousands upon thousands of individuals, women and men who work hard to sustain that company so that vehicles are provided for a myriad of purposes. 'Ending' something if it has a flaw is like throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Why not change what needs changing and be less vitriolic? Are you shorting VW? Are you invested in Mitsubishi? Are you a Renault shill? Do you like speaking in hyperbole so as to clarify something without having to do the heavy lifting?
Obvy responses to poster above you if that wasn't clear to someone.
Take Arthur Andersen. After the Enron scandal, Arthur Andersen was basically split up and absorbed into the other accounting firms, especially Deloitte and EY. Are we really better off having the Big Four accounting firms instead of the Big Five? I'd say we need more competition, not less.
Not to mention the many innocent parties around the world who lost out due to the actions of a few.
I'd be in favour of sanctions that target those responsible and the chain upwards to the top, rather than a business as a whole. Even clawbacks of past bonuses, although that would be logistically very difficult.
Do you have any basis for that? I think most people care about clean air and support laws and regulations to protect it. The laws did pass; there are regulatory agencies that are funded.
So have VW purchase back every one of those cars at MSRP. It's an invisible amount anyway, right? The largest auto maker in the world could do it without blinking, right?
Then fine them a few $billion for damage to the environment, jail a handful of employees, and we can move on.
I like how people almost never understand what they're talking about when they complain about corporate personhood. How, exactly, do you think corporate personhood is responsible for the mentioned instances of "cheating"?
Here's why corporate personhood was created; to create a legal framework under which corporations could be more effectively sued. Corporations don't actually get the same rights as individuals; they can't vote, they don't get 5th amendment rights, etc. Corporate personhood is, in most respects, quite anti-corporate (in the sense that it makes it easier to attack corporations in court).
But of course, to people who never bother to read beyond the headline, it sounds like it gives corporations the same rights as people, so of course it must be some sort of evil robber baron thing!
Googles don't be evil is a good example of the problems with good intentions.
And so while I think it's fair to want the responsible people to be punished it's not as simple as it sound.
TBH, HN's BFF Elon Musk thinks regulators were too hard on VW: http://www.takepart.com/open-letter-to-california-air-resour...
But yeah by this logic, Winterkorn was worse than Hitler. Went way more wholesale on the gassing.
The problem, of course, is that would also mean putting a lot of people out of work and would also hurt many who may have not done anything wrong.
Its kinda of like that scene in fightclub where Edward Nortons character talks about the cost of doing a recall.
The emissions scandal should have ended VW.
Solution: Guillotine for corporate crime.