"Wait a minute your honor, here's my newborn child; he's the legal owner of that truck, and therefore he's the one that should be locked up for running over the old lady."
If you gently poisoned millions of people, entirely on accident, as a private citizen, you would never see the outside of a prison. If you incorporate and claim it's a standard part of your business, you won't even lose your private mansion. Judges have significant leeway in piercing the corporate veil and depriving bad actors of their ill gotten gains, but they don't. The US DOJ has significant leeway to go after companies aggressively and really push for seizing assets of criminals, a cop literally doesn't even need a real justification to do it, but they haven't since Enron.
We've had forty years of the only "punishment" for doing anything wrong as a company being a 1% of ill gotten gains fine, even though none of the actual underlying laws have changed to cause this reduction in punishment. This has been an entirely internal choice. Of course this results in companies largely not giving a fuck about anything that isn't profit.
Imagine a bunch of college kids running around water sources with unclear intentions.
Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine. Look at the saint Soline movement in France. Those people try to keep rain water accessible for all. ( as oppose to massive rentension basin for corn only )
Result : they are eco terrorist and should be meet with large deployment of hostile police force. ( thousand of flash ball and tear gaz grenade fired in one single night )
Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities.
Corporate liability needs to be ratcheted up several orders of magnitude before we’ll see any actual change. As it stands, most governments have no teeth against corporate greed and exploitation.
As an aside, I sometimes think public defenders and prosecutors should come from the same pool of attorneys, held to account for striking balance instead of just W's to one side or the other.
It's arguments like that where I wish judges and the court system as a whole could do something like finding that an argument was in complete bad faith and fine the companies and lawyers just for having the gall to make it. ( I know it's a pretty bad idea in reality but that and some of the lies told to get mergers through are just infuriating)
Even if you have dedicated prosecutors who are able to oppose moneyed interests, the law gives corporations huge tools to wriggle out of suits.
Perhaps fines should be levied against those that held voting rights.
What you see in industries such as mining where corporate liability is technically far less forgiving is that this concept of limited liability implies that a network of corporations can play musical chairs with hard-to-predict risks - essentially abusing bankruptcy and the general difficulty in enforcing liability via the courts even in the best of times to achieve not merely limited liability, but intentionally reduced liability. Since much of this is just a bunch of man-made rules, of course we're all going to game them to find the particularly profitable loopholes; this is inevitable. If it's not pollution, it's lobbying. If it's not lobbying, it's privatizing infrastructure at exploitative cost. If it's not physical infrastructure, it's owning social infrastructure, i.e. platforms. If it's not platforms, it's an incomprehensible spaghetti designed to evade or avoid taxes.
Regarding corporations as equivalent to natural persons for many legal questions was a huge mistake, and needs to be reversed. I'm not particularly hopeful we'll get there without a literally bloody revolution, or by losing a war, or some similarly horrifying discontinuity of modern life.
Allowing people to cooperate under some legal entity is a great idea; allowing capitalist incentives to optimize those a reasonable idea with some risks (but hopefully manageable ones). But doing all of that at essentially no cost, little oversight, lots of loopholes, very little transparency, very limited liability, legally not just unrestricted but even protected "speech" and with arbitrary nesting has to be one of the most idiotic things we've come up with in centuries.
Isn't it a bit early to make that conclusion, especially since all the legal action hasn't concluded?
3M is filing for bankruptcy due to PFAS litigation, and even then they can't cover the costs [0] This doesn't work, the damage is already done, and the profits have been pocketed. What's worse with PFAS for environmental pollution is that no mechanism for clean up currently exists.
> criminally charge the decision makers for cases of negligence.
Might work as a weak extrinsic motivator, but there's plenty of "hot potato" going in this kind of work. It's also hard to prove negligence when the "decision makers" are ignoring the environmental costs through either wilful ignorance, burring their own research, or through optimistic interpretations which give them plausible deniability - combine that with shared responsibility and it gets hard to point the finger at individuals unless you were in the room. It's hard to pin down a "decision" of inaction.
We either need some kind of intrinsic motivators, i.e make it in the interest of corporations to protect the environment. Or really heavy legislation that requires extensive proof of ecological safety for every new chemical dumped into the environment rather than the current "we'll figure it out later" model.
[0] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/3m-head...
Are you suggesting that 3M should continue to operate as if they didn't poison the world? I'm fine with them being bankrupted by the lawsuits. Let it be a warning for the next company.
1. If the damage done is so severe that it's impossible or impractical to reverse, then even in the case of recovering 100% of the profits ever generated, it still won't be enough to fix the damage. A larger long term environmental cost for the many has been traded for a far far smaller short term financial reward for the few.
2. As the sibling commenter pointed out, companies can be used as a financial liability shield, just pay yourself an absurd salary, keep liquid funds and reinvestment low (especially when the game is up), and all that's left is a functioning but otherwise empty husk.
>We either need some kind of intrinsic motivators, i.e make it in the interest of corporations to protect the environment.
You do this by deleting any company that shows itself to be poor stewards of the environment, and making sure it really really really hurts, financially, for the ones who profited from it, including high level management. "Just doing my job" shouldn't suffice when your job is overseeing a chemical of unknown danger.
When involving yourself in an unethical company means you lose your fortune, the incentives will be aligned. If that means rich people do extensive due diligence before involving themselves in anything, surely that's a good thing right?
That seems like a nightmare in from a regulatory compliance point of view. You could do all the required research that the government wants you to do, and still get personally punished a few decades later if it turns out the product was harmful.
Even putting aside the problem of implementation, you also need to consider the second order effects. Specifically, impact on the development of new technologies. Why would anyone want to commercialize any new technology when it can set them up for unlimited personal liability in the future? Remember, the whole point isn't that just the company has to pay for their damages, it's their shareholders and corporate officers will personally held liable for damages as well. How are you going to get innovations in fusion/ai/superconductor when all of them will be subject to the threat of arbitrary and retroactive punishment in the future? For instance, you create an generative art AI startup today. Presently there aren't any regulations, so you do the bare minimum of due diligence. This seems reasonable, given that it's not really like chatgpt so the chance of AI takeover is low. Three decades down the line generative art AI becomes a hit and millions of artists around the world are unemployed. They lobby the government to prosecute you and your shareholders for putting them out of work, arguing that you "CHOSE not do enough research beforehand to be aware of dangers". Does that seem like a fair risk to subject the founders to? Do you think this is a worthwhile trade-off between innovation and conversation?
The onus should ALWAYS be on you PERSONALLY as someone being PERSONALLY enriched by the company you own and or run, to not poison the world. If you are worried that it will eventually come out one of your products is harmful to the environment and yet you've basically dumped it everywhere, maybe do enough diligence to convince yourself that you will be safe, or DO NOT SELL A DANGEROUS OR POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS PRODUCT TO PERSONALLY ENRICH YOURSELF TO THE TUNE OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Why should businesses exist solely to enrich their owners at the expense of the average human? Doing so should be one of the most heinous crimes.
Employees need corporations to generate profits, otherwise there are layoffs or closures and people lose their jobs. This is bad for the people because we have limited social safety nets and joblessness can devastate people.
People who hope to ever retire need corporations to generate profits, otherwise their 401ks can never grow. This is bad for the people because without investment growth it is unreasonable for a most people to generate the sums needed to retire with dignity.
We've generated a system where the people will complain when corporations are held to any account. We've tied ourselves to the success of big business and can't get off the ride.
The protections provided to corporations are intended to shield hands-off investors, not executives and board members that drive profit above safety and common sense. I'm not in favor of a lot of heavy handed regulation, but I'm all for corporate liability.