The pure shock of the prospect of breaking them up would spook investors, tank their stock, put both CEOs on the defensive, and force them back in line, and everything would get resolved nicely with a face to face meeting and a handshake.
Whether it’s merited or not is not the point. Purely from a governance standpoint, as a citizen I hate to see corporate interests trying and succeeding to usurp government and societal norms.
Sometimes examples need to be made so others know not to make the same mistake.
I'm all for allowing corporations to have goals that aren't 100% in line with the country's best interests, but those goals do NOT and shall not ever take legal standing over the country's interests. We need to have serious repercussions for when corporations try to usurp government in a race-to-the-bottom attempt to further weaken labor laws or measures designed to protect common citizenry.
Fining the board and C-Suite executives collectively a sum of 5x the company's market cap should be a start.
No way a corporate Dem is going to break them up.
In our government, that’s a big part of what the president’s role is. “Bully pulpit” and all that. Presidents do it every day, for smaller and higher profile cases.
At that level, it’s all negotiation. If they didn’t want (or feared the) scrutiny, corporate interests wouldn’t have started the negotiation in the first place. They know it looks bad if Biden doesn’t respond, and that he must in some way. They’re just betting that he won’t start with such a strong gambit, because corporations are no longer afraid of our government, and haven’t been for decades.
If this kind of authoritarian stuff is what motivates people in NLRB and similar agencies, I'd say abolish them altogether. I'd rather be ruled by cyberpunk dictator Bezos than people with such opinions/approaches
The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.
And this has happened before. The Roman emperor Caracalla once described his policy on taxes and welfare thus - "None should have money but I, so I can bestow it to soldiers."
The last quarter millenia of history stands in contradiction to this. The country with the most extensive security apparatus in 1916 was Russia, and that did not help the czar and his family in the end.
Among the young in the US, socialism is now as popular as capitalism ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capita... ). As Marx predicted, short sighted big business functionaries yet press ahead with removing the few scraps they toss from the table in response. It is not the working people who have to fear, but the aristocracy. Besides, the enlisted soldiers abandoning the front and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow is what really ignited the revolution.
Rather I think it more likely that the concerted effort to brand welfare and regulated capitalism as socialism for decades has finally succeeded.
When Ukrainian pleasants were starving in 1932, did it cause any sort of disturbance? No. Why? Because the soft and pathetic Okhrana was replaced by the effective and ruthless Checka.
Prosperity requires hard work, and capitalism encourages that push for excellence more than socialism ever could. Socialism tends to degrade into communism and authoritarianism, with lots of corruption, because the notion of giving away everything to the state goes against human nature.
I often wonder if what we have today is really capitalism or rather it is something much worse.
You picked a very peculiar weasel word to refer to being fairly compensated by the value you create. As if workers who scramble to make ends meet while working for the wealthiest organizations ever devised by man were actually wasting resources that can only possibly be used wisely by billionaires.
And by the way, I recommend you check out the french revolution, and what the urban plebes did to their old masters.
As to the French revolution, who ended up being the master of the French plebes at the end? Could it be a certain military officer named Napoleon and his marshalls?
I'm not sure if you are being disingenuous, but you should pay attention to what I said and understand that my comment was on your adoption and use of the weasel word "justification of getting more resources to consume".
As if actually paying workers a living wage is somehow destroying resources.
Either the company's profits go for the billionaire's pockets, or it is transfered to the worker's salary as part of the fair compensation for making everything happen. It's curious how you only see "destruction of resources" when profits don't line up a billionaire's pockets.
Do you understand what I said?
I wonder if the founders intended that the bill of rights be extended to legal entities?
No, the real question is whether the framers intended to prohibit people from implicitly trading away certain individual rights in exchange for limiting what would otherwise be their unlimited personal liability.
Business activity was vastly different at the founding
They were aware of corporations as a business structure. English public stock corporations had played a major role in the founding of the colonies of Virginia (Virginia Company of London and Virginia Company of Plymouth) and Massachusetts (Massachusetts Bay Company), and also in the history of Canada (Hudson's Bay Company). They were certainly aware of these concepts. Corporations are older than the United States is.
That said, it was a much rarer business structure, only used for very large firms, because incorporating a company required a special act of Parliament – a power inherited by the colonial (and thereafter state) legislatures. It was not until the 19th century that it became the norm to for companies to be incorporated under a general incorporation statute, as opposed to a separate incorporation statute being passed to incorporate each individual company.
We don't get to label a group of citizens and then get to violate their rights because we labeled them.
"We" aren't labeling the citizens, they're doing so themselves. The default mode is that people are subject to unlimited personal liability for the harms they do to others. Society has chosen to make available a privilege of doing business in a limited-liability form (corporations, LLCs, LPs), but that privilege has strings attached. Don't like the strings? Then simply do business individually or as general partners — and accept the risk of unlimited personal liability.
(Also, the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial applies to suits at common law; NLRB cases arise by statute, not common law, although SCOTUS has extended the jury right to so-called equivalents of common-law cases, which seems suspect.)
I swore an oath to defend that cloth multiple times and at this point it’s not clear that it holds up to 21st century scrutiny for being the kind of governing document we would create, should we have an opportunity to do so.
The Constitution is absolutely open to change via democratic means, but in absence of that, it is the democratic product of the people.
If you paid young people to go on vacations in Thailand - that'd be a an anti-guillotine fund.
Social security covers way more stuff than pention plans, at least in civilized countries. It covers stuff like unemployment benefits, medical leaves, parental leaves, etc.
I think that in some countries it also covers some healthcare.
We could try to fix prices like the socialist countries do. But this does not lead to good outcomes in any conceivable way. Price fixing creates scarcity. I think we already try to increase supply of healthcare workers by importing them. But I don't know enough about it to know if a meaningful number of them are imported.
If a young person asks me for career advice, I'm saying that they should try for medicine. Not everyone can handle it I'm sure, but demographic projections suggest it has a positive outlook.
Except for gas.
Once all the peaceful means of addressing labor disputes become illegal, what will be left to people aside from violence?
The only way out of this is through non-violent unity and solidarity, which is conveniently at an all time low.
The reason non-violent methods work is because they are implying that if you don't pay attention to the non-violent methods, the only recourse left is violence. Because realistically, if your non-violent methods are easily enough ignored, they'll be ignored.
And historically, violence has been an excellent tool for change. Not always for the better, that's for sure, but to deny that mass violence, especially targeted at those deemed to be in power, doesn't change things is ignoring basically all of human history.
Speak softly, but carry a big stick.
Socialism is not the bogeyman you think it is. Some of us who were fortunate enough to benefit from living in countries in western Europe can tell you that basic rights such as 10 weeks of paid parental leave including for the father is a very nice thing to have.
My employees get a ton of paid leave because I respect them, not because our business is socialist.
Behold, a socialist "utopia" where people line up 3 days to see a "free" dentist: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/people-line-outside-dentist-third-... This is probably a little worse than average but I have heard many times that socialist countries with free healthcare will let you die before seeing you, because they simply don't have resources to live up to the promise. In that case you'd be lucky to have cash to get out and see a doctor in another country.
Parental leave is not vacation.
> basic rights such as 10 weeks of paid parental leave
Behold, a capitalist "utopia" where your medical bills being paid can depend on how many people you can share your GoFundMe with, or where you divorce your lifelong spouse while on hospice care so as to not saddle them with debts arising from your end of life care.
Who knew the socialist revolution would be won not through class struggles ultimately culminating in a violent popular uprising by the proletariat, but rather by redefining "socialism" to mean welfare capitalism?
More seriously, while almost nobody is calling for actual guillotines there is a huge problem looming: income inequality started getting worse 40 years ago and that trend is only going to get worse as automation becomes more capable. Pair that with the demographic trends (fewer workers supporting more retired people) and climate change, and this century is shaping up to be quite volatile compared to most people’s lived experience. History has taught us that one of the greatest sparks for conflict is lack of hope; a slight increase in the taxes rich people pay will reduce that risk and it’s hardly a communist uprising to go back to the rates which balanced the budget two decades ago.