Comment by thijson
13 days ago
Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
13 days ago
Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
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Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.
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The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire
Problem remains: What do we do, if others don't care and violently start killing our group? Do we reward them, throwing away all our weapons and making them our new government?
This question of course currently has a very real real world parallel.
See also: just war theory
9 replies →
> We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Surely "plot the downfall of civilization" is an exaggeration. Knowing that certain actions have harmful consequences to the environment or the humanity, and nevertheless persisting in them, is what many individuals lawfully do without getting together.
Well said, and yes, this is practically what must happen.
The group of pretty much all humans is such a group because we all conspire to burn fossil fuels. Do you really think a global civilization death penalty is a good idea? That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
even back in the 80's
The 1980s is when the issue was finally brought into the political conversation. Shell internal documents go back as far as 1962: https://www.desmog.com/2023/03/31/lost-decade-how-shell-down...
As for science itself: the first scientific theories on greenhouse effects were published in the 1850s -- and the first climate model was published in 1896: https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...
No entity can police itself. Not even the police.
Companies, non-profits, regulators, legislative branches of government, courts, presidential administrations, corporate bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, regular citizens. They cannot self-police.
That's the motivation for having a system of _checks and balances_[a]: We want power, including the power to police, to be distributed in a society.
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[a] https://www.britannica.com/topic/checks-and-balances
go further. humanity can't police itself.
1970s
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
Global warming was understood for almost a century by 1980
Your second point is right, but depressingly it was the 50s instead of the 80s.
Maybe more parallels to tobacco companies. Incredible amount of taxes and warnings and rules forbidding kids from using it are the solutions to the first problem and likely this second one too.
To your point...
1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
>Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Companies can't. Employees can. If someone's still working at Meta, they are ok with it.
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
Deniers should watch the movie "The White House effect". It's a great documentary that shows where and how the strategies of the oil companies changed.
"Companies can't really be expected to police themselves."
so does government
No one expects government to police itself.
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
Any examples of such societies?
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> so does government
The public is supposed to police the government, and replace it if it acts against the public interest.
But now that you mention it, perhaps we should also give everyone an equal vote on replacing the boards of too-big-to-fail corporations
Not so sure about that.
The US-ians voted twice for Trump so far. I have difficulty seeing the good it did for the world , let alone the USA and the US-ians.
Specifically for corporations, giving everyone in the world the power to vote for dismantling Meta (a world mega-corp) might be interesting to see , though.
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true that.. but it seems that they are fostering an environment for SA and even p3dofeelia.. Channel 4 news did a piece on it..