• Google must be arrested. (Score:2)

  by S_Stout ( 2725099 ) writes:

  Google must go to federal prison and serve no less than three consecutive life sentences.
  • Somehow corporations can't commit crimes? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) writes:

    I always thought it was kinda funny that corporations could be legally treated as people, except for if they kill people, dump benzene in the river, or result in a bunch of injuries they appear to be immune or highly resistant to normal criminal penalties. Where is my corporate death penalty or life sentence? Now obviously they could suffer penalties but that sure feels theoretical at this point, eh? We all know corporations almost never pay for their crimes, even though it's just a group of gangsters calli
    • People, not things, commit crimes. (Score:2)

      by StevenMaurer ( 115071 ) writes:

      A "corporation" in legal code, is approximately equivalent to a Virtual Interface in programming. It is only a "person" for the sake of torts (lawsuits, contracts, and the like), not criminal law. And despite the rhetoric you hear from the idiot left (admittedly not quite so numerous as the idiot right), this is a very good thing.

      Just for example, say you're trying to build a high rise. If you know anything about buildings, you know this involves all sorts of people, firms, specialists, and groups. You've g
      • Re:People, not things, commit crimes. (Score:2)

        by david_thornley ( 598059 ) writes: on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @01:37PM (#63680331)

        Individual responsibility doesn't work here. Let's take dumping benzene. John Smith is a truck driver. He needs his job to help support his family. His employer has deliberately set things in a way that he needs to dump the benzene in the river to meet the numbers he needs to keep his job. If John stays legal, he gets fired, and Jim is hired to do the same thing. Due to the corporate policy, and the lack of strong labor unions, the company will find someone to dump the benzene in the river, whether it's John or Jim or Joe, and anyone who insists on taking it to a proper disposal center suffers.

        This is the sort of thing Wells Fargo did: raise quotas to the point where they could not realistically be met by legitimate means. Low-level bank employees had the choice between behaving illegitimately or being fired. This isn't just theoretical. (When the regulators found out about it, Wells Fargo claimed innocence, fired a lot of low-level employees, and blamed them.)

        Now that we've determined that upper management caused the situation, how do we punish anyone in upper management? They didn't directly order anyone to do anything illegal. The responsibility can't be pinned on any individual, so no individual manager or executive can be convicted.

        The company can be fined (although they'll try to get out of it by blaming it on rogue employees), but the management has taken that into account in their decisions. The expected cost of fines and penalties will be part of the cost-benefit analysis.

        Arguably, strong unions would help resist this, but the corporations have been working very hard on union-busting for decades, and have succeeded in poisoning public opinion against unions and weakening labor laws. Corporations will resist facing criminal punishment for the reasons you've given. The only other way to stop this that I can see is to make financial punishment a multiple of the money the corporations saved, and that's not going to happen any time soon in the US.

        This is what's taught at some or all business schools. I have friends with MBAs that tell me about these things. Causing a lot of harm in order to increase shareholder value a little is praised at those schools. Changing that is going to take a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt in the process.

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        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) writes:

          I agree with much of what you say except the part about unions being the panacea. It looks more to me like unions ran off all the good work. They had a good thing going for a while, but it wasn't only corporate "union busting" (some bull busting heads on the picket line) that caused problems. It was the fact that unions are basically just gangsters trying to extort money from the business. It doesn't matter if the company is greedy and evil or angelic and beneficent: they still will want to offshore/relocat

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