I didn't bother to read the article. Perhaps it's about something legitimate.
The actual article. Which I still haven't read.
I'm going to assume it's about how business leaders decided to break so many laws in their search for profit.
I think it's reasonable for this entire thread to contain nothing but unfounded assumptions about the article.
I don't care to find out what they're talking about, but given the title they're giving it I'm for it.
For all we know, the article may contain an amusing side anecdote about penguins. I guess we'll just never know.
They can't even spell "criminalization."
It's hard for penguins to spell, essear. They don't have thumbs, you know.
The first three paragraphs are enough for me. Description of government civil settlements as shakedown operation, citation of settlements with the various big financial institutions, BP, and Toyota, scare quotes around class action lawsuit, questioning of the concept of corporate liability. Very Teahadist, I'd bet even by their standards.
Can't fool me, we have a screenshot of that consumer violating a non-social media complaint clause mere minutes before we forced to comply with a binding arbitration agreement. Brought it on himself.
It is less tea partiest than Warrenesque in its criticism of settling for $ rather than holding a trial and public fact finding.
Goes to show that the Economist is in the same business as the checkout-line tabloids, and the cover fulfills the same function as something like: "Cher* gives birth to alien twins!" Different only by dint of it patronizing, suckering really a different intended readership.
Which I realize is exactly what my father and grandfather before him would have said, because I heard it said.
*Chosen to be deliberately out-of-date. Who functions as that today, the entertainer now famous for being famous? Jennifer Aniston?
OK, yeah, the article is less tendentious in actual content than my skim suggested, but the entire framing is "this is rapacious and destructive of business," whereas my impression is the practice of settling is in fact institutionally favorable to big concerns - "a fine is a price" and all that, plus the benefits corporations get from their own practices being obscured.
An idea I nurse, probably too simplistic, is that in punishing business malfeasance, fines or settlements must be at least the estimated profits made from it, plus a fudge factor. I do realize it would make settlements less likely, and see that as worth it.
Dean Baker must write weekly that the officers who approved those offerings, and signed off on tranches of securitized mortgages they knew to be fraudulently obtained committed fraud, and should have been prosecuted as individuals, rather than leaving the firm from which they've moved on to pay these settlements, while the guilty parties even keep their bonuses.
Don't just go after the firms, go after the wrongdoers as individuals.
Oh, come on folks, be reasonable. As the article itself says, the peccadilloes corporations committed were just petty: "BNP Paribas disgustingly abetted genocide, American banks fleeced customers with toxic investments and BP despoiled the Gulf of Mexico."
Who the heck would want to criminalize that stuff?
Oh I see why you're all put out: it should be "The Criminalisation of American Police Departments".
14
Lose Weight Just By Relaxing Trade Restrictions!
Successful Economic Recovery Spurred by IMF Funding Found Living In Cave!
Will Self agrees with Halford, because language prescriptivism
http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-28971276
14 last: Reality TV stars -- "John and Kate" or whoever.
I am so grossed out by the gross thing that just happened that I can't even bring myself to describe it just yet.
I do actually have photos. One of a drop of some weird white pus, rolling down the wall, from behind the picture I was hanging of my (dear, sainted) mother.
The second of the (giant bodied) spider running out from behind the top of the picture, up the wall, with a popped, leaking (egg?) sac on its back.
Pics or the police will blame it on the minority member standing closest.
Do you think you could sew it back up?
Probably better not to have a bunch of baby giant spiders hatching in your artwork.
31: you mean retrieve him from the pipes, unflush the toilet, uncrumple the tissue, re-whole the spider, re-inject the egg-pus drop, and then re-sew the sac? Maybe.
I love how heebie thinks the eggy spider is a him!
As per tradition I haven't read the article, but I have listened to their podcast and they've brought up a few times the point Econolicious mentioned in 13. I can't say I entirely disagree; there are large companies that are doing horrible things, and the regulators often (as I understand it, not an expert) have a choice between fining them and taking them to a trial where their only option is total dismemberment of the company. It would be nice if there were other, slightly weaker punishments so that it would be more politically/economically feasible to take more of these cases to trial.
I read the last bits, if that isn't disqualifying. They want a clearer line between civil and criminal law, and criminal action should be against the individuals who done the deed. This will never happen.
Also fewer federal "regulatory" crimes. Of course. This will never happen.
A slow day at the office at The Economist as far as I can tell.
I think a Chinese style solution would be an ideal middle ground: the company remains more or less as it is, but the executives involved all get executed.
If the crime was committed by some particular maverick bad apple, then yeah, the criminal action should be against the individual. But it seems like sometimes the overall culture of the organization (it's understood your supervisors will look the other way, or they even tacitly encourage bad behavior), or structural facts about how the organization is... organized, have an important causal role to play. In those cases, it makes sense to (also?) punish the organization.
I once heard someone defend the idea that corporations should literally be subject to criminal penalties. So a corporation that gets the death penalty gets disbanded, for example; a corporation that gets imprisoned is put into receivership by a state-appointed official whose job is to get the corporation to a stable healthier place for the sake of the public good, i.e., explicitly not primarily to maximize shareholder profit. I think there were a couple of other options he laid out, but I don't remember.
(I don't know enough about the law to tell why this isn't just a suggestive metaphor---I remember the receivership bit because calling it literal imprisonment seemed a bit of a stretch to me---but he seemed to think it was more than that.)
The idea was exactly that there ought to be ways of punishing and reforming corporations between merely fining them and total dismemberment, when targeting single individuals seems more like scapegoating the particular people than getting to the root of the problem.
(Obviously I didn't read the article.)
I think that totally dismembering a few corporations every once in a while would go a long way toward keeping the rest more-or-less in line.
On the podcast the context was of banks that had become (or been allowed to become) too big to fail.
I like the idea of receivership, or better yet nationalization for those that get in that situation and commit malfeasance. But the occasional literal decimation, of the ranks of either corporations of executives, could also be helpful.
I think that totally dismembering a few corporations CEOs every once in a while would go a long way toward keeping the rest more-or-less in line.
FTFY
Oh those photos are huge. Hang on.
This reminds me of my hate for the "War on Coal" BS. I would be all in favor of a war on coal. I would like to see Consol Energy HQ carpet bombed, and drone attacks on radical coal clerics such as Blankenship. I think that all rail lines running to and from coal mines need to be destroyed, preferably Sherman-style. But all it actually is is... Obama talking about subsidizing other sources of GHG as well? I mean, sure the EPA released those rules a few months ago, but the War on Coal meme predates any concrete action that disadvantaged coal by several years. And, again, the much overdue Nonmetaphorical War on Coal has not come into being.
I think America's future is black. Coal black.
Coal is hunted down even in the depths of the earth, hauled out, and burned without trial. It doesn't get much more warlike than that.
Spider abortion is the only kind still allowed in Texas.
49: and then, by way of revenge, destroys the whole fucking planet. Dark. Very dark.
I kept meaning to share this photo I took at the state horsepark of a custom license plate wrap that I'm pretty sure is, like the plate, pro-coal and not pro-black women.
Two thoughts on summer:
1) good riddance; you can fuck 90F/90% humidity with a desiccated, poison ivy-wrapped stick
2) farewell summer dresses, our time together was much too short
I mean, sure the EPA released those rules a few months ago, but the War on Coal meme predates any concrete action that disadvantaged coal by several years.
Coal plants are less and less competitive compared to natural gas (or, increasingly, solar) even without full pricing of the fact that it's going to drown Miami and Amsterdam, so the coal companies are blaming the librul hippies who want to destroy good American jobs.
good riddance; you can fuck 90F/90% humidity with a desiccated, poison ivy-wrapped stick
Come on out to the continent west of the Rockies, I'll show you around in these parts.
ARGH the internet is lately made not of cats but of spiders. I sort of retired this phobia in college but even the description above has my skin crawling.
Welcome to the teo and Smearcase show! Tonight's topic: Spiders!
Tonight's topic: Anything but Spiders!
Tonight: teo talks spiders while Smearo talks cats! CAN THEY MAKE IT WORK?
40.2 sounds like a good idea and I think it would be nice to try RCTs of this approach as an alternative to imprisonment for people too, if we haven't already. Have we?
Once a coal mine is abandoned to hippies, the spiders take over.
In other news, I didn't manage to get the DNA post done before the end of August, so I slapped up a quick post about freely available archaeological reports from several decades ago. (I use the end of the month as an artificial posting deadline because I hate the idea of going a whole calendar month without doing a single post.)
I just read an Economist article I found while googling a research topic and now I need to punch someone in the face.* They could replace all the writing with a MOAR NEOLIBERALISM PLZ lolcat and the content would be the same but at least the cat would be cute.
*I'm in a particularly terrible mood because I was roped into being on a food selfie TV program today. 6 hours of being filmed while forced to take food selfies with a point and click camera and pretending to enjoy it makes me want to stab someone in the throat with a rusty icepick.
Neoliberalism? Noah Smith (left-Neo) made me laugh out loud this morning with two posts that seemed to connect for me. Just titles, no links:
"The Axis is Back" ---Russia and China are just like 1930s Germany and Japan, almost kinda
"Calling Gordon Gekko: This Is Japan" ...open Japanese equity markets to international speculators because hostile takeovers and greenmail improve efficiency
"Yes, women's labor force participation matters" ...because 1 new woman CFO and 99 cashiers and precarious factory workers equals higher productivity, lower labour costs, and freedom!
and
"Let me explain Japan for Westerners" ...ok, you have to be careful about "essentialization, exoticization, and homogenization" but Smith's bottom line...
"If you want to start learning that Japanese people are not much different than the people you grew up with"
...is of course, homo economicus. Everybody's the same, or should be, as long as it is like us.
Here's Exhibit 23,573 showing that it actually matters which party is in the White House even when the Democrat is a disappointment. As all of them are.