Just once I’d love to see a major government force a company into bankruptcy by making them clean up their own mess.
Company: “We can’t clean up our industrial mining waste, it’s too expensive and we would go under!”
Government: okay well we will have the taxpayers pay for it. Here have a bailout. Remember, daddy loves you so much “Oh then I guess you should have factored that into your costs. Get to work. And when you have no more money to pay for others to clean it up for you, we expect to see the executives and management out there with gloves and a can-do attitude”
It happens semi-regularly.
Unfortunately it doesn’t turn out like you’d think.
The company immediately bankrupts itself, but all of its assets and funds are protected by S-Corp and LLC chicanery; so they end up paying less than they would have if they stayed afloat and got fined, and now they’ve got a “new” company with the same people doing the same thing that’s protected from lawsuits.
Because that’s how we designed the system.
And by we, I mean the oligarchs that keep us fighting among ourselves instead of at them.
Eliminate the corporate veil. The people making and benefiting from the decisions made by corporations should be the ones liable, not some entity that doesn’t really exist and can be made to truly not exist if continuing pretending to exist cuts off the money train.
Though this would require fixing the justice and political systems first, since they’ve been corrupted by people who think this is the way things should look.
Just once I’d love to see a major government force a company into bankruptcy by making them clean up their own mess.
Company: “We can’t clean up our industrial mining waste, it’s too expensive and we would go under!”
Government:
okay well we will have the taxpayers pay for it. Here have a bailout. Remember, daddy loves you so much“Oh then I guess you should have factored that into your costs. Get to work. And when you have no more money to pay for others to clean it up for you, we expect to see the executives and management out there with gloves and a can-do attitude”It happens semi-regularly. Unfortunately it doesn’t turn out like you’d think.
The company immediately bankrupts itself, but all of its assets and funds are protected by S-Corp and LLC chicanery; so they end up paying less than they would have if they stayed afloat and got fined, and now they’ve got a “new” company with the same people doing the same thing that’s protected from lawsuits.
Because that’s how we designed the system.
And by we, I mean the oligarchs that keep us fighting among ourselves instead of at them.
Eliminate the corporate veil. The people making and benefiting from the decisions made by corporations should be the ones liable, not some entity that doesn’t really exist and can be made to truly not exist if continuing pretending to exist cuts off the money train.
Though this would require fixing the justice and political systems first, since they’ve been corrupted by people who think this is the way things should look.
Totally agreed. Unfortunately I don’t see it happening in our lifetimes.
Would love to be wrong here though.
Happened all the time, that’s why companies need to pay into escrow now (or whatever it’s called).
And it really doesn’t help much because the mess is still there.
I’d love that, honestly. Too bad most politicians don’t have the (figurative) balls for that