1. Execute the company (dissolve the charter)
2. throw the board collectively in jail for a time for inaction of illegal actions leading to death
3. charge all who conspired to subvert laws as a co-conspirators to premeditated murder
4. Liquidate the company and pay back shareholders not in C levels, the Board, family thereof, or people charged with aforementioned crimes
> go after the officers with criminal charges, and make the shareholders liable financially
Even if the officers serve a prison term and forfeit all personal fortune, companies will still put them on some comfortable position (pre-bribing other officers as a side effect) after they get out.
Just confiscate the shareholders' ownership by court ruling. The company keeps running as it did before.
Still collateral damage in the form of private savings being wiped out, but you can bet this won't happen more than once before the rest of the capitalist class wises up.
Jail time for board members and executives is probably also effective.
A corporate death sentence is a bit too abstract. It also punishes the shareholders much more than the actual transgressors.
The CEO and the Board of Directors have often been paying themselves exorbitant salaries and benefits. After they resign or get fired they still have generous pensions. So what if the company doesn't exist, they're still personally quite well off.
No, what's really needed is to take the CEO and the Board and send them to prison. Put them in a chain gang. Have them go out to the prison yard every morning, pick axes in hand. Have them start with big boulders. Have them make tiny little pebbles out of them. Have them do this six days a week (Sundays off of course) for about 10 years.
Put the whole thing on "reality TV".
Such public humiliation would have a salutary effect on all the other CEOs and boards out there.
Yeah, some might say "cruel and unusual punishment", but chain gangs were quite popular not too long ago. They passed constitutional muster then.
If this is proven to be a criminal act, even of criminal negligence, charge not only the people making decisions, the board members, but also shareholders, relative to their holdings. Including grouped stocks such as funds.
All it will take is once for this to happen and shareholders to actually think about the repercussions of “investing” in corporations that do this kind of thing.
Sending some fall guy to jail is shooting the messenger. The message from the stockholders is: we don't care about security or privacy. The message the feds should send back to them is: well you should.
Conversely, no one's going to "rethink the core paradigms" without some money on the line.
Fire the board and the C-suite, wipe out all the shareholders and run an IPO, take the proceeds as a fine or restitution for those affected.
Or if you’re feeling particularly mean just deny the corporate entity’s rights (and parents) to do business at all, force the owners to run a fire sale for any value they can grab.
You penalize corporations with fines proportional to their total value, removing permissions to operate in certain ways, break them apart, or just legally dissolve them entirely.
The problem is all too often fines are like 30 seconds of revenue. Make it 50% of market cap forcing them to raise cash or pay the fine in stock.
That won't do any good, sadly, which is the system working as designed.
The violation is associated with the company, which can disincorporate, sell off all assets to a holding company, then reincorporate as a shiny new corporation pure as driven snow.
Criminal charges can only be applied to specific individuals; and each of those individuals you can bet are engineering their organizational structure to provide plausible deniability.
Our justice system is ill equipped to handle poor behavior by corporate actors compared with human ones. You can't jail a Corporation, and while you can kill one via revocation of charter, there is nothing to keep the same people from gathering together to do it again under a new corporate identity.
the board and corporate governance of companies should be held criminally liable for actions they oversee. You can get locked up for life under the kingpin act. Let's make that applicable here.
You make those same shareholders liable for the crimes of their "employees". It could be as simple as "executing" companies, i.e., nationalizing/simply erasing companies for abusive behaviors, or it could be a more complicated weakening of the limited liability of corporations.
> You can't send a corporation to jail, but you can disband it entirely, or prevent it from operating
Just "disbanding" a corporation would be pointless. The shareholders (most likely, someone in senior management) could just purchase back (or replicate) the assets and keep going.
The proper ways to "kill" companies include revoking their licenses (see Arthur Anderson), fining them into bankruptcy and possibly liquidation and sanctioning them (for foreign SOEs). None seems to apply in this case, where a prohibition on federal contracting and securing an admission of guilt, which lets other customers who were harmed seek redress through the courts, seem to cover all bases.
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